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Overdosed Tropes - TV Tropes Trope Overdosed is when a series uses many tropes. The inverse, when a trope applies to many different series, is an Overdosed Trope. If you want a real challenge, look for a work page that doesn't use a single one of these tropes. Many of these tropes are popular because they are used as a verbal shorthand (Squick, Oh, Crap!, etc.), and others are popular because they're more ways of discussing works than they are part of the work themselves (Nightmare Fuel, moments of awesome and funny). In any event, the only requirement to be included on this page is that a trope is referenced by at least 10,000 other pages, as listed in the "related" page. The numbers given here are for rough estimation purposes only, since the pages will inevitably have changed since the trope was added or updated. See Also: Omnipresent Tropes, Tropes of Legend, Trope Overdosed. For tropes that attract a lot of potholes, see Pothole Magnet. 10,000-20,000	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverdosedTrope
Over 100% Completion - TV Tropes When 100% Completion and Rank Inflation collide. There are a number of video games that track the player's completion percentage, and in some of these games it's possible to go beyond 100%. This could be for a number of reasons: - It's a bug. - The creators did it to hide secret content. - The original game went to 100%, but later they added new content and upped the top percentage to match. This can occasionally lead to a situation where the game will trigger rewards for 100% completion even if the player hasn't even come close to fulfilling the intended requirements for it. - 100% designates that you've done enough in the dev team's eyes, and they don't want to pressure most gamers into completing the insanely-hard challenges that the true top percentage would require. (Arguably self-defeating, since if the game is tracking it, many players will still want to achieve it.) - The rest of the completion percentage comes in through a New Game Plus mode. - It's just the game being cheeky about tracking completion. - Some combination of the above. May be a consequence of a Fractional Winning Condition, where the game tells you you've obtained 100% of the necessary stuff when there is, in fact, more of it to collect. ## Video Game Examples: - In Arcaea, the maximum score appears to be 10 million, obtained by getting "Pure" on all notes. But if you hit a Pure extra-accurately, or keep a hold or Arc note held down for a tick, you will gain 1 additional point, and if you get a Pure Memory (all Pures) you'll have a score of slightly over 10 million (for example, if you get a PM and you hit 300 notes with these "super" Pures, your final score will be 10,000,300). In practice, it's impossible to have a score of exactly 10 million if there are any hold or Arc notes in the chart. note : Theoretically, it would be possible to have a score of at least 10 million without having a Pure Memory, but there's no chart that has nearly enough notes for it to happen. - Batman: Arkham Knight has a New Game Plus mode that pushes the game to 200%. The Season of Infamy DLC adds an additional 20% to the campaign, meaning fully completing Arkham Knight with New Game Plus gets you 240%. - While the game doesn't normally track completion percentage, The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth gets extra cheeky about the concept by awarding your save file with a 1001% for unlocking and collecting everything. This goes even further in Afterbirth+ with 1,000,000%. Getting 1,000,000% in all three save files causes the game to register 3,000,000% completion. Repentance follows suit with the Dead God achievement (plus a special ∞%◊ for doing it on all 3 save files). - Burnout Paradise tops out at 102% - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: It's possible to achieve 1100% completion in multiplayer due to the Prestige System. - Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin goes up to 1000% map completion — it has 10 sub-maps (including the main castle) each of which contributes 100% completion. - Castlevania: Symphony of the Night can reach 200.6% map completion due to a combination of \|\|the existence of the Inverted Castle\|\| and some of the cavern areas not being mapped 1:1 \|\|between castles\|\| due to the way the map works, resulting in extra 6 rooms in the latter. However, it's also possible to exploit glitches to bring this percentage as high as 240%. - Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped goes to 105%, and Crash Bash reaches 200%. In the former, the extra 5% is for completing two hidden levels, getting the gems within them and being awarded a hidden gem for getting all of the relics to at least gold standard. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex goes to 106%—because there are 106 collectibles in the game. Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time also goes to 106%, which requires all gems on both modes (Normal and N.Verted), all Flashback Tapes and all (Platinum) relics (Flashback Relics, Time Trial Relics and Perfect Relics). Crash Team Racing keeps it simple by its extra 1% just needing gold rewards on all its Relic Races. - Cuphead: After completing the game, an additional 100% may be achieved by defeating all the bosses in the now-unlocked Expert mode for S rankings and up to 200%. - A recurring trope in the Donkey Kong Country series. Donkey Kong Country tops out at 101%, note : In a bonus area of Oil Drum Alley, stop the barrels on the single banana for a barrel to break the right wall and get another bonus area for the extra 1% Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest tops out at 102%, and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! tops out at 105% (which is only possible by using the "TUFST" cheat code that removes all checkpoints and almost all DK Barrels). The one Donkey Kong Land game that does this, 3, goes to 103%. note : The main game tops out at 97%; the twelve post-game time-attack stages from the clocks given to you by K. Rool in addition to the ones from Baffle's minigames are .5% each Donkey Kong 64 returns to 101%, only for DK: King of Swing, Donkey Kong Country Returns and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze to go all the way to 200%. - Doom: The game can tabulate a kill percentage above 100% on any level with an archvile in it, since archviles can resurrect dead monsters, except other archviles. A player routinely has to down the same enemy multiple times before concentrating fire upon the archvile itself, which raises the kill count above the installed enemy count. Also, the game's hardest difficulty (Nightmare) features respawning monsters and killing a monster after it respawns will count twice for the kill percentage, meaning that it is common for the kill percentage to exceed 100% in Nightmare runs. - Doom II: The Final Boss, the Icon of Sin, will continuously spawn in hordes of enemies, meaning the player will likely have a kill percentage in the thousands. This also happens when that boss is fought again in one of the Master Levels. - Fez goes to an oddly specific 209.4% - Frog Fractions: Game of the Decade Edition tracks how much of the "Hop's Iconic Cap" DLC you've experienced, going all the way up to 200%. - Inverted with the first print of Gran Turismo 2 discs, in which it was only possible to achieve 98.2% completion. This was fixed in later revisions and the European version, note : which, unlike the Japanese and American releases, was not Christmas Rushed where it is also possible to achieve 100.91% completion. - Hollow Knight originally stopped at 100%, then went up to 106% and later 112% with the addition of new goals from the DLC packages. This makes the "100% in 20 hours" and "100% in Steel Soul Mode" achievements much easier to get, as you can choose which 12% to omit; in particular, the Trial of the Fool and White Palace are no longer required. - Inverted in Just Cause 2, where it's only possible to achieve 99.67% completion due to several missing assets. - Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls: It's possible to collect over 100% of the reported money in a stage, because that's actually just how much money it takes to get A rank, and there's more money than that in a stage. - In maimai, the Achievement rating appears to be a percentage of the maximum score for the song, with 100% meaning you got an All Perfect. However, most charts have "Break" notes that award bonus points, 100% Achievement is based out of getting all Perfects and 2500 points on each Break note, and you can get 2550 or 2600 points on a Break if you hit it extra-accurately. In practice, the vast majority of All Perfect performances have something like 101.44% or even as high as 105%, depending on the ratio of Break notes to other notes, and furthermore it's possible to get 100% or more without getting all Perfects if you get a lot of 2550- and 2600-point Breaks. - Pokémon Red and Blue can assess your Pokédex completion and congratulate you for finishing it when you finally obtain all 150, a mammoth undertaking. However, if you are able to obtain Mew, either from a Nintendo event or from exploiting a glitch, then you can reach 151. - In Puyo Puyo Tetris, completing the main story (Acts 1-7) gives 100% completion, while completing the extra stories (Acts 8-10) gives an extra 30%, for a total of 130%. - The sequel Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 has a whopping 219% completion that is obtained from getting four stars all of the stages, four stars are unlocked after getting three stars from all the stages in an Act. - In Psychonauts, beating every round of the punching minigame in Basic Braining awards a PSI Cadet rank, making it possible to have a rank of 101 over the supposed maximum of 100. Doing this in the Steam version nets you the achievement "Math Is Hard". Psychonauts 2 tops this with a maximum rank of 102, although this time it was clearly intentional (an ability is unlocked at rank 102). - Retro Achievements: Beating a game on hardcore mode gives a 200% complete message. - In SEUM: Speedrunners From Hell, completing all secret levels will result in a completion of 666%. - Splatoon 2 has the Hero Mode campaign reach 1000% completion if you beat every stage and boss battle with all nine hero weapons. Though you'd only know that the game considers this to be 1000% if you use the SplatNet2 phone companion app, which tracks a bevy of player statistics. Strangely enough, the app doesn't do this with the Octo Expansion campaign, which does acknowledge 1000% completion (beating every level with every weapon, plus defeating the superboss) in-game by putting a "Complete" written in the game's Conlang on your subway map. - Spyro the Dragon: - Super Bomberman 5 goes up to 200%. - Racing game Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour goes up to 105% completion, which requires winning all races and collecting everything in Adventure mode. ## Non-Video Game Examples: - Carl²: In one episode, Carl has C2 take a test for him, and C2 ends up scoring 105%. This is grounds enough for Carl to be accused of cheating. He ultimately decides to study for retaking the test himself. When HE takes the test, he ends up scoring 72%. - House of Robots: Robot Revolution: In chapter 31, Mrs. Kunkel congratulates Rondolph R. Reich for getting a score of 103% on his test. - Star Trek: Lower Decks: Played for Laughs In-Universe. After Ensign Sam Rutherford completes the advanced command training simulation in "Envoys", the computer informs him that the casualties are at 105%. He somehow killed more holographic characters than what was generated by the holodeck for that program. We never get an explanation as to how this is possible, although given the comedic tone of the scene, we're probably meant to to infer that Rutherford's Epic Fail overwhelmed the system's logic.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Over100PercentCompletion
Overdrawn at the Blood Bank - TV Tropes "Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?" The average adult male human body contains roughly five liters (one and a third gallons for Americans) of blood; blood volume is proportional to body size, but you'd be hard-pressed to find an adult with six liters. When donating whole blood, 450-500 mL (16.9 oz) is normally taken, which produces feelings of fatigue and weakness for a while, and you must wait 56 days before doing it again. Red blood cells do not regenerate all that fast; that's why we have transfusions. While people can survive losing quite a bit of blood provided they get prompt medical attention, after losing 40% or more death is pretty much guaranteed. But who wants to deal with all that when you're writing action (or comedy)? The more blood, the better! Blood loss doesn't affect fictional characters so much, especially those in Video Games. No matter where they get shot or stabbed, it's "Only a Flesh Wound", even if it results in a geyser of High-Pressure Blood that releases several times the blood volume of an adult human. Usually it's the flesh wounds that are what hinder the character; blood loss is rarely shown to be a problem to those Made of Iron (maybe they use that iron to make extra hemoglobin?). This can be taken to extremes when the player, protagonist, and enemies are shot so much they paint the walls red and create pools of blood on the floor, all with no ill effects other than a scuffed wardrobe (with little or no blood on it, sorry, White Shirt of Death) and artistically dripping blood. It seems the only ounce of blood (29 mL) that matters is the last one. Compare Killing for a Tissue Sample. Not to be confused with Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, which features a lot less blood and a lot more stupid. Before citing something as an example, keep in mind that five liters is still more than enough to make a HUGE mess. What looks like too much blood to a person who doesn't know what a gallon and a half of liquid looks like when spilled may in fact be entirely realistic. note : If you live in the USA, get a gallon and a half of milk (5,678 mL) and fling it around your kitchen. See? Sorry, cleanup is on you. ## Examples: - Kouta from Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts suffers from this regularly, due to him suffering from nosebleeds, particularly when Aiko is teasing him. Some of them may only be a spurt, but more often than not, he ends up losing quite a bit of blood from seeing the various girls in the show in revealing outfits. In one episode he even hooks up to a blood bag, only to have that drain too fast for it to be of any use. - Happens to ridiculous extents in Bleach. Partly justifiable in that most fights happen between spirit beings, but they do seem to have anatomy that resembles living creatures. Originally, a Shinigami's body was described as being more-or-less a thin bag containing nothing but blood plasma. A Retcon and some Real Life years later, and they have much more human-like anatomies, but still tend to bleed more than what a normal human would survive (well, they aren't normal humans anyway). - Several characters in Blood+ receive large injuries and spill a ridiculous amount of blood. Justified in that they're not humans. - Used more often than not in the anime version of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, a series where the titular character often kills the main character with a spiked club only to bring him back from the dead seconds later. The very first death has blood, to quote a magazine review, 'spewing out all over the room like lava from a volcano', after Dokuro obliterates the protagonist's head. - Burn Up! sees Yuji have a nosebleed severe enough to flood the Coptown Police Tower in one of the omake-scenes in Excess. - Cells at Work! features a lot of blood splattering around everywhere whenever White Blood Cell or another immunocite kills a bacteria. Despite bacteria not having blood. - Subverted in Change 123. The author (committed as ever to technical accuracy, if not overall plausibility) comments on the effects of blood loss, and takes pains to apply it to the series' primary fighters, even throwing in some Deaths Of A Thousand Cuts. - Done literally in one chapter of Codename: Sailor V: Minako first did a normal whole blood donation (in Japan either 200 or 400cc depending on body mass) at least two years underage, and then, the very same day, as part of the infiltration to look for Chuu Chuu she donated again... With the doctor, being Chuu Chuu in disguise, taking 800cc. Minako drank eight tomato juice cans before climbing on top of the hospital where he had his base and annihilating him. - Deadman Wonderland gives us the titular Deadmen, for whom this is a Required Secondary Power. Though it's still a plot point that Deadmen have finite supplies of blood. And especially that protagonist Ganta has less blood than adult Deadmen since he's still a child, a flaw exacerbated by the fact that most Deadmen make weapons like blades or whips out of their blood, but Ganta fires his blood as bullets and thus can't just pull it back into his body afterward. - Teru Mikami from Death Note. He got a good three gallons by stabbing himself WITH A PEN. - The disease from Emerging is most easily spread through the blood of the infected. Fortunately for the virus, its hosts have copious amounts of High-Pressure Blood to spare! - Excel♡Saga: - The Too Hot for TV final episode exaggerated Hyatt's usual death and massive blood loss. She floods the entire planet with her blood. - The manga is not quite as absurd, but still provides plenty of this trope in its own right. For example, Hyatt once got caught in a gas explosion in the bathroom, and Elgala looked in horror as her blood kept steadily pumping on the glass door. Then she walked out, completely unharmed. - Subverted in Fushigi Yuugi. The infamous Episode 33 (Or manga volume 8) where \|\|Nuriko dies.\|\| Nuriko is badly wounded in a fight with a "werewolf," but is still determined to get the Shinzaho for Miaka, and loses a lot of blood in the process. \|\|Much to the ire of the fangirls, Nuriko does not survive.\|\| - There wasn't a fight scene in Ga-Rei where the characters weren't bleeding. The main characters might have a Healing Factor, but even the ones that don't never bleed to death. - It's common in most Gundam series for blood to flow out of a Mobile Suit any time the cockpit is destroyed, usually in quantities great enough to paint the torso of the machine. - In the Halo Legends short The Duel (which focuses on the Elites/Sangheili), protagonist Fal 'Chavamee duels his much larger clansman Haka. It ends with a Mutual Kill, with Fal's chest exploding into a waterfall of purple blood after being stabbed by Haka's BFS. - Kill la Kill brings us Ryuko, the protagonist who has downright ridiculous amounts of blood to spare. She literally has enough blood to constantly be venting it like someone cut through a hose for almost an entire episode and loses enough blood to create a geyser on two separate occasions. Her being \|\|a Half-Human Hybrid with Life Fibers\|\| might have something to do with it. - Kodomo no Jikan manages to pull this off with a Nosebleed. It was 10 seconds long and appeared to be a gallon a nostril. Two gallons of blood from a 3-foot-tall 9-year-old. She should be dead from that. - An episode of Magical Pokaan takes this trope literally by having the vampire girl giving daily blood donations, just so she could get the blood of the handsome guy running the donation cart. Throughout most of the episode, she's on the verge of death due to massive blood loss. - Negima! Magister Negi Magi: - A chapter had Negi coughing up what must have been several gallons of blood, and this is after bleeding profusely from other injuries. Of course, his Black Magic gave him a Healing Factor, and it's magic, but still... - Much earlier in the manga, Negi's students were worried that Negi was acting rather woozy and out of it. They eventually discovered that Evangeline had drained some of Negi's blood as payment for her Training from Hell. She actually states that she took "about the same amount you would give at a blood bank" the problem being that she was doing it every day when you're not allowed to give blood again for several weeks. At that rate he'd be exsanguinated within a week; even faster if she wasn't adjusting the amount taken for his size. - During Neon Genesis Evangelion, whenever anything bleeds it tends to gush out blood in huge globs or jet-like sprays. And the bigger it is, the more it bleeds. Some of these angels happen to be several kilometers/miles long, and when they die, their whole body shoots out tidal waves of the stuff. Logical conclusion: \|\|staining the moon\|\| in End. - Justified with the fact that it would need a lot of pressure in order to get the blood to circulate the body. - Deconstructed in Rebuild. Instead of exploding, the angels liquefy, and the sheer amount of blood floods Tokyo-3 every battle. - Used with excessive glee in the anarchic world of One Piece: The sword-fighter Zoro regularly loses several pints of blood every time he has a major battle. The record, according to Word of God, is six(!) or about two-thirds of his total. - Zoro fits this trope so greatly that a rant at the fanficrants LiveJournal community "about how fanfic authors needed to actually consider the ramifications of them injuring or causing that much blood loss with whatever characters they were writing" actually referenced him as an exception since it is perfectly normal (if not expected) that Zoro lost more blood in a single battle than most people have in their bodies, and Word of God that Zoro lost 3 liters of blood in his first fight with Mihawk, and then 5 liters in his fight only a couple of days later(!) with Hachi and Arlong. The human body, on average, holds 5.6 liters of blood. So yeah. He should be dead. But it's okay! He survives with the power of Heart! - With Luffy this is actually justified: the Required Secondary Powers of being a Rubber Man mean his body produces blood at an impossibly fast rate to get to his stretched-out limbs, so he really does have more blood than a regular person. - Post time-skip, Sanji is working very hard to match Zoro, initially having regular massive nosebleeds just from looking at a woman. \|\|In Chapter 609, after a mild occurrence of Marshmallow Hell, Sanji suffered from a nosebleed so violent that it actually necessitated Chopper to ask everyone in the vicinity for a blood donation. While this may be the One Piece universe where blood floweth freely, Sanji had literally just lost what appeared to be roughly fifty gallons of blood. Through his nose.\|\| This picture is probably needed to support the claim◊. Please do note that the giant fish is in the foreground, and Sanji's nosebleed mermaid is in the background. If you look closely on the rocks beneath the nosebleed, you can probably make out a few silhouettes. These silhouettes are normally human-sized mermaids and fishmen, which means that Sanji essentially has enough nosebleed to shape a figure at least 100 times larger than a regular human. Even though it probably Runs On Nonsensoleum, Sanji still takes the prize for losing the most blood in One Piece, because he lost more blood than his body could ever contain. - At another point, back when they were sailing in a resin bubble at an insane depth in the ocean, Sanji had a nosebleed so explosive, it caused him to fly in the air from propulsion and caused him to fly through that bubble and away into the ocean. - In Episode 523 of the anime, they have a joke panel with Zoro, and nine pint bags of blood that were being transfused into Sanji. They made it look like they pulled all the blood from Zoro! In reality, it's blood Chopper already had stored on the boat. \|\|Sanji has a rare blood type, which becomes a plot point later on when Chopper runs out of stored blood and needs to find a donor.\|\| Zoro probably could donate that much blood, though. - Saya from Onidere once has a nosebleed that flooded an entire room. While she's in it. - In Priest, Ivan Isaacs loses absurd amounts of blood during battle. He may be undead, but he's still losing more blood (in liquid volume) than his body could ever conceivably carry. - Saint Seiya: - Although everyone bleeds a lot, Shiryu is notable for regularly geysering more blood than everyone else in his team has at least once per arc (the only time it's played fairly realistic is when he tears his own wrists open so Mu can fix up his and Seiya's suits. Shiryu went into a coma, and it's stated that he teetered on the edge of death, but he miraculously came back and was ready to fight again right then and there). It gets downright ridiculous in the Scorpio Milo vs. Cygnus Hyoga battle, during which the latter gushes out more blood than his entire body could possibly contain. And not only does he live through it —once Milo has realized the truth and stopped the blood loss via Pressure Point— but he's back on his feet and fighting at full strength not even five minutes later. - In Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas, Capricorn El Cid actually uses this strategically. When fighting Icelus, an enemy that bends space to avoid and redirect attacks back at El Cid, he sprays a geyser of blood from a lost arm all around himself so that he could hear the resulting distortions when Icelus warps space. While he does die to blood loss, it's a good 2 episodes later after * killing four gods inhabiting a single body.* - Absurdly overused in the manga Samurai Deeper Kyo. More then half the manga is a long continuous series of death matches for the main characters who receive about a couple dozen serious wounds each battle and usually one or two fatal ones. The is no regeneration factor ever mentioned, and there is only one real healer, and even she can only close open wounds, not internal which almost all the cast get at some point. - Mostly averted in Shiki. The exact amount of blood in a human's body is referenced often - since it's a series about vampires - but \|\|in the end there is a lot of blood gushing around from staking various shiki, who are stated to have even less blood than a human.\|\| - The Vision of Escaflowne: Thanks to Synchronization with the Escaflowne and his status as the guy wearing red, Van suffers at least one coagulation-free day of bleeding from nearly every inch of his body while his friends futilely attempt to make it stop. While his blood pressure does drop low enough to cause heart arrhythmia and freak out The Medic, losing more blood than is contained the bodies of all of his comrades combined is apparently not enough to cause any permanent damage. Even knowing that he's \|\|half-Draconian\|\| pushes suspension of disbelief. - Wolf Guy - Wolfen Crest brings it up to One Piece levels, if not higher, with the final arc in which Akira—the werewolf protagonist who can take a blast from a shotgun to the face during the full moon with no ill consequences—gets stabbed in the abdomen, then runs dozens of miles to find the base his teacher has been stashed in, jumps an eleven-foot fence, kills two attack dogs by punching them in the mouth, completely wipes out a group of guards armed with AK-47s while simultaneously being shot at by a gatling gun firing 4000 rounds per minute, runs through a field of anti-tank mines, gets some fingers chopped off by the Big Bad, gets sliced up with a katana, loses some more fingers and an arm, and still manages to save the day. Did we mention that this was during the new moon when he is as weak as a human? \|\|He does die shortly afterward, though.\|\| - The manga of Zatch Bell! has a bit of this. Look at \|\|Kiyomaro's death scene over here◊\|\| for example. Then again, \|\|he was dying, and most of it is probably just charring, it is in black and white.\|\| Maybe a better example would be reading most any battle chapter in either the Ancient Mamodo arc or the Faudo arc. - Subverted in the first TPB of Fables: Rose Red's apartment is found literally covered in her blood. Bigby the sheriff performs an experiment to see how much blood would be necessary to cover the room, and discovers it's over the amount of blood needed in humans to survive. In other words, she's dead... except \|\|she actually faked her death, with the help of her boyfriend: they took out a pint of blood at a time for a few months, stored it in the freezer, and when they had enough, used it to give the impression she'd been murdered.\|\| - The Bleeding Monk from Harbinger is... a monk who bleeds. A lot, and constantly. So much so that you can pretty much find him by looking for the red river and then heading upstream. - Averted in one comic where X-23 attacks Wolverine, severs major arteries, and uses dirt to stop them from closing long enough for him to bleed out sufficiently to pass out from blood loss. Of course most of the time Wolverine laughs at the idea that anything less than skeletonization could stop him. And even that's not a sure thing, while in this case, the fact Logan is kept bleeding at all is what makes her strategy successful in this case. - Parodied for Black Comedy in The Addams Family when Puggsley and Wednesday, with the help of Uncle Fester, set up their sword fight on stage where the two give each other a Mutual Kill with Puggsley losing his arm and Wednesday getting a Slashed Throat, the two of them splashing the blood all over the stage and all over the shocked audience. The only ones cheering and giving a standing ovation are their family. Even when they take a bow, the blood's still gushing. - Army of Darkness played up the blood fountains for Rule of Cool. - Christmas Blood: When \|\|Annika\|\| gets chopped in the face and lifted above \|\|her\|\| friends, they get drenched in more blood that should have reasonably been pouring out. - Dracula: Dead and Loving It: - A few Godzilla films feature this trope. - In Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Hedorah's blood is highly toxic and corrosive, and the only part of his body which his blood can actually injure are his eyes. When Godzilla punches Hedorah in the right eye, the large amount of blood released means that he has to shut his eye to prevent it from being damaged. He also shuts his eye over Godzilla's hand, burning his flesh right down to the bone. Godzilla also bleeds after losing an eye of his own to some of Hedorah's acid. - In Godzilla vs. Gigan, Godzilla gets slashed in the shoulder and around his eyes several times, ejecting blood everywhere. This gets repeated to the point that he actually begins to suffer from shock. Anguirus also gets Gigan's buzzsaw pressed into his face, splattering blood over the screen. - In Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Godzilla sprays High-Pressure Blood everywhere after getting shot in the neck by Mechagodzilla's finger missiles. - In Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, Godzilla gets hit with the G-Crusher, making his secondary brain rupture so violently that it covers the screen in black blood and ooze. - In Shin Godzilla, Godzilla's forms all generate massive amounts of blood. Its initial emergence ruptures the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line, pouring in hundreds of gallons of blood. Its first form leaves an enormous trail of blood in Tokyo Bay before making landfall, and its second form spurts superheated blood from its gills every few steps. Later, after its fourth form is hit by the MOP bombs, it sprays out what seems to be a small tidal wave of blood from his back. Also, an unfinished deleted scene showed its third form vomiting up a torrent of blood that would have covered several city blocks. - In keeping with the film's source material, this trope is in constant use in Hobo With a Shotgun. Perhaps most obvious when Logan has his head ripped off, and the blood sprays from his severed neck at a ludicrous velocity for several minutes without any decrease in volume or speed. - In The Jerk, at one point Steve Martin's character has been giving blood for juice and popcorn so often that he cut himself shaving and nothing but air came out. - Kill Bill: - The Bride chops Sophie Fatale's left arm off above the elbow, presumably severing all the brachial arteries, and she's left bleeding copiously on the floor without medical attention while the Bride fights Gogo Yubari, the Crazy 88 and O-Ren Ishi. According to a deleted scene, the Bride later severs Sophie's other arm below the elbow, before dumping her down a steep slope to a hospital emergency department. Somehow Sophie doesn't bleed to death... - During O-Ren Ishi's presented-in-anime origin story, her father is stabbed from behind by a thug (which O-Ren witnesses). Her father seems to swell before a cannon of blood spews out. - The Naked Witch: When the witch pushes the miller into the stream, more blood flows into the water than should have been in his body. However, it is implied that this might be a magical effect cast by the witch. - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) played up \|\|Glen\|\|'s death scene for Rule of Cool so bloody that it was bloodier than blood. - In The Passion of the Christ, Jesus sheds an inhuman amount of blood when he's flogged, then sheds even more when he's crucified. - Playing With Dolls: When the killer makes a cut above his first victim's breast, a LOT more blood starts pouring out than one should expect. - Everyone who is wounded in Revenge (2017) loses a huge amount of blood. The film features so much blood that, according to director Coralie Fargeat, the prop team would often run out of fake blood. Jen should have bled out somewhere between the canyon and the lake, judging from the Trail of Blood her pursuers follow. Richard is even worse. While playing cat-and-mouse with Jen in the house, he loses so much blood that it pools deeply on the wooden floor and makes it impossible for Jen to maintain her footing in the corridor. - Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, being a Bloody Hilarious Gornfest has this, especially when the warden is put in a meat grinder (the actor playing Ricky spent three days covered in fake blood after shooting that!). - This happens at the climax of Sanjuro in part due to Production designer Yoshiro Muraki adding 30 pounds of extra pressure to make things more dramatic. When Sanjuro slashed his opponent, the rival samurai was supposed to spurt blood right afterwards. However, the hose for the machine blew a compressor and led to a slight delay and a massive blood spurt lasting for a second. When Muraki nervously looked towards director Akira Kurosawa, Kurosawa nodded his approval (partially due to the difficulty of filming it twice). - The Saw films, shockingly, avert this. Throughout the series, the blood splatters are pretty realistic in size. Also, victims who survive massive blood loss without dying (e.g. Lawrence in Saw and Brit and Mallick in Saw V) visibly show common effects that are consequences of blood loss. - The end of Tokyo Gore Police. After getting his legs cut off by the main character and injecting himself with something, the villain spends the remainder of the film airborne on twin high-pressure blood jets. - Played for laughs at the beginning of Tropic Thunder where a soldier suffers a headshot through his helmet and proceeds to spout a three-foot-high fountain of blood into the faces of his comrades, probably about three gallons in total. - Vampires Suck parodies the trope. Becca gets a papercut and her finger starts shooting a stream of blood. She later suffers another cut on her arm that makes her bleed enough to fill a pyramid of glasses. - In Battle is an Art, the MC, Herah, get her arm torn off and had it emerge as a gesyser of blood but even used it to make several tattoos. Justified in that her alien body will function properly till her flame goes out no matter the damage. - In the Creepypasta "DAY OF ALL THE BLOOD", the protagonist (later revealed to be the reader before they forgot about the incident) begins bleeding profusely all of a sudden. It never stops, and everyone is forced to send him into space so that he stops getting blood everywhere. - In Halo: The Flood, an Elite is sniped in the head by a Marine with an anti-material rifle. The book lovingly describes a fountain spewing from where his head was for a good ten seconds before toppling over. - Laughing Jack: Implied. Just before his mother steps into James' dark room and finds her son pinned to the wall with his guts spilling out, she can feel warm thick liquid at her feet. Presumably, she stepped into a pool of her son's blood. - Lampshaded in Mistborn. When Vin and Kelsier discover \|\|Marsh\|\|'s flayed body in a room drenched in blood, amid the horror, Vin wonders if one body could have produced that much blood. \|\|No, it couldn't. Several people died in that room, and Marsh was not one of them\|\|. - The music video for Papa Roach's "Hollywood Whore" initially features said whore "passed out on the floor," as per the lyrics. Towards the end, however, she stands up and appears to sing along to the lyrics—then she starts to cry blood from one eye, which soon catches fire and burns off her entire face as she vomits enough blood to cover the stage (and the singer, who begins to resemble Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead.) It's . . . unnerving, to say the least. - Invoked in the Innistrad storyline in Magic: The Gathering. On Innistrad, there exists a cursed blade called the Bloodletter. This item is particularly coveted by the vampire tribes on the plane, because a wound inflicted on a person by the blade will bleed infinitely, even after death. It doesn't actually kill the person, it just seems to make their body produce an infinite amount of blood on a wound that will never heal. On vampires, it seems to cause an inverted effect whereupon the cut vampire will be drained of all their blood and wither into an empty bag of dried skin. - Vampire: The Masquerade has an odd reversal of this: stronger vampires could drink multiple times the amount of blood their body could possibly contain. - Subject 16/\|\|Clay Kaczmarek\|\| of the Assassin's Creed series managed to cover an entire room with paintings using his own blood as a medium. While the human body does have enough blood to make that kind of a mess, it's a bit of a stretch to believe that he managed to finish without passing out. And even if there was some time where he took breaks you have to wonder how Abstergo missed what was going on. - Bloodborne: Blood plays a very crucial role in the story (as the name suggests), as it is supernatural (getting hurt causes your blood to heal your body at the cost of draining out, your health bar determines how much blood you can still lose before you die from blood loss), therefore most enemies will bleed and bleed and bleed with every strike. Eventually, The Hunter themselves can become absolutely COVERED in the blood of their foes! - The story also takes place in a city that is being haunted by eldritch cosmic entities, who also bleed profusely when attacked. - The DLC expansion, The Old Hunters, also introduces the boss Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower. As a distant relative of the Cainhurst nobility, she could use their Blood Magic, but absolutely hated to do so, and instead used the Difficult, but Awesome trick weapon Rakuyo. When you fight her, she'll start out just using her weapon, but in the beginning of the second phase, she'll stab herself to use said blood magic out of sheer desperation. She'll then toss Sword Beams made of her own blood around quite liberally (and in the third phase, the blood trails left behind start to catch fire). None of this actually hurts her, and by the end of the fight she will probably have coated her boss arena in more blood than even someone as tall as Maria could possibly possess. \|\|This is heavily implied to be because Maria is actually dead in the real world (probably via suicide), and you're fighting a shadow of her in the Hunter's Nightmare.\|\| - Borderlands: One of the optional bosses in the game is a Scithid (basically a giant flying slug) called Bleeder. As the name implies, Bleeder is constantly bleeding huge quantities of blood. All the time. It bleeds about its entire body's worth of blood in about five seconds, and no matter how long it takes you to kill it, it will always have a seemingly infinite supply of the stuff. - In Dead Space 2, Isaac Clarke, the player-controlled character, gets slashed or grappled regularly (depending on your skill), losing gallons of blood each time. - Deus Ex: After taking so much damage, your character will start bleeding, and will leave a trail on the floor. Yet as long as you have some health left, you can bleed all you want with no ill effects. - Diablo II: When hit with a weapon causing the "open wounds" status effect, the target bleeds uncontrollably, leaving quite a large trail wherever they go. Of course, nothing actually affects their ability to fight until the Critical Existence Failure happens. - There's also the Paladin skill "Sacrifice", which gives a noticeable increase of damage and attack rating (i.e. how likely you are to hit) at the cost of some of your health, which is represented in-game by the character bleeding about a gallon of blood. Of course, with a decent set-up, one can keep using this skill indefinitely and clear out entire areas full of monsters with no ill effect. - Enemy corpses explode if they either spawn with the Fire Enchanted modifier or are subjected to one of several skills after their death (the most famous being Corpse Explosion. Since there is only one animation for it, smaller enemies look like they have more blood than their bodies could physically contain, even if they'd been hollowed out and filled with nothing but blood and Ludicrous Gibs. - Doom, played with source ports with decals enabled: Every hit on an enemy near a wall will leave a blood splat on it. The shotgun is essentially several hits with one blast. Since some monsters have incredibly high Hit Points, you can basically paint the town(/dungeon/techbase/Hell) red when fighting one with the shotgun. - Bad guys in the Dragon Age series seem to have far, far more blood than they really should, and delight in taking every opportunity to leave the scenery (and the player) drenched in it. The blood that gets on you tends to stick around for a while, but nobody ever seems to particularly care. This is especially odd when you consider that Dark Spawn blood is supposed to be poisonous. - The amount of blood is lampshaded at one point in the city elf origin. You're said to have enough blood on you to "fill a tub". During Zevran's cameo in II, you can point out that you're still covered in assassin blood while he and Isabela are flirting. "Invigorating, isn't it?" - And then there are Blood Mages, who regularly cut themselves and gush out at least a half-gallon of blood every time they cast their spells. At least there you can say A Wizard Did It. It also tends to float and swirl around, so it could be less blood than it appears to be if it's coating a magical effect (which is to say, it could be like oddly shaped bubbles of blood - like an inflated balloon which is more air than plastic). - Although bleeding your enemies out is one of the ways you can kill an enemy if Dwarf Fortress (the others being bisection, decapitation, and suffocation), the amount of blood a creature loses before finally dying can be surprisingly large. Especially with the glitch that causes infinite blood tracking; the blood of a single groundhog can theoretically be used to paint the floors of an entire fortress blood-red by getting stuck on a dwarf's boots and spread around without actually decreasing. - Though quite gleeful in its use of Bloody Hilarious Ludicrous Gibs, Fallout is usually pretty good about the volume of blood in a human being or random wasteland critter; occasional glitches in the game show that even a completely gibbed individual still has roughly the same volume of component parts flying everywhere, with one odd exception: the ravens of Fallout: New Vegas. They are completely ordinary birds and die in one hit from anything. When they die, however, the resultant death animation has them disintegrating into several bloody chunks that go flying while a five-second-long blood-spraying animation plays, continuing long after the raven has ceased to exist. There is no way that a two-pound bird can contain that much blood. - FEAR, in the first game there are several locations (including a large multi-level elevator lobby) which are literally drenched in blood, far more than could be explained by the admittedly large number of corpses lying around. Then again, all that is left of some of the people are skeletons. So it's more like their entire bodies were liquefied and then sprayed out all over the place. It also isn't clear how much of the blood is a hallucination (Alma's psychic visions tend to include lots of blood). - Here's a fun activity: Log on to Final Fantasy XI with a high-level character. Pick a fight with a lower-level Notorious Monster of the Monk job. Now watch it use Hundred Fists and hit you countless times for minimal-to-no-damage while each hit causes you to bleed like a geyser. You could lose under a hundred HP, yet appear to have lost bathtubs full of blood. - Galerians deals mainly in blunt-force trauma and is pretty staid about blood 'n guts overall...until the player triggers the Limit Break head exploding mode lifted straight out of Scanners. Any opponent with a vascular system will turn out its contents in an impressive fountain the moment protagonist draws near. - There's a certain add-on in Garry's Mod that combines this with Ludicrous Gibs. There's even so much blood that the Source engine is reaching the decal limit, thus overwriting previous blood splatters from, ahem, earlier blood debts. - The God of War series has the typical "enemies bleed a set amount from weak attacks, and you can often hit them over and over without killing them" variety. This can get a bit absurd when you're making rotting zombies bleed twice their weight from Cherry Tapping. - In Half-Life 2, there are points where you might get pinned against a wall (or any static/physics object, for that matter) and get repeatedly shot by opponents. Turn around after you have finished them off, and you can find a magnificent smear of blood coating the wall behind you. - In Halo: Combat Evolved, on the first level, if you kill Captain Keyes or any of the people operating on the bridge just for the hell of it, Cortana will seal the bridge and call in invincible marines to kill you. The marines are invincible, but still bleed when shot or pistol-whipped. This can lead to situations where there's buckets of blood on the ground from one guy, and if you let up on your attacks for a second, he'll be shooting and cussing like you didn't do anything. Hell, this goes for anyone in the game; shoot up any dead body, and blood will squirt out, but you can make a lake of blood and still have plenty left. - In Hitman: Blood Money, a puddle of blood slowly forms under dead NPCs. However, there are also a few animals in the game you can kill, and these get exactly the same size blood puddle. Since these animals include a tiny dog and rats, these get a hilariously huge puddle of blood. - Jagged Alliance avoids this in every possibility, by decreasing the performance of wounded mercenaries/soldiers and causing them to slowly bleed away their hit points unless the wound is properly treated. A gravely wounded soldier/mercenary will bleed to death within less than two minutes, and such wounds can only be treated by a medical expert. In Jagged Alliance 2, Enemy soldiers groan as they suffer from blood loss, giving away their positions, and every mercenary in the game has responses when they are moderately bleeding, and when they are about to die from exsanguination, complete with full voice recording. One custom player mercenary even lampshades this trope; "I have a rare blood type." Dead soldiers/mercenaries do die in a pool of blood, but the amount of blood coming out is quite reasonable◊. - In Legend of Mana, there is a scene before a boss fight with a vampire where the protagonist is talking to an NPC with a bat on the ceiling above. About halfway through the conversation, the NPC will mention the bat, who begins to drain blood from the protagonist. So long as you don't proceed with the conversation, the bat will never stop draining the protagonist's blood. Also, several techniques will cause those hit by them to spatter what looks to be gallons of blood with no effects other than the damage the skill causes. - Let It Die: Killing human enemies (unless you used heat-based executions) tends to cause an excess of blood to spontaneously eject from their pores. Crush their skulls with a hammer? Blood explosion. Shoot them with a nail gun? Blood explosion. Poison them and watch them die? Blood explosion. Stomp their heads in? Struggles, followed by blood explosion. Chop their hands off? Blood splatters out of their arms, followed by yet another blood explosion. - In the DOS game Liero, your worms will begin bleeding at low health. If you manage to survive for a long time, you would eventually produce far more red pixels of "blood" than could possibly fit in the worm. - When Meat Boy walks, jumps and runs, blood splatters around him, leaving bloodstains everywhere. - Mortal Kombat, from the very beginning, was known for the sheer volume of blood that would splatter during a match even without Fatalities. - In MK: Deadly Alliance, there are certain "missions" in which you have to make your enemy bleed a certain number of pints of blood within a certain time limit. The number was generally somewhere between 40 and 80. And they were still alive and well at the end of it. - And some gamers actually claimed the violence made the game more realistic. - Forget the blood, how about when the Fatalities cause the characters to explode with multiple rib cages and skulls and about 20 arms and legs flying out from one single mutilated body? (For example, Sub-Zero's freeze-and-shatter fatality in the arcade version of MK2.) More like Overdrawn At the Skeleton Bank. - The amount of blood lost to any attack in Neverwinter Nights seems to be constant, so it adds up to this over time on "Normal" violence level. On "Special," it's this within seconds (and Ludicrous Gibs when you land a finishing blow.) - Shades in Nier gush out awe-inspiring fountains of blood, and the bigger the Shade, the more blood there is to gush. It has a certain internal logic —Grimoire Weiss uses Blood Magic, and thus absorbs the blood of any Shade slain by the main character (though not those slain by his companions) in order to create his magical constructs. - No More Heroes. In the North American version (the only version of the game to be uncensored), every Mook practically explodes with blood to the point where it loses all seriousness and can even be viewed as a form of Black Comedy. Bosses also do the same, except in more... creative ways. - The support character from No Time to Explain spends a lot of time in the gullet of some monster or other, constantly spraying blood in all directions. One of his randomized lines when a new screen starts is "WHY DO I HAVE SO MUCH BLOOD?!" - Outlast has a lot of bloodshed throughout the game. There was a scene that was filled with blood. - In Portal, Chell can take tons of turret shots, and leaves large blood smears on walls when hit. 5 seconds, and you're okay again, ready to lose another three pints. Valve eventually revealed (when people wondered why the blood was gone in Portal 2) that this had been a mistake; they'd forgotten to turn off the blood decal effects that were built into the engine for Half-Life 2, which didn't feature regenerating health. * : For those wondering why Chell wasn't supposed to bleed at all: the turrets "fire the whole bullet" with a spring-loaded mechanism rather than actually using gunpowder. - The Splatterhouse series, but its reboot/remake takes the proverbial cake. If the name alone wasn't hint enough, you'll know what you're in for when just punching a single enemy spews enough blood to make even Mortal Kombat seem tame. - Team Fortress 2 has standard First-Person-Shooter blood 'decals', that appear every so often. When combined with the recuperative effects of a friendly Medic though, you can lose a lot of blood without ill effect. - Additionally, a few of the weapons added post-release cause a "bleeding" effect that lasts for eight seconds or until the player has been healed and, unusually for such a cartoony game, does cause their health meter to tick down constantly. It's basically just a cosmetic reskin of the "being on fire" status effect. - The Medic's Crusader's Crossbow allows you to shoot several arrows into your teammates to heal them causing bleeding wound decals and visible arrows to be left behind. Hilarity Ensues. - In the promotional video Meet the Sandvich, the Heavy beats up an enemy Scout, who cries out "My blood! He punched out of my blood!" Despite having all of his blood punched out, he still manages to scream shortly afterwards. all - They Bleed Pixels measures the player's score in "pints". Just smacking around one shambler without any combos will give you nine pints, which is a fair value given their body size, but some of the combos can cause ludicrous blood spray, both score-wise and graphics-wise. - The Blood Pack DLC for Total War: Shogun 2, which changes the games previously Bloodless Carnage into "oh goodness that is a lot of blood spilling on everything and oh you've gotten it on the camera too." - 8-Bit Theater combines this with High-Pressure Blood to make some truly epic gorefests, although in fairness, most of the cases of people spurting that much blood are actually fatal, even if it's far more than could possibly be in their bodies. - Air Ride Adventures has Orange Kirby with his infinite blood supply, making him immortal if you think you can kill him slowly with wounds on him. - Bob and George provides the page image, where an unfeasibly large amount of blood fountains up from the Helmeted Author's chest wound. This example crosses over with Bloody Hilarious. - Cherrys Cure: The main character Cherry draws enough blood to keep a hungry vampire fed on a consistent basis. - In Homestuck, Vriska shows this after \|\|being curb-stomped by Aradia. She manages to bleed out like, ten gallons of blood before she dies.\|\| Andrew Hussie being well, himself it gets a Lampshade Hanging. - Paradigm Shift has the heroine, Kate, get shot and bleed out far too much to have walked it off like she did. However, this is intentionally done to highlight her Healing Factor and the eventual reveal that \|\|she's a werewolf\|\|. - White Rooms: When Andre removes his necklace, he suddenly begins forcefully spewing gallons of High-Pressure Blood from his mouth, only able to stop when Ed puts the collar back on him. - Combined with Hilarity Ensues and Artistic License Biology, in an episode of 6teen, Jude Lizowski donated blood 17 times in one day, for the sake of free doughnuts and with the help of a few costume changes and a lame accent or two, but is thankfully medically helped and okay by the end of the episode. In reality, Jude wouldn't be to donate blood 17 times in such a short period of time for a few reasons: - You can only donate blood once every eight weeks — and Jude probably would've died around the fourth or fifth donation. - If he only had three pints, realistically, he wouldn't have been able to actually move. - While it ultimately depends on how big someone is, on average, the human body only has about nine to eleven pints of blood, maybe twelve at the most. In Canada (where the show is set) Canadian Blood Services takes about one pint max, so donating 17 times would involve losing 50 to 70% more blood than would exist in his body! - Taken to ridiculous extremes in the early Beavis and Butt-Head short "Blood Drive" in which the duo give blood, the nurse never takes out the needles and all of their blood is sucked in the enormously engorged bags and they are skinny shriveled husks. - Dilbert: One episode had a bizarrely literal example, the company had a blood drive that everyone else but Dilbert was disqualified from for whatever reason, too bad about the quota. - Amazingly the only symptoms he suffers afterwards are the same as having one too many. - "Driving without blood is surprisingly difficult." - In Disenchantment, Bean drains the blood from a pig in order to save Elfo from exsanguination. The pig has enough blood to fill the beaker and cover the lab's floor about six inches deep. - Peggy and Minh of King of the Hill get into a blood donating spree during one episode, trying to beat the other to a free coffee mug. They both spend the episode anemic, and weak from so much donating. Peggy wins, even though she can barely move and has to literally drag herself into the back yard to brag to Minh about her "victory". - One of the shorts that make up Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected. "For the love of God, my anus is bleeding!" The cloud-thing that says this line then goes on to bleed so much that it fills up the room (or the screen, anyways, given the lack of backgrounds) and the last shot is of the character struggling to stay afloat. There's also the scene where a guy's eye pops and the jet of blood from the socket sprays all over his friend. - Robot Chicken co-creator Seth Green admitted in one DVD Commentary that they often use too much blood on the show when somebody gets shot or otherwise maimed- right before a scene where Lionel Richie blew his head off and the entire room was covered in blood. - Robotomy had this on the second episode, "Bling Thing," only instead of "blood," it's "coolant" (since Blastus and Thrasher are robots), and donating too much causes such bizarre side effects as jitters, paranoia, fire blisters, and rectal whistling. - Insects have (green) blood that surrounds all of their organs and fills their exoskeletons. As biologically accurate as it was, Deadly Creatures should have ended up looking like a Tarantino film.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverdrawnAtTheBloodBank
Out with a Bang - TV Tropes "I never thought I'd die this way... but I'd always really hoped!" "O'Grady, he was eighty, though his bride was just a pup, He died upon the honeymoon when she got his Irish up" — Da Vinci's Notebook, "Another Irish Drinking Song" When a character dies in the very act of sexual intercourse, to the shock, embarrassment, or mortification of the still-living partner. In many cases, the cause of death is a heart attack or stroke — which is generally Played for Laughs. If the moment was particularly heated, the character may also Go Out with a Smile. Alternatively, someone may be killed through other means during sex. If it's murder, then the killer may do it to get their jollies, or because that's when the victim is particularly vulnerable. The expected outcome for a Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex scenario. Contrast Mate or Die, where the character must have sex to live, and Pre-Climax Climax where the likelihood of death encourages sex. If death is averted, expect Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex instead. Both Making Love in All the Wrong Places and being Overcome with Desire could lead to this if the couple were particularly careless about the circumstances in which they make love. Not to be confused with a person blowing themselves up, or with people deciding to make their demise a memorable one. This should also not be confused with Sex Signals Death, where sex is a method of foreshadowing death rather than causing it directly. Also not the same as Coming and Going; although that also juxtaposes sex and death, the people involved don't have to be the same people. Truth in Television for some people, although the chances of someone dying naturally during sex are very low, unless there are already some serious medical issues, usually pulmonary, cardiac, or blood pressure-related, usually due to age. Also true for some animal species, most notoriously drone bees, whose genitalia literally explode inside the queen bee during mating, and octopi, who both die in relatively quick succession - the male from rapidly going senile and either dying of aging or from being eaten by a predator, and the female from slowly starving to death while protecting the eggs. ## Examples: - In Afro Samurai, Okikku attempts to invoke this trope on Afro by killing him during sex with a blade disguised as a hairpin, but she undergoes a SexFace Turn instead. She is killed soon afterward by her former bosses for her betrayal after revealing to Afro that she is his childhood friend Otsuru and briefly fighting alongside him. - Ayakashi Triangle: A curse the Gogyosen meant to kill Suzu instead ends up inside Matsuri—specifically, the male half of him that splits off. Their plan then becomes to take control of the male Matsuri, have him seduce Suzu, and transfer the curse into her through sex. - Basilisk: - It has Kagerou, a female ninja "blessed" with the ninja skill of having her breath turn into instant-death poison when she's aroused. The results of this are seen a bunch of times, too. You'd think it obvious that raping a ninja lady is not a good idea. Too bad the guy who DOES rape her is... well, immortal. - Basilisk also had Okoi, a ninja who pulled her opponents' blood out of their bodies via skin contact. Guess what her favorite method of getting close enough is. - In the Battle Royale manga, Mitsuko Souma forces herself on already-dying Yuichiro Takiguchi, because she thinks it will "make him better". She stabs him to death out of frustration when it doesn't. This is not played for laughs. At all. - The very first demon we meet in Berserk takes the form of a beautiful naked woman who lures men into sex with her so that she can transform into her true form and eat them alive. She is killed by Guts in the very first scene of the manga when she tries this on him and gets her brains blown out the back of her head with his Arm Cannon. But during the Eclipse, we get to see this Apostle in action when she eats Corkus alive. - In Bleach, Bambietta Basterbine will sometimes call a subordinate to her room under the pretense of sex, but the encounters always end up with her killing them, with it being ambiguous as to whether anything actually happens in-between. Her friends complain, but she doesn't care. - In Blood+, Diva's rape of Riku is implied to have either directly caused his death (through the... fluid transference) or directly preceded her killing him by giving him her blood. - Demon Beast Invasion begins with a demon having sex with a woman until she explodes. - Similarly yet again, this is the point of the 'Poison Princesses" in Dokuhime. Their poison-exporting kingdom uses them to get rid of troublesome political opponents. - Don't Meddle with My Daughter!: - Played for laughs in chapter 2, when the giant plant monster makes the mistake of raping Athena. Her immense strength, combined with her pent-up libido, made her cum hard enough that the plant monster couldn't contain the energy from it; causing it to explode! - The alien parasite doesn't fare much better, in the "Amazing Eighth Wonder Vol.1". It possessed Clara so it could feed off of her pent-up sexual urges. But it winds up getting caught in the middle of a two-woman orgy between Clara and her mother. During which, Clara uses speed clones to gangbang her all at once. The combined energy released from their orgasms reduces the parasite to a shriveled husk. - In the second chapter of Franken Fran, Fran heals a crippled girl by making her part insect. When she goes to a love hotel with her new boyfriend after her convalescence is over, she instinctively eats her mate. - In GTO: The Early Years, Makoto claims that last year's car race winner, Masao, died from too much sex (3 girls every night for a month), and he looked like a (very happy) mummy when they buried him. In the next panel, Eikichi and Ryuji completely miss the point and declare that they're going to win this year. In the background, another student is handing Makoto some money, implying it was just a bet to see if he could get them to believe such a ridiculous story. - Narrowly averted in episode 4 of the anime adaptation of Interspecies Reviewers. The reviewers enter a room full of Lilim despite being warned, with Crim sitting it out. Zel casts stat buff spells on himself, Stunk, and Brooz beforehand, but the buffs expire half an hour later, with the reviewers only being saved from death by exhaustion by the arrival of a "Raid Party" consisting of 100 orcs, who demand a "rematch" with the Lilim. Stunk gives the Lilim a 1 out of 10 in his review, while Zel and Brooz give them a 0. Furthermore, as mentioned by the narration, it takes the three of them 3 weeks to recover from the ordeal. - In Isuca, the demons pleasure their victims to ecstasy while fatally draining their life force. - In episode 2 of Kaiba, a woman has intense sex with Kaiba's body, into which she has copied her memories. The ominously heightening experience, coupled with thoughts of her father, results in an explosion, covering the entire room with what appears to be green blood. - Maken-ki!: In chapter 111, Love Espada is confronted by apparitions of high school students who call her a whore for always tempting them with her body, yet never allowing them to screw her. So she gives them what they want. But her sex appeal and her libido are both so unbelievably high, that they only manage to last a few minutes before each of them blows their loads and dissipates. Espada is left disappointed, but still horny. - Monster Musume has poor Kimihito avoiding his charges for one chapter—mostly because they're riled up by the full-moon, a sudden annulment of the "No having sex with extra-species" rule, and have little to no self-control at the moment. - A PG variant of this appeared in Negima! Magister Negi Magi after the World Tree causes Nodoka's request for a kiss from Negi to turn him into a kissing-obsessed Determinator. Asuna is quick to point out that if he actually kissed anyone in that state, they could die due to suffocation. When Negi finally ends up kissing her, she actually faints before the magic wears off and he turns back to normal. - In the Ninja Scroll movie, the ninja Kagero is the poison tester for a feudal lord because her body is immune to poison. Unfortunately, the immunity is because her body absorbs poisons instead of processing them, and as a result, her bodily fluids are so toxic that even kissing her is a death sentence for the other person. Tessai finds this out the hard way when, after kissing her (and then going further) his stone form's invulnerability becomes compromised. Subverted later on, when she and Jubei learn that them having sex would be the antidote to Jubei's poisoned state. - In The Seven Deadly Sins, Nadja's heart disease was worsening, so she decided to spare herself a slow and bedridden death by seducing her Love Interest. Unfortunately, she did not tell him that, which led to Gowther panicking and being falsely imprisoned for rape. - The infamous "goosh goosh" scene in Tokyo Tribe, in which Buppa rapes a young man so violently that he gets split in half. - Discussed early on in Undead Unluck. After a kiss on the cheek by Fuuko causes her Unluck power to drop a giant meteor, Death Seeker Andy theorizes what sex would lead to. Fuuko is quick to shoot down the idea: since how effective Unluck is depends on how much Fuuko likes the target, Andy would only get crappy results forever if he tried to force himself upon her, causing Andy to wisely change his mind. - At one point in the yaoi manga Under Grand Hotel Swordfish has sex with Sen to the point where Sen would have died if Swordfish wasn't stopped by guards. - Bill Hicks had a bit where he talks about his ex-girlfriend, and how he fantasizes that one day, she'll be having sex with her morbidly obese, abusive husband, and he'll die mid-coitus, right on top of her, slowly crushing her to death, and bile and blood and tobacco-laced saliva will spew out of his mouth into her face, and just before she drowns, she turns her head to the TV, "...and I'm gonna be on it!" - One of Whoopi Goldberg's popular characters from On Broadway was a Jamaican woman who travels back to America with a rich old man she refers to as "the Old Raisin". He dies after having sex with her, and she shrugs, "You know, they come and they go." However, she realizes she had developed feelings for him, calling him a "remarkable man" who "liked to give people adventure". Fortunately, she inherits his entire estate of $40 million. - Richard Pryor claimed that this is how his father checked out; "My father came and went at the same time". He also said in one routine that it's how he wanted to go if they were ever going to do World War III: "If they launch, we'll get told you got half an hour to get out. Half an hour? That ain't enough time. Everyone clogging up the road; you ain't getting no-place! Me, I know a woman I been wanting to be with for ten years... I would RUN over to her house; I'd say "baby (pant) we got fifteen, (pant) fifteen minutes!" And hope I get a nut just as the bomb go off!" - In his third Evening With... DVD, Kevin Smith talks about the requirements for being canonized and says it helps to die in the name of God, which means you could be in the middle of coitus, and suddenly clutch your chest and cry out "Jesus!" and you'd be "Saint Nutsdeep, Patron Saint of Dying While Fucking". - The Host of The Darkness dies if they conceive a child, and the Darkness will make sure he does if he ever has sex. There are loopholes, however. - In God Is Dead, a new goddess, the crimson-skinned goat-legged Gaia, distractedly announces to her female acolytes "Yes, yes, tell my followers I love them. Now... I need a man." In the next issue, a man is on her bed, and she is seen sliding onto the bed with him. Elsewhere in her fortress, two women are talking, and the man's screams are heard. One woman looks up and casually says "The goddess will require new bedsheets." After events elsewhere, cut back to the entrance to Gaia's bedchambers, as two women are carrying the old bedsheets between them with the unfortunate man's dismembered limbs sticking out. - Gold Digger: - Issue #220 has Madrid running afoul of an exiled Amazon Breeder who devised a spell that would suck nine months of vitality from her lovers and transfer it to a fertilized zygote, allowing her to give birth to a fully developed baby almost immediately after getting pregnant. Problem was, the spell would eventually glitch, and instead of taking nine months, would take nine hundred years from the unfortunate paramours. The fact that she seemed to have no problem with that is one of the reasons she got exiled. - A later episode had Gina and Brianna's respective boyfriends with the otherwise-enviable position of studying a tribe with an extreme size difference between genders; exposure to a magical field made men grow to a good eight or nine feet tall, but the women more like forty to fifty feet. Zan rather worriedly notes that despite their superhuman strength and toughness, the men of the tribe still get very nervous at the prospect of mating with their wives. The "worried" part, of course, comes from the fact that the single women of the village find the two of them very cute, the pheromones given off by nervous or frightened men is considered a turn-on to them, and one of them in particular is having a little trouble with the concept of "no"... - One Hellblazer storyline's Big Bad is the act of rape made flesh. In the climax, said rape demon sodomizes a man to death. The poor guy bursts. - A gruesome example in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Edward Hyde rapes Hawley "The Invisible Man" Griffin to death. - In Lori Lovecraft: Back to the Garden, two demons use Danke Schoen as a portal through which to enter the mortal realm. The process creates an intense, orgasmic sensation that overwhelms and destroys the target vessel. The demons note that most humans are killed in a few minutes — Dirty Old Woman Danke holds out for two hours. - This seems to be a major problem for Elizabeth Hawkesmoore in Nikolai Dante — modern army men have no staying power. - The "Little Deaths" storyline of Powers focuses on the police investigation of a philandering Superman Substitute who died at the climax of sex with one of his (many) lovers. In a rather tragic twist on the matter, his secret identity was married and his secret wife, upon being bombarded with the news of how her husband lost his life, kills herself. - Purgatori: The vampire Jade prefers to have sex with her male victims before draining them of their lifeforce. - Common in the Ramba comic series (which is about a hit-woman who frequently uses sex as a weapon to reach her targets). Two particularly disturbing incidences (from the same two-part story) are a woman being raped to death by a man with a blade attached to his penis, and a woman being drowned in semen. - Raptors: Sex with vampires is very dangerous for humans. Aznar ends up killing his girlfriend Sylvia when his vampire side awakens and he drains her dry, and Vicky nearly dies of exhaustion after being shared on the bed by the Molina twins. - Sabretooth has been shown & stated to occasionally kill his sex partners. In one quick instance, we see him lying in bed with a woman, who appears to be sleeping. When we see a close-up, it's clear she's dead and not from natural causes. - In The Sandman (1989), a minor Running Gag is the thought of going out "between two nubile virgins, crushed by an elephant at the moment of ecstasy". In Death's story in the anthology Endless Nights, someone actually pulls this off (ringing a bell to cue the elephant, if you were wondering) and lives to tell about it, thanks to some Alchemical Phlebotinum that sticks a small island in a sort of "Groundhog Day" Loop. - The Simping Detective had this happen to a number of the Boss' Mooks. It turns out that Bob was injecting alien prostitutes with a substance called Jazzalite, explodes violently upon contact with semen. His ultimate plan is to inject the Boss' new wife, Innocence, with the stuff and let nature take its course. It turns out that she's been having an affair with Colm "Shite" O'Leary and ends up killing him instead. - In Spider-Man: Reign, it's all but outright stated that Mary Jane dies from radiation poisoning and cancer derived at least partially from exposure to Peter's radioactive semen, thus forming a particularly slow-working example of this trope. - Teen Titans: Cinder of the fake Titans team put together by Deathstroke is a serial killer who hunts down rapists and sex offenders. Deathstroke first discovered her when she murdered one of his targets, a child molester, by having sex with him and causing her vagina to transform into a gout of flames in mid-coitus. - In Tomorrow Stories, Lapis Lazuli (whose body is composed of sapphire) murders her gangster lover by driving her diamond hard finger into his ear while they are having sex. - In Wanted, the Professor mentions killing his arch-nemesis by giving his lady friend a radioactive condom. - The Wicked + The Divine: The 455 special reveals that Attila the Hun dying on his wedding night was because he married the reincarnation of Inanna who killed him as they were consummating their marriage. - Wolverine: In the story arc "Get Mystique", Senator Ralph Miles Brickman is about to get it on with his favorite sex worker, Zahira. He asks if she would like to oblige him with "one of those funny positions"; she obliges by trapping his neck in the crook of her knee, strangling him. As he dies, she shape-shifts, revealing herself to be Mystique and she hisses "How was that? Was it GOOD FOR YOU?" - An old joke, somewhat NSFW: Two people are having sex in the back of a car when the man suddenly has a heart attack whilst still joined with his partner. The woman freaks but can't get him off her; she nevertheless manages to summon help, who get the emergency services to come out. They determine that the only way to get him out of there is to take the roof off the car. The fire department saws the roof of the car and manages to get the guy out, and as the paramedics are taking him away a police officer tries to comfort the woman, who is sobbing hysterically. She says "Don't worry, your husband's going to be fine." The woman replies "Fuck him, he's not my husband. It's my husband's car, though." - An ambulance is called early one Sunday morning to the home of an elderly couple, and the paramedics find them both naked in bed - him dead, her weeping. When the paramedics ask what happened she explained: "Well my husband had a weak heart, but we both still wanted to have a sex life. So we'd only have sex once a week, timing our thrusts to the sound of the church bells to keep it slow.... if only that fucking ice cream van hadn't come along!" note : Which brings up a bit of Fridge Logic in that no sane person would ever mistake an ice cream truck's song (which can be many different tunes from "Do Your Ears Hang Low" to "Camptown Races" and other children's songs) for church bells (which probably wouldn't be ringing long enough anyway). - Three nonagenarians are chatting. Abe: I see old Zachary died last night. That's how I'd like to go - suddenly in bed while I sleep. Bob: You're right about suddenly, but that is way too boring. I want to die in a spectacular high-speed car crash. Charlie: You both have it partly right. I want to die suddenly, spectacularly and in bed. Abe: How does that work? Charlie: I want to be shot dead by a jealous husband. - Two men exploring a jungle are captured by a native tribe. The two men are given a choice: Death, or Unga-Bunga. The first man chooses Unga-Bunga and is immediately raped by all the men of the tribe. After that, the second man chooses death as he prefers it to gang rape. The tribe leader declares "DEATH... BY UNGA-BUNGA!". Some versions of the joke instead have three men: the first chooses Unga-Bunga not knowing what it is, the second chooses it as he prefers it over death, and the third chooses death. - An undertaker is reminiscing about his career: "There was one time when I got a call from a brothel regarding one of their patrons, who seemed to have passed on after congress with one of the ladies working there. I picked up a body bag, a toe tag, collected my off-sider, and off we went to the cathouse. When we entered the room, my young lad noticed that the deceased had an erection. Well, he wasn't exactly polite, but I decided to use it as a teaching moment and said that this often happens. In fact, it could be used as a means of testing whether someone was truly dead or not. Saying so, I reached for the gentleman's member and firmly pulled on it. And... well, it turned out he wasn't dead at all." - In Angels and Demons, the assassin's final atrocity was to be making the leading lady give him head and slitting her throat as he came. Foiled, thank God. - The Yeerks from Animorphs die after mating. Actually, it's not so much "die" as "three Yeerks merge into one big blob and the blob breaks up into little baby Yeerks". Bizarre Alien Biology, indeed. - In Apprentice Adept, this is more or less how Agape's people, the Moebites, reproduce: when the mating urge occurs, two Moebites basically do a Fusion Dance and form a new Moebite. Since the process pretty much eliminates the personalities and memories of the parent Moebites, it's a case of "Mate and Die". - Lawrence Block novels: - In The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian this happened to Bernie's lawyer. Ray: He was bangin' his secretary on his office couch, same girl's been with him eight, ten years, and his ticker blows out on him. Massive whatchacallit, coronary, an' he's dead in the saddle. Girl said she tried everythin' to revive him, and I just bet she did. - In Here Comes a Hero Léon gives Evan a Belgian passport belonging to one Paul Mornay. Léon: It is genuine. Evan: And M. Mornay? Léon: M. Mornay has taken to bed one of the most energetic tarts in Montmartre. Evan: From his picture, one would think it would kill him. Léon: And so it did. At the critical moment, zut! The little death becomes the great one. Thus did his passport come upon the market, and thus one may rest assured that M. Mornay will not report its loss. - A particularly disgusting variation of this occurs in John Connolly's short story "The Cancer Cowboy Rides". Buddy Carson seduces a drunken waitress and has sex with her; however, on the second round, the waitress begins to feel the effects of Buddy's unique gift — fast-acting cancer transmitted by touch: tumours, black blood, and a slow and agonizing death that Buddy watches eagerly. - What happens to any Mortal who has — or tries to have — sex with a Caster or Incubus in The Caster Chronicles. It's doubtful how far anyone would actually get; just a heavy make-out session with Lena nearly kills Ethan in Beautiful Creatures. He would have died, had it not been for Ryan's intervention. - In The Chronicles of Amber, the lead character Corwin claims that when he said he wanted to die in bed, what he meant is that he wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while having sex. - Ciaphas Cain: - In one short story set while Cain was commissar for the 12th Valhallan Field Artillery, Cain visits a women's home that turns out to be a Slaaneshi cult. The leader starts to seduce him, intending to use him as a Human Sacrifice, but he twigs to the plan and kills her with his laspistol mid-foreplay ("Sorry, I prefer blondes."), then escapes with his troops while frantically calling in an artillery barrage on his own position to stop them from raising a daemonhost. - A nonlethal variant is present in another story where a local brothel turns out to be the epicenter of a genestealer infestation. Several of Cain's troopers visit it and end up implantees suborned to the will of a tyranid hive-mind. - In one campaign, the planetary governor dies at an extremely inconvenient time, and several people suspect foul play. The historian Amberly has provided just says that the governor's death was perfectly reasonable for a man of his age, considering his large number of mistresses. - The Color Purple: Celie finds out at her father's funeral that he died during sex with his new young wife. Celie: How he die? New wife: [whispering] On top of me. - In the Darkness Series books, an officer decides to tie up and rape a hot spy for no particular reason and sends his soldiers out of the tent. She manages to get to a razor and slit his throat (though it is implied to be after he finishes) before cutting her bonds and escaping. - In Digital Fortress, an obese man hires a prostitute. Because they came into possession of an item that the hitman was tracking down, they were murdered while in the act, as the hitman's instructions were to kill anyone who had even seen it. - Discworld: - Discussed in The Last Continent; Much to the embarrassment of the wizards, their prim and stuffy head of housekeeping, Mrs. Whitlow, offers to give The Talk to a God of Evolution who's interested in this whole "sexual reproduction" thing... with amusing anecdotes and racy hand gestures involved. Ridcully wonders aloud if there's a Mr. Whitlow, and when Ponder says he's pretty sure Mrs. Whitlow is a widow, Ridcully asks "Anyone know what he died of?" - In Making Money, the previous bank owner died during sex with his mistress. Moist later finds a closet full of interesting sex toys, including a clockwork vibrator that Mr. Fusspot takes to use as a chew toy. - Discworld, it should be noted, is carried on the back of a giant turtle that is flying through space. Some people are very concerned about where it's migrating to, and what effect the answer will have on Discworld. What if the turtle is planning to mate? Which turtle will be on top? - Dragaera: A strange aversion in the third Vlad Taltos book, when the main character decides (for no good reason) to have sex with the female assassin who just killed him (he got better, evidently); later, thinking back, he notes that he was wondering whether she would kill him before they finished. - It's all but stated outright Kitiara from the Dragonlance books has killed men while or after having sex with them. - The Dresden Files: - Storm Front begins with Harry being called in to help investigate the deaths of two people who took this to the extreme—magic caused both of their hearts to explode messily out of their chests mid-coitus. Justified as Harry theorizes that the strong emotions during sex amplified the magic attack. - White Court vampires feed on various emotions, and the Raith clan specifically prefer to feed on lust. They can and often do kill during sex, especially if they're particularly hungry and need to feed intensely. - Lord Raith was such a boss White Court that he used to use this power as an opener at parties by kissing someone to death, something that takes most of his kind the duration of sex, so minutes instead of seconds. Then Margaret LeFay McCoy neutered his demon and linked that curse to her bloodline, so as long as Harry and Thomas are around, Papa Raith can't Feed and therefore can't do this. He also doesn't have much access to any of his other vampire powers since he can't feed to refresh them. - In White Night, Molly gets to re-experience someone's 'out with a bang moment' thanks to a White Court vampire. This makes things very awkward for Butters and Dresden who were watching, expecting pain and despair rather than an orgasm. Butters: Is she above age? Dresden: Um, yes. Butters: Good. Now I don't feel quite so Nabokovian. [Cue comments about needing to get out more.] - In Cold Days, Harry reveals that he considered asking Lara Raith for this if Kincaid refused to kill him. I mean, hey, if you're going to go, there are worse ways to do it than to be taken out by the freaking queen of the world's succubi. - After witnessing a... rather unpleasant death, Injun Joe remarks that he'd rather go in his sleep. Harry, on the other hand... note : May or may not be a reference to The Chronicles of Amber. Harry: I want to be stepped on by an elephant while having sex with identical triplet cheerleaders. - In Eccentric Neighborhoods, Ulises Vernet, who can't keep it in his pants, appears to die from a heart attack sustained during the act. He is found naked and with an expression of contentment on his face. - The Elenium: In The Tamuli, the emperor of the Tamul empire is required to marry a woman of each subject kingdom at the same time, (there are nine subject kingdoms) and then consummate with all of them that night. After mentioning this, Emperor Sarabian recalls that his grandfather had not survived the night. - In the Forgotten Realms novel Daughter of the Drow by Elaine Cunningham, female-on-male murder during sex is called "the spider's kiss" among the drow (in reference to their spider goddess Lolth, among other spidery things in their culture). The title character, wizard/cleric Liriel Baenre, actually subverts it, however, as she instead knocks her lover unconscious to save him from a group of Vhaeraun worshipers. - A character in Gai-Jin dies like this after the strain re-opens injuries sustained at the beginning of the book. - The Soft Ones in The Gods Themselves reproduce by "melting", an extended period of time in which they physically merge with their other two partners. Afterward, one of them gives birth. The children's sexes always occur in a specified order, and all the members of the triad die after the birth of the third child. Subverted because we eventually discover (along with the viewpoint Soft Ones themselves) that they don't actually die, they permanently merge and become a "Hard One", which up until now the Soft Ones and the reader have been led to believe is a different race. This also occurs temporarily during the other meldings, though the Soft Ones retain no memories of this. - In Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi and its subsequent adaptations including The Untamed, Sect Leader Jin Guangshan is killed this way when one of his many bastard children has finally had enough of his ill treatment, drugs him, and orders a dozen prostitutes to keep servicing him until his weakening heart gives out. No one figures out it was murder for over a decade because he was so notorious as a womanizer that everyone figured it was inevitable he'd eventually be found dead in bed with a woman. - "How's the Nightlife on Cissalda", a Harlan Ellison story about the human race ending because people were too busy having sex with aliens to eat. - In the Inheritance Trilogy, the enslaved Old God Nahadoth kills anyone who makes him sleep with them via the Brown Note of his true form; it's mentioned that the last person who was tempted to try ended up splattered across a courtyard. When Yeine survives having sex with him, it's a sign that he's truly come to care for her. - In The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Jane used sex magic to convert her unfortunate targets into jet fuel for Melanchthon. - The Jennifer Morgue has Ramona Random, a CIA agent with a succubus bound to her soul who usually kills by these means. It leads to a nasty predicament where one of her targets has a heart attack during sex, and she needs the little death to go with the big one or the awakened succubus will eat her soul as well. - In the Johannes Cabal series, Zarenyia is a spider-centaur succubine who feeds through sex that is always lethal to her partners/victims. It's established that they enjoy it immensely and that they are also horrified because they know they're going to die-its mostly Played for Laughs in the series traditional Black Comedy-there's a funny moment when Zarenyia and Cabal go up against somehow she's slightly powerless against because in addition to being a mighty warlock he is also a eunuch. - The Kingkiller Chronicle: The Felurian is an infamous Fae woman known for being a Sex Goddess and the mortal men she seduces usually die of a heart attack or sheer exhaustion after having sex with her. The rare few that survived the experience emerge with their minds shattered beyond repair, knowing they will never feel such pleasure again. Kvothe is legendary for being the only man to ever survive with his mind and body intact, although he accomplished it via trickery. - In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita's lover Pedro literally dies at the climax, due to a sudden heart attack. - Mentioned in reference to Shelob in The Lord of the Rings, who killed her mates. However, this is a case of Truth in Television, since spiders do actually do this. - Matador Series: In The Albino Knife, Marcus Jefferson Wall has his consciousness transferred into a cloned mastodon, which then suffers a stroke while having sex with an elephant. It Makes Sense in Context. (This is a subversion, as the scientists who transferred him manage to pull him back out in time. Marcus is undamaged.) - Mademoiselle Boleyn has Mary Tudor be free of the aged king of France when he dies as they have sex. - "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", an article by Larry Niven explaining — in very close detail — exactly why Superman could never have a Superboy and why this trope would be the likely outcome of any mating with Lois Lane or other non-Kryptonian females. (This appears to have been totally ignored by the modern-day DC Comics, which has established Clark and Lois as a married couple who, presumably, have a non-lethal sex life.) With Kryptonian muscles behind it, Kal-El's semen would emerge with the muzzle velocity of a machine gun bullet. - Orthogonal plays this universally and chillingly straight: For the protagonist race, sex triggers immediate reproduction, which consists of the mother fissioning into four children. It's a necessary part of biology... and also murder. - In Rainbow Six, part of the villains' testing of their lethal-if-not-vaccinated biological agent involves getting uninfected captives to have sex with infected ones while both sides are drugged. True to form, said virus can be spread by intercourse. - Retired Witches Mysteries: The sea witch in book 2 seeks out a new mate — a young male witch — every hundred years or so, sleeping with any witch of the right age that she can get her hands on, but if they aren't suited to be her mate, they die in the process. - In Ringworld, one of the humanoid species is a race of "vampires" that use cranked-to-eleven pheromones to draw in victims of the opposite sex from other species, with almost invariably fatal results. - Roadmarks features a woman who specializes in killing her partner at "the moment" so that he's coming and going at the same time. - The Sano Ichiro book The Perfumed Sleeve, Sano's rival Makino dies during a threesome; his partners fled in panic, and his manservant finds his body and tried to "clean things up" so it looks like his master died with dignity. - The Scholomance: Sexual consent is one way to bypass a wizard's personal defenses and drain their life energy for Black Magic. The protagonist guesses that Jack killed Luisa this way since he wasn't powerful enough to drain her by force. - In "The Serial Murders", a jockey is literally 'ridden to death'' by his girlfriend, who was using a whip and spurs. - In the book Snap Shot by A.J. Quinnell, the Mossad agent Misha Wigoda is killed this way by the SDECE's agent Janine Lesage at the end of his interrogation. This was because even though he was on Valium, they couldn't extract any useful information from him until they discovered the lust Janine was producing in him. They used this to extract the information they wanted from him. Janine always wanted to kill a man while having sex as she had heard that when that happens the victim gets a monumental erection. - Setup for Chuck Palahniuk's Snuff: An aging porn star is shooting a world-record gangbang and may or may not die at the end of it. A lot of the book is other characters arguing about whether this result is intentional and/or inevitable. The actual ending manages to be much more embarrassing. - A Song of Ice and Fire: - Sansa meets Lady Myranda Royce, a widow her own age whose middle-aged husband expired the first time they had sex. Myranda: He died on top of me. In me, if truth be told. You do know what goes on in a marriage bed, I hope? Sansa: That must have been dreadful, my lady. Him dying. There, I mean, whilst... whilst he was... Myranda: Fucking me? It was disconcerting, certainly. Not to mention discourteous. - Also discussed by Tyrion, who, when asked how he wishes to die, replies, "At the age of 80, in my own bed, with a girl's mouth around my cock." - While it doesn't need to be fatal, Melisandre is implied to drain the life out of people she has sex with and use it to fuel her magic. After doing so twice with Stannis, she says she can't do it again lest she kill him. - Given that author George R. R. Martin has created an extensive fictional history for his story, it's not surprising that this shows up in historical contexts. Lord Ossifer Plumm was an old man when he married young, nubile Princess Elaena Targaryen of the royal house. Apparently, this trope was the result. By great good fortune, his single interaction with his bride left her Someone to Remember Him By, and young Viserys Plumm inherited the lands and title upon his birth. However, rumors dogged Lady Elaena that Viserys had been conceived too late. One suspect was the current king, Aegon, the Fourth of his Name — called "Aegon the Unworthy" because he Really Got Around (amongst numerous and sundry other flaws). Another, only a little more outlandish, was that Ossifer Plumm had impregnated his bride from beyond the grave, from six feet under. This becomes a Brick Joke over a hundred years later when Princess Classic Daenerys Targaryen meets one of Plumm's descendents, Brown Ben Plumm, now an exile leading Private Military Contractors on the other continent. He explains that a Targaryen married his ancestor because said ancestor "had himself a cock six foot long." - The Speed of Sound: Henry Townsend, a congressman backed by the American Heritage Foundation, accidentally strangles a hooker during sex, and calls the Foundation to get him out of trouble. Instead, the Foundation sends two assassins who force him to shoot himself to protect their reputation. - In Spinning Silver, the demon that inhabits Tsar Mirnatius consumes anyone who has sex with him. He goes to great lengths to keep his bed empty, but inevitably he manages to attract a maid or a footman and has to send a compensatory purse to the family. This has led to a lot of worry among his nobles about his heirless state since he doesn't even have a bastard who could take the throne. - Split Heirs: Ludmilla, who was in her seventies or so, died while having sex with Odo when she climaxed. - For a nonlethal variation, the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture gives this as one of the reasons Deltans who enter Starfleet swear an oath of celibacy. Because Deltan sex involves a merging of minds as well as bodies, a non-Deltan who sleeps with one risks insanity by doing so. Captain Willard Decker enters into a relationship with Lieutenant Ilia knowing full well the risk. - At the beginning of the Star Trek: New Frontier series, the Vulcan Selar is consummating her Pon farr with her mate when he dies. This merely delays the Pon farr for a little while. She eventually consummates with Burgoyne, the hermaphrodite engineer. - In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, it's revealed that the H'nemthe have evolved (naturally or socially, it's not clear) this trait due to their 20 males to 1 female gender ratio. The females, who are otherwise vegetarians, eviscerate their partners after sex with their razor-edged tongue and they sincerely believe this is actually the greatest expression of love between the sexes. One of the short stories in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina revolves around an alien Corrupt Bureaucrat named Feltipern Trevaag wooing and having sex with the alien identified in the movies only as "Yamnose", here revealed to be a female H'nemthe named M'iiyoom Onith. When the inevitable happens, the folks who clean up the mess consider Trevaag to have truly been Too Dumb to Live, not only for trying to sleep with a female H'nemthe but for not realizing the Genius Bilingual Bonus in her name; "M'iiyoom" is the H'nemthe word for "Nightlily", a beautiful but carnivorous flower that uses its sweet scent to attract prey. - Gene Wolfe's "There are Doors" features an alternate Earth where humans have a very different reproductive cycle; after sex, women store men's semen in their body for the rest of their life and can use it to have as many children as they wish. Men die, as their immune system shuts down. - In Timeline-191, Lucien Galtier dies, after a long and eventful life, of a heart attack during the act. This event provides the transition to his son-in-law, the new viewpoint character, who helps his wife, Lucien's daughter, deal with her grief via gallows humor. - In Time Scout, someone conjectures that sex with Margo would kill you. His interlocutor implies that it would be worth it. - Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (originally Mañana en la Batalla Piensa en Mí), the book by Spanish author Javier Marías, is about a man whose lover dies in his arms while having sex. - In the Towers Trilogy, Xhea's mother Nerra was raped by a man who died in the process due to her Touch of Death. - In Michael Ely's Twilight of the Mind, a Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Expanded Universe novel, the daughter of the imprisoned Sheng-ji Yang kills her husband, the new chairman of the Hive, by placing a poisoned device in her vagina and getting him to forget his distrust of her long enough to seduce him. As soon as he penetrates, he gets injected with a fast-acting poison, while her guards take care of his guards. Thus she becomes the new Chairman Yang. - Averted, sort of, by Cheryl in John Ross' Unintended Consequences. She's about to be retired as a mob boss' toy, so he gives her to one of his lieutenants who's infamous for getting bitey with his playmates. Fortunately for Cheryl, when the big moment comes, he doesn't notice the rock maple hair sticks that she uses to lobotomize him, and the thrill of escape helps her get off. - In Vicky Peterwald: Rebel, Vicky is kidnapped by assassins after the bounty put on her by her Evil Stepmother, and escapes by seducing one of them and then crushing his throat while riding him. She regards the act as a rape of her later, since even though she initiated the act, she was motivated by desperation rather than desire. - Villains Don't Date Heroes!: Invoked. CORVAC brainwashes the superstrong Fialux into having sex with Night Terror, minus any restraint. Night Terror admits that it sounds like a fine way to die but saves them both instead. - Roulette, from Wild Cards, has the superhuman ability to fatally poison men having sex with her, and she is manipulated by the Big Bad into being a hitwoman for supers. - In the The Witcher books, Ciri is right about to have sex with Hotsporn when he dies from his injuries in a previous battle. He dies in her arms, but it's not at all romantic. - Discussed in Zolang er leven is by Renate Dorrestein. A widower realises that there was nothing he could have done to prevent his wife's death, but he could have been making love to her instead of fighting. - Featured, not surprisingly, in 1000 Ways to Die: - A very shy Japanese couple who were very much in love, but restrained themselves from even kissing each other for the 7 years of their marriage so far decide one day to consummate it with the help of some plum wine. As the couple simultaneously climaxes, their bodies weren't used to the exertion, and after passing out, the two die peacefully in their sleep from their hearts stopping. - In another episode, a man with a fetish for overweight women ended up dying by suffocation when his date for the night climaxed and then passed out from exhaustion on top of him, preventing his lungs from expanding and covering his face with her fat rolls. He doesn't seem too displeased. Her reaction when she awoke was disappointed, but oddly not that surprised. - A subversion in "Sex Ray", where the victim didn't die during sex, but because two others were Making Love in All the Wrong Places. A man in for a routine head X-ray gets a front row seat to his X-ray technician getting it on with a nurse in the control room, which he doesn't seem too bothered by. Unfortunately, the patient has his brain fried by repeated X-rays as the nurse kept hitting the button to turn the machine on with her backside. - A cheating sleaze is bitten by a spider, whose venom acts like Viagra during his final hours. Trying to relieve himself of the... tension, he goes through a series of his girls until finally collapsing dead with one. note : The venom of Brazilian wandering spiders does have this particular symptom, but its other symptoms ("tachycardia, increased blood pressure, vertigo, fever, sweating, visual disturbances, nausea, vomiting, difficulty breathing and paralysis") would realistically prevent anyone from having sex, or at the very least make it a very difficult affair. - And there was one about a virgin who went to a Nevada brothel, signed on with a Dominatrix for the night... but it turned out he had a severe allergy to latex. That he was completely dressed in (including a zipper over the mouth). - Another cheater was inadvertently given nine times the recommended dose of Viagra - his wife snuck him three, he took three before he went to see his mistress, and she slipped him three. Needless to say, it was fatal. - A couple likes to do it out in the open. They have sex on top of an old and malfunctioning electrical transformer. The dude had just gotten a "Prince Albert" cock piercing, and once it touches the transformer... BZZZZZZT! He gets electrocuted to death. (The girl lives, but only because her feet weren't touching the ground, thus not completing the circuit.) - In an episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun, Sally and Harry were trying to kill an overweight fortune teller they thought knew they were aliens. Eventually, they asked her how she foresaw her own death and she replied that she would be killed having sex. Fortune teller : Not a bad way to die, right? Sally : No... but a horrible way to kill. Right, Harry? [Harry has an Oh, Crap! expression on his face] - American Gods (2017): Shadow's wife Laura died while giving a blowjob to another man (he was driving at the time, and they crashed). Bilquis also devours people while having sex with them. - In American Horror Story: Coven, we have Girl Next Door Zoe, who has a magical vagina that kills anyone she has sex with. She eventually finds a loophole that lets her escape the life of a Celibate Hero - it turns out that she's perfectly fine to hook up with people who have died once and been brought back from the dead. - The Angel episode "Lonely Hearts" has a parasitic demon that keeps a constant stream of hosts by emerging from the current one and, er, "penetrating" a partner during sex, killing them and coming to rest in their body. Not during, after. While cuddling. - In Anything But Love, it happens to a guy Jamie Lee Curtis' character is dating. She later recalls him saying "Omigod, not yet!" but thought he meant something else. - Babes in the Wood: Caralyn fears that she bonked a man to death in the second episode of Series 2. Charlie is worried when he finds that this sex partner of Caralyn was the same age as him and fears that he'll befall this fate, whilst Frankie implies that this has happened to her before. At the end of the episode, Caralyn finds that the man had a weak heart and is thus convinced that she didn't do it, whilst it is heavily implied that Charlie killed his own partner in sex. - Being Human (UK): Succubi and Incubi inflict death on any human they have intercourse with. The succubus Yvonne killed the only man she ever loved in this manner, due to being completely unaware of her own nature, and has been living a sexless life ever since due to the trauma it caused her. - One sketch in The Benny Hill Show, Benny Hill sings about a guy who died this way. He notes it took the coroner a week to get the grin off his face... and two more days to close the coffin. - In the Sitcom Blossom, Blossom, displeased that her father Nick plans to remarry, has a Fantasy Sequence where Nick's much younger new wife has killed him in this way. - The Boys (2019): Popclaw is shown getting oral sex from her landlord when she accidentally crushes his head with her thighs while losing control of herself. - In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Where the Wild Things Are", Buffy and Riley compulsively have sex in a haunted house, fueling it with psychic energy in the process, and it is revealed that they'll die from it if not rescued. Willow: It must have been terrible, being trapped like that. Buffy & Riley: Yup, oh yeah, terrible... - One episode of Caroline in the City had Caroline help Richard fake his death to make his art more valuable and to get back at an art critic. They even arrange a fake funeral, and Richard manages to stay convincingly dead through a harangue by the critic who didn't buy his act, but just as he starts apologizing for his behaviour at the funeral, he mentions how Richard died. Caroline had been telling everyone he died this way with her, and the shock/outrage causes Richard to blow his cover. - In one episode of Cheers, an elderly woman who Sam hired as a waitress (ironically because Carla didn't want him to hire someone who he would fall for like he did with Diane) claimed that all three of her former husbands died this way. Both she and her daughter believed that it was because she was too passionate. Sam: I don't mean to beat this to death, but were they... smiling? Lillian: From ear to ear! And that was the grumpy one! - Subverted and then played straight in an episode of Chicago Hope. A man has a very bad blockage in his heart and shows up to get surgery. It turns out the doctor is an old flame of his. He doesn't tell her about his heart condition, instead acting like the only reason he's come to town is to see her. (Which isn't entirely a lie. It was really both reasons). They end up having sex and he has a heart attack during it. He actually lives for a while afterward since the doctor took the necessary steps to preserve his life and got him into surgery immediately. But while in recovery, his wife shows up. He wakes up to see his wife and the doctor together and instantly assumes that the doctor felt guilty (she didn't know he was married) and told the wife about his infidelity. The panic causes him to have ANOTHER heart attack, which kills him. - CSI: - Forms the basis of the plot of at least one episode, with rather roundabout complications. The main suspect, a very overweight woman, accidentally suffocates her partner when she passes out drunk on top of him. The woman actually told the police that she smothered him with a pillow because she said she would rather confess to murder than suffer through the jokes that would be made about her because of the true nature of the victim's death. Believe it or not, the show handled this with a degree of sensitivity. - And then there was the guy who fell off a hotel balcony while having sex on the railing... The woman claimed that he raped her and that she accidentally pushed him off the balcony. She was married and didn't want her infidelity to become known. - CSI: NY: In "Enough", one Victim of the Week is shot in the head while having sex with a prostitute in the back of his car. The prostitute then pushes his body out and steals his car. - This is how Kemal Pamuk dies on Downton Abbey. Awkwardness, drama, and Disposing of a Body ensue. - In The Dresden Files, Harry attempts suicide by vampire while having sex with her. - On Dynasty (1981), Cecil Colby (Lloyd Bochner) suffers a heart attack and dies underneath new wife Alexis (Joan Collins). Alexis slapping him in the face to bring him around adds Narm. - Ha'Gel from Earth: Final Conflict. Very similar method of death for his victims. Of course, he was desperate, as he seemed to be the Last of His Kind. He essentially rapes both Sandoval and Beckett to produce Liam, the hero of seasons 2&3. Liam doesn't seem to acknowledge his alien parent any more than he absolutely has to. - Farscape: - John Crichton enters an alternate reality where one of his plans went pear-shaped and Moya is on the verge of imminent destruction. So naturally, Chiana tries to have sex with him, figuring she might as well die doing something she likes. An earlier episode has Aeryn and John trapped on a transport pod that's running out of air. Realising they'll be dead in less than an hour they suddenly start tearing off their spacesuits to have sex... only to be interrupted by D'Argo coming to their rescue. - Zhaan's backstory has her murdering her Quisling lover while having sex with him. - An Invoked Trope in Chilean Telenovela La Fiera (1999). In her Establishing Character Moment, Black Widow Magdalena Ossandón is shown to have gotten rid of her latest elderly mark on their wedding night this way. It crosses into Black Comedy/Gallows Humor territory when people in charge of the funeral suggest making it a closed casket ceremony because the rigor mortis set in too soon due to the guy's strenuous activities prior to his passing (Truth in Television), leaving his face fixed in a satisfied expression that made it incredibly obvious just how he died. - Firefly: Word of God regarding the mysterious syringe that Inara reveals in the pilot is that it contains a drug that makes having sex with her lethal. There was supposed to be an episode later in the series where Inara was attacked by Reavers. Mal was to discover her badly traumatized and surrounded by Reaver corpses and help her through it. - Discussed in Game of Thrones by Tyrion, who, when asked how he wishes to die, replies, "At the age of 80, in my own bed, with a belly full of wine, and a girl's mouth around my cock." - In Ghosts (UK), Julian Fawcett is the trouserless ghost of a disgraced MP who died in a sex scandal in 1993. - Discussed but averted in Gilmore Girls. At the beginning of season five, Paris calls Rory and tells her boyfriend Asher died over the summer while they were on vacation. Asher being old enough to be Paris' grandfather, this is, of course, Rory's first assumption for the cause of death, leading to one of the best lines Paris ever had in the show: No, Rory, this great man was not brought down by my vagina. - On The Golden Girls, this is apparently how Rose's husband Charlie died. Rose: Oh, there was something wild about him that night. Although I did think it was strange when he started yelling, "Rose, I'm going! I'm going!" - And this also apparently happened with one of her boyfriends, though it was more likely after the deed, not during. She almost gives up sex because she's convinced she must be cursed for this to happen to her twice. - The Great: Lady Joanna, who fell out of an open window mid-coitus. - In Isabella Rossellini's humorous educational series Green Porno, this is the common fate for male bees. - The Handmaid's Tale: After the Ceremony (Rape) with Emily, her new Commander dies from a heart attack. She promptly starts kicking the shit out of his corpse. - The Hard Times of RJ Berger: R.J. Berger and Lily Miran... in a hospital bed while she is in critical condition no less. Although viewers will have to wait; due to the machine indicating that she flatlined, it is unknown if she is truly dead. - Harrow: In "Peccata Patris" ("Sins of the Father"), the Victim of the Week is a gay schoolboy who suffers a fatal allergy to semen while giving his boyfriend oral sex for the first time. This leads to Death by Falling Over when he is given a shove while choking. - Hill Street Blues: When Michael Conrad died in 1983 (due to urethral cancer), his character, Sgt. Phillip Esterhaus also died. How did he die? Suffering a massive heart attack while making love with his girlfriend, Grace Gardner. (Several episodes that had been completed prior to Conrad's death were aired in late 1983-early 1984, prior to the airing of "Grace Under Pressure," although his last appearances had him only appearing "at roll call.") - Not the trope itself, but Barney of How I Met Your Mother names the trope when a cremated friend of his that happens to be a suit in an urn, which he takes to the bar, causes a girl to go home with him. - In Just Shoot Me!, Nina encounters her old agent, Catherine, who has grown suicidal. Nina tries to help her take her mind off of it by introducing her to Finch. It seems to work as the two hit it off, only for Nina to find out Catherine had intended to invoke this trope, figuring her heart would give out during sex. Nina rushes to try and stop it only to find a stretcher being wheeled out of Catherine's apartment. Ultimately subverted. The one on the stretcher was Finch. Catherine had performed a particular maneuver and his asthma kicked in. He was still begging for more as the paramedics were wheeling him out. - Killjoys: Sabine dies having sex with D'avin as she hemorrhages the green plasma. - Portrayed in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent that opened with a paranoid millionaire having his trophy wife gunned down after one last love-making session. - Lexx: Technically, being eaten by Lyekka isn't sex, but the victims surely hallucinate so. - Mad Men's Roger Sterling has a heart attack and nearly dies while cheating on his wife. - A bit on The Man Show featured a commercial for "Die Like A Man" a service that would let an aged relative expire in a more manly way. Among them was a parachute not opening, a boxing match with a pro boxer, and vigorous sex with a beautiful woman. - On an episode of MASH, a visiting general goes out this way with Major Houlihan... Hilarity Ensues as the general's aide de camp spends the second half of the episode trying to find a battle into which he can bring the general's corpse. The idea, of course, is that instead of going out with a bang, the general — in the public eye — will Go Out With a BANG. - Metal Hurlant Chronicles: In "Three on a Match" the captain of the USS Atlanta* is having very rough sex with one of her crew members. The two of them have The Immodest Orgasm at literally the exact instant Metal Hurlant collides with her quarters and sets off the chain-reaction destruction of the Atlanta. - Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries: In "Death & Hysteria", the Victim of the Week suffers a High-Voltage Death when the killer tampers with her vibrator. - The concept of this trope gave rise to this classic observation on the British show Mock the Week: "There are those who say there is no good way to die. These people have obviously never heard the phrase drug-and-sex-fueled heart attack". - On Mr. Belvedere, George is distressed to learn that one of his friends died this way and is subsequently very reluctant to make love with Martha. She finally manages to seduce him by telling him, "At least you'll go out with a smile." He suddenly remembers that his friend did indeed have this expression on his face and they fall out of sight. - Subverted in an episode of Night Court. Dan Fielding met a woman who had killed most men she'd had sex with. The only survivor was John Wayne, "... who never walked the same again." At the end of the episode, Dan emerged from her embrace while doing an impression of The Duke. - Happened to multiple characters in Nip/Tuck. - Larry Hagman portrays an elderly porn star who dies with a smile on his face while filming a sex scene in his latest movie. - Teddy, a black widow serial killer, murders her new husband while they have sex on an operating table, by convincing him to get high on the anesthetic and forcing him to overdose. - A gold-digging man dies during sex with his octogenarian wife, the irony being he had half been hoping that she would die any day due to her poor health. - Gina Russo dies during sex with Christian while they screw in the room of the medical practice, with the glass railing she is braced on gives way mid-coitus, causing her to fall to pavement several stories below. - In Outrageous Fortune, gold-digging Pascalle marries a much older man but they can't consummate the marriage because he has a serious heart condition. I could kill him with my body! - Oz. Preferred murder method of Depraved Bisexual Serial Killer Chris Keller, as it's a good way to get an inmate to walk off with you someplace where there are no witnesses. - Paris Police 1900 begins with French President Félix Faure dying of a heart attack while receiving oral sex from his mistress, which is widely claimed to have happened in real life. - Picket Fences did a similar story, but without the sex: an obese woman didn't want to admit that she'd rolled over in her sleep and smothered her husband by accident, so she claimed to have done it deliberately. - A BBC Play For Today set in the Ulster Troubles featured a scene in which a senior RUC (police) officer was "getting it on" with a "sex worker" when two IRA gunmen burst into the bedroom; before they killed the cop, one of them said "For the love of God, man! Have you never heard of Safe Sex?" - In Powers at the start of the series, Olympia dies while having sex. - One episode of The Practice involved an attractive woman in her thirties/forties on trial for murdering her elderly husband by sex. The Reveal is, of course, that she did it, but not to get his money; she just had some serious daddy issues. - In the "Coasts" episode of Prehistoric Planet, the scaphitids (a type of ammonite) are shown dying after mating, just like their modern cephalopod relatives. - Emmett of Queer as Folk (US) had an older lover die this way. In an airplane bathroom. - Red Dwarf: - Supposedly fated to be Lister's death long after the events of the series. "He chokes to death, aged 181, trying to remove a bra with his teeth." The source of this information does not have a stellar record, however. (And the Cat comments that at the age of 181, the bra was probably his own.) - He does seem to have a penchant for that kind of thing, though... in the episode "Timeslides", he gains a Portal to the Past and tweaks things a little so that he does not go on Red Dwarf and instead dies in a plane accident, aged 98. He was having sex with his fourteenth wife and lost control of the plane. - Parodied on Seinfeld, where one episode includes Kramer passing out (while not during sex, the situation seemed headed that way). The woman he passes out on top of contacts her relative (brother?) who has mob connections and Kramer wakes up in the East River. - The Jailbait episode of season 5 of The Shield had Officers Lowe and Hanlon called to a warehouse where the owner reported discovering two bodies. The fat truck driver presumably having died of a heart attack and crushing his partner to death with his weight. After the necessary gallows humour, the officers are shocked to discover the woman is still alive. - Happens in almost every episode of Silk Stalkings. Sometimes more than once. One example stands out in "Where There's a Will": a wealthy man is murdered by his younger partner when she handcuffs him to the bed and forces him to take a sexual performance enhancement drug that aggravates his heart condition. The man starts begging her to stop when he realizes what's happening, but she ignores him and continues to ride him while he's suffering a fatal heart attack. - Referenced in Smallville, where Clark spends an episode worrying that this will happen to Lana, if he gets overexcited and loses control of his powers. He doesn't. Which is a pity, cause it would have been hilarious. Jor-El apparently took precautions and later "trained" Clark to prevent this from happening, which allows him and Lois to later have a healthy sex life. - Star Trek: - In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Let He Who Is Without Sin...", Dax's previous host Curzon is stated to have died having sex. (With Vanessa Williams, so, justified.) However, this directly conflicts with Jadzia's Orb vision of her symbiont implantation in the pilot (in which Curzon is very much alive), and with her account of Curzon dying in a hospital bed in "Blood Oath" (in which he is said to have died in a hospital bed a day or so after Dax's removal). note : The Expanded Universe attempts to reconcile this by saying that the incident led to his death, but he was kept alive by artificial means until the symbiont could be removed, to reduce the risk of complications that could arise from the symbiont being transported without a living host. - In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Favorite Son", Taresian reproduction involves three women and one man, and is always fatal to the man. Between this and the fact that the species doesn't have male children very often, they end up depleting their male population so severely that they devise a scheme to bring alien men to them. - Jokingly discussed in Star Trek: Picard regarding the Beta Annari, a sentient reptiloid species whose highly developed olfactory sense allows them to smell the last thing you ate and the last person you had sex with... if they're not the same thing. - On The Steve Harvey Show, Regina's husband Jordan dies this way on their honeymoon. She returns home and recounts the tragedy to Cedric, Lovita, and Steve. Steve (to Cedric): I always knew it would be killer, but Damn! - The Tick (2001): The Immortal, (a Superman-expy), has a heart attack while under Captain Liberty. Given the... erm, frizzy part of her hair in the following scenes (and the paired scorch marks in her ceiling), it's evident he wasn't in full control of his heat vision during the act. - Tidelands (Netflix): All men whom the sirens call to mate with them out in the sea drown while they're doing so. - On Too Close for Comfort, Ted relates how a friend of his died this way, the woman in question not his wife. ("All he was wearing when they found him was a pair of socks and a big grin..." he mutters.) However, Muriel is less upset by the guy's adultery than the fact that he had no will, something Ted has been putting off writing. (He spends most of the episode trying to convince himself that he has to.) - The Torchwood episode "Day One" features an alien that feeds off sexual energy, which has the unfortunate effect of reducing its sexual partners to dust. [The team is watching a security video of the act] Gwen: He just... Jack: [deadpan] Came and went. Owen: Now that's how I'd like to go. Tosh: I'm sure we could arrange it. - Happens in one of the later episodes of Twin Peaks as a hot 20-something gets married to a 70+-year-old who happens to be the Mayor's brother. Only on their wedding night, the groom dies of a heart attack. The Mayor brands her a witch and almost shoots her but after a quick, ahem, discussion they decide to get married instead. - In Two and a Half Men, Alan befriends his elderly next-door neighbor (who has a dislike of Charlie), and eventually dates and has sex with her, and she passes. Charlie keeps making fun of them (well, mostly Alan) till the end: "That's it! I knew there was a "big bang" joke! " - On Waiting for God, Diana reveals this once happened to her. When Tom says, "What a wonderful way to go!" she replies, "For him, maybe! I was dreadfully embarrassed!" - Westworld. Once Maeve discovers the true nature of Westworld and that Death Is Cheap, she arranges to get killed every time she wants to talk with the technicians whose job it is to fix her. One death involved taunting a client during sex until he strangles her, and a couple of others involve having sex with outlaw Hector Escaton, one on top of a safe while a posse shoots down the door, the other inside a burning tent. - On What We Do in the Shadows (2019), Laszlo summons his mortal form's ghost. His unfinished business? He died (or, rather, was sired) "in the saddle" but before reaching the end of the act. - On Will & Grace, Karen's husband Stan apparently dies in bed with his mistress. It's later revealed that he was faking it. - The X-Files: - The episode "Gender Bender" from season 1, is an example of this trope. - The third season episode "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" had the titular psychic suggesting that this would be Mulder's death: "You know, there are worse ways to go, but I can't think of a more undignified one than auto-erotic asphyxiation." - In the same episode Clyde also predicted he himself would die in bed with Scully. This ended up being true, as he died in bed, and Scully was in the room. He was in bed, and with Scully, but not in bed with Scully. Ironically, he dies in a way similar to how he predicted Mulder would die, but the way he asphyxiates himself is suicide. - Mitch Benn's Black Comedy "Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation" is about people who died while attempting, yes, well... Was it a tragic accident or was it suicide? Would they still be alive today if they hadn't gotten bored and tried, Auto-erotic asphyxiation. Did they want to die? There's no way of knowing, They couldn't tell whether they were coming or going. - The Eric Bogle song "Little Gomez" is about a randy Chihuahua that is crushed to death while attempting to consummate a liaison with a Saint Bernard. - Kim Petras' "Death by Sex", from her Halloween album Turn Off The Light, features her offering this to her lovers as an incentive. - In name only: If you think "Death by Blowjob" is A Good Name for a Rock Band...too late. A (now defunct Industrial) Belgian label had this name. - Musician John Entwistle went out like this in June 2002, in a Las Vegas hotel room with a hooker note : Who was also a massive fan of the band, and just as much a personal friend of John's as much as she was a "personal friend" of John's and a supply of cocaine. In the words of his bandmates: Pete Townshend: That's how John would have wanted to go out. Roger Daltrey: If you knew John, ... that was the perfect ending for him. - A double KO takes place at the end of "Leaving Love All Over The Place" by George Jones: - Yuliy Kim's song "Baron Germont" is about a baron who went to war, leaving his young wife behind. Years later, he returns and is surprised at how young his friends look (they fell victim to the trope; he was looking at their kids). - Father John Misty's "I Went to the Store One Day" actually wishes for this. When my body says, "Enough!" Don't let me die in a hospital I'll save the big one for the last time we make love - "Nymphomaniac Fantasia" by Nightwish seems to be (the lyrics are somewhat cryptic) about a woman who discovers her significant other has cheated on her ("The scent of a woman was not mine") and kills him after having sex with him one last time. Old love lies deep, you said Deeper shall be the wound between your legs - Classical Mythology: - In Greek mythology the empousae are a species of female demons that take on the form of beautiful women and use this form to seduce male victims. Once an empousa has gotten the guy to bed, she devours him alive and drinks his blood. - King Minos was under a curse... to ejaculate snakes and scorpions. This was a curse placed on him by his wife, a powerful sorceress, who did it so that he wouldn't cheat on her (the curse was only activated if he slept with anyone other than his wife, in order to cause him pain and kill his mistresses in the process). Minos eventually found a workaround when he got a mistress who was also a sorceress, and she made a potion that counteracted the curse so they could be together. - Irish Mythology: In story of the first people to settle Ireland, a ship lands on Ireland carrying 50 women and 3 men. note : It was originally part of a larger fleet that had a more even ratio of men and women, but by the time it reached Ireland all the other ships had sank. In order to try and sire a second generation for the settlers the women split into three groups, one for each man. When one of the men died of exhaustion the women of his group all joined the second man's group. He died of exhaustion too. The final man, a druid and shapeshifter named Fintan, now pursued by an army of lonely women fled by jumping into a river and turning into a salmon so as to not share the fate of his compatriots, and hiding inside a cave until the women were all killed in a flood. - The Book of Numbers tells us that after Israel settled in Shittim, they started worshipping Baal and being driven to sin by the Moabites. God responds by smiting them with a plague and in the midst of everything an Israelite man named Zimri and a Midianite woman named Cozbi sneak into a room to have sex. They are spotted by Phineas, son of Eleazar who immediately takes a spear and shoves it through both of their bodies at once. This soothes the wrath of God who ceases the plague. - Old Harry's Game: The Devil gets pretty irritated after the invention of Viagra, as Hell experiences a sudden flood of old men suddenly showing up half-dressed and smiling like idiots, leading Satan to wonder if mankind will successfully manage to pork itself to death. - Multiple instances of this in F.A.T.A.L., including being the victim of an eternal orgasm spell and failing a saving throw if your anus or vagina is stretched too far. - In Warhammer 40,000 this is apparently the only way to have sex, especially when Slaanesh is involved, and especially when the Dark Eldar are involved. The only ones this doesn't happen to are either asexual (Orks, Tyranids), religiously abstinent (Space Marines), or beneath notice (99% of human and tau civilians). - In La Cage aux folles, the conservative political leader, while noting that most of the national newspapers have fondly eulogized the president, noticed that one liberal newspaper noted that the president's last words were "Remember my little gift." - In City of Angels, upon hearing that the sexy young "Miss" Alaura Kingsley actually has a 75-year-old husband, Oolie's quip (after several unsuccessful ones are rubbed out by Stine's typewriter) is: "He must've decided to go out with a bang instead of a whimper." - In The Consuming Shadow, victims of a lust god are described as having died from "exhaustion". All damage to the body comes post-mortem. - Can happen to your character in the Crusader Kings games if he's old enough, though as it's a Real-Time Strategy / Simulation Game, nothing explicit is shown. - In the Gamecube game Cubivore, you play as a titular creature, who, as an animal, likes to talk about how much he wants to kill and eat things and also mate. Of course, "mating" in the Cubivore-verse involves the females slaughtering the male in some obscure way. We later find out that what appears to be the dominant female in all of Cubivoredom apparently devours the male when mating with him. - Disco Elysium has a notable dramatic version. It turns out that the Hanged Man, whose murder the Player Character is investigating, was shot dead right in mid-coitus with the Femme Fatale. She turns out to genuinely have nothing to do with his death though, except for the killer being a Stalker With Crush towards her and deciding to Murder the Hypotenuse. - The Elder Scrolls: - In the in-game book Hallgerd's Tale, Pasoroth beheads the man cuckolding him during the act of cuckolding, then takes over where the other guy left off. - The Morag Tong is an assassin's guild officially sanctioned by the Dunmeri government. One of their favorite techniques is to seduce their target and murder them in bed. Fitting, given that the Tong operates in service to Mephala, the Daedric Prince associated with manipulation, lies, sex, murder, and betrayal. - In Fallout 2, the player can get his/her car stolen in New Reno. After finding the chopshop with their car in it, the player can buy it back, threaten to kill the owner T-Ray, or, if female, pay by other means. Female players can keep doing this to get car upgrades and fuel cells. However, doing it too quickly in a short span of time will make T-Ray explode after having too much sex. - F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin's ending changes the context of several life-threatening scenes throughout the previous game, making this implication clear. If Beckett is killed during any of Alma's attempts to grapple him, it turns out that getting overpowered and raped by a psychic ghost of world-ending power is quite lethal. - Mass Effect: - Some asari of the universe have a rare genetic defect that kills their partners during sex. These asari, known as Ardat-Yakshi, grow smarter, stronger, and deadlier with each encounter, and it is an addiction to them, such that upon diagnosis, the Ardat-Yakshi is given the choice of living in isolation or being executed. In Mass Effect 2, Samara's loyalty mission has you going after an active one of these by the name of Morinth, who uses her condition much like a serial killer and has been doing this for 400 years. You can choose to recruit her on your team, and get it on with her — with predictable results. - Also in Mass Effect 2, Science Hero Mordin Solus warns Shepard of possible complications with various romantic partners: - He hypothesizes that Jack might lose control of her already unstable biotic powers and accidentally kill Shepard mid-coitus. If you do consummate the relationship, however, nothing of the sort actually occurs. - A similar aversion also occurs with Tali, except in this case Mordin is afraid that she'll be the one to die due to her species' unusual immune system, which adapted to assimilate pathogens instead of killing them. However, Tali's smart enough to take the right precautions and comes out of it with nothing more than a nasty cold. And even then, she admits that it was totally Worth It. If you continue the romance in Mass Effect 3, she suffers no ill effects due to having adapted to Shepard. Mordin also warns both Tali and Garrus that, due to Mirror Chemistry, ingesting bodily fluids could give either partner a potentially fatal allergic reaction. - In Monster Girl Quest, when Luka is defeated by certain monster girls they will kill him in the resulting rape scene. They may do this by draining all his energy (mostly succubi), draining all of his fluids, forcing him to ejaculate until he dies of exhaustion, or eating him whole. - An interesting take on this trope in M.U.G.E.N- Panty's finishing move is to have sex with her opponent (thankfully, it's censored). Granted, this is accurate to her character, but Panty never had sex during a fight at any point in the series. - In the Rogue Like game NetHack, there are incubi and succubi who might have sex with you (incubi for female characters, succubi for male characters). When this happens, there is a chance that "You feel exhausted", and you lose some hitpoints. If you die because of this, it's considered "overexertion". There is also a chance of leveldrain. Unless you wear proper "protection", then it's just HP loss. - Sengoku Rance has the Ninjas themselves. Hell, Suzume has a few like poison on her breasts, a drug that would burst whenever someone came inside her, and so on. - The Sims: - This is actually possible in The Sims 3 (console), as can be seen in this screenshot◊. - An elder Sim in The Sims 4 can suffer Death by Overexertion if they "WooHoo" while uncomfortable, and promptly warrant a visit by the Grim Reaper. - Avoiding this is actually a puzzle in the first game of The Spellcasting Series, as Ernie ends up on an island of amazons who have no problems taking what they want from our dorky hero. Take too long, and Ernie dies from exhaustion. - In The Spiral Scouts, after providing King Roland with an elixir, he goes to have sex with Queen Vale, so loud and so intense it shakes the castle and sounds like cannon fire, and that Vale can feel Roland's "bone-dog" in her ribcage. After it's over, Roland goes back to Remae and tells her "Well, she's dead." - WildStar has a quest in Deradune where you guide explosive Mammodin (rhinos) into poacher camps. You fail if you get too close to other Mammodin, which prompts them to either attack you or try to mate with you, prematurely detonating the explosives. - Implied to be the cause of death of the first husband of Lucrezia Flathead in the Zork Series. Given that husbands four through eighteen all died on their wedding nights, it may have happened to them, too. - In ATOM GRRRL!!, Big E's "weapon" hid under her coat. She basically pegs guys to death. - The hentai game Bible Black (which spawned an even more popular H-anime) has several "Bad Ends" which use some combination of drugs and/or magic to cause the hero to die of... "dehydration". - Bloodbound has a suspiciously cheap diamond scene to hook up with an antagonistic character (less than half the price of typical hookup scenes) and warns you that it's not going to end well. In the scene, the vampire Priya Lacroix warns the player not to make a sound or she'll bite. No matter how quickly you select the choices to stay quiet, you'll eventually cave, causing Priya to suck you dry before you return to the checkpoint. - Similar to the Mass Effect example above, in Fate/stay night the Makiri lust worms do this to women. Basically (to quote the game), "The worms will transform when attacking a woman so that they are only able to violate her nerves. They will spread their tentacles all over her body and devour her spirit. The lust worms will wet the woman's skin with their mucus, excite and destroy her central nerves of pleasure, and satisfy their hunger. It must be their instincts, as the worms seem to love the woman's womb. They do not eat female flesh but seek the organs within them. They give the woman huge enough orgasms to fry her brain, and they go into her body to devour her placenta. Unwilling to eat human flesh, the worms have only one way to get what they desire. As a result, the woman's mind and body are completely violated and destroyed." And these worms are basically penises with More Teeth than the Osmond Family. - Katawa Shoujo treats this seriously because it is a very real danger for the hero, who has a weak heart that can fail from too much excitement and/or physical exertion. Usually, he's able to keep calm enough to avoid any problems, but at least one H-scene is cut short due to him coming extremely close to having a heart attack. - Subverted in Phantom of Inferno, where Drei informs the badly wounded main character that she wants to go out like this as commandos approach the building they're in. While in great pain and doubting her sanity, he is forced to go along with her plan as she undresses him herself, and just at the climax the commandos rappel into the room - Drei rolls off, grabs her pistol, and shoots both dead. While stark naked. She then explains that she's decided that was a stupid plan, and she's going to kill them all instead. - Amazing Super Powers — "I can't decide whether I want it to be Keith..." (see also Alt Text and hidden comic). - The protagonist of a risqué webcomic Bad Bunny note : Best remembered for "offscreen turducken porn" joke. The site disappeared after the author died. is a rabbit in love with a dog twice his size. Every night of their sex ends with him in trauma center. They do each have another lover their size (a rabbit and a wolf, respectively), but the rabbit keeps occasionally coming back for more, despite knowing the next time could kill him. - Rek'mar of Drowtales was finally able to sleep with Lulianne, who he had been courting for the longest time. At this point, Lulianne was already under the possession of Khaless and Rek'mar's aura is absorbed by her during the act, killing him. - In Mage & Demon Queen, Malori dies this way after finally managing to get her longtime-crush-now-turned-girlfriend Velverosa into bed. Played for Laughs in that Malori being a human wasn't able to keep up with Vel's draconic stamina, and since Death Is Cheap for humans, she revives in her hometown's church not long after, naked and mortified. - Oglaf: - Navaan convinces a man dying from a snakebite on his penis to have sex with her, asking "Do you want to die fucking or not fucking?" Navaan: Fact! It's not necrophilia if he was alive when the sex started. - A man who's about to be executed for treason asks if they the town does "erotic executions", so they assign him to Greta, an executioner dominatrix who proceeds to ride him until he suffocates in the noose. - Ow, my sanity: Apparently, a female member of the cult in David's dorm went into cardiac arrest and died due to either one mammoth-sized orgasm or several. - This Perry Bible Fellowship comic. With a twist, naturally. - This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic has Superman explaining to a woman that she wouldn't survive sex with him, she understands and leaves. Then Wonder Woman says the same thing to a guy... next panel shows a tombstone. The bonus panel says he was the Author Avatar, and didn't last two minutes. - Super Rivals: Shapshifting supervillain, Madame Mischief, executes a security guard after having sex with him while disguised as a female guard he had a thing for. - Magarce from Tally Road experiences this trope almost literally. If it were not such a shocking and gratuitously furry image, the latter would almost be a perfect trope-illustration- except that she's not actually dead, just 'out'. One can only assume she has an (ahem) Made of Iron. - Tripp: Tripp has to have sex with Proxy ( not his girlfriend) in order to meet God, who gives him a mission that requires sacrificing himself, immediately. It looks like he went this way until he can come back and explain what really happened. - Vampire Cheerleaders: During her introductory scene in chapter 1, Suki gets into an argument with Zoe, who mentions Suki having killed her boyfriend. Suki taunts her by bragging that she screwed him first and said he was a good lay. - White Dark Life: As to be expected, this is exactly how black widow driders function. The stimulation from sex outright kills the males and drives the females into a berserk frenzy who promptly devour their partner. The other types reportedly don't have this problem though. - Mortasheen has two creatures designed to administer this: Abysmal, an anglerfish with an illusionary ideal mate as a lure, and Widoweed, a venus flytrap creature that attracts men via pheromones. - Snopes has a (false) story about someone who electrocuted himself using a cow's heart as an electrically-stimulated sex toy. - This Dirty Old Man on Not Always Right says he'd die of pleasure to see the submitter dressed like an old-fashioned pinup girl. She's more amused than offended. - Aqua Teen Hunger Force: After Carl's pool is severely polluted for several episodes and is revealed to have even developed life, Frylock finally cleans it. A mermaid comes out and offers to have sex with Carl, or rather she shrinks down into his penis to grant him an unmatched sense of euphoria that turns out to be her laying her eggs in him, which causes Carl to explode open. Frylock admits to having sex with her as well and also explodes, then Meatwad follows suit. - Family Guy: - Justified, wherein one of the...involved parties is Death. - In season 14, Superman is seen standing over the body of a young woman with some police. She's in bed in her nightie, her mouth is open, and her brains are splattered all over the wall. Superman claims that he just heard her scream, and everything was like this when he got there. No clues, probably never to be solved, but what can you do? One of the police comments it's just like the bodies of three guys they found in a public restroom a few days ago. "Yup. Unsolvable." - Futurama: - This trope was spoofed in an episode of Robot Chicken, which combined aspects of The Golden Girls and Sex and the City: Blanche: In the middle of my no-denture adventure, my boyfriend's spirit released, in more ways than one! Man sitting at an adjacent table : Check, Please! - South Park:	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutWithABang
Over and Under the Top - TV Tropes Over and Under the Top can refer to: - Downplayed Trope: A trope that is played much lighter than usual. - Duo Tropes: Tropes where two characters are paired with each other, whether as friends, lovers, enemies or any other relationship. - Exaggerated Trope: A trope is used to an extreme extent. - Foil: A character who highlights another character's trait(s) by contrast. If a direct wick has led you here, please correct the link so that it points to the corresponding article.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverAndUnderTheTop
Over-Enthusiastic Parents - TV Tropes It's considered a given that parents love their kids, but there are those that take it to embarrassing extremes. They constantly talk about their offspring (whether or not anyone's actually listening), shove baby pictures under everyone's noses, treat each of their kids' fingerpaintings like they've recreated the Mona Lisa, get excessively worked up and upset if said kids are annoyed with them for some reason, and make a spectacle of themselves. The kids' responses to this vary according to age, personality and level of embarrassment. May occasionally overlap with Boyfriend-Blocking Dad, My Beloved Smother, Doting Parent and Amazingly Embarrassing Parents. ## Examples: Anime and Manga - Maes Hughes in Fullmetal Alchemist is practically the definition of this trope. Constantly talks about his daughter, check. Treats everything she does like the "best thing since sliced bread", check. Makes a spectacle of himself, check. Shows everyone photos of her whether they want to see them or not, check doesn't begin to cover it. He practically kidnaps people to get them to visit his daughter! All part of the usual humorously exaggerated characterization, of course. - After she accepts to take part in the radio show, Ichigo from Seiyu's Life! realizes that not only has her father started following her on Twitter, he's sharing it with the entire family and posting pictures of when she was in kindergarten. - Soul Eater: Spirit Albarn. No baby pictures, but he's got everything else covered (especially the 'making a spectacle of himself' part). His daughter is embarrased and exasperated by his foolishness... but the love is nonetheless appreciated. Film - In Meet the Parents, the parents of Gaylord "Greg" Focker are totally supportive of his love life, and his mother is a sexual therapist so this sort of thing is right up her professional alley. The term "fruit of your loins" comes up often, to Greg's embarrassment. Literature - Roald Dahl mentioned this kind of parents (who think their stupid child is the best in the world) as being the second-worst ones in Matilda. The worst ones, however, are those like Matilda's parents, who treat a smart child like shit. Live-Action TV - Seinfeld: - Jerry's parents are eager to be involved in his life that he is terrified by them moving into New York, where their phone calls will be considered "local". - There's also his Uncle Leo, who constantly gushing about his unseen son Jeffrey who works for the Parks Department. - Monk: \|\|Monk\|\| immediately transforms into one of these upon meeting his dead wife's daughter, taking hundreds of pictures to show off, and marveling about every little detail of her life ("You know the Internet? She's on it!") Music - The song "Talent is an Asset" by Sparks imagines Albert Einstein's parents as being overenthusiastic and overprotective. Webcomics - Ha Jinsung from Tower of God really dotes on his student Viole, always defending him, constantly praising him, even when he's sleeping. Whenever he starts rambling, Viole just prefers to leave the room. It could be that Jinsung is trying to make Viole feel a bit better, since he fits various tropes that usually aren't good for your mental health: Anti-Villain, Broken Bird, Break the Cutie, Fallen Hero, Heartbroken Badass, Jade-Colored Glasses. This makes Jinsung one of the most likable members of the terrorist organization FUG. - Virtual Pet Planet: Dee's owner is pretty much the definition of this trope, and can sometimes even go into Doting Parent. Western Animation - The parents of Spoiled Brat Angelica on Rugrats are like this when they're not comitting Parental Obliviousness like most of the other parents on that show. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Rainbow Dash's parents are her biggest fans, up to and including having her image on t-shirts, that they actually wear. They go out of their way to cheer her on for everything, up to and including hanging up a towel. Now we know why Dash's ego is so over-inflated. She does get sick of them after a while, though.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverEnthusiasticParents
Overcomplicated Menu Order - TV Tropes "Oh, what, I have to be an employee to haze the rookie?" Bubble Bass: I'll take a double triple bossy deluxe, on a raft, four-by-four animal style, extra shingles with a shimmy and a squeeze, light axle grease, make it cry, burn it, and let it swim. Squidward: We serve food here, sir. A character makes an order in a restaurant or cafe that is so ludicrously complicated it'll be a wonder if the waiter/barista/cashier can remember half of it. This is frequently used to show pretentiousness on the part of the one making the order, though Rule of Funny is often just as likely an explanation. This is done particularly often with espresso beverages, custom cocktails, and food with overly-precise details, although incidents of the character ordering off the menu also count. It frequently involves Hash House Lingo and/or Sommelier Speak for extra convolution (or the waiter might give the plain English order to the chef in Hash House Lingo, making it a lot shorter and easier to remember in the process). See also Must Have Caffeine, Drink-Based Characterization, and Real Men Take It Black. May be a trait of an Unsatisfiable Customer. Compare Complexity Addiction which has a similar theme, but with plans instead of food/drink. Compare and contrast Cordon Bleugh Chef when it's the chef that likes to be overcomplicated (and with often disastrous results). ## Examples: - A non food related version shows up in Interspecies Reviewers. The Succubus Tower is a gigantic brothel with over 60 floors and thousands of succubi eager to please, so customers have to be very specific just to narrow down the selection. - In Nichijou, after Yukko fails miserably at ordering off the complicated new coffee list, she invites Mio to the same coffee shop to watch her fail, but Mio flawlessly recites one of these. - Invoked by Set in an episode of Oh, Suddenly Egyptian God, visiting Horus' restaurant and trying to trip him up with an overly long and excessive order, repeatedly canceling and un-canceling requests for menu sets. Horus manages to complete everything in time with the help of Otter. - In the first series of Ojamajo Doremi, Doremi gets one of these at her first apprentice witch exam, which is to conjure up whatever is requested by the examiners. She doesn't pass. Especially unfair as her friends got relatively easy requests. - What they are depends on the language. In the original Japanese dub, Aiko had to make cubical takoyaki (fried octopus dumplings) and Hazuki had to make a three-layered pudding, while in the 4Kids dub, Mirabelle was tasked with making square crab cakes and Reanne made a chocolate soufflé. Meanwhile Doremi (Dorie in the 4Kids dub) had to either make anmitsu (an old Japanese dessert made of small cubes of agar jelly and sweet red bean paste) and coffee with milk or hot milk and sweet jelly taffy. - Episode three of Otherworldly Izakaya Nobu features a variant where the complication comes from limitations rather than requirements: the young lady Hildegarde wants a tasty meal that is not smelly, spicy, sour, bitter or hard, with no potatoes, eggs, bread, porridge or stew. Her uncle Johann muses that what made her into such a Picky Eater is a combination of her being spoiled by him when she was young, being insecure about her newly arranged marriage and missing the comforts of a warm meal, as her meals tend to be cold by the time the testers are finished checking for poison. - Early on in Komi Can't Communicate, Najimi sends Komi to Starbooks with a complex drink order, ostensibly to help her practice talking to people. When she finally gets up the courage to approach the counter, she discovers that the drink isn't even a normal menu item; it's a combination of two other menu items. The stress of trying to figure out how to order it eventually results in the barista having to guess the order based on her (highly agitated) body language and giving her an enormous drink even more complicated than what she was trying to order. - BoBoiBoy: In episode 2, Ying's order to the Burgeria employee is a long order of sets and specifics, and her Motor Mouth doesn't help. She even goes to the restaurant herself to repeat the order, then after writing it down, the Burgeria employee looks up and is confused to find no one at the counter (since she had just gained Super Speed and is using it here). - Near the start of the High Society arc in Cerebus the Aardvark, Cerebus is looking for an excuse to start a fight in the fancy hotel he is staying in. At dinner, he orders prime rib of yak with rum and raisin sauce, four bottles of fine wine each from a different year, and for dessert "any fruit that's out of season". To his disappointment, all the demands are met without protest. - In one of the D.R. & Quinch stories from the comic book series 2000 AD, D.R. wants to appear eccentric at a fancy restaurant and so orders four dozen lobsters, wearing Prussian Blue waistcoats. Then when they're delivered, he complains that the waistcoats are Turquoise Blue, "and where are the chocolate-covered ant's brains?" - Crabgrass: In the header panel for this comic, Miles makes such an order when his mom is preparing burgers. She is clearly not amused by his request, promptin him to remark that that attitudes like this are the reason most restaurants go under in the first year. - Retail: In this strip Cooper ask Marla if she wants anything from the food court. She says she wants a Caesar Chicken Pocket, then proceeds to talk about several substitutions over the order and even to get her an specific soda from a neighboring restaurant. He just answers if she can just choose a number from the menu. (Compare that to Cooper, who when asked by Donnie what he wants, just asks for a number 5 from where Donnie is going.) - In the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera, Groucho, playing the shady social consultant Otis B. Driftwood and operating solely along the lines of the Rule of Funny, orders two to three portions of what seems to be everything on the menu in an illogical way, punctuating his selections after each item with an order for "three hard-boiled eggs" for the stowaways hiding in his stateroom. - Casino Royale (2006) (the Daniel Craig version) puts a twist on the usual James Bond martini by having him order one consisting of: "Two measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it over ice and add a thin slice of lemon peel." And after four of the other people at the table decide they want one too, Le Chiffre sarcastically wonders aloud if anyone's interested in playing poker instead of drinking. This is also a Mythology Gag to a specific scene in the books. Bond's order is recreated exactly, right down to the waiter's pleased expression (although by that point Kina Lillet hadn't been made in 20 years, which makes it even harder). - Inverted later in the film. Bond orders "a martini", the waiter asks "Shaken or stirred?" and Bond replies "Do I look like I give a damn?" - Jack Nicholson's character in Five Easy Pieces wants an omelet with wheat toast. The hostile waitress refuses to accommodate him, so he orders his omelet with no potatoes, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, "hold the lettuce, hold the tomato, hold the mayo. And hold the chicken salad." Waitress: You want me to hold the chicken, huh? Bobby: I want you to hold it between your knees. - The restaurant scene in L.A. Story has the people at the table order espressos of escalating length, with Harris topping them all (and setting the rest of the table telling the waiter to add a twist of lemon to the orders they've already made). Harris: I'll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon. - In Tampopo there's a scene where a bunch of businessmen visits a French restaurant. Each person defers up the ladder of seniority until the CEO of the company orders (something bland and safe for people new to French cuisine, as I recall.) Each person down the chain of command promptly orders the same thing—except the most junior executive. He turns out to be an expert on French food, and makes a complex order that thrills the waiter, but embarrasses the heck out of everyone else. - Inverted in Dude, Where's My Car?, when the boys place a fairly straightforward drive-through order and the worker complicates it by repeatedly asking "And then?" - Good Burger: Connie: Hello, my name is Connie Muldoon, I'm hosting a family reunion and my oven has run amok! I think it's the heat actuator. Anyhoo, I'd like to order... Speech increases the more she talks Three Good Meals, four Junior Good Meals, a seventeen-piece order of your Good Chunks, and on two of the Junior Good Meals, I need to substitute the Good Cookies for Good Pies. Now don't fret if that's extra, I'll pony up the overage. And, uh, oh, on the regular Good Meals, I need two of the Good Burgers to have ketchup, mayo, mustard, lettuce, tomato, but no onion, I've got an interview this afternoon. Let's see, that takes care of everyone but Uncle Leslie who doesn't eat meat but, of course, he does eat dairy, so I don't get it. Let's get Leslie a Good Chickwich with some Good Fries, and a Good Root Beer all to go. But I would like to have my beverage while I wait. Now, total me up. - In When Harry Met Sally..., Sally's Establishing Character Moment is this order in a diner: Sally: I'd like the chef salad, please, with the oil and vinegar on the side. And the apple pie a la mode. But I'd like the pie heated, and I don't want the ice cream on top, I want it on the side. And I'd like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it. If not, then no ice cream, just whipped cream, but only if it's real. If it's out of a can, then nothing. Waitress: Not even the pie? Sally: No, just the pie, but then not heated. - Get Shorty: While sitting in a restaurant, Karen explains to Chili that celebrities will also order something that is not on the menu, and then leave without eating it. On cue, Martin Weir enters, orders an omelette made entirely on egg whites, has a brief conversation with Karen and Chili, and then leaves before the omelette arrives. - In Tin Men, BB and Tilley, two aluminum siding salesmen, have been in an Escalating War ever since they got into a car accident. At one point in the movie, Bagel (BB's boss) and Sam (Tilley's partner) try to get them to bury the hatchet by taking them out to breakfast. However, BB becomes so frustrated at Tilley taking so long to order breakfast (specifically, in asking the waitress how the eggs are cooked) that he ends up starting the feud back up again. - In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, when Jen strikes out on her own and visits a restaurant, she has this exchange with the waiter: Jen: Steamed whole cod, bite-size meatballs, a little starchy, but keep the sauce light, shark fin soup, mixed vegetables, and some warm wine. Waiter: I have to order from a bigger restaurant. Jen: Hurry then. - Comedian Tim Hawkins had a wife list one of these when a husband asks his wife "what she wants" at Starbucks (view it here). Wife : All right, here's what I want. Listen. Listen; this is what I want. I want a tall, skinny, sugar-free, decaf soy vanilla latte, extra hot, whipped cream, double sleeve, no cup . Beat Husband (turning to clerk) : Please tell me you got that! - A Russian joke: A man walks into a bar and orders a cocktail: Give me a Yabba Dabba Chillie Willie Rum & Whiskey Bowfinger, cool, shaken, not stirred, with a slice of lemon! Excuse me, sir. I couldn't hear you clearly. You said you want a Yabba Dabba Chillie Willie Rum & Whiskey Bowfinger, cool, shaken, not stirred, with a slice of what exactly? - (This is a variant of a joke about a Japanese Tourist in Russia asking a cop about where he could find a coke) - A variation on the theme is the joke where a customer rushes in, places a long and confusing order, says he'll be back for it in ten minutes... and just after he leaves, the clerk, who has a Speech Impediment, finally gets around to asking what they want. - The Big Bang Theory: - A Running Gag is Sheldon being very specific on how he wants his food prepared. It was also done once with Leonard's mother. - In the episode where Sheldon decides to work at the Cheesecake Factory in order to let his mind work on a physics problem, Leonard gives him an extra-complicated order in revenge for all the times Sheldon did it to him. Sheldon understands and doesn't hold it against him. - In the TV show version of Clueless Cher and Dee have a favorite restaurant to go to for lunch period, which has "the best" Chinese Chicken Salad - which they order without the chicken or dressing. They basically pay $12 for a bowl of lettuce. - A real-life example from Kitchen Nightmares has Gordon Ramsey going to Sebastian's, the owner boasting of his "special menu." It's about eight pages long with the diner having to order at least a couple off of each category and mixing them up. In a priceless moment, Sebastian explains it all as the camera focuses on Gordon just staring at him in utter disbelief. - In an episode of Cheers Diane convinces Sam to let her be the bartender for the evening rather than just being a waitress. An order comes in for a Bloody Mary, a particularly complex mixed drink. Naturally, Diane doesn't know how to make it so she looks it up in a bartender's manual, taking a long time to make sure it's just right. As she finishes, she remarks that it is a complicated drink. Sam agrees, which is why he always mixes up a big batch before the evening starts and stores it in the mini-fridge behind the bar. - Frasier: - Zig-Zagged in an episode where, before Martin gets to the coffee house (Martin being a more down-to-earth food kind of person) Niles orders him a biscotti "but when you bring it to the table call it a cookie." The waitress dutifully brings it, only for Martin to correct her. "Thank you, dear, but it's called a biscotti." - Niles orders his overly complicated coffee drinks with a "whisper of cinnamon." And his steak order must be seen to be believed. - There was also one episode with an Overly-Long Gag about the baristas shouting relay orders to each other (when they're all standing within three feet of each other) and Niles orders a "nonfat, half-caf, low-foam latte," and then begins to worry that the order is being altered as it gets relayed through the chain, even though the person actually making the drink is well within earshot of Niles himself. To the mortification of Niles, he gets exactly what he ordered - under the title of a "Gutless Wonder". - In Malcolm in the Middle, Craig orders one of these at the restaurant where Reese works and tells him to listen carefully as he doesn't want to waste calories by repeating it. - In an early Sesame Street skit, Ernie asks an ice-cream man for a Chocolate, Strawberry, Peach, Vanilla, Banana, Pistachio, Peppermint, Lemon, Orange, Butterscotch ice-cream cone. Amazingly enough, the ice-cream man delivers! But Ernie is inconsolably P.O.ed because the cone was prepared upside-down. Watch it here. - The Spoils of Babylon "The Age of the Bastard": While Devon cannot get a vegetarian option at the steakhouse that somehow fits in the tiny submarine, Cynthia's order just gets more and more complicated. Cynthia: Oh, and another thing? Waiter: Yes, ma'am? Cynthia: Ah, yes, could I have a carafe of tomato soup, two turkey legs Waiter: Very nice. Cynthia: I'd like some cold cereal with some hot milk, two pots of tea, and a white wine in a coffee mug with a little bit of salt in it. Waiter: Okay, salt in it. Cynthia: Thank you so much. Waiter: Very good. Thank you. Cynthia: Thank you. Oh, and one more thing. Waiter: Yes? Cynthia: Could I have a cotton blend napkin? Sometimes when you iron out the regular napkins, they're too itchy for my thighs. Waiter: I understand. - Portlandia includes a sketch in which a starving couple wander into an overly gourmet burger joint and are exhausted by the barrage of options they're forced to navigate just to order a simple burger. They're then forced to start over because the menu changed while they were ordering. - On an episode of Roseanne, during Roseanne's stint as a waitress at Rodbell's she has a customer order a BLT with the ingredients in a very specific order only to end up asking for "everything on the side, cause you won't do it right". Roseanne, who just found out this is the woman Dan's been having dirty dreams about, laments that not only is she cute, but has a great personality too. - One episode of the Disney show Hannah Montana had the protagonist's brother ordering coffee in a diner. He rattles off one of these, to which the waitress just replies "... Coffee?". He just says "Yes please." in response. - Piper in Charmed goes above and beyond, giving the waiter specific instructions for how the chef should prepare the fish she orders. As her date points out, it comes with the territory, what with her being a professional chef herself. - The West Wing: in the second season episode "The Lame Duck Congress", Toby goes out to lunch with Fowler and Fox, two political insiders who will tell him important information about a crucial vote. Toby knows what he's in for when it comes to them ordering food ("You've never seen grown men order lunch like this"), but it irritates him all the same: Fowler: I'll take the risotto, but I'd like it cooked with chicken broth instead of oil, is that possible? Waitress: Sure. Fowler: And I'd like to substitute snow peas for the asparagus. Fox: I'll have the same, but I don't want the squash pureed with either cream or butter. In fact, it doesn't even have to be pureed- Toby: Fellas! - Discussed at length in the Dave Barry column "Decaf Poopacino," as a source of immense frustration for people who need plain ordinary coffee to wake up in the morning. The column takes its title from its subject, the world's most expensive coffee obtained from the excrement of a tropical weasel. It also contains this quote, which speaks for itself: "These consumers are always ordering mutant beverages with names like 'mocha-almond-honey-vinaigrette lattespressacino,' beverages that must be made one at a time via a lengthy and complex process involving approximately one coffee bean, three quarts of dairy products, and what appears to be a small nuclear reactor." - A now-discontinued column in the Raleigh, NC newspaper the News & Observer once complained that Starbucks should institute a separate line for folks who just want regular coffee. - One Deadpan Snarker replied if the complainer wanted regular coffee, they should just get their own coffee pot. - One Old Master Q strip have Master Q, depicted as an extremely picky eater, making an overcomplicated mess over a simple order of fried noodles with instructions like "Cut the oil by 40%, add more sesame, leave a side of mustard, add a side of chopped onions and garlic, add barley, replace the chicken with half-bacon, the wanton soup should have 15% less salt and 35% more pepper, etc. etc"... the following panel had the waiter who took Master Q's order throwing the damn thing out of a nearby window. - Done a few times in Zits. One strip observes that the more complicated the coffee order, the more high-maintenance the girlfriend. - FoxTrot: - Peter Fox, while making a real complex order at a coffee shop (which ultimately translates back to 'a cup of coffee' once the jargon is stripped away), is charged $1.97, to which Peter pays $2.00 and tells him to keep the change. He also admits to Jason that he realizes he was being annoying, which was why he tipped him. Cue the three pennies flying towards his head. - Roger inverts this trope, thoroughly confusing the barista when he asks for a "regular cup of joe." - Also inverted in Citizen Dog, where Mel orders cups of coffee for himself and his dog Fergus from a trendy coffeehouse. The barista confusedly asks for directions from his coworker on how to prepare coffee ("It's a mocha java latte without the cinnamon stick!"); the final panel sees the pair dejectedly sitting at their table with huge mugs filled to the brim with whipped cream monstrosities accessorized with peeled bananas, little umbrellas and straws. - In Pearls Before Swine, Rat is sometimes seen working at a coffee shop where customers make such complicated orders. His responses are... characteristic of Rat. Customer: Hi, uh...I'll have, uh...one large nonfat no foam double caramel decaf latte to go. Rat : I heard 'Blah, blah, blah, coffee.' - Best of Three: The cafe actually seems to encourage these, with the waiter suggesting a fancy, complicated order. Grant in particular has a long one. (Helen can question if he " always tortures waiters like this".) Grant: Id like a small pot of freshly boiling water and two Earl Grey teabags in a mug. Do not attempt to begin brewing the tea yourself, please. On a separate plate, I will require a strip of lemon peel the full circumference of the lemon at the center, that is, no half-measures and two cubes of raw sugar. That would be the light brown kind. Also one cookie, the driest you have. - The waiter is actually quite impressed and makes it for him. In contrast, Helen can either order a cappuccino or nothing. Waiter: What, just a cappuccino? No special instructions? You dont want the steamed milk in a bowl on the side? Piece of kumquat peel? Half-dozen pomegranate seeds? - In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there's the matter of Big Smoke's order. Big Smoke: I'll have two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip, a number 7, two number 45s, one with cheese, and a large soda. - Poptropica: Kirk Strayer from Back Lot Island orders a specific coffee: a half-caf leviathan latte-espresso. He refuses to go back to work unless he gets it. Of the two coffee shops on the island, some are out of specific types, so you need to order two drinks separately and combine them. - Tales of Vesperia has the waitress minigame, where choosing specific characters denote their difficulty. Raven, being the hardest, has the customers order ludicrous amounts of food they would honestly not be able to finish. - Girl Genius: From the Twitter of Othar Trigvassen: We can't just walk out, and I'll bet the garbage and mortuary wagons are routinely inspected. This calls for desperate, unsavory measures. Chez Leon, one of the best restaurants in the city. The Master dines here frequently. Oslaka is puzzled. Didn't we just eat? Indeed we did. The waiter and I spend twenty minutes discussing our meal choices. I demand only the freshest and most exacting dishes. He almost smiles. The meal is brought. It's a masterpiece of presentation. The chef himself appears and compliments me on the suggestions I made. He weeps. He waits for me to eat. I hesitate, and then ask for a bottle of ketchup. We are tossed out the city gates less than 3 minutes later. - xkcd orders exactly $15.05 worth of appetizers, expecting the waiter to figure out what quantities of which items to serve in order to reach that number. The joke is that the costs listed on the menu just happen to mean that the waiter is being asked to solve a complex mathematical problem. Though in this case, you could just solve it with 7 orders of mixed fruit. - Narbonic uses it for humor derived from comparing Caliban's old job in Hell and his new job in a Starbucks. Caliban: ERIC! Get your arse back in line, or when your order comes up I will see to it that your medium nonfat soy vanilla burns your flesh to the very core! - Questionable Content: - When Cosette starts working at Coffee of Doom, Angus (who doesn't even drink coffee) orders "a half-caf soy no-foam latte, not too hot, with a shot of vanilla and a dusting of nutmeg, fresh-ground only, please. Make it a medium, but put it in a large to-go cup." His explanation for doing this is "Oh, what, I have to be an EMPLOYEE to haze the rookie?" - When Emily starts working there, Faye says she has to take "the test": Faye: Make me a ... quad venti upside-down caramel macchiato, 4 splenda, 3 raw sugar, 187 degrees exactly. Emily: That sounds dumb and bad. I'll make you a nice espresso instead. Faye: Well done, you pass. - This is in keeping with Faye's previously expressed belief that people who order stuff like this don't actually like coffee. "I want a mocha with extra chocolate, whipped cream, and someone to hold my hand while I drink it!" - SpongeBob SquarePants: - In "Pickles", Bubble Bass makes an order using a string of complicated Hash House Lingo (much of it specific to Southern California's famous In-N-Out Burger). Squidward gives up trying to write it all down about halfway through, and dryly replies "We serve food here, sir." Luckily, SpongeBob overheard and has the order ready seconds later. - In "Bubble Buddy", SpongeBob asks Squidward to make a meal for his bubble buddy at Krusty Krab, which is not just overly specific but has to be remade several times (it'd be hard to go to the details). And at the end, Squidward and Mr. Krabs are given bubble tips and money... which pop, infuriating the two. - Bubble Bass is subject to this trope once again in "Larry the Floor Manager". He asks for very specific toppings on his Krabby Patty, such as Himalayan salt, smoked paprika, and micro greens. He takes so long to describe it he starts to drive customers away, prompting Mr. Krabs to shove a regular Krabby Patty into his mouth and kick him out. - In an Orson's Farm/US Acres segment of Garfield and Friends, Roy tries to take advantage of an offer of free food for a month at Orson's new diner by ordering outrageous items, including moose stew with chocolate sauce and broiled yak's nose with green gravy. Roy: I'd like an alligator-cheese sandwich made with cheese from an alligator named Cynthia, I want it with lettuce grown in Northern Bolivia and picked on Memorial Day, I want it served on rye bread with exactly 71 caraway seeds per slice, and I want a pickle in the shape of Muncie, Indiana. - In the We Bare Bears episode "Cupcake Job", the Bears get jobs at a gourmet cupcake store. They quickly run into trouble, including a bossy business-woman who makes a complicated order that leads to Grizzly accidentally breaking the cupcake-making machine. - Blaineley does this in song in Total Drama World Tour: "Get me a half-fat, no-foam latte, steamed to 102 heat! I'm quite specific." - The Powerpuff Girls (2016): The Fashionista villain Bianca asks for a "non-fat almond milk, skinny double-chai latte". This is later downplayed as the almond milk isn't just for the joke. "Monkey Love" gives a Call-Back by revealing that Bianca is lactose-intolerant. - In The Simpsons, Barney brings Yoko Ono to Moe's Tavern. He orders a beer, while Yoko orders "a single plum floating in perfume, served in a man's hat". Moe cheerfully brings both orders in full from under the counter. - In the The Boondocks episode "The Block is Hot", Jazmine is selling glasses of cold lemonade of a uniform size from her stand for $1, nothing else. She still has to put up with customers like this. Female customer: I'll take two small lemonades, with ice. Two small lemonades, without ice. Three large lemonades, one with ice, one with no ice, one with crushed ice. - The 2010s Urban Legend of "secret menus" at chains like Starbuck's and McDonald's encouraged this. You can't just ask for some fictional menu item you saw on the Internet and expect employees to know how to make it, so in practice, it's no different from a complete custom order—and they could get fairly complex.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvercomplicatedMenuOrder
Top-Down View - TV Tropes Follow the bouncing ball. Top-down view, also sometimes referred to as bird's-eye view or overhead view, was a common perspective in video games before the advent of 3D, and is still in use in some genres today. Commonly found in Real-Time Strategy games and occasionally in Simulation Games that don't use Isometric Projection. It is also used in some Action Games, such as the early Grand Theft Auto series. Some of these games, in addition to having the camera angled straight down, also use a perspectiveless top-down projection in which everything on the screen is viewed as if the camera were directly above it. Not everything can be drawn well in this perspective, though, which is why Cheated Angle is often applied to character and item sprites. See also Isometric Projection, Side View and Three-Quarters View. ## Examples: - Arena.Xlsm - Balls of Steel - Battle Chess - Bolo - Bubble Trouble - The Classroom Trilogy - Crüe Ball - The Crush Pinball series ( Alien Crush, Devil's Crush, and Jaki Crush) - David's Midnight Magic - Decision: this view actually makes some of the giant 10 foot tall zombies harder to see, as they're the same color as the road. - Extreme Pinball - The early Grand Theft Auto games. - The 2D The Legend of Zelda games mostly use this view; many of them including the original, have brief side-view sections. - The original SimCity, sort of, though there was an inconsistent bottom-left-to-top-right tilt for most of the graphics, see here. - Evolution Worlds uses this as one of its two camera angles. - Bosconian - Heartlight - Heavy Water Jogger - Hell Is Others - Herc's Adventures - Highway Hunter - Hotline Miami - In Live A Live, the city in the Near Future chapter is depicted in top-down view, which, in a game which holds to Three-Quarters View everywhere else, sticks out like a sore thumb. - A Nightmare on Elm Street - A Noble Circle - Obsession Pinball and its Polished Port, Absolute Pinball. - Of Guards And Thieves - Outbreak - The Outlaw, The Drunk & The Whore - All of the original games in the Pinball Dreams series. - Pokémon Pinball - Psycho Pinball - The Punisher - Reassembly - Red Zone: Both helicopter and on-foot levels have a top-down view. Unusual for a Sega Genesis game, walls and structural objects are rendered with a 3D perspective that varies with the player's position, though it's fairly obvious that the latter are composed of flat sprites stacked on top of copies of themselves. - Robot Rascals - Roller Ball - Ruiner Pinball - Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball - Stick RPG (First game) - Sword Dancer is one of many RPG for the PC-98 that use this style. Although in battle this changes to a 2D Fighting Game perspective. One of the first games to do this. - TaskMaker - Tasty Planet - Tauronos - Temple of Apshai - Uncle Albert's Adventures - Urban Yeti! - WarioWare - The World's Hardest Game - Many early Digital Pinball Tables, such as the Crush Pinball series ( Alien Crush, Devil's Crush, etc.) - Done as an art style in Williams Electronics' "rollercoaster" pinballs ( Comet, Cyclone, and Hurricane); the playfields are drawn so the player is looking down on the Amusement Park attendees from high overhead. - Spacecraft in FTL: Faster Than Light are depicted in top-down view. Character sprites, however, make a generous use of Cheated Angle, especially the Lanius whose downward-facing sprites look rather like player-facing sprites. ## Top-down projection - Practically all Vertical Scrolling Shooters ( Ikaruga, 1942, etc ) - Most all Roguelikes, to the degree that ASCII art can be said to have perspective. - Many 2-D Space games ( Asteroids, Star Castle, etc ) - The Bilestoad - The first two Escape Velocity games. Nova instead gave everything a 3/4ths tilt. - Grand Theft Pizza Delivery: Zigzagged. For the most part, the game is viewed in this manner, but in the over-world, while the cars are shown like this, the buildings are seen from a Three-Quarters View, likely to make navigating the over-world easier. - Super Mario 3D Land has this in World 5-2, which is designed in homage to The Legend of Zelda for its 25th anniversary. Super Mario 3D World, its sequel, has an Auto-Scrolling Level in this view. - Tiny Hands Adventure: Two of the levels, "Knossos Walkabout" and "Seaside Maze", are viewed from above. ## Non-Video Game Examples Films — Live-Action - Exit 0: The first shot of the movie is a top-down view of the car containing The Protagonists driving along a road. - The Swarm (2020): The first shots of the movie are a top-down view of a road through a cornfield as the intro credits roll. - The Widow (2020): Some shots of the van driving through the woods are filmed from a bird's-eye view, right over it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverheadView
Outside-Genre Foe - TV Tropes "Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs"? I'd watch that. The end of the Mesozoic era... A herd of Chasmosaurs is unusually jittery! They now know they have more to fear than Tyrannosaurs! Now they face an even greater danger... Tyrannosaurs in F-14s! There are some things you just can't plan for. An opponent from completely outside your genre is one of them. A cowboy is not expecting to fight demons, a demon is not expecting to fight aliens. In more mild cases, this simply requires a readjustment of tactics, but more extreme situations (such as Cthulhu showing up on a Buddy Cop Show) are simply going to end quickly and messily. Subtrope of Outside-Context Problem and Genre Refugee; supertrope to Vile Villain, Saccharine Show and Cosmic Horror Reveal. Often a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere if it's a video game Boss Battle. Compare to The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. ## Examples: - Beastars: Part of what makes Melon such a dangerous antagonist is that he's a Fighting Series Starter Villain in a Teen Romantic Drama. He's someone even the weakest Stock Shōnen Hero would beat to a bloody pulp in two seconds, but because he's an Ax-Crazy Large Ham who does things For the Evulz in a setting where being able to break a ceiling with your bare hands is considered the apex of physical strength, he suddenly gets upgraded to a Final Boss-level threat. - The head writer of Digimon Tamers decided that the final boss would be neither Digimon nor human, something that neither the heroes or the audience could ever expect. The D-Reaper more than qualified; an ever-growing mass of red goo that aims to delete everything. Originally a mere data-management program, it absorbed so much data that it threatens to destroy both the Digital World and the human world. Even the strongest of Digimon can be wounded merely by coming into contact with the thing, and it takes the heroes multiple episodes to figure out how to even fight it. The D-Reaper is also rendered in 3D CGI, in contrast to the rest of the series being in 2D animation, just to further emphasize how wrong the thing is. - Dragon Ball - Dragon Ball was a martial arts/comedy show in a world with some futuristic sci-fi elements and many more magical elements, and Goku and company dealing primarily with armies, powerful martial artists, and the occasional monster. Then came "Demon King Piccolo" who was a force of pure evil who took the franchise to its darkest point (albeit, even though that was the original show's penultimate arc, that's still quite an early point). - Then the sequel series Dragon Ball Z came and completely changed the direction into a strong sci-fi bent, with the first enemy being Goku's big brother, who revealed both of them were aliens. DBZ had practically changed genres into a martial arts/sci-fi show (though deities and the afterlife were strong elements), the final threat, Majin Buu, is an Eldritch Abomination, and nobody knows where it came from. - This swings back in the other direction when Dragon Ball Super featured a Doctor Slump crossover episode. By this point, Dragon Ball had evolved into a mostly serious Fighting Series so when Arale shows up looking for a play-fight, she ends up steamrolling Goku and Vegeta using the Reality Warper powers that come from existing as a gag-based manga character. Vegeta realizes early on that he has absolutely no chance against a gag-strip character. - In Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro, you'd expect the next major villain to be a demon, since Neuro is a demon and all. \|\|Only one other demon is ever shown in the series and Neuro easily controls him.\|\| Instead, the series goes in a completely unexpected direction by making the first truly major arc follow \|\|a super powerful A.I. that can turn people into criminals and slaves via brainwashing\|\|. How do they top that? \|\|Six humans who are really, really evil. That evil is where they get their superpowers, in fact.\|\| A series about a demon detective never once goes the supernatural route. - The Greater-Scope Villain of Naruto is actually not a ninja at all, and not even a human. \|\|Kaguya Otsutsuki is a woman who came from the heavens above and created chakra. In other words, an alien.\|\| - Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl: Ash and his friends once encountered an actual ghost. While there are many Ghost type Pokemon, the one they faced was a human ghost that was going to drag them into its realm. - Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a Magical Girl show where \|\|the adorable, fluffy cat-weasel mentor for the protagonists is actually a villain ripped straight from a Cosmic Horror Story. Kyubey is revealed to be a Manipulative Bastard who follows its own Blue-and-Orange Morality while dooming the protagonists and humanity as a whole to an unimaginable fate\|\|. - In the Soul Hunter manga and 2018 anime, which has been mostly Chinese fantasy, \|\|it turns out that So Dakki, the supposed villain, was working for the alien Jyoka all along. Jyoka, as the Signpost of History, has long been manipulating all of Earth to her whims\|\|. - Toriko has been a simple Black-and-White Morality story of the benevolent IGO vs. the monstrous Gourmet Corp, \|\|which is why a third power, consisting of hidden agents within both groups and collaborating with wealthy folk called NEO, takes everyone off guard.\|\| On top of that, \|\|NEO is controlled by the long-thought-dead Acacia possessed by an Appetite Demon from a different dimension brought to ours by a race of interdimensional and indigestible aliens called Nitros, several of whom populate NEO's higher ranks and who the GT Robos are based on.\|\| Considering most of the series is humans fighting giant animals, it really comes out of left field. - Senran Persona: Ninjas of Hearts: Asuka and Homura are introduced to Shadows and find out the hard way that their Ninja Arts have no effect, causing them to eventually awaken Personas. On the other end, the Phantom Thieves of Hearts later find themselves under the attention of Shinobi, both Good and Evil, because their special ablity could affect Shinobi Society, and they are ordinary high school students for the majority of the time. Homura puts them through Training from Hell in order to prepare them for any Shinobi that might come looking for them. - Fate Genesis: Dr. Eggman is this for participants of the Holy Grail War as his machines are more than capable of keeping up with Magecraft and magic. Notable since many magi believe it to be impossible for technology to match magic. - Jaune Arc, Lord of Hunger: Darth Nihilus is this to the High Fantasy-inspired world of RWBY. Up until then, the students and staff of Beacon Academy were mostly used to fighting Grimm, human criminals, and Faunus terrorists. Then came Darth Nihilus, the evil spirit of a Sith Lord whose Force abilities rival those of Remnant's strongest magic users. For the heroes, Nihilus is the first enemy they've encountered that was extraterrestrial and undead in nature. - Left Beyond: An odd case in which the arguable protagonist is one of these (no, it's not an isekai). Turns out that the best way to derail a piece of apocalyptic Christian fiction is to throw a slightly more benevolent version of the MCP from Tron at it. - Last Child of Krypton: \|\|Darkseid\|\| was this to NERV. Giant aliens? Sure, we can deal with it. An ancient, malevolent, overwhelming powerful alien God of Evil? Hell, no. - \|\|Deoxys\|\| in Latias' Journey, an Eldritch Abomination of Warhammer 40,000 proportions... in what starts out as a pretty straightforward Pokémon story. - In the The Culture/ Harry Potter crossover Culture Shock (Ruskbyte), the Culture finds it hard to believe that Potterverse wizards, for all they appear primitive, can manipulate both layers of the Grid simultaneously, something only an even more advanced faction had previously demonstrated, nevermind things like the moving paintings that they can't even explain. - The Master of Death: Outsiders are this by definition, but even discounting what Potter specifically can do, Potterverse spells can do things like transfiguration that the Dresdenverse has no conception of. - Zero vs Kira: Thanks to the Death Note, Light is this to the Britanians and Black Knights alike. - Death Note Equestria: Thanks to the powers of the Death Note (which even she doesn't fully understand), Twilight Sparkle as Kira becomes this to the entire Equestrian government. That said, just as L is figuring out the limits and rules of her powers, the golems suddenly show up, taking both sides by surprise. - Equestrylvania: The reason Dracula's forces are so effective against Equestria's military is that they come out of nowhere, and are like nothing the ponies have ever faced before. - The God Empress of Ponykind: Discord, due to not acting like a normal Chaos Daemon. \|\|Not even the Chaos Gods know what he is or where he came from.\|\| - The Bridge: Several pony characters remark on how nothing could have prepared them for a Kaiju. Likewise, numerous kaiju characters find themselves at a loss against some of the Equestrian villains. Xenilla has to seek out a unicorn expert just to figure out anything about King Sombra. In a case of Dramatic Irony, almost all of the characters have no idea the Big Bad \|\|Bagan\|\| even exists. The few who have heard of him think he isn't due to arrive for another 30,000 years, leaving them unprepared as they don't know the sealing magic has failed. - The adult fanfic Wandering Pilot gives the feminist world of Queen's Blade the main protagonist of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Because of how he's from a world different from their own (Humongous Mecha with psychological horror for the best examples) in addition to being a very unusual kind of boy, every badass woman has her eyes toward him. Of course, this is more than just a mere harem fic as he's only interested in helping people, yet his insertion and new unique powers he himself can't comprehend causes changes and problems for everyone. - The Superwomen of Eva series: the appearance of true-to-Kami-no-it's-not-an-Angel-plot-no-it's-not-something-you-drank-no-we-are-not-making-this-up superheroes (or rather, super heroines) hits every single person good and bad within the cast that already had some issues from living in the world of one of the archetypical "Super Robot with Dysfunction Junction" anime shows like a brick to the face, and the start of their Character Development (or their Start of Darkness) is their struggle to wrap their minds around this fact. - A certain untitled Draconia Chronicles fanfic has a human space colony ship put down in the No-Woman's Land between the Draconic Empire and the Tiger Territories. When the dragons attack, they're ground into hamburger by AA cannons. When the tigers attack, they're shitstomped by Space Marines with Powered Armor and laser guns. Both factions decide to leave the humans be, because if this is what they're like defensively, what'll it be like when they're mad? - Arturia Pendragon is as such in A Knight's Tale as Inquisitor ever since she landed in Thedas, with this trope being one reason why she's so efficient in dealing with the (most recent) clustermess that is plaguing the world. In a land of Dark Fantasy so used to dragons of various stages, the occasional Blight, in addition to the religious zealots and vicious nobles regularly roaming around and about, positively NO ONE foresaw an unusually competent teenager (who is not at all a teenager) that wields the holy sword to end all holy swords, which none of the resident Standard Fantasy Races (who are much more accustomed to the Low Fantasy their world tends to lean into more often than not) have at all bore witness to such an degree up until the point of Arturia's arrival, all while she easily no sells any magic that doesn't belong to an Archmage due to having such high Magic Resistance thanks to herself essentially being the reincarnation of a dragon. This only increases as the Anchor begins changing Arturia into something even she's not sure of anymore. - In Dangerous Tenant, the Resident Evil series, which is basically a shooting game as characters fight their way through hordes of zombies, finds a new hero in the form of the Tenth Doctor ( Doctor Who) after he arrives in their world by accident. Where his allies could only shoot down the attacking zombies and try to stop the virus being released to create more, the Doctor is able to scientifically analyze the available information about the T-virus and devise a new version that will be perfectly harmless to humanity but render them all immune to the mutative effects of the T-virus from then on. - Citadel of the Heart has the fic most noteworthy of this being Digimon Re: Adventure. An OC Omegamon utilized elsewhere in the series, when her Fusion forcefully ends, her undying will to maintain her Fusion permanently comes to life as an Omegamon Zwart D known simply as "Blackheart". Digimon Re: Adventure is under most circumstances a Porn with Plot with a Slice of Life type of tone, even though the partner Digimon still exist, and enemy Digimon do indeed exist elsewhere in the story. However, the jarring part about this is just how utterly bloodthirsty Blackheart is and her desire for genocidal war in contrast to every other villain wanting the protagonists alive if captured, not killed. Blackheart, and the Black Digitron which leaks from her entire frame, is the go to Knight of Cerebus for the entire fic, and is considered a Vile Villain, Saccharine Show due to how out of place she is within a Porn with Plot fic, even in spite of her being the central catalyst to the Myth Arc that actual plot utilizes. - Abyssal Plain has made it apparent that the Others (Boogeymen) of the Abyss, while deadly and vast in their horror, are not used to a large group of combat experienced and battle-hardened superheroes and villains with abilities that Magic can't completely replicate. - Akko Kagari and the Evil Within sees the staff and student of Luna Nova, a Wizarding School, fighting against a bioweapon with a purely scientific origin. - In Temporal Anomaly, the Dark/Low Fantasy medieval setting of Drakengard is turned upside down by the arrival of Oma Zi-O - a post-apocalypse Evil Overlord in Power Armor who can completely control time in any manner he wishes - an ability that has never existed in that world's history until now. - The New Adventures of Invader Zim: While canon has some fantasy elements, it's primarily a sci-fi setting, as this Series Fic also is. However, one of the main antagonists of Season 1, Norlock, is a magic-wielding vampire. - The Wolf in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a supremely capable bounty hunter who easily trounces Puss the first time they meet, even drawing actual blood. He relentlessly stalks Puss, relishing in the feline's fear, and is played so deadly serious the whole movie turns into Slasher genre whenever he shows up. The reveal of his identity and motivation changes little, given he is \|\|unambiguously, literally, itself.\|\| Death - The MST3K-covered The Beast of Hollow Mountain appears to be a standard Western, with an American rancher trying to deal with disappearing cattle, his love for a local Mexican woman, and his rivalry with another rancher in his Mexican village. Then, later in the film - probably much too late for some - it turns out his cattle are vanishing because \|\|there's a T. rex running around\|\|. - Blood Red Sky sees a group of criminals initiate a carefully planned plane hijacking, only for one of the hostages to survive being shot and turn out to be a vampire. - This is how the aliens are viewed in Cowboys & Aliens. As a result, they're initially referred to as "demons", something the cowboys do know about. Ironically, while the aliens and their technology are inexplicable to the Wild West, their motives are not: \|\|they're here to mine gold.\|\| - Simon Phoenix in Demolition Man, a Human Popsicle from the 20th century awoken in a future of Perfect Pacifist People; to counter this threat, they unfreeze an old-school cop familiar with violence. \|\|OK, Dr. Cocteau probably did expect him, just not that he would find a way around his Restraining Bolt and take over.\|\| - At the climax of Gangs of New York, the opposing gangs are facing off ready for a mass street fight according to the "ancient rules of combat", armed to the teeth with knives, clubs, and axes. Then, just as they're about to begin, they're hit by artillery fire, and the army marches in and starts shooting everyone. Suddenly the long blood feud is forgotten as the two sides unite in the struggle to survive. - Hannibal Lecter has elements of this trope. Where most of the villains in his stories are serial killers whose crimes are portrayed in a grounded and realistic manner, Hannibal is a much more over-the-top and theatrical caricature of an Evil Genius who wouldn't be out of place in a Universal Horror monster movie. - Heathers starts off seeming like a typical '80s teen movie, with all of the characters being familiar genre archetypes. Then J.D. starts his killing spree. - Horror films are fond of this trope, especially when starting off as crime thrillers, often resulting in an Enemy Mine situation: - The House On Willow Street features a kidnapping gone wrong due to Demonic Possession. - Splinter starts off as a carjacking before the monster turns up. - From Dusk Till Dawn could easily be mistaken for a crime caper movie for the first hour \|\|until the vampires show up\|\|. - Frontier(s) has a caper gang exploiting civil unrest in Paris to commit a major heist and taking shelter in the countryside, in which they run head-first into a French Neo-Nazi copycat of the Sawyer family. - Them! starts out as a Dragnet-style police procedural murder mystery, before the murders are eventually revealed to be the work of giant mutant ants. - I Come in Peace: The alien drug dealer arrives in the middle of a botched sting operation to kill the human gangsters. Later, he kills more of them when they arrive to kill protagonist Jack Caine. - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Mola Ram and his Thuggee cult aren't out of the ordinary for the archaeology/adventure genre as a whole, but they stick out among Indiana Jones villains. The typical villains in these movies are soldiers of a modern government, usually one at odds with Indy's own United States (Nazi Germany in the first and third film, the Soviet Union in the fourth one), that are trying to obtain long-lost artifacts and use them to help them Take Over the World. The Thuggee, by contrast, are a long-extinct cult and secret society, recently resurrected by a charismatic guru who follows a Religion of Evil (a twisted and ultimately false version of Hinduism), and who, while he's also looking for an artifact to help him take over the world, already wields dangerous occult powers of his own. - James Bond: - For much of his first adventures, James Bond was tasked with defeating world-domination oriented plots of European and/or Asian villains, or at least very high-stakes criminal or spying plots, always with the Cold War as backdrop. In Live and Let Die, Bond finds himself facing off against a Caribbean-based drug ring, led by a dictator with Hollywood Voodoo connections, and nothing relating it to the Cold War whatsoever. In the same movie — though "foe" is something of a stretch in this case — J.W. Pepper is your typical Smokey and the Bandit/ The Dukes of Hazzard-style Southern sheriff who suddenly finds himself caught up in Bond's wake. - Licence to Kill has Bond going after a powerful drug lord, although this time It's Personal and not a mission. Not a world domination or high-stakes spying plot, and unrelated to the Cold War, again. - The medieval society of Krull is woefully unprepared for the arrival of The Beast's interstellar, teleporting base of operations, a seemingly infinite army surplus of Slayers with laser spears, which promptly proceeds to curb-stomp battle the last remaining, desperate alliance of men at the beginning of the film, leaving only the Hero and his abducted bride-to-be as the sole survivors of the relentless slaughter. - Little Shop of Horrors begins by setting up the main character's situation as a loser who lives on the Wrong Side of the Tracks, works for his abusive father figure in a failing business and has an unrequited crush on his attractive coworker who is regularly beaten by her scumbag boyfriend. Then a talking alien plant shows up. - The Long Good Friday is about a London gangster whose operations suddenly come under attack from an unknown party. He assumes that it's a rival mob trying to take over his territory, but eventually discovers that \|\|it's the IRA\|\|. He has no idea why they're after him, and his advisers warn that they operate in a completely different world than him. - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - In The Avengers, Loki is, as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha Romanov (a.k.a. Black Widow) puts it, "nothing we were trained for" — most of the eponymous superteam are used to terrorists with fancy weapons, not mad physical gods from another dimension. Fortunately, Loki's elder brother Thor has dealt with his crap before and joins the human heroes. - Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos, the alien warlord with god-like powers granted by the Infinity Gauntlet is this to many of the heroes he fights in the movie. While Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy aren't necessarily strangers to alien threats, Doctor Strange is sworn to fight against magical dangers, Spider-Man confronts street-level criminals, Captain America and Iron Man handle dangerous terrorists and Black Panther guards Wakanda from invaders. Thanos is unlike anything they had to contend with before, and even Thor and the Guardians are shown to not be enough to fight him either. - Pirates of the Caribbean: Lord Cutler Beckett really stands out given the fantastical nature of the series. The franchise's other villains include a crew of pirates cursed by the gold they stole to be undead for eternity, a creature that's basically the seafaring version of the devil, a sorcerer who practices Hollywood Voodoo, and another crew of undead sailors. Beckett, by contrast, is an utterly mundane (if very successful) businessman, and director of the East India Trading Company, who nevertheless manages to be at least as great a threat as any of the others. What makes him scarier is that despite not being a part of it, he's perfectly aware of the supernatural world. He just treats it as another economic sector to be taken over, identifying all the important actors in it, looking for the pressure points that will allow him to coerce them into serving them, eliminating them if that can't be done, and playing them all against each other. - Predator is a great example. It starts off as a war/action movie, with experienced soldiers going on what looks to them and the audience like another jungle skirmish, to fight some local guerillas. Then the hyper-advanced alien comes in, hijacks the plot, and turns the movie into a completely different genre. The characters go from seasoned soldiers on a mission to the playthings of something that sees hunting them as an enjoyable hobby, and couldn't be more confused about it. - Predator 2 opens like a late-80s Dirty Harry-style crime-action film, with rival gangs shooting up the streets of Los Angeles and the LAPD struggling to handle them. Then an alien hunter shows up and becomes a bigger problem. \|\|Even the alien-hunter hunters aren't fully prepared for what they're up against.\|\| - Prey (2022) does the same again, in the eighteenth century American Great Plains. The main characters are Comanche warriors and French trappers who, as in the first two movies, find themselves completely caught off-guard by the appearance of an alien hunter. - The aliens from the beginning of Transformers: Age of Extinction, when they appear 65 million years ago. The dinosaurs have no idea what is going on when they show up en-masse and proceed to turn the planet's surface into metal. - The Valley of Gwangi has a gang of cowboys stumbling upon a Lost World full of Living Dinosaurs. - The entire Kid Detective genre ( Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, anything by Enid Blyton) essentially runs on this. The criminals in these novels are prepared for cops, spies, the occasional Great Detective, and anyone else they might run across in a more ordinary crime thiller. What they're not expecting at all is to be thwarted by a small-group of pre-teenage children, so they usually end up completely blindsided when it inevitably happens. - Blood Meridian is, for the most part, a mundane (if tragic and horrifically violent) work of historical fiction. The only exception is the enigmatic figure \|\|Judge Holden\|\|, a villain transplanted from a Cosmic Horror Story. \|\|Killing him appears to be a complete impossibility, and people who attract his attention never seem to survive in the long run\|\|. The implication seems to be that he is either an unknown Humanoid Abomination, Satan, or the abstract concept of war given human form. - In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Space Hotel USA is invaded by Vermicious Knids, carnivorous aliens who have destroyed several planets' populations but cannot invade Earth itself (they burn up in its atmosphere). Humanity is almost completely unaware of their existence, and the crew and guests of the hotel can only run for their lives when they attack. Luckily, an exception to humanity's unawareness is up there with them — Willy Wonka, who knows all about the creatures and whose Great Glass Elevator is actually Knidproof. Although it takes some doing, he manages to rescue the remaining crew and guests. - The Vord in Codex Alera come as a nasty shock to the Alerans, who are more or less Roman Legionaries with Elementals powers. They're use to dealing with the Marat, the Canim, the Icemen, and each other. These other races are (as the books explore) not all that different from the Alerans when you get down to it and would fit more or less into another fantasy setting. The Vord, meanwhile, are basically the Zerg from StarCraft or Warhammer 40,000: Tyranids even to the point that it's implied they are a space-faring race. The only information about them the Alerans have is bits of nearly-forgotten Marat folklore from the last time they almost ate the planet, and they certainly seem like they found their way into the wrong series. - Demigods & Magicians: - Percy Jackson is not able to defeat the Son of Sobek because it comes from Egyptian mythology rather than Greek, so he needs Carter Kane's help dealing with it. - Annabeth, with all her knowledge of Greek monsters, has no idea what to make of the head of the staff of Serapis when she sees it, particularly since it's incomplete at the time. After she meets Sadie and finds out about the Egyptian side she's able to start making connections, and even figures out who the staff belongs to, but still Serapis, a god born of the melding of Greek and Egyptian legends, makes her feel as though he turns her entire world inside out simply by existing. Then she finds out that he was set loose by Setne, a master of a form of magic she's never encountered before. This is mitigated somewhat by the presence of the Kanes, who are familiar with the Egyptian side, and help bring Percy and Annabeth up to speed. - In "The Depths of Shadows" by Jack Butler, a hardened team of heavily armed, heavily cybered up street samurai walk right out of a William Gibsonesque world into a Dwindling Party nightmare when they encounter an honest to God vampire. - Discworld: In Sourcery, Coin the Sourcerer walks into Unseen University and starts altering the whole world with limitless magical power, the first sourcerer to show up in centuries. Discworld's wizards normally have to work within fairly consistent rules and limits, largely because they can only draw upon and channel natural background magic that already exists in the environment; sourcerers can generate magic — or at least draw it in from Somewhere Else where it's functionally infinite — completely at will, meaning that they can brute-force reality itself by sheer power until the only explanation for what they do is A Sourcerer Did It. This is highlighted by the fact that even Lord Vetinari is caught completely off-guard and spends most of the book as a small lizard. His credentials as a schemer and anticipator have not yet been established at this point in the series, but even if they had, there's no reason he would ever have anticipated this. - Happens in The Elric Saga. Elric's main foes are various evil wizards and the gods who are embodiments of chaos. In the novel Sailor on the Seas of Fate, he is suddenly summoned to join a host of other warriors to combat an enemy that threatens the entire universe, a pair of alien sorcerers from another universe that popped in from a science experiment from billions of years in the future and aren't bound by the laws of Elric's cosmos. He himself is revealed to be an incarnation of the cosmic Eternal Champion and he's to merge with three other Eternal Champion incarnations to fight the alien sorcerers on their own terms, the other warriors were simply recruited to be cannon-fodder. Nowhere before was it ever indicated that Elric was anything other than a med-dependent, bookish albino prince and later in other novels outside a few ancient immortals, almost no-one on Earth is shown to have any knowledge of the Eternal Champion. - Frederick Forsyth is fond of this. - The Day of the Jackal gives us the title character. The OAS, a terrorist movement that's struggled unsuccessfully against the French government for years, is at this point completely infested with moles and informants and no longer able to make a move without their enemies learning about it. Therefore, three of its leaders decide (without involving any of the other members) to go completely outside the system and recruit a foreign Professional Killer to assassinate President De Gaulle. (Ironically, it's only by relying on the most conventional means of the genre that the Outside Genre Foe is ultimately defeated: while the special action units, intelligence agencies, and friends recruited in the underworld that have been so effective against the OAS all come to nothing, Commissioner Lebel is ultimately able to track down the Jackal through mundane but thorough detective work). - The Odessa File: The ODESSA is a fraternity of former SS members that look out for one another in the post-Nazi era. As such, they have long experience dealing with Israeli spies, Nazi-hunters, and the occasional investigators from former Allied governments. What's much more mystifying to them is to find themselves relentlessly investigated by Peter Miller, an ordinary German journalist, who isn't a Jew, isn't a member of any other group targeted by the Nazis, and other than sharing his generation's revulsion for the Nazi past, not even particularly political. (The occasional Nazi-hunters who lend Miller a hand are similarly baffled). Only at the end of the book do they (and the reader) find out that Miller is \|\|the son of a German officer murdered during the war by former SS officer, and current ODESSA member, Eduard Roschmann. Roschmann had commandeered a ship assigned to evacuated wounded soldiers so that he and fellow SS could use it to flee the Soviet advance, while leaving the remaining soldiers to fight to the death, and murdered Miller's father when he tried to prevent this\|\|. - InCryptid is mostly Urban Fantasy, with the foes ranging from dangerous cryptids to human mages and monster hunters to even an Eldritch Abomination in one book. In the short story "Survival Horror", Antimony and Artie are trapped in a magic video game that tries to kill them. Despite the game relying on Runic Magic, it leans much more towards science fiction than most of the rest of the series. A non-enemy character, Annie's grandfather Martin Baker, is a Revenant Zombie presumably created with Mad Science, which is never mentioned elsewhere in the series. - Jack Ryan: - The Jack Ryan novels trend firmly towards the Stale Beer brand of Spy Fiction, with most of their villains being members of real-life terrorist groups, criminal organizations, or governments hostile to the United States. Rainbow Six, however, pits the heroes against what are effectively James Bond villains (it's even lampshaded in the narration): a small cabal of rich people trying to release a virus that will wipe out almost all of humanity so they can live in a world that conforms to their environmentalist ideology. There's some effort to cushion the blow by tying them to real-life green radical movements and (at first) making them use ordinary terrorist groups as proxies, but it's still a hell of a genre shift. - The Ulster Liberation Army from Patriot Games is this from the point of view of the British and American analysts trying to figure them out. They're an Irish republican terrorist group, so far so good, but everything else about them is incomprehensible: they don't announce their existence to the public or claim operations (which is arguably the whole point of a terrorist group), they carry out operations that risk so much backlash that the other movements declared them off-limits long ago (like targeting the British Royal Family or carrying out operations in America), and they identify themselves by the prefix "Ulster" rather than "Irish" ("Irish" is the identity preferred by Catholic/Republican groups, "Ulster" by Protestant/Loyalist groups). It turns out that most of this is because \|\|their real target isn't the British or the Loyalists, but the IRA itself, which they're trying to seize control of after overthrowing its leadership. Remaining secret means that their terrorist actions continue to be attributed to the IRA, weakening its public support and emboldening radicals more in line with the ULA's goals, in addition to making it easier for them to hide from IRA vengeance.\|\| - John Kelly/Mr. Clark becomes this in Without Remorse. The villains are Baltimore drug dealers and human traffickers who effectively think they're living in a season of The Wire: when their members start turning up murdered, they assume it's all part of a power play within the Baltimore underworld, eventually settling on a disgruntled underling as the likeliest suspect. It's not until the very end of the book that they discover they're actually being assassinated one by one by a pissed-off, revenge-driven, Navy-SEAL-trained Vietnam veteran, and ex-boyfriend of a prostitute they murdered when she tried to run away from them. - In the Mistborn series, up until the end of the second book, everyone has been dealing with understandable threats: The Lord Ruler was a badass but defeatable foe in the first book, while the various kings struggling for power, including the army of koloss, were predictable and understandable, if dangerous and well-armed, foes. Then in comes \|\|Ruin\|\|, who is \|\|a literal god of destruction and unmaking\|\|. - \|\|Legrys Mor\|\| in Murder at Colefax Manor is a \|\|a Lovecraftian Eldritch Abomination inside an otherwise fairly normal murder mystery.\|\| - From the point of view of the bad guys (and readers), this is what happens in Weber's Out of the Dark. So you got your typical science-fiction alien invasion of Earth opposed by assorted teams of Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, but there's really no way humans can win, since genocide by biological warfare would be fairly easy for the aliens if things get too out of hand... and then \|\|a ludicrously overpowered to the point of ridiculous Dracula\|\| decides he's getting tired of all this alien invasion shit. - Morgarath from Ranger's Apprentice has an army of non-human minions which he controls through telepathy and is able to hire assassins from a second non-human race, in a setting that otherwise has absolutely zero supernatural or paranormal elements. - The main characters of Relativity are all superheroes. The villains are all, well, supervillains. Both sides are pretty evenly matched, all things considered. Then along comes Phanthro, who can travel through time and alter history... - The Reynard Cycle: If the backstory is to be believed, the Demons "fell from the heavens" and enslaved the entire world in seven days. Even though there were only seven of them. - Second Apocalypse plays with this: In an otherwise High Fantasy setting, an alien invasion would be completely outside genre... but the Inchoroi crashed in the world since before history was recorded and most of the wars have been against them, so they essentially made themselves part of the setting. Then it turns out that Damnation is a physical and metaphysical reality and the gods are real eldritch abominations, pushing the High Fantasy setting straight into cosmic horror. - A Song of Ice and Fire: - The Targaryens were this in the backstory. Aegon and his two sisters arrived from Valyria and conquered Westeros in short order because no one knew how to deal with their dragons. Of particular note is Harrenhal Castle. It was a massive fortress whose construction nearly bankrupted the Riverlands, and it was made to be the strongest, most defensible castle in Westeros... against a ground assault. Then comes Aegon the Conqueror on the back of Balerion the Great, and he just flies over the ramparts and torches the castle and all the defenders, leaving it a burned out wreck. - The Others are shaping up to be this, too: a race of unearthly humanoid abominations from the uttermost north, capable of bringing snowstorms and raising the dead, and who blanketed the world in The Night That Never Ends the last time they took power against a Low Fantasy continent primarily concerned with the civil war and associated political maneuvering that's ravaged the land. Magic has been in decline so long that most people don't even know it existed, and Westeros has forgotten the gigantic Wall it has up north was built specifically to guard against the Others. - Star Wars Legends: - When you say "space adventure about a magical force", you (impassively or fondly) think of Star Wars. When you say "religiously sadomasochistic alien zealots", you blank out. When you add "that are immune to the Force", you get the Yuuzhan Vong. Extremely unusual addition or not, those guys dominated a large portion of the post-Palpatine era. A subversion might come into play, since there are theories that Palpatine, having foreseen the invasion through the Force, orchestrated the Clone War and the Galactic Civil War specifically to prepare the Galaxy. - A smaller-scale example is the Ssi-ruuk from The Truce at Bakura. Like the Yuuzhan Vong, they're an empire of Scary Dogmatic Aliens from outside of known space wielding unfamiliar tech who launch an invasion of the galaxy shortly after the Battle of Endor (though their threat is resolved in much shorter order). The event catches the Rebels and Imperials off guard enough that they temporarily set their differences aside and join forces to stop the aliens. - Abeloth also comes to mind. Really, an Eldritch Abomination as the Big Bad for a Star Wars book? And meta too: You know you're in Star Wars Legends when Lighter and Softer is Lovecraft IN SPACE! And it's no joke about this being Lighter and Softer than Legacy of the Force. - A duology of books by Joe Schreiber ( Death Troopers and its prequel Star Wars: Red Harvest) both revolve around Zombie Apocalypses happening in the Galaxy Far, Far Away - Predating Abeloth by several decades is J. R. R. Tolkien's Ungoliant. Tolkien's Legendarium is a High Fantasy setting where Eru Ilúvatar and his angels created everything; thus, most of the antagonists are Fallen Angels like Melkor and corrupted races like the Orcs. Yet one of The Silmarillion's antagonists is an Eldritch Abomination who appears out of nowhere, briefly teams up with Melkor, then wanders off as mysteriously as she arrives. Ungoliant is so alien to the setting that her power over "Unlight" is capable of disorienting the Valar themselves. She may be a Fallen Angel too, or she may have emerged from the Primordial Chaos; not even Tolkien himself could decide. - The Arrowverse has a habit of introducing these: - Season 2 of Arrow introduces Mirakuru, a Super Serum used by a cult to create insane and violent Super Soldiers. Up until now, the protagonists had only fought ordinary criminals and corrupt businessmen. This is their first encounter with genuine superhumans. - In Season 4 of Arrow, Oliver has to fight against Damien Darhk, whose powers are mystical/magical in nature. Darhk can siphon a person's life force with his touch, and he can stop bullets (and arrows) in midair with a simple gesture. - In The Flash (2014), a young Barry Allen watches his mother being murdered by what appears to be a fast-moving man shrouded in lightning. Barry's unbelievable story results in his father being imprisoned for the murder. Fourteen years later, a particle accelerator explodes, creating other "metahumans" with similar powers. However, that doesn't explain how a metahuman could exist before the particle accelerator explosion. Fans of the comics know that the murderer's origin is even more bizarre: \|\|He's a time-traveller\|\|. Later on, the show adds alternate dimensions and aliens into the mix. Season 4 adds an honest-to-God vampire to the show. - For the first two seasons of Legends of Tomorrow, the Legends go up against enemies who are mostly technology-based or metahumans. Season 3 throws magic into the mix as the time demon Mallus is the Big Bad of the season, with Season 4 introducing more magical enemies and Season 5 having various damned souls escaping Hell and into history. - The yearly crossover events run on this. The second one, Invasion! (2016), had an antagonistic race of aliens known as the Dominators invading Earth to eliminate metahumans, causing Team Arrow, Team Flash, the Legends and Supergirl to team up and take them down. Crisis on Earth-X has an army of actual Nazis (from an alternate Earth, Earth-X, where they won World War II) crashing Barry and Iris' wedding, backed up by evil versions of Arrow and Supergirl and the Reverse-Flash. The third, Elseworlds (2018), has the heroes (minus the Legends, but including Superman) against both a rogue android designed to copy superhuman abilities, as well as a mad doctor with access to a reality-altering book. Elseworlds served as a prelude to the latest event, Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019), where every hero possible is called in to combat the threat of the Anti-Monitor and his antimatter wave from wiping out the multiverse. - Blake's 7 very nearly had this happen in Series 2, where at one point the intention was for the \|\|arriving alien force in that series' cliffhanger\|\| to be \|\|the Daleks\|\|. - Charmed: - Whitaker Berman from "Dream Sorcerer" was a science-fiction villain (he used advanced technology that let him kill people in their dreams) in an Urban Fantasy show. - Barbas (the demon of fear) invokes this in "Ms. Hellfire"; since the Charmed Ones have thus far thwarted every magical attempt on their lives, he opts to try something different by hiring The Mafia to kill the Halliwells. - Breaking Bad is a drug themed crime drama, but one of the final villains is a ruthless gang of Neo-Nazi mercenaries who routinely deal with problems with extreme force and heavy fire power. They're so dangerous that no one even tries to fight them outside of \|\|two DEA agents and a small band of much smaller time crooks.\|\| Both efforts fail because they're unbelievably outgunned by a death squad straight out of an action movie. - In the Community episode "Epidemiology", Greendale deals with a Zombie Apocalypse. Unlike every other Genre Shift in the show, this isn't just people playing pretend or taking things too seriously; it's a real effect of eating meat infected by an experimental virus. In the end, the plot is resolved by The Men in Black, who never appeared before and never appeared again. - Given that the premise of Doctor Who allows writers to play with any number of genres, it isn't uncommon for the Doctor to encounter threats that vary from madmen from James Bond to supernatural threats like witches and the actual Devil. In regards to the latter the Doctor usually explains that magic is another form of science and powerful entities are not literal gods, but that never really changes what the threat is. - Maldis from Farscape is an Evil Sorcerer in the middle of a Space Opera. - In Game of Thrones, the Night King and his army of the dead are this to any character that's not either a member of the Night's Watch or a wildling. The White Walkers are just considered children's stories, since they haven't been a threat for thousands of years. Much of the characters spend time fighting amongst each other over who will sit on the Iron Throne, unaware of anything supernatural. \|\|Much of season 7's plot deals with Jon Snow trying to convince others that the threat is very real.\|\| - Kamen Rider deals with this during recent years, as the titular heroes cross over into other series more frequently. - Kamen Rider Decade deals with this during their teamup with Samurai Sentai Shinkenger. A Monster of the Week from that Sentai gets his hands on a Transformation Trinket that allows him to turn into a monstrous Kamen Rider. This turns this monster into an Outside Genre Foe to both the Riders and de Shinkengers, as the former never dealt with a Sentai monster, while the latter never dealt with a Kamen Rider. - The finale of Kamen Rider Drive has Shinnosuke, AKA the titular Kamen Rider, deal with actual ghosts, to set up the next series; Kamen Rider Ghost. In his own series, Shinnosuke fought against sentient androids who tried to incite a Robot War. Nothing prepared him for an encounter with the paranormal. - In Lost Girl, the Garuda catches everybody by surprise because it predates the Fae. There was no myths or legends of it, so there is nothing to reference. \|\|However, a few people like Lachlan knew about it and had been preparing.\|\| - The Monkees usually outsmart normal antagonists like foreign spies, con artists or arrogant jerks. In the second season, they start dealing with more magical or alien bad guys. The best example is The Devil and Peter Tork. - A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017): In "The Miserable Mill", Olaf's crumbling alliance with a local villain sees him openly dismissing Dr. Orwell's "high-concept science fiction gimmicks". - Supernatural is an Urban Fantasy series with villains that consisted mainly of ghosts, demons, monsters, witches, angels, Gods, etc. The one-off villain Doc Benton from the episode "Time Is On My Side" was a notable outlier, though, being a normal human man who somehow attained a crude form of immortality without the use of magic or anything paranormal, just "very, very extremely weird science." - Crossovers in Super Sentai and Power Rangers can play out like this, as each series in these franchises has a particular theme they stick to, which can really conflict when crossing over with another series. However, this phenomenon can also exist within their own self contained series. - Choujin Sentai Jetman has this trope within their own series. During a short arc in the second half of the show, the Jetman team has to deal with a group of ancient demons, while their usual foe are an interdimensional alien empire. - The crossover trend started with the crossover between Ninja Sentai Kakuranger and Chouriki Sentai Ohranger. The former deals with ninja's using Supernatural Martial Arts to fight magical demons, while the latter is a military organizations who deals with an Alien Invasion of sentient robots. Power Rangers uses footage of this team up, but since all villains are aliens at this point in the show, the encounter does not feel as contrasting compared to the Sentai version. - In Mahou Sentai Magiranger vs. Dekaranger, the police themed Dekarangers, who normally only fight tech using alien criminals, are suddenly confronted by a magical demon, which are normally faced by the Magirangers. The Magirangers, on the other hand, are introduced to the aforementioned alien criminals. - Engine Sentai Goonger features several supernatural monsters, despite their usual foe being a race of polluting sentient robots. Almost all of these supernatural occurences are from the the parallel dimensions established in the series lore. There is even a dimension based on feudal Japan that is ruled by an evil sorceress. - The aforementioned series also encounters this trope during their crossovers. Both Juken Sentai Gekiranger and Samurai Sentai Shinkenger have fantasy themes, while Go-onger is more sci fi themed. The teamup with Gekirangers involved the Go-ongers fighting an immortal dragon god, while the teamup with the Shinkengers made the Shinkengers fight sentient robots, with them normally fighting demons from Japanese folklore. - Azazel from the Direct-To-DVD Tokumei Sentai Gobusters Returns Vs Dobutsu Sentai Gobusters is this. He absolutely does not fit into the Go-Busters universe. The enemies of the original series are all made from data and therefore fit a robotic/technological theme, while Azazel is a supernatural demon, despite demons not being an established part of the Go-Busters universe. Also, this is a standalone Go-Busters film, not a team-up with someone who usually does fight such foes. - Tokusou Exceedraft is a futuristic Rescue Cop Show with some grounded science fiction elements, such as the Powered Armor its heroes wear. As such, it's likely no one expected Satan to be the Big Bad for the final stretch of episodes. - Zero Zero Zero charts the various organized crime outfits responsible for buying, selling, and transporting a massive shipment of cocaine from Mexico to Italy. However, while the shipment is making its way through Africa under the watch of experienced drug brokers, it gets waylaid by Moroccan jihadists who have seized control of the area. The drug brokers are at a loss on how to deal with the jihadists, whose principles and objectives are completely alien to them. - The music video of Skrillex's "First of the Year" has a child kidnapper very surprised when his victim summons a demon to kill him. - The video for "Bun Dem" has a similar plot: a corrupt police officer fraudulently evicting low-income households is thwarted by a Magical Native American boy who summons a Thunder Bird made of lasers when the cop tries to pull a gun on him. - The WWE has a history of vaguely demonic or otherwise magical characters (often Heels) with ill-defined supernatural powers, e.g. Kane, The Undertaker, Papa Shango and Bray Wyatt. The most famous of these, the Undertaker, was in turn based on a gimmick from AWA (a more original gimmick was planned but it was shot down by Vince McMahon, eventually salvaged with Kane, making him the trope twice over) - The Flood, really. A collection of Rudos from across time and space, including Kaiju Big Battel, is out there enough already but they were led by Jimmy Jacobs, who has never been of any real significance in Chikara and was seemingly tied down in a war against Ring of Honor at the time? As it turns out, he wasn't the leader, for those very reasons. The whole thing was orchestrated by the nebulous Titor Conglomerate. - Then there was the time Bart Gunn fought Butterbean at Wrestlemania XV. He did about as well as Johnny Knoxville did. - All Flesh Must Be Eaten: One of the expansion books, A Fistful o' Zombies, features a mini-setting, Singing Cowboys, in which (in-setting but "off-screen"), the director of The Western B-Movie that the Player Characters are part of decided to cash in on both the sci-fi movie craze and the Roy Rogers-style "singing cowboy" craze of The '50s and added a Zombie Apocalypse sub-plot into the film with nobody the wiser. As such, the rules enforce Lighter and Softer play proper to the "film's" time period... except when the players encounter zombies. - The classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, where the players find themselves in a crashed starship fighting pod people and robots. - Magic: The Gathering: - Zendikar was introduced a standard Dungeons & Dragons-style Adventure-Friendly World, with Lost Technology and Floating Continents abundant. Then a planeswalker accidentally frees the Sealed Evil in a Can Eldrazi, and the setting becomes a scramble for survival as the plane is overrun by Eldritch Abominations. One of the Eldrazi later shows up on Gothic Horror world Innistrad, and serves as an Outside-Genre Foe there as well. - Pretty much any time Phyrexia shows up. Most notable are High Fantasy Capenna (and its present incarnation, the Art Deco city of New Capenna) and Norse Mythology-esque Kaldheim, which could not possibly prepare for biomechanical horrors more at home in a sci-fi setting. - The inevitable result of an antagonist planeswalker stirring up trouble on a foreign plane, such as the megalomaniacal dragon Nicol Bolas subjugating the Egyptian Mythology-esque Amonkhet (mortals and gods alike), or the demonic Ob Nixilis usurping the street-level gangsters of New Capenna. - The titular threat of the Pathfinder adventure path Iron Gods (heavily inspired by the above Barrier Peakss) are artificial intelligences from a crashed alien spaceship attempting to attain mythic power and wipe out free will. In an otherwise renaissance-era fantasy setting. - Goes both ways in the Reign of Winter adventure path, with the players both encountering, and becoming, an Outside-Genre Foe. A portal transports the adventurers to a foreign, magic-dead world - Earth, circa 1918. Setting-appropriate foes such as ghouls and faeries are swapped out for tanks and Russian soldiers. It works both ways; gas masks and flak jackets do little to stop Cloudkill and stunning fists. - in Warhammer 40,000: - The Tyranids and later the Tau Empire are alien races that feel more at home in a straight sci-fi universe rather than 40k's Science Fantasy Warhammer IN SPACE! setting. Daemons fighting aliens is far from a rare occurrence. - Meanwhile, the Tau have no psychic ability, and so write off the humans' tale of horrifying daemons as the gibbering of madmen (to be fair, Chaos does have that effect on people) and the actual daemons they've fought as a particularly unpleasant alien species. In one case they managed to kill a daemon and proclaimed they had killed "Slaanesh", which is... not how it works. - BlazBlue is a series rife with Shinto and Norse symbolism, but the big reveal of Chronophantasma is that \|\|Izanami herself\|\| is the Big Bad. \|\|Not a symbolically-named machine like the Susano'o Unit, the actual Shinto goddess of the underworld is out to destroy everything\|\|. Then Central Fiction takes it up a notch by revealing that \|\|the Susano'o Unit isn't a symbolically-named machine, it's the actual body of the god Susano'o. The spirit of said body? That's Yuuki Terumi himself\|\|. - In Bloodborne, \|\|The Great Ones, along with the Cosmic Horror Story, is completely unexpected for a Gothic Horror setting, their incomprehensible nature being the origin of the Beast Plague and how WRONG they look like makes them truly horrifying.\|\| - Code Vein: The game is about vampires born from parasites in their hearts struggling to survive and figure out what happened to their world after a strange cataclysm damaged it and left a shattered oasis surrounded by impenetrable mist. Then the forces behind the apocalypse are revealed to be \|\|Aragami, organic Grey Goo colonies that are the main antagonists in post-apocalyptic sci-fi game God Eater.\|\| - The classic real-time strategy game Command & Conquer: Red Alert is about a war between the Allies and the Soviets in an alternate universe where Hitler was killed before he could rise to power. It is a classic military game where you fight infantry, tanks, etc... but the Counterstrike expansion pack features some secret bonus missions where you fight giant ants. For no particular reason. - The expansion for Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge, brings this back for a brief moment in its Soviet campaign, where the first mission requires you to steal an Allied time machine to go back in time to undo the results of the previous war... but in the process of powering it up, you end up giving it too much juice and get sent far further back in time than intended, resulting in your 1970s-era Soviet soldiers having to spend a minute or two fighting off dinosaurs before the time machine powers up again to send you where you're needed. - Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn had a small set of secret bonus missions where you fight dinosaurs, and then fight as dinosaurs. Unlike in Yuri's Revenge, there's no time-travel involved, it simply starts off with you being sent off to investigate an island there's been report of anomalous incidents on and promptly seeing an island crawling with archosaurs straight out of Jurassic Park. - Darkest Dungeon's villainous factions are, for the most part, the collection of cosmic horrors, pig demons, fish-men, fungal monstrosities, apocalypse cultists, and shambling undead that one expects from a game billing itself as a "Lovecraft in the middle ages." The exception to this is the Brigand faction, a heavily armed goon squad of outlaws, highwaymen, out-of-work mercenaries, and all-around thugs, who use gunpowder weapons and brutality to compensate for their lack of supernatural powers. - First Drakengard game is ostensibly a game taking place in medieval-fantasy setting. So who's its True Final Boss? \|\|A space travelling, time distorting Eldritch Abomination named Grotesquerie Queen of course! And this applies in more ways than one: not only do you fight her in modern-day Tokyo, but while the rest of the game is Hack and Slash with RPG elements, said boss fight is a Rhythm Game (and fiendishly hard at that).\|\| - The current page picture is for the sadly cancelled team First-Person Shooter "Dinosaurs Vs. Alamo", which involved Wild West Cowboys facing off against zombie dinosaurs. - Far Cry, for the first couple missions, looks like a standard FPS with you versus a bunch of mercenaries hired by a Mad Scientist... then about a fourth of the way through, mutant primates with weapons grafted onto them force their way into the fight, turning several encounters into a three-way brawl between you, the mercs, and the mutants. - The faction in Fire Emblem: Three Houses known as "those who slither in the dark" \|\|are the descendants of Agartha, a technologically advanced and morally bankrupt ancient civilization, who\|\| use Lost Technology to create unusually powerful and portable weapons. \|\|This same technology affords them access to Humongous Mecha, electric cannons, and intercontinental ballistic missiles that they use to destroy strategically important locations after losing a battle for them.\|\| The heroes have no real understanding of what they are, and refer to them as "controlled beasts" or "javelins of light." - Ghost Recon Wildlands and Ghost Recon Breakpoint both got limited-time events in which the Ghosts (Tier-One Special Forces operators in a somewhat-realistic "modern warfare" franchise based on the works of the father of "technothrillers") faced off against respectively a Yautja and Terminators. - Throughout the history of Grand Theft Auto, there's been very little variance on the types of enemies you face — other criminals, gangs, Dirty Cops, evil executives, etc. The Doomsday Heist update brings in several foes on a scale never seen before: \|\|a Corrupt Corporate Executive...'s murderous AI and his army of cyborg clones, some of which have the capability to turn invisible.\|\| - The most famous moment of beat-em-up Growl is when, in a game all about fighting against perfectly human poachers, you finally confront and defeat the leader of the poachers...only for a giant alien centipiede from the Darius series to burst out of his dead body to serve as the Final Boss. - Halo: - The Covenant were this for the UNSC. The UNSC is busy dealing with preventing a devastating civil war with their outer colonies, when suddenly a collective of alien races shows up, burns one of their planets to glass, and declares their intent to do the same to the rest of humanity. Despite this, the UNSC (while far from being on the winning side) adapts pretty quickly and lasts far longer than expected. - The Flood are this as well. While fighting aliens had become regular business for the UNSC, nobody expected space-zombies with a Hive Mind to enter the fray. - Even more so in the Forerunners' case. Going about their regular business, \|\|fighting humanity\|\|, when suddenly an alien parasite \|\|that claims to be the defective remnant of the gods their religion states favored them above all others\|\| arrives and attempts to assimilate their entire empire \|\|as retribution for committing genocide on them millions of years before\|\|. - The Hex has two In-Universe examples: - The Festival of Blood DLC for Infamous 2 has Cole, a superhuman from the Cape Punk genre, being turned into a vampire and fighting the clearly supernatural Bloody Mary. - In Jagged Alliance 2, while clearing out an evil scientist's bunker, your team comes upon a huge area of even more huge mutant bugs to fight. This leads to some humorous comments from all your mercs who all have funny comments to say when confronted suddenly with a non-human enemy. - Fourth-wall observations aside, the setting of Kid Icarus: Uprising is very much a magical one with the main characters being various angels, gods, monsters, and nature spirits, with almost all technology capable of being explained away as Magitek...and then the Aurum show up in Chapters 15-17, and are basically a robotic Hive Mind Alien Invasion determined to devour all life on the planet. - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: One side quest involves Link protecting a farm from aliens. Yes, aliens. They appear ghost-like, and NPCs even call them "ghosts", but their design is based on The Flatwoods Monster and their abduction of animals and a little girl emphasize them being aliens. This is the only time aliens show up in any of the fantasy-styled Zelda titles. The Greys do show up in the Spin-Off title Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, but that game is a lot less fantasy and a lot more whatever-goes. - In the final chapter of Live A Live, \|\|the heroes of a prehistoric comedic love story, a Wuxia tale, a ninja tale, a Wild West story, a modern martial arts story, a tale about psychics and mecha, and a science fiction horror story are all drawn into a fight with the demonic villain of a medieval fantasy story\|\|. - The Marathon mod "Devil in a Blue Dress" eventually reveals that the one behind the space pirates was none other than Morgaine Le Fey, straight out of Arthurian legend. - This was the idea behind The Redman in the first One Night at Flumpty's, being a genuinely eerie-looking red skeleton that completely does not mesh with the rest of the Creepy Cute (but genuinely deadly) enemies you've encountered yet. Jonochrome: I figured his arrival sometime after 3am in this game would be kind of an indicator that the game just got real since he's so completely out of place from everything else you've seen up until that point. - Red Dead Redemption is a game set in The Wild West. The Expansion Pack Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare just throws a Zombie Apocalypse in there, with the characters having no idea what's going on or even having a simple understanding for what zombies are since this is decades before the monsters have become part of pop culture. - Red Faction: Armageddon: In a series about a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits rebelling against tyranny, the last thing you'd expect was a bunch of insectoid aliens coming out from deep within Mars. - The hero from Rent A Hero looks like a Super Sentai character but his enemies are strictly human criminals, the only nod to those shows are two people dressed in monster costumes (one in an actual show to entertain children)... Until, near the end of the game, he has to fight against the spirit of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh that possessed the archaeologist who unearthed his sarcophagus. He treats it like any other of his jobs and gets paid accordingly. - The Chimera of the Resistance series. Taking place in an Alternate History where Russia's government was not taken over by followers of Lenin, Russia becomes an isolationist nation that is hidden behind the "Red Curtain". Following The Tunguska Event of 1908, Russia does not communicate with the rest of the globe, leading the other world powers to treat them as potentially hostile. About 40 years later the real nature of The Tunguska Event is revealed: it was the arrival of an alien invasion squad that has devoured Russia's population and now is turning their attention to the rest of Europe and the world beyond. - The story of Road 96 is about teenagers in an authoritarian nation called Petria attempting to escape to the border, avoiding law enforcement or supporters of the dictator who threaten to turn them in, while potentially becoming drawn into the conflict between the police and the Black Brigades. Then there's Jarod, an apolitical Serial Killer who doesn't care about the wider conflict in the slightest as he kills police, Black Brigade members, and potentially the player character in a campaign of revenge. - Saints Row IV: In a series about fighting enemy gangs, the cops and other realistic foes, who seriously expected alien invasion? Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell adds a new complication in the form of Satan being real and wanting the Boss for his daughter. - In the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, the Big Bad of any game belonging to it is either a human, a demon, or an angel. Devil Survivor 2 then introduces the Septentriones, a group of actual space aliens as the main antagonists. Really, the demons (and angels) of almost any game in the franchise also count. Except for a few games, their existence completely blindsides everyone. Aside from (most of) the Persona and Devil Summoner games, they also usually accomplish the near or complete extinction of humanity. - Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has the Executioners, who roll into the galaxy and start destroying everything, apparently sent by masters from beyond our reality to destroy us all, and an order of magnitude more powerful than anything else faced up to that point in the game, with ordinary enemies rivaling bosses in difficulty—if they can be beaten at all. \|\|Eventually, the characters go to a Cool Gate to travel between worlds, using the overpowered magical abilities that their parents gave them to break their way out of our world and into the world of the Executioners' masters... whereupon they end up dumped in what seems to be an amusement park and fight some guards who you handily beat, them being little better than mooks compared to the characters. They discover that the world that the game has been taking place in is a video game made by people in 4D space, and the Executioners are nothing more than NPCs sent to clean up the errors which have been accumulating in the game world by deleting everything\|\|. - Tatanga from Super Mario Land is a space alien that kidnaps Princess Daisy and is defeated by Mario's own Outside Genre Fighter Airplane, which hasn't been seen before or since. Then the sequel implies that Tatanga was working for Wario to distract Mario. - Super Mario RPG: Played for Laughs and for a company joke with Culex, who looks like he belongs in a Final Fantasy-style JRPG, complete with being pixellated 2D sprite in a game composed mostly of prerendered 3D enviroments. He's even aware of it himself; he just came to your dimension as a scout and is about to return because he found it inhospitable to his kind, but is willing to stick around for a good fight before leaving. - Super Robot Wars Z has The Edel Bernal, who, unlike other SRW Original Generation Final Bosses, is a godlike being who is not seeking power or self-aggrandizement. He just started all the chaos in the game For the Evulz, and as the good guys chew him out during the final battle they actually freak out somewhat when they come to the realization that he just doesn't care, and it become dramatically clear that they are fighting a lunatic with no real goal except what entertains him. - True Crime: Streets of LA is, for the vast majority of its runtime, a mundane, top-down GTA clone focused on a detective dealing with mundane street crime in Los Angeles, trying to unfurl a conspiracy... and then there's the level that's a full homage to Big Trouble in Little China, right down to the bit where your cop takes on an ancient Chinese sorcerer and his army of ghosts. - Undertale: In the Neutral ending, \|\|Photoshop Flowey is like nothing you've seen before in the entire game. He's animated like something from another genre, he changes the entirety of the battle mechanics, and he abuses save states in order to hit you with attacks that you've already dodged. The best part? Before changing to his God Form, Flowey crashes the game because the original game's engine isn't designed to handle him. He literally does not belong in the game.\|\| - Urban Chaos is a game about a police officer fighting crime, that is, until she starts fighting \|\|a cult of tuxedo-wearing cyborgs with pocket-sized miniguns who levitate and explode when they die. If that wasn't enough, the Big Bad reveals himself to be a 1000-year-old ancient warlock, and he summons a demon from Hell to wreak havoc on Union City\|\|. - Nobody in Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria expected that \|\|Lezard Valenth was actually a time-shifted version of himself from the future. By the time anyone figured it out, he had outwitted everybody, forcing the survivors into an Enemy Mine to beat him\|\|. - While the Wolfenstein series tends to deal with Those Wacky Nazis dabbling with the occult and advanced technology on a regular basis, a special mention has to go to the end of Wolfenstein 3-D's prequel, Spear of Destiny. B.J. Blazkowicz has seized the titular artifact from a Nazi stronghold... only to get teleported to Hell, where he is forced to battle ghosts and a demon known as the Angel of Death. - Girl Genius: Klaus Wulfenbach seemed to have inadvertently summoned one when \|\|he stops time\|\| in Mechanicsburg to contain the Heterodyne. \|\|Something with a different perception of time noticed that something is amiss... and it is coming to investigate.\|\| The Other does not quite qualify, because even though it did not play by the "rules" of the Long War between the Mad Scientist Sparks, it/she mostly just seems better at established practices. Extradimensional aliens have nothing to do with mad scientists. - Hooves of Death gives an inverted example. Amidst a Zombie Apocalypse, humanity escapes complete annihilation thanks to unicorns emerging from The Masquerade to lend a hand (or hoof?). Their four-legged saviors make perfect shock troops against the undead hordes thanks to the natural immunity, magical powers, and razor sharp horn, and even a zombie's most powerful weapon, its disease-spreading bite, only gives a unicorn a mild fever. Played straight later, as actual Hellhounds start to appear, \|\|and not even the unicorns were aware of gnomes existing at all, much less zombified versions of them\|\|. - Worm has \|\|Scion, after he discovers he enjoys killing people\|\| as an unusual example; this enemy didn't appear suddenly, he'd been around for a while and everybody knew who he was, but the discovery of what he actually is serves as the Cosmic Horror Reveal in what was previously a superhero setting (albeit a very dark one). However, even though the set-up was unusual, once he starts attacking the trope then gets played straight, as the protagonists have no idea what the hell they're going to do against that kind of unimaginable power, and all their previous experience and strategies only postpone the inevitable. - It's hard to find something that's outside the kitchen sink of the SCP Foundation, but series of scips nicknamed the Kaktusverse (SCP-2254, 4812, 4840, 6666) switch the setting from its standard Sci-fi horror to High fantasy, with biblical element. The primary threats of the stories are the Three Profanities, ancient monsters conjured by a faerie princess, the Four Knights, once heroic knights that are now cursed into becoming monsters, and Titania, an ancient goddess of the fae. - Hitler Rants: Both Der Disneygang and Battle for the Bunker deal with this trope, albeit in reverse. Der Disneygang features the animated Disney realm having to deal with a Nazi occupation. The sequel, Battle for the Bunker, has Nazi Germany being attacked by a horde of vengeful cartoon and anime characters, who are able to completely ignore the laws of physics like they do in their own medium. This takes the Nazis completely by surprise. Bunker then adds another Outside Genre Foe, in the form of an alien invasion, which both the Nazis and the Cartoons are unprepared for. - Too Many Cooks is a Genre Roulette to begin with, but The Killer is the only character who seems to come from a horror movie. - Jackie Chan Adventures: - Most of the primary antagonists are of Chinese origin, and so can be reliably countered with Uncle's magic. So, come Season 4 when Tarakudo, lord of the Japanese Oni, is the main enemy to be faced, Uncle's magic is largely useless. Good thing that Tohru's mother had regaled him with bedtime stories of the Oni and their weaknesses in his childhood. - In-Universe, Bartholomew Chang could be considered an inversion, in that he's exactly the sort of mundane, non-magical international criminal that Section 13 is supposed to be dealing with, even though by the time he shows up they've already been pitted against demon sorcerers and other magical villains. - Legend Of The Dragon is based around mysticism, but the villain of the episode "Hair of the Dog" is a misanthropic, canine-obsessed Mad Scientist who had mutated himself into a Wolf Man-like beast. - Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) has "Curse of the Lion Men", which has... Lion Men invading the world and turning other people into Lion Men with eye beams. Another episode also has a genie. - The Simpsons: - "Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment" has Rex Banner, who is sent to Springfield to enforce the dry law. Played for Laughs as he's an animated copycat of Elliot Ness as interpreted by Robert Stack in The Untouchables and someone who definitely would have done a better job at keeping law and order during the time of the Hays Code (where he would have been handed victory just because he's a lawman) than on the modern (and incompetent) Wretched Hive that is Springfield. - Similarly, there's Frank Grimes from "Homer's Enemy", who arrives in Springfield for a job at Burns' power plant, and quickly proves himself to be the Only Sane Man, until it finally causes him to suffer a psychotic break that leads to him accidentally electrocuting himself. - While he's never a foe to Homer (if anything, he's the best Benevolent Boss he's ever had), Hank Scorpio from the episode "You Only Move Twice" stands out because he's a James Bond villain in a series that doesn't usually have people trying to Take Over the World (C. Montgomery Burns would eventually demonstrate he has the resources and drive to pretend to be a Bond villain, but his aims are much more petty in scope, like dumping toxic waste in places he doesn't likes or forcing the town to pay bigger electricity bills). - "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner" is a somewhat contentious example from the show's later seasons, as it has Kang and Kodos serve as direct antagonists to the Simpsons outside of the horror-themed Treehouse of Horror episodes. - Star vs. the Forces of Evil: The show is a comedy/action western series, with season 4 focusing on a Big Bad that is a deranged, PTSD and racism driven former knight of the kingdom, while the main character deals with questioning what to do after her main goals have been more or less solved. The episode of that season "Gone Baby Gone" has the villain Wyscan the Granter, an elf-like Bishōnen Sissy Villain that was clearly inspired in both design, battle style and mannerism by some of the male villains from the early days of Sailor Moon. - One episode of Superman: The Animated Series inverted this. Bane, The Riddler, and the Mad Hatter come together to create the "perfect team" to defeat Batman, and with perfect timing Batman comes knocking. Only problem is, it's actually Superman posing as Batman while the real Batman is missing, so "Batman" suddenly pulls out impossible strength to overpower the Riddler's inescapable trap and Bane in a one-on-one fight through sheer brute force, and the Hatter's attempt to escape afterwards is foiled by "Batman" moving quickly enough to block off both ends of a hallway on his own. - One episode of SWAT Kats, "When Strikes Mutilor", had a non-kat villain in the form of a multi-armed, vaguely lobster-ish alien named Mutilor, who planned to suck away all the water from the SWAT Kats' planet and sell it to a desert world. He's the only such villain to appear in the show. - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) has the turtles mostly fighting the Foot Clan and Kraang and the various humans, mutants, robots, and aliens that entails. When the ghost of the Chinese Evil Sorcerer Ho Chan shows up, they've never faced a supernatural foe before and therefore have a difficult time fighting him. Note that supernatural phenomena are slowly phased into the series as it goes on, so this label becomes less applicable the further you go.) - Winnetoons was a Western, yet the villains of the episode "The Big Plague" were Pirates who were reduced to conducting their plundering on land after becoming shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutsideContextVillain
Overarching Villain - TV Tropes Greater-Scope Villain: A threat/villainous presence that's more dangerous, affects more people, or is more significant than the story's current Big Bad in the setting as a whole, but isn't causing the conflict of the immediate story. The Heavy: The villain that moves the plot forward and gets the most focus among the antagonists, even if they are not the Big Bad.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverarchingVillain
Overlaid Societies - TV Tropes Two or more distinct populations all live in the same place, and all are aware of each other. However, there's something about the setting that keeps them distinct. Either they're time-shifted from each other, or they're prevented from interacting by some kind of Applied Phlebotinum, or something similar. As a result, they have different governments, possibly different cultures, and they definitely think of themselves as distinct from each other. Depending on the details of how this is implemented, it can be used as an allegory for Real Life ethnic or class division. Compare the Masquerade, which often operates similarly except that one society is unaware of the other's existence. Compare also Wainscot Society and Mouse World. Compare Layered Metropolis as well, which is a literal take on a layered civilization with multiple stacks of floors and/or districts. May involve Urban Segregation if the wealth, class, ethnic, or society gap between civilians is large. See also Ethnicity Monarch. ## Examples: - Star Wars: On the planet Naboo, the Gungans and the Naboo live in separate but linked societies. In The Phantom Menace Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn tries to enlist the help of the Gungans as the Trade Federation's takeover of the Naboo would affect the Gungans eventually. \|\|Jar-Jar and Queen Amidala get their help for the final battle.\|\| - The City & the City by China Miéville is about two cities that exist in the same place, whose inhabitants have trained themselves to "unsee" whichever city they're not currently in. The division is further enforced by a secret police called Breach, which disappears anyone who crosses between cities by unsanctioned means, a crime considered worse than murder. - Darkborn: A curse has caused the world's population to be split into the Darkborn (who are burned by light) and the Lightborn (who die in the dark). There's no actual taboo against interaction, but the practical difficulties mean they have essentially separate societies and governments. - Dayworld: Overpopulation has caused the Earth's population to be split into seven groups, each of which lives for one day of the week and spends the other six in stasis. - Delusion World: The human worlds are in danger of being overrun by telepathic aliens, but there's one human colony world that the aliens won't touch. When the Earth agent arrives, he finds two societies that exist in the same city but can't see each other, although both can see him. It turns out to be an advanced form of selective obliviousness that the philosophically opposed people have learned to use to avoid having to deal with each other. \|\|At the end, we learn it is this that keeps the telepathic aliens away — the humans' power of disbelief is so strong, it causes the aliens actual pain and can outright kill them!\|\| - Trinity Blood: There's a society that straddles this and the Masquerade: what seems to be a society of Muggles on the surface is actually knowingly preserving the Masquerade, and there is a second city just below the ground. \|\|The city above ground is Londinium, Albion; the city below is home to Friendly Neighborhood Vampires essentially being used as forced labor in return for protection.\|\| - Twilight Robbery by Frances Hardinge has the city of Toll, split into the day city and the night city, with citizens allocated to each one depending on how auspicious their name is. - Wave Without A Shore by C. J. Cherryh is set in a city where the upper class has got so good at ignoring the underclass that they literally don't see them anymore. - The Outer Limits (1995): In "Stasis", a society plagued by overpopulation is split into three groups: Alphas, Betas, and Elites. The Alphas and Betas are workers who alternate with their counterparts in stasis, and the small group of Elites are an administrative elite. - Final Fantasy VII: The Layered Metropolis of Midgar has the eight slum districts, which used to be named towns, and the plate, which is elevated above them and blocks most of the sunlight from the slums. The most important buildings and people live on the plate. - Super Paper Mario: The Hub Levels Flipside and Flopside are identical mirror copies of each other, right down to having Mirror Character NPCs, only being separated by dimensions and having reverse layouts. With the exception of Merlon, Nolrem, and a select few of NPCs (like the one that builds a shortcut pipe between the cities), most of them are not aware of each other's existence. - Xenogears has The Sacred Empire of Solaris and the land dwellers. Extreme Urban Segregation applies: most if not all Solaris citizens view the land dwellers as chattel animals only fit for food, fuel, experiments, and labor, and the very existence of Solaris is concealed from the land by a set of interdimensional gates, so the only interaction between them are extractive activities, essentially mining the land and the land dwellers. - Among the land dwellers, there's the split between humans and demihumans, and between both and the Chu tribe. - In a more meta sense, due to repeated apocalyptic collapses and due to reincarnation and effective immortality existing in the setting(from the forced crash landing on the planet itself to the Zeboim nuclear war to the Solaris-Shevat War and the Day of Collapse 600 years before the game's present time) all of life on the planet is recursively overlaid over itself. - SCP Foundation has SCP-3838, a series of eight tribes in Turkmenistan that occupy the same area of land, but over different time periods. They can time travel to visit other time periods, and treat the time periods they inhabit like territory that can be inhabited, migrated to and from, invaded, or conquered. - Buzz Lightyear of Star Command has the deuteragonist Mira Nova hail from a world called Tangea. She's a princess among her people, who can move through solid objects with ease, among other powers. Also living on Tangea are the Grounders, who have psychokinetic powers. The two races are segregated and are antagonistic to each other. Moreover, being in close proximity means the powers of both are negated. - Futurama: Beneath the city of New New York is a society of Mutants who have built their own city out of the flushed waste from the surface. The mutants are forbidden from coming to the surface on the grounds of being "Inferior genetic scum". - Caste societies can be like this. Also, moieties and various other forms of kinship require certain members of society to treat other members of society as if they don't exist. - In The Netherlands, during Pillarisation, each community - Catholic, Liberal Protestants, Conservative Protestants, Liberals, and Socialists - had its own institutions, from the cradle to the grave: political parties, schools, trade unions, and even sport teams were separated. - The South African Apartheid system aimed to do this, with each racial community being given its own homelands. Of course, it ended in naked White supremacy. - The Ottoman Empire had separate laws and institutions depending on which millet (religion) you belonged to.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlaidSocieties
Readings Are Off the Scale - TV Tropes "Lock On! 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000,000, 1,000,000,000,000, IMMEASURABLE! Kachidoki Charge!" The measurement instruments used by the heroes — whether it's a speedometer, a Power Level rater, or something else — can never actually measure the full scope of their subjects. Nor can they be recalibrated to expand that range at the cost of some loss of detail. When one encounters an especially intense situation, one can merely stare slack-jawed at their pegged, now-useless meter, and yell "Readings are off the scale!" Presumably this is to allow writers to say something is astonishingly big or powerful, without having to make up the measuring units for Subspace Quantum Tachyon Emissions, or using a real value that is out of proportion to what would be sensible. Basically Up to Eleven taken, well, Up to Eleven. In comedy genres, many Thing 'o Meters will tend to go off-scale, begin shaking violently, or even explode. It should probably be noted that, as the Real Life Examples below indicate, in real life it's seldom as easy as just "recalibrating". At a certain point, any measuring device will eventually reach the limit of what it was designed to measure. Seen in almost every Space Opera, as well as any series which involves Power Levels. If you're using a chart, Off the Chart will be the case, too. Compare Readings Blew Up the Scale for a reading that's so far off the scale it will cause the device to suffer Explosive Instrumentation. Also compare to All of Them, for someone giving a 'verbal reading' that's off the normal scale. When this is applied to media reviews, it's Broke the Rating Scale. ## Examples: - In Dragon Ball: - Neon Genesis Evangelion: - In one episode, Lt. Ibuki uses this trope directly ("All our meters and gauges are going off the scale!") when trying to recover Unit-01 and Shinji. - Misato finally addresses this trope in one of the last few episodes: Maya: Yet, I can't believe it. I mean, it's impossible on this system. Misato: Nevertheless, it's a fact. We must accept the fact and then investigate the cause. - In Rebuild of Evangelion it's not so much a matter of going beyond measurable values as exceeding safety thresholds; the "negative values" of plug depth indicate the pilot has moved out of safe depths in the plug and into the zone where "contamination" is a major concern. Unit-02's beast mode also causes all readings to go haywire and Unit-01's destruction of its limiters allows it to "transcend all human reason." - Plug depths actually have a limitation on how high they can go. It's labeled "The Great Beyond Depth"; one can only assume things don't go well for the pilot there. - Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: - This line is used in the opening where Simon faces down an armada with an impossibly large size: The fleet size is "off the charts". The opening fades out as he orders the attack. - In the show itself, the gauge our heroes use for measuring their spiral energy is designed to handle large values: It's a logarithmic scale, which first spirals outward in one color, then switches to another color and spirals outward again, and repeats this as much as is necessary. In the final episode, after \|\|Lordgenome's Heroic Sacrifice and absorbing the energy worth of The Big Bang,\|\| the gauge switches immediately to a never-before-seen rainbow color, spirals out to the maximum, and then the glass covering shatters and it keeps increasing onto empty air, in plain defiance of all logic and common sense. In other words, spiral power went off the scale on a scale that was designed to measure things that go off the scale. - In Episode 2 of Vividred Operation, after Rei powers up the first Alone, one of the Bridge Bunnies at Blue Island HQ exclaims that the empowered Alone's energy levels have exceeded their gauges' limits and can no longer be measured. - In an episode of MM!, new character Noa is trying to harness "pervert energy", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, energy related to the level of a person's perversion. She measures this energy from Taro while he's being tortured and is utterly astonished. Taro's later told that his insanely massive pervert power is what allowed Noa to proceed with her evil plan. What follows gradually turns into yet another Dragon Ball Z parody. - In Diebuster, the Buster Machine Quatre-Vingt-Dix uses a physics-breaking Exotic Maneuver to freeze enemies at -1,000,020,000,000 Celsius. Note that absolute zero (the coldest possible temperature, at which all molecular motion stops and thermal energy is nonexistent) is about -273 degrees Celsius. You cannot, ever, go colder than this. - In Space Runaway Ideon, the crew of the Solo Ship head back to Earth to use the most advanced computer on the planet to try and calculate the eponymous mecha's potential output. Needless to say, they're all shocked when the readout points to \|\|literal infinity\|\|. Quickly, they begin to worry about the fact that a release of that kind of energy at once could \|\|destroy the universe\|\|. The computer wasn't exaggerating.... - Pokémon: - In the FireRed/LeafGreen saga of Pokémon Adventures, Orm uses the Dark Pokédex to gauge the power of Yellow's Pokémon and laughs at their low levels. And then Yellow's Viridian Power kicks in, sending the numbers over the eighties, effectively freaking him and Sird out to the point that they know better than to try to fight her head-on. (Technically still on the scale, but the suddenness of the spike has the same effect that going off it would.) - In Episode 22 of Pokémon the Series: Black & White, one of Professor Juniper's assistants mentions that the energy readings they're getting are off the scale. - In Umineko: When They Cry, where gods are hard-pressed to even reach the last measured digit in magic resistance, meta-Battler's resistance is maxed out at "Endless Nine", as the Siestas discover to their horror after they try to shoot him. It makes sense his Anti-Magic is at endless nine. He's Anti-Magic incarnate, thanks to his position in the game as "Magic cannot exist." Also note that this reading was taken during his high point; in the previous arcs he's a bit less of a determinator and in later arcs, \|\|he begins to accept the existence of magic and even gets to be ~~Beatrice~~ Endless Sorcerer.\|\| Though that doesn't stop him from no-selling \|\|Featherine\|\|'s entire honor guard of main-character mages' spell-storm in EP8. Seems like once \|\|he reaches the truth, he can toggle it at will. Or maybe just when he's protecting someone\|\|. - In Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts, during a Furo Scene in the anime adaptation, Shimada examines several other girls' breasts with size-detecting heat vision. One... generously endowed character causes the numbers to max out. - Yu-Gi-Oh!: Seto Kaiba's computer control panels nearly exploded when Kaiba powered up his Infinity +1 Card, Obelisk the Tormentor. A bit peculiar considering that Obelisk was a hologram with no physical presence whose model, animations, and statistics were probably programmed into a Duel Disk with computers probably not too far off from the ones used to gauge its power level. And given that each card's statistics had to be programmed into the Duel Disk to begin with, it's not so clear why Kaiba needed to monitor any monster's power levels at all. - The dub of the Duelist Kingdom arc has Tea saying (in an awestruck voice) "Blue-eyes Ultimate Dragon's Attack Power is off the charts!" The card in question has 4500 ATK and at this point in the game and show normal Blue-eyes' 3000 ATK was considered overwhelming, so the reaction was justified. - In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Amon becomes wise to Professor Cobra's plan to kill him by increasing the power to his D-Belt; so Amon sabotages Cobras equipment so that the same thing happens to everyone's D-Belt and then throwing a party where dueling is involved. (Amon realizes that Cobra will be forced to abort the plan, lest every student in the school die as a result, something he would never get away with.) The result is an Oh, Crap! from Cobra as readings on his equipment goes haywire, followed by him panicking as he tries to shut the system down. - In Ties That Bind, the companion movie to Street Fighter IV, Ryu's Satsui no Hadou is the target of Seth and SIN. The first time he's provoked into using his power, the power gauge the scientists are reading max at ...999999999999999 (the camera angle obscures the start of the number, but it's big). In the final battle, he manages to control the Satsui no Hadou, and we get a shot of the equipment rolling over from ...999999999999999 to ...000000000000000. - Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie has a more subdued example, where a similar reading of Ryu rated his fighting potential at 3620. That number may sound reasonable, but M. Bison's lead scientist believes that the reading must be wrong because only the most powerful martial artists can break 2000, so 3000+ is off the scale. - In the first Sakura Wars OVA the developers of the spirit armor are having trouble finding someone who is able to pilot it. After their latest military pilot nearly kills himself trying to operate the mech, the scientists comment that they need to find someone who can move the gauge on the spirit-power-measuring-thingy. They idly flip it on in the presence of the granddaughter of the chief scientist (and daughter of the owner of the company), and the gauge, of course, promptly overloads and breaks. - In Guilty Crown the protagonists find a Void-o-meter, to detect the level of power someone has both when they use their own Void and when someone else uses theirs. Most people rank around one hundred, with three hundred being on the higher end. For Inori, it slowly spirals up to two thousand before giving up and just declaring "OVER." - When the main Zentraedi fleet shows up in Earth's orbit in Super Dimension Fortress Macross/ Robotech, everyone there understandably has an Oh, Crap! moment, and one of the characters mentions that due to the sheer volume of ships (5 million of them), their radar can't even keep up with it all. - Bleach: - The final arc opens with panic in the 12th Division as the Shutara Scale measurements break down. The Scale is supposed to measure the Balance of Souls between all the worlds, but a sudden upsurge in Hollow soul destruction sends the Scale off the charts. The Shinigami comment that the Scale simply isn't designed to handle so much destruction in such a short period of time, announcing the resurgence of the allegedly almost-extinct Quincies. - The Quincy invasion of Soul Society manifests as multiple powerful pillars of light. The 12th Division struggles to analyse them because the amount of raw power makes it hard to calibrate the instruments. They briefly get a clear reading to confirm the enemy is definitely Quincy before the attackers step out of the pillars and nearly half of the Gotei 13 is decimated within just a few short minutes. The measurements break down completely. - NG Knight Lamune & 40, the main robot King Sccrusher runs on a Hot-Blooded meter, and it can use a Limit Break when the gauge goes off a scale. Since this is a traditional shonen anime, the meter goes off the scale every episode. - In Fairy Tail's Grand Magic Games arc, Cana Alberona, \|\|armed with Fairy Glitter\|\|, has a much greater magic level than everybody else, much to everybody's amazement. The magic-measuring device stopped at 9999 because that was as far as it went... and because she completely vaporized the thing in the process. - The final episode of Sentou Yousei Yukikaze has so many JAM clustered around the Passageway that the sensor officers in the FAF fleet simply give up trying to count them. It's very justified, considering that \|\|the planet Faery is breaking up and revealing that it is built out of countless JAM.\|\| - Toriko does this with its Capture Level system. For example, capture level of 5 and above is immune to conventional weapons. The strongest beasts in the human world range between capture level 91-99. However in the Gourmet World it goes off the scale with creatures regularly getting levels of over 100. The first beast Toriko even encounters is the Breath Dragon with a capture level of 219. \|\|The strongest capture level is the Meat Dish of Acacia's Full Course GOD... 10,000.\|\| - Naruto: - This happens with the Ten Tails. When the Ten Tails finally appears, Kurama, the Nine Tails, tells Naruto that trying to measure the Ten Tails' chakra levels is pointless. Naruto goes into Sage mode, allowing him to sense the Ten Tails's Chakra, and is almost blown back by it, and we're given a visual of how much it has: \|\|It's depicted as a Planet\|\|. This is later taken further as the Ten Tails turns into its second form and, back at the Shinobi Alliance headquarters, an entire second sphere of chakra is created as a result of the mutation, symbolized as a planet appearing, and making it, in just its second form, have enough chakra to rival every living thing on the planet. And it just gets stronger from there. - Taken Up To Eleven with the appearance of \|\|Kaguya. While it's already hinted that Kaguya is extremely strong (so strong that the Sage of Six Paths himself, her own son, says that he's nothing compared to her), when she finally ressurrects herself, Naruto again attempts to measure her chakra. She has so much that She dwarfs the aforementioned Ten Tails. So she essentially dwarfs a being so powerful it was at that point stronger then every other being on earth combined\|\|! - YuYu Hakusho: In the Three Kings arc, a bunch of Raizen's old training buddies come out of seclusion to pay respects and join the new tournament. They collectively flex their energy to "see if they've still got it," and Yomi's strategist's energy-reading device goes off the scale before it breaks. Miles away from the energy source. - In [C] Control, there are three levels of attack an Asset can use: Microflation is the weakest, Mezzoflation is medium and Macroflation is the highest. For attacks of Mezzo level and above, a digitized announcer calls out the name and level of those attacks when used. When the ungodly powerful Q uses her Signature Move Cannibalization, the announcer is unable to determine its level and stutters: - In I Went to School to be a Swordswoman, But My Magical Aptitude is 9999 the nine-year old heroine Rola is assessed when she joins a prestigious Academy for adventurers by touching a magic crystal. While she shows strong initial ratings on her physical stats, her ratings for the six different magic types are each 9,999. For comparison, the great sage who founded the school, a heroine from 130 years ago, had ratings in the 3,000 to 6,000 range. It is even said the crystal simply maxes out at 9,999 and her true abilities could be even higher. - Early on in My Hero Academia, the members of Class 1-A are given several tests to assess their physical abilities and Quirks, including one where they have to throw a ball as far as possible. Uraraka uses her anti-gravity Quirk on the ball and it just floats away, never to return, so her score is recorded as "Infinity". - Most Stands in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure are rated from A to E on various parameters, but a couple break the scale entirely, having either "infinite" or "null" written in their entries. Sometimes it's self-explanatory (Notorious B.I.G. has Complete Immortality and isn't connected to its user, so it gets infinite Range and Persistence), and other times it's just because trying to put the Stand on any kind of scale is impossible (how do you grade the destructive power of cursing a person to experience death for eternity?), which is especially common with Reality Warper-type Stands. - The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. in one episode the characters all have a physical examination. When Kusuo is tested on a device that reads a person's grip strength, he squeezes too hard due to his poor control of his Super Strength and it shows an extremely high rating. He hides this by squeezing even harder so the meter loops all the way around past the maximum and zero, so it looks like he got a low result. - Beastars: \|\|Oguma, on his deathbed,\|\| reveals that he really does love \|\|Louis\|\| by explaining that he calculates the monetary value of his relationships with everyone that he knows, but when he tries to calculate the price of his relationship with \|\|Louis\|\|, the only person he loves, his calculator only returns an error message. - Lampshaded in an issue of Fantastic Four: Mr. Fantastic: Power is right off the readouts... Human Torch: So I'm guessing bigger readouts wouldn't help? Like that amp in Spinal Tap that goes Up to Eleven? - In Cable & Deadpool issue #15, Black Box has Deadpool hooked up to some equipment that's monitoring him and showing Black Box his thoughts. After some observation, Black Box notes that Deadpool's ferocity and skills are off the charts. Black Box: Clowns. He is too funny. But his ferocity—his skills—are off the charts. I should know...I've charted them all. - Lampshaded in an issue of First Comics' Humongous Mecha series Dynamo Joe: Pomru: The readings are off the scale! If we get outta this we're gonna need a bigger scale! - In X-23: Innocence Lost, Rice uses this to describe X-23's intellect and physical fitness when she's seven years old. - Ultimate FF: Sam tried to get readings of the mutated workers inside the dome, to no avail. - In Blood of the Phoenix after Harry fights a fifth-year dueling dummy, two sixth-year dummies and a seventh-year dummy during a school dueling competition and beats them all, his name is listed so far up the enchanted scoreboard that Ginny Weasley is technically in first place. - Child of the Storm: the sheer scale of Jean Grey's Psychic Powers \|\|and by extension, those of her twin sister, Maddie\|\| are noted more than once to blow every single pre-existing scale. Harry is the only one hanging in even approximately the same neighbourhood \|\|and with sufficient creativity, can fight Maddie for an extended period... but only while making damn sure to stay out of her reach\|\|, and he once remarks that he's the Moon to Jean's Sun - far closer than literally everyone else, but still far, far behind. - In White, when measuring the Arrancars' power to determine the Espada, Ichigo's reading is simply "error" from how powerful he is. - In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, Cirda of the Terrible Trio finds that power-scanning three of the four jams her scanner needle at the top. However, she can't determine anything else about their power because earlier she had cannibalized that functionality to ensure that her scanner would be able to sense things through the masks that nearly everyone wears. Sadly for her, the four don't have masks yet, so the cannibalism was unnecessary. - John overhears Cirda scream the exact "over Nine Thousand" lines from Dragon Ball Z. From then on, the four ironically refer to themselves as being Nine Thousands whenever they talk about going up against someone, or they need to complete a difficult task. They even gain a Share Phrase: No, wait, John said, a note of weary but evil craft in his mental voice. They should know what hit 'em. Teach 'em not to fuck with Nine Thousands. - Meta Example: Put My Immortal into Microsoft Word, and it will bring up an error message saying that there's so many mistakes that it can't correct them. - Dragon Ball Abridged: - Subverted in this dialogue: Nappa: VEGETA! What does the Scouter say about his Power Level ? Vegeta: IT'S... one thousand and six. Nappa: What ... really? Vegeta: Yeah. Kick his ass, Nappa. Nappa: Yay! [Nappa proceeds to get his ass kicked] Vegeta: Hmmmm... that doesn't seem right. Wait, wait wait wait... Nappa! Nappa: Whaaaaaat? Vegeta: I had the Scouter upside down. It's over 9000. [crushes Scouter] Rawr . - Parodied in a video released before they finished that episode. Nappa: VEGETA! What does the Scouter say about the Subscriber Count? Vegeta: IT'S... nine thousand and ten. Nappa: Wait, so you mean... Vegeta: Yes Nappa, it's... Nappa: It's! Vegeta: It's over! Nappa: It's over!! Vegeta: IT'S OVER EIGHT THOUSAND! Nappa: WHAT EIGHT ... wait, what? Vegeta, you didn't do it right! Vegeta: Yes I did Nappa. Yes. I. Did. - Parodied once more during the battle with Freeza, when the overlord's scouter tries to measure Vegeta's power after the saiyan had gone through several zenkai boosts. After a few seconds of trying, the scouter displays "F*K THIS I'M OUT" and then explodes. - In the Worm/ Hazbin Hotel* crossover WannaBee, Clack gets a surprise when Taylor Hebert, upon getting her sins measured, actually manages to max out the Sin-O-Meter. - In The Worm That Dorks, during the Quirk Assessment Test, Izuku accidentally breaks off the handle of the grip tester. Aizawa marks down his grip strength as "Yes". - In the first chapter of Quantity of Quirks, Izuku's Quirk Assessment results are marked as "Yes" for grip strength, long jump, and distance running. The first because he broke the machine; the last two because he can fly. - In It's An Unliving, the Self-Insert Black Lantern has a timer built into his power ring that states how much time he has remaining before his ring is shut down note : As said ring is the only thing keeping him sorta alive, shutting it down will instantly kill him. The timer maxes out at 640 hours and killing evil people fills the timer. A random serial killer earned him an hour. Lex Luthor earned twenty four hours. And Ra's al Ghul earned 213 hours. When he kills Vandal Savage, he's informed that the timer only gained 282 hours and the remaining 17,843 hours are available to use for alternative usage note : For some quick math, the timer maxes out at twenty five days while Vandal provided over two years of time. - In A Green Dragon's Hoard: Momo technically gets first place on the Quirk Assessment, but only because Izuku's scores were all so high that Nemuri simply wrote down "Yes" for each one. - The Rigel Black Chronicles: Magical power coefficients for alchemy are measured using a color scale, with black as the minimum (and thus strongest) of 1.0. However, Dumbledore's coefficient is 0.97. Apparently it took a lot of trial and error to calculate. Dumbledore: My first six months, all my arrays exploded. Nicolas was quite displeased with the destruction I wreaked on his workshop. - In Das Boot, when everything is going to hell and the submarine is stuck on the ocean floor, the depth gauge is far past its last marking (260 meters). 260 meters is already way past the point where the navy originally expected the hull to be crushed and destroyed. The manufacturer's warranty extended only to 90 meters. - Implied in Ghostbusters. - The PKE meter (handheld device used to measure ghost activity) seems to only have three readings: "Zero," "Pegged," and "Blown Up." When we see it used, it only seems to go "active" when a ghost is within visual range, so it's only slightly better than, say, looking. - The 2009 video game shows the PKE meter in better detail. The "antenna" on the meter rise higher the closer the meter is to a spectral entity, regardless of power. The bars in the middle are kind of a "hot-cold" mechanic for pinpointing a hidden ghost or cursed object. There's more to it than that, as Ray and Egon both comment on the readings, noting things that are non-obvious, but for the rookie Ghostbuster (that's you), it's just a ghost locator. - The Fifth Element: Temperature probes sent to absolute evil jam, one at a million degrees, the other at minus 5000. A bit later, Leeloo's DNA is described as having hundreds of different bases. note : The "minus 5000" part is more than just "off the charts", it's actually impossible. The lowest possible temperature is absolute zero (0 °K), or −273.15 °C, or −459.67 °F. - In The Phantom Menace, Anakin Skywalker's midi-chlorian level is said to be "off the charts" and "over twenty thousand." It's not entirely clear whether this means that they could only measure them up to twenty thousand, or that a little over twenty thousand was the actual count but unprecedentedly high, even Master Yoda doesn't have that much. - Midway through Forbidden Planet, we are shown a power gauge consisting of a (very large) number of lighted displays, each of which shows ten times the amperage of the previous one. (Think of it as a decimal display with a whole lotta digits.) What the protagonists consider a large power output barely registers as a blip on the first gauge. Naturally, by the end of the film, we see the whole panel lit up (and flashing!). - The energy readings of the reactor in Antarctica are off the scale to Nite Owl's Owlship in Watchmen. - Whiteout has a particularly ridiculous example, where someone says that the radar went off the charts. Given that radar isn't actually used to measure anything, how it can go "off the charts" is a mystery. - Star Trek (2009) uses it twice, most bizarrely for James Kirk's attribute tests (there's no way to score very high scorers?). Either that or "Off the charts" is used as Federation slang for "Really friggin' high": a fact which would explain an awful lot. - Inverted in the Soviet sci-fi film Moscow Cassiopeia, where an accident (a guy sitting on a console) results in their relativistic ship accelerating beyond the speed of light in just a few seconds. The Captain notes this on the console readout, which shows the rising speed bar. Forgetting the fact that accelerating beyond the speed of light is impossible without some sort of Applied Phlebotinum, there'd be no way for any device to measure translight speeds (although you could still put the numbers on the scale just for the hell of it). The crew passes out and wakes up to find that they have arrived at their destination, while everyone on Earth has aged several decades, which seems to indicate that they did not, in fact, travel faster than light but merely approached the speed of light, causing Time Dilation. Given that the captain is still a teenager, it can be forgiven if he incorrectly gauged the speed. - According to the ship's name/acronym ZARYa (means "dawn"), the "R" standads for "relativistic", meaning the ship is actually designed to go to a significant percentage of the speed of light. The star in question is a real one; over 200 light years away, but with the Time Dilation, the teens were expected to only age about 20 years (requiring 90%+ lightspeed). Instead, they got into some Negative Space Wedgie, making it 20+ years on Earth, a couple minutes for them, and definitely FTL. - Bomba says this in one scene in Epic (2013). - In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Nancy has her dreams monitored by a brain-scan. The doctor notes that a "really intense" nightmare would read about seven...then watches in disbelief as it goes to 10, 15, 30... - In This Island Earth, Joe tells Cal about a strange bead-like device that blew up their equipment after giving off an amazing amount of power. Cal muses on this, realizing they could use it to generate enough power to power an entire town by itself with it. - In Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, they say this about the level of radiation Godzilla is emitting. - In Ultraviolet (2006), a computer scans Violet and tries to count how many weapons she has in her Hyperspace Arsenal. It eventually gives up and says "Many" in a surprised tone of voice. - Queen of Outer Space. After the rocketship crashlands on Venus, the crew note that the speedometer's needle is at the far end of the scale at 100 miles per second — they can only speculate how fast they might actually have been traveling. - In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), it's stated that King Ghidorah is hiding within the eye of a Category 6 tropical storm. In reality, there's no such thing as a Category 6 storm, since Category 5 encompasses all possible readings above Category 4 (although you could interpret it as the characters simply saying "Category 6" to aptly communicate that the cyclone is impossibly big). - Despite their phenomenally polymorphic instrumentation and interface, sensors on Star Trek are especially prone to this fatal weakness. This is lampshaded in the Star Trek: New Frontier book Being Human: Soleta: Readings are off the scale. McHenry: They're always off the scale. We just have to install bigger scales. - Funny inversion in Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: The temperature at the evil sigil during the Apocalypse is never measured correctly. The machines put it at either -150 or +350 degrees. Both are correct, 'cuz that's the temperature in Hell. - Discworld: - The Last Continent uses a thaumometer, that measures magical energy. Sure enough, it melts when it detects a magical field of over a million thaums (in this case, caused by \|\|the creation of a new continent\|\|). - While not strictly "off the scale," as it continued to measure as intended, the resograph of Moving Pictures (which detects distortions in reality) was at one point spitting out a burst of eleven small lead pellets every few minutes. Unfortunately, the wizards who found it in the back of a storeroom didn't know what it was supposed to be measuring or what the number of pellets and the interval between dispensing them meant until they dug up the operating manual some time later, at which point it turned out that a "really serious" distortion in reality would make it cough up two pellets. Per month. The moment when he figures this out is one of the few times Ponder Stibbons, Unseen University's "token sane person", skips over "This Is Gonna Suck" and goes straight to "Oh, Crap!". - Comes up once in The Corellian Trilogy. Note that said detectors were good up to over 500° Celsius. C-3PO: —and there are probably temperatures much higher than that, except the detectors are not there any more to tell us. - In Ender's Game, this is said about Bean's intelligence. He scored near-perfectly on all their aptitude tests (save physical abilities, given his age), but had also included notes in the margins pointing out mistakes the test-makers had made when writing them and making suggestions for improving the tests. The instructors decide that Bean's intellect is so great that their tests cannot accurately measure it, and therefore they can't be sure of his true limits. - Essentially, he has no upper limit on his intelligence, due to the nature of the genetic engineering he underwent as a fetus (he lacks the normal inhibitors that slow down neural development after infancy, but also the ones which tell his body to stop trying to grow when he reached adult size). - It's pointed out several times that Bean is much smarter than Ender, but Ender is a natural commander, while Bean is more of a strategist (i.e. no one would follow Bean). - This also occurs with the final battle at the Formic homeworld. There are so many Formic warships in orbit that the computer can't track them all, leading to the edges of the radar constantly dropping and picking up readings. - Occurs in the Lensman series - but only a very few times. The Lensman Arms Race applies to sensors and recorders there as well as to other systems. When the readings do go off the scale, it's impressive. "Those beams were hot - plenty hot. These recorders go up to five billion and have a factor of safety of ten. Even that wasn't anywhere near enough - everything in the recorder circuits blew." \|\|The most extreme instance was when a Faster Than Light meteor was pulled from another dimension and sent into a star. No gauge, chart, or screen could properly record what happened at that point. Everything pegged out, whited out, etc. Incidentally, this marked the end of the Lensman Arms Race; the finale of the series occurs shortly after because this was already Apocalypse How levels; if they didn't act fast, the galaxy would go next.\|\| - Hermione from Harry Potter has done exceedingly well on tests, ranging from 113% to 320%. That was muggle studies. One can only assume that being raised as a muggle, she knew infinitely more about it than even the professor. - In Warbreaker, there is a passing mention of the amount of breaths that a Returned had registering as infinite to Vivenna. This may have been a mistake, as it was referring not to the God King, but to a normal Returned, which would only be about four times more than Vivenna herself. This is because \|\|Returned don't have two thousand Breaths, they have one Divine Breath that's two thousand times stronger than a normal Breath. This odd situation throws off Vivenna's senses a little, especially since she's never practiced using the Breath-sense before\|\|. - This is why it took so long to discover that the dinosaurs were breeding in Jurassic Park. The program that kept track of the population was set with the expected number as its upper limit, because everyone believed the dinosaurs were incapable of breeding. They assumed everything was all right as long as the population didn't drop. It was only when Ian Malcolm told them to re-program the counter with a higher number that it was proven that the dinosaurs were breeding. (in the film, this doesn't occur, Alan discovers a dinosaur nest in the field.) - In The Girl from the Miracles District, after Kosma scans Nikita's magic signature, he's horrified to see that practically all of it is the berserk spirit, with almost no space on the scanner to show all the rest. - Iron Widow: The legendary Chrysalis pilot Qin Zheng's spirit pressure was too great to be measured by the technology of his era. On top of that, he could control all five forms of qi interchangeably, while most people are limited to one or two. - In Jean Johnson's Theirs Not to Reason Why, there are devices which measure psychic abilities (telepathy, telekinesis, etc) on a scale of 0 (no ability) to 20 (highest known rating of any ability from any person ever measured). There is a second device which suppresses psychic abilities, which is discovered to be by a factor of 4 (so a rating of 12 would show as a measurement of 3 when the suppressor is interfering with the person being tested). Ia has several of her abilities tested, and they eventually rate her power level as 84: with the suppressor running and reducing her ability by x4, she showed a measurement of 21... - The Black Magician Trilogy: The position of High Lord in Imardin's Wizarding School goes to the strongest mage, which is tested by measuring how long the applicant's Mana reserves can withstand an assault by twenty senior mages. Akkarin defeated all twenty at once instead. \|\|This is an early sign that he uses the Vampiric Draining of Black Magic to boost his power to otherwise impossible heights.\|\| - Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest: The Role-Playing Game 'Verse of Tortus features items called "status plates" that describe the stats and abilities of their owners. Hajime Nagumo starts as a Level 1 Synergist, but by the time he finishes the Great Orcus Labyrinth, becoming a Phlebotinum Muncher in the process, his status plate gives up the ghost, displaying his level as "???". - In the manga oneshot, ∞, the main character, Mieko has a power that determines how much affection someone has for her. A score of 0-20 is for people who aren't interested in her, 21-40 is for acquaintances, 41-60 is for friends, 61-80 is for best friends or those who admire her, and 81-100 is for those who love her romantically. When her best friend has a "∞" score, despite having a 68 before, Mieko is disappointed, mistaking the ∞ for an 8 and hoping to work hard so that her friend will like her again. - Chakona Space: During chapter 7 of Tales of the Folly, a few Chakats have some fun. When they finish, they are subjected to being rated by the rest of the crew and passengers of the Folly. Most give average scores, but one of the scorecards is marked "HOLY #%#^^$$!!". Later, in chapter 9, a pair who didn't realize they were quite so noisy get busy after work and affect all on board. Afterward, they are greeted by everyone holding the "HOLY #%#^^$$!!" card. Neal lampshades this when he comments: "We sometimes find the scale were using isnt quite large enough for what were trying to measure." - Earlier in the same series, a small fleet of Starfleet's finest encounter the Folly. The sensor tech on one of the ships is having trouble believing the readings being sent to his systems. Sensor Tech Carson: "Well, for one thing, your passive scans are showing non-powered objects at five times the range my sensors could, and the couple of times your people went active my display wouldnt scale far enough out to see what they were looking at!" - How Not to Summon a Demon Lord: There is a mirror that measures people's Power Levels. When Diablo tries it, he's too powerful, so it malfunctions and shuts down. - American Restoration: A foot x-ray machine (known to be a big radiation leakage source to begin with) is brought in to be restored. A radiation specialist is brought in to see if/how badly this one leaks. He turns it on and it leaks more radiation than Chernobyl. His detector doesn't read high enough to properly quantify the extent of the leakage. It is worth noting here that the restorers promptly removed the X-Ray tube from the machine and rebuilt it with a simulation which projected a photographic x-ray negative onto a screen instead of using real x-rays. - A quick gag in season 4 of Arrested Development has Dr. Norman tell George Sr. that the latter's testosterone levels are off the scale. Then he clarifies that they are below the scale. - Babylon 5 used off-the-scale readings as shorthand for the equivalent of Wooden Ships and Iron Men spotting a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. The rest of the time they're just fine as-is. - In the short-lived sequel series to Babylon 5, Crusade, Captain Gideon subverted the trope the first time it appeared by ordering that the sensors for the Excalibur be recalibrated so that the readings were back on the scale. Given that they are adventuring out on the frontier, they run into that kind of all the freaking time, and he'd like to know if the ship's Wave-Motion Gun might actually work on that particular target. - The Big Bang Theory's Doctor Sheldon Cooper claims at one point that his IQ "cannot be accurately measured." This is in fact an issue with extremely high IQs. Pretty much all IQ tests produce increasingly unreliable results for results higher than 145-148 due to the fact that there's generally not a large enough sample to normalize them properly. - Chernobyl: Happens three times in a row before the characters can get an accurate scale. Played deadly serious, since they're measuring radiation. - The explosion of Reactor #4 is read by the workers' dosimeters as 3.6, which is the highest they can go (the plant's actual heavy-duty dosimeter was destroyed when the reactor blew up, which is why they're working with such small ones). It's pretty obvious to everyone that this is not actually the correct number and is a bit low for an exposed reactor core, but unfortunately Dyatlov, Bryukhanov, and Fomin are either deeply in denial or desperately trying to cover it up, so they report 3.6 as the accurate number. During the initial meeting in Moscow, Legasov points out that this was likely "the number they had" to justify his suspicions that the disaster is far worse than the Chernobyl higher-ups are letting on. - Later, a dosimeter that went up to 1000 roentgens was outright fried by the radiation. - A 200 roentgen dosimeter survived, but also reported the radiation as the highest it could go. - Finally, the characters receive a heavy-duty dosimeter and Pikalov goes up to the core in a lead-lined truck to get an accurate reading of 15,000 roentgens, the equivalent of two Little Boys per hour, confirming the true scale of the disaster. And in real life, it is suspected that that dosimeter maxed out too. - Doctor Who: - The Goodies. In one episode it becomes so hot the thermometer squirts mercury in someone's face when they go to look at it. - In an episode of How Clean is Your House?, Aggie tells a smoker that the carbon monoxide levels in her living room were right off the scale. - The page quote comes from Kamen Rider Gaim. When he performs certain attacks, the power is added up in multiples of ten, sometimes ending up at 100,000 or 1,000,000. When using Kachidoki/Triumphant Arms (he gets a super-er mode later, but at the time it's the most powerful thing ever, able to contend with swarms of enemies. And that super-er mode is, in fact, at its best when using Kachidoki Arms' weapon!) and activates a finisher he's using for the first time in the big team-up with Ressha Sentai ToQger, it goes up over a trillion before the Computer Voice gives up, declaring its power level immeasurable. - Knight Rider: K.I.T.T. had a top speed that approached 300 mph ... and several times, Michael Knight drove the car that speed (always accomplished through film speed techniques), usually racing to catch a criminal or avert a potentially deadly situation ... such as the time Knight needed to (very quickly) transport a nuclear bomb to a desert location before it exploded. In the example, K.I.T.T. easily outran several state patrol troopers the first one reported that the car was traveling at speeds "off the clock" and crashed (at blinding speed) through a road block. - In the Lost episode "The Incident", Dharma is drilling into the island's electromagnetic pocket. Dr. Chang notes that the Gauss readings are off the scale. (This magnet is known to be strong enough to crash a plane.) - A comedic version from The Munsters - when Lily was asked what Herman's weight was, she replied "three spins". When asked for clarification, she said that when he stepped on the scale, the needle spun around three times. - Occasionally, the MythBusters will get results that go above and beyond any sort of measurement available to them. In one notable instance, they managed to completely max out a G-force accelerometer with a rating above its maximum value of 500 G, or five hundred times the force of gravity; this device had previously recorded numbers in the 160 G range, already considerably more than necessary to kill a human being. 500 G is around five times the lethal baseline of G-forces for humans, and they still managed to produce more force than even that unpleasantly high number. However, the best way to tell that the Mythbusters have gone off their known scales is to wait for Stunned Silence from Adam. - When the White Dino Gem reveals itself in Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, Tommy tells the other Rangers that the energy readings are higher than his equipment can track. - In Star Trek: "The Corbomite Maneuver", the mass of a starship only one mile across was off the scale, according to Spock. One wonders how he measured the mass of, oh, planets or moons. - Either the starship had a ludicrously dense hull, or the Enterprise's sensors just weren't designed to measure the mass of anything substantially larger than itself. - It's more sensible to assume that the mass for a starship a mile across was wildly out of proportion to what it should be for a vessel that size. - In "Operation: Annihilate!" the meter on Spock's biobed measuring pain drifts straight to the top and stays there. Implying that it simply can't measure any higher. - Another episode has a more humorous take on that, where Spock lies on the bed and the readers immediately go haywire, including at least one needle leaping to the highest point and staying there. Spock then points out that these are normal readings for a Vulcan and, since the biobed was calibrated for humans when he laid on it, he triggered almost every life support alarm the system had. - Averted in Star Trek: Enterprise, where a device designed to measure the age of metal happily shows a negative number when used on parts from the future. (Presumably the device can measure the effect the universal background radiation had on the forging process, or somesuch technobabble.) - In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Where No One Has Gone Before", the Enterprise is accelerated to a velocity that causes Data to quote this trope. - Dungeons & Dragons: Various Aura Vision spells will give their users a Poke in the Third Eye if they detect an "Overwhelming" aura that's above the conventional limits for the phenomenon being detected. Trying to read the mind of someone with Super Intelligence, Detect Evil on a Demon Lord, or analyze the magic properties of an Artifact can short out the spell and leave the caster stunned. - Lots of combos in Magic: The Gathering allow you to generate more Mana than you put in, resulting in the ability to use timing rules to generate an arbitrary amount of things. For example, A Magus of the Coffers taps at a cost of (2) mana to give you one Black mana for each swamp you control. You can then equip him with the Sword of the Paruns, which will let him untap for (3). Pay two, tap the Magus for six black mana, pay three to untap him, and then do it again. Written out: -(2) => +(6B) => -(3) => -(2) => ETC. Lather, rinse, repeat, and apply to the variable cost cards, such as Exsanguinate, and you wind up with combos that can do 9999 damage to each opponent at the table and then let you gain that much life. Considering you start the game at 20 life and even the Commander's Arsenal Life Counter only goes to 99, it's certainly off all of the official charts. - The base Chronicles of Darkness game uses a Point Build System where a character's Attributes (e.g.: Strength) and Skills (e.g. Weaponry) are measured on a five-point scale, with 5 representing a conventional human maximum, although some supernatural abilities can temporarily boost them even higher. Characters from the various game lines can also break that limit once their core Power Level gets higher than 5, on the basis that a Vampire: The Requiem elder, Mage: The Awakening archmage, or similarly puissant entity simply isn't bound by mortal norms anymore. - Warhammer 40,000: Done subtly with the T'au Forge World battlesuits. The Ta'unar Supremacy Armour and the Y'Vahra Battlesuit have the designations KX139 and XV109 respectively. Thing is, the T'au count in Base 8, with the XV88 Broadside Battlesuits previously being their top-of-the-line armament before rolling overfor the XV104 Riptide. Their new anti-titan materiel didn't just go to another place value, it broke their numbering system. - Cyberpunk: lists Adam Smasher's Empathy stat as Yeah, right... on a scale from 1 to 10. According to the fluff, Smasher is simply so psychotic, sociopathic and unstable from the start that there is no lower level of sanity for cyberpsychosis to drive him to, or to put it another way, he subverts Cybernetics Eat Your Soul by not having had a soul to begin with. - DanceDanceRevolution: A boss song can have one or more parts of its Groove Radar spill right over the edge. But the crowner would have to be the Groove Radar for the Challenge chart of "MEGALOVANIA", where it just looks like one giant blob◊ plastered on top of the thing. - In Final Fantasy XII, Ghis's control personnel on-board the Leviathan marvel at the power of the Dawn Shard. Female Technician: Sixty-eight hundred, sixty-nine hundred, seven thousand! This must be deifacted Nethicite! The count still climbs! - In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, when the party steps forward to have their personal energy measures by Lexis's kymograph, Guy's results are five times more than the highest reading Lexis had ever seen, then Selan's are shown to be eight times more, then for Maxim, yes, the readings are off the scale. - Homeworld's Nebula missions feature this. However, it is stated that your personnel are working to recalibrate them to compensate. - Done straight when the Bentusi are first encountered. Made hilarious by the calm way it's stated. - Also happens in Chrono Trigger, if Robo is in the party during the battle with Lavos' final form. He tries to assess Lavos' power level: Robo: Power level is... immeasurable. It's completely off the scale! - Enemy Scan abilities in the Final Fantasy series usually depict boss statistics as a series of "???" readings, indicating how powerful they are compared to regular flunkies. Notably, some games allow you to upgrade the Libra/Scan spells to reveal these readings. - Their stats aren't actually off the scale, mind you. They often aren't even beyond what is achievable for the player characters given sufficient Level Grinding. (Except HP and MP, which are often above the player characters' limit, which is usually 9999 and 999 respectively. The Big Bad of Final Fantasy III, for instance, has 65000 HP.) - Final Fantasy X has summons which can deal damage over the damage limit, as well as weapon modifications which allow the player characters themselves to do so (predictably called "Break Damage Limit"). - World of Warcraft: - Monsters and enemy players more than ten levels above yours will have their level displayed as "??" or a skull symbol. They might be +11 to you, or +50. Either way, you probably don't want to mess with them. Most common occurrence of such were the "Welcome Bears" for starting Forsaken players when they could wander over from their starter level 10 zone into level 40+ Western Plaguelands. - Raidbosses are also level skull. They count as being 3 levels higher than the attacker's current level for purposes of determining hit chance and such. Notably this still applies even if you overlevel the dungeon they are in - their health and power may be piddly compared to yours now, but accuracy penalty still applies. - World of Warcraft now has an achievement labelled "It's Over Nine Thousand!!!" What is it for, exactly? Why, for getting over 9000 achievement points, of course! - In Persona 3, Your Mission Control all but freaks out at trying to perceive the Superboss' power. Fuuka: Her power is unbelievable! Who is she? - Lampshaded in the Ghostbusters videogame: Egon: ''These readings are off the charts...now I'll have to make new charts." - Even more hilarious is the fact that Egon is not astounded, but annoyed. Of course, being the super-brain that he is, he probably just doesn't like having something he can't quantify. - In Fallout 3, the player has a radiation measuring device. At the end of the game, \|\|if the player steps into the highly irradiated control room of the Project Purity building, the meter will get maxed at +100,000 (as in, more than one-hundred-thousand rads) and jiggles\|\|. Mercifully, no-one comments on this. - Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door had the Iron Cleft Bros. with a defense so high it was even in Goombella's book marked as ???. The only thing hard enough to hurt an Iron Cleft is another Iron Cleft. Goombella: Defense is... UNKNOWN?!? What the heck is wrong with this book?!? It says no known form of attack can damage an Iron Cleft! - FreeSpace 2 had a Vasudan sensor officer describing the mass readings of the Sathanas as "Exceeding superdestroyer class". They ended up making the "juggernaut" class to describe the Sathanas... and then the fanmade Blue Planet mod introduces two ships which "exceed juggernaut specifications by at least fivefold." - In Half-Life 2: Episode One, the Combine are purposely trying to destabilise their Citadel's Dark Energy Core to cause a massive explosion (sacrificing the whole base of operations, and the surrounding city), then use the release of energy to send a message off-world and open up a super-portal from which off-world reinforcements can pour in. When Alyx Vance looks at the Control Room monitor, she claims that the Core Reactor's readings are off the charts. - In Portal: - The Announcer in the second game claims "nine... nine... nine... nine..." days have passed since the first game. How much time has actually passed is open to speculation. - In the original Portal GLaDOS mentions that "Aperture technologies remain safely operational up to 4000 degrees [sic] Kelvin." (It is implied that Aperture test subjects do not.) Such a temperature is far off the scale of household and most industrial thermometers. To put how hot this is into perspective, consider that the surface of the Sun is just over 5778 K. And the player has to use an Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator to destroy Aperture technology, meaning it must be even hotter. - Shadowrun from Genesis has this with Walking Bear, a female orc shaman. When people want raw power, they usually hire Winston Mars, a Troll Samurai who can reach incredible amounts of strength (the power charts even states his power as [sic] Incredible! when maxed out). But here's a catch: Orcs have the one of the best Max Body/Strength, second only to Trolls. Also, using cyberware as a shaman will weaken your spells. But if you stop fearing the soul-stripping cyberware then cyber up Walking Bear, you will end almost as strong as Winston Marrs (also cybered, in this comparison). With this, Marrs will have a full power bar and Bear will have a nearly-full ("Massive" power). HOWEVER, there are talismans which increase strength and defense ratios, which are only usable by shamans and were meant to be used to make up for their fragility. That said, after maxing up Walking Bear, give her a Power talisman (you can only have one) and Defense talismans (they stack, up to three). The power readings will still read only as "Massive" instead of "Incredible!", but the bar graph charts for attack/defense will be so high, they will go beyond its limit and actually start a new one to carry its excess. Her defense is so massive that even in a game where you never will be invincible, be due to scratch damage, rolling ones or other overwhelming strikes, BULLETS WON'T EVER FAZE HER, and only the strongest mental attacks will scratch her mental gauge. - In the original Disgaea the Superboss Baal shows up. Laharl reads his power as "Level 4000" (his literal level out of the maximum possible 9999). By way of comparison, the previous optional boss was 2500. The Final Boss of the story proper is 90. - In a meta-example, in the third game it is possible to achieve amounts of dealt damage big enough for last digits of the number to go off the screen edge. - In the fourth game, the damage cap seems to be 184 quadrillion (can anything even have so much HP!?) - It is also possible to increase a character's pool of mana so high that the display can't keep up with it. At high enough levels, the game simply lists the character as having "Lots of Mana". - Similarly, when the amount of money won in battle exceeds 7 digits, the games will display "Super [Bonus]" or "A lot" in place of the actual amount. - Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny goes even further off the charts — the new Level Cap for the game is an excessive 99 million! Damage in the game was shown to go somewhere into the quintillions, and potentially higher! - Grolla in RosenkreuzStilette gets a big shock when \|\|Iris\|\| attacks her with immensely powerful magic, leading her to think of her as not just any girl, but some kind of immensely powerful monster. Grolla: What in the...!? How did she obtain such powerful magic? \|\|Iris\|\|, what ARE you!? \|\| Iris: Heheheh. Why, I am myself, of course. I don't expect a commoner to understand my genius.\|\| - In the GITADORA series, charts are given a rating from 10 to 99. Guitar Freaks & Drummania V5, the Superboss song "Rock To Infinity", on all instruments' Extreme difficulty, is given a rating of infinity. Subverted when the song is unlocked for play as a non-extra stage song, in which it's simply rated 99. Subsequent installments continue to simply give the song a finite number rating within the game's rating scale. - In Mass Effect: "Uh, Commander? I'm getting some strange readings. Really strange. Like, off the damn charts." - The Crowd Sourced Science Messages mod for Kerbal Space Program will note such results for some experiments in some environments, such as a barometer imploding on Eve. - The prologue of Xenogears has a team of Bridge Bunnies yelping about the rising "base code" of a vaguely-defined thing that is attacking their spaceship. - During one particular boss fight in Xenoblade Chronicles 1, you are given a vision where one Physical God titan cuts the other in half with its sword; the damage readout for this attack, which normally shows a number (and a skull if the attack is fatal to the target), instead displays a Mobius strip. - In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, on first encountering the final boss, the main character's suit can't even translate its appearance into a perceptible form. It requires outside assistance from a near-divine entity before you can see what it looks like. - Fate Series: - The EX rank in general, as the rank indicates the weapon/ability cannot be properly measured. Ea is this by virtue of being incredibly powerful, but other EX abilities approach the trope from different angles. For example, A rank magic resistance grants incredible resilience to a spell, EX magic resistance makes spells simply miss the person entirely. A rank Mad Enhancement renders its user absurdly powerful, but completely incoherent; EX madness can be anything from "in full control of their faculties, except in this one circumstance, where they go full crazy with stats to match" to "so crazed literally nothing gets into their thick skulls, and so insane their speech goes back to being coherent". - Fate/stay night: Gilgamesh´s sword, Ea, a rank EX Noble Phantasm with the ability to destroy reality and slice the world in 2 (the scale goes from E- to A++ for anything but the most ridiculous Noble Phantasms). Fully charged, it does 5000 units of damage (Excalibur by comparison does 200) though the amount can be multiplied several times by powering it with Gil´s own mana and that of the weapons in the Gate of Babylon. It can somehow be stopped by Avalon. Given Avalon was famous in Arthurian stories as stopping the wearer from being ever being hurt, and granting them pretty-much-immortality, this isn't as out there as it seems. In fact, Rin chides Shirou over forgetting that Excalibur was far, far less important to Arthur than the sheathe. - Fate/Grand Order: - Servants are rated on a scale of 1-5 stars by stats and rarity. Joke Character Angra Mainyu is the only one to clock in at zero stars. Atypically, he fits at both the top and bottom: he's generally weaker than any one-star (though he's actually treated as a two-star in terms of stats and level requirements), but due to his unusual requirements, he is also much rarer than any five-star. - Avenger Edmond Dantès, has a Luck stat completely blanked out - the scale can't accurately measure the fact that the events surrounding his legend means his luck is insanely bad and absurdly good simultaneously. - \|\|Oberon Vortigern's\|\| NP is an EX-Rank Anti-World Noble Phantasm much like Ea, but unlike it and several other similarly ranked NPs in the game, it goes Up to Eleven in that both its Range and Maximum Targets are also listed as Unlimited. That's because \|\|Lie Like Vortigern is basically a sentient black hole that has the capacity to devour everything in existence.\|\| - When \|\|normal human\|\| Bedivere is properly scanned by Chaldea in Fate/Grand Order - Divine Realm of the Round Table: Camelot, his Magic stat can only be measured as F because it's just that low in comparison to Servants. - Fate/EXTRA: CCC-exclusive character BB had her stats represented as "Star" rank, which is somehow above EX-Rank! Then again, as an AI-construct of the Moon Cell, she likely hacked her stats to be so high. When she appears in Grand Order, they're brought down to normal, but her Luck Rank is at EX because her efforts in CCC change it from E- to EX automatically because the scale quantifies what happened to her as a miracle that only someone who had that much luck could ever accomplish. - Civilization V has Gandhi's willingness to use nuclear weapons set to 12/10. For purposes of effect, this is the same as 10/10, but it does come into play: a leader's traits can vary by up to two points in either direction, randomly determined at the game's start (if a leader's base in a trait is, say, 6/10, the actual amount can be anywhere from 4 to 8); with a 12/10, Gandhi will never have less than 10 in Nuke Use. - Asura's Wrath has the Gohma measured in Impurity levels, but one in particular stands out. Gohma Vlitra Impurity Level: IMMEASURABLE. - In the Shining Series, any stat that is over 100 is shown as ??. - In Mega Man X4, when Cyber Peacock tries to analyze X, he comes up with the following gem: " His potential... is limitless?! ...not possible." - In StarCraft, Kerrigan runs up into off-the-scale problems, repeatedly. - In her backstory, she already was the most powerful human psionic. So powerful that she went off the scale, and they designed a new scale with her as the benchmark for the maximum Class 10. - After being infected by the Zerg and turned into their Queen, with mind equal to the usually building-sized Overminds, she is off the scale by an order of magnitude. She gets called a "class 12" as an approximation. - Eventually in Star Craft II: Heart of the Swarm, \|\|she obtains her "Primal" Zerg form, which of course boosts her abilities even further. The scale gives up entirely and she is described simply as "Unclassifiable"\|\|. - Legend of Grey Moon has a stats screen at the end of the game, listing time, deaths, gems (out of 16) and secrets (out of 11). However, these maxima are misleading and there are actually more; at 100% Completion, the stats screen will tell you that you have 17/16 gems and 28/11 secrets. - In Carmageddon 2 all the cars have a five-segment "strength" rating that tells you, generally speaking, how much they can hurt your opponents. The impractically huge and ridiculously heavy dump truck gets a rating of eighty out of five. - In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, while not in the storyline or dialogue, abusing the Alchemy/Enchanting or Alchemy/Restoration Positive Feedback Loop would cause all numbers in affected equipment — both enhanced stats and gold value — to have so many digits that they would go off the side of the screen. Creating a fortification of health enchantment with such huge buffs allows you to tank a hit from a giant - In Kirby Air Ride, one of the game modes (City Trial) allows players to collect stat-boosting items. When a player collects health boosters, the length of your life bar will extend, actually taking up more of the screen. It is possible to extend the bar so long that it actually extends off the top of the screen so that you can no longer see the end. - The Torifune Military Academy in BlazBlue evaluates its students' potential in various categories during the nomination and enrollment periods; even afterwards, the student council can reference them to help with their education or (in the case of troublemakers) containment. In the wake of an incident between a trio of "in-name-only" nobles and Makoto, Jin pulls up hers and points out to Tsubaki just how out of their league the nobles stood to be. "A beastkin, huh? Her ars magus aptitude is average, but her physical tests are off the charts. She would have no trouble dealing with a group of two or three people." - NBA superstar Steph Curry had such an absurdly successful real life season in 2015-16 that the developers of the game NBA 2K 16 admitted that they couldn't properly replicate his shooting accuracy without breaking the game engine. - Fire Emblem can only display HP up to a certain level, depending on the game, in the in-battle HP meters. If a character's health goes past that (such as the final boss of Blazing Sword, \|\|the Fire Dragon\|\|), the HP is displayed only as "??" until they've taken enough damage to bring it below the limit. In addition, the HP gauge glows until that point. - The eponymous Superbosses of the Leviathans DLC for Stellaris, have a fleet strength depicted as just a skull. - The story trailer for Apocalypse says this word-for-word \|\|when the Molluscoid Colossus is preparing to fire its planet cracker at Europa VII\|\|. - Pokémon GO will display a wild Pokémon's Combat Power as "???" if it is higher than that of any that the player has. - In Sonic Forces, Tails tries to scan Infinite to determine his powers... only for the results to come back so messed up, he can't make sense of them. - Star Wars: The Old Republic: On Iokath, Lana Beniko notes that the superweapon power levels are off the chart and rising by the second. How she can tell if they're rising then they're already off the scale is anyone's guess, although the central glowy bit is noticibly getting brighter. - The thermometer on the HUD in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is calibrated for normal atmospheric temperatures. In extremely hot regions, like Death Mountain, it is consistently maxed out, and any wooden weapons and shields Link has equipped will catch fire (and so will Link, if he doesn't have adequate protection from Flamebreaker armor or a Fireproof elixir). Likewise, if Link gets frozen solid, the thermometer gets completely encased in ice. Also, opening the map while on Death Mountain has the temperature indication reading a red "Error". - In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, the final boss has functionally infinite health and cant be beaten with force, prompting this exchange between two of your party members: Shift: So that's it? We're just a distraction?! Screw that, I wanna beat \|\|STORM\|\| fair and square! Eddie: I'm not sure if that's even possible. \|\|STORM\|\| is unlike any enemy we've ever seen before. The "HP" scale simply does not apply to it. - Warframe has a set limit on the amount of damage it can display, a point far beyond the health of any enemy in the game. However, certain warframes (with Banshee being the most egregious) can take a powerful critical-based weapon into damage levels so high that the number displays as a negative. (The damage is still happening as normal, of course, it's just that the number display can't handle it.) - Frog Fractions normally displays a numerical amount of fruit that the player has, though the player can find a huge secret stash of it by \|\|going underwater\|\|. After the stash is found, the player's fruit count will be displayed as "Like a billion", which is basically treated as having infinity. - During Chapter 3 of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC, the party delivers a black orbment to Professor Russell so he can figure out what it is. Professor Russell decides to scan it, and the results are catastrophic. At first, the readings are erratic, then Tita reports that the needle is spinning, meaning the maximum reading is being exceeded several times over. And that's before the scanning equipment ends up setting it off, forcing Professor Russell to shut it down when it becomes apparent that it's deactivated every orbment in Zeiss except the scanner. - Mass Effect: Andromeda: The first time Ryder activates a Vault, Peebee, who is elsewhere at the time, calls in to tell Ryder the readings are off the chart. Then she apprehensively adds "really, really off the chart." Turns out Ryder also activated a security system, and everyone has to run for their lives. - In Mega Man Legends, after grabbing the red refractor from the Lake ruins, Roll suddenly calls you up in alarm saying she just picked up a reaverbot signal. Roll: Mega Man! I just picked up a reaverbot signal! It came out of nowhere! It's a big one! The readings are going off the scale! - When Protectors of the Plot Continuum are on a mission, and Canon Defilement readings are off the scale, it is generally a good idea to throw one's Canon Analysis Device away before it goes kablooie. - According to Rational Wiki, irony meters have a habit of exploding when this trope comes into effect. - Chakona Space features the contributor series, Tales of the Folly. This trope happens several times including at least one hanging lampshade. - A rather terrifying nonfiction example could be found in the now sadly defunct blog, "Random Acts of Reality" by a London Ambulance Service EMT. On one occasion he transported a patient whose blood pressure was so high that the monitor couldn't accurately measure it and glitched out. Not surprisingly, the driver had the lights and siren on for that trip to the ER. - The SCP Foundation grades anomalous objects on one of three levels: Safe (objects that are easily contained and if left to their own devices pose little threat to humanity), Euclid (objects that are not provably hostile, but whose limits and the exact nature of their powers are unknown, thus they might be dangerous) and Keter (objects that are extremely and actively dangerous, even under containment, and are often very difficult or even impossible to contain). A rare few SCP objects are so dangerous and/or bizarre that the community has had to make up a new classification beyond Keter: Apollyon (only one canon SCP object has this designation, and it is capable of causing XK-class End of the World Scenarios \|\|and the Foundation has no known way to stop it or even slow it down\|\|). - SCP-3812 is a Reality Warper that cannot be detected by Foundation equipment specifically designed to measure distortions to reality. Unusually for this trope, this isn't because SCP-3812's level of reality distortion is too low or too high to be measured, but because \|\|it isn't distorting it's own reality: it's distorting it's own fictional narrative\|\|. - The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles: Tebow notes that his performance in the Broncos vs. Chiefs game on November 13th, 2011 was so bizarre that his passer rating afterwards was 102.6—a wildly unintuitive result from a game where he only attempted eight passes and only completed two of them. In a life of goofy left-handed football accomplishments, I consider that game to be stranger than anything I'd ever done to that point. I necessitated the sort of lopsided pass-run imbalance that the NFL hadn't seen in over 30 years. I completed only two passes. I somehow won, and I somehow finished with a great passer rating. I played so strangely that numbers lost their meanings.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Over9000
Outside-Context Problem - TV Tropes "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." The Outside Context Problem is, quite simply, a curveball that no one saw coming; more strictly, it is a curve ball that nobody could possibly have seen coming. They may be a mysterious foreigner from the next town over or a continent away, with skills, technology or mystic powers no one heard of, much less imagined. Or they may be a Time Traveler from the future... or the past, an invader from a parallel universe, outer space, or even stranger places. When they arrive, the heroes won't have any defenses in place capable of stopping them, no idea how to defend against their onslaught, and no clue what their end goal might be. It might even be a mysterious object, or just some unexplained supernatural phenomenon. Finding out the answers to the above questions will be the heroes' top priority. With luck, they'll find scattered legends foretelling their arrival and possibly how they were beaten last time. If not, The Professor might theorize all new means to defeat them. One popular method is to summon a hero from the same place or era to battle them, because this villain is so bad that their only hope is that a random Joe from the villain's home will at least have an idea how to stop them. Of course, said villain will likely assimilate better to the environment than such Fish out of Water heroes. If the Outsider is an interloper in an existing conflict, he or she may become a Conflict Killer that forces an Enemy Mine situation if he turns out to be Eviler than Thou. Named for the Outside Context Problem from the Iain M. Banks book Excession (as seen in the quote above). The classic example he gives is a stable, powerful, and wealthy society suddenly facing a hostile invader whose advanced technology and bizarre philosophy are completely alien to them. note : For example, when the Aztecs met the first Spanish explorers, they were so shocked by their 'floating mountains' (ships), steel armor, and horses, that they initially put up no fight as the Conquistadors moved in to take over. By the time they rallied and fought back, many were too ill from foreign diseases like smallpox to put up much of a struggle. Super-Trope to Technologically Advanced Foe, Outside-Genre Foe and Evil Learns of Outside Context. Compare Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, but played dramatically. Cosmic Horror Reveal is a subtrope, where Eldritch Abominations appear with little foreshadowing. Compare also Diabolus ex Nihilo, where such a villain is used to shake things up and then discarded, and The Spook, which might fit in the context but is still a surprise apparition. See How Unscientific! for moments that break the conventions of the story's main genre, which is a major part of these villains. Contrast Generic Doomsday Villain and Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond. Compare/Contrast Genre Refugee. Frequently found in the Alien Invasion genre and can result from an Ass Pull. Often overlaps with Vile Villain, Saccharine Show. ## Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> - American Vampire takes place in a setting featuring vampires of many breeds and bloodlines. And then after a long timeskip in Second Cycle, it introduced an Eldritch Abomination seemingly unrelated to them that can turn humans and even vampires into her puppets. In one hand, the Vassals of the Morning Star (a prominent vampire-hunting organization) is revealed to have been originally created to destroy the Beast millennia ago, but they failed ever since their founder went evil and hid the creature and with the rise of the Carpathian vampires, they have been focused in fighting vampires primarily. The heroes have no way of fighting it conventionally (nukes have proven ineffective as the US nuclear tests were in fact attempts to destroy the Beast) and they are particularly outgunned specially by the time they are facing it as the Beast's minions infiltrated positions of power in the government to freeze the VMS. - In Captain Atom: Armageddon, Captain Atom is this for the Wild Storm Universe. The WildStorm heroes, especially the more powerful ones like Mr. Majestic and The Authority, thought that they had their world pretty much in hand, and that they could handle just about anything that came their way. When Captain Atom showed up and, through no fault of his own, contracted a condition that was going to cause him to destroy the universe, they figured that they could cure him. When that failed, they figured that they could kill him. Cue a very satisfying series of Curb Stomp Battles. - Bane functions this way in Batman: Knightfall. A villain who has been cut off from the outside world for almost his entire life, his existence is at best an urban legend to most Gotham City natives. When he murders six prostitutes and carves images of bats into their flesh, the Gotham police naturally blame Batman. Even after he and his gang launch rockets at Arkham Asylum, enabling the world's most dangerous criminals to escape and wreak havoc on the city, most Gothamites are too preoccupied with trying to stop The Joker, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, and all the rest that they remain ignorant of Bane's ultimate plan for the city: \|\|to permanently cripple Batman, seize control from Gotham's mob bosses, and rule over the city as its "king."\|\| - The Anti-Monitor in Crisis on Infinite Earths was out of context for the entire DC Multiverse. A being that annihilated nearly all the universes and forced the heroes to collapse the five remaining universes into one, forever transforming the DC Universe and everyone in it. His power was so overwhelming even an assemblage of the mightiest beings from all remaining worlds proved little more than a distraction. Even with its shell torn away, its power drained, and its power source dismantled, it took Superman and Superboy (along with some help from Darkseid) to finally finish it off... which in turn triggered a supernova. He was that nasty. - When Daredevil faced Killgrave, the Purple Man, his abilities proved to be this for the legal system, as there's no law that could convict a man for simply asking for favors. - In the DC Rebirth, there's \|\|Dr. Manhattan, who is revealed to be the one who turned the pre- Flashpoint DC Universe into The New 52. Up until this point, the Watchmen universe and the DCU were never even connected.\|\| He's apparently outside of every context. - As Doomsday Clock progresses, it is revealed that the DC Universe itself is a Out Of Context Problem to Dr Manhattan. \|\|No matter what he does to change the timestream for the sake of making the universe more of a Crapsack World, heroes still rise (with Superman usually being one of the first), and while he can adapt and curb-stomp in retaliation, he is still surprised that things like the Lantern Rings and magic can hurt him.\|\| - In the Disney Ducks Comic Universe this happening is what starts some of the franchise' subsets: - Magica De Spell started out as one, being the first character capable of not only matching wits with Scrooge but also using magic (through various gadgets at first, but still magic). Even after she became a recurring character, her abilities and modus operandi are so radically different from anyone else that nobody knows what trick she'll pull next, with her schemes including giving the Beagle Boys overwhelming superpowers (she failed only because they were that stupid and screwed it up), banishing his greed (she pulled it off twice, in two different ways), brainwashing Santa Claus into doing the job for her (she had asked him for the Number One Dime for years before stumbling on a way to straight-up brainwash him), forcing Paperinik to steal the Number One Dime (again, pulled it twice, first by gaslighting him through illusions and making a magically-enforced promise to stop if he gave her the coin and later by discovering his secret identity and blackmailing him into it. His gadgets allow him to just waltz through the Money Bin's defenses, so he can do it at will), hypnotizing Scrooge into exchanging his entire fortune and economic empire for an old slipper, and more. - In the "Donald Versus Saturn" miniseries the problem is Rebo, a full-fledged Galactic Conqueror only held back by the fact he only has two subordinates and none of them can make combat robots to man his fleet. - In Paperinik New Adventures the new problem is the Evronian threat: Paperinik, both in his superhero identity and as Donald, has faced all sorts of opponents, including time travelers, superpowered opponents, magic users (notably he's the only character capable of taking Magica in a fair fight), and even aliens, but an entire species of Planet Looters made even Rebo pale. - Normally the Junior Woodchucks deal with environmental problems, poachers, and Corrupt Corporate Executives. In Threat From the Infinite (whose events are alluded to in Paperinik New Adventures) the enemies are the T'zoook, aliens who came from nowhere and are causing damage to the environment while looking for something, and the entire first half of the series has the JWs trying to figure out what their deal or even their name even is, before the Space Police (that was looking for the Tz'oook to fine them for ruining multiple worlds) reveals it: \|\|they're the survivors of the original Earth civilization, forced to escape on the City Ship when their hyperpolluting civilization caused the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event and surviving thanks to their relativistic travel speeds making time pass slower for them. Now they're back and, after finding Earth fixed itself but has a new dominant species, they are looking for their old cities so they'll be able to use the machines kept there to cause a Societal Collapse and retake the planet in the confusion\|\|. - First Strike: Baron Ironblood has decades of experience with weird super-science, allowing him to be prepared for anything Cybertron throws at him. But both Ironblood and Cybertronians as a whole are completely caught flat-footed by \|\|magic, in the form of it's most powerful wielder.\|\| - Galactus is this for the entire Ultimate universe when he shows up in Cataclysm: The Ultimates' Last Stand. After the events of Age of Ultron, he tears his way into the Ultimate universe where he bumps into his Ultimate counterpart, the Gah Lak Tus swarm, which proceeds to fuse with him, amplifying his hunger. Following a short fight with Captain Marvel, who manages to wound him with a last ditch effort attack, he travels to Earth to consume it and recharge. Once he gets there, there's no fanfare, no warning, nothing. Galactus just drops out of the sky on a normal sunny day and proceeds to blow up New Jersey. The rest of the series centers around the Ultimates scrambling in a desperate attempt to figure out who he is, where he came from, and how they can possibly stop him. - The Ultimates: Even in a world where magic and gods are known to exist, the idea of someone working for the literal Devil is nigh-impossible for the Avengers to swallow. They just think the Ghost Rider is a souped-up Mutant. They are wrong. They are very wrong. - A Matrix comic book story by Neil Gaiman pitted the Machines against aliens and their Living Ship. Unable to defeat the aliens on their own, the Machines were forced to train a human to do it for them, even equipping him with a specially built spaceship called the PL-47. - The opening of Revival shows the US government responding to nonantagonistic undead with a quarantine like an infectious disease. CDC scientists examine the problem but are helpless to address it since it arises from Hindu mysticism. Routine police investigation of a conventional murder somehow leads to attack by a ninja assassin. This all emphasizes how death itself is an Outside Context Problem. - This happens quite frequently to the Runaways, since they are a bunch of kids with very little training: - Early in the first volume, the team encounters a vampire. In the Marvel Universe, vampires are so far outside the expertise of most established heroes as to necessitate the existence of specialist like Blade or Hannibal King, and thus this lone vampire wipes the floor with the Runaways, only dying because he tries to feed on Karolina, whose blood turns out to be solar-charged. - Towards the end of Brian K. Vaughan's run, the team battles the Gibborim, who previously managed to kill all of their parents and their original leader with barely any effort. The only reason the team survives is because the Gibborim are dying after failing to secure a new sacrifice. - During Civil War, the Runaways run afoul of S.H.I.E.L.D., which sends a Brainwashed and Crazy Kree assassin after them, resulting in several of them being gravely injured and sent to a Black Site. - The Runaways inadvertently become a Outside-Context Problem in the "Dead End Kids" arc when they are sent back in time to 1907. With so few other superpowered individuals around, they stick out like a sore thumb and their attempts to secure the parts needed to return to their own time accidentally starts an arms race between two superpowered gangs, resulting in widespread destruction and mayhem. - During Secret Invasion, the team happens to be in the middle of New York City at the very moment that the Skrulls are invading en masse. Xavin, normally the person most likely to seek out a fight, takes one look at the size of the invading force and panics, clocking all of their teammates and trying to carry them as far away from the Skrulls as possible. - In the "Homeschooling" arc, the Runaways find themselves being targeted by the US Military. The opening salvo alone kills Old Lace and leaves Klara injured and scared out of her mind (which is a serious problem because her powers go haywire when she's scared.) In the end, the only thing they're able to do is flee through a hidden tunnel as the military burns their house down. - The Shade's powers explicitly come from a source outside that of "normal" supernatural forces such as magic, worked perfectly well when the Genesis event depowered everyone else, and render him immune to being converted into a Black Lantern. The Flash is lucky their fights were mostly to keep Shade from being bored, and that he's mostly neutral rather than an active villain these days since he can be neither killed nor contained. - Chaos appears randomly in the middle of Metropolis City, uses his ability to induce extreme fear in his opponents to catch the Freedom Fighters off guard completely and \|\|kills Johnny Lightfoot, becoming the only villain to successfully kill a Freedom Fighter\|\|. - Colonel Granite and Operation Starwatch also serve as this, being completely unknown to Mobius par the Freedom Fighters leading an Alien Invasion from Planet Earth, invading Mobius, trouncing the Freedom Fighters with superior firepower, and planning to sell off the conquered Zones to human industrial developers (and rename Mobius "Planet Percy" after his first name). - Superman is this from Lex Luthor's perspective. Before he showed up, he could think of himself as the unchallenged greatest person in the world by ordinary standards, being fabulously rich, famous, brilliant and free to do as he pleased. An existence of superpowered alien from another planet, who foils his plans and becomes far more beloved figure than he ever was, is something he could never have predicted and is shown to be the driving reason behind his hatred of him. - Doomsday showed up out of freaking nowhere to curbstomp most of Earth's heroes before going off to accomplish what no one else dreamed was even possible: kill Superman. - The Ultimates (2015) is a team specifically created to solve Outside Context Problems before they occur. Their first task was to solve the Galactus problem permanently (or as permanently as comic books get), before he devoured another world. Their last mission had them, with Galactus as their benefactor, combatting a multiversal threat on a scale they couldn't even percieve at first. - Watchmen: - Dr. Manhattan. He's the only Super in the world (other "capes" do exist, but they're just people in costumes), and sports godlike powers. World politics are changed forever when he shows up. This leads to moments like him ending the Vietnam War in about a week, and the escalation of the Cold War because the Russians are scared shitless. A noted scientist comments that Manhattan is for all intents and purposes God and that absolute terror in response to that statement is, in fact, the sane response. - \|\|A giant squid monster attacks New York, and the world governments unite to fight this terrible threat. The all-too-human Big Bad created the alien-looking monster as a Batman Gambit to prevent human extinction through nuclear war.\|\| - A minor example in DC Ink's Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed. The Amazons are Artificial Humans created by the gods, so they're immortal and never age. Diana was a clay sculpture the gods turned into a human being, and ages normally. When she starts going through puberty, they have no idea how to handle it. - In one story in the early X-Men comics, both Professor X and Magneto assumed that the Stranger was a mutant, and tried to recruit him for their respective teams. It turned out that he was actually an extremely powerful alien, who did not appreciate it when Magneto tried to hector him into joining the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and he proceeded to curb-stomp the annoying little villains before going home to his own planet. - Terry becomes this in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker to defeat the Joker once and for all. The Joker is so used to dealing with Bruce's Batman (who is a stoic, honor-bound fighter with a strict no-kill policy) that he loses it when Terry mocks him and gives him a vicious "The Reason You Suck" Speech that utterly deconstructs him. Terry also has no problem fighting dirty and revoking the Joker Immunity. - Beast and all his servants from Beauty and the Beast. The setting for the story is a peaceful and normal, French countryside. We then have Beast's castle, where all the humans have been transformed into moving and talking inanimate objects; and there's Beast, who lives up to his name. Because of Beast's appearance, Gaston uses this to rally a mob to kill him. They're mostly foiled because they never expected the castle's furniture to come alive and beat them up. - Frozen: Elsa's powers are leagues above anyone else in the entire film, which is one of many reasons why she is depressed. She's so out there and powerful that the antagonists have no real means of countering her, except to attack her very human side. On the other side of the scale, \|\|Prince Hans\|\| comes completely out of nowhere as a scheming, politically-minded manipulator. In a story about magic and the bond between sisters, no one was expecting the villain to have based their plans on medieval laws of succession. - The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: The DUPLO aliens to the Bricksburgians. None of the heroes' attacks seem to have any effect on the invaders, and they even have the ability to eat lasers, which Metalbeard comments isn't possible. - Spike becomes this in My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) to the Storm King. While he obviously knew about the princesses and the magical powers possessed by unicorns, his soldiers were completely unprepared for someone who can sprout non-magical fire from their mouth. - The Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf movies' villains and conflicts often come so out-of-the-blue that it makes the goats team up with the wolves, something that never happens in the show prior to later seasons. To give some examples: - The Fractured Fairy Tale world of Shrek has largely cartoonish, fairytale-based villains. Then Puss in Boots: The Last Wish gives us \|\|the physical embodiment of Death itself, played so straight it isn't funny—which is exactly the point.\|\| - Wreck-It Ralph: Any character who game hops into another game falls into this. Ralph is completely out of context for the people in Sugar Rush since the characters tend to be cute little anime-style characters or anthropomorphic candy, while he's a giant brute able to shatter jawbreakers with his bare hands, something that is thought to be impossible. Vanellope is quick to take advantage of this. - The Cy-bugs deserve special mention. They're a Horde of Alien Locusts, capable of rapidly reproducing and then devouring everything in sight. In their own game, where they serve as the antagonists, they're kept in check by a Reset Button that kills them all off between games. If one escapes into another game without such a Reset Button, it can quickly grow an unstoppable army. Calhoun, one of the residents of their home game, even considers them more similar to a computer virus in nature rather than an AI. And of course, the world of Sugar Rush happens to be entirely made out of high-calorie food... - Avatar: The Way of Water: The tulkans, a society of Sapient Cetaceans who live on Pandora, once fought brutally amongst themselves for territory. Once the bloodshed grew to be too much, the tulkans came together as a species and decreed that no tulkan would ever kill another living thing again, and that any tulkan who did would be forced out of their society in disgrace. That worked out well for many years...until humans arrived on the planet and started killing the tulkans for their brain matter. The tulkans, genuinely unable to comprehend that a species might go against "the Great Balance" and actually wipe them out, did nothing when the whaling ships arrived. \|\|Except for one of them, who became an outcast for fighting back.\|\| - Common in Batman films: - At the beginning of Batman (1989), the city officials are concerned with Boss Carl Grissom and his gangsters. They're completely unprepared and baffled by the arrival of The Joker, who decapitates the existing criminal underworld and focuses exclusively on pointless mayhem. - In The Dark Knight, Batman is so beyond anything the mob has ever dealt with that they are on the brink of collapse. They reach out to The Joker as a desperate act to get rid of Batman and their other enemies. To say that this backfired would be an understatement, as Joker turns out to be another Outside Context Problem. Batman, the cops, and organized crime all have their own brand of rational goals; nobody was prepared to deal with a mastermind who was exclusively in it For the Evulz. - In The Dark Knight Rises, the Gotham police dismiss Bane as just another gangster, but he turns out to be the commander of a revolutionary army that invades and occupies Gotham, which becomes a national concern. - Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey has the duo being killed by evil robotic duplicates of themselves, sent back in time by Chuck De Nomolos to kill them so he can take over the future world. But in turn, they didn't count on the real B&T escaping the afterlife with the help of the Grim Reaper, and then constructing good robotic versions of themselves (with assistance from a pair of Martian scientists) to destroy the Evil Robot B&T. De Nomolos himself intervenes shortly thereafter, but is foiled thanks to B&T's ingenious use of Retroactive Preparation — and ultimately helps to cultivate the utopia he wanted to eliminate. (Rufus also reveals his involvement shortly thereafter; he'd been in disguise at the the woman in charge of the Battle of the Bands who'd let them in the event to start, having escaped De Nomolos at the start of the film.) - Casper: When the hero is a ghost and the primary antagonists are mortals who didn't even believe in ghosts at the beginning of the movie, it puts Casper firmly in this trope. - Cowboys & Aliens. The Alien Invasion plot is enough of an outside-context problem in contemporary settings where there's a good chance of characters being a little more savvy, but a bunch of 19th-Century cowboys obviously won't have any idea what they're really up against. Indeed, the heroes refer to the invaders as "demons" in the film, because they actually have a concept of those. - DC Extended Universe: - The Kryptonians in Man of Steel are a race of indestructible, super-strong Human Aliens capable of tearing humans apart with their bare hands and impervious to any weapons, that absolutely no one in the military has any idea to fight against, let alone defeat. It's only with the help of another member of their race that they have a chance. - Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is all about how humanity reacts to the events of the previous movie and the unnerving knowledge of this trope hanging above their heads. The government fears Superman acting on his own because of his immense power and their inability to stop him and Batman is outright plotting to bring him down because of the danger he represents. Alfred: Everything's changed. Men fall from the sky. The Gods hurl thunderbolts. Innocents die. That's how it starts — the fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness, that turns good men cruel . - Wonder Woman (2017) is chronologically the first example of this trope with the titular Amazon warrior making her presence known during World War I, long before the Kryptonians' arrival in Man of Steel. The moment Wonder Woman steps into the battlefield, the Germans are unable to stop her advance, as she is able to liberate a town in matter of minutes what took a year for Allied soldiers to achieve. The only things capable of slowing her down are \|\|General Ludendorff on strength-enhanced drugs and her half-brother Ares, the God of War, is the only one capable of outright matching her\|\|. \|\|Ares himself\|\| qualifies as this too, since Steve instantly recognizes him as this since there is nothing his crew can do against him, leaving Diana to handle \|\|a god\|\| herself. - The Equalizer: Protagonist Robert McCall is one to The Mafiya that makes up the primary antagonists in the film, especially because Evil Cannot Comprehend Good is in full effect. They're all under the impression that he's an assassin who has been hired by a rival crime family to take them out. However, he's actually a retired CIA superspy who is targeting them because they brutalized and nearly killed a young Hooker with a Heart of Gold under their employ with whom Robert was good friends. - Newt Scamander is an outside-context hero in the Fantastic Beasts films: his affinity with magical beasts, many of which have scantly-documented abilities, gives him a curveball to use against wizards with more traditional powers. Using this method, he is able to capture Gellert Grindlewald, the most dangerous wizard alive, single-handedly. - The Gods Must Be Crazy is built on this, from the discarded Coke bottle to Xi's response to white society. - Often an issue in Godzilla films. Largely due to the monsters being so incomprehensibly huge, but also due to several of them having Bizarre Alien Biology. Militaries and conventional weaponry (and, on occasion, even NUCLEAR weaponry and alien technology) are often proven useless. Japanese giant monsters are usually only killed by either an incredibly advanced weapon (example: the Oxygen Destroyer) or by another monster (usually Godzilla himself). - In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), even in a world stated to be populated by colossal beast gods like Godzilla, King Ghidorah turns out to be the odd one out. While all the other Titans, although destructive, are shown to be a natural part of the planet's ecosystem, most normally avoid humans, and their radioactivity even restores their destruction by promoting ancient plant growth, Ghidorah actively seeks to devastate the world for his own purposes. He also tanks a weapon said to kill all life within two miles, and cripples Godzilla, without a scratch, which is seen as unprecedented, and his energy is enough to awaken and agitate Titans globally. This is because \|\|he's actually an alien that arrived from outer space in prehistoric times and now wants to aggressively terraform the Earth to better suit his biology\|\|, something which the human ecoterrorists who awakened him to help restore the planet's biosphere did not see coming. - From the same universe, Kong: Skull Island. After Kong downs an entire wing of military helicopters, Shea Whigham's oddball character calmly acknowledges that "There was no precedent. We did the best we could." - 2016's Shin Godzilla does a very apt job of demonstrating that in a realistic setting, Godzilla himself- or any Kaiju really- is the devastating embodiment of this trope. At first, no one even believes that something like Godzilla could exist, to the point that even the experts brought in by the Prime Minister as consultants refuse to make concrete statements for fear of damaging their reputations. When Godzilla first makes landfall, \|\|the government is paralyzed by indescision, unsure as to what department this falls under, or whether they can legally use the Self-Defense forces against what is essentially an animal. Between this and their refusal to endanger bystanders with Self-Defense force weaponry, they don't even get a single shot at Godzilla before he causes massive casualties and vanishes into the ocean.\|\| When he shows up the next time, it's even worse. Ultimately it takes \|\|a complete government overhaul, aid from foreign powers, a crack team of rebellious international scientists, and the threat of a nuke hanging over their heads plus prep time and access to Godzilla's inert body for a workable plan to be put into effect- and even then it's explicitly a crapshoot.\|\| - In the Mouth of Madness has this for both the protagonist and the authorities in general, who are helpless in the face of \|\|reality itself falling apart.\|\| - A Kid in King Arthur's Court: Calvin is an everyday '90s kid teleported to the 6th century by the spirit of Merlin to help King Arthur. Although he's far from physically impressive and doesn't have any special powers, what keeps him ahead of Lord Belasco is his knowledge of future technology, which is created by a friendly blacksmith, along with his knowledge of King Arthur's story. - Played with in Last Action Hero, in which the villain attempts to become this trope by escaping Jack Slater's world of Action Tropes for our own: one where the bad guys can actually win. For him, it's a mind-blowing concept and opportunity. - In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Treebeard states that the danger of enraging the ents should not be an Outside Context Problem to an istari a.k.a. a wizard, for "a wizard should know better!" - Multiple in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: - By the end of the The Matrix, Neo evolves into a Matrix-warping super being like none have seen before. He can fight off and even kill an agent with ease, something that is thought to be impossible. Once he's finished with Agent Smith, the other two agents can only run. In the sequels, the agents fare better (and \|\|it's revealed Neo is not the first of his kind\|\|), but they're still completely outmatched by Neo. Another problem is \|\|Agent Smith surviving their final encounter from the first movie and becoming a virus that infects almost everyone in the Matrix by the third. The machines barter with Neo to stop the threat.\|\| - Monster Hunter (2020) has a team of United States Army Rangers sent to the New World. They quickly learn that the United States Military doesn't exactly have weapons capable of damaging creatures the size of the Chrysler Building, nor does military training prepare you to handle a Giant Spider swarm. The lone survivor of the squad ends up having to start more or less from scratch to deal with these threats, by learning how the natives fight them. \|\|When one of the monsters gets into our world at the end, it confirms further that our world's military firepower doesn't come close to handling them.\|\| - Imhotep in The Mummy (1999). He was an Ancient Egyptian priest who was mummified alive and cursed. The result of this curse is that, when he comes back, he's practically invincible and no one except for the Medjai really know how to deal with him — and the only way they had to deal with him on hand was to simply prevent him from being released in the first place. - Col. George Taylor from Planet of the Apes (1968). Despite being captive, enslaved, and thought to be mute, Taylor is out of context to the apes once they realize that he can write, is quite intelligent, and eventually talk once his throat is healed. All the other humans in the film are kept as pets who can't talk or think intelligently. - This is the basic setup of the first two Predator movies. Take a relatively generic action film premise, such as a jungle commando mission or an inner-city gang war, with all the regular tropes and plots in play... and then drop an intergalactic alien trophy-hunter into the mix. It gets back with a rage in Prey (2022), which similar to the above mentioned Cowboys & Aliens puts extraterrestrials against people who don't even understand the concept, namely the Predator hunting Native Americans and a French expedition in the 18th century. - The creatures in A Quiet Place are described in newspaper clippings we see as having mostly overwhelmed the world's militaries due to their nearly impenetrable armor, speed, agility and incredibly sensitive hearing. - RoboCop (1987): After Murphy is rebuilt into a cyborg, he spends most of the film relentlessly hunting and taking down criminals in Old Detroit. RoboCop is so beyond anything they have ever experienced that they're completely helpless before him and he takes down the drug lords who murdered him without taking any damage. A newscaster in the movie compared it to a comic book hero coming to life. It takes the criminals gaining access to military weapons and help from the big number two at OCP just to slow RoboCop down. - Invoked in the 2002 live-action Scooby-Doo film; as Fred observes, Mystery Inc.'s "area of expertise is nutjobs in Halloween costumes", \|\|and now they're the only hope to save mankind from a literal demon apocalypse\|\|. - A lot of the Star Trek films rely on this sort of thing. Relatively justified, since the protagonists are explorers, but in some cases, there are problems even they can't really begin to deal with: - Star Trek: The Motion Picture begins with a massive alien probe that's disintegrating everything in it's path heading straight for Earth. Admiral Kirk takes the refitted USS Enterprise out to investigate it. Turns out \|\|it was an ancient Earth space probe that had encountered a race of machines and grown into a powerful entity. Some expanded universe material implies it's connected to the Borg in some fashion.\|\| - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan has the titular villain. He seemingly comes out of nowhere to torment Admiral Kirk (over something Kirk had no part in; from Kirk's POV, Khan is just some guy he ran into 20 years ago and hadn't thought about since then) by wrecking his ship and stealing the terraformation device "Project: Genesis". - Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: Another alien probe wreaks havoc again, only this time it's broadcasting frequencies that are actually whale song. Kirk and company (flying in their stolen Klingon Bird-of-Prey with the Back from the Dead Spock) are outside the probe's area of effect (which has crippled every ship in it's path), and use the slingshot-around-the-sun method of time travel to go to 1980s Earth and retrieve some humpback whales (since by their time the species has gone extinct). Hilarity Ensues as the crew struggle with 1980s society. - In Star Trek Into Darkness, the USS Vengeance is this from Kirk's perspective. Bad enough that The Dreaded Dreadnought is bigger and more powerful than the Enterprise, leading Kirk to decide that a Hyperspeed Escape is the best option, but he simply does not figure on the Vengeance being able to catch up with them at warp, leading to an epic Curb-Stomp Battle. If not for \|\|Scotty sabotaging her from the inside\|\|, the Enterprise would've been destroyed. - Star Trek Beyond has the Swarm of Mecha-Mooks that Krall has at his disposal. They're too numerous for phasers to destroy many of them, they're too small and nimble for torpedoes to lock onto them, and they have tech that lets them pass straight through shields. They behave in much the same way as piranhas in movies do, and can destroy a starship in minutes. - Star Wars: - Invoked by Kyle Reese during his interrogation by the LAPD in The Terminator, when he explains frantically and vainly that the title character is unlike any threat they are familiar with: Kyle: You still don't get it, do you? He'll find her! That's what he does! THAT'S ALL HE DOES! You can't stop him! He'll wade through you, reach down her throat, and pull her fuckin' heart out! - Terminator: Dark Fate: \|\|Carl serves as this to the Rev-9; In the final battle, he holds his own with nothing but a blunt weapon and a few well-timed tackles. Indeed, whenever the Rev-9 is up against Carl, it's on the back foot, repeatedly trying to slash and stab Carl with its blades to zero effect. By the time it figures out it has to match Carl with brute strength, it can only do this once before Carl and Grace double-team it. A T-800 from a future that no longer exists is something the Rev-9 was simply never designed or programmed to deal with, and it's completely at a loss over how to efficiently neutralize this opponent.\|\| - Violent Night: The villains of the film are a gang of mercenaries who take a wealthy family hostage on Christmas Eve to steal the immense fortune in the vault below their house. They are well armed and well prepared for every eventuality. Except for the fact that Santa Claus is real, he was in the house when they took control, he can hold his own in a fight \|\|due to being a former Viking warrior\|\|, and he is not happy that they are threatening the sweet little girl of the family. - Willy's Wonderland: The murderous animatronics are quite deadly and have been able to prey upon the backwater town for years. When The Janitor gets trapped in the building with them, they attempt to make him yet another in a long line of their victims in a typical slasher movie style. It goes awry when he begins to effortlessly demolish them one by one. By Author: - David Eddings: - The Malloreon lists off every individual who is required to take part in the final confrontation of the Prophecies, as recorded by ancient oracles. And then the Big Bad starts conjuring up demons and making pacts with the King of Hell. This throws all sides for a loop — to the point that the heroes theorize this is why Beldin, one of the most powerful mages in the world and someone not in any of the prophecies, is tagging along with their group: because the Prophecies insist on keeping their battle equal, as anything else would render the results invalid (and wipe out all existence). - Early in The Hidden City, the bad guys get really desperate and summon an Eldritch Abomination. Of all the good guys' side, only Aphrael and the Bhelliom had any idea what Klæl even was at that point. This leads to a scene where the armies of the Church Knights, who have no idea this has happened, coming across what - to them - appears to be the King of Hell, who summons armies of alien warriors, and losing thirty thousand men, plus twenty thousand wounded, in a comparatively brief engagement. By Work: - Jake Epping aka George Amberson is this to the FBI in Stephen King's 11/22/63. They believe him to be a spy, but cannot explain his existence or seemingly impossible knowledge of events, since he is actually a time traveler from the future. Jake even has his own Outside Context Problem in the form of the Yellow Card Man. - In 1632, a whole West Virginia town is transported to that year in Thuringia during the 30 Years War. The resources of a hardscrabble coal mining town make it an immediate badass player in the war filled countryside. Imagine buckets of napalm fired from a trebuchet to break a castle siege and you get the idea. Also almost everyone in town, man and woman alike, is a hunter and pretty gun savvy. Automatic weapons and long range rifles with telescopic sights vs. wheel lock pistols is not much of a contest. - Agatha H. and the Airship City takes place in a Steampunk world. At some point prior to the start of the book, something started destroying towns by killing the local Sparks without ever being seen, dropping giant machines from the sky with pinpoint precision, and zombifying the inhabitants of every town it struck. When it was mostly known by rumor it was thought to probably just be another Spark, but it killed all of the people that it could have possibly been and got named the Other. It is heavily implied that the Hive Engines note : Spherical machines the size of a small house, capable of producing endless quantities of slaver wasps. Wasps zombify and/or mind control anyone with an accessible windpipe. were dropped from orbit, onto a world which has abundant airships but (at this point) no heavier-than-air flight or space capability. note : By the time Agatha reaches adulthood, it has both, but only on a small scale - Gil's flyer is the first known heavier-than-air flying machine, and Professor Guylian Consolmagno's expedition to Skifander was probably a space-capable airship traveling to Mars and back. How would an airship work in the vaccuum of space? Good question! Wild Mass Guessing suggests 'because space is full of aether'. - Rob of An Outcast in Another World, to some degree. He's from another world, his existence was entirely unexpected, and he brings new ideas and a new perspective. \|\|To a larger degree, The Blight are Eldritch Abominations that Elatra is unequipped to deal with\|\|. - Like the Disney film, most literary versions of Beauty and the Beast use this trope. It starts by following the realistic fortunes of a merchant and his children who lose their wealth and become peasants, with no hint that magic even exists in their world. Then the father stumbles across the Beast's castle... - The human George Campbell in "The Challenge from Beyond" (a Round Robin short story by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard among others), to the worm-creatures of Yekub. \|\|He's initially a victim-protagonist who falls to a trap that swaps his mind with that of an alien from another galaxy, but once there (and once Howard gets to write him), he combines the alien brain's knowledge and a human's disregard for the limitations of local culture to pretty much immediately become God-Emperor.\|\| The fact that he used to be a boring geology professor only makes him more dangerous, as he has nothing to lose or miss about his former life. - Codex Alera is a High Fantasy setting involving the realm of Alera, a Roman-esque society where everyone has Elemental Powers and much of the drama comes from warfare with rebellious lords or monstrous humanoid or Wolf Man invaders. The majority of enemies, while brutal and vicious, are still at roughly a medieval technology level... and then the Vord arrive. The Vord are a swarm of insectlike alien monsters intent on annihilating all life on the planet, have mutable forms and are terrifyingly intelligent, and are such a completely out-of-context opponent that the Alerans fail to grasp just how deadly the threat is for years after their initial (extremely bloody) skirmishes with the invaders, and the entire kingdom is virtually overrun in under a year once the Vord attack in force. - As mentioned, the Trope Namer is from The Culture series; the Excession. And when a civilization like the Culture considers something "Outside Context", things are about to get hairy... - The Culture is itself an Outside Context Problem for almost every other civilisation in the galaxy, being so technologically advanced that as of Excession, when OCPs are first discussed, they could easily "Sublime" and Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, but have chosen not to. - Domina: - The titular city was a crime-ridden island where gangs used Bio-Augmentation to turn themselves into monsters and kill each other. It was easily one of the most dangerous cities on the planet (it's mentioned that foreign spies rarely survive more than a week), but there were clear political lines and people generally understood what was going on. Then the Composer showed up with super-powered zombies and decided to start a Zombie Apocalypse For the Evulz. It takes a significant amount of time to get the gangs to stop killing each other long enough to fight the real enemy; one gang even continues a civil war while they're under attack by zombies. It's eventually revealed that the Composer \|\|is a sociopathic immortal from a far distant future, let loose like a wild dog as part of an excuse to give powers to the entire city\|\|. - Speaking of the Composer, nobody expected Silk to show up. \|\|Not only is she also an immortal from the future, but the Composer is her clone. Silk refers to her as her sister. When she arrived to retrieve the Composer, hundreds of people immediately attacked her. She ignored them and teleported straight to the people who could give her what she wanted\|\|. - And then there are the para, who surprised even Silk. \|\|They were aliens heading to Earth at light speed; in the original timeline, they arrived some time around 2200, so Silk was working under the assumption that it would be the same this time. But the same process that sent her back in time scattered a few artifacts across the universe, and the para stumbled across an FTL drive that they were able to jury-rig into a tow boat, allowing them to arrive in Sol two hundred years ahead of schedule\|\|. - The Dresden Files: - The appropriately named Outsiders, who come from outside reality and do not play by the normal rules that govern supernatural beings. Particularly \|\|Nemesis, an entity that can infect people's minds and warp their personalities to sway them to the Outsiders' cause. It can alter the fundamental mental nature of the beings it infects, such as removing the Cannot Tell a Lie restrictions that normally bind the fae, something that everyone believes to be impossible.\|\| - \|\|Ethniu the Last Titan\|\| from Peace Talks. Aside from the fact that no one seemed to know she still existed, she's so powerful that \|\|she smacks Mab through several walls (in one blow, for clarity's sake)\|\|. - Then there's the Oblivion War. A side story reveals that Thomas Raith is a Venatori, a secret player in a war that's been kept hidden from even the White Council, for very good reason: The Old Ones, the creatures the Venatori are trying to keep in check grow more powerful the more they're scrutinized, which means exposing them to any of the other players in the supernatural world would have the same effect as dropping a match on a puddle of gasoline. - Eurico the Presbyter has the Umayyad Caliphate for the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain. Up until that point, they only had been at war with the Franks in the north, who were linguistically and culturally closer to them. They never really expected an highly organized and massive invasion from the South by an enemy with such a different culture. It doesn't help that the kingdom was also highly disorganized, fragile, and unprepared for such an invasion. - Humans in the Faeries of Dreamdark series. When the Djinni sealed away the demons, they enchanted the seals on the demon bottles so that no creature, force, or sapient they had created could open them. But since the Djinni did not create the humans (and have no idea where the hell they did come from), they are capable of releasing the sealed demons. - The Expanse series: The protomolecule falls into the middle of an increasingly tense standoff between Earth, Mars, and the Belt, and its presence just makes everything worse. Everyone is scrambling to get control of it, but very few people have even the remotest idea of what it is or how it works, and nobody understands its actual purpose. \|\|It gets worse when humanity thinks they have the protomolecule figured out, as it opens a Portal Network across the galaxy to numerous inhabited worlds... all of which are abandoned by the Precursors. Then they hit another outside context problem when the entities that killed said precursors start getting upset that humans are intruding on their realm....\|\| Chrisjen Avasaral: I have a file with 900 pages of analysis and contingency plans for war with Mars, including 14 different scenarios about what to do if they develop an unexpected new technology. My file for what to do if an advanced alien species comes calling? It's three pages long, and it begins with "Step one: find God." - And then there's another outside-context problem. \|\|In Persepolis Rising, the Sol system and her colonies have been trying to repair all the damage done to Earth, worrying about precedents and politics and the like. Then Laconia, which has been silent for three decades, mentions that they're returning to the scene. Everyone expects that things have gone poorly for them and are doing a diplomatic mission to ask for help. Instead, the Heart of the Tempest comes through, instantly vapourises a cruiser with a directed magnetic beam that nobody's seen before, destroys the Slow Zone defences, then proceeds to conquer the rest of humanity single-handedly.\|\| - Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series: - "The Mule": The titular antagonist acts as a Spanner in the Works to the Seldon Plan, which is supposed to anticipate every possible major event in the next 1,000 years, because he is a Mutant with Emotion Control powers. He can forcibly and permanently alter the behaviour of individuals and large groups, destroying a basic premise of Psychohistory. However, \|\|Hari Seldon anticipated that something was bound to happen to disrupt his thousand-year plan, so he put together a secret team to make sure the unexpected could be accounted for, and "Part 2" is the story of the protagonists trying to warn the secret team (Second Foundation) before the Mule can find them.\|\| - Foundation and Earth: By the climax, Golan Trevize comes to the conclusion that this trope is the main reason why he \|\|chose Gaia over the Second Foundation. Psychohistory and the Second Foundation's means of manipulation and planning are based on human behaviour (the Mule thought like a human, he just had an ability most others do not have), leaving them open for problems if faced with truly alien ways of thinking\|\|. - In Gulliver's Travels the title character is a fairly normal human, but because the Lilliputians are only about six inches tall he becomes an One-Man Army (or more accurately a Navy) for them. The reverse goes for Brobdingnag, who treat Gulliver like a circus attraction. Taken to a new level in Houyhnhnm-Land, where the Houyhnhnms had never encountered an intelligent Yahoo before. - The Heroes of Olympus: In The Mark of Athena, Percy Jackson and his friends are attacked by his half-brother Chrysaor, son of Poseidon and Medusa. Normally, when they face a new supernatural being, the well-read Annabeth Chase gives exposition. However, since there are no myths about Chrysaor other than his birth and the fact he fathered Geryon, Annabeth has no idea about his powers and weaknesses, which makes him very dangerous as he easily bests Percy in a fight. - The Great Evil from Humanx Commonwealth, is so far out of context that it turns out to be \|\|from another universe entirely\|\|. In fact \|\|it's revealed that its nature as an outside-context villain is the whole reason it's dangerous in the first place; in its own universe it was a harmless and benevolent force but due to the physics of the HC universe being different from its birthplace, its powers became destructive. Flinx ends up "defeating" it by dropping it back into its own realm, causing it to instantly become friendly again.\|\| - Similar to Superman, John Carter from John Carter of Mars is an ordinary human soldier born with no super powers. He ends up one of the strongest people on Mars because of that planet's lower gravity, much like how Superman gains his ability from the Earth's yellow sun. - Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. While other races have long history of heroic deeds (and a long history in general), hobbits are the youngest folk in Middle Earth, and have never achieved anything noteworthy (although centuries of peaceful existence in a world as violent and dangerous as theirs is arguably an achievement in itself). They don't travel, so they are practically unheard-of on the other side of the Misty Mountains. The only one viewing them as potential heroes is Gandalf (and later Saruman, who noticed the other wizard's fondness of them). Sauron probably didn't even know that hobbits existed until he got info on the One Ring's location from Gollum — and it just so happens that they exhibit extraordinary resistance to its corrupting power, in marked contrast to every other race in Middle Earth. Frodo even uses his status as Outside Context Hero on the Rivendell Council. - In The Night Angel Trilogy, the invasion of Khalidor from the north, starting from the second book but the seeds of which were being planted as early as the beginning of the first. A powerful, magic-using, sadistic empire that had supposedly been held off by the defenses in the North for so long that everyone in Cenaria had ceased to consider them anything other than a distant potential threat. However, because Khalidor has been considered a non-entity in current affairs, no one is vigilant against the steady infiltration and manipulation of events in Cenaria, so that, by the time the invasion proper begins, there's effectively no defense. The Sa'Kage, the secret underground group that runs the city's criminal empire, is likewise caught flat-footed by the fact that Khalidor considers them a pest to be completely extinguished, not a necessary evil to be tolerated as they had for centuries. - Inverted in Out of the Dark, which seems like a typical Alien Invasion novel. Then \|\|Dracula gets pissed and wipes out the invaders\|\|. - Safehold: Merlin Athrawes. In a world deliberately engineered to be stuck in Medieval Stasis, he's an advanced cyborg with superhuman personal abilities, a secret cave full of futuristic technological goodies, and a mission to break that medieval stasis. - Seveneves: "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." - In the Shadowleague books, Lord Blade is this for the people of Callisoria, and possibly even his fellow Loremasters. - In the Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not stories "The Sign of Two" and "Curtain Call", this Trope is a good description of the reason Holmes fails to solve these cases; Holmess logical, scientific mind means that he literally cannot comprehend the idea that Jekyll and Hyde could be the same man in "The Sign of Two", and "Curtain Call" would only make sense to him if he accepted the notion that his long-time friend Doctor Mabuse is actually an immortal agent of Satan. - George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has this crop up as part of the "it doesn't matter how clever you are, you're going to get spannered" discourse. And, these are, naturally, the biggest, baddest spanners of all: - The Seven Kingdoms are ripping themselves apart in civil war, blissfully unaware that the demonic Others are amassing their army of the undead just north of the Wall. Only the Night's Watch has taken any (tottering) steps to actively fight them, and they are woefully outnumbered. Worse, much of the shakey knowledge they used to have about the Others has been lost. Even the current Watch took some convincing that what they are facing aren't just myths, and is having trouble coming to terms with the fact they're not. The only authority figure in the Seven Kingdoms who takes the threat seriously is \|\|Stannis Baratheon\|\|. - Westeros had a long and storied history of intrigue and conquest long before Aegon the Conqueror and his two sisters flew in with a dragon apiece and curb-stomped five of the seven native kingdoms in quick succession, forcing a sixth to surrender rather than be conquered by force. But, how they did it and what they decided to make of the kingdoms after doing so was on a scale far closer to the larger than life myths of the Dawn Age than, you know, bog standard invasion and politics. The trope is best expressed by Harrenhal, a massive and impregnable castle that was nonetheless defenseless against dragonfire. - Dragons coming back from apparent extinction took the Free Cities of Essos (and the not-so-free cities of Slaver's Bay) a little by surprise. But, that was nothing compared to Daenerys Targaryen living up to the stubbornness of her Valyrian blood. And, the fire. - Heck, this is pretty much the story of the Valyrian Freehold in a nutshell: get dragons, rise pretty much from nothing, take over almost half a freaking super-continent, change cultures at will... go so hugely and unexpectedly boom that the various physical, political, and social craters wind up smoking and causing various brands of fallout for almost 500 years of chaos. Westeros got the lite version; Essos is still reeling from the full-fat, cane sugar, fully caffeinated original when Daenerys rocks up as... an unpleasantly nostalgic aftershock. - The eastern religion of R'hllor was virtually unknown in Westeros at the start of the series, yet evangelical inroads made by the clergy have allowed them to quickly shift the balance of power in the Seven Kingdoms. Also, unlike the two dominant religions of Westeros, the followers of R'hllor are capable of using real magic with some requiring a great sacrifice. That this is suspiciously close to the Targaryen motto of "Fire and Blood" and the old myths and legends surrounding the rise and dramatic fall of Valyrian magic has not escaped readers... and, links back to the above examples, too. Magic is as full of nasty outside-context pitfalls as it is nigh-unimaginable (and highly risky) opportunities. Or just outright bloody chaos. - The less magical, more mundane, and usually more subtle version also crops up: paradigm shifting — for when systems get suddenly changes so much, the old version pretty much dies, despite keeping some previous ideas alive. Major power-players like Petyr Baelish, Varys, and Maester Pycelle, as well as even more minor ones like Bronn, Qyburn, and Thoros of Myr to historical leverage points like Ser Duncan the Tall, the Great Spring Sickness, or the formation of the city-state of Braavos all manage to take the various established powers by surprise thanks to flying in under the collective radar to engineer, take part in, or spark paradigm shifts almost nobody could predict until after the once-taken-for-granted sociopolitical landscape is yanked from under them. - Euron Greyjoy enters the scene in the third book, and seems to come from an entirely different genre, bringing elements of high fantasy and Lovecraftian horror into the low fantasy world of Westeros. Few people in Westeros even know who he is beyond his role in the Greyjoy Rebellion, but when he returns with a ship full of Valyrian artifacts and deformed mutes, he begins to establish himself as the biggest threat to Westeros save the Others themselves. Not to mention, while most human villains desire wealth, power, or are simple sadists, Euron seems to want something much more: \|\|the end of the world.\|\| - This is the central concept behind Area X in The Southern Reach Trilogy. Everything about it is just so utterly alien to human science that it's implied we aren't even capable of comprehending what it is, how it works, who/what caused it and why. - Discussed in the StarCraft novelization Liberty's Crusade. Arcturus Mengsk describes the twin Alien Invasions of the zerg and protoss in a chess context (while playing a game with viewpoint character Michael Liberty) as being like a green army suddenly invading the chessboard midgame and attacking both white and black. - Star Wars Legends: - The Yuuzhan Vong in the novel series New Jedi Order. They hail from outside the galaxy far far away and have a truly alien culture, where pain is a glorified state of living and killing is a sacrifice to their gods, which put them at extreme odds with all the other inhabitants of their galaxy and guaranteed a war as soon as they arrived. And they used completely unique organic-based technology. If that wasn't enough, they existed completely outside the Force and were completely immune to it. - A duology of books by Joe Schreiber ( Death Troopers and its prequel Star Wars: Red Harvest) both revolve around Zombie Apocalypses happening in the Galaxy Far, Far Away. The results are bloody, gory, and nobody who tries to exploit them, Imperial nor Sith, gets to benefit at all. - The Stormlight Archive: The plot of the series is that the Voidbringers, ancient demons from fairytales, are returning to the world to finally defeat humanity after being driven off countless times before. The problem is, the last time they were driven off was four and a half thousand years ago. Not only has that time faded into myth so much that most people don't believe the Voidbringers existed in the first place, but at the Last Desolation the Heralds of the Almighty abandoned their oaths and told humanity that they had finally won for good. That means that the few people who do believe the Voidbringers existed also believe they're never coming back. Very, very few people recognize the signs and know what to expect. And a number of those are operating under the belief that because the return of human magic users is a harbinger of the return of the Voidbringers, killing off said magic users will prevent the Voidbringers from coming back. - This is increasingly becoming a theme of the series as a whole. As the story progresses we discover that nobody really knows what's going on or how any of the magic they rely on really works, and more and more powerful characters are getting blindsided by unforeseeable twists (in the case of \|\|Odium\|\|, quite literally unforeseeable). - There Was No Secret Evil Fighting Organization is set on an Earth where superpowers are not tied to a purpose; no evil threats, no history of superpowered beings, nothing. One minute Sago was a Ridiculously Average Guy, and the next he somehow knew he had telekinesis. He waited for ten years for someone, anyone, who understood what was happening to show up, but no-one ever did. Then he snapped and started doing his utmost to make Earth magical, driven by a furious obsession that (luckily for him and everyone else) manifested itself in a semi-positive way. There's an Alternate Reality Episode depicting a villainous Sago, who humanity cannot stop from desecrating the solar system. - Villains Don't Date Heroes!: At the start, Night Terror is prepared to fight basically anything on Earth; she states at one point that she, personally, is the strongest military on Earth. Then superhuman alien Fialux shows up, who is stronger, faster, and tougher than even Night Terror's greatest weapons can handle. - Warhammer 40,000: In the stories about Ciaphas Cain, the Necrons are presented as even more ancient, mysterious and deadly than the other enemy groups. In a galaxy where fighting invincible armies of inhuman monstrosities is routine, people still tend to be clueless and helpless against the Necrons, both because most have never heard of them and because they're so exceedingly deadly and able to do things like teleport at will. Humans often inadvertently build cities and bases on Necron tombs, heightening the terror when they rise from their slumber and kill everything on the planet. Even after Cain has encountered them, about all he can draw from his experiences is an attitude in the lines of "Even if I was a real hero, I'd still run away from them." They even surprise and Curb Stomp the armies of Chaos the same way on one occasion. - The War of the Worlds (1898): This trope works in both directions. The humans had no idea about the alien invaders and \|\|the alien invaders had no idea about human diseases\|\|. - The Worldwar series involves a reptilian alien species interrupting World War II by invading the planet in anticipation of a later colonization fleet, forcing the democratic and totalitarian regimes that were previously at each others' throats to work together against the aliens. Ironically, this goes both ways — the Race had scouted out "Tosev 3" some eight hundred years ago and were unimpressed by their probes' images of scruffy knights in crappy armor, and had no idea a species could go from that to radio, planes and atom bombs in a matter of mere centuries. Despite being advanced enough to travel between worlds on Sleeper Starships, the aliens' actual military consists of jet fighters, tanks and helicopters that are the equivalent of our modern armed forces, so while they have the advantage over the armies of World War II, it isn't enough of an advantage. - The characters of World War Z repeatedly lampshade that nobody even believed in zombies, let alone knew anything about how to defeat them. note : Hilariously not the case in Real Life: The Military does plan for things like zombie outbreaks specifically as thought exercises so they'll be ready for Outside Context Emergencies. - Additionally, Iran gets one in the form of Pakistan. Iran considered itself (and, early on, genuinely was) safe and secure, with abundant natural resources, highly mountainous terrain that was extremely unforgiving to zombies, and cities located far away from one another that could be easily isolated if one of them were to be overrun. Unfortunately, Iran's attempts to stop the flow of refugees from neighboring Pakistan — including blowing bridges at the border — enraged Pakistan's government and triggered a nuclear war that destroyed both countries. The man being interviewed describes how, unlike longtime rivals and nuclear powers India and Pakistan, the lack of historic enmity between Iran and Pakistan and the relative infancy of Iran's nuclear weapons program meant that the two countries had never developed the mechanisms and diplomatic channels to prevent war between them. - Worm and its sequel Ward: - The Endbringers in are massive, unstoppable monstrosities that regularly obliterate major population centers. Their origins and motivations are completely unknown \|\|though the characters theorize that someone is creating them\|\|. The entire Hero/Villain dynamic was shaped specifically with the Endbringers in mind once they showed up. They're powerful enough to force cooperation and an unwritten code of conduct between the two sides. - In Worm, \|\|the source of the powers themselves, the Entities. They are sapient, planet-sized, multidimensional, hive mind, alien beings that use portions of themselves ("Shards") to empower "lesser" beings via trigger events in order to gather data in an attempt to find a solution to Entropy. They reproduce by learning enough data to split off a new version of themselves, and travel by blowing up planets across every alternate dimension. The secret organization Cauldron is dedicated to trying to find a way to stop them, but no one else has any idea what they are or how they work. Until one of them starts ending the world ahead of schedule...\|\| - In Ward, \|\|the Titans, who are gigantic, Endbringer-like creatures formed when a Parahuman undergoes a "broken" second trigger event and merges with their Shard, an event made possible by the destruction of the Entity Scion at the end of Worm. The first was created when due to being stuck in a time loop and suddenly released, Dauntless undergoes 10,000 second trigger events at once. Later, 12 of them are suddenly created when overuse of powers at a critical moment causes cracks in reality to form. Each has different levels of humanity and goals. They are individually as tough and destructive (or more so) than the Endbringers. Much as with Scion and the Endbringers in Worm, no one has any good idea how to fight them, much less defeat them, though at least in this case, being formerly human, maybe there's a way to communicate with them...\|\| - Fesxis from Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues. All of the cast receive their superpowers from a single Mass Super-Empowering Event, which is heavily implied to be hard science caused by the government. The exception is Sebastian, who instead gains his powers from Fesxis — an eldritch, otherworldly shadow spirit with no connection to the empowering event. - This is essentially what allows The Ballad of Edgardo's eponymous hero to become a Lethal Joke Character - elemental damage has ridiculous modifiers when used with weapons, while Edgardo is a Bare-Fisted Monk and took a trait that uncaps his Spirit pool in exchange for only being allowed to use raw note : non-elemental Spirit. Because he's possibly the only person who's even taken this trait, everyone he fights consistently forgets about the fact that raw Spirit can't be resisted, and with enough Spirit buildup, Edgardo can launch Megaton Punches strong enough to one-shot lower level players and seriously dent even high level ones. And once he reaches the area that instantly refills people's Spirit up to the cap, which he doesn't have... - Collection Quest: Part of the reason that Danny has been left alone by both Coil and the PRT is quite simply the fact that his kids now have powers they aren't prepared to handle. Coil's gone so far as to give him a quiet protection service; apparently, whatever happened in a throwaway timeline where Danny died was really bad. - BattleTech: The Clans become this to the Inner Sphere in the mid-31st century. After a period of three hundred years of constant warfare between the five Great Houses, the level of technology in the Inner Sphere had regressed to near 20th century era levels, with virtually all Star League-era technology becoming Black Boxes. Then suddenly a massive army appears from the edge of known space, using BattleMech designs that look like nothing anyone's ever seen before and equipped with weaponry and equipment that's vastly superior to anything produced even during the golden age of the Star League. They curbstomped everyone in their path to Terra, and it was openly wondered if they were even human. It turns out that in those three hundred years, the Star League Defense Forces that left the Inner Sphere had been researching, developing and improving their technology for the day when they would come back and retake the Inner Sphere. - Chronicles of Darkness: While all the different game lines for Vampires, Werewolves, Mages, Changelings, and much, much more, all take place in the same world, the different forms of supernatural beings — and their respective antagonists — all tend to travel in their own circles, and either don't interact with the others much or don't even know that they exist. Thus, when they do cross paths, it can lead to all kinds of chaos and misunderstandings. - As such, when the inevitable crossover chronicle happens, the general approach is to go even more "outside." For years, the God-Machine, hinted at in the first pages of the original core book, was often used from this. When the God-Machine was better defined, Onyx Path released The Contagion Chronicle, a sourcebook for invisible conspiracies comprised of all the various supernatural groups aimed at investigating, controlling, and stemming outbreaks of the mysterious reality-warping "Contagion" whenever it occurs. It can be memetic, it can be mutagenic, it can infect the laws of physics... and no, nobody knows where it came from. - Dungeons & Dragons offers a thousand and one options for this. In general, pulling new monsters, character classes and abilities from splatbooks that the players aren't familiar with or have yet to be incorporated into the campaign would create examples of the trope — upset the usual arcane/divine magic divide with something like psionics, incarnum, pact magic, throw monsters and classes from a Far Eastern setting into your standard Western fantasy campaign, and so forth. Examples with the trope already built into them include: - Summon Magic can literally pull a villain from some other context, or have a party pull this on someone else after getting summoned by another spellcaster. - Inevitables are robots from another plane that enforce the natural laws of the universe. - The Bodak, depending on which sourcebook you read, is a Fraal from the d20 Modern setting that has been raised from the dead after coming in contact with pure evil. \|\|In other sources they are treated as the spirits of people who voluntarily cut their own hearts out in service to Orcus, and can reproduce through eye contact, or they are humans who died in the Abyss and were reanimated by the pure chaos and evil that permeates the plane. D&D lore provides several different origins for Bodaks\|\| - Illithids are this to the aboleths, a race of aquatic aberrations from the dawn of time, who have Genetic Memories that stretch back further than lesser races' creation myths. They remember a time before deities, but as far as the aboleths can tell the mind flayers just showed up a couple of centuries ago, which is one of the few things that freaks them out. Depending on which edition you're using, this is because the Illithids used Time Travel to escape their civilizations' collapse at the end of the universe, just materialized in the world after coming through a breach in reality itself accidentally opened up by a wizard experimenting with planar travel, or arrived on the Material Plane after sailing between worlds on their irreplaceable interplanar warships. - The Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module is an entire campaign of this, as the players have to deal with a crashed alien spacecraft and all the technology it contains. Generally regarded as one of the toughest early D&D modules. - Eberron: The Last War ended with the Day of Mourning. On a single day, the nation of Cyre, right in the middle of the other nations, was consumed by mist, killing everything within its borders. The other nations were so terrified that they made peace among themselves, and four years later, no one has any idea what caused it. - Exalted: - There are quite a few of these. In the past five years, Abyssal and Infernal Exalted — types of Exalted no one's seen in all of history — have started crawling out of the woodwork after their respective bosses got their hands on half of all the Solar Exaltations ever crafted. And for the recently-returned Solars, the eventual return of the Scarlet Empress can seem like this as she would likely reunite and reinvigorate her empire as well as regain control of the superweapon that lies at the heart of it. - The Abyssals and Infernals apply doubly so to the Sidereals, who were watching the shop while the Solars were dead and the Lunars were on the run. They have the ability to track all things which reside within Fate... which the Abyssals (who have technically died and surrendered their fates) and the Infernals (who were reforged in Malfeas) don't count under. - The quintessential example might be the conquest of Thorns. An army of ghosts and undead, led by the horrifically powerful ghost Mask of Winters, supplemented by the aforementioned Abyssals (being seen for the first time) and a gigantic dying monster, leading to the city being not only taken over, but converted into a Shadowland expanding at a terrifyingly unprecedented rate. - The event of the Alchemical Exalted (or Autochthonians in general) entering Creation would play out like this in scenarios with a military context. The reverse holds true as well; the Autochthonians have very little idea what Creation is actually like and it disturbs them fairly badly. - In a rare inversion of this trope, the Primordials are terrifying lovecraftian planes of existence which are also sentient and compromised of greater demons and lesser ones as well as being Genius Loci with Malevolent Architecture topped of with Blue-and-Orange Morality. The only thing that saves them from this trope is that they made the universe and have been running things from day 1. That, and the protagonists were literally created by the Gods (who in turn were made by the Primordials because they wanted someone to take care of the boring make sure reality doesn't fall apart business) to destroy them makes the titular Exalted outside context problems to them. That said, the aforementioned Demons, the Yozis, and Undead, the Neverborn, that corrupted half the Solar shards? They are mutilated and imprisoned in the body of their king (and yes, that means Malfeas is imprisoned within himself) and killed-but-that-wasn't-programmed-into-reality-so-you-are-stuck-in-horrific-pain-until-reality-is-destroyed Primordials in that order. - Magic: The Gathering: - The Eldrazi, being Eldritch Abominations from the spaces between planes of existence which feed on said planes, and don't obey the basic rules of magic. Until their escape, the plane of Zendikar where they were imprisoned was presented as an adventure world. To quote the Rise of the Eldrazi Player's Guide, "Previous quests have been for treasure and glory. In the new Rise of the Eldrazi set... only one goal remains: survival." - New Phyrexia's attack. Even when the Mirrans knew they were at war, they expected their opponents to wage war on the people... not the ecosystem. - During the Conflux of Alara, all five Shards got hit with this. Each one had been without two colors of magic for so long they had forgotten those colors even existed, meaning that each one suddenly found themselves running into two mini-worlds defined by magic they had never experienced. Best exemplified by Esper, the white-blue-black Shard, which developed into a land of cyborgs who infused etherium into their bodies because only one of their three colors was even capable of artifact destruction, and then suddenly found itself running into red and green, two colors of magic that excel at blasting artifacts into shrapnel. - Inverted for the players/series protagonists, the planeswalkers, who able to travel between planes at will, cast powerful magic, and summon completely alien creatures. From the perspective of the planes they visit, they are the Outside Context Problem. - In Nomine: Yves, Archangel of Destiny, was the very first being made by God, and named all concepts, things and celestials made during the creation of the world and most of its early history. A few millennia after the Fall, a new Prince arose in Hell to serve as his mirror — Kronos, Prince of Fate, who appears to be the same kind of higher celestial as Yves, but Fallen and corrupted. Yves understands what Kronos is, but not where he came from. He has no memory of ever naming him, nor of any being that could have Fallen to become him. This gap is unique to Kronos, and worries Yves immensely. - Pathfinder: Baba Yaga was this to the Linnorm Kings. She suddenly arrived in her Dancing Hut one winter 1400 years ago, conquered half their territory with her army of trolls and fey, established one of her daughters on the throne, and just as quickly left, leaving her army behind to protect the newly-established kingdom of Irrisen. Reign of Winter eventually reveals why she bothered; she \|\|sustains her immortality by consuming the Life Energy of her female descendants/daughters. Irrisen, then, ensures she always has a steady supply of that precious bloodline protected and kept ready for her when she needs a pick-me-up\|\|. - The same adventure path has the players both become, and encounter, this trope. Book five, Rasputin Must Die! has the fantasy adventurers arrive in 1916 Russia. The party encounters land mines, tanks, and modern infantry and firearms, while the Russians, shell-shocked and largely numb from the horrors of the Great War, steady their rifles against flying wizards and armored paladins with steely resolve. After all, after watching your village get shelled and drown on dry land from mustard gas, at least the elf casting Cloudkill is something you can shoot back. - Rifts is basically "Outside Context Problem: The Game." In a World where cyborgs duke it out with mages, vampires, demons, Eldritch Abominations, alien Corrupt Corporate Executives, The Empire, and even combinations of any or all of the above fight for territory, it gets a little crazy. In the backstory, the Coming of the Rifts was this for the people of Earth. A small nuclear war caused the very fabric of existence to fall apart, pouring horrific creatures onto an unsuspecting planet, while nature itself seemed to be trying to tear the planet to pieces. Something like a billion people died in the opening salvos, and their deaths only triggered more chaos and insanity. Three hundred years later, the earth is still recovering, and humans are only just starting to reclaim their world. - Vampire: The Masquerade: The Kindred have a great number of prophesies and theories concerning the end times and the Final Nights, and a great many schemes, plans and contingencies laid aside for that eventuality. In "Wormwood", one of the apocalyptic scenarios in the Gehenna sourcebook, absolutely none of this comes to pass — the end times come unannounced, bereft of any of the signs the vampires spent centuries watching for, in a way that none of them predicted, because God has made up His mind that the Kindred have overstayed their welcome on the Earth. One night, the eldest vampires begin to notice a loss in power, and forty nights later every vampire on Earth is dead; many go to their final end never understanding what is happening to them. - Warhammer 40,000: Most factions are connected one way or another to War in heaven. Orks Eldar, and Necrons are all decended from the particepants. While Chaos and The Imperium were created indirectly by the carnage it left behind, but two of the main factions are totally unrelated to the backstory and have proven hard to deal with in different ways. - The Tyranids are a swarm of ravenous bugs invading from another galaxy entirely. Less a species and more of an infectious self replicating ecosystem with a powerful psychic presence. None of the other factions have any idea who they are and where they came from (Despite supposedly being from another galaxy their vanguard of genestealer cults has been around for way longer than they should have been). And nobody has any long term plan to deal with them other than "try not to die" making them the Greater-Scope Villain of the setting. (Fortunately they mostly exist just to get Worfed in the fluff) It is hinted in fact that the Tyranids are actually fleeing their own galaxy — just what could possibly be so bad that these abominations would flee into this galaxy to get away from it!? - The other is The T'au a primitive species of little blue hooved aliens from a backwater part of the galaxy that were largely left to their own devices thanks to a Negative Space Wedgie. Over time they developed into a high tech space faring empire they broke onto the scene out of the blue and proved to be hard to deal with both due to their technology being leagues ahead of what the average human in the setting has access to and due to the fact that unlike every other faction they actually attempt things like diplomacy and incorporating conquered people into their empire in a setting where Xenocidal purges are the norm for anything that looks kinda different from you. Also since they're not really connected with anybody else every other faction (But especially Chaos) is an Outside-Context Problem to them! Their lack of understanding of how the setting works ironically makes them the most unpredictable of all the factions. - The Emperor inadvertently set one up for his own Imperium prior to the Horus Heresy. Despite the Emperor knowing about the Chaos Gods, one of the cornerstones of his new Imperium was the "Imperial Truth", a rational, secular philosophy that had no room for gods or "daemons" — he hoped to starve them of faith, which would hypothetically cause them to stop existing. So when fully half of the Space Marine Legions fell to Chaos, not only did the Loyalists go from fighting aliens and isolated human societies to fighting soldiers just as superhuman and well-equipped as they were, but soldiers with access to summoned daemons and the surprising applications of using them. - The Harrowing, an event mentioned in Dark Heresy. Fluff indicates that it was an entire eldritch universe barging into the Materium and kicking the shit out of everyone in the region so badly that all the habitable worlds in a sector or three are nothing but lifeless deserts. It may well have been an even more devastating conflict than the Horus Heresy, but almost nothing remains outside of Astartes battle sagas and a few third-hand fragments in some obscure and seemingly unreliable sources. Which isn't even covering what the Imperium had to do to survive. - Back in the days of the Great Crusade, the Imperium encountered a species who had long ago ritualized their warfare to enormous arenas where armies would slaughter each other. The Space Marines wasted no time in destroying the keylekid from afar instead of bothering with the xenos' honor system. - Beast Wars: Uprising: "Cultural Appropriation" has several sides running into a set of Go-Bots from another universe. Thanks to their being Go-Bots, their tech means they could take the hyper-advanced mankind by surprise, since mankind have become more than a little self-assured of their superiority. - The main Toa groups in BIONICLE have a habit of being this, mostly because you don't expect Toa to pop up in canisters next to your island (twice), invade your underwater prison, \|\|rise above being The Unchosen One and turn you into a Makuta popsicle\|\| or randomly appear at the centre of the world. Even outside of this, there's a whole bunch of these running around regardless, the most notable being Makuta facing an outside context \|\|Humongous Mecha\|\|. - This is uncovered in Double Homework once the protagonist finds out that he and his former classmates \|\|have been used in one of the Zeta experiments to study the sex lives of teenagers\|\|. - Hazbin Hotel: Alastor the Radio Demon was a human radio host/serial killer who died, went to Hell, almost immediately launched a bloody onslaught against the established demon lords of Hell, and won with minimal effort and maximum carnage. No one knows why he did this, and more importantly, no one knows how a random sinner note : As opposed to a Hellborn like Charliegot that powerful that fast. - RWBY: This is the reason why Professor Ozpin and his inner circle are so hesitant about what they're doing. They know precisely who they're fighting, but the situation they're in is so unprecedented that they're not sure what to do, and Ozpin and General Ironwood are at odds over how best to proceed. \|\|The Fall Maiden's magic, which normally transfers from host to host along predictable patterns, was partially stolen by Cinder. As a result, they don't know what will happen if/when the previous Fall Maiden dies and where her power will go. Whatever plan they can come up with is a shot in the dark, and all they can do is try to stack the deck in their favor.\|\| - In 8-Bit Theater, Red Mage serves as this with his Munchkining with RPG rules despite the fact that no one else even understands them, forgetting to record massive amounts of damage from an Eldritch Abomination to slice it open from inside and polymorphing into himself to undo an undesirable shapechange. - In Ask White Pearl and Steven (almost!) anything, Garnet has a harder time getting a read on Steven's future than most others. - Demonically sapient dream-invading dolphins in Awful Hospital. Bear in mind that the heroine is nowhere near any body of water at the time they contact her. Later revealed to be full-on Animalistic Abominations and strongly hinted that \|\|not even the Parliament Assimilation Plot, the putative Big Bads, know why the dolphins are getting involved\|\|. - The Old Ones in Cthulhu Slippers are this to humanity, and are so powerful they conquer earth in a night and a day. Like almost everything in the comic, it's Played for Laughs. - In Erfworld, the Anti-Hero protagonist, Parson Gotti qualifies. He originates from a different universe, giving him a radically different perspective of reality from the locals. Though Erfworlders frequently describe him as a transcendent military genius, the real reason he poses such an overwhelming threat to the world is that he is a Munchkin, summoned into an RPG Mechanics 'Verse suffering from Creative Sterility. The actual Big Bad, Charlie, also shows signs of this, and has been secretly subverting the Fantasy Gun Control Erfworld has been subject to because of Medieval Stasis. - The Last Halloween involves the world being invaded by monsters without any sort of warning. Not only are most of these monsters capable of slaughtering dozens of humans with ease, but there are billions of them; one for each human. Humanity is nearly wiped out after a single night. - One-Punch Man - Saitama is somewhat of an Expy of Superman while living in a World of Badass running on Anime tropes. note : The most powerful villain so far was approximately as powerful as Frieza and Saitama curb stomped him. This makes Saitama highly overpowered compared to all the other characters, and is Played for Laughs most of the time. Since he's largely unknown in spite of his power, he also comes as a surprise to villains. - While the Hero Association is somewhat prepared to take on the sudden the Alien Invasion by Boros and his minions — after all, it's just a monster attack on a bigger scale — Boros himself would have curb stomped any and all of them if Saitama hadn't happened to confront him first. - The Monster Association gathers and creates hordes of powerful monsters and launches a coordinated attack that stretches the Hero Association to its limits. - In Stand Still, Stay Silent, we get the Rash, that created the post-apocalyptic setting within only a few months of appearing in a group of refugees of unknown nationality, 90 years before the story really starts. Among mammals, it crosses the species barrier without a problem, except for cats, which have some kind of firewall. Among the infected, the 90-odd% who die a slow and apparently very uncomfortable death (involving skin loss in later stages) are the lucky ones. The rest get horribly mutated into Plague Zombie monsters who can, occasionally, have periods of lucid awareness\|\|, mainly to beg for death\|\|. This resulted in the disease having an impact well beyond the Black Death combined with the Columbian Exchange on both human population and biome. By the time the story starts, the Nordic countries possibly house what's left of humanity, with just under a quarter million souls, only about 11% of which belong to immune people. All their medical attempts to find either preventatives or cures have either flat-out not worked, or Gone Horribly Wrong. The story hints that \|\|the disease may have a magical component to it, meaning that addressing its biochemistry can only ever form part of the solution.\|\| It's little wonder it came as a bit of a surprise. - In Tower of God, this is more or less why the Irregulars are called that note : and why people invoking the name usually don't count the rulers of the Tower, who represent the status quo, even though they are technically Irregulars too. They're beings who enter the Tower under their own power, rather than being chosen the way everyone else is, and they're exempt from the unbreakable rules enforced by the Administrators of the Tower. Irregulars have a reputation for being mysterious and immensely powerful. Phantaminum entered the palace of the King of the Tower for unknown reasons and killed many of the most powerful people in the Tower easily before disappearing. Enryu killed one of the near-omnipotent Administrators, altering that Administrator's floor forever and leaving behind a weapon meant for killing the king. Urek Mazino "merely" showed himself to be more powerful than basically anyone and created a new, feared political faction in the Tower (feared largely because he's in it). And then there's the comic's protagonist... He seems pretty weak at first, but as the story advances, he keeps causing jaws to drop by breaking more and more rules of what's supposed to be possible. "A monster has arrived." - Wonderlab: \|\|Due to the fact that Distortions were a fairly new phenomena within the comic's timeline, nobody knows how to specifically deal with a Distorted Catt coming to wreck the facility.\|\| - The Dream SMP is largely a story about politics, war, and moral dilemmas...and then there's the Crimson, a Botanical Abomination which can manipulate the players into serving it and is trying to spread across the entire server. Its origins and motives (if it has any) are otherwise unknown, especially considering that most of the major players in the plot have yet to interact with it. - The entire premise of Rplegacy's Dark Clouds Gathering fantasy crossover RPG is that a war breaks out between the Legion of Light and the Army of Shadow, which is thrown for a loop when the Phantom-lord Grogna summons his equals from other dimensions to bolster his forces, introducing people, monsters, technology, and magic that are completely unfamiliar to that world. It's then turned around on the Army of Shadow when the Legion of Light does the exact same thing to bring the heroic champions that held the villains at bay. - Projection Quest has the titular Projection, which cycles between the forms of various characters from other realities to teach Taylor skills and powers from them. In a world where most capes have a singular set of powers they understand instinctively that never grows, Taylor has a continually increasing number of powers she has to learn, and a super-powered partner to boot. Everyone gradually comes to the realization that this makes her impossible to predict. - In The Salvation War, angels and demons being very real certainly was a surprise, as were their abilities, but humanity understood them and adapted. In turn, the former two have a much harder time dealing with the humans having suddenly turned from helpless cattle into ruthless and efficient killers. - Invoked in Sideways In Hyperspace when Earth's early interstellar travels, with starships carrying a few dozen people and able to travel between systems in weeks, encounter a species operating on a completely different scale, turning up in a system and breaking up entire planets into raw materials. "Outside context problem" is an official designation, which the aliens receive after some initial arguing and a completely failed attempt at formal First Contact. - The "Everything Is On Fire" arc in Thrilling Intent suddenly introduced Narn, a mysterious being who invaded Xinkala, set the city on fire, and disappeared as fast as they came. None of the major players in the Onorhant saga have any idea what they were or wanted, and it wasn't connected to the ongoing war between the Clans and the Ban. - While the appearance of Israphel in the Yogscast Minecraft Series was certainly unexpected, since Lewis Brindley and Simon Lane initially assumed that they were all alone, they adapted to him fairly quickly. What really took them by surprise was the appearance of \|\|the Sentinels\|\|, bizarre, Mechanical Abominations , not that unlike the Reapers of Mass Effect in that they corrupt the thoughts of beings, driving them insane. They also did this to \|\|the Sand, which was formerly the thing keeping them prisoner\|\|. Their appearance had received little foreshadowing, and on top of that, Simon and Lewis only travelled on the inside of one. We still have no idea what they are doing, how they are linked to Israphel, or what they even look like externally. - Amphibia: \|\|The Core.\|\| In the second season, we get snippets of King Andrias having meetings with a massive mechanical octopus-like being, but the rest of the cast have zero idea it even exists. Even in the season finale, "True Colors", \|\|where the cast finds out King Andrias', well, true colors, in that he wants to use the Calamity Box to become a dimensional conquerer, nobody has any clue that an even greater threat is lurking just beneath their feet. Sasha and Grime have an Oh, Crap! moment when they discover a mural of it, but they have no time to address it in the battle against Andrias. Turns out The Core is The Man Behind the Man manipulating Andrias into thinking he is doing what is right for his family.\|\| - Avatar: The Last Airbender: - Toph becomes this after she learns how to metalbend, something no one thought was even possible. - Aang's Avatar State merged with the ocean spirit, La, at Season 1's finale. It is so out there that they destroy the Fire Nation's entire navy fleet and killed their captain without them being able to do a thing to stop them. - Aang himself is out of context since, on top of being the Avatar, he is the last airbender, an art thought to be lost for one hundred years. Aang with airbending alone was enough to take down an army unit since no one had any experience with dealing with an airbender. - Captain Planet and the Planeteers: Despite his name being in the title, Captain Planet and to a lesser extent the Planeteers themselves are completely out of context. We have a group of five kids with magical rings that can control the elements and a person's heart, and who can summon a super hero who rivals Silver Age Superman, against regular humans. Even the villains who are mad scientists and mutants don't stick out as much as them and most villains have no clue how to handle the Planeteers, let alone Captain Planet. Gaia is even worse since she is the spirit of the freaking Earth. Only other god-like beings like Zarm can even consider challenging her. - Codename: Kids Next Door: Compared to all the other villains, the Cheese Shogun didn't have a specific grudge against the KND or children in general; rather, he just captured everyone his Cheese Ninjas encountered and used them all as slave labor in his cheese mines. - The Fairly OddParents! normally deals with a magical threat that Timmy accidentally creates, which only occasionally reaches world-conquering levels. Wishology introduces the Darkness, an Eldritch Abomination that Fairy World only narrowly defeated in the past, and its return was very unprepared for. It devours both Fairy World and Yugopotamia within minutes of its arrival, and its agents, the Eliminators, are dangerous enough that even Jorgen von Strangle would rather not tangle with them. By Part Two of the trilogy, the situation deteriorates to the point where Timmy revealing Cosmo and Wanda to his parents, friends, and enemies is barely above an afterthought, with the threat of the Darkness throwing Da Rules out the window. - Gargoyles: The titular Gargoyles were under a spell that made them sleep for a thousand years before waking up in mid-90s New York where they are the only supernatural creatures around (at least early on). Outside of Xanatos and Demona, most of their earlier enemies were at a loss dealing with them. - A Cryptid Episode pulled this off for Generator Rex, where the non-E.V.O Chupacabra throws the entire cast for a loop after expecting, well, the usual nanite-created mutant. A few other non-E.V.O threats would also pop up later, including a T. rex and dimensionally-displaced Ben Tennyson, that would also create fair amount of confusion. - Bill Cipher of Gravity Falls certainly qualifies. In a show that normally deals with more low-level paranormal things like gnomes and living golf balls, he's a reality-warper from another dimension with Blue-and-Orange Morality that can possess people, enter minds through dreams, and is utterly powerful in \|\|our dimension, once he manages to break through\|\|. The second half of the final season is dedicated to the characters trying to prevent him from gaining even more power. - Jackie Chan Adventures: Tarakudo turns out to be this for Uncle; for all the old man's knowledge on how to deal with the supernatural, most of it centers on threats from his native China, and he quickly learns he has no clue how to deal with Japanese monsters. Worse still, he can't even "do reeeeesearch" on them because all of the information is written in Japanese, which he can't read. Thankfully, his apprentice Tohru is Japanese and can read it just fine, plus he was raised on the stories of Tarakudo and his Oni Generals and was very familiar with them already, leading to him and Uncle trading roles as master and apprentice for the duration of the season. - The Legend of Korra: - Season 1 gives us Amon, the leader of the Equalists, who \|\|via bloodbending\|\| is able to permanently remove a person's bending. Before him, the only person with this ability was Avatar Aang, a Physical God. - Season 2 gives us the Dark Spirits, spirits who have been corrupted and turn violent. They are completely indestructible and bending can only repel them temporarily. Before Season 2, spirits were rare in the human world and never harmed humans unless provoked. - Season 3's villains are all masters of an unusual form of bending: lavabending, combustionbending, waterbending without accompanying body movement, and \|\|weightless flight. The last one belongs to something few would expect, an evil Airbender that does not pull his punches unlike even the historical ones\|\|. - Season 4 had everyone know Kuvira would eventually march on Republic City in order to reclaim it for the Earth Kingdom. No one knew she would use \|\|a Humongous Mecha armed with a spirit Wave-Motion Gun\|\| to do so. - Mega Man (Ruby-Spears): - Just as Vile and Spark Mandrill in "Mega X" are completely out of context for Mega Man, X himself is an out of context foe to Wily and his robots. When they did try to fight him, he catches Cut Man's weapon and crushes it like it's tinfoil. - Mega Man himself was this when he was still just Rock, a regular robot helper. When Wily was about to reprogram Roll, Rock made Wily stop by lying about how Dr. Light built an army of warrior robots, and that they were coming to stop him. Wily believed Rock, because robots couldn't lie. Rock then gets Dr. Wily to release him on the promise that he would show him how to stop the warrior robots, and uses the opportunity to escape with Roll. Wily could only scream in outrage and confusion over the fact that a robot lied to him, when robots couldn't even lie in the first place. - My Little Pony: - If there was one villain in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic that almost no one, in and out of universe, saw coming, it was the Changelings appearing at the very end of the second season. The only pony to know of their presence was trapped underneath Canterlot, imprisoned by the Changeling Queen and it's implied that she had no idea they existed until she was imprisoned in the first place. As for out of universe? Most theories for the finale didn't factor in shapeshifting insects, and the few that did guess something involving impersonation probably didn't think of something like that. Heck, the villain even used this to their advantage and struck at the best possible moment. - The Dazzlings from My Little Pony: Equestria Girls Rainbow Rocks, being Emotion Eaters that use Mind Manipulation, would be normal for one of the show's season openers/finales... but they appear in the High School AU, where magic doesn't normally exist. When Twilight Sparkle and friends try confronting them the usual way, nothing happens, and she spends the rest of the film struggling to find an alternate method while the Dazzlings operate unchallenged until the finale. Even then, beating them is more the result of brute force than actual strategy: their final attack fails until the previous film's villain, who's spent the entire movie trying to atone for her actions, is properly accepted into the group, giving them enough power to defeat the sirens. - \|\|The Collector\|\| from The Owl House is described as "neither witch nor demon", is considered unnervingly alien to the denizens of the Boiling Isles, and was trapped beneath the Titan for easily over 400 years. When they're freed you immediately realize why — \|\|they turn Big Bad Emperor Belos into a smear on the wall with a single finger poke, end the eclipse powering the Draining Spell by moving the moon out of the way as if it were an app on a touchscreen, and start using their Reality Warper powers to remake the Boiling Isles into their personal playground.\|\| - Primal (2019) features the Fire Demon, a particularly strange and frightening example in that the more we learn about him, the less context we have for why he's in the story. He's first introduced in the Season 1 finale, "Slave of the Scorpion", when Mira's drawings in the dirt include a towering, faceless Horned Humanoid, heavily implied to be the titular Scorpion, whose emblem is branded on the back of Mira's head. Mira and her pursuers shake up Spear's world quite a bit, introducing metal technology, bows and arrows, wooden ships, and language to the setting. When Mira is recaptured, Spear pursues her to a Viking village and frees her, but something seems off as there's no sign of the scorpion emblem anywhere. When the chieftain of that village goes after Spear for revenge and fails, he is Dragged Off to Hell by the demon, just as featureless and even vaster than in Mira's drawing, to offer his assistance, much to the chief's horror and confusion. So he's unaffiliated with that particular Viking village but regardless seeks vengeance for Mira's escape, right? Wrong. The series finale throws a curveball at us by giving us a flashback to Mira's first capture, revealing that the horned figure she drew represented the perfectly ordinary Viking warrior who took her — the shadowy demon we thought had been foreshadowed since the end of Season 1 in fact came completely out of nowhere in the final act of Season 2, and has no personal reason to pursue Spear and Mira whatsoever apart from whatever he gets out of the Chieftain's Deal with the Devil. The demon considers the bargain fulfilled the moment Spear is wounded, and drags the Chieftain off once again, never once interacting with the protagonists or even being known to them. - Reboot: - The User of Mainframe is a person that exists completely outside the realm of the protagonists and is unaware of all the damage they cause by playing games on their computer. Game Cubes therefore appear at complete random and often inconvenient times, sometimes serving as Conflict Killers when the people stuck inside have to work together in order to survive. - Daemon was introduced in the middle of Season 3 as a virus who'd managed to corrupt nearly all the Guardians offscreen. Since Mainframe is usually cut off from the rest of the Net, there's no way the heroes could know about her. She has little else to do with the plot and doesn't make another reappearance until Season 4, where she finally presents herself and attempts to invade Mainframe. - The viruses Megabyte and Hexadecimal were also shown to have been outside context problems, having been accidentally unleashed upon Mainframe via a portal accident cutting the original virus Killabyte in half while he was being upgraded by his creator into Gigabyte. - Played for Laughs on Rick and Morty — while usually a sci-fi show with villains who are aliens or extra-dimensional beings, in one episode Rick casually affirms that vampires exist in their world, and acts like the others are dumb for not suspecting this might be the case when somebody is found dead and completely drained of blood. Particularly silly because this isn't even the main plot of the episode, just a subplot that gets tied up off-screen and serves as an excuse for Rick to test out the new experimental technology that the episode actually focuses on. - School For Vampires: In "The Vampire who cried werewolf", usual Harmless Villain Vampire Hunter Paulus Polidori temporarily takes a level in badass and actually becomes a threat to the vampires with his latest weapon, a machine that can mimick sunlight. Too bad for him that there was a Werewolf exchange student staying at the school, on whom the machine had the same effect as the light of a full moon... - In Spider-Man Unlimited, Spidey becomes one after traveling to an alien world where Beast Men rule over humans. Mainly because he's not quite a normal human, nor is he one of the aforementioned beast men. The villains aren't even able to remove his new Nanomachine costume (which he "borrowed" before leaving Earth) after having him Strapped to an Operating Table despite the Cyberpunk setting. - Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Chancellor Palpatine/Darth Sidious is expertly playing both sides and has virtually everything under control (and most of the things he doesn't control go his way either way, because ultimately, he is Running Both Sides). What he doesn't account for is the Zillo Beast — a prehistoric Kaiju from Malastare, which according to Word of God may or may not be aware of Palpatine being evil — and it comes scarily close to ending Sheev then and there (complete with probably the only time in the entire show where Palpatine shows genuine fear). - Star Wars Rebels: "Zero Hour": - Thrawn had no idea of the existence of the Bendu, and so is completely taken by surprise. Thrawn can handle Jedi, but the Bendu is another level. Furthermore, the fact that the Bendu is extremely powerful in the Force and a Wild Card means that Thrawn has no cards to play against him. It doesn't stop him from trying, though. - To a lesser extent, the Imperials probably didn't expect a force of Mandalorian warriors, a group meant to be unaffiliated with the Rebels and busy with their own civil war, to show up and take out their last Interdictor cruiser, either. - Thrawn himself. While the Rebels have encountered cunning and competent enemies before, none of them come anywhere near Thrawn in terms of intelligence, competency, and patience. While enemies like the Inquisitor are dangerous because they're ruthless and powerful in the ways of the Force, Thrawn is dangerous because he's intelligent enough to be able to use the vast power of the Empire effectively. - In the finale, \|\|Ezra finally defeats Thrawn by summoning a pod of purrgil to destroy the blockade, seize the ships, and hyperspace them both to parts unknown. While Thrawn has experience with Jedi, the Jedi ability to control creatures is one of their lesser known powers, and Ezra's bond with purrgil is entirely unique to him.\|\| - Steven Universe: - Steven himself — being a Half-Human Hybrid makes him something completely foreign to everybody. This has its ups and downs, mostly the latter in early episodes, but it proves beneficial when it turns out his physiology lets him No-Sell the technology used by the the first major antagonists and perform feats previously thought to be impossible, like Fusing with a human being. - The Cluster Gems. \|\|They're forced Fusions of shattered Gems that cannot take a coherent physical form.\|\| Before their first appearance, the Crystal Gems had no idea that such a thing was even possible, let alone that Homeworld had done it. \|\|And then there's The Cluster itself, which is made of millions of shattered Gems, is stuck at the center of the Earth, and whose awakening would obliterate the planet. While the smaller Cluster Fusions can be easily poofed in a standard fight, the Crystal Gems just don't have the resources to do the amount of damage to it that would be required, and the plan they did come up with and spent much of the season putting together ends up failing; they solve the issue through Steven connecting with the fragmented mind of the being, allowing it to become lucid and able to control its form.\|\| - From the non-canon crossover with Uncle Grandpa — the Gems have no clue who he is or where he came from, and are completely unused to his reality warping, fourth-wall breaking antics. And given the list of other Cartoon Network series he checks at the end, they're probably not the only ones who were at a loss dealing with him (no doubt the SWAT Kats, who were also on the list, were incredibly baffled). - In the movie, the villain, Spinel, fights in such an unusual way that the Crystal Gems simply can't tell what she's going to do next, in addition to being rusty from two years of peace. The only one of them with any knowledge of her is Pearl, and she didn't even realize Spinel could fight. - Teen Titans: Happens to Cyborg when he is pulled back in time to the Bronze Age by a witch to help save her people from monsters. \|\|Subverted that the summoning was part of an evil scheme all along\|\|. - Tom and Jerry: In Jerry's Cousin, Muscles Mouse is a super strong mouse that can easily beat up any cat and shrug off any attack thrown at him. Tom clearly has no idea what to do and surrenders at the end. It's one thing for Tom to encounter a bigger, strong opponent like Spike but to face a mouse with super strength is another. - Unicron in The Transformers series. Originally he was a terrifying Galactus Expy in The Movie before he was fleshed out as a god of chaos later on. Still, no-one had any idea how to deal with him in the first place when he showed up. This was lampshaded in the original movie. Kup, the eldest of the surviving Autobots had at least one story for every occasion, usually a bad one. However, upon seeing the massive Unicron, all he could mutter was "nope, never seen anything like this before." - Beast Wars: Tigerhawk. Not only was he far stronger than any Transformer seen in the series, except for maybe Rampage, he has mystical abilities never seen by any Transformer that allows him to curb stomp any foe he ever faced. It took a warship firing maximum weapons at him to take him down. - Wander over Yonder: Lord Dominator, the Big Bad in Season 2, shows up from another galaxy and takes all of the characters by surprise when she shows to be a much more effective and dangerous adversary than anyone they have ever encountered. - A Black Swan event is a rare, high profile, and hard to predict event beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology. These events have such a low probability that they cannot be predicted or foreseen by our statistical tools, and they usually disrupt or completely destroy established systems of thought. By their very nature they are outside the context of current established practices and methods, and require new, outside-the-box approaches to be dealt with properly. - Like accidental "black swans", most large frauds are OCPs. They either slip through the blind spots of fraud detection by accident or are designed specifically around the weaknesses of the current system, in many cases by already-known fraudsters such as Artur Alves dos Reis. - Donald Rumsfeld phrased it: There are known knowns There are known unknowns There are also unknown unknowns. There are things we dont know we dont know. An Outside Context Problem is an unknown unknown with teeth. - The 9/11 attacks were this on a large scale. The US hadn't been truly at war outside of minor peacekeeping roles since the Cold War anticlimactically ended. Most cases involving terrorists hijacking planes were for the terrorists to go somewhere, not using them as kamikaze weapons — let alone causing the first attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor. For the public, they were only vaguely aware of Al-Qaeda at best from previous minor attacks. (The various US intelligence services were aware of the threat, but any cooperation to stop the attacks was halted thanks to a lack of cooperation and communication among the agencies.) This was summed up the best by one of the FDNY firefighters from the documentary film 9/11, as they rushed towards the burning North Tower (the documentarians had been with the firefighters checking out a suspected gas leak, and wound up capturing the only clear film footage of the plane crashing into the tower), one said "What do we do? It's like... What do we do for this?" - Probably the largest outside context problem that most TV Tropers have faced in their lifetimes is the Covid-19 pandemic. Virtually all plans made by 99.99% of the population for 2020 and later were severely altered or cancelled when the worldwide pandemic broke out and infected massive swaths of the population in most countries. While not truly unexpected by scientists, a plague of this magnitude (the largest in over 100 years) came as a complete surprise to the average citizen or business, with mixed results. On the negative side, businesses that had been developing increasing amounts of JIT (Just In Time) inventory management to keep down their costs for several decades found themselves completely unprepared for their carefully designed supply chain systems all ground to a halt. Many smaller restaurants that didn't have large cash reserves found themselves out of business as dine-in eating was heavily curtailed. On the positive side, technologies for online communication were already being rolled out, allowing many schools and businesses to adapt (with mixed results) to functioning online. - This is a source of some of the nastier examples of glitches and security issues in Computer Programming. Every well-made program attempts to deal with unexpected input and program states, but it's impossible to account for every possible interaction of software and hardware, the creativity of dedicated code jockeys, and the ability of end users to break things. - One of the more out-of-left-field examples is Row hammer — an exploitation of basic design elements of modern RAM cards that allows a software process to alter the contents of adjacent memory cells in the physical hardware of a computer. note : In Layman's Terms, it's like discovering there's a way to hotwire and drive most cars from inside the trunk via Percussive Maintenance. While the trick is extremely difficult to utilize, several groups have demonstrated bizarre security attacks that completely bypass all existing protections in a way that's equally difficult to detect and protect against. - Almost all computer hardware can experience what is (for it) an outside-context problem: Cosmic Rays. While the hardware and software engineers are usually aware of the existence of the issue (high-energy particles originating somewhere in outer space that can, if they happen to hit the silicon, flip bits in memory or disrupt CPU operations), from the computer's perspective, something that should never happen - something that is, in fact, completely impossible - has just happened; 0 + 0 has just returned 1 (or something equally mathematically impossible). And while some safeguards can be put in place, cosmic ray hits are, by their nature, inherently random. - The US government has a variety of disaster protocols. One such protocol is CONPLAN 8888, which covers a zombie apocalypse. Of course, it isn't 100% serious, but it's intended to mimic more mundane emergencies that might overwhelm traditional responses, and thus avoid a complete Outside Context Problem. - European colonization caught the native people of the Americas completely off-guard with many unprepared for the new weapons and disease brought over. The local response can range from being on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle to full and peaceful assimilation, with a few unique adaptations thrown in for good measure. - On the other side of the coin, hurricanes were sufficiently out of context for the visiting Europeans that the Spanish had to borrow a local Carib word to describe them, and hurricanes repeatedly blocked settlement of the Gulf and southern Atlantic coast of what would be the United States, including Florida. - The Rashidun Caliphate in the 7th century. Romans and Persians had, under a variety of different political regimes, fought one another in the region for over six hundred years, leaving both sides exhausted and severely depleted and so unable to resist the Arab invasions that seemed to come from nowhere in a shockingly short amount of time. Sasanian Persia was conquered in its entirety, while the Eastern Roman (aka Byzantine) Empire lost a vast amount of territory and even more in the centuries that followed, and would never again be a regional superpower. - Large-scale barbarian invasions often came across as these to the invaded parties. Due to the almost-complete absence of reliable long-range communication in ancient times, kingdoms and countries often had no prior warning before a tribe of hostile nomads would suddenly appear on their borders. The Mongol invasion of the Middle East in the 13th Century is a prime example. After nearly two centuries of bloody warfare that fizzled out from attrition with no real victory for either side, nobody had been able to pay attention to anything going on further East. Hulagu Khan and the Golden Horde just seemed to come out of nowhere, crushing an exhausted Baghdad in less than a fortnight. - The Bronze Age Collapse was the result of a multitude of factors such as natural disasters and economic disruption, but the most jarring was the Sea People attacks. To this day historians have no idea who the hell they were (and are only 99.9% sure they weren't Fish People), as they could've been foreign invaders, starving Anatolian raiders, Mycenaean remnants, or all of the above at once plus more. What we do know is that their unconventional Zerg Rush tactics completely invalidated the chariot-based warfare Bronze Age civilization depended on, leading to them steamrolling everyone but Egypt (who even then suffered a Pyrrhic Victory) and completely collapsing international trade which was already devastated by the aforementioned disasters. - Invasive species can become an outside context problem if introduced to a biome that has no meaningful defense against it. Introduced Species Calamity page has more info on that. - While volcanoes were known to the Romans before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, they were used to tamer Strombolian and Vulcanian eruptions. The sheer violence of the Vesuvian eruption and the massive pyroclastic flows were completely out of their frames of reference; Pliny the Younger's writings of the eruption display a palpable difficulty to grasp what he was seeing.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutsideContextProblem
Overlord - TV Tropes A link to something about "Overlord" sent you to this page. The context of the link should help you figure out which page you want. If an internal link led you here, please change it to point to the specific article. Thanks!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Overlord
Overdosed Tropes - TV Tropes Trope Overdosed is when a series uses many tropes. The inverse, when a trope applies to many different series, is an Overdosed Trope. If you want a real challenge, look for a work page that doesn't use a single one of these tropes. Many of these tropes are popular because they are used as a verbal shorthand (Squick, Oh, Crap!, etc.), and others are popular because they're more ways of discussing works than they are part of the work themselves (Nightmare Fuel, moments of awesome and funny). In any event, the only requirement to be included on this page is that a trope is referenced by at least 10,000 other pages, as listed in the "related" page. The numbers given here are for rough estimation purposes only, since the pages will inevitably have changed since the trope was added or updated. See Also: Omnipresent Tropes, Tropes of Legend, Trope Overdosed. For tropes that attract a lot of potholes, see Pothole Magnet. 10,000-20,000	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverdosedTropes
Overcrank - TV Tropes To "overcrank" means that the frame rate at which the film is being shot is higher than normal, so that when played back at a normal speed the action is in slow motion. Normal frame rate is 24 frames per second, so if you overcranked to 120 frames per second the action would be shown at 1/5 its actual speed. This shift can be intentionally obvious, to emphasize the dramatic note : or sexy details of a scene; it can also be used as a background effect — for example, in movies featuring Godzilla and similar monsters, overcranking adds a sense of ponderous weight to the monsters' motion. If someone's running, expect to hear the main theme from Chariots of Fire or The Six Million Dollar Man, at least in your head. This trope is also present in almost any shampoo commercial. Bullet Time is another form of overcranking, except in three dimensions. If working with scale models, overcranking can be used to make them seem to behave normally with gravity, like in Ghostbusters (1984). Modern slow motion footage is shot with digital cameras that have a very high framerate, rather than film, but the principle is the same, the footage is slowed down to 23-30 frames per second where it plays in slow motion. Note that overcranking does not include video recorded at double speed and played back at the higher speed. Normal digital video cameras shoot at 30FPS (25 in some countries), but one can get inexpensive 2.7K or 4K cameras that will record at 60 (or 50) FPS. If the video is then played back at the higher speed, that is not overcranking. If it was recorded at 60 (50) FPS, then played back at 30 (25), it is. Two prominent examples where overcranking is the main focus are TV series Time Warp and web series The Slow Mo Guys. It's extremely easy to do this badly, or to use it as a parody. Undercranking is an inversion. Adrenaline Time is a combination of overcranking and undercranking. Sub-Trope of In-Camera Effects.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Overcrank
Overdrive - TV Tropes "The pod race in the film suffers from a common trope, in which characters needing to go somewhere really fast head off in their vehicle. At some point they realise they're not going to make it in time, so they open the throttle all the way and go even faster. The question of course being why weren't they going as fast as they possibly could already?" A character needs to drive somewhere quickly. Maybe they're in a car race, or maybe they're just racing against time. At one point, they realize they're not going to make it in time. So they... go faster. Huh? Why didn't they just drive that fast to begin with? Odd as it may seem, this unexplained increase in speed can have some basis in reality. It can be simplified as a cost vs. benefit decision. If somebody has 'nothing to lose' and must be somewhere at a certain time then they have to speed up - BUT - if they push their machine too hard it will fail before they get there. If they had backed off slightly, then it could have broken down after they had arrived. In a race a driver will hold back simply because there's a notable difference between "the fastest they can drive" and "the fastest they can continuously drive without wear and tear completely destroying the engine halfway through the race". Smart drivers limit themselves to the latter, and use the engine-wrecking speeds in short bursts—or for those desperate final laps. Fuel consumption is also a potential problem. Having to find out where to refuel in the middle of some prairie or ocean is not a way to get to destination ASAP. Running out of propellant halfway to the next planet and thus unable to decelerate is not a good idea either. The cost of fuel, oil (or Helium-3, or whatever) and repairs is also a factor. In most cases engines are supposed to work much longer than one or two rides and generally engines aren't so cheap that the cost of damaging one could be disregarded without a really good reason. Then there are Nitro Boost systems, which are of limited duration by definition, and speed limits. On normal roads, a driver may initially be unwilling to flagrantly violate the speed limit—and risk bringing the ire of the police down on them—until they get really desperate. Finally, it might be a matter of safety. Crashing and burning is not an effective way to reach a destination, and the driver may initially only be going as fast as they feel comfortable going... until they realize it's not enough, and they just have to risk it. Of course, in spite of the risks associated with such insane speed, it almost invariably results in victory for our protagonist, rather than catastrophic engine breakdown in the penultimate lap. Ludicrous Speed laughs at your puny physics and mechanical stress limits! And of course, there are some instances—say, short drag races—where this trope makes absolutely no sense no matter how you slice it. If the villain does this, don't worry. Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat, every time. A Sub-Trope of Holding Back the Phlebotinum and Miracle Rally when it's in a race. A Sister Trope of Tim Taylor Technology, and the mechanical equivalent of a Dangerous Forbidden Technique. If it involves the risk of a catastrophic failure, it's Explosive Overclocking. ## Examples: - In The Vision of Escaflowne, when Van, Allen and Hitomi are escaping Zaibach's capital on Escaflowne (which transforms into a dragon for flying) they are pursued by Zaibach's mechas which are much faster. As they're closing in and a panicked Van is urging Escaflowne to fly faster, it suddenly transforms to reveal a jet engine and shoots forward at Ludicrous Speed. - During the final race in Initial D, Takumi is forced to over-rev his AE86 to keep up against his opponent. \|\|This ultimately causes engine failure and spins the car out of control on the last stretch of the race. He just barely wins by depressing the culch and reversing the car with its own momentum.\|\| - Notably the series points out some of the real life the limitations of this trope. AE86 doesn't go faster when it's over-reving, rather Takumi uses this to gain more flexibility when he's changing between gears. - During the Final Battle of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Fate T. Harlaown, whose fighting style is already based around her Super Speed, reveals the ultimate mode of her Barrier Jacket (essentially, Magical Girl-themed Powered Armor), the True Sonic Form, which allows her to move faster than even top-of-the-line combat cyborgs can track her. Its activation phrase even starts with an "Overdrive" command. The reason why she doesn't use it all the time, however, becomes apparent soon thereafter: with all of the Jacket's energy pumped into speed, it offers all the physical protection of a wet tissue. - In Half Life: Full Life Consequences, John Freeman's reaction to his brother being in mortal danger is to try to reach him by going "fast" on his motorcycle. And then events happen that cause him to go "faster", three times. Even though it was established that he was in a huge hurry and didn't have time to waste. So, basically, he felt his brother wasn't in that much danger at first. - But at the end of chapter 2, Gordon does berate him for getting there slow, as he is \|\|now a zombie ~~ghost~~ goast\|\|. - And in that same chapter it's established that John Freeman has another, faster motorcycle, which was unfortunately out of gas in the first chapter. How it was refilled in-between is a mystery. - In the Final Fantasy fan fic "Cid Wars", the characters are at one point trying to get somewhere by van, and each time someone said they needed to go faster, the driver upshifted. This happened a total of eight times, complete with one of the characters asking "Just how many gears does this van have?" - The podrace from Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace is all over this trope. Sometimes Anakin passes other racers with ease, and other times he keeps pace with Sebulba over long straightaways. It also genuinely makes zero sense that he wasn't going as fast as he could to begin with, considering how he started the race in last place due to engine failure and his freedom was on the line. Explained in the spin-off videogame: The engines can't run at full power for very long before they begin to overheat, and once their temperature passes the redline they will very quickly seize up, catch fire or otherwise fail catastrophically. - Speaking of the Star Wars films, the Millennium Falcon is a noteworthy aversion: The reason her hyperdrive conks out at the worst possible time so often is that it's been hot-rodded six ways from Sunday and is almost permanently in the "overdrive" state, with very little margin of error between "overdrive" and "something important just overloaded and burned out". - Cars is a rare subversion of the "more speed always works'' aspect of the trope: Lightning McQueen gains a whole lap on Chick Hicks and The King by skipping several pit stops—then both of his rear tires blow out in the final lap, and the race ends in a three-way tie. - In Galaxy Quest, the overdrive blows-out after being held down too long, leaving the ship nearly crippled. - The protagonist of My Science Project, a car mechanic by hobby, has a supercharger equipped on his car, which he uses to outrace an energy surge (just go with it) racing down power lines, to cut off the Imported Alien Phlebotinum device before it gets more power to warp time and space even further than it had already done to that point. - Done with a horse at the end of True Grit. Rooster Cogburn rides a horse so hard and fast that it eventually dies just short of his destination. - In the film Fail Safe (think Dr. Strangelove played for drama), in order to catch up to a bomber with a nuke which is about to destroy Moscow, a group of pursuing US fighter jets are ordered to use their afterburners to increase speed, even though everyone knows that they'll just run out of fuel early and crash in the ocean. - Spaceballs has "Ludicrous Speed", an even-faster-than-regular-Faster-Than-Light speed mode for Spaceball One that is used to try to catch up with the heroes. The problem is that it's so fast that it overshoots the heroes and anything not tied or nailed down inside of the ship is violently thrown around with the immense G-forces of the acceleration and instant stop. - Pushing one's car too hard is a central point in Ford V Ferrari, and in endurance racing in general. The Ford GT40 was designed with reliability in mind so it could be pushed closer to its redline throughout the long hours of its races. This is emphasized at the 24 Hours of Le Mans (in the film) by Carrol Shelby defying the orders of the Ford executives, which were not to push the cars too hard. Shelby tells driver Ken Miles (via a sign): "7000+ GO LIKE HELL", or in other words, not to be afraid to push the car past 7000 rpm. Later during the race, Miles winds up in a speed battle with one of the Ferraris, both pushing their cars to the redline. The Ferrari eventually blows its engine, and Miles goes on to finish the race. - In James Blish's Cities in Flight novels, the cities of the title can fly at faster-than-light speeds, but they're all equipped with a gadget called "Situation N" which can instantly teleport them away from trouble. Only thing is, it can only ever be used once per city. - Military warships in Honor Harrington series has a version, though with acceleration rather than top speed. The inertial compensator that allows the crew to survive the hundreds of gravities their drives are capable off is normally only run to 80% of its theoretical maximum capacity to reduce wear and reduce the risk of failure. It can be run higher in emergency situations but is not recommended because if it fails you have precisely zero seconds of warning and then the entire crew is reduced to a red smear. This has happened "on screen," too— though less times than it probably should have, given the stated risk and the number of time's it's been chanced. - A similar situation exists with the hyper generators that allow FTL but it is much rarer. The option to take the inertial compensator to full power is built in but to run the hyper generator requires physically disabling the safeties. The effect of trying to go into higher levels hyperspace and failing is described as "bouncing." - In the end the situation is like the Space Shuttle, the actual safe speed is higher than listed. Over time Manticore finds they can push their compensators (after upgrades based on Grayson's less refined but fundamentally superior type of compensator) much higher than listed, and that 80% of that is hopelessly cautious. Solarian technology isn't so robust; a Solly Admiral is thought to be bold by Solly Standards to seek 85% in a battle. - And all this is before considering that the Manticorans typically limit themselves even further in peacetime so as not to tip potential enemies off about their capabilities before they actually have to fight them. - Deconstruction in the Sword of Truth, where it turns out that your horses do have a maximum output. You can push them past that... and you'll run them into the ground. Later in the series they start taking extra horses so that they can switch them out and avoid the negative aspects of this trope. - In the Robert A. Heinlein short story "Sky Lift", the pilots of a continuous-boost "torch ship" are forced to maintain multiple-G acceleration, right at the edge of their physical tolerance, for days while rushing to deliver medical supplies to a colony facing an epidemic. \|\|They succeed, but one dies and the other is prematurely aged by the experience, leaving him permanently physically impaired and with cognitive problems very similar to senility.\|\| - In The Last Continent, when Mad is being chased by the road gang in his armoured cart, he feeds the horses a mixture of oats and lizard glands, which he calls the "supercharger". At least one reason he doesn't use it regularly is because the horses become almost impossible to stop, or indeed steer. It's probably also not healthy for the horses to take it too often. - Star Trek was a frequent offender. The Original Series played this completely straight. The Next Generation explained that speeds beyond Warp 5 damage the fabric of space-time. ...Then a new warp engine was invented that didn't damage space-time, completely erasing the prior justification. - At least in TNG and later the energy requirement grew exponentially with the speed, thus if the matter wasn't urgent, they went slower to conserve fuel. - In The Wounded, the matter is very urgent, yet they decide to go Warp 4 so that the writers can have them step on the gas later when things go really bad. - Super Pursuit Mode in Knight Rider. This is explained by a simple application of physics: aerodynamic downforce reduces the vehicle's speed, since the air resistance of the vehicle is increased (there's more surface area for the wind to hit). What Super Pursuit Mode accomplishes is increasing K.I.T.T.'s maneuverability at high speeds, thus preventing Michael from wrapping K.I.T.T. around a power pole note : or rather, wrapping a power pole around K.I.T.T.. The game makes this point, too. Your maximum speed is decreased a bit, but it's much easier to steer. - Hyperthrust in Street Hawk allowed the bike to run at 300 mph, but since no human could safely drive through the city at such speed, it required Mission Control to program the route on a computer. Wherever traffic was too dense, there was no safe route and therefore no hyperthrust. - BattleTech's BattleMechs can be equipped with myomer acceleration signal circuitry (MASC for short), which when active provides about a 33% boost to maximum speed by making the 'Mech's artificial leg muscles contract that much faster. There is, however, always a chance that the added strain will result in internal leg damage, and this chance increases rapidly if the system is used over multiple turns in a row, wherefore it's useful primarily to provide short emergency bursts of speed. An alternative — and incompatible — approach involves using special extra-strong myomer fibers in the first place; unfortunately, those require the 'Mech to run hot enough for its weapons to start to incur to-hit penalties before their performance exceeds that of the normal version. (To make the most of these 'triple-strength myomers', a 'Mech's heat level should ideally stay at exactly 9 — no lower, no higher, on a scale from 0 to 30 — for extended periods.) - Aerospace Fighters from the same game have Overthrust, which gives similar advantages and disadvantages to Real Life Afterburners. You can increase your speed 4-5 times over normal, but burn twice as much fuel and start rapidly heating up. - Boost in the Motorstorm series works this way. You have an unlimited supply of Boost, but using it heats up your engine. if you don't lay off the boost, or drive through water to cool your engine down, it will blow out your engine, respawning you near last place. - Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song has Hasten Time and Overdrive, the ultimate Hydrology spells. Casting one of these babies lets the user instantly end the enemy's turn and either give themselves and all their allies a free turn to act — or act five times in a row themselves, without any fear of interruption. However, the spell's big drawback is that it's a major drain on your MP, especially in Overdrive... is it worth having your caster attack five times uninterrupted when it will then take them several turns to recover? - Star Wars Episode I: Racer makes the engines overheat and burst into flames if Boost Mode is not turned off before too long, which can result in your engines deteriorating (which nicely explains why Anakin wasn't boosting the whole time in the film). And unless you pay for the rather expensive repairs, you'll start the next race with a half-broken engine. In the sequel, Revenge, your engines won't catch fire anymore, but boosting while overheated will constantly damage your engines, leaving you vulnerable to being knocked out if you hit a wall or get attacked by another racer until you take time to repair the damage, which often will cost you more speed than the prolonged boost gave you in the first place. - Similarly, in F-Zero (from X onwards), you can boost whenever you want after the first lap, but doing so drains your health. Boosting in a pit area is essentially free, but cuts down on the amount of time you can spend there to repair any other damage. - An armor attachment in Dogyuun allows the player to move very quickly as long as they hold down button 2, with no drawbacks whatsoever. However, moving around too quickly will make it more likely for you to crash into enemies or bullets. - Driving at max speed in Baja: Edge of Control is not recommended, as it will cause the truck's radiator to begin to fail (along with your suspension being repeatedly crushed going over jumps at 100mph); The AI can be seen driving at less than max power most of the time to protect their engines, which is critical in the long point-to-point rally tracks. - Sonic the Hedgehog: - When Metal Sonic falls too far behind in the race with him in Sonic the Hedgehog CD, he'll overclock his systems to trigger a move called the "V. Maximum Overdrive Attack", which greatly increases his speed and surrounds him in a destructive energy field. Supplementary materials explain that this technique places enough of a strain on Metal's body that prolonged use could cause him to self-destruct. - The battle with Metal Sonic in the console version of Sonic Generations is a prime example of the overclocking putting a strain on Metal's systems; after using the Overdrive to either attempt to ram Sonic or call down lightning, Metal will be seen smoking and trying to recover, giving Sonic the opportunity to attack. On his last hit, Metal charges up a much longer Overdrive that Sonic has to slow down by making Metal ram through a floating platform, and then deliver the final blow with one well-timed spin jump as Metal's energy field flickers out. - The Mario Party and Mario Party 2 mini-game "Slot Car Derby" punishes players who maintain the maximum speed for too long on tight turns by making the car spin around for a second and have to accelerate from zero again. A common strategy is to ease off on the analog stick just before this happens, watching for the puffs of smoke that serve as a warning, then pump it back to maximum the very next second. "Slot Car Derby" returns in the second game, which also has "Filet Relay", where players dressed as penguins can mash the A button to move faster, but will wobble and fall over if they go too fast. - The Armored Core series has Over Boost, which allows an Armored Core to move much faster than normal by consuming enormous amounts of energy. Depending on the title, it may also overheat the AC or consume Primal Armor, leaving you with paper-thin defenses once you arrive at your destination. - MechWarrior Living Legends's various Nitro Boost systems - MASC on battlemechs, afterburners on aerospace fighters, and turbo on treaded/wheeled tanks - all generate excess heat when used. Aerospace fighters have the most extreme heat generation, to the point where it's easy for them to melt their own fusion reactor while trying to flee danger, whereas most tanks can boost almost indefinitely. On community-made race maps, players have to handle both their heat (doubly so if it's weapons-live racing) and stay on the track; not too difficult on most tanks, very difficult on the Hover Tanks which have heat-free boost, but are highly unstable and prone to flipping and sliding off the track. - The term "Overdrive" in Real Life simply means the output spins faster than the input. Nothing more, nothing less. In a car, this reduces engine speed for a given road speed, reducing fuel consumption. Every car will, in fact, be slower in an overdrive gear than in direct drive or underdrive as the engine will be at a mechanical disadvantage and have to work harder to achieve the same acceleration. Yes, the wheels can spin faster, giving a theoretical high top speed, but in Overdrive, the engine may not have the torque to accelerate to those speeds. This is exactly why your car's transmission, automatic or manual, has low gears in the first place. - Many World War II-era fighter aircraft featured an engine setting called "War Emergency Power". It was intended for emergency use in combat and normally had a time limit imposed on its use, as it would wear out the engine in a very short time. WEP appeared in many forms; some aircraft engines simply had the capacity to run at power levels that would overstress their own components. In these cases, a piece of tape was inserted to stop the throttle at the maximum safe setting; if the tape was broken, the engine would need to be inspected after the flight. Other aircraft implemented WEP through the use of consumable additives. Nitrous oxide injection would cool the fuel/air charge (allowing more fuel and air to enter the cylinder on each cycle) as well as providing additional oxygen at high altitude. A few aircraft were designed for the stress of nitro injection, and were limited only by the onboard supply of nitrous. Water or water/methanol injection provided a lesser version of the same effect, but also cooled the engine and allowed it to operate beyond its radiator's normal capacity. - A handful of civilian aircraft — often those intended for "bush aviation" — also possess an "Emergency Power" setting. It's facetiously said to provide "just enough power to get you to the scene of the crash." - The Space Shuttle's main engines were designed for a certain maximum normal output, rated as 100%, but can run at up to 110% thrust in emergency abort situations. After a few flights it was determined that 104% was safe for continuous operation, and it was easier to routinely go to 104% than to rewrite all the documentation to make that the new 100%. - Most modern fighter aircraft are equipped with equipment variously known as afterburners (US), reheat (Brit), or forsazh (Rus). This system dumps additional fuel into the exhaust manifold in order to burn any oxygen that was not consumed in the main stage of the engine. This can greatly (~160%) boost the thrust at the cost of extreme fuel consumption; afterburners can empty the multi-ton fuel tanks of a jet fighter in less than 5 minutes. Go really fast if you have to, but do it too long and you'd better be ready to walk home. - Averted in some planes (like the SR-71 Blackbird) that are designed for high efficiency during afterburn; you can have your engines spittin' flame for as long as there's fuel available, and everything will be ok. The downside is that they are horribly inefficient when not afterburning. The Blackbird also burned a special fuel, which meant its operating costs followed the plane itself into the stratosphere. - Afterburners also come with a side effect of a massive thermal signature. This negates a stealth aircraft's stealth by making it visible to thermal sensors, and in general makes it much easier for heat seeking munitions to find their mark even with countermeasures. Modern stealth planes, such as the F-22, utilize a technology known as "supercruise" to travel at supersonic speeds without resorting to their fuel-guzzling afterburners. - The US destroyer USS Samuel B. Roberts managed to do this during the Battle of Samar, by ordering the engine crew to push the twin boilers as hard as they would go. This managed to add 5 knots to the speed of the ship while it was under fire, going from the rated 23-24 knots (that the engines were said to max out at) to 28.7 knots. The ship was sunk by gunfire from a Japanese battleship during the battle, and managed to earn itself the title "the destroyer escort that fought like a battleship." - Considering the captain had already made an announcement to the crew of "We're making a torpedo run. The outcome is doubtful, but we will do our duty.", they knew the ship's remaining lifespan was measured in dozens of minutes, and didn't care one bit about doing something which would destroy the turbines in a few hours. - US Navy slang for the above action is "All ahead Bendix." The ship's speed is controlled by a device which was often made by the Bendix company and their logo was just beyond the maximum setting, so it appeared that "Bendix" was an option for higher speed. - Many other vehicles, both civilian and military, have a "red line" power setting which represents the maximum power available without immediately damaging the engine, and a lower "yellow line" setting which is the maximum safe cruise setting. For example, the manual for the Turbomeca Arrius 1A (a turbine engine used in helicopters) lists a maximum continuous power of 296 kW, an intermediate contingency rating of 357 kW (120% normal) usable for up to 30 minutes, and an emergency maximum for 2.5 minutes of 388 kW (131% normal). Most aircraft have a "never-exceed speed" listed in their specifications that's some way below their theoretical maximum, to provide a safety margin against excessive airframe stress. - The original VW Beetle is an exception in that it could safely operate all the way to the red line; in The '50s, when it was normal for a small car to have a top speed in the range of 70 MPH, the company used this as a selling point. - Many cars have an aerodynamically-limited top speed, creating a situation where the engine looks like it ought to be able to take you faster, but it doesn't have enough torque to accelerate you. - For many steam engines, going over a certain amount of power required locking down the automatic valves that were designed to keep the engine from producing more pressure than it could handle. Lock them down for a short while, and your ship gets a bit more power and speed. Do it too long, and you might cause the engine to explode, or overstress some other component connected to the engine and cause it to break. - The RMS Carpathia was a transatlantic passenger steam ship that responded to the Titanic's distress call shortly after midnight on April 15th, 1912. Captain Arthur Henry Rostron, who had been awakened by the ship's wireless operator with news of the distress call, ordered all engineers and engine stokers out of bed and on duty in order to "make all possible speed to the Titanic" before he had the chance to get dressed. He then cut power to most of the Carpathia's heating and hot water facilities, diverting nearly all of the ship's steam output into the engines. While technically rated at 15.5 knots, Carpathia had not once exceeded a top speed of 14 knots since her shakedown cruise a decade before that fateful night. Dashing through the frigid Atlantic night towards the Titanic 58 nautical miles away, dodging ice and navigating freak weather conditions that made the sea even more treacherous, the Carpathia reached a speed of 17.5 knots. She arrived at the last known location of the Titanic at 3:30 am on April 15th. Half an hour later, she found the first of the lifeboats. 705 of the Titanic's original 2,208 passengers were brought aboard the Carpathia. No other ship would arrive in time to find survivors. - When done to computers, it is called Overclocking. This makes the computer faster, but also generates more heat and can cause hardware errors or even ruin the CPU if performed incorrectly. - Humans (and many other animals) can do something like this. Between adrenaline increasing blood pressure to move more oxygen and fuel to muscle cells, and muscle cells over-performing at the potential cost of both tearing themselves apart and overheating to death, normal humans can manage to lift cars and outrun sprinters under duress. The reason your average person doesn't perform like an Olympian all the time? They would die very quickly if they kept that over-performance up for longer than a few hours, at best. - Direct Current electric motors have a natural "balancing speed" where the applied voltage equals the counter-Voltage produced by the rotor itself turning in a magnetic field. A mode of operation known as "shunt" activates additional diverter resistances in parallel with the field winding, reducing the strength of the counter-Voltage and allowing the motor to turn even faster.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Overdrive
Overhead Interaction Indicator - TV Tropes Bronya (on the left) wants to be near Mei, while Mei wants someplace to sit. A frequently-occurring situation in video games is when the player(s) need to have some kind of interaction with another character, especially an NPC, whether it be a conversation, a particular action that needs to taken, etc. To signal this, an icon of some variety will appear over the character's head. This can be something as simple as an exclamation mark or question mark, or something more complex like a speech or thought bubble showing what action needs to be taken. Compare Notice This, when something in a game that the player can interact with that's not necessarily a character will have some sort of indicator like a color change, icon, or sound. Related to Alertness Blink, when someone/something has a visual and/or auditory reaction to your presence. See also Expressive Health Bar. # Examples: ## Video games: - Diablo II: NPCs with a glowing speech bubble containing an exclamation point overhead will either give you a quest or an important piece of quest-related dialogue. This carries over into Diablo III, although it's now a glowing exclamation point. - Honkai Impact 3rd: - Your Valkyrie that is on the homescreen will have a thought bubble floating by her head that takes three colors and does different things when tapped/clicked. If it's blue, she will say one of an assortment of canned statements with a speech bubble providing the translation. If it's a purplish tone, she will do the same, but it's to scold you for playing too long and/or tell you to shut down and get some sleep. If it's white, she will say something but instead of dialogue, an interface appears where you can see her current Affection Point level and also perform some other actions, such as swapping Valkyries or entering Portrait Mode. There's also a variant where the speech bubble is spiky and yellow with exclamation points. These give special dialogue pieces such as the Valkyries saying something about their birthdays or, in Bronya's case, asking the Captain to get her a HOMU Happy Meal. - In the dorms, a Valkyrie will occasionally have a blue speech bubble appear over her head with a chair, book, a scared or sad face, and other things. These indicate actions that the player can do with her to potentially increase her happiness meter and/or receive a reward. To trigger the action, the player has to either tap or click on the Valkyrie (once or a few times depending on the indicator), or drag her to a specific part of the room like near a bookcase or onto something she can sit on. - Some of the quests in the Sakura Samsara version of Open World are activated by tapping/clicking on a female villager with a yellow exclamation point over her head. In other quests in different parts of the game, the same yellow exclamation point will appear over the heads of NPCs you need to talk to. - The Legend of Zelda: In multiple games, Link can interact with characters with a downward arrow overhead. - Punishing: Gray Raven has a dorm system similar to Honkai Impact 3rd above. Dorm inhabitants will regularly have "dorm events", with an icon above their heads indicating whether they need to be moved to certain furniture items or petted. If a blue triangle is above their heads, they will instead converse with you, either resulting in a mood boost or a gift. - Sunset Overdrive: A spinning blue circle with a exclamation mark where the dot has a spiky lighter shape around it. The "Re-Quests" Quest Saleswoman has one, and the player points it out the second time they talk to her and third times they talk to her: - Second time - Player: You sure you don't need something? I mean, there's a spinny icon above your head and it's really...compelling Quest Saleswoman: What, that? Oh, just testing it out, making sure it's rotating properly. Go on, sweetie. I'm fine here. - Third time - Quest Saleswoman: FINE. But I really shouldn't be giving in to a quest junkie. Here's the deal, sweet pea. I rent out these icons so people can help each other. There's a bunch of overdue icons out in the city. Find them for me and bring them back. - The Borderlands series: Since the second game, indicators have multiple colors and symbols: - A yellow exclamation mark above someone or something indicates that a quest can be started by interacting with them. - A green question mark means that there's a quest to turn in. Absent in 3, where the green "Turn In!" prompt is also gone. - In Pokémon Ranger, citizens in need of a ranger's help will have a thought bubble containing an ellipsis, alerting the player to speak with them. - Digimon World: A Pictorial Speech-Bubble appears above your Digimon expressing its various needs, such as food, sleep or going to a bathroom. - In Age of Conan, quest-givers have exclamation marks above their head (which according to Zero Punctuation, makes it look like they've just spotted Solid Snake). - In Bug Fables, NPCs who give the player quests or are involved in the progression for some quests will feature a speech bubble with an exclamation mark above their heads. - Divinity: Original Sin II: Player Characters and their companions get floating exclamation marks when they want to discuss a significant plot point that just occurred. However, other NPCs and scripted dialogue aren't similarly marked. - Dragon Age series: NPCs with quests to give have exclamation marks, while NPCs associated with an ongoing quest have an arrow about their heads. - Going Under: A character with a speech bubble overhead will have different interactions depending on what's in the bubble. If the bubble is white with scrolling bars, you can converse with them or receive a business card from them. If the bubble is blue with a checkmark inside, the character is giving a quest. - Magicka: Parodied in Chapter 1, where a villager with an exclamation mark above her head requests the wizards to deal with rats in her cellar, but shortly after, a group of goblins appears to attack. When they are killed, the villager states that rats don't feel like a problem anymore. The exclamation mark still remains above her head, though, and when talked to again, the villager laments that she can't find a way to get rid of it. - Märchen Forest: Mylne and the Forest Gift has a player-centric variant. When Mylene is walking around outside, if she comes across something she can interact with, an exclamation mark will appears in a speech bubble over her head. - Titan Quest: - Quest characters will have a yellow exclamation point over their heads, while NPCs that just give general information will have a yellow diamond. - Merchants come in sellers of equipment for physical fighters, equipment for magical fighters, and ones that sell both types of items, and have symbols of crossed swords, a book, and a sack overhead, respectively. - Item Storage caravan people have a chest as the symbol that's displayed above their heads. - In World of Warcraft, quest givers have an exclamation mark above their heads, and NPCs where you finish a current quest have a question mark. - In Theme Park, speech bubbles with icons for food, drink, rides, or their mood appear over the park guests' heads. - Theme Hospital uses these to show the mood of patients and staff, as well as to show when you receive a fax regarding someone in the clinic. - In Clean-o-Clock, which is a licensed game of The Loud House, all the kids except baby Lily occasionally get a thought bubble with a picture in it. If you click on them, and then on what they're thinking about, they will perform a particular action with the object (for instance, if you click on Lana and then a broken object, she'll fix it). - Diner Dash: Diners have a heart meter over their heads that gradually reduces the longer they have to wait to be served, making customers with reduced hearts a priority to attend to. - PlateUp!: - Customers will have a green bar overhead representing their patience for each stage of the process of their stay (waiting to get into the restaurant, have their order taken, and get their food respectively) that gradually decreases, and will turn red when it's critically low. - Any food prep task will have a similar timer bar over the player's head as they're working. In some cases, such as a stove or microwave, if you leave the food to sit for too long, an exclamation point will appear over the bar to show that it's about to burn. - Cold and Flu Invasion: The patients will have speech bubbles depicting the type of pill they need. - Moshi Monsters: Characters who want to send you on a quest have speech bubbles with exclamation points over them. - Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Villagers will sometimes have a thought bubble above their heads, indicating a concern that provides an opportunity for the player. These concerns include giving the player a nickname, developing a new catchphrase, wanting to sell or gift something, or moving away from the island. Other times, they'll just share a random thought with the player. - Genshin Impact: NPCs that give quests will have an exclamation point over their heads. - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: NPCs associated with the active quest have an arrow above their heads. - Starbound: NPCs that give the player quests are marked with yellow exclamation marks, quest-relevant entities feature blue arrows pointing at them, and when all conditions for finishing the quest are met, a blue question mark appears above the quest-giver. - Xenoblade Chronicles 2: - Characters with new sidequests for you have a question mark over their heads, while characters who you need to talk to as part of an in-progress quest have an exclamation point overhead. - Random NPCs who you either haven't spoken to before or who have changed their text since you last spoke to them have a small star overhead. - In Terrible Triplets, the titular triplets get thought bubbles depicting what they want. For instance, if one of them is thinking about its bottle, it's time to feed them. - In Vet Set Go, the animals request objects via speech bubbles. - In My House, if your character needs to pee, they will have a thought bubble with a toilet. Everyone else can apparently read this thought bubble, since if you try to interact with anyone while having to pee, they'll tell you to go to the bathroom instead. - In There Is No Game, if you try to feed the squirrel a nut without cracking it first, it will have a speech bubble with a picture of the nut being cracked. ## Other media:	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverheadInteractionIndicator
Overflow Error - TV Tropes In older electronics, 8 bits was the standard — strings of 0 and 1 were divided into sections of eight each, and it was seen as sufficient to get every letter and number across. It was an effective, compact way to store data, which is why it was largely used until the mid-1990s. The problem is, it also got the short end of the stick in Powers of Two Minus One: since binary works by an "on and off" system, there was a maximum value — 11111111, equal to FF in hexadecimal or 255 in base 10. Any commands to increase the value past this trigger the "next place value" protocol, which changes all 1s to 0s and turns the nearest 0 on the left into a 1. The problem is, there is no nearest 0 on the left, so the value rolls back to 00000000. This can also work the other way around, which is called underflow — if a value attempts to decrease past 00000000, it will go "down" to 11111111, which can lead to some pretty strange variables. Note that the limit does not strictly apply to 8-Bit systems and thus can be higher than 256, but occurrences of that sort are the most famous and most common due to the comparatively low cap. While mostly obsolete because of technology improvements, these types of errors still remain famous because they were known to cause some pretty hilarious crashes or Ascended Glitches. This is a programming-specific relative of Readings Blew Up the Scale. In older video games, a Kill Screen or Minus World is often a result of this, when trying to read data for level "257" causes a Reality-Breaking Paradox. Compare Crosses the Line Twice when a situation is so horrible that, whether intentionally or not, it becomes hilarious. ## Video Game Examples: - Civilization: A longstanding Urban Legend of Zelda argued that Mahatma Gandhi, the in-game leader of the India civilization, had an AI aggression level of 1, but when a civ adopted democracy and thereby reduced its aggression two steps, it would cause the 8-bit variable to wrap back around to 255 and make him insanely aggressive. The bug never actually existed according to series creator Sid Meier: his studio in fact anticipated the problem and coded aggression to never go below 1. India is somewhat more likely to invent nuclear weapons earlier than other countries, but that's actually a result of its AI being coded to prioritize scientific advancement. The memetic error was in fact made up by an Internet Troll on This Very Wiki, irritated that AI Gandhi had nuked him (which is still pretty funny considering Gandhi's real-world religiously motivated pacifism), supported by screenshots of the game's Mad Libs Dialogue. - Stellaris: An overflow error in some versions allows leaders to become immortal. As a leader ages, their chance of dying of old age increases until they reach their maximum lifespan, at which point their chance of dying from old age is 100%. Playing with policies to extend and then reduce the lifespan can create a leader whose chance of dying is greater than 100%. A leader who is about 24 years older than their maximum lifespan causes an overflow where their chance of dying resets from 100% to 0%. - In some releases of Sweevo's World it was possible to lose two lives when you only had one left - for example, by being at minimum energy on your last life, and walking under a weight to touch an enemy. The enemy would kill you, then the dropping weight would kill you again; this would cause the lives counter to wrap round to 255. - The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games have a cap of 24 heart containers, which can be reached in normal gameplay. In a linked game it's possible to unlock an additional heart container, but this causes an error that subtracts one heart container from Link instead: he ends up with a max of 23. - Atari's Battlezone (1980) started the player out with slower, boxy tanks to shoot, until the player had blasted five of them, then the game threw quicker, sleeker tanks at the player. That is, up until the player had 255 tanks killed; thereafter, the register overflowed to -1, an error code. The game however simply interpreted this as "player has not yet killed enough slow tanks" and thereafter fielded the older, slower boxy tanks. This typically happens around the 80000 to 90000 point mark. - The famous Kill Screen in Pac-Man was caused by attempting to proceed to Stage 256 — the game keeps track of the stage number by the fruit icons in the corner, and there's always supposed to be at least one. Similar glitches also exist in Galaga (which just causes the game to freak out and then crash) and Dig Dug (which causes a level that insantly kills you because an enemy spawns in the same space as the player). - Similarly, the kill screen in Donkey Kong is caused by a glitch in the algorithm that determines the level timer. On Level 22, the timer is set so high that it overflows and ends up being set at just 4 seconds, making the level impossible to complete. - In Sinistar, if you get hit by a projectile and touch an enemy simultaneously while on your extra life, the game will subtract two lives, rolling backwards over 0 and reading it as 255 lives remaining. - The Elder Scrolls: Legends: Although players won't reach a fraction of the maximum health or creature power in normal gameplay, intrepid players sought to experiment with the maximum amount. They confirmed that it was the integer limit of 2,147,483,647, and that going over this causes the number to go negative. - Hearthstone also has a integer limit of 2,147,483,647. The easiest way to reach it are cards like Divine Spirit and Linecracker, which have effects that multiply an attribute, and some way to infinitely recycle them. It's not something you can just casually do, but there have been challenge combo decks that hit that absurd number. - In-Universe in Slap City's story mode: A cop attempts to write up Business Casual Man, only for his offenses to roll over to zero in the police database. - In Trimps, the developer was forced to cap the level number at 810 and add a parallel advancement (Universe 2) because making the game work with the numbers generated would have required rewriting the code in a different system. - Ratchet & Clank: - While most games cap how many Bolts you can hold, the PlayStation 2 ones didn't, leading to this error. Famously, a fan by the name of RSmit spent three and a half years doing this in the second game, Going Commando (saying that it was "too easy" to do it in the third and fourth games), in what he called the Quest for the Max. He eventually succeeded in 2007, and as a result flipped the number to approximately -2 billion Bolts... meaning he couldn't afford the Tractor Beam gadget to progress past the second level in his next Challenge Mode run. Why it happened : Since the game used 32 data bits, and one of the symbols has to be the positive/negative symbol, the maximum amount of Bolts is 2 to the power of 31, or 2,147,183,648. When he exceeded that number the only thing the game could do was change the positive/negative sign bit, hence the flip. - It's been observed in at least Going Commando that it's possible to complete Challenge Mode 255 times. If you do so the next Challenge Mode is in a state dubbed "New Game +0", where Ratchet retains all his weapons and gadgets as normal, but the enemies return to the stats they'd have on an initial playthrough. - Sonic the Hedgehog: - A Game-Breaking Bug in Sonic the Hedgehog causes the final boss to be unbeatable if you hit Dr. Eggman while his HP's 0. His programming doesn't check to see if his HP's already at 0 when you're hitting him, thus giving him 255 HP, which can't be depleted within the 10 minute time limit the game imposes on each level. - The 16-bit versions of Sonic 1 and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 feature a bug in which your character can lose two lives at once if they take damage while drowning. If you're on your last life, this causes your total number of lives to underflow, giving you 255 lives. This is such an absurdly high number that the game can't even display it correctly - the lives counter only has two digits, so numbers above 99 appear garbled. - The mainline 16-bit games have a bug known as the "level wrap" glitch, which comes from being unable to put the player's X-axis as a negative number. So if the player goes further left than the leftmost pixel of the stage, their X-axis instead becomes a very large number, and the player is suddenly teleported as far to the right as they can go. This normally puts them at the very end of the stage, where they complete the stage instantly if there's no boss, or fight said boss if there is one. - Super Mario Bros. stored the number of lives as a signed byte (ranging from -128 to 127). So Mario can safely have 127 lives, but if he has more than that and then dies, it's an instant game over. This inadvertently functions as a punishment for stockpiling lives with the Infinite 1-Ups trick, since having that many lives isn't likely to occur in the average playthrough. - Noita: - The Repelling Cape perk increases the speed at which stains fade on the player, and additional copies stack the effect. However, at 10 stacks the perk glitches and causes stains to never fade. - Each use of the Perk Reroll machine doubles the cost of the next use. With significant prepwork it is possible to use the reroll enough times that the machines glitch and begin charging only single digits. This will work for nearly a thousand rerolls before the glitch corrects itself. - Chantelise: When the game time reaches, 99:99:99, it then overflows back to 0:00:00. Also, hacking for lots of money could lead to prices, since the price of things increase every buy, to overflow into negative numbers, and buying those objects may send your Pix count to overflow as well. Although, under normal play, pix are capped at some all 9s number, before it starts overflowing, to prevent overflow. - Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury has an objective early in the game where you have to get a Senzu Bean to give to Gohan so he can deliver it to an injured Videl. The thing is that Senzu Beans are also normal items that you can eat to heal back to full health and Ki, and this one is no different. If you eat the bean and then talk to Gohan to complete the objective, he takes one Senzu Bean from your zero Senzu Beans, resulting in an underflow that gives you 255 of them when the item normally has a cap of three. - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: It is possible to abuse the alchemy/enchanting loop to enhance gear so far it acquires negative armor or damage ratings. - Final Fantasy: - Final Fantasy IV has the "64 Door Hierarchy Glitch" which works on this principal. In a nutshell, the world map is "Room 0" and doors are listed as "Go" doors (increment it by 1) and "Return" doors (decrement it by one). In certain places it's possible to keep going through "Go" doors and keep increasing this number, and if you get it to 64 the number will roll over and whatever room you are in will become the new world map (Room 0). When this happens, if you then go through a "Return" door (or use Warp), all hell breaks loose. - In Final Fantasy VI, through the Sketch Glitch it is possible to obtain 256 copies of items. Attempting to sell them all at once rolls over from 255 to 0, and the shopkeeper will pay you nothing for them because the game thinks you're selling nothing. - Final Fantasy VII has an overflow glitch that causes the game to think that enemies have so much HP that it had better fix the problem and instantly kills them. - This error was one of the reasons why Final Fantasy XIV had a stat squish in Endwalker. Due to how drawing aggro works, the team cited that sometimes the tanks would generate so much aggro, it would roll over back to 0, causing the enemies to disengage the tank and target whomever was the second-highest. In an MMORPG, this is a huge no-no that would most certainly lead to a wipe. - Overflow errors are common enough in older Final Fantasy titles that the Final Fantasy Wiki has a page listing them. - In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, a conversation option with your Wookiee teammate Hanharr allows you to break his will, reducing his Intelligence stat in exchange for a Strength increase. A Good Bad Bug left over from the game's Troubled Production lets you do this repeatedly, eventually sending him past zero and raising his Intelligence to the maximum possible value. - The Logomancer: In the RPGMaker.net version, defeating a Watcher of the Abyss underflows the Regret stat. This is changed to just being set to 0, in the Steam version. - A Game Mod for Pathfinder: Kingmaker raises the game's Absurdly Low Level Cap to 29 from 20. Reaching level 29 requires over 2 billion XP, note : There isn't enough available XP in the game to do this: the time limits on the main storyline quests discourage excessive level-grinding, capping the de facto maximum level around 24. and the notes for the mod state that a level cap of 30 would have an XP requirement higher than the 2.15 billion limit of a signed 32-bit integer. - In Persona games with social stats (at least confirmed for Persona 5 by modders), social stats have no hard cap even if the Player Character has reached max rank, meaning the value keeps increasing for every action that rewards points for that social stat (to be fair the values themselves are invisible outside of modifications, so most players do not know this). This keeps going until it reaches 32,767, at which point the stat ends up negative, resetting the stat's rank to 1. note : Restoring it to the initial number from such a state takes 32,768 points. Considering the absurdly high number for this effect, a player either had to mess around with the game code, or chain New Game Plus playthroughs an insane number of times to see it. - Pokémon: - The chance of a move's secondary effect activating is stored in one byte, so if it somehow reaches 256%, it'll be treated as 0%, and so on. This does not apply to the move's accuracy itself; "100%" accurate moves can miss in the first-generation main series games (but not Pokémon Stadium), though that's an off-by-one error, not an overflow. * : Specifically, the game generates a number from 0-255 and checks if it's below a certain cutoff. 255 is not less than any numbers in that range, so it will always generate a miss. - In the first two generations, the amount of experience each Pokémon needed to reach a specific level was determined by a formula. For a very specific subset of species, the value for a level 1 Pokémon was negative, so its experience value would underflow and it would be treated as level 100 * : technically level 245, but the game separately caps the value of "level" at 100. So if you're ever wondering why Pokémon Eggs hatched at level 5 before Generation IV, this is why. - In Pokémon Red and Blue, Missingno. will always be at an absurdly high level due to the nature of the variables being read - namely, the characters in the player's name, which will always have a hexadecimal value above 100, the normal Cap. Attempting to level up your level 255 Missingno. with a Rare Candy, however, will reset its level to 0, and attempting to train it at "legal" levels past this will prove difficult because without the advanced level multipliers, it's quickly found out the hard way that it has the 6th lowest base stat total of all Generation 1 Pokémon, only being beaten out by Magikarp and the not-fully-evolved bugs. - In Generation I, if a Pokémon has 255 or 511 HP, any attempts to use self-healing moves like Recovery and Softboiled will fail. - Pokémon Gold and Silver: - the Thick Club held item can increase Marowak's Attack past 1023 (2^10-1), causing it to roll over to 0 and deal minimal damage. - If attempting to catch a wild Pokémon with more than 341 maximum HP, the game glitches out because the capture formula assumes HP3 is supposed to be greater than HP. This can't happen without cheating, but if you're unlucky enough to be playing a ROM hack which spawns something with 342 HP, have fun reverting to your last save. - In Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, attempting to sell 256 of an item gives you no money, because the game thinks you're selling 0 of that item. The only items stackable this high are Berries. - Pokémon Diamond and Pearl* introduced the move Trick Room, which is supposed to invert Speed order. However, from Pokémon Black and White onwards, if a Pokémon has 1809 or more effective Speed, it still moves first. Explanation : This is the result of an integer not overflowing when it should, as the game subtracts Speed from 10,000 and doesn't expect it to be less than 8192 (2^13). A Pokémon with 1808 Speed is set to 8192 which overflows to 0, but a Pokémon with 1809 Speed is set to 8191 which doesn't overflow. - Pokémon Sword and Shield has \|\|Eternamax Eternatus\|\|, an unplayable Pokémon with base Defense (and Special Defense) of 255, and thus a maximum of 658 in those stats if hacked into the party. Because the game multiplies the stat by 100 during certain calculations, and 65,800 > 65,535, it overflows into a ridiculously small Defense stat making it an unintentional Glass Cannon — or, if the stat is 656, it rolls over exactly to 0 when truncated, causing a Divide by Zero error which the game parses as "opposing attacks have zero power"! - This is done In-Universe in Super Paper Mario when Dimentio brings the heroes to a dimension of his own design that multiplies his powers 257-fold. Because of the overflow, his strength is reset. Not that it mattered; it also strengthened the heroes as well. - In Wild ARMs, there's an infinite item glitch where if the first two characters each use up one expendable item, then an item with quantity 1 is swapped into the inventory slot of that expendable item by the third character, when the turn finishes the game will subtract 2 from the quantity of the swapped item, leaving you with -1 of that item, or in the game's mind, 255. - An early port of "Wizard's Castle" for Microsoft BASIC or QBASIC had the player's bankroll of gold pieces stored as an integer variable. Most players that survive long enough to find the Runestaff, and thence the Orb of Zot, usually do so with less than 65,536 gold pieces on hand. However, for hearty souls bent on a dungeon clearing, the game crashed on the 65,536th coin. Later updates changed this to a single-precision variable. - SimCity for the SNES had an integer underflow bug that could be triggered by tricking the budget screen into accepting to pay more money than you have for road/police/fire maintenance; money would then roll over to its capped value of $999,999. - Wii Sports: Your score in the minigame about returning tennis balls wraps around to 0 each time it goes over 255, but only when the game saves your score at the end. Proof here. - Final Fantasy Tactics has an infinite Job Point glitch that can be invoked by selecting a skill to learn, pressing Page Down, then confirming. If the skill under the cursor after the Page Down cost more Job Points than were available, the number was subtracted from the current number of Job Points, rolling it over negative and giving the player thousands of free job points instead. - In the Wide-Open Sandbox spaceship game Frontier: Elite II, distances between stars were calculated using 16-bit values. This meant that a star about 655.36 lightyears away was treated as being close to zero lightyears away for fuel purposes. With a bit of trigonometry, this meant it was possible for players to plot a course between any two stars using only two hyperspace jumps. The "feature" was removed in later versions. - Minecraft - One of the game's most well-known glitches, the Farlands, was caused by a stack overflow. In beta versions of the game, traveling to a coordinate larger than the 32-bit integer limit would break the code for world generation, resulting in the normal Minecraft terrain ending in a massive, vertical wall, with holes dotted around like Swiss cheese. - Java Edition counts days up to the 64-bit integer limit. Once it overflows, the day/night cycle actually breaks and visually runs in reverse, resulting in mobs spawning in broad daylight, zombies and skeletons burning as well as spiders becoming passive during the night, etc. Of course, the amount of time it would take to overflow that day counter is a Time Abyss. - Terraria has a few. - Exceeding the 32-bit integer limit for the amount of times a monster has been killed in a given world will cause it to overflow to the negative limit, the only consequence is that the banner every 50 kills will no longer be rewarded until the counter hits 50 again. - Through a rather complicated setup involving the jousting lance (a weapon which increases in damage the faster you're moving), it's possible to overflow the display on the DPS Meter, resulting in a negative DPS reading, this number can even wrap around to the positives again, which displays as an unusually low number. MappyGaming elaborates more on this. ## Examples in other media: - In one episode of Lupin III: Part 5, two guys build a safe that measures intelligence on a scale of 0-300 and can only be opened by someone whose intelligence is 0. Lupin's gang tries everything to lower Lupin's intelligence, but they can't get it low enough. Instead, Lupin eats lots of fish to increase his intelligence to 301, causing the safe to overflow back to 0 and open. - The Andromeda Strain: The pathologists analysing the disease run a computer simulation of the casualties that would result if the contagion ever Escaped from the Lab. After blossoming from population hubs in the United States and Canada, the screen blanked to a single number: 808. The technician informs them that 808 means the computer can't calculate contamination levels that huge. - Referenced in Strong Bad Email: "4 branches" when Strong Bad talks about Homestar's occasional Genius Ditz moments: Strong Bad: You know how in video games, if you get the super-duper high score, it eventually flips back to zero? Well, sometimes Homestar does something so stupid, he flips back to smart. - In Level 30 Psychiatry Dr. Gardevoir and Roll happen on a bottle of Champagne that was left open since her graduation, with Gardevoir commenting that it's probably turned into vinegar at this point. Turns out, it overflowed and turned back into a bunch of fresh grapes. Roll even refers to it as a 256=0 issue. - In Kid Radd, the title character's "Mega Radd" Charged Attack only charges up to a max value of 255 in his own game because it was 8-bit. \|\|But the game's programmer was lazy and didn't set an actual limit in his coding. This becomes a potentially major problem much later in the comic, long after Radd set foot outside his game\|\|. - xkcd: - A character gets thrown off by this while Counting Sheep, causing their mental image of the whole herd to stampede in the opposite direction. Whether it's a bigger problem to have one's brain throw an overflow error or to be awake even after 32,767 sheep (the limit of a signed 16-bit integer) is anyone's guess. - "Depth" features 32,767 angels dancing on the head of a pin — one more and they'd become 32,768 devils. - "Age Milestone Privileges" claims that when you turn 128 years old, your age overflows and you turn back into a baby. - The Millennium Bug was a defied example of this trope. Due to resource constraints, early programmers stored the "year" variable as a two-digit number; however, this meant that when the year 1999, stored as "99", became the year 2000, it would roll over as 1900 instead, potentially causing unintended operation. Fortunately, the attention called to the impending problem prompted tech companies to spend the money needed to upgrade any remaining affected systems before the year 2000 hit. - It was a long-standing myth that images in the GIF format could only hold up to 256 colors because of the limits of most earlier PCs' video cards. They can hold more, but it's generally considered bad practice to do so except in large-filesize environments. - Overflow errors aren't limited to numbers. Lots of software bugs and exploits use them, by sending a much larger chunk of data than is expected by the receiving software. Heartbleed is an overflow in reverse. One sends a very small piece of data to the server, and asks for a very large piece in return. - Many electronic scoreboards only have room for two digits, meaning in the event of a team reaching 100 or more points, the scoreboard will display "00" again, and it'll be up to the coach and audience to keep track of what the true score is. Of course, depending on the sport, that might be highly implausible (three digit scores in basketball are fairly common, but in soccer and hockey, it's not that unlikely for the combined score of both teams to still be in the single digits when the game ends). - In a 2015 Pennsylvania high school football game, the visiting Meadville Bulldogs defeated the Dubois Beavers by the otherworldly score of 107-90. Again, this was a football game. The scoreboard at the Dubois stadium could only handle double digits, so Meadville's final score was shown as "07" on the scoreboard◊. - On the very rare occasions where a cricket score has gone over 1000 runs in an innings, the same problem applies: cricket scoreboards do not run to four places. - The Therac-25, a machine built for radiation therapy, had one that killed people. In short, the machine recorded whether or not its hardware was in the correct rotation by incrementing an 8-bit variable, which flowed over on every 256th increment and bypassed the safety checks.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverflowError
You Can't Miss It - TV Tropes Often characters will give complicated directions and then act as though what they said is simple, often much to the annoyance of those trying to figure out what the character is talking about. This is not limited to travel directions though. Can also be used for other situations like cooking or computer assembly. When the actual phrase "You Can't Miss It" is used, the landmark or destination in question may be either easily missed, perhaps by taking a Wrong Turn at Albuquerque, or truly and tragically unmissable. Especially irritating for those with No Sense of Direction, or a Directionless Driver. Compare It Works Itself. ## Examples: - In one election ad for Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, there was a TV ad featuring a woman asking a neighbor for directions. After the neighbor gave overly complicated directions, the woman asked for some easier way and the suggestion was voting for Cesar Maia for Mayor. Note: That was the election where he won his first term as Mayor. - A 1960s Tang commercial, which aired during The Bugs Bunny Show, has Bugs tricking Yosemite Sam into abandoning his Tang by disguising himself as a prospector and giving him fake directions to gold. Bugs: Say, how come you're not over in Cactus Canyon? They just had a big gold strike there. Sam: Cactus Canyon?! Where's that? Bugs: Straight ahead to the third traffic light, then turn left. Ehh, you can't miss it. - In Soul Hunter, a hideously complicated aerial maneuver is called out (and part of it is the Konami Code "up up down down..."), but it pays off in the end because the guy giving the instructions was The Chessmaster. - A variation is done in Dragon Ball Z. During the Buu Arc, Super Buu appears at the Lookout to fight Gotenks. Knowing Goten and Trunks don't stand a chance, Piccolo has them go to the Chamber of Space and Time to train while he stalls for time. When Buu gets impatient and demands to fight now, Piccolo decides to take him to the Chamber, but purposely takes the longest most convoluted route imaginable to buy even more time. - Bert and I...: A common element of directions given to tourists. - "Which Way to Millinocket?" starts to describe several routes that involve things like "Just keep the river on your left." - "Directions" includes directions like "Two miles before the red schoolhouse, you take a left." - Dave Allen: "If you want to get there I wouldn't start from here." - From Jeff Foxworthy: "If the directions to your house include the phrase 'turn off the paved road', you might be a redneck." - A joke involves a guy asking for directions at a bar in the middle of nowhere, being told to turn left at a crossroads where there's a red pickup truck parked. And what if it's not there? Turn left anyway. - The Wolf and Twitchy in Hoodwinked! are contemplating how to get to Granny Puckett's house when Boingo shows up and offers directions: The Wolf: You know how to get there? Boingo: Oh, yeah. Yeah, in fact, I know a shortcut. The Wolf: [to Twitchy] You hear that? He knows a shortcut. Boingo: You go over the woods and through the river ... no, you don't wanna go through the river. You'll get all wet. The Wolf: You see, Twitchy, you get lemons, you make lemonade ... [cuts to the Wolf and Twitchy walking in ankle-deep water through a pitch-black tunnel; Twitchy turns on his camera light] The Wolf: ...and then that lemonade goes bitter, and ferments, and turns to pig-swill. Never trust a bunny with directions , Twitchy. Twitchy: Sure thing, boss! Never trust a bunny! - Madagascar: When Marty escapes from the Central Park Zoo and walks through New York, he asks a a police horse for directions to Grand Central Terminal. Horse: What you gotta do is go straight back down West 42nd. Marty: Uh-huh. Horse: It's on your left after Vanderbilt. Marty: Okay. Horse: If you hit the Chrysler Building, you've gone too far. Marty: Okay. Thanks a lot, officer. - And Now For Something Completely Different featured a different extension to the Hungarian Phrase Book sketch. "Can you direct me to the railway station?" is translated in an incriminating phrase book as "Please fondle my buttocks." As a Hungarian in London approaches a civilian: Hungarian: ( using book) Please fondle my buttocks. Civilian: Ah. It's past the post office, down two hundred yards then left at the light. - The Borrowers: The greedy Ocious P. Potter rudely demands the city hall receptionist for directions to the demolition department and she replies by giving him a lot of complicated instructions, ending with "walk quickly." Later on, Pete Lender politely asks for the same thing and this time she says "Take the elevator to the top and walk straight ahead — you can't miss it." - This is Spın̈al Tap: the guys get lost backstage and ask a janitor for directions to the stage. Following his directions only lead them back to the same janitor. - From The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra: "Stay on this road here, past Dead Man's Curve, you'll come to an old fence, called The Devil's Fence. From there, go on foot till you come to a valley known as The Cathedral Of Lost Soap. Smack in the center is what they call Forgetful Milkman's Quadrangle. Stay right on The Path Of Staring Skulls and you come to a place called Death Clearing. Cabin's right there, can't miss it." - From The Dish: Al: The prime receiving station has no idea where Apollo XI is? Glenn: Yeah, it's on its way to the Moon. - Later, they realize that this is the correct answer: if the spaceship was on its way to the Moon, with only a few thousand miles to go, it would be within a few degrees of the Moon in the sky. - The phrase is used in From Dusk Till Dawn, when the elder Gecko brother is giving the minister instructions on how to get to the Titty Twister, ending with, "From what I understand, you can't miss it." It ends with a Gilligan Cut to the establishment, which includes a 30 foot neon picture of a naked woman, and bikers riding around in front of it so, yeah, sorta hard to miss. - In Funny Farm, the movers get lost trying to find the main characters' new house. A local gives them directions that only a local would understand, including instructions to turn where landmarks used to be. They arrive a day late and pissed off. - The Case Of The Mukkinese Battle Horn opens with a thick London fog. But the narrator cheerfully points out that even in the thickest of fogs, there are some landmarks you just can't miss. Like Nelson's column, for example. sound of car crashing "You see? There's someone not missing it now!" - In Red Sonja, directions to find Queen Gedren's castle include "Straight north from here. You can't miss it. But it's worth a try." - In The Final Frontier when asked how to get to Turboshaft 3, Scotty gives Kirk, Spock, and McCoy directions that end with Scotty telling them they can't miss the Turboshaft. Scotty: Straight down that tunnel to the hydro vent and turn right, then left at the blowscreen. You can't miss it. - Erma Bombeck once wrote a joke about asking a gas station attendant directions on how to get to a baseball field. The guy starts into the complicated turn left turn right you've gone too far, only to have her say that they're already at the last landmark. The guy says that's cause she's here already, the baseball field is behind the station. What a wisenheimer. - The Curse of the Blue Figurine: Referenced in the sequel The Drum, the Doll and the Zombie, when a very frustrated Professor Childermass has just gotten a set of directions from a gas station attendant and pre-empts the expected line with "Don't you dare tell me I can't miss it!" - Parodied in Dave Barry Slept Here, in which the old route from Europe to the East is described: "cross the Alps on foot, then take a sailing ship across the Mediterranean to Egypt, then take a camel across the desert, then take another sailing ship back across the Mediterranean, then change to the IRT Number 6 Local as far as 104th Street, and then ask directions." - The Discworld Mapp explains that navigating by asking people where you are never works. Either the person isn't from around here, despite the fact they are walking a dog, or they know where they are in such detail that they can't pass this information on in any useful form: "turn where you get to where the boot factory used to be, no, tell you what, it'll save you some time, go along where the viaduct was, you can't miss it, then turn right only it's really straight ahead, and kind of jiggle past the main road and ... no, I tell a lie, what you do is, you go back down here until you get to where you can see the old hospital was, only you can't no more 'cos they've taken the sign away, and..." - Mr. Tyler from Good Omens gives directions like this, complete with tangents aggravated by his self-righteous tendencies. Mr. Tyler: You go back down that road for half a mile, then first left, it's in a deplorable state of disrepair I'm afraid, I've written numerous letters to the council about it, are you civil servants or civil masters, that's what I asked them, after all, who pays your wages? then second right, only it's not exactly right, it's on the left but you'll find it bends round toward the right eventually, it's signposted Porrit's Lane, but of course it isn't Porrit's Lane, you look at the ordinance survey map, you'll see, it's simply the eastern end of Forest Hill Lane, you'll come out in the village, now you go past the Bull and Fiddle that's a public house then when you get to the church (I have pointed out to the people who compile the ordinance survey map that it's a church with a spire, not a church with a tower, indeed I have written to the Tadfield Advertiser, suggesting they mount a local campaign to get the map corrected, and I have every hope that once these people realize with whom they are dealing you'll see a hasty U-turn from them) then you'll get to a crossroads, now, you go straight across that crossroads and you'll immediately come to a second crossroads, now, you can take either the left-hand fork or go straight on, either way you'll arrive at the air base (although the left-hand fork is almost a tenth of a mile shorter) and you can't miss it. - In The Hollows novel A Fistful of Charms, Rachel is in a small town and is given directions to the local magic store that includes such useful landmarks as "the church that burned down two years ago". - The Squire's Tales: One of Gerald Morris's books has the heroes ask a random couple for directions. The couple mentions things like "the swamp where Betty's horse almost drowned," and "The tree that was cut down after it was struck by lightning" before they start arguing about whether someone's son broke his arm before or after they painted their barn, and the protagonists leave in disgust. - Doctor Who: - "The Unquiet Dead": The Doctor: There's a wardrobe through there. First left, second right, third on the left, go straight ahead, under the stairs, past the bins, it's the fifth door on your left. Hurry up! - In "Daleks in Manhattan", when Martha and the Doctor volunteer to do a tunnel clearing project in the sewers for Mr. Diagoras, Diagoras says, "Turn left. Go about a half a mile. Follow tunnel 273. The fall's right ahead of you. You can't miss it." Of course, there is no tunnel collapse it's a ruse invented to lure more Hooverville residents into a position to be captured and converted into Dalek-Human hybrids. - Also happens in the Adventure Game "TARDIS", when the Doctor tries to direct Amy to the Drawing Room. Supposedly, it's "half a mile down the corridor, left, then right, then right again, then the third right, past a weird swirly thing, left, then the other left, through the sun room, past a green door, right, along a wall until it becomes slimey, down a lift to the third floor and straight ahead." - A set of instructions for getting from the Hekawi Indian camp to Fort Courage on F Troop once included (approximately): "Turn left at the big rock that looks like a bear. Then turn right at the big bear that looks like a rock." - In How I Met Your Mother, Lilly gets annoyed that Barney can't get the twenty or so steps to make some oragami figures. - Subverted on Little Britain: Ray McCooney: Oh, we're easy to find. When you see the hanging tree, take a left. When you come to the old well, take a right. If ye pass the scarecrow, YE'VE COME TO FAR!... Yeah that's right, opposite IKEA. - Married... with Children: Al went to a shop and found it closed. When he asked a passerby where to find her, he gave a complicated set of instructions and Al asked if he could simply go to the other side of the street. The passerby explained he needed a ride. - Monty Python's Flying Circus: Chris Quinn/Michael Ellis: Oh, where do I go to complain? Lift Operator: Straight on, then left, then right past the thing, then up the little stairs, then right past the bit where it's gone all soft, down the wobbly bit, left past the nail, past the brown stain on the wall to your right, and it's the door marked "exit" straight ahead of you on the left. - One episode of NCIS had Torres and Bishop following a set of these to find a criminal's hideout, only to get captured. The rest of the team then has to track down the person who gave them the directions, so they can get a copy to find them, and try to follow them themselves. In the end, what allows the team to find them was realizing that something Torres said before they lost cell connectivity indicated that they were in a registered historical building, of which there were very few in the area, allowing them to just look up the address. - One Saturday Night Live sketch from 1992 was a game show called "What's The Best Way?" where New Englanders had to give directions from location to location (Like Quincy, Massachusetts to the the Jordan Marsh department store in Bedford, New Hampshire) and answered questions about the route (Example: Hartford to Sturbridge, how many Dunkin' Donuts along the way? Answer: \|\|Fourteen, four of them with drive thrus.\|\|) - In Top Gear, the cast used a navigation service to plot a route between 2 towns without using the major highway. The route they got was ridiculously long, and including going through Cork in Ireland and going through France. Then they printed up the directions. - The opening number of the musical Plain And Fancy, which is actually titled "You Can't Miss It," has Pennsylvanians offering the main characters confusing directions that might or might not take them to the Amish village of Bird-in-Hand. Girl: There's a shortcut no one knows about Down a back road no one uses, Past a gatehouse no one's living in, Cross a drawbridge out of order, By the long way takes an hour; This'll cut off near a third of it! Ruth: And that leads us into Bird-in-Hand? Girl: Bird-in-Hand? I never heard of it! - The mapmaker gives you directions like this in a delivery mission in The Longest Journey. - In Quest for Glory II, before you can buy a map of the city (which allows you to instantly teleport to any location you've been to before, and navigate the confusing maze of alleyways to anywhere new you need to get), you need to get your money changed to the local currency. The map-seller is happy to give you directions to the money-changer... directions that require note-taking and extreme care to follow correctly. - Inverted in Dungeon Siege . When Legion Overseer Ibsen Yamas gives the quest to reinforce Fortress Kroth, he says "Just follow your nose through the ice cave and you'll get there soon enough." However, after the ice cave, the player and the party must fight through a crystal cave, a forest full of bandits, a zombie-infested swamp, a steampunk underground Goblin fortress, rid a difficult waterlogged dungeon of enemies, clear some Temple Ruins of floating skeletons and beholders, and finally emerge in a scrubland... only to find your path to Fortress Kroth blocked by the Necromancer Gresh. Once he is dead, his barriers disappear and the fort is open. - From Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko and Heffer ask directions to Flem Rock from a country bumpkin, who proceeds to give rambling directions, then gets sidetracked telling an anecdote about a friend of his: Bumpkin: Flem Rock? Well... first you gotta go back 5 or 10 Miles till you get to big purple shed with Rufus painted on the side. You take the dirt road just past that shed. Don't go to far, just a little bit past it. If you see another shed with Chaka Khan painted on the side then you've gone too far. - The Looney Tunes short "There Auto Be a Law" had a Running Gag of a man in a complicated overpass asking a hamburger stand attendant for directions to the main road. The attendant keeps giving him different directions, ending each time with "you can't miss". At the end of the cartoon, the attendant confesses that he doesn't know how to get out of the overpass, and that he opened the stand to keep from starving to death. The man ends up opening a hotdog stand right beside the attendant. - In the Danger Mouse episode "Custard", Danger Mouse is searching space for a custard-eating alien that can help thwart Baron Greenback's plot to flood the world with custard, and asks another alien for directions. The alien obligingly gives him complicated directions, complete with seemingly-random pointing and obscure landmarks ("...turn left at the planet with the little pink rocks and the shops that close on Thursdays..."). - Squidbillies: Early's incomprehensible directions to the pizza guy. "No, I said left at the BIG stump! I know you think that's a big stump, but there's a bigger'un comin' down the road!" - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Where the Apple Lies", Applejack gives deliberately vague and complicated directions to Filthy Rich and Spoiled Milk when they're looking for Granny Smith's room in the hospital, ending with "Easy as Granny's apple pie." Naturally, they get lost. - The Ant and the Aardvark: "Technology Phooey" has the Aardvark building a computer to help him find an ant. Computer: ( imitating Paul Lynde) Oh, boy. Have I got an ant for you. Aardvark: That's good. Where is he? Quick. Tell me! Computer: Straight ahead, one mile. You can't miss it. ( Paul Lynde-ish laugh) - The Fairly OddParents!: In "Power Pals", Timmy's friends help him get rid of the Power Pals by sending them fake distress message, under the guise of an alien race under attack, so they can leave Earth in their ship. Super Sam: Where does this battle take place, strange alien visitor? A.J.: You can't miss it. Take a left at the Andromeda Galaxy, and we're the third red sun on the left. Oh, and if you hit the Milky Way, you've gone too far. - Google suggests you swim across the Atlantic Ocean. If going between China and Japan, it suggests you jet ski the Pacific. - The "giving directions by where things used to be" thing is not uncommon in small towns everywhere. Everybody knows where the grocery store / highschool / police station used to be. - Never try to navigate Oakland, CA at street level using a GPS device. - In extremely rural areas, directions tend to use things like barns, silos and unusual trees as markers. This is more a matter of necessity than any desire to be mean on the part of the direction-giver — there simply aren't that many other landmarks that can be used and roads are often poorly marked. - Georgia residents have, as a sort of state-wide In-Joke, the phrase "If you see the Big Chicken, you've gone too far." The Big Chicken, incidentally, is a KFC made to look like, well... - Ski resorts fall victim to this trope when it comes to trying to get from one spot of a mountain to another. Bigger ski resorts, in particular big Colorado ski resorts like Vail, Breckenridge, Keystone, Snowmass, Steamboat, and Winter Park can fall victim to this, as there can be spots where you have to rely on geographical landmarks to get your bearings, as trail signs are sparse. Sometimes, the locations of chairlifts can be used as a guide in places where trees are sparse.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyComplicatedDirections
Overused Running Gag - TV Tropes "It's a running gag... well, it's limping a bit by now." When the writers openly acknowledge that a Running Gag has run its due course, even as they are hauling it out again gain gain gain *WHACK* There we go. Anyhow, the use of a Running Gag is generally constrained over the course of one episode. But there are some jokes that the writers thought are just so funny that they should be used in another episode, and another, and another and another. Even if it isn't Once per Episode, it's still squeezed into the series wherever they see fit fit fit fit fit *THUMP* Okay. After a while, though, the writers will come to realize that the bit has started to peter out. Then one can be sure to start seeing plenty of Lampshade Hanging and heavy subversion in the effort to keep the joke fresh, or tolerated. Once that wears thin, one can expect the bit to be dropped like a Christmas ham ham ham ham ham *SMACK* Okay, that joke's really wearing thin. Before we continue, let's get that audio equipment fixed. One hour later.... There, fixed. Anyhow, for this to be a trope, examples should not be subjective. They should be based on whether the writers have reacted to its overuse (lampshaded or used it less), rather than just a feeling that the gag has been used too much. The inevitable fate of many a comedy Catchphrase. Commonly confused with Overly-Long Gag, which is when a single gag is stretched out for an irritatingly long time. That said, for any joke, good or bad, enough repetition can make people decide it's an Overused Running Gag. The next step after this is Running Gagged, where the joke is terminated with extreme prejudice, once and for all. Or until they bring it back. Compare Didn't We Use This Joke Already?, when it's not a running gag, but still the writers are apologising for redoing the same joke. Also compare Discredited Meme, which this often leads to to to to to *WHUMP* Okay, if it does that again, that audio equipment is gonna get a dose of C-4. Note: This is for In-Universe Examples Only. Do not use this trope to Complain About Running Gags You Don't Like. ## Examples of Acknowledged Overused Running Gags - In a meta example, Bakuman。 featured the main characters working on a light-hearted comedy manga, but only a bit more than 10 chapters in, they're already making entire chapters based on the running gag of the main character saying "I dunno about that." This serves as one of the signs that this isn't the right sort of series for them. - In CLANNAD, Okazaki attempts to make Kotomi more social by bringing her to new people and telling her to introduce herself, at which point she always turns around and introduces herself to Okazaki. The third time this occurs, Okazaki remarks that that particular gag is getting old. - In Case Closed, Conan has to usually sedate someone then impersonate them using his voice changer to give his deduction at the end of almost every case. Kogoro (his most frequent target) almost catches on, that at one point when Conan speaks in his voice before Kogoro gets tranqed, the latter frantically feels himself around his face since he remarks that that should be around the time he feels a prick (the tranquilizer dart) in or around his neck; Conan shot him in the forehead instead. And Kogoro still comments on it before falling asleep, since he was also hit there before. - In Negima! Magister Negi Magi there was a running gag throughout the Mahorafest arc of Takane always getting stripped, four times in total, largely because she used magical clothing that stopped working if she was knocked unconscious. When she reappears in the Magic World arc she forces several girls to wear it as well because it increases defense, so \|\|when attacking the Cosmo Entelechia stronghold\|\| you can see the only one who knows about that and has to wear it herself nearly in tears. Contrary to all expectations, not one of them gets stripped this time. - Pokémon: The Series: - Brock flirting with any older female he sees, before being hauled away by Misty/Max (by the ear), Bonsly (using Double-Edge) and Croagunk (getting Poison Jabbed in the ass). It's acknowledged in-universe by his companions (and even antagonists Team Rocket) occasionally getting annoyed at his antics. It was funny the first three times, then it just became old. For Croagunk's bit, it's a minor Running Gag in of itself for Dawn to get caught completely surprised whenever Brock makes an instant recovery. - Making fun of Meowth's tendency for the bizarre Imagine Spots, mostly from the other members of Team Rocket. - Mispronouncing Bill and Stafan...er, Team Rocket's Butch and Best Wishes' Stephan's names. Both characters frequently mention that they're going to change their names after several characters get them wrong. - Nurse Joy, Officer Jenny, and Don George, of whom there's a seemingly infinite number of them in every town found, all going by the same name and all looking alike; frequently it was pointed out by the protagonists who found this just straight up bizarre in each of their earliest encounters, with Brock being the only one to spot any sort of difference among all the Joys or Jennys in his womanizing ways. - For a gag that's been on for far much longer than Brock's flirting, the Team Rocket motto. To date it has been lampshaded, parodied, plagiarized, exploited, and made fun of not just by the Rockets' eternal prey the "twerps", but even some of the one-shot characters! - Clemont and his inventions which, as his little sister Bonnie points out many times, have dumb names and tend to explode for no good reason. - And then Bonnie pulls a gag similar to Brock's by asking older girls to "take care of" (i.e. marry) Clemont, leading him to scold her and drag her away. - In Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, during an episode explaining many of the series' jokes to newer audiences, the audience member asks about the background running gags. "It's like something we do Once per Episode." "What's funny about that?" - In the first two The Swan Princess movies, Puffin says, "No Fear!", so many times, Jean-Bob finally grabs Puffin's beak shut and threatens to tear it off if he says it again. - By the third movie Austin Powers in Goldmember, the running gag of several witnesses likening a flying object to a naughty body part was called out by Ozzy Osbourne, watching it on TV with his family. - Dave Barry often has Overused Running Gags in books which aren't merely recycled columns: - "No! Sorry! That's it for the Hawley-Smoot tariff, you have our word." ( Dave Barry Slept Here, which nevertheless references it in three subsequent chapters). - "Do you think we've had enough Winston Churchill jokes? Explain." (also Dave Barry Slept Here) - "Do you think the author will eventually grow tired of the Buffalo Bob joke? Why not?" ( Dave Barry Turns 50) - "If you think we're getting tired of the zucchini joke, you had best think again." ( Dave Barry Hits Below The Beltway) - Robert Rankin often makes jokes about this, such as characters observing that something isn't going to become a running gag, or that it's not a particularly good one. - The Mary Tyler Moore Show: It had a running gag that Mary threw the worst parties. Every time she had a party something always happened to ruin it. Near the end of the series, they put together a flashback episode, the first and only time they used that gimmick, about Marys parties. The guests reminisced about past parties while waiting for guest of honor Johnny Carson to arrive. Marys building had a blackout. Johnny showed up. We heard him but never saw him, to great comedic effect. - The Man Show had a "Museum of Annoying Guys", and one of them was the Real Life version of this trope. "It's the beat a Catchphrase to death guy." - The Rita Moreno episode (#5 of season 1) of The Muppet Show features an old-style phone backstage. When it rings, Fozzie answers it, and something comes out of the receiver related to who's calling. At the fifth call, Kermit gets fed up and asks, "Is there no end to this Running Gag?"; then Animal comes in and puts an end to it (as well as to incoming calls, unless someone thinks to call the number for the phone on the desk). - In the 2000 The Invisible Man TV series, Darien Fawkes would greet each worsening situation with "Oh, Crap!" in a resigned manner. Eventually, the characters find it annoying. By the second season, there are lampshades; for instance, it's the only thing he remembers about himself when he gets Laser-Guided Amnesia, forcing him to use it to tell who his friends are. - Parodied in The State. Under pressure to create more catchphrase-driven characters like Saturday Night Live, the writers created "Louie, the guy who says his catchphrase over and over again." The character would repeatedly ask for volunteers to present him with a substance and then loudly announce, "I wanna dip my balls in it!" while holding up two golf balls. The Only Sane Man in the sketch can't understand why the gag never gets old to any of the other characters. Ironically, the character proved popular and was brought back a few times. - Hannah Montana's tendency towards zany schemes is noted, repeatedly, by Lilly, who eventually gets fed up at never being asked to just sit down and have breakfast but constantly being roped into Miley's schemes. On Wizards of Waverly Place, Harper tends to think similarly about Alex Russo. Same for The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and Zack roping Cody into schemes. - Raven's schemes in That's So Raven almost always involve costumes. In one episode, she learns Chelsea is doing something at school and plans to dress up as a janitor "with a mustache" to snoop around and find out why. Eddie points out that she can just ask Chelsea, and Raven gets offended that he doesn't understand her at all. Raven eventually decides to snoop around without the janitor disguise, but she still winds up wearing a mustache. - iCarly: T-Bo's food on stick gag (capsicums, chicken, doughnuts, etc) is put up with a couple of times, and now every time it's brought up he is forcefully rejected by the other characters. - Everything Spencer touches catching on fire, no matter how hard he tries to avoid it. When it happens in the Grand Finale, Spencer just looks at the item with a bemused "Of course you burst into flames." expression on his face. - Friends had Ross's running joke "We were on a break!" Despite being called out on it, this saw usage right up until the very last episode. Additionally, Joey's Catchphrase "How you doin'?" saw a few lampshades. - The IT Crowd has Roy answer the phone almost every time with the line, "Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?" However, early in the second season he interrupts his signature line with, "I'm sick of saying that. What do you want?" From that point on he never again utters that catchphrase \|\|until he brings it back in the fourth\|\|. - One episode has Jen bet him he cannot go an entire day without saying it. He loses. - And in another episode, his phone is hooked up to a tape machine that plays a recording of him saying the catchphrase when someone calls. - Of course, this is a joke about how this is often some of the first advice you'll be given if you're having trouble with your computer. - In the film Escape 2000, there is a scene at the beginning where the phrase "leave the Bronx" is repeated constantly. Mike and the Bots naturally turn this into a Running Gag, with Servo even singing the phrase repeatedly along to the music at the end credits. But when the movie is over and Mike tries to make the joke again, Crow tells him that it's not funny any more. - Stargate SG-1 had a habit of making Who's on First? jokes using the Goa'uld System Lord Yu. When Elizabeth Weir tried to get in on it, she was stopped by Daniel. Daniel: Don't. Every joke, every pun, done to death. - My Wife and Kids introduced Michael's catchphrase "Eh... No." in the second season, which he used to troll the kids by giving them hope he would say yes to them before ultimately rejecting them. It was used so often in the second season alone that he began finding increasingly idiotic ways to drag out the "Eh..." part of the catchphrase, such as running up & down the hallway several times whilst saying it before jumping back into the room & saying no, that it made no sense that his kids continued to get their hopes up that he'd say yes years later. - Community: The show had paintball episodes in the first & second seasons. The third season had the characters commenting on how played out paintball was at that point, and everyone agreed they shouldn't have another paintball game... Only for the fourth season to end on another paintball game. Abed even says that they "finally found a way to make paintball cool again." - Monty Python's Flying Circus did this on a number of occasions - One of their running gags was to cut from a sketch to stock footage of the Women's Institute applauding. In one sketch at the end of the second series, a judge in a sketch threatening to clear the court room if the stock footage was shown again. - Another running gag was to end a sketch by having a policeman come in to arrest someone. In the third series a policeman came on and arrested the entire show for overusing this gag — and then he was arrested by another policeman for the same reason. - Movie buff Cisco from The Flash (2014) has time and again compared the odd things that he and the rest of Team Flash tackles to the movies he saw, making at least one Shout-Out per episode. Joe, usually the Only Sane Man of the team and just as versed in movies as Cisco was, eventually tires of it at one point. "You and your movies." - On Star Trek: The Original Series, Dr. McCoy has expressed annoyance with Spock's Catchphrase "Fascinating". McCoy: Please, Spock, do me a favor and don't say it's "fascinating". Spock: No, but it is...interesting. (McCoy rolls his eyes) - Paul F. Tompkins' album Impersonal contains a short routine ("Cherry Picking") that quickly turns from the concept of a "migrant farm worker fantasy camp" into a meta exercise in seeing how long the gag can play out. Randy: Thanks a lot, Mr. Guerrero. Hey, uh, quick question — what's up with your accent? Jesus Guerrero: Ho! It is not very good, is it? Not at all believable. Randy: No, it's kind of... kinda just sounds like you're a vampire or something. Jesus Guerrero: Oh, I know it sounds that way, but I am not! Please, Randy, do not worry that I'm going to feast on your blood to sustain my undead existence. I assure you, that is not going to happen. I am just a poorly drawn stereotype. Randy: You really are; you should probably stop. Jesus Guerrero: Oh, I know I should! And yet, I continue on, do I not? This should have ended a few minutes ago if you ask me, but I don't know — I just keep going until all the goodwill is exhausted by the crowd. Randy: I think we're probably there. Jesus Guerrero: Oh, I know, and yet here comes a few more minutes of this! Ho ho, boy! Believe me, Randy, no one is more aware than I that this has outworn its welcome. Randy: Why don't you just knock it off? Jesus Guerrero: Would that it were that easy, my friend. From your lips to God's ears, you know what I'm saying? Oh, Randy, the stories I could tell you of how long I have done this poor, borderline-offensive accent. - El Goonish Shive has used every possible permutation of the hammer and the demonic duck, and yet they just won't go away, even despite the author explicitly saying they will. - They haven't been seen in a while, so maybe he kept his word. A whole arc was spent on some of the characters going to see why the hammers have stopped working, which resulted in a canon explanation for why they're gone (and were there in the first place), and one character gaining the ability to use them as her personal magic spell (which she has yet to use). This was also the last time the Demonic Duck was seen. This was in 2010. - Ctrl+Alt+Del had the Running Gag where Ethan gets hit by an arrow from off panel (as a homage to The Kentucky Fried Movie). The author decided to end the gag after it became overused and played with its end by having the last arrow fired by Ethan and into the author himself as punishment for all the times he was hit. - A strip of The Order of the Stick has one person telling his teammates to stop screaming "SNEAK ATTACK"; after that, for the first time, someone reacts to them yelling and kills them before they can land the blow. - For added strangeness, the one being criticized for calling his attacks is a fighter that shouts "Power Attack", while the dozens of rogues in the fight are shouting "Sneak Attack" with no commentary. - PvP had a panda that would randomly attack Brent. The reasons behind these attacks were eventually explained in a rather long arc, and the gag died down considerably after that. - For a while, almost all the male characters in Sluggy Freelance joked among themselves that "monkeys" was Gwynn's pet name for her breasts. Since Gwynn owns several real monkeys, this gag came up a lot when she made innocent remarks like "My monkeys! They're gone!" or "Be on the lookout for my monkeys and grab them if you see them. They could pop up anywhere." Eventually, Riff got tired enough of the joke to reprimand himself for using it again. And then \|\|the monkeys got killed off\|\|. - At least one running gag in Bob and George (specifically, Wily getting overheard by someone standing just behind him) got this treatment. As early as the third iteration, it was acknowledged as an Overused Running Gag, and supposedly retired. And then it was brought out of retirement. And averted, inverted, inverted again, parodied (to the breaking point), double subverted, lampshaded, and...well, you get the idea. - Schlock Mercenary: In-Universe, this is what Tagon considers Shodan's continuing to bring up the accident during the Mall Cop Command arc where Tagon got a fork stuck in his eye. - Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff does this on purpose to go with the Stylistic Suck, outside the universe the fans reference SBAHJ endlessly and inside the Homestuck universe, where characters reference SBAHJ all too often. - In Square Root of Minus Garfield, this happened with the "Garfield (pun for Minus) Garfield" meme, also known as the "pudding pops" strips. Strip 268, "Garfield Linus Garfield", began this gag. Each strip in this gag editted Garfield strip 2001-11-28◊, by replacing the second panel's Garfield with Linus, Sinus, or anything that rhymes with "minus", or sounds a bit like "minus". Most of the strips kept a line about "pudding pops". Strip 478 lampshaded the gag but failed to stop the meme. Strip 518 provoked a forum thread that became strip 625, "Garfield Skynet Garfield: Judgement Day". This strip killed the Overused Running Gag; but the gag later returned to life, and now the admins limit new "pudding pops" strips to about one per month. - Girl Genius has what appears to be a running gag in the first couple of volumes, with multiple Jaegers all commenting on how good she smells to the point at which Agatha gets extremely angry at the next person who mentions a 'smell'. - Except for the fact that this is not just a running gag, but foreshadowing - all Jaegers have Undying Loyalty to the Heterodyne family, which comes along with a way of knowing who is and isn't a Heterodyne, including the voice, and the smell. Although the lower-ranked Jaegers just noticed the nice smell and didn't realise what it signified, the Generals and the detached Jaegers realised that Agatha was a Heterodyne very quickly. - South Park's "Oh My God, They Killed Kenny!" It gets old, gets lampshaded, subverted and eventually cut down severely in the later seasons. - Drawn Together is yet another example of the "regurgitate the same jokes over and over, then acknowledge how they've stopped being funny and continue using the jokes over and over again" tactic. - Find a Running Gag not lampshaded, inverted, or subverted on Phineas and Ferb. - Family Guy - The two vaudeville players Vern and Johnny, who appeared so often to fill the time before commercial breaks that Stewie killed them to assure the audience that they would never appear again. (They still came back... as ghosts). - Cleveland picked up a gag where Peter would destroy half his house while Cleveland was taking a bath, causing his tub to slide out of his (second-floor) bathroom and dump him in the yard. When Cleveland's first wife gets killed this way in The Cleveland Show, Cleveland feels survivor's guilt because, in his own words, he'd fallen out of that same house "way more times than could possibly still be funny." - "Believe it or Not, Joe's Walking on Air" pokes fun at itself for its constant use of a Cutaway Gag by having Cleveland complain about how he hates it when a show cuts away to some other bullcrap. Cue a Cutaway Gag showing Hitler riding a unicycle as he juggles fish. Later on, as the guys discover that Joe's new legs have turned him into a jerk and discuss "re-crippling" him, Peter says that "it's the right thing to do, like punching out Hitler." The show cuts back to the same gag as before, but Peter rushes in and punches out Hitler, saying "See? We had a plan for that all along." - In a cutaway gag where Quagmire thinks he's the one getting the spinoff, he mentions the two of the show's more infamous running gags. Quagmire : See ya later, bitches! Have fun with your stupid goddamn giant chicken jokes and your Conway Twitty Hey, why's there a moving truck outside Cleveland's house? - In a later episode Peter meets God who gives him a message from Conway Twitty himself telling them to stop. - The Simpsons: - Xiaolin Showdown: Omi and his butchering of idioms. At one point Raimundo (usually the one who "translates") eventually asked Omi if he's been doing them on purpose. It got to the point that the myriad reactions of other characters (especially the villains) towards them has become a Running Gag itself. Wuya (Arc Villain of Season 1): Can somebody PLEASE translate?! - Jackie Chan Adventures: The Once an Episode gag of Jackie telling Jade to not get involved with his missions, only for Jade to get involved anyway and Jackie to say something along the lines of "I told you to stay put!" Jade asked him on one occasion if he gets tired of saying that and Jackie himself sometimes questions why he even bothers. - The Smurfs (1981): - For most fans, the running gag where Brainy Smurf gets tossed out of the village for ruining a Smurf's day or simply speaking his mind is considered this. Season 9 made it clear the running gag was getting old and didn't make as much sense, with the Smurfs jumping to various time periods. - SpongeBob SquarePants: - In-Universe, in "Ripped Pants," when everyone finds it hilarious that SpongeBob ripped his pants, he starts finding creative ways to rip his pants and make people laugh. After the first three times, however, people start to get tired of it, the final straw being when SpongeBob pretends to drown as a lead-in to yet another variation of it. - The show now has its own version with Fred, the fish who says "My leg!" after an injury. He got A Day in the Limelight where whenever the words "My leg!", "Fred's leg!", or "Your leg" appear in conversation, they're screamed in the some way as the original gag; this happens no less than 40 times. A few episodes later, in "ChefBob", Fred shouts "My leg!" and Krabs just tells him to shut up. In "SpongeBob's Big Birthday Blowout", Plankton forces Fred to say the line, which he does in a deadpan tone. Despite these lampshades, the joke is still used unironically in later episodes, even making it onto The Patrick Star Show. - Throughout the Ben 10 franchise, Ben Tennyson often suffers from Power Incontinence, where the Omnitrix would transform him into a different alien than the one he wanted. Sometimes there would be entire episodes where Ben would be given the wrong alien, and it happened enough for Ben to comment his annoyance at the watch seemingly never getting it right, at one point even saying "it's not even funny anymore". Though this was justified early on due to the Omnitrix malfunctioning or somehow being broken, by the time of Ben 10: Omniverse the Omnitrix has been perfected and Ben only has himself to blame for getting the wrong alien. - The Fairly OddParents!: Episodes focusing on Catman after season 5 have Timmy actively dreading seeing him again. "9 Lives!" has him try to put a stop to Catman's superhero antics by convincing him he only has one of his nine lives left, and episodes like "Cat N Mouse" have Timmy reacting with fear or exasperation whenever Catman shows up, just wanting him to go away. The end end end end end *BOOM*	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlongRunningGag
Out-of-Character Alert - TV Tropes Bit the bullet there, Sonic. You could've brought back an imposter if you went with her word. Eizzil: So, how did you figure out I wasn't really your stupid girlfriend? Numbuh One: When I look into Lizzie's eyes, I can tell she's not a jerk . The inversion of Something Only They Would Say: When a character is pretending to be someone else, they may unwittingly reveal this by saying something that would be out-of-character for who they're impersonating. Variations include not responding to a well-known Berserk Button, doing things they're normally afraid of (or have a similar excuse for never doing), expressing hatred for a nickname they insist to be called by, or otherwise invoking O.O.C. Is Serious Business. A common variation in Japanese media is using the wrong pronoun. Often Invoked in kidnapping and I Have Your Wife scenarios, to let the heroes know that something is amiss. If the Big Bad is demanding a ransom, this is to alert them to the fact that it's a trap; if he wants the kidnapped to "assure" The Hero that the kidnapped is "in fact" okay, this is to secretly convey that they're not. Sometimes serves as a Quiet Cry for Help. If they've pre-arranged such an alert, this is a Covert Distress Code. Real-life military personnel sometimes use hand signals when being taped to communicate in another way with their 'home base'. There are a few documented cases of soldiers giving hand signals (and one case of them just flipping the bird to the camera) to alert the people receiving it that no, they weren't being treated very politely at all. And some have done it just for fun, giving the sign for coercion when forced to shake a politician's hand, for instance. Compare with Spotting the Thread, Lying Finger Cross (a common gesture used in this trope), Not Himself, Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping, and Trust Password (a pre-arranged alert to confirm one's identity and freedom of action). Contrast with Something Only They Would Say (in which a character is identified by a characteristic) and Bluff the Impostor. Sister Trope to You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious and Batman Grabs a Gun. See also O.O.C. Is Serious Business. ## Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> - In an early '70s TV commercial for the short-lived Cap'n Crunch variant Vanilly Crunch, the good captain's ship is approached by Wilma the Whale, the mascot for that cereal. After the captain does a description of the cereal, he shoots a cannon at the whale! Turns out that pirate Jean LaFoote (the "bad guy" in these ads) had disguised his now-sinking vessel as Wilma. Cap'n Crunch knew it because he described Vanilly Crunch and the whale didn't smile. - In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Mighty Little Defenders episode 51, when Weslie and Wolffy go to defeat General Wolf with the others, they notice that the elder goats Slowy, Blady, and Gogoa, as well as Wolnie and Wilie, all have doofier-looking faces than usual, and that Wolnie apparently prefers Wolffy stay a dog when not only has she consistently worked to get him back to his wolf self, she's allergic to dogs. \|\|The out-of-character elders, Wolnie, and Wilie are fakes - Darker has tricked Weslie and Wolffy into thinking they've woken up when they're actually still in his virtual reality world.\|\| - In the first episode of The Elysium Project, Ian figures out that the Jessica that he's talking to is actually Mirage when "she" accidentally gives away that she doesn't know about the rendezvous point that they had set up with the other escaped subjects. - In Big Finish Doctor Who play Intrusion Countermeasures: The Reesinger Process, Dr Allison Williams and Group-Captain Ian Gilmore are undercover in the eponymous interrogation training program, which is actually hypnotising people. When Gilmore gets sent out as a hypnotised assassin, the guy running the place (who has got the idea they're an item) tells Allison he's resting but he says he loves her. Allison is taken aback by this but decides it's probably military code for "everything's fine". - In one episode of Flash Gordon, Dale distinguishes the real Flash from an impostor when the fake announces that he loves her. In a bit of a twist, Flash (the real one) is visibly troubled by this. - Modesty Blaise: - When captured by terrorists and forced to call Modesty, Willie addresses her by name instead of calling her "Princess". She immediately packs her bags and comes to his rescue. - Modesty & Willie also repeatedly use a pre-arranged distress code throughout the series. If either of them drops the name "Jacqueline" into a communication, that's the cue to hit the panic button. - They also use "Bertha" as code for "I need a distraction". - Dan Dare: Captured by the Mekon and forced to broadcast a message to Earth, Digby claims he's having such a nice time it reminds him of a holiday he once had. His aunt realises he's referring to an occasion when he was wrongfully arrested and that he and Dan Dare are being held against their will. - In a nod to Star Trek, the Fighting Fantasy novel Starship Traveler has a part where you're captured by aliens and cloned, and the clone tries to impersonate you so the aliens can steal your ship. If you succeed on a roll, you can with great mental effort implant two things into the clone: an inability to lie, and the name of a certain sterile prison planet back in your own universe. When the clone tries to get your crew to beam down and get captured, he'll tell them that it's lovely down there, "as nice as [prison planet]". - In Dungeons & Dragons third edition, the Sense Motive skill can be used to notice when someone familiar is under the effect of an enchantment. With subtle enchantments (which the subject may not even be aware of), the difficulty is rather high; however with Dominate effects, which drastically reduce the range of actions of the victim, the check is much easier. - Fleuret Blanc provides an example of someone else setting up a person as out-of-character rather than acting out-of-character themselves: \|\|Junior\|\| tries to deflect blame for the anonymous text messages by pinning it on \|\|Le Neuvieme\|\| — but \|\|the messages are in English, and Le Neuvieme only speaks French\|\|. This allows you to figure out the real culprit. - Ace Attorney: - Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations: - Phoenix thinks this trope is in play in the first case when \|\|Dahlia Hawthorne starts acting all-around bitchy. After Mia revealed Dahlia to be a major Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, who only dated Phoenix to get a certain poison-filled necklace and tried to kill him when seduction failed, she didn't feel the need to pretend anymore\|\|. Phoenix, however, is still \|\|crazy in love with "Dollie"\|\| and, after the trial, claims that this \|\|Dahlia\|\| was a fake. \|\|In a way he's right. The girl he actually dated at the time was Dahlia's twin sister Iris, who really was a Nice Girl, while the Dahlia at the trial was the real Dahlia, who he'd only met when she gave him her necklace.\|\| - In the final case, \|\|when Iris starts acting like an Extreme Doormat and makes some Innocently Insensitive comments, it's a clue that Dahlia is impersonating her.\|\| Phoenix does notice that something's off, but since he met said person just two days earlier \|\|(or rather he thinks he did)\|\|, he doesn't connect the dots immediately. - Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Dual Destinies: The lawyers get quite suspicious when the very expressive \|\|Bobby Fulbright\|\| drops the ham and acts completely stoic during cross-examination, and Athena is soon able to confirm their suspicions by using her Mood Matrix on him \|\|and getting zero emotional readings, even when he was supposedly desperately thanking Blackquill for believing in his innocence\|\|. - In the Whateley Universe story "Test Tube Babies", team superboy Lancer is fighting a power mimic/shapeshifter who now looks like Lancer. One of them yells at a teammate with an anti-brick weapon to 'shoot both of us'. The teammate blasts that one senseless. Not only is the teammate savvy, but they have communicators they would really use instead. - Atop the Fourth Wall: - The meme "Evil [X] Be Like:" has famous people and characters saying the opposite version of their famous quotes or catchphrases, indicating they had turned against their original alignment. - In To Boldly Flee, The Nostalgia Chick and Oancitizen infiltrate Zod's ship disguised as his old friends, Ursa and Non. Unfortunately, Non is mute, and Oancitizen can't resist talking. And he really can't resist singing... - During the first episode of the Yellow Temperance mini-arc in Vaguely Recalling JoJo, Jotaro realizes that Kakyoin is a fake after witnessing Kakyoin in the act of devouring some beetles. Jotaro punches the fake Kakyoin in the face, which gets him to reveal himself as Rubber Soul. This is pretty much what happened in the arc it's parodying, oddly enough. It helped that Rubber Soul is a jackass who doesn't bother trying to mimic his target; he likes making them look like sudden assholes. - In No Evil, Ichabod and Paula reach Kitty's house late at night and find that she appears to have stopped in the middle of canning some pumpkins and not cleaned up. Ichabod is dismissive of Kitty's "carelessness"; Paula instantly realises that there's no way Kitty would have left in the middle of a task of her own free will, and starts looking for evidence of whoever abducted her. Cue a late-night visit to Mictlan Wood, where Paula punches her way through rather a lot of undead. - Sanders Sides: Deceit spends the majority of his debut episode pretending to be Patton. He does a scarily good job for the most part, though he slips up just enough to tip off the other Sides gradually (Pointing out when he does something Patton-like, trying to get Thomas to lie when the real Patton has always said lying is wrong, showing no signs of sadness at the idea of a dead hamster, calling Virgil "friendo" instead of "kiddo", etc.) Later, when he tries to impersonate Logan, he talks in idioms and that sets the alarms on Thomas and Patton who think that the real Logan wouldn't use them as he would take them literally. Ironically, Logan later proves that he does know some idioms too.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutOfCharacterAlert
Overkill - TV Tropes You can overkill lots of things. But here, overkill might refer to: If an internal link led you here, please change it to point to the specific article. Thanks!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Overkill
Overly Long Airplane Banner Gag - TV Tropes Getting someone's attention in this day and age is hard. One way to do it big, though, is with an airplane banner - a banner attached to an airplane that shows a message. Named after Overly-Long Gag, this is where the "gag" is that the "airplane banner" is "overly long", such that they need a second airplane to complete the thought. The second banner is sometimes only one or two words long. It's also possible to use this trope with paragraphs of skywriting. This can overlap with Cue Card Pause. ## Examples: - Described in a GEICO radio ad — the GEICO Gecko and the Boss read the banners as they go by. The Gecko thinks it's a bit much. - The notorious anti-smoking group Truth once put out a Public Service Announcement with an airplane flying along a beach, with a banner in tow asking about what additives are put in cigarettes. What follows is an entire fleet of additional planes with even more banners listing off dozens of the 599 additives that are evidently added to the tobacco. - An advert for Go Compare [an insurance comparison website] features the annoying Tenor attempting to secure his job despite the fact nobody likes him. He sets up one of these; only the website compares so much he needed another plane to finish the last word. It's about as funny as it sounds. - The Brothers Solomon has this gag, and wins for having the longest one ever. It goes beyond ridiculous, beyond Narm, and on into stupefied "I can't believe how long this is going on and on with redundant crap in an airline banner. This is stupid!". But, of course, the protagonists are clueless, and it is a comedy. It's an important part of plot twists before the finale. - This Red and Rover comic. - Family Guy: Neil sends a message to Meg via airplane banner. First plane: Meg, I am your destiny. Love, Neil. Also, have you seen my good pen? I feel like I loaned it to you in physics, but I haven't seen it in a Second plane: while. - The Simpsons: A land-based variation in Cape Feare: Sideshow Bob tries to claim there's no harm in lying in the middle of a public street (where he's stalking Bart), when a marching band followed by a parade of elephants comes by to prove him wrong. TERROR LAKE SALUTES HANNIBAL CROSSING THE ALPS	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyLongAirplaneBannerGag
Overlord Jr. - TV Tropes "I will not have a son. Although his laughably under-planned attempt to usurp power would easily fail, it would provide a fatal distraction at a crucial point in time." The male offspring (or nephew) of the bad guy. Their personality can vary a lot from sniveling wannabe who pushes his familial connections, a kid who idolizes his dad and is more mischievous than truly evil, a carbon copy of their dad, a spoiled Royal Brat, or a selfish scumbag who would kill his own dad to seize power. Could even be a "Well Done, Son" Guy. Why are these guys so evil? Is it because of Villainous Lineage, are they being loyal to their father... or do bad guys just make lousy parents? Often the ones who seek to avenge the villain and sometimes they'll come out of nowhere with no prior hint of their existence. Though it's not uncommon for them to show no concern whatsoever for the death of their parent. A Sister Trope to Daddy's Little Villain (the Distaff Counterpart to this). These characters differ from Mad Dictator's Handsome Son in that they almost never change sides and are often truly evil. Contrast Evil Parents Want Good Kids, where the son's evil may mark them as an Inadequate Inheritor to the father. ## Examples: - Code Geass. Schneizel fills this role, pitted against his exiled and rebellious half-brother Lelouch. - Pride in Fullmetal Alchemist. Somewhat of a subversion since he's actually over three centuries old, but he still sees himself as his father's loyal child. - Gihren Zabi of Mobile Suit Gundam is one of the nastiest versions of this trope, being much more dangerous than Degwin while lacking any human qualities his father his has. It culminates in Gihren \|\|killing and usurping Degwin when he tries to do something sensible and make peace\|\|. - Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ: Glemy Toto turns out to be \|\|either Gihren's illegitimate son or his clone. It's not entirely clear, but he definitely inherited a number of traits from him.\|\| - Freeza's son Kuriza in Neko Majin Z is a parody of this. Freeza himself was one to King Cold, with the twist that the son is the primary villain and we never even hear about his father until after Freeza's defeat. Cold retrieves and upgrades Freeza's body, only for them both to be curb-stomped by Future Trunks the minute they set foot on Earth. Just to rub salt in the wound, Goku would have teleported to Earth and done the exact same thing if Trunks hadn't shown up. - Also, the Piccolo in Dragon Ball Z started off as "Ma Junior", son of Demon King Piccolo in Dragon Ball. Though technically he's more of a reincarnation. - Garlic Jr also counts, even though we never see Garlic Sr except for one flashback. - Helmeppo, son of Axe hand Morgan in One Piece. He's a sniveling jerk who does whatever he likes as his dad controls the town. \|\|He eventually realizes his dad doesn't care about him and manages to do a HeelFace Turn\|\|. - Giovanni from Pokémon is one of these, but to his mother. She was the leader of Team Rocket, a Yakuza-like organisation that illegally hunts, steals, and smuggles Pokemon before he became the leader. - Ukyo of Samurai 7 starts out as the spoiled son of the wealthy merchant who owns the city to which our heroes come to recruit samurai to protect the village. Strange appearance, gentle voice, Royal Brat tendencies when not immediately satisfied. Lives a sybaritic lifestyle with a large kidnapped (but not unwilling) harem and is immune to repercussions for anything he does—until Kikuchiyo slices his car in half, provoking a meltdown and revenge for his first time feeling physically threatened. Or something. It's not for the car, anyway. - And then he turns out to be running an Evil Plan with assassinations and things to edge his father out and take over. And otherwise to have a mind and ambition. - And then he turns out to be adopted. Specifically, \|\|to be one of the Emperor's many clone-children, whom he scattered across the kingdom among peasants and merchants to see if that would produce a worthy heir since all the ones he raised at court were judged idiots. Ukyou, who was originally seeded into a village and clawed his way up, undergoes a lengthy test of his leadership abilities where he basically proves that he's a Magnificent Bastard. Emperor is very pleased and declares Ukyou his heir instead of killing him. Ukyou, naturally, murders daddy dearest that night. Thus, Emperor Ukyou becomes the final Big Bad after having been an early distraction kind of threat.\|\| - So basically, he's this twice, and Starscreams them both. - Prince Lotor/Sinclaine, son of the villain Zarkon/Daibazaal in Voltron/ GoLion goes under the greedy scumbag who hates his dad. However, in his first appearance, Lotor/Sincline got along quite well with his father and its only after he saw Princess Allura/Fala that things began going south between them. - The Amulet graphic novels give us Prince Trellis, whose dad clearly hated him from the day he was born, giving him a name like that. Said father is the evil elf king who's been despoiling the world for years since a huge magical power-up drove him insane, and he does not give a damn about his child. Faint shades of Royal Brat at first, mostly huge inferiority complex. - Trellis really wants to please his father, but his morals are increasingly a problem until after being informed his father has approved killing him if he keeps giving trouble, he turns traitor to help the main characters do a heroic thing. They do not actually notice that he did this, so the second book ends with Trellis completely alone on a hill, watching the heroes' house walk away. - Worth noting that these elves are sort of greyish with nasty sharp pointy teeth, and Trellis is about three times as human-looking by the end of his HeelFace Turn as he was early in the first book. - The Awesome Slapstick had Dr. Denton, Destroyer of Worlds, a five-year-old genius who built a giant robotic teddy bear. It's never shown if his parents were also Mad Scientists, but he does get chided for building robots indoors. - Flattop Jr in Dick Tracy. - Ezekiel Stane is the come out of nowhere variety. He took revenge on Iron Man for his father's death 20 years prior (real time). - Mongul in the DCU is the son of the original Mongul. He is also far, far, FAR worse; if his father was a Blood Knight douchebag with some genuine Magnificent Bastard moments, his son is an arrogant, manipulative, and depraved monster who kickstarted his career by punching his own sister's head off, and from there displayed some of the most consistently disgusting behavior short of Darkseid or Vandal Savage that the DCU has seen in a long time. \|\|Of course, he eventually fucks with Sinestro and meets some much-needed karmic retribution.\|\| - In a sort of odd reversal, in the 1990s New Gods series, Yuga Khan popped up outta nowhere. "Yuga Khan?" Um, yeah. He's Darkseid's father. He's so horrifically badass, Darkseid basically hid in the basement when Daddy returned until the latter managed to get himself imprisoned on the Source Wall. Again. It sort of makes Darkseid an Overlord Jr. by means of retcon. Never heard from again, of course. - Victor Von Fogg from PS238. - Sin City gives us the Yellow Bastard, the heir to the Roark crime/political family, who is appropriately enough named Junior. - Harry Osborn is the "Well Done, Son" Guy variety combined with a boatload of drugs and the mistaken belief that Spider-Man killed his dad. - Baron Helmut Zemo, the son of Baron Heinrich Zemo. - What Syndrome wanted to do with Baby Jack, the youngest son of The Incredibles. \|\|It didn't work because the baby manifests his shapeshifting powers while been snatched.\|\| - The Archer: Michael, the warden's son, also works in the reform camp and pretty much acts as his father's henchman. - Scott Evil and Mini-me to Dr Evil in Austin Powers. - In Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman, el Chinchinero has a son who he is training to follow in his footsteps as a Professional Killer. The son even wears a miniature version of el Chinchinero's outfit. At the end of the film, the son attempts to avenge his father by shooting the Machine Gun Woman. - The most famous aversion of all comes in The Empire Strikes Back: Vader : "Luke, you have not yet realized your importance. You have only begun to discover your power. Join me, and I will complete your training. And with our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict, and bring order to the galaxy... Luke, you can destroy The Emperor! He has foreseen this! It is your destiny! Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son. " - Iosef Tarasov for Russian crime boss Viggo Tarasov in John Wick. - Chris D'Amico (Red Mist) in Kick-Ass. - Special Female Force: It's revealed late in the film that the Big Bad terrorist known as "The President" has actually died years ago, and was replaced by his son who uses a latex mask resembling his late father's face to appear as his old man in public. - The Ballad of the White Horse has Harold, Guthrum's nephew. Unlike most other examples, he's stupid enough to be The Brute and thus the first of the major villains to die - in fact, the only named character to die before Book Six. - In Brilliance of the Moon, the third Tales of the Otori book, one of the main villains is Iida Nariaki, the nephew of Iida Sadamu, the Big Bad from the first book. - In The Chathrand Voyages, the Shaggat Ness has twin sons, Pithor and Erthalon, who are every bit as insane, idolize him and work hard to support his rule and later return (despite his habit of setting their clothes on fire while they're asleep). While the Shaggat is an Ax-Crazy maniac, however, the sons are more just weird, especially Erthalon, who thinks he's destined to be king of a colony of monkeys on a remote island. note : That's actual monkeys we're talking about, as in the animal, not a derogatory term for island natives. Yeah. - Kalarus Brencis Minoris in Codex Alera manages to be a snivelling wannabe, a spoiled brat, a selfish scumbag, and a "Well Done, Son" Guy all at once. His dad is shown to be abusive, but how well Brencis Jr. took to the bigotry, sexism, and pleasure in casual sadism, murder, and rape that his father taught him kills any hint of this being a Freudian Excuse. - Haplo of The Death Gate Cycle essentially starts out as this (yeah, he's not Lord Xar's biological son, but the two consistently frame their relationship as surrogate father/surrogate son and are about as close as an Evil Overlord and his Dragon can be), and Haplo does all he can to lay the groundwork across the multiverse for Xar's coming rule. However, as Haplo's Character Development gradually kicks in across the series, he begins to realize that maybe Xar is no longer the good lord Haplo believed him to be; following his HeelFace Turn, Haplo becomes Xar's enemy (albeit with much regret on both sides) though in the end \|\|Haplo willingly offers his life to Xar to prove that he still believes in him and that Xar's other adviser Sang-drax- a demonic entity in humanoid form- is their mutual enemy\|\|. Yeah, Haplo has a complicated relationship with his adopted father, and by extension this trope. - Dune has House Harkonnen this way. Headed by Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, human life is of little consequence to the Baron or his nephews, the brutish Glossu Rabban and Harkonnen's heir Feyd-Rautha. - Ironically, it's the Baron's grandson and granddaughter (whose relation to him was hidden, and who are also the children of his arch-enemy, who he tried to kill) and later great-grandson who actually become overlords, although the first is a subversion, the second is possessed, and the third is a Necessarily Evil Dark Messiah. - In the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Antorell, the son of head wizard Zemenar, isn't actually a kid, but is still something of a Harmless Villain who wants to impress his father but doesn't ever really pose a credible threat to main characters unless he has other wizards with him. - Draco Malfoy of Harry Potter has elements of this, though it turns out he's more like The Dragon Jr., and while he never does a HeelFace Turn, by the climax of the sixth book he's learned he's just not cut out to be truly evil, either, and his position is mostly as Harry's Rival and the books' Alpha Bitch / Jerkass for all occasions. - Klitch of the Redwall book Salamandastron has an argumentative but mutually-admiring relationship with his father Ferahgo, the warlord. When Ferahgo thinks Klitch had plotted to kill him, he reacts with a distinct "better luck next time" vibe. - A Song of Ice and Fire. Ramsay Bolton is the bastard son of the evil Roose Bolton. Roose raped Ramsay's mother, then took him as his heir after Ramsay had Roose's trueborn son murdered. Roose is annoyed by Ramsay's overt evil and lectures him about keeping his sadistic hobbies on the down low as Roose does. - Mordaunt, son of Milady (a rare example of the Overlord Jr. being the son of a female villain) in 20 Years After. - The War of the Flowers: Lord Nidrus Hellebore, the architect of the plot to unleash Old Night into the mortal world, has a son named Anton who takes after his father in terms of evil if not necessarily ambition. Born to a life of idle luxury and raised by an Evil Sorcerer, Anton becomes a sadistic hedonist who takes glee in torturing Hellebore's enemies, including the daughter of his ally, who betrays him out of love for the protagonist. - John Ross Ewing III, in the Revival of Dallas. Considering who his father is, it should come as no surprise. - Howlyn, the Big Bad of season 5 of Earth: Final Conflict, is an Atavus who ruled prehistoric Earth millions of years ago, when his kind were forced into hybernation by a meter shower. His son Yulyn wants nothing to do with Howlyn and refuses to kill to feed. He wants to return the Atavus to their homeworld, where they don't need to do that. - Kyojuu Tokusou Juspion has Mad Gallant, who acts as The Dragon to his father Satan Gorth. Satan Gorth is grooming him to be his successor and intends to one day pass his empire onto him. - Even if you don't feel Uther is especially evil, Arthur from the BBC's Merlin (2008) qualifies completely. Bit of a "Well Done, Son" Guy, extremely loyal to his father, although he increasingly questions his most hardline policies, particularly on magic. (Which is logical, because Uther's stance on that particular matter is heavily irrational.) - The Peripheral (2022): Lev Zubov has an adorable little boy named Anton, who can only be 7 or 8 years old at most. \|\|He accompanies his father he corners Ash and Ossian having learned of their attempted betrayal. His father asks him to fetch him a knife, and, when he returns with the weapon, he asks if he can watch\|\|. - Thrax, son of Rita Repulsa and Lord Zedd from Power Rangers Operation Overdrive. He seeks to avenge his parents' magic-induced HeelFace Turn at the end of Space. - Subverted, more or less, with King Mondo's eldest son Prince Gasket from Power Rangers Zeo. He aspired to be The Starscream, \|\|but then fled like a coward when his very angry father confronted him.\|\| - Smallville's Lex Luthor was apparently raised to be the "resents his father" variant, complete with multiple references to Alexander and other great conquerors. Although at first he was too nice, he later goes totally off the deep end and becomes the feared character we always knew he could be. - Stargate SG-1: Klorel, son of Apophis. Since the Goa'uld are a race of Explosive Breeders and Puppeteer Parasites with Genetic Memory and several more layers of Bizarre Alien Biology, including Klorel having a "human" brother named Shifu... Well, it is too bad the character was Put In A Jar Through A Gate. - Super Sentai - Battle Fever J has an interesting play on this in that the Monster of the Week, the Egos Monsters, are created from the essence of Big Bad Satan Egos and thus are considered his "children", which makes them Number Two to him and ranked above his actual Co-Dragons, Commander Hedder and Salome. - Warz Gill from Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger is the son of the Zangyack Emperor, who has yet to be seen onscreen, but he's the one who orders the attack on Earth. Of course, the "damned pirates" are always in his way, so it's just a matter of time now until Daddy shows up to see why his son hasn't conquered Earth yet... Episode 37 confirms that his Dragon was effectively his babysitter and that he was aware of this the entire time. He pulls out all the stops against the Gokaiger, but \|\|is killed in the following episode. Enter one very annoyed Overlord Senior.\|\| - AEW has Mr. Brodie Lee Jr., aka "1", son of the late, lamented Dark Order leader Mr. Brodie Lee. note : AEW signed the younger Lee, 8 years old when his father died, to an actual contract to help support the family. More of a borderline case because The Dark Order underwent a HeelFace Turn after the elder Brodie's passing. - Vince McMahon's son Shane and son-in-law Triple H both qualify whenever they are heels. - Our Miss Brooks: In "Babysitting New Years Eve", Miss Brooks babysits Mr. Conklin's bratty nephew, who's constantly yelling "I want a drink of water!". Averted with Mr. Conklin's daughter, Harriet, a series regular who is very much a friend of Miss Brooks'. - In Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto, Cesare claims to hate his father, but their body language and mannerisms — and flair for the dramatic — are strikingly similar. Act 2 opens with Rodrigo in a pose very similar to Cesare's at the very end of the play. - Herbert von Krolock in Tanz Der Vampire, who not only acts as The Dragon to his father but whom Word of God states is personally responsible for Alfred's nightmare during the "Carpe Noctem" dance sequence. - Dungeons & Dragons example; while this hasn't been confirmed, it has been suggested that Demon Lord Graz'zt is this to Archdevil and God of Evil Asmodeus. Whether he's the rebellious (but still evil) son, or secretly still working for his father, is also up to speculation. - Lixer is a much better example since he is confirmed to actually be Asmodeus' son and is far more competent (if slightly weaker personally) than Graz'zt could ever hope to be. - Joseph Prosek II note : He's named after his grandfather, in case you were wondering in Rifts is this to his father Karl, Emperor-For-Life of the Coaltion States. Surprisingly, while he is arguably even more evil than his father, he is also a completely loyal, loving son, content to serve as Minister of Propaganda while patiently waiting for his father to step down. Karl is equally devoted to his son, and both stand side-by-side in their iron fist in a velvet glove rule. - The Pyramid article "Call No Man Happy Until He is Dread: Dark Lords in GURPS Discworld" has a bit about family which warns "Sons, unfortunately, seem to slip into the Unwisely Trusted Lieutenant role with appalling ease; being brought up by someone with lousy parenting skills, who nonetheless convinces you that you're an Heir To Power, is doubtless bad for team spirit and moral sense." - Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, though he's for the most part the Dragon-in-Chief. - \|\|The Player Character\|\| in Dark Messiah is the spawn of the Big Bad, the Satanic Archetype Kha-Beleth. If he stays loyal to his father he winds up as the Generation Xerox version of this trope. - Deltarune: Lancer. Looks almost exactly like his dad? Desperately looking for approval? A Royal Brat who commands subservience from his father's minions? He's this in spades. He even, in a pacifist run, overthrows his dad and takes over himself. Thankfully, he's also an innocent example who doesn't actually know a lot about evil and ends up making friends with the party. - Rico Jr., son of the demon lord Rico Sr., in Dokapon Kingdom. He has traits of the Royal Brat, Enfante Terrible, and a carbon copy of his dad. - Several examples in Fire Emblem: - There are a ton in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War. - Scorpio plans to \|\|avenge and\|\| succeed his father Andrei. - Downplayed with Danann's younger sons Iuchar and Iucharba, since they're more of a pair of anti villains and one of them can be spirited to the hero's side by Larcei, the girl they both have crushes on. \|\|Their also anti villainous older brother Brian is a subversion - he fights for familial honor rather than Danann himself, and as he dies he says he's fought for the wrong side.\|\| - Then there's \|\|Julius\|\| who manages to \|\| strip his father Arvis of all his authority\|\|. - In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, there's the sniveling Erik, son of the greedy Darin. - Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia has Berkut, nephew to Emperor Rudolf of Rigel and heir to the Rigelian throne. \|\|...or so he thinks. In actuality, Alm is Rudolf's son and the true heir. When Berkut learns that he had been strung along by his uncle for his entire life, he snaps, and his fiancee, his friend, and he himself all pay the price.\|\| - Rufus Shinra in Final Fantasy VII. His dad tried to Take Over the World with money, once he gets done in by the game's Big Bad, the son vows to do the same but with fear instead. - Knight Bewitched: Typhus the Younger is the son of the Big Bad, Typhus the World Breaker. He's also just as genocidal towards non-dragons as his father. - Ogura from The Legendary Starfy has multiple sons as bosses. The mom question is avoided as he created them magically. - Dr. Wily has a son in Mega Man Battle Network, Regal, that also took up villainy. Regal's MUCH worse than Wily is, hands down. \|\|Wily actually did a HeelFace Turn to stop him, out of sheer horror at Regal's misdeeds.\|\| - Allen O'Neil Jr., son of Allen O'neil in Metal Slug Advance. He's basically a weaker version of his father and even has the same maniacal laugh. - Sektor is revealed to be one of these in Mortal Kombat 9. He's the son of the Lin Kuei Grand Master, willingly gets transformed into a cyborg in both timelines, and in the original timeline, he \|\|kills his father and\|\| becomes the Grand Master himself. However, in plotline terms, this is for all of about five minutes, as Sub-Zero has taken that title from him and incapacitated him by the time of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. - The Witch Boy of Overlord II is the son of the Evil Overlord of the former Overlord. However, he never plays sidekick to his father since the original Overlord ended up stuck in hell after he takes it over at the end of his adventure. - Discussed and analyzed in Resident Evil 6, when Jake learns he's the son of the Omnicidal Maniac Mad Scientist Albert Wesker. His attitude, fighting style, and even abilities are remarkably similar to Wesker's and he becomes moody and snappish out of fear that he's on his way to becoming Wesker Jr. \|\|He ultimately averts it: not becoming this trope becomes the driving force that turns him into a selfless and heroic person\|\|. - In the second Robopon game, it's revealed Dr. Zero, the first game's Big Bad, is this. - In Star Fox, Andross' nephew Andrew is this. In Star Fox Assault, Andrew pilots a giant robot that fights in a similar way to Andross, prompting Falco to say, "What's this, an Andross wanna-be?" - With the death of Mr. X in the Streets of Rage series, his crime syndicate is left under the control of his children, Mr. and Ms. Y, in Streets of Rage 4. - The Super Mario Bros. series has Bowser Jr., who looks a lot like his dad, admires him greatly, and is more of a mischievous troublemaker. As much of a jerk Bowser is to practically everyone else, it's at least made clear that Bowser Jr. is one of the few people that Bowser genuinely cares about very deeply, and it shows right back, as Bowser Jr. just wants to make him proud. - Bowser had the Koopalings, six other sons (and one daughter) who are also chips off the old block, though they were later retconned into being siblings, but not his kids. Ludwig in particular was generally treated as Bowser's heir before the introduction of Bowser Jr. - Seiji Amanone from Spirit Hunter: NG is the heir to Taizou Amanome, the current head of the Amanome Family. According to Taizou's profile, he dotes on his son dearly, and Seiji is clearly a chip off the old block given how well he utilizes the Yakuza and its connections. That said, Amanome Sr. isn't above giving some tough love if Seiji gets too out of line. - In chargesdotcomdotbr Tonin series, Vilano's youngest son decided to show his willingness to follow his deceased father's footsteps by forsaking his original name and renaming himself "Vilano Segundo" (Vilano the Second). - Jobe Wilkins, of the Whateley Universe. Son of Emperor Wilkins (aka supervillain Gizmatic), the ruler of Karedonia. Jobe is a Royal Brat, and a brilliant (if sociopathic) Mad Scientist even though he is only fourteen. If he isn't destroying opponents with hideous bio-warfare inventions, he is destroying opponents with martial arts expertise. His father's only regret is that Jobe prefers biological inventing instead of mechanical inventing. - Zuko of Avatar: The Last Airbender should have been this, but he couldn't measure up, so his little sister fills the role instead. He did seem to become this for a while, when he thinks he finally gained his father's respect, but when \|\|his father plans to commit genocide on the Earth Kingdom\|\|, Zuko makes a full HeelFace Turn. - Victor in Babar as the son of rhino warlord Rataxes, although as the show continues this is downplayed as Victor is actually a friend of Babar's children and is more like a Sitcom Arch-Nemesis relationship between the parents. - Pete Jr. in the Donald Duck cartoon "Bellboy Donald" is a Bratty Half-Pint, with a copy of his father's personality. In his newer form from Goof Troop this is inverted with him being completely different from his dad in almost every conceivable way (except his appearance which became closer), fearful and resentful of him, and an entirely sympathetic character. - Jose Von Reichter in Cyber Six. He's just as much of a nasty piece of work as his old man, though he seems to eschew his father's overt Nazi ideology in favour of being a horny little freak. - Senor Senior, Jr.: son of Senor Senior, Sr. from Kim Possible. He's a lazy young model who isn't too interested in villainy, but will grudgingly lend a hand to his dad in taking over the world. However, he has been shown to have inherited some of his father's diabolical nature. At one point, he turned his father in... for billions of dollars in reward money. This would enable him to bail his dad out and rebuild the family fortune which they had been scammed out of. In an unusual variant, the parent didn't become a villain until recently, by which point the child was at least a young adult. - Bian Zao, the son of Taotie in Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness mostly thinks his father's plots to get revenge on the Jade Palace are "lame", but the episode "Youth in Re-Volt" reveals he's still a potential villain, he just doesn't want to do it his dad's way. - Subverted with Tarrlok \|\|and Amon\|\| in The Legend of Korra. \|\|As children, neither of them wanted to follow Yakone's dream of ruling Republic City and taking out the Avatar, but they ended up attempting to do so anyways, albeit with different motives \|\| - In The Little Mermaid television series, there's an episode involving a stingray-merman (who is evil) training his young son to be evil (even singing a whole Villain Song about it). The little stingray boy is conflicted between pleasing his dad and being himself. - Lloyd Garmadon, son of Lord Garmadon, from Ninjago starts off as this. He wanted to follow in his evil father's footsteps and thus did the most vile thing he could think of: unleashing the Serpentine Tribes. After being betrayed by every one of them, he decides that he doesn't want to be evil anymore and joins the ninja. - What Cyril Sneer wanted of his son Cedric in The Raccoons, but after the first TV specials, he does a HeelFace Turn. - Prince Lotor from Voltron: Legendary Defender. As a charmer and cunning strategist, he represents a somewhat different threat to his father Zarkon, who is all about brute force and authority. - As of season 2 of Young Justice, \|\|Kaldur has become this to his father, Black Manta\|\|. \|\|It's actually subverted, he was good all along.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlordJr
Overly Generous Time Limit - TV Tropes So you don't want to put the pressure of a normal Timed Mission on the player; however, on the other hand, you don't want the player to be able to take their sweet, sweet time on a mission that is supposed to be urgent for story reasons, or that you otherwise don't want a player taking forever on. You could constantly nag the player to continue, or you could implement an Overly Generous Time Limit - a time limit so generous that even regular conservative play will leave you with quite a bit of time to spare, and only extremely deliberate slow play will cause the player to run out of time. Compare Absurdly High Level Cap. ## Examples: - The Secret of Monkey Island: One puzzle involves Guybrush getting thrown in the ocean with a heavy weight tied to his leg, and you have to figure out how to escape before he drowns. You have 10 full minutes (it's a Call-Back to an earlier joke where Guybrush bragged that he could hold his breath for 10 minutes), and the puzzle is easy enough to solve in ten seconds. - Shenmue and its sequel give the player time limits of a few in-game months (late November until mid-April in the first game, and until the end of June in the second). Aside from the infamous stealth segment in the first game, there isn't a lot of pressure to rush through the game, giving the player time aplenty to explore and enjoy themselves. - King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella has a time limit of one day, as in 24 hours. As the game is much shorter than that and restoring a saved game also restores the clock, players are unlikely to ever notice there is a time limit. A certain event advances time to nightfall because otherwise you'd have to idle for 10 - 11 hours to reach night. - Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards technically has a time limit, but it is eight hours and a midgame event will cancel it. Again, restoring an earlier save also restores the clock. The game doesn't even tell the player that there's a time limit, so you'd basically need to open the source code to find out. - Happens in one crucial point in Iconoclasts: \|\|Robin and Royal must escape a decompressing base on the moon after their messy run-in with the Starworm, which unfortunately had Royal be subjected to Mind Rape and left him in a near-catatonic state, either unable or merely un willing to do anything except lament his failures and beg for death. Robin picks him up and carries him with her anyway. After all, the doors in the base only open for him, so she wouldn't be able to escape without him... and then you get to the door, and discover that the force of all the air in the base being sucked out into the vacuum of space has ripped the scanner panel off the wall. It's still hanging on by its wires and fully functional, but is now much too far away from the door to allow Royal to go through it, since he has to be near the panel for the door to open, and it automatically closes once he's out of range. You are given three and a half minutes to escape the base, which is far more than you need, which naturally leads you to think there must be some way to save him, so you spend that extra time trying everything you can possibly think of, without success. You give up and escape on your own. After landing safely back on the planet, Robin slumps against the escape pod and breaks down crying, and you realize that the reason the time limit was so long wasn't to be generous\|\|. - Time limits in modern Driving Games mainly exist to kick off idling players, but Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune has a particularly lenient timer. Typically you'll cross the finish line with at least two or even three minutes left on the clock. About the only time this is averted is in 10-Outrun Mode, where you have to pass 10 opponents with the first 9 opponents awarding bonus time; at the highest levels, a few mistakes are enough to make you run out of time and fail the challenge. - Some of the console-exclusive Ridge Racer games have a 10-minute time limit even though the average player is unlikely to take even 5 minutes to complete the race. Ridge Racers and Ridge Racers 2 on PSP each start a 5-minute countdown once the first-place opponent crosses the finish line, which is just as generous. - Hyrule Warriors, like most of the Warriors games, has the standard time limit for a story map or conquest-type Adventure Mode map be one hour. It almost never even comes close. - Most of the timed missions in City of Heroes were of this variety. The limits were in real time, starting from the moment you accepted the mission, but barring one endgame-level mission that was intended to be impossible (at least to unprepared players when it first came out), they tended to be in the one-to-two hour range, more than enough time to fully explore the site and take out everything there. - Every duty in Final Fantasy XIV has a time limit of at least an hour. The chances of this time limit actually being reached is so remote that duties almost always end in only one of two ways: victory for the players, or a vote to end the duty early. - Asterix and the Great Rescue's first level has a time limit of 3 minutes, but it's a very simple level with few enemies that can be beaten in far less than that time. The rest of the levels, on the other hand, are a marked aversion, and often require every second on the timer to get through, especially on Hard. - The classic Sonic the Hedgehog games required you to get through each level in every zone in 10 minutes or less, which is easily double what even the least experienced player would require, if not more (assuming that badniks or hazards don't do the job first). A few acts avert this hard, however (Carnival Night Zone Act 2 and Sandopolis Zone from Sonic 3 & Knuckles being the most infamous). In addition, the timer actually counts up from zero and gives no indication that anything will happen when you reach ten minutes, unlike the Mario games, with far less generous timers that count down to zero. - In Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow's "Deep Jungle" level has a time limit of ten minutes. Even taking the time to explore and find all of the secrets - some of which a player only has to find once per playthrough - it's likely that a player will reach the Goal Ring with more than five minutes remaining. - The version of Sonic Unleashed released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have an optional mission in which you are given 45 minutes to clear Eggmanland. While it's the longest stage in the game by far, it shouldn't take nearly that long provided you do it without dying, at 15 to 20 minutes if you play extra carefully. This mission requires you clear the stage with no deaths anyway. Considering its difficulty, that may have been the real challenge behind the mission. - The Sponge Bob Movie Game has two time challenges for each of the driving and sliding stages, regular time challenges and Macho time challenges. The regular time challenges have timers so generous that you're likely to finish each one with several minutes to spare, and you're far more likely to die from the obstacles on the track than you are to come anywhere close to running out of time. The Macho time challenges, however, are quite a bit harder. - In Super Mario Galaxy, both ray surfing minigames kill you after 3 minutes have passed and you haven't completed a lap yet. Even in the first one near the beginning of the game, players can easily do it in half that time and falling off the very narrow track is the main threat. This also applies to both Boo races, but the Boo always completes the course in about a minute and you're killed for losing anyway. - The Speedy Comets in the same game generally give far more time than even the least experienced player would need. The intense music and ominous red filter over the screen suggest urgency, but the player can often let Mario sleep for a few minutes before grabbing the Star. Unsurprisingly, the sequel would rework these particular comets to be more difficult. - "Topman Tribe Speed Run" and "Luigi's Purple Coins" are notable cases. In the former, you're given six minutes to do a level that can be done in under three, and in the latter, you're given three minutes to complete a level where the ground vanishes under your feet (and can be done in two minutes). - In Super Mario 3D World, apart from the levels with 30 or 100 units on the timer, most of the levels' time limits are absurdly long for the levels' lengths. Some of them even give you more time with green clocks. - In the final Nod mission of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, you are given a little more than three hours to position three ICBM launchers on the map in order to destroy GDI's orbital command station before it can locate and destroy the World Altering Missile. Taking your time to build a force large enough to completely wipe out the highly defended GDI base — which isn't a mission requirement — and placing the ICBM launchers at your leisure afterwards takes an hour at most. - Persona 5 has the boss fight against Okumura use a hard time limit of thirty minutes. Defeating the boss at an average level for the time won't take nearly that long; Okumura is a Flunky Boss, and after defeating the last Giant Mook that he summons, he completely stops putting up any offense, and is so weak that a few regular hits will take him down. Even watching all of the mid-battle cutscenes, getting to Okumura himself takes about twenty minutes, meaning the only way to lose at that point is to intentionally let the timer run out. - Averted for his battle in Royal, where it's noticeably harder in that he sends out increasingly harder waves of robots instead. If you don't wipe them out in a set number of turns, they will flee and he will summon the same wave until you do, which can shave off precious time. And if you're not sufficiently prepared, especially when \|\|Cognitive Haru\|\| pitches in, and then \|\|self-destructs to potentially wipe your team\|\|, you can end up cutting it close with just less than a minute to spare. - Fallout 2, mostly thanks to technical limitations, has a hard-coded limit of 13 in-game years before the game suddenly throws a "The End" screen at you and brings you to the main menu. Completing the game's quests and generally doing everything there is to do in the game usually takes about 4 in-game years at most. - Mass Effect 2: Arrival becomes a timed mission after a certain point, with 90 minutes to complete the mission before the Reapers arrive. Unless you deliberately run out the timer to see what happens, it's not a concern. That said, parts of the mission cut to certain time intervals until you reach the finale, where you can't relax anymore. - Final Fantasy VIII: The first mission Squall takes can have a time limit of up to 40 minutes but can easily be completed in 8 or less. You are advised to "Select a time limit. Choose one suited to your abilities. Challenging yet reasonable." The game never makes it obvious but the mission is considered part of an exam, and your marks are higher the less time you have remaining when you finish it, regardless of the time limit you chose. Beat the boss with under 7 seconds to spare for top marks. - Final Fantasy X-2: The final boss battle will end in defeat after thirty minutes. Most players are unlikely to see that unless they deliberately drag the battle on to see the bad ending. - Monster Hunter games traditionally give the player a 50-minute time limit for most quests. Whether the time limit is generous or not tends to vary; on offline single-player quests and when hunting online with a full party, quests are often over before the timer is even halfway depleted, taking maybe 10-15 minutes tops. However, should a player decide to solo a quest tailored for multiplayer, the player may find themselves in a legitimate race against the clock, especially if they choose to take on an endgame-tier monster. - Tyranny's first mission can become an example through Loophole Abuse. The Fatebinder must read a powerful spell called an Edict of Kyros that will kill everything in the valley, Kyros' forces and hostiles alike, on Kyros' Day of Swords. However, that is a specific day in the in-game calendar. If Kyros' Day of Swords has already passed when the Edict is read, the Fatebinder may have up to a full year to complete the mission which can take about two days if they drag their feet. - Summer Carnival '92 Recca has a one-hour time limit for the main mode of the game, although a good player can beat the game in about 25 minutes. Justified, as the game was made for an event, and the timer keeps ticking even if the game is paused. However, averted with Hard mode, which is longer and most players take 50 minutes to complete it, meaning that it is possible for someone to take too long on the bosses, or run out of time because they paused to take too long of a break. - All missions in the Ace Combat series until Ace Combat: Assault Horizon had been timed, but while time constraints did constitute a real challenge in some of them, you could complete the main objectives of most others with a ton of time to spare. For instance, in typical Escort Missions, your time limit had normally been set to a couple minutes after whatever you escorted left the mission space (which was a scripted event). - The Japanese Rail Sim series features time limits, but they are at least a couple of minutes longer than your scheduled arrival times. - Resident Evil 2 gives you five minutes at the end of Scenario A to beat the mutated William Birkin. The timer starts as soon as you enter the elevator room and the fight starts right after you press the button to call the elevator, which gives you more than enough time to beat Birkin. The same five minute timer also plays out at the end of Scenario B and even though you will run down the clock a bit more due to having to travel all over the place to reach the next room, fight Mr. X, and power on the escape train, you won't ever come close to running out the clock. Birkin also shows up at the very end of Scenario B as a Post-Final Boss and you're given two minutes to beat him, which is still plenty of time to do so since it won't take you more than a minute to put him down, even if you don't use the rocket launcher you obtained previously. - At the end of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, a missile is launched and will hit Raccoon City. Although there's no actual timer to measure how much time you have left, it takes a good five minutes or so for the missile to arrive. It takes only a minute or so to beat Nemesis for the final time. - Resident Evil 2 (Remake) gives you ten minutes to escape at the end of the game, which is double the time limit that was present in the original game. This is due to your character having to go through a few rooms first before reaching the train and being forced to fight their respective boss enemies. Regardless, ten minutes is very generous since the bosses don't take long to defeat. - Nintendo Wars: - The final mission in Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising gives you a time limit of 30 turns. If you even come close to taking this long, chances are Sturm's already wiped you out. - In Advance Wars: Dual Strike, an early mission gives the player a (real world) half hour to complete a mission, even though the game is turn-based. Even a novice is unlikely to take more than 5 minutes to complete the mission. - In Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, on the mission Lin's Gambit, you are given a 40-day (turn) time limit to capture the opposing HQ or wipe out all enemies before Greyfield is able to shoot nukes to wipe you out. The meta-ranking of the game starts penalizing you for slow play after turn 12. - Chapter 20 in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance gives you a 20-turn time limit for a chapter that a reasonably-levelled party can complete in 5, and that's if they're not rushing. - In Battle for Wesnoth, this is in effect for almost every mission - the time limits for the most part exist not to rush the player, but to prevent the player from sitting on their villages for 100,000 turns and going into the following missions with more gold than they'll need for the entire campaign. - The SNES strategy game Liberty or Death starts in the year 1775. If neither the American nor British forces claim a final victory by the time King George III dies in 1820 (45 years after the game starts), the game automatically ends in victory for America. Justified, of course, in that Englands forces would be incapable of continuing with their king dead.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyGenerousTimeLimit
Overly Long Scream - TV Tropes For want of an extension cord, Jon's voice was lost. "In the meantime, though, we're going to skip straight to the theme song, so I can scream for a full minute. [deep breath] AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—" A character freaks out about something, and screams. And screams. And screams, to the point where it becomes hilarious. (Although, sometimes it goes even longer than that.) Sometimes, the character takes a deep breath to continue screaming and even comments something like "Why do they make buildings this tall? Everyone knows you should be able to fall to your death in the same scream!" This is almost always intentionally Played for Laughs; unintentionally hilarious long screams qualify as Narm. May result in an Inopportune Voice Cracking if the tone can't be sustained. May overlap with The Scream, Big "NO!", Heroic BSoD, or Faux Horrific. Reactive Continuous Scream is a subtrope. Hope you brought your earplugs! ## EXAMPLES!!: - Played for Drama in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba when Tanjiro, Zenitsu, Inosuke, and Tengen let out a LONG ANGRY scream in unison right when they brutally decapitated Gyutaro and Daki simultaneously who were screaming loudly out of fear. The look on the Demon Slayers' faces may be Nightmare Fuel as they suddenly resembled manga/Berserk artwork. - Dragon Ball Z is king of this trope. Granted the characters in question are trying to charge up their ki, but they do it by screaming their heads off, and oh boy, sometimes their scream can go on for a minute without pause! Fun fact: Sean Schemmel did pass out in the booth at least once during recording for Dragon Ball GT. - In Chapter 325/Episode 202 of Gintama, Shinpachi lets out one of these that lasts around 15 seconds when he hears that Kondo and his sister have gotten married and are expecting a child (Depicted in the manga by having his scream filling some of spaces between the panels on the page it happens on). Made funnier by the fact that he's speeding across the city the entire time, swimming through a river, outpacing some marathon runners and a bullet train in the process before finally reaching the ocean and exclaiming his utter disbelief. - My Hero Academia: Played for drama as a young Tomura Shigaraki \|\|turns his father to dust.\|\| - Non-comedic example: Mewtwo in Pokémon: Mewtwo Returns screams in agony for nearly thirty seconds straight when he tries to break free of Giovanni's machines, though this is justified since he's using telepathy and not actually vocalizing. - Ace Ventura: Pet Detective: Ace proves that Podacter's death was a homicide by opening and closing the balcony door while screaming; the door is soundproof when it's closed, meaning that someone else was there to close the door after Podacter fell to his death. - Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip: Dave does this in style of his catchphrase "ALVIN!" - Austin Powers: In ''International Man of Mystery", a security guard is frozen in fear when he's in the way of a slowly-moving steamroller being driven by Austin and Vanessa (the other security guard was smart enough to dive out of the way). His response is to scream "STOOOOOOOOOPPP!", continue to scream as the steam roller inexplicably comes closer to him, and finally muster a Big "NO!" as the steam roller runs him over. - Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey: They fall down a pit to Hell, screaming the whole way, but the pit is so deep that they eventually get tired of repeatedly screaming and start playing 20 questions. - Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Cameron's scream when he realizes how much mileage is on his father's Ferrari when he and Ferris pick it up from the garage. - The Fifth Element: Chris Tucker's ear-molesting performance as Ruby Rhod. Akin to a seemingly endless loop of a stuck pig. - A good example of this trope being played straight is in The Green Mile during Eduard Delacroix's execution. \|\|When Percy Wetmore purposely doesn't wet the sponge, the electrical current isn't conducted directly to the brain, and instead, Del is left to take the force of electricity full-charge with no current. This results in him basically cooking alive. For most of the ordeal, Del is screaming in ungodly agony, and probably would have right up until he actually died had his vocal cords not been fried.\|\| - Home Alone: - Macaulay Culkin's Overly Long Scream became practically iconic, and his "scream face" made up 90% of the trailers and marketing materials. - Harry and Marv both get some good long screams in during the movies as well: - Harry opens a door to the MacCallisters' house and immediately gets his head set on fire. He stands there making a noise to the effect of " " for several seconds straight before making a 180 and diving headfirst into the snow outside. One ad for the movie shown on Freeform during its annual Christmas event exaggerated the trope by drawing out his already long scream for even HWUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!! longer. - And of course, there is Marv's hysterically loud and long scream when Kevin drops his brother's pet spider on Marv's face. - In HOUBA! On the Trail of the Marsupilami, both times Dan Geraldo falls down a hole (well, he's The Klutz), he lets out a comically long scream, hinting at Bottomless Pits. - The ending of House on the Edge of the Park, after Alex, a rapist and murderer, have the tables turned on him and gets a bullet put through his dick. Cue Alex letting out a looooooooooooooooooooong scream in slow-motion (at least some 40 seconds) before falling backwards into a pool. - In another rare example that's played straight and doesn't come across as Narm, in Into the Woods, when the Baker attempts to take Red Riding Hood's cape by force, she responds with an 8-second scream, not pausing until the Baker brings back her cape and puts it back on her. - Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008): When the main characters fall down the hole leading to the center of the earth. Of the "take a deep breath, then continue screaming" variety. - In Kiss Me Deadly, Mike Hammer slams a desk drawer on the hand of a scientist after he gets the information he was looking for. The man continues to scream even well after Mike has moved on to examining what he got. - Walter in The Muppets (2011), upon learning of the trouble his heroes' studio is in, screams across several short scenes. (Odd that nobody tried even to muffle him on the bus.) - Westley does it in The Princess Bride, when Humperdink charges into the Pit of Despair and cranks Rugen's life-sucking machine to its maximum setting. This causes Inigo to say "Fezzik, you hear? That is the sound of Ultimate Suffering". - The film version of Ronja the Robber's Daughter has a memorable one. - In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Ron uses up two whole lines of text to scream "AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" after he wakes up to find Sirius Black standing over him with a knife. - In one French translation of the book, the first word is actually spread over two lines, with the "H"s alone occupying one. - In the Warrior Cats novella Tree's Roots, Tree's mother Moonlight yowls a terrified "Mrrrrooooooooooow!" during a storm. - Angel. In "There's No Place Like Plrtz Glrb" Cordelia is presented with Lorne's severed head to encourage a more compliant attitude. She doesn't start screaming though until the head starts talking to her (turns out Deathwok demons can survive decapitation). Lorne patiently tells Cordy to get it out of her system, but when the scream goes on and on without stopping, Lorne tells her to shut up because he no longer has the hands to cover his ears. - On Cheers during the last season, Carla got drunk and had sex with one of the regulars, but couldn't remember which one at first. When she realized it was \|\|Paul\|\|, she let out a scream that went through the commercial break. - The Closer: A 6-year-old girl did this in the police station to demonstrate what her parents told her to do if the recently murdered child molester living next door ever approached her. - The Drew Carey Show has this happen to Lewis. "AAAAAAH! I'm still falling - I just ran out of breath! AAAAAAAAAH" - Supernatural: In the second-season episode Hollywood Babylon the brothers investigate a possible haunting on a movie set. This trope is one of the signs of how terrible the horror movie being filmed is. - A non-comedic example in Torchwood Series 2 episode "Adrift": a boy gets zapped through a spacetime rift and returns seven months later (but 40 years older). What he saw on the other end of the rift has driven him mad and he ends up in a mental hospital screaming for twenty hours straight, every day. - Definitely non-comedic in The Monocled Mutineer, where a condemned deserter screams like an animal all the way to the firing squad and during his execution. One of the soldiers threw up afterwards. - Mystery Science Theater 3000: - Near the end of "The Leech Woman", Tom Servo cracks up and starts doing an impression of Granny Clampett, repeatedly shouting "JED!" This culminates in him letting out a ridiculously long shout of "JEEEEEEEEED!" that lasts throughout the entire end credits of the movie. - In "The Mole People", the SOL crew have a bake sale, and Crow's showing is a mile-high meringue pie... that really is a mile high. He falls off trying to cut a slice for Mike and screams all the way down, for a full seventeen seconds. "... can I just get that to go?" - In "Space Mutiny", Servo installs railings EVERYWHERE on the SOL, including but not limited to in front of Mike's bedroom and an ankle-high railing around the carpet, in jest of the tropenaming railing kills that dominated the horrid film. Mike trips over one and falls into a previously unmentioned pit. Hilarity ensues. "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! takes breath Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Servoooooooooooo!" - In "The Screaming Skull", Crow pranks Mike by dressing up as a skull and saying "Raargh!" Mike started screaming forever, whacking Crow over the head with the bag of chips he happens to be holding, running away, returning with a baseball bat and hitting Crow a few more times, running away again, returning with his full set of golf clubs, carefully selecting which club to use, pausing to let Tom Servo admire his new driver, then whacking Crow several more times with said driver. And all the while, Mike does not stop screaming. - Odd Squad: - In "Soundcheck", Circle Sue gives a loud, shrill one upon finding out that some of her triangle-shape chairs have disappeared, with the song "Take Away Four" playing under it the entire time. It manages to startle a currently-dancing Otto and snaps Olive out of her "why am I being tortured like this" reaction. - "Double Trouble" has a four-way one when Delivery Debbie explains to Olive, Otto, and Oprah how she inadvertently created her clones. First she begins to scream when she creates and sees her first clone, then the clone begins to scream, then it inadvertently creates two ''more'' clones which begin to scream upon seeing the first clone and the real deal. From there, it's just one big moment of shocked screaming that concludes with the real Debbie eating the camera as the scene moves back to the present time and she's just shown screaming in Oprah's office while the Director gives her a rather unnerved look. - Otto gives one in "My Better Half" upon finding out that half of his body's been taken by Symmetric Al. It's so long that he's still shown screaming by the time he (somehow) gets down to the Lab and Oprah has to yell at him to shut up and calm down, to which he rightfully responds by reiterating that half of his body is gone. When Oscar tells him that he can't restore his body, he goes from screaming to being on the brink of crying as he gives out sorrowful wails. - London does one of these in the episode 'Poor Little Rich Girl' of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody after finding out that she is broke. She starts screaming in her hotel room and is still doing so when she steps out of the elevator in the lobby. - Literally happens in the middle of every episode with Shelby and Cyde in Best Friends When Ever, when they find out something bad and proceed to start screaming at the camera and viewers whilst overlapping each other. However, their screams last the entire commercial break in every episode, so we recommend you cover your ears for this one. - Linkin Park: The song Given Up features a scream at the beginning that lasts 18 seconds. - Some live performances had singer Chester Bennington stop for a bit to catch his breath. - The Metal Scream during Lamb of God's song "Laid to Rest" lasts for sixteen seconds. - Used as an Overly Long Title for the game AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. - The witnesses in Ace Attorney have been knowing to scream their lungs out for incredible lengths, especially during their Villainous Breakdown. Furio "The Tiger" Tigre in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations takes the crown: his introduction is roaring for over seven dialogue boxes. - When Agon is first encountered in Brutal Orchestra, he spends four screen-filling text boxes doing nothing but screaming in terror before calming down and joining the party (although not without getting one last little scream out of his system first). - Vincent Brooks in Catherine screams for twenty seconds straight when \|\|on Day 8, Katherine screams that she'll never forgive him for cheating on her for Catherine.\|\| - Non-comedic example: in First Encounter Assault Recon, the intro combines this with Distant Reaction Shot to show the full extent of the second Synchronicity Event. - LittleBigPlanet 3: Newton does one in the cutscene when he and Sackboy, along with the trio of heroes fall to their doom until they landed on his dad's ship. - Serious Sam brings us the Headless Kamikazes, suicidal Mooks who will charge at Sam and scream until they explode either from charging into Sam or getting blown the hell up. If you have a big enough space, it is possible to have the Kamikaze keep chasing you and screaming all throughout. - In Shadow Warrior (1997), if Lo Wang is falling from a dangerous height, he will scream all the way down. Find a pit deep enough and he will actually pause for breath and then continue shouting. - In the 2012 Halloween Update for Team Fortress 2, the update's new map features a bottomless pit with a fully restoring health pack above it. Any class that falls into it will let out one of these, but the Scout and Spy will lampshade it on a couple of occasions should they fall in. The Scout will say "Holy crap, dis goes on forever..." after a while of screaming. The Spy will either say "Come on, I don't have all day!" after some screaming, or he will scream for a bit and continue after taking a breath. - Unintentional version: In the Tomb Raider series, if Lara falls more than a certain distance, her death scream starts playing, on the assumption that she'll die from impact damage when she lands. There are a handful of places in the early games where you can fall so far that the scream loops multiple times before she hits the ground (and at least one place where Soft Water will allow her to survive such a drop). - Used as part of the background music for Quake. A scream which is incorporated into the music goes on, and on, and on and on, fading in and out and becoming ragged at times but going on for far longer than should be humanly possible. - Snowball uses this in BFDI 6 when he gets Rocky and Golf Ball on his team. - In the "BURN STUFF!!!" PSA, upon learning that his ice cream has melted: - Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "sibbie", Strong Bad's frustration at accidentally writing a song about Sibbie (and then somehow creating a follow-up to that song called "I Freaking Hate Sibbie") drives him to repeatedly body-slam Homestar's radio while screaming in frustration for five straight seconds. - Used a lot in Siblings's first April Fools' Day cartoon called "Siblings Untitled 01", such as the part where Rob and Johny ride a mine cart to a tropical forest screaming. Also at the end, Rob does this before Johny smacks him in the head with a chair. - Awkward Zombie plays this for laughs (if it's not being terrifying) here. - Alex's Atomic F-Bomb in Captain SNES: The Game Masta. - Happened at least a couple of times in Freefall, in accordance with Cap'n Sam Starfall's philosophy, "When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!" Helix is usually eager to join in. In one notable incident near the beginning, the two of them are running in circles and screaming for long enough that they have to stop to take a deep breath (synchronized, even) before continuing. Florence comments on how inexplicable it is that Helix, who is a ROBOT, needs to stop for breath... Then she tears out his voicebox to shut him up and offers to do the same to Sam if he doesn't quiet down. - Homestuck has John's Big "NO!" in Act 6, which has him take a deep breath twice. - The Last Halloween has an extreme example that goes on for several pages when Mona realizes that Dr. Fugue and his associates aren't humans in costume. It doesn't exactly help when Dr. Fugue suggests primitive brain surgery to make her be still. - This comic from Planet Zebeth. - In Witchprickers, Ilemauzer the bat has one when she discovers she became a lot more humanoid. - Uncyclopedia has AAAAAAAAA!, an article consisting of nothing but this. - This What If? entry features illustrations of Mount Thor in Canada, with the vertical drop labeled "AAAAAAAAAAAAA". The Alt-Text for both images are also literally "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" (the second image's Alt-Text has a "::gasp::"). - Atop the Fourth Wall: - Dragon Ball Z Abridged: - Vegeta's scream can be heard by Krillin and Gohan miles away, Goku in outer space, King Yemma in the afterlife, and Trunks on Earth twenty years in the future. An alternate future! - Lampshaded when Goku is screaming his head off in pain from heart disease: Yamcha: I can't really remember the last time he inhaled! And while that's sort of impressive, I don't think it's healthy! [Goku inhales a massive breath] Oh, good, he took a br— [Goku starts screaming again] - 5 Second Films: "Late For Work" features an Atomic F-Bomb which is implied to last all day. - When The Nostalgia Critic reviewed Son of the Mask, the CGI scenes featuring the baby horrified him so much that he let out a scream that stretched out through the commercial break. - Scott The Woz screams for the entirety of the end segment of his "The Worst Games of All Time" video after he's played and reviewed the aforementioned games. - StacheBros: In "Mario & Luigi's Delfino Dilemma", Luigi is so afraid of flying in planes that he screams through most of the flight to and from Isle Delfino, much to Mario's annoyance. - X-Men Origins: Wolverine summed up in 30 seconds. - Adventure Time: - Lemongrab screams all the time as his default speaking voice, but it tends to turn into this when he gets really mad. In one scene in "Too Young", Finn and the princess leave a sign by his bed that says, "You really smell like dog buns." After he reads it, Lemongrab clenches his fists tightly, starts shaking, opens up his eyes wide, opens up his mouth wide, and screams loudly for several seconds, his tone rising in pitch until it cracks. - In "Another Way", Finn does this while running away after a few clown nurses hold him down while kissing his toe. - In The Amazing World of Gumball, Richard did this as a child when he found out that magic doesn't exist. He didn't stop for 15 years. All other episodes showing him younger contradict this, though. - Richard also screamed a Big "NO!" for a long time when he found out he had to get a job. - Animaniacs (2020): In "Who Donut?", Wakko does this after he finds out that someone ate his donuts. - Back at the Barnyard: Done at the end of one episode when Bessy shows Otis the album she made. When Otis sees the album Bessy had created, he was shown screaming forever. - Bob's Burgers: In "Lorenzo's Oil? No, Linda's", Gayle freaks out when she hears Linda is getting involved in essential oils. She's so freaked out, she's shown screaming non-stop as she goes to pick up the kids and take them to Angie's house. Tina: Aunt Gayle, you're scaring me! - Done several times on Courage the Cowardly Dog. A notable example would be when he uses it in "Ball of Revenge" to defeat a handful of recurring villains from the show in a game of dodgeball. - The title character of Dan Vs. does this at the beginning of every episode with his Skyward Scream. - Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Little Ed Blue", Ed's shout of "BIG TROUBLE!" is loud enough to rip Eddy's shirt off. - In the second Eek! The Cat episode, Eek has a very long scream after his dream ended with his head exploding. - The Fairly OddParents!: In "The Great Fairy Share Scare!", Timmy lets out a Big "NO!" that lasts 47 hours when he finds out that he now has to share his fairies with Chloe. He claims he just stopped to take a breather but is stopped by Jorgen when he tries to start again. - Peter Griffin does it in Family Guy when the experimental drug that temporarily turned him gay wears off in the middle of a group sex session. Also his shriek of acclamation when the drug first kicks in and Lois asks if he has turned gay. Also when his doctor performs an intimate anal examination. - Futurama: - Bender is quite fond of these. Leela: They're [the Omicronians ] back! Amy: We're doomed! Doctor: Doooomed! Bender: [[[{inhale}]]] Doooooooooooooooooooooooooo- - In another case, or possible a Re-Cut of the same episode, the show cuts to commercial in mid-scream, creating the impression that Bender keeps going indefinitely. - In "Rebirth", a robotic version of Leela wordlessly screams in horror, for an entire night, after discovering that her arm is full of wires, she's not the real Leela, and the original version of her is in a coma. - In the Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi episode "Collect All Five", Ami lets out one of these when she finds out that... Ami: I'm missing Bunny Huggles!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!! - An episode of Invader Zim featured a man about to be crushed by a falling planet who spends a good minute and a half shrieking "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!! NOOO! OH NO! OH NO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" and breathing heavily. - Another episode had a banker mistaking ZIM for a criminal. "That's him, that's the guy. AND HE'S BACK FOR MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE! Get him!" - Lampshaded by Sheen in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius when Jimmy finds out in the Bad Future that he is MARRIED to Cindy, and his scream lasts the entire commercial break. Carl: Wow, you just screamed for four minutes, Jim. Sheen: I'm both impressed and disturbed. - Happens in Johnny Bravo when Johnny and Carl go over a waterfall, and at one point, stop screaming to take a breath. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In the episode "Parental Glideance", upon meeting Rainbow Dash's father, Scootaloo lets out a shrill scream of excitement. It begins just as the opening starts; she's still doing it when it ends. And then she sees Rainbow Dash's mother and let out an even longer, shriller scream. - In The Penguins of Madagascar episode "Crown Fools", King Julien loses his crown, which causes him to let loose a nonstop scream that lasts well into the night. - Phineas and Ferb: - In "I, Bro-Bot", Candace's reaction to seeing robot versions of her brothers running around is to run for the family panic room, shrieking her head off. - In "Phineas and Ferb's Hawaiian Vacation", Candace screams as she falls over a waterfall for ten seconds straight. - Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur opens with Shaggy being taken to the ER because the gang's latest mystery had him on a nonstop scream for almost three hours. He finally stops when the doctor tells him to since people listen to doctors. Daphne: Do you think it's a world record? Doctor: Oh, definitely. I'm just wondering if it's a violation of the laws of physics. - The Simpsons: - In "The Blunder Years", the family goes to a nightclub/restaurant. Homer gets hypnotized by a stage hypnotist and unearths a traumatic childhood memory and starts screaming. He continues screaming as they leave, he tips the valet, drives home, brushes his teeth, and lies in bed. The next day Lenny and Carl bring him home from work still screaming; it was interrupting naptime and quiet time at work. - Homer and Bart join the crew of a fishing boat. While at sea, they are caught in a heavy storm. When the boat crests a huge wave and begins a precipitous drop, everyone screams for a few seconds, pauses for a deep breath, then continues screaming. - In "Brother from Another Series", Bart and Sideshow Bob are falling down the side of a dam and are screaming as they fall. The fall takes so long, they have to stop and take a breath before continuing. - Smilinguido: The Latin Spanish dub of "The Thing" turns Forfo's crying at the beginning into this. - On SpongeBob SquarePants, Plankton did it once in the episode where he and Mr. Krabs switch places. Plankton: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Takes a drink of his soda AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! - Squidward's scream when SpongeBob and Patrick walk in on him during his bath, in a scene from "Have You Seen This Snail?" that has been subjected to Memetic Mutation. - Steven Universe: Whenever a Gem does this, it's justified; they don't need oxygen to breathe. - In "It Could've Been Great", Peridot screams for 20 seconds straight when riding on Lion, who is going at Super Speed. - In "Know Your Fusion", Garnet screams for 16 seconds straight when Smoky Quartz reveals themself and their destructive power. Not out of fear mind you, but sheer glee. - In Taz-Mania, the Dingo and Taz are both knocked off a tall mountain and start to fall. They take so long to fall that they have to draw for breath and Dingo has time to admire his house. - In an episode of Total Drama, DJ screamed and ran a rather long way away from Heather, who was still wearing her facial mask and shaving her leg. - In an episode of Total DramaRama, Gwen spends almost her entire screen time screaming, \|\|even causing a tornado which destroys the school\|\|. - Happens twice in the VeggieTales episode "The Ballad of Little Joe". The first time with the Baker and the Blacksmith (played, respectively, by Jimmy and Jerry Gourd), and the second time with the Mayor of Dodgeball City (played by Mr. Nezzer). - Played for laughs in the stinger of Young Justice (2010) episode "Teg Ydaer", where passengers trapped on a school bus traveling across time and dimensions are shown screaming for practically the entire credits, repeatedly gasping for air so they can keep doing so.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyLongScream
Out-of-Context Eavesdropping - TV Tropes "I must be the only gullible husband who ever overheard snippets of surprise-party planning, and believed his wife was having an affair!" A little information is a dangerous thing. If a character overhears an acquaintance saying about them, "I'm gonna slaughter that bastard tomorrow..." and walks away before they finish, "...at basketball," well, they've missed a pretty important bit of context that drastically affects the meaning of that statement. And if they assume that this acquaintance literally means to murder them and start taking precautions as if that were the case, they're going to wind up looking very foolish at the absolute least. This trope is a Narrative Device in which an eavesdropper hears part of a statement or conversation out of context and leaps to the wrong conclusion. It is a very specific aversion of Exact Eavesdropping which was popularized, on television at least, by Three's Company, but is Older Than Dirt. Often Lampshaded or Subverted, but just as often played straight, making it a bit of an Undead Horse Trope. Often a form of Contrived Coincidence. A common source of Third-Act Misunderstanding. Compare One Dialogue, Two Conversations, a similar trope without the eavesdropping, and Poor Communication Kills, where the speaker and not the listener is at fault for the misunderstanding. See also: Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults, One Side of the Story, Funny Phone Misunderstanding, Not What It Looks Like. Can result in half or more of the entries on the Mistaken for Index. The Moving Experience can often happen because of this. Compare Twisting the Words. ## Examples - The tie-in manga for the Confession Executive Committee ~Love Series~ song "A Solution for Jealousy" had Akari overhear her close friend Natsuki confess to Haruki. The full scene shows that they were doing a practice confession for her actual crush, Yuu, but Akari's being upset about the whole ordeal makes even more misunderstandings than probably intended. - In Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA, Illya and her friends overhear a teacher warning their teacher Taiga that if her students lose an upcoming dance contest, she will have to give him her "meat". Since the guy sounded really perverted and Taiga was so distressed, the students assume he'll force her to have sex with him if they lose the contest, so it fuels their resolve to win. They win the contest, only to be annoyed when they learn that the two teachers had made a bet that one would have to give the other a lot of meat for cooking and eating based on the results. Taiga was so distressed because food is Serious Business for her. - In episode 1a of Jewelpet Sunshine, Ruby overhears a conversation and thinks her class's dolphin teacher has only one year to live, leading to her and the other Jewelpets going out of their way to make Dolphin-sensei's last year enjoyable. \|\|That conversation was referring to one of the school's computers, not Dolphin-sensei.\|\| - One episode of Magical Princess Minky Momo begins with Momos Muggle Foster Parents discussing a troublesome she, saying that she is a nuisance and that no one in town likes her so it will be difficult to convince her to leave, while unbeknownst to them Mocha overhears them in the hall and promptly jumps to the conclusion that they are going to cast Momo onto the streets to fend for herself, so he rushes to tell Momo about this, causing her to immediately ask her parents if its true, to which they say they would never treat their daughter that way and they were actually talking about a Grumpy Old Woman whom they are trying to convince to go on a bus trip with the rest of the neighborhood, without success, resolving this misunderstanding within the first two minutes of the episode. Momos other animal friends then quip that Mocha was an idiot. - Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun: - Nozaki and Sakura are in a clothes store looking for clothes as references for Mamiko. A couple of shoppers come across them, assuming they're on a date and that Nozaki's looking for clothes as a gift to Sakura... then they overhear Nozaki asking if he can take photos of Sakura in a stereotypical Sailor Fuku, and conclude they're in a cosplay club. Made hilariously worse in the manga, as they conclude that Nozaki and Sakura belong to a fetish club. - Miyako's fellow college students are unaware she's a Sequential Artist, so when one of them takes a look at Miyako's notes she thinks she's got a boyfriend. Later, when her friends overhear Miyako, Nozaki and Sakura talking about their manga ideas, they assume that all three are lovers. And since mangas thrive on romantic entanglements, the conversation makes their relationship sound very twisted. - In Chapter 53, Miyako and Nozaki's manga discussions are overheard again, this time by Seo's older brother Ryousuke (who had unhelpfully heard about the rumours of Miyako's "high school boyfriend" note : Nozaki), as he misunderstands Miyako's brainstorming ideas as cosplay proposals. - In Chapter 44, Ken's asked Nozaki to come up with a mascot for Let's Fall in Love! ♡ merchandise. Sakura, thinking this is along the lines of Maeno and his tanuki note : Maeno is a fellow editor of Kens, who, among other things, like to make Sequential Artists insert tanuki in their work., asks what sort of animal Ken likes. Nozaki remembers him saying he likes salmon... which results in Sakura imagining Mamiko carrying a salmon everywhere she goes, and telling Nozaki "I tried thinking about it rationally, and I really don't think sleeping with a fish is a good idea." Sakura's classmates have no clue what the hell she's talking about. The conversation moves on a little, and the next line the classmates overhear from her is "I tried thinking about it rationally, and I really don't think it's right for fish to eat people." - Mikoshiba asks Miyako whether she prefers breasts or butts (for manga work). Haru tunes in just in time to hear Miyako telling this younger boy she prefers breasts. Similarly, she misunderstands when she hears Mikoshiba asking Miyako if she's okay with confinement (again for manga work), and is unsettled by how cheerfully Miyako agrees to it. - Wakamatsu sees Kashima talking about the beach trip with Seo and Sakura, and assumes that Kashima is Seo's boyfriend. He's shocked to hear that they're all staying in the same room, not knowing that they're all girls. Things get even more awkward when he follows them to the swimsuit store. - Nagasarete Airantou: First, Mikoto partially overhears a conversation between Ikuto and Ayane and assumes they are going on a date so she and Suzu spies on them for the day. When they eventually end up at Ayane's room, Mikoto assumes they are finally doing "something better than kissing". And they overhear Ayane telling Ikuto to be more gentle with wrapping his hands around something he finds softer than he thought. \|\|They were making rice cakes for Suzu\|\|. - Negima! Magister Negi Magi has a couple of these. - Most obviously when a bunch of the girls overhear Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Evangeline requesting that Negi pay for that day's training session, which goes something along these lines: Evangeline: Hurry and whip it out, boy! Negi: But Evangeline-san, we already did it, it's too much! Evangeline: I told you, call me master. - By the way, the payment was sucking blood from his arm. - Ranma ½: In the "Tunnel of Lost Love" OVA episode, Ryouga teams up with Ukyo; in another attempt to split Ramna and Akane. The plan backfires due to Ryouga repeatedly defending Akane from the spirits inside, which causes Ukyo to become upset with him and leads Akane to misinterpret it as jealousy. This sets up the scene where Ryouga apologizes and is dragged off by Ukyo; so they can speak in private. Akane then tells Ranma her suspicions about Ukyo's feelings for Ryouga, prompting them to follow and eavesdrop, in time to overhear the following exchange: Ryouga: ( to Ukyo; ) Please, I give you my word of honor! Ukyo: ( petulantly ) How can I trust you? Ryouga: We can start over, can't we? I'll never betray you again. Ukyo: If only I could believe you were telling the truth... ( Ranma and Akane gasp in realization and sneak away ) Akane: I knew it! Ranma they're... THOSE TWO ARE IN LOVE!! Ranma: ( dramatically amidst fireworks display ) WELL WADDYA KNOW!? - When Ranma was forced to spend a few days at Ukyo's place, Akane visits them and overhears them. Ranma appears to be struggling to finally choose something which Akane assumes to be about his fiancé, so Akane barges in. They were talking about playing cards. - In Silver Spoon, Tokiwa overheard Hachiken and Yoshino talking about "taking responsibility" and started a rumor about them having a sexual relationship. They were talking about raising a pig. - In It's Tough Being Neeko, Neeko overhears her parents talking about having someone named Sousuke stay in her care, since she, a NEET who stays with her parents, has a duty to help out around the house. She initially assumes they're trying to marry her to a young man with that name, but it turns out that Sousuke is a cat. - In Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee, As Nelli gets home from a shopping trip, she finds her Delicate and Sickly brother Nello writing a letter to their friend Jiggy Pepper, who left town to become a Letter Bee. Nelli hears Nello through the window, as he sobs and tells Jiggy that he's "so angry." Nello dies a week later, and Nelli assumes that he was angry with Jiggy for leaving them behind. In reality, Nello had promised Jiggy that he'd look after Nelli, and was angry about not being able to fulfill that promise. - Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!: - Episode 8 opens with Hana trying to pay Sakurai back for throwing up on his futon in the previous episode. They're in public, and at first the onlookers think he's extorting her, then when he mentions there was "a lot of alcohol involved" and "it was your first time (drinking)" and tells her to "forget that night ever happened", they assume he used alcohol to take advantage of her sexually. - In episode 9, Hana's mother Tsuki misinterprets Hana and Sakurai's conversation (with her in the room!) about her cats as them talking about him being into her, and her daughter willing to help them hook up. - Later in the episode, Tsuki overhears Hana and Sakurai in the cafe storeroom talking about aged coffee beans, but thinks Sakurai is talking about how he Likes Older Women. - The manga version of the above scene is even dirtier: Hana accidentally rips open a bag of coffee, spilling the beans all over the floor. The way Sakurai yells at Hana makes Tsuki think they're having sex in there, and she ends upd having to ask the Master to call her a taxi. - Boonie Cubs: In episode 32, this is what kickstarts the plot; Warren overhears Tiki and Babu describing a monster to Billy and immediately assumes there's actually a monster on the loose and inadvertently spreads a rumor about it before he can hear that it's just Coach Mac, whom Tiki and Babu mistook for a monster. - Happy Heroes: In Season 2 episode 32, Careless S. overhears Happy S. and Sweet S. saying they want to "take over the entire world" and "take care of the doctor and that last Superman", leading him to believe the note he found saying the others have turned against him and want to kill Smart S. is true. However, Happy S. and Sweet S. are just playing a video game with Careful S., and the game's villain is called "the doctor". - In "The Power of the Press" in Mad House Comic Digest #5 a member of a betting syndicate is accidentally run over by one of the main characters and wakes up in their apartment just in time to overhear them discussing what to do with the "dead fish on ice" - i.e., the one in the refrigerator. After escaping, he complains to his boss that "They were as casual as if they were talking about lunch!" - In John Byrne's Batman & Captain America crossover, Private Steve Rogers has been assigned to bodyguard Bruce Wayne, supposedly because his connections to the Gotham Project make him a target for the Joker's espionage, but secretly because the Army think Bruce has a Suspiciously Clean Criminal Record and may be the mastermind behind the whole thing. After a few days of this Bruce and Dick are discussing how this hampers their activities Batman and Robin, and Cap arrives at the window just in time to hear Bruce say he's going to have to ditch Rogers because he's got an appointment with the Joker... - Garfield: In this comic◊, Jon calls a local garage to schedule routine maintenance for his car. Garfield walks in just as Jon says "I'd like to bring in him for a checkup" and thinks that he's talking about a trip to the vet ("But I just had one"). As Jon proceeds to describe the various procedures he wants done—"Tighten his hoses, replace all the worn parts..."—Garfield gets progressively more and more terrified until, by the last panel, he's attempting to hitchhike to Abu Dhabi. - Used in an infamous storyline in the Popeye comic strip: A woman overhears Olive Oyl talking about getting rid of a baby robot a home shopping channel had mistakenly sent her and assumes she's talking about getting rid of her (unborn) baby and quickly assembles a crew of her cohorts to talk her out of it. Although there was little negative feedback from readers or newspapers, the artist behind this strip was soon fired (the official reason being that the artist had gone too far in trying to include modern elements into such a legacy strip. The "abortion" strip was merely the last straw). - In the Love Hina fic Contract Labor, Motoko overhears Kitsune talking on the phone with Haruka about how Keitaro saved Naru from getting kidnapped at knife-point by a gang, and Keitaro is currently with the police talking it over. Having only heard Kitsune's side of the conversation, and already fully prepared to believe the worst in Keitaro as it is, Motoko automatically assumes that Keitaro had assaulted Naru and attacks him with her sword when he returns to the Hinata House, only to get T.K.O.'d by Kanako in retaliation. When Motoko comes to the next morning, she meets her sister Tsuruko, who wastes no time in chewing her out for jumping to conclusions so quickly based on what little information she heard. - The sequel to The Dark Lords of Nerima has Luna go to the Tendo Dojo to gather information on the eponymous Dark Lords. There, she overhears Ranma and Akane talking about the usual chaos that afflicts Nerima, and an upcoming meeting with the Sailor Senshi to try and sort out the misunderstanding, but since she misses key portions of the conversation, she becomes more convinced than ever that Ramna intends to take over the world and the meeting with the Senshi is a trap. - In The Lord of the Rings fanfic At the End of All Things, Sam overhears Frodo claiming that he should have never let someone come on the quest with him, and how he wishes that they'd remained in Mount Doom. Sam thinks that Frodo is talking about him and is heartbroken (Frodo's really talking about Gollum). - In Harry Potter and Future's Past Hermione's father overhears what he thinks is her and Harry having sex. When he bursts into her bedroom he finds her cleaning the computer screen, while Harry is playing solitaire. - In the Mork & Mindy fanfic Mork and Memories, Mork overhears Mindy talking on the phone to her father and hears her say that things would be easier if he was a human so he makes himself forget he's an alien. Unfortunately, he accidentally knocks himself out by falling downstairs before he gets a chance to hear Mindy say she doesn't care about easy. - In Say a Prayer Percy bursts into the Gryffindor second-year boys' dorm after hearing Hermione moan "Oh, Harry, it's magnificent." The "it" in question is actually a book compartment Harry's new magical guardian had installed in Harry's old school trunk. - In The Peace Not Promised, Severus and Lily's breakfast conversation in the Great Hall leads Hagrid to believe that she's pregnant, and being as loose lipped as he is, he spreads the story around amongst the staff. Cue staff members keeping Lily away from alcohol, fussing about which potions she's allowed to brew, ensuring that she wraps up warmly, but never directly approaching her about it. - In the Animorphs fanfic THX 1138, Tom overhears his dad compare Post-Infestation Affective Blunting Syndrome to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, and assumes at first that ex-hosts such as him have schizophrenia. - In You are Crazy, Malph!, which is a fanfiction crossover of Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, with a bit of Mork & Mindy thrown in (\|\| although that part was a dream\|\|), Ralph Malph hears Shirley mention a rabbit dying and Laverne ask, "Is it Carmine's?", which makes him think Shirley is pregnant but really Carmine's pet rabbit died. - In the Sam & Cat fic "#GrandFinale", after Sam and Cat start dating, when Carly comes to Los Angeles for a visit, Cat overhears Sam on a phone call that she takes to be about how Sam is going to dump her for Carly, when in reality Sam's talking with Freddie about her own realisation that she's over her past crush on Carly and has fallen for Cat, to the extent that Cat leaves before Sam explicitly calls Cat her girlfriend. - The Kim Possible fic "Equal Romance 01: Tension Living" features a complex version of this. When Kim and Ron are stuck together for over a week after Drakken's latest device forces them to hold hands for that time (they can change which hand they're holding but they have to stay in contact), another side-effect of the link is an erratic telepathic connection that allows them to occasionally hear each other's thoughts. Ron uses the opportunity to try and subtly make Kim aware of his deeper feelings for her, but when they're about to sever the connection, Kim overhears only some of Ron's thoughts, and mistakes Ron's thoughts of joy that they're taking a new step in their relationship for self-satisfaction that he drove away Kim's current love interest and he has her all to himself. - In The Day When Ron Did What Ron Does Best Ron overhears what he thinks is Harry and Ginny about to have sex. It turns out that Harry is piercing her ears. - In Voices carry Ron overhears what he thinks is Snape and Dumbledore having sex. In actuality they're trying to put the cork back in a wine bottle. - In Mixing It Up Harry overhears what he thinks is Hermione and Susan talking about sex, when they're really trying to decide on the cocktails to be served at Ginny's birthday party. - In Getting Another One Ron and Ginny overhear what they think is Harry and Hermione having sex, when they're actually trying to fit a new bookshelf into too small of a space. - In Cocksure Draco overhears what he thinks is his father, Snape and Remus comparing penis sizes, when they're actually talking about their pet cockatoos. - In Did I Hear that Right? Harry overhears what he thinks is Hermione having sex with Fred, George and a cucumber. It turns out that the twins are painting a still life while Hermione holds a fruit bowl at the proper height. - In Simple Misunderstandings Ron, Hermione and Draco overhear what they think is Snape and Harry having sex. In reality, Harry is giving Snape a massage. - In this Danganronpa, Sayaka, Leon, Mukuro and Junko all hear moans of pleasure coming from Kyoko while she and Makoto are inside his room, they jump to the conclusion that the duo are having sex. In actuality, Makoto is giving Kyoko a massage. - The Bolt Chronicles: In "The Party," Mittens overhears two cats talking about the title event after emerging from a nearby apartment building. Given what they're saying, she assumes they just emerged from the party, but it turns out the shindig occured the previous evening. - Happens twice in ''When True Love Comes Between Two Duelists; Fubuki overhears a rather suggestive conversation between his sister and Judai, prompting him to burst into the room and find them...playing video games. The third time this happens is an aversion, but by that point Fubuki, thinking he's wised up and not wanting to embarrass himself a third time, just walks away. - In Chapter 8 of The Season's My Reason, Nozomi overhears some screaming and shouts of "Push!" coming from a hospital room and believes someone inside is having a baby. In reality, Chiyu is trying to push Manatsu out of a tunnel in the wall she's gotten stuck in, and Sango is screaming while trying to squish a bug. - In Flushed Away, Roddy overhears Rita talking to her father and Liam, her younger brother. Rita: Great! So, I hand Roddy over to The Toad, and claim the reward, and then we're all sitting pretty for the rest of our lives! Is that the idea? Liam: Yeah, The Toad will pay a fortune for him! He's a bad one anyway, so it's alright. [ thinking Rita's going to sell him to The Toad, Roddy leaves quietly, but doesn't hear this part ] Mr. Malone: Oh, you cheeky little monkey! I won't have no son of mine acting the rat! Rita: We Malones never go back on our word. Liam: [looks out the window] He's gonna steal your boat. Rita: He won't steal my boat. Liam: He's stealing your boat. Rita: He isn't stealing my boat! Liam: He stole your boat. Rita: WHAT?! [She looks out the window and sees Roddy leaving on the Jammy Dodger] - In Hercules, Phil overhears Hades discussing his plans to destroy Hercules with Megara, the girl Herc is in love with. He immediately leaves to warn Herc, and misses the part where Meg refuses to go along with Hades' plan anymore. - In The Incredibles, Helen picks up the phone and hears Bob speaking to a woman she doesn't know, but misses the part of the conversation about Bob getting a new assignment and only hears his eagerness to leave in the morning to meet with her. The whole conversation might have clued her in that Bob was actually doing secret superhero work again. Instead Bob's recently changed behavior which includes him buying a new sports car and getting in shape as well as Helen having just found a long, blond hair on his tuxedo leads her to the conclusion that Bob is cheating on her. - In the first Shrek film, Shrek is about to confess his love to Fiona, when he overhears Fiona talking to Donkey, saying that no one could love a monster like an ogre. Of course, he is unaware that she is talking about the curse that turns her into an ogre, which she conveniently doesn't explicitly mention again until just after Shrek gets disgusted and leaves. - Barely Lethal: When Liz Larson asks Megan/Agent 83- a former trained assassin trying to lead a normal life- if she's ever killed anyone, their subsequent conversation could strongly suggest that Megan is talking about sex. - In the 1947 comedy Copacabana, Lionel and Carmen have made up a fake stage persona, Mlle. Fifi. When they decide to dump the persona, an old woman hears them joking about it and misinterprets them as saying that they murdered Fifi (who no-one else knows was just Carmen in a veil with a French accent). Hilarity Ensues. - In Down with Love, a secretary overhears Ewan McGregor and David Hyde Pierce discussing a new kind of sock that obviates the need for sock garters in such a way as to mistake them for comparing penises. "It stays up all day long!" and "Well, how long does a man's hose need to be?" are just a few examples. - A scene from Look Who's Talking has James pulling out a splinter from Molly's finger. Her mother overhears and assume they're having sex. When James comes out, he zips his fly. - In Love Affair, a cop is suspicious when he hears Michel the painter's agent tell Michel that he sold one of Michel's paintings. Agent: I sold one! The woman! I got $100 for her! - Pee-wee's Big Adventure: Pee-wee and Simone talk about her "big 'but,'" the thing holding her back from following her dreams. Simone's eavesdropping boyfriend mistakes their conversation for pillow talk and attacks Pee-wee. - In Shall We Dance? (1937), a policeman overhears Linda and Peter discussing the dilemma caused by the newspapers publishing "evidence" of their (nonexistent) secret marriage. Linda is suggesting that Peter marry her so they can then have a public divorce, but the policeman thinks they're talking about ... something else. Linda: You got me into all this. The very least you could do is marry me. [The policeman looks shocked.] Peter: It wasn't my fault any more than it was yours. Linda: All right, it's my fault. But you've just got to marry me. Peter: Well, now, I'd like to think it over. [The policeman frowns disapprovingly.] Linda: But why? There's nothing to think over. Peter: All right. [The policeman smiles.] But where can we get a license? Everybody in New York knows us now. [The policeman casually strolls past them.] Policeman: Why don't you try New Jersey? - In This Is the End, when Emma Watson is the only female in the house, the cast discusses making sure that she's comfortable and doesn't feel like she's in danger from them. However, since she's in the next room, she can make out half the conversation so she thinks that they're discussing who gets to rape her. This leads to her violently leaving the house. - In White Christmas, nosy housekeeper Emma has a habit of eavesdropping on phone conversations. She hears Ed Harrison (an Ed Sullivan expy) planning to bring General Waverly on his show, and immediately hangs up her phone receiver to tell the Love Interest... and misses the hero (Bing Crosby as George Wallace) rejecting this scheme. - In Rags, Charlie happens to be cleaning the hallway when Kadee, Finn, and her father are discussing how much time Kadee is spending with him. She sarcastically points out that someone like her has no reason to be spending so much time with a janitor who mops the floors she walks on, and he walks away in annoyance before she sincerely calls him cooler than anyone else in the building. - Clarice Bean: In "Don't Look Now", Clarice assumes her family will be moving house when she overhears her mother say something about more space and an extra bathroom, but actually, they're getting their house renovated. - In the first book Clémentine book, Clementine overhears a portion of a number of things that leads her to believe that her parents are planning to get rid of her. In fact, they're actually planning a Surprise Party to thank her for helping her father to solve "the great pigeon war." - Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In "Dog Days", Greg overhears his dad Frank say on the phone that he'll "leave him with enough food and water for a week" and assumes he's talking about him, but really, he's talking about \|\|Sweetie the dog, who he's giving to Grandma.\|\| - Dirty Bertie: In "Toothy!", Bert overhears his dentist Mr Filling and Mr Filling's nurse talk about putting someone who's male and seven years old to sleep. He assumes they're talking about him, but really they're talking about \|\|Mr. Filling's dog Rex.\|\| - Harry Potter - In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry overhears what seems to be Snape forcing Quirrell to help him steal the Stone. It turns out \|\|Quirrell was after the Stone and Snape, suspecting as much, was trying to scare him into giving up on it.\|\| - In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, \|\|it turns out Snape was the one who told the prophecy to Voldemort, which led him to try to kill Harry. However, he only heard the part labeling Harry, and not why he would be dangerous, leading to his initial downfall.\|\| - In the events leading up the original The Mysterious Benedict Society, Sticky Washington is financially abused by his parents after they learn he's a genius, forced to repeatedly enter quiz competitions to the point of exhaustion. After pretending to run away from home, Sticky overhears part of a conversation of his parents in which he hears the phrase "better off" and believes that they feel they're better off without him. This is the final straw that causes him to truly run away. At the end of the story, he learns that in fact what his parents had said was that perhaps he was better off without them because of how badly they had messed things up. - Ramona Quimby: - In the book "Ramona Quimby, Age 8", Ramona overhears her teacher Mrs. Whaley say something about "my little showoff" followed by "what a nuisance!". Ramona thinks her teacher believes she's a showoff and a nuisance, but in actuality, she was calling her a showoff in jest and saying that when she accidentally cracked a raw egg onto her hair, it was a nuisance for the school secretary to have to wash it out. - In one book, Ramona overhears her mother talking in a serious voice. She only hears "I don't think", "I think we could", her name, and the words "teacher" and "school", so she believes that she is in trouble with her teacher. \|\|Really, her father is considering going back to university.\|\| - Whateley Universe: The Good Ol' Boyz try to blackmail Phase and She-Beast with a recording of them talking about several murders. In reality, Phase and She-Beast were detailing the plot of Titus Andronicus to Dragonrider, and Phase was being overly enthusiastic and narrating in first-person. It's lampshaded later that Fantastico should have understood what they were really talking about, because he'd previously written a paper on Shakespeare's tragedies, including Titus Andronicus, so since he didn't, he obviously didn't write the paper himself, which gets him an extra punishment for handing in a paper he didn't write. - Played very much for drama in Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff overhears Cathy say that she's resolved to marry Edgar because it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff now. He doesn't stay long enough to hear her confess that she truly does love Heathcliff as her own being, and that a key part of why she's chosen Edgar is so she can share her new wealth with Heathcliff and help him escape from Hindley's abuse. Cue Heathcliff's FaceHeel Turn and twenty-year Roaring Rampage of Revenge on everyone who led Cathy away from him and their children too. - Justified and invoked in an Angel episode. Cordelia is magically shown several conversations her teammates have about her by the demon Skip, all of them seemingly very insulting towards her. However, Skip is actually deliberately showing her very specific parts of the conversations taken out of context for his own agenda. - Austin & Ally: - Austin overhears Ally and Jimmy discussing about selling his latest song which he is performing at Jimmy's Halloween party to Taylor Swift, unaware that they are actually organizing a duet for him and Taylor Swift at the party and plan on surprising him. - Dez overhears Ally telling Trish what she will say to her childhood crush from camp ("Elliot, you were the love of my life! I've always wanted to be your girlfriend!") and rushes to tell Austin, who has just developed romantic feelings for Ally. However, Dez is unaware that Ally actually meant to say that she did love Elliot and wanted to be his girlfriend, but has changed her mind after noticing that he only talks about camp and is really planning to end their short-lived relationship. - In the Babylon 5 episode "Rumors, Bargains and Lies", Delenn and Neroon are in private conference onboard a ship discussing how to resolve the Minbari Civil War. Delenn says that neither the Warrior Caste nor the Religious Caste should be allowed to win the war because it would unbalance society—but a Religious Caste member walks by the room and hears only the part that the Religious caste should not win the war. He thus concludes that Delenn is betraying her caste and surrendering the war to Neroon's Warrior Caste, which leads to the Religious Caste members (who crew the ship they are travelling on) to plot to sabotage the ship's life support so that it doesn't reach Minbar. - In an episode of The Black Adder a couple of knights overhear the king talking to his wife saying how satisfied he is with the current Archbishop, and won't ever again have to say "will no one rid me of this Turbulent Priest?" Unfortunately they only hear that last part where he's quoting himself, so they go off to slay the Archbishop to get in the king's good graces. (This is parody of the fate of Thomas Becket, though that a Rhetorical Request Blunder.) - In an episode of Bumble with An Aesop about listening, Fishy states that "it might rain or it might not". Bumble doesn't hear the "might not" and thinks it will definitely rain. He remarks "we'd better take the clothes in in case there's going to be a storm", but Boo only hears the "there's going to be a storm" part and tells Peek that there will be a storm and might be a flood, but he's distracted by playing and only hears something about a flood, so he starts to prepare for a flood. - The Dick Van Dyke Show: - In "Jealousy", after everyone keeps making comments about his evenings with the new guest star, Rob rants to Jerry about the unfairness of the suspicions. Rob tells him that he thinks Laura is the World's Most Beautiful Woman, but Jerry won't be satisfied until he hears Rob say that Valerie Blake is a dazzling vision and Laura looks like a fishwife next to her. Unfortunately, Laura only comes back in for the latter part. - In "Go Tell the Birds and the Bees", Rob and Laura get a call that Ritchie has been telling the other students the facts of life. One of Ritchie's female classmates calls him, and Rob and Laura eavesdrop, thinking that he's giving another of his lectures. He says that the process usually takes three months, but it can take almost a year if the family doesn't eat much cereal. When they ask him about it, it turns out Ritchie was just talking about sending in box tops to get a toy helicopter. - Two notable examples in El Chavo del ocho: - In "El cumpleaños de Don Ramón", la Chilindrina decides to prepare a surprise party for her dad and asks for Quico, Doña Florinda and Doña Cleotilde's help. Unfortunately, Don Ramón forgot that today was his birthday and starts becoming suspicious when he overhears them talking about him, so he sends El Chavo to listen in to them. Everything El Chavo hears makes him think that Don Ramón is going to die, and then that they plan to kill him to spare him the agony. - In "Disgusto amoroso", Doña Florinda and Professor Jirafales break up, and the teacher comes to Don Ramón to ask him for help to get back together with her. At one point, Quico and el Chavo watch through the window how Professor Jirafales rehearses a love confession in front of Don Ramón, causing them to get wrong ideas about what's going on, which they relay to Doña Florinda making things even worse. - Diff'rent Strokes: In an early episode, Willis and Arnold (black) plan to run away because they overhear their adopted father (white) saying that black boys should be put with black families, thinking that he didn't want them; but he didn't believe in that, he was telling someone else what a white social worker said to him before he threw her out. - In the first season finale of Downton Abbey, O'Brien overhears Cora and Violet discussing hiring a new lady's maid, so she thinks she's going to get the sack and plots her revenge. Turns out, Cora was just helping Violet to find a replacement lady's maid, since hers was retiring. - The Dog with a Blog episode "A New Baby?" has the kids misinterpret Bennett discussing getting a promotion of getting a boat for their parents having another baby. - In Frasier, Daphne overhears Frasier talking to Eddie about his love for Daphne. He means it in the platonic sense of course, but she is alarmed that his feelings are romantic. She tells Marty that she knows Dr. Crane is in love with her (meaning Frasier). Marty presumes she means the other Dr. Crane (Niles), who has been in love with her the entire series. He confirms this and tells her to keep things quiet, adding further to the misunderstanding. - On General Hospital, shortly after marrying Jax to force herself to get on with her life after ex-lover Sonny told her he was staying with his pregnant wife Lily, Brenda confided to girlfriend Robin that "I never realized how much I cared about him". She's referring to Jax, but Jax overhears this and thinks she's talking about Sonny. - In an episode of Good Luck Charlie, while the parents are in the kitchen discussing Gabe's many shenanigans at school, Amy mentions a friend of hers who sent her son to Military School for also being a troublemaker. Gabe overhears them and mistakenly believes that his parents are planning on sending him to military school. - One episode of Kids Incorporated has Haylie overhearing the rest of the group making disparaging remarks about a doll's weird facial features, and she assumes they're all talking about her. - Averted in Little Mosque on the Prairie: Fatima overhears a conversation between Rayyan and JJ — "why not do it now, we're gonna do it after the wedding anyway..." "after the wedding, I want to do it right in front of my parents!" — and correctly guesses that they're talking about when they should open their wedding presents. - Happens during Earl's coma fantasy in My Name Is Earl. Earl is the star of a 1950's style Dom Com in his head, and he is married to a friend's ex-girlfriend that Earl was attracted to. She is pregnant, and conversing with Joy (their next-door neighbor) about a really awesome guy. Earl thinks she's talking about a gigolo...it turns out she's referring to a doctor. - The out-of-theater plot to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Mitchell revolves around this. The Mads have hired Mike Nelson to help with an inventory of the Deep-13 lab beneath the Gizmonic Institute, but they find him insufferable and decide to kill him. Gypsy overhears them plotting and comes to the conclusion that they're plotting the death of Joel and spends the rest of the episode plotting to help Joel escape the Satellite of Love. Thus did Joel leave the series and was replaced by Mike. - ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.?: The family is discussing doing something nice for Adela. Of course, Adela manages to overhear them make plans to surprise her by taking her to a plant nursery, but thanks to her tenuous grasp of English, thinks they are talking of dropping her off at a nursing home, scaring her. - Subverted in an episode of Robin of Sherwood where the villains have hired a group of thugs to impersonate Robin and the Merry Men and commit atrocities. It's hinted that Marion and Much may believe that Will and Tuck really have turned evil due to an ambiguous overheard conversation, but it turns out that they were never confused. - In Seinfeld, a friend of Jerry overhears him tell Elaine that she should "just kill" Suzie. The thing is, Suzie isn't a real person, just someone Elaine made up at work because of reasons. Killing her off would just be an attempt to get out of her self-made web of lies. - In an episode of Shake it Up, CeCe and Rocky believe that Gunther is moving back to the old country after taking bad advise on the girls' newest webshow when they overhear him telling Tinka that he bought a plane ticket and Tinka was very sad about it. It turns out they misunderstood the conversation because the plane ticket is really to visit a sequence convention across town and Gunther and Tinka's cousin is actually the one who moved back to the old country. - In The Stanley Dynamic episode "The Stanley Grandpa", the kids overhear Grandpa Lawrence explain to Lisa that he's been dyeing his hair white to look more distinguished, and believe that he is dying. - In That's My Bush!, Laura, worried about the dry spell she and George are experiencing in the bedroom, overhears him talking about her cat (her "pussy"), describing it as old, smelly, too hairy and overall disgusting, and adding that it's about time he gets a younger one. - This premise was the plot of roughly 2/3s of the episodes of Three's Company. - In an episode of The Muppet Show, Fozzie keeps hearing remarks that sound like the others want to get rid of him and only Gonzo is on his side. Of course, we know that the bear in question is Gonzo's teddy bear, but Fozzie doesn't find this out until the end of the episode, when Kermit reassures him that he never intends to fire Fozzie. - Sesame Street: In one episode, Maria is planning to see a movie titled Moving to Cleveland. When Elmo hears her say the movie's title, he assumes she actually is moving there. - This is the catalyst for the plot of "Let It Go" from Bear in the Big Blue House. Tutter overhears Bear and Doc Hogg having a conversation about it having not rained much lately. As usual, it's Doc Hogg who's doing most of the talking and he says that it's going to get mighty dry. He says he's starting to wonder if it's ever going to rain again. Tutter takes this to mean that it's never going to rain again in Woodland Valley and spreads this around to all of the other kids of the Big Blue House. However, he didn't hear the rest of it. Bear: ( shaking his head) Oh, Doc. Don't worry, I'm sure it will rain very soon. In fact, let's see if we can get a weather report on the radio. ( turns on radio, the forecaster says that there's a storm coming) - The Men from the Ministry: - Mr. Lamb and Mildred eavesdrop on Ministry's doctor and engineer Lambry conversing about heating system in Mr. Lennox-Brown's room, and come to a conclusion that he's dying of a disease. - After Lennox-Brown and Lamb have an argument over an ill-fated Stilton cheese purchase, he and Mr. Crawley hear Lennox-Brown and Mildred discussing about killing a mouse which pests the office, which they interpret as Lennox-Brown and Mildred trying to kill Lamb. - In The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola accidentally kills his ally Antonio without recognising him in a dark street, after overhearing an ambiguous conversation between Antonio and another character that gave him the impression that Antonio was an assassin hired to kill him. - The titular character of Othello hears what appears to be Cassio bragging about sleeping with Othello's bride. Cassio's actually talking about his mistress, Bianca. A justified use of this trope as Iago was talking to Cassio at the time and deliberately guiding him to talk about his mistress. - Granblue Fantasy: When Medusa eavesdrops on the girls chatting about Valentine's Day and hears Io's remark about how "looks [of the chocolates] are important too.", she just assumes that meant everyone has to dress up in fancy clothes for the occasion. She did sport a new outfit for the event. - Detention: the plot is kicked off by Ray hearing an out-of-context conversation and deciding to act on her own instead of discussing it with anyone. As a result, \|\|she inadvertently gets all members of the book club arrested, forces Ms. Yin to flee the country, and gets Mr. Chang killed, and, upon realisation, kills herself in remorse\|\|. Poor Communication Kills at its finest. - Mega Man Battle Network 4 Blue Moon: What leads AquaMan to completely flood the net with his crying, when the discussion he heard was really about his operator looking to get rid of a washer, not her Navi. - Etra-chan saw it!: - Akane accuses Tsutsuji of being a pornstar in an attempt to make her boyfriend Tokusa break up with her due to Akane thinking he is rich and owns several lands. \|\|Tsutsuji's friend Karin reveals that Tsutsuji was overweight in high school and often mistaken for being that pornstar because they look alike, Tokusa also reveals that he isn't rich at all and has hemorrhoids note : Jinushi can refer to both "owning several lands" and "having hemorrhoids" in Japanese., the reveal causes Akane to run away crying. The whole incident started because Akane eavesdropped on Tsutsuji and Karin talking about Tokusa's hemorrhoids in the cafeteria and misinterpreted the context.\|\| - Yuzuriha "marries" Kuroki without him knowing because he was in a coma due to an accident, claiming he is the heir of a large company and owns a Porsche. Kuroki's parents Tokusa and Karin end up going to court against Yuzuriha. \|\|Hiiragi is then called by the judge and reveals the actual context about her claims; Kuroki is actually a farmer from the countryside, the "Porsche" is revealed to be a tractor named "Farm Road Porsche" and the "next company president" is actually a nickname for Kuroki because he was sharing vegetables his parents grew to poor students, including Hiiragi. The "marriage" ends up being nullified by the court's order. As it turns out, Yuzuriha lived next to Kuroki's apartment and eavesdropped on him talking on the phone with Hiiragi and she took the conversation between them completely out of context.\|\| - Akane and Yuri think that Tsutsuji was recommending adult magazines to her students when Akamatsu yelled, in reality, she was actually talking about young adult novels, which are books aimed at teenagers. - The Order of the Stick: Miko overheard Lord Shojo discussing the fact that he told his paladins some lies, and concluded that he betrayed the city. He actually told those lies because the paladins are so traditional, they wouldn't let him do what he thought was needed to save the whole world. - In Scary Go Round, Desmond overheard Shelley and Amy talking (jokingly) about how Ryan ought to leave, and misunderstood them as talking about him, causing him to run away. (Link) - StacheBros: In "Mario & Luigi's Delfino Dilemma", Mario and Luigi hear Bowser from their hotel room say he's happy together and that he has everything he's ever wanted, making them think he kidnapped Peach somehow. They break into his room to confront him, but it turns out he was only talking about his room's jacuzzi. - Aladdin: The Series: In "To Cure a Thief", Abu runs away after a nasty falling-out with Aladdin, and he is soon partnered with a thief who wants to rob the palace. As he roams the halls, he overhears Jasmine and Genie trying to cheer up Aladdin, who denies that he misses him. Aladdin: I didn't ask Abu to leave! I-I'm glad he's gone! He can just stay away forever! (Abu, feeling betrayed, lowers his head and sadly walks away) Aladdin: (sigh) Who am I kidding? I miss that furry little guy. - American Dad!: - In the episode "Old Stan on the Mountain," Stan, having been hexed to become an old man after expressing his disdain for the elderly in front of one, assumes that climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro will break the hex, with Steve and Hayley agreeing to help him. While Stan is relieving himself, Steve and Hayley squash a bug and talk about how they should "put him out of his misery" and that they're sure "he'd rather die than live like this." Stan's hearing aid only picks up those parts, and he quickly assumes that they took him out to the mountains to kill him. - In "Stannie Get Your Gun", Roger tries to trick Steve into thinking he's adopted, which Steve doubts at first until he hears his parents arguing about his sister Hayley's anti-gun views. Stan: As far as I'm concerned, we only have one child! It's like someone left the other one on our doorstep! Steve: (gasps and starts sobbing) - In Arcane, Powder spies on Vi and Mylo arguing about her after she lost their loot from a robbery, and runs off upset when Vi agrees that there are a lot of things she can't do. Had she stayed a little longer she'd have learned Vi was building up to listing, as things Powder "can't do", the ways Mylo had messed up the heist himself, such as boasting about their haul thus instigating the fight where Powder lost it. - Deconstructed: This becomes less of a one-off and more of a defining character trait, as Jinx's bitterness and insecurity lead her to repeatedly spy on the people close to her, and misinterpret their words or actions uncharitably, always leading her to personal tragedy. - In the Arthur episode "Arthur and the Real Mr. Ratburn", Arthur and Buster, upon overhearing Mr. Ratburn talking on the phone where he states he needs "boys' heads", thinks that he actually wants boy's heads. \|\|It's not until after they follow him around and into a carnival that he meant heads to make puppets for his show.\|\| - In "House of Mirrors" from the PBS The Berenstain Bears, Sister Bear overhears Lizzie's mother telling her that Sister Bear has "big ears" in warning her not to speak so loudly about the surprise she's planning for Sister. Sister Bear only hears the part about the "big ears" and takes it literally, resulting in her being down about self-image. - In "Butterbean's is Closing!" from Butterbean's Cafe, Cricket overhears Butterbean on the phone saying that she's closing the cafe. Butterbean only means to close for the afternoon to surprise her staff with a picnic that afternoon, but Cricket gets it in her head that she means to close forever. She then ends up spreading it around to everyone else, even though Butterbean had asked her to keep the closing a secret. - In an episode of Clifford the Big Red Dog, Cleo overhears Sheriff Lewis mentioning that he and T-Bone will be moving soon. She assumes this means they're moving off the island, but it turns out he was just talking about moving a few blocks down the street. - The Cuphead Show!: The plot for "Dirt Nap" gets started when Elder Kettle overhears Cuphead and Mugman from the other side of a barely closed door, thinking they're talking about him. It starts out as the cups talking about how he's not as youthful as he used to be, then about how they might have to "take him out of his misery", and finally, burying him in the backyard. \|\|They are actually talking about their pet earthworm.\|\| - An episode of Dexter's Laboratory has Dexter and Dee Dee listening in on their parents having an argument, and they conclude that Dad was cheating. It turns out they were playing a game of Scrabble. Dad: Well, how about the last time I caught you cheating?! How easily you seem to forget who dealt the cards then! Mom: That was different! I told you that the jack of spades was wild! Dexter: Who is Jack? Dee Dee: Whoever he is, he must be more exciting than Dad. - The Fairly OddParents!: - Played for Laughs in "The Grass is Greener". Timmy overhears his parents say that they'd be able to afford so many more nice things if they didn't have a son, but as soon as he walks away, Timmy's dad adds, "—is the exact opposite of how I really feel!". There's a more serious example later, when he checks on them using a magic mirror and sees them throwing away all his belongings; Timmy promptly smashes the mirror and walks off in a huff just before his parents reveal that they did this so they could replace them with much nicer belongings they'd just bought him. - Another episode, "Big Wanda", has Timmy and Cosmo overhearing some fairies talking about "taking Wanda out", and that they were going to use a butcher and it was going to be expensive. At the end, it's revealed that the fairies were just taking Wanda out to dinner at the butcher's restaurant, where the food is expensive. - In the Donkey Kong Country episode "From Zero to Hero", Bluster Kong has an X-ray, which reveals something wrong with the machine. Bluster overhears Cranky, Donkey and Diddy Kong talking about how they just got Bluster's X-ray and "doesn't look good" and they'd "give it a week". However, Bluster leaves before he hears the context, thinking that he is the one they were talking about and that he is going to die soon. - This is the basis of "Franklin Snoops" from Franklin. After Franklin and Bear get spy kits, they start spying on their friends. They overhear Beaver and Goose plotting something and tape them saying that something is going to happen when one of them says "It looks like rain," but because the tape cuts off, they don't hear the rest. They assume it's a prank that involves spraying them with a hose and decide to turn the prank on them, but actually, "It looks like rain," is just a stage direction for a puppet show. - The Garfield and Friends episode "Arrivaderci, Odie" had Garfield break Jon's vase and attempt to make Odie take the rap. After Garfield is out of sight, Jon does believe Odie broke the vase, but doesn't get mad at Odie and proceeds to drive the dog to Dr. Liz Wilson when Odie starts sneezing. A bit later, Jon finally gets rid of a fly that was bugging him at home by taking Liz's advice of opening a window and waiting for the fly to get out. Garfield wakes from his nap to see that Odie isn't present and overhears Jon gloating over the phone of finally being rid of an insect, which causes Garfield to assume that Jon got rid of Odie for breaking the vase. - In Gravity Falls episode "Dreamscapers", while inside Grunkle Stan's mind, Dipper finds a memory of Stan mumbling to Soos "I can't stand him", "He's a failure", and "I just want to get rid of him", leading Dipper to believe that Stan was talking about him (hence the reason he makes Dipper work so hard). After coming across the memory again, Dipper hears that Stan was actually talking about how people used to treat him, leading up to Stan revealing that he actually cares for Dipper and is merely toughening him up. - Happens a few times in Hey Arnold!. In one episode Arnold mistakenly thinks his teacher is in love with him when she's actually talking about her fiance with the same name, and another time he and Gerald think Mr. Green the butcher's life is in danger when a few people say they're going to "get him" (they're actually planning a birthday party for him). - In an episode of The Hive, Buzz Bee thinks Miss Ladybird (his teacher) is leaving school the following day because he saw her looking sad and saying the words "sad", "leaving", "school" and "tomorrow" in that order. \|\|It turns out she really said that Clara Bee, the school janitor, was leaving.\|\| - In Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable breaks into his girlfriend's house, then her closet, steals her super battle suit, joins the football team as star quarterback, gets caught with the suit and controlled by a villain, ends up in a physical and emotional fight with Kim, then ends up on the team anyway (and is still a star player just in a different position), all because he thought Kim was going to take Bonnie's advice about "trading up" to a socially acceptable jock boyfriend. Ron then overheard Kim talking with Monique about trading up and agreeing with Bonnie. Turns out they were talking about a new mobile phone. - King of the Hill: Bobby is chafing under his dad's miserly nature (and Hank really is a stick-in-the-mud about it) when he overhears Hank jokingly brag to Peggy that he "made $1,000 today." Bobby does some quick calculations under the belief he makes $1,000 every day and figures that his dad should have well over seven million dollars over twenty years. He then goes on a spending spree with his father's emergency credit card. What he doesn't realize is that Hank was telling Peggy about his annual bonus—it's a one-time thing, not a regular wage. - Lilo & Stitch: The Series: In the episode, "Shush", Lilo and Stitch find an experiment that allows them to hear private conversation. They listen in on Nani on the phone saying insults about a guy, and Lilo assumes that she's referring to David. Eventually Lilo confronts Nani, only to find out that she was talking with David about a movie they had just seen. They later pass by Mertle's house and overhear her apparently making rude comments about her friends Yuki, Teresa, and Elena (aka the "Yeeeah" girls) to which when they run into the three, Lilo relays what Mertle said about them causing a fallout between Mertle and them. It's only later found out that Mertle was taking about her old dolls that she was intending to throw out. - The The Loud House episode "Ties That Bind" has Lincoln and his sisters overhearing their parents argue about Dad's 11 novelty neckties, and they think that they want to get rid of their kids. And after everything is cleared up at the end, it appears that it's going to happen again. Dad: What do you mean you've got a bun in the oven?! Lincoln: (gasp) YOU GUYS!!! Dad: You know I'm gluten-free! - Milly, Molly: In "Aunt Maude is an Alien", Humphrey thinks Aunt Maude is planning to zap everyone because she mentions "zapping them all", but she's actually talking about pests in her garden. - On a Muppet Babies (1984) episode, the kids overhear Nanny talking on the phone saying, "I must get rid of one of them." The kids think she is talking about them, but it turns out she was talking about an old chair. - In the My Friends Tigger & Pooh episode "Tigger Goes Snowflakey", Rabbit complains that his stripy nightshirt is too itchy and he never wants to see it again until he finds two snowflakes that are exactly alike. Tigger thinks he's talking about him. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: - In "Party of One", Pinkie Pie overhears everypony else in the Mane Six planning something without her, and they even say at one point "If Pinkie Pie finds out, everything will be ruined!" She concludes that they don't want her as a friend anymore, but they are really just throwing a surprise party in her honor. There's also the line "Can you believe she was planning on throwing a party today? Obviously this will be so much better," which plays to the impression that they don't want to come to a second party in a row, but it really meant "Can you believe she's planning on throwing some random other party on her own birthday?" (which she had totally forgotten about). - In "For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils", Sweetie thinks her older sister, Rarity, deliberately upstaged her at her own birthday party: when Sweetie made her big entrance to the party, the guests were all distracted by cake and party favors that Rarity had just handed out, and they were saying "Who even needs the birthday girl?" Sweetie Belle only discovers the context years later: the guests were bored from waiting for Sweetie's entrance, so Rarity passed out the cake and party favors as a last-ditch effort to keep them from leaving, and when the guests praised her, she responded that the party swag were all Sweetie's doing. - In "Bridle Gossip", the six lead ponies all think Zecora the zebra (who they've barely met) plans to eat Applejack's little sister Apple Bloom after hearing her describe a pot of something as the "perfect temperature for ponies", then ask where the filly is. In actuality, she was planning to give the ponies a bath with ingredients mixed in with the water that would cure them of a plant's ill effects they'd earlier experienced. She was talking about the bathwater being the right temperature. - The Owl House: - In "Eda's Requiem", Eda overhears Luz and King discussing King's decision to "le-", which, in the context of their conversation, leads her to believe that King is planning on leaving her when he finds his biological parents. This causes Eda to suffer from premature Empty Nest for most of the episode. At the end it turns out he wanted to le... \|\|gally change his name to King Clawthorne to officially become part of her family. Cue Tears of Joy.\|\| - In "For the Future", Emperor Belos tries to persuade the Collector that his "best friend" King is actually planning to betray him. To prove that he's not, the Collector listens in on King's discussion with Eda and Lilith. When the latter pair suggest trapping the Titan again, King objects, which the Collector takes as proof of King's loyalty... until King adds that trapping the Collector won't work, and a "more permanent solution" is needed. The Collector stops listening, believing Belos to be right... and therefore misses King explaining that he sympathises with the Collector's childlike mentality and merely wants to try talking him down. - In an episode of PAW Patrol, the pups are watching an episode of Apollo the Super Pup and laughing about how incompetent and silly the bad guy is. The only one not present is Marshall, who, after having a bad day, overhears these comments and believes that they're about him, causing him to temporarily leave the PAW Patrol and setting into motion the objective of the episode: finding him. - Phineas and Ferb had an episode where Dr. Doofenshmirtz believes that his daughter Vanessa overheard him say he would rather have a son than a daughter when he was just venting to a fellow scientist and spends the episode trying to wipe her memory of the ordeal. It turns out, Vanessa didn't even hear him because she was wearing headphones. - The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Little Miss Interprets", the girls overhear the Professor ranting about how poorly he made three cakes intended for a party he's throwing for them; from what they hear, they believe that he wants to get rid of them and make new Powerpuff Girls from scratch. Things get more intense when they hear the Professor talking to other characters, and they assume that they're in on it. Clown: So you want me to throw them out just like that? Why don't I just eat 'em? Professor: Eh, be my guest. - Recess had the episode "Bachelor Gus" in which Gus overhears his parents talking one night and assumes that his family is moving again when he hears his father mention "operation relocation". He then runs away from home and moves into the jungle gym but gets scared from living on his own. His parents find him and he learns that they were actually just going to move Gus into a different room. - In a Richie Rich Riches cartoon, Richie and Gloria overhear a phone conversation in which Richie's father says he's "wiped out". Thinking that his family is suddenly in financial trouble, Richie organizes a fund-raising campaign, only to find out that Mr. Rich was talking about his surfing lessons. Upon learning this, Richie and Gloria work together to bring the whole campaign to a halt, though they also had to deal with Richie's cousin Reggie van Dough taking advantage of the whole situation for his personal gain. - The Simpsons - The page quote comes from "Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind", where Homer takes snippets of a conversation between Marge and Duffman and believes they are having an affair, though the situation is a little different. Homer actually had heard the entire conversation in context, and understood what was really happening, but in order to keep the surprise Marge worked so hard on, he drank one of Moe's forget-me-shots to forget the event, and could only remember snippets. - In the episode "My Pods and Boomsticks", Homer, who is prejudiced against the new Muslim family, hears the father talking about his demolition job. Unfortunately, the parts of the conversation that Homer hears makes it sound like he is a suicide bomber. - In another episode, Marge listens in on Bart and Milhouse playing a card game and thinks Bart is dealing drugs. Lampshaded, where she mentions that she listened to it out of context. - Lisa in the episode "Dude, Where's My Ranch" overhears her cowboy crush talking to a girl named Clara and thinks she's his girlfriend. She finds out the truth, that Clara's his sister... but not before her jealousy gets the better of her and she sends Clara down a dangerous trail. - In The Smurfs (1981) episode "Smurf Me No Flowers", Brainy goes to talk to Papa Smurf about Lazy's problems with insomnia when he overhears Papa Smurf saying, "Oh, what a pity...if only he had come to me sooner, perhaps I could have helped, but now I'm afraid it's too late." Brainy thinks it's Papa Smurf talking about Lazy's problems being a prelude to something worse and goes to tell his fellow Smurfs about it, but in reality it's Papa Smurf talking about Vanity's withered plant. - Spongebob Squarepants: - "As Seen on TV" has SpongeBob (who had just recently appeared in a TV commercial and was letting it go to his head) overhearing part of a conversation between two fish as he was cleaning the restrooms: "Well, I knew this guy's acting was good, but his singing is phenomenal! I'm telling you, if this guy were to cut a solo record, it would be a hit!" He assumes they were talking about him (thus letting his fame go to his head even more), but they were actually talking about someone completely different. - "Model Sponge": SpongeBob overhears Mr. Krabs talking about how it's time for him to "let the little guy go", and assumes he's getting laid off from the Krusty Krab. After SpongeBob leaves the restaurant to find a new job, however, the audience sees that the "little guy" Mr. Krabs was referring to is actually a scallop. SpongeBob, of course, doesn't know this until he returns to the Krusty Krab near the end, asking Mr. Krabs not to fire him. - "Stuck in the Wringer" has SpongeBob yelling at Patrick for ruining his day by gluing him in the wringer. The Bikini Bottomites overhear this and take this out of context in believing SpongeBob was bullying Patrick as the latter runs off in tears. They then tell off SpongeBob by saying he deserves the predicament he's in. - Star Trek: Lower Decks: - "Cupid's Errant Arrow": Boimler thinks that he overhears his girlfriend and another Cerritos officer having sex in a shuttlecraft, but they're just having trouble sticking a pipe in a storage compartment. - "First First Contact": Tendi walks into sickbay to see that she's being removed from the manifesto for the Cerritos's medical crew. After Rutherford confirms this, they both believe she's being kicked off the ship. At the end of the episode, she talks to Dr. T'Ana and finds out shes being moved to senior science officer crew because she was too good for grunt medical work. - The Thomas & Friends episode "Percy's Big Mistake" had Percy overhearing The Fat Controller say something about scrap and thought it meant he was to be scrapped (he's a steam engine). \|\|The Fat Controller actually said that Percy was working to hard recently and so after taking some scrap metal to the smelters he would be given the somewhat easier job of carrying the mail for a week\|\|. - In "Pickle's Smelly Socks" from ToddWorld, Pickle overhears his friends talking about said socks and think they don't want to be his friend anymore when really they just can't take the smell of his socks anymore. - Top Cat: - The main plot of the episode "The Late T. C." is kicked off when Dibble overhears a conversation between T. C. and a doctor, and mistakenly thinks that Top Cat only has a week to live. - "Dibble's Birthday" has Dibble overhear his superiors discussing their (old, out-of-date) police cars, and thinks they're talking about him.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverhearingMisunderstanding
Surplus Damage Bonus - TV Tropes Every so often, a game will provide an incentive for doing some extra damage beyond what is strictly required to deplete an enemy's Hit Points. Sometimes, the extra damage translates into extra Experience Points. Other times, the extra damage translates into money; this way, any Hit Points or Mana that get expended in battle can be replenished with now-affordable Healing Potions and Mana Potions. The incentive may be something as slight as a Cosmetic Award, such as a more spectacular enemy explosion and/or Ludicrous Gibs. In cases where the aforementioned Limit Break attacks get rewarded, this can be a gameplay-encouraged version of There Is No Kill like Overkill. Instances where this is possible in multiplayer games involve Beating A Dead Player. ## Examples: - In Mega Man Star Force 3, overkilling an enemy with a non-elemental card attack will increase the Noise level by the amount of extra damage. When the level exceeds 200%, you can transform into your Finalized form; additionally, ending a battle with upwards of 100% Noise will enable you to obtain Illegal Data. - Dark Souls: - Enemies drop more souls when one attack does enough damage to One-Hit Kill them (regardless of how much health they had before the last hit). - In a (presumably) unintentional example, the combined health bar of the 4 Kings has slightly more health than those of the individual kings added together. To avoid fighting a 5th king, it's necessary to do extra damage to each king that spawns (or to continue to attack during their rather long death animation). Doing so can also effectively reduce the HP of the final king, as he dies as soon as the combined health bar hits zero. - In the Deception series, it always pays to hammer the enemies with as much damage you can dish out in a combo, giving more ark points for designing new traps. This is especially true for Deception 4, where the demoness of Sadism will give you bonus ark for doing so. - Streets of Fury: Players can juggle enemies even after they die, continuing to fill their super meter as if they were still alive. Combo an enemy long enough, and they explode. - In Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Paper Mario: Color Splash, and Paper Mario: The Origami King, one extra Heart Point of damage to an enemy beyond its last bit of health becomes one coin. This gets added to the automatic coin and sticker reward for winning the battle itself. - Final Fantasy X has an overkill mechanic; if you kill a monster with an attack that exceeds a certain amount of damage, the party will be awarded with more AP and items. - The DS Glory of Heracles game has defeated enemies hang around on-screen until they take a certain amount of extra damage. At that point, they're Overkilled and dissolve into Ether (which you need to cast spells). Undead enemies have to be Overkilled; otherwise they'll resurrect at the end of the turn (unless the fight ends before then). Thankfully, party members can't be Overkilled, and in fact enemies will sometimes waste turns hitting a defeated ally. - Some of Arumat's Battle Trophies in Star Ocean: The Last Hope requiring inflicting overkill damage on the foe. Initiating a Rush Gauge special attack barrage is the best way to handle it, as the enemy won't die automatically from the attack until it's completed. Good thing, as you'll need to inflict over 90,000 points of overkill damage to get all the trophies for that category. - In Fantasy Life, doing "overkill" to a resource-gathering point (trees for Woodcutters and ore deposits for Miners) gets you more resources. - Golden Sun: Killing an enemy with a Djinni of the appropriate element causes the enemy to glow briefly before it dies, and gives more coins and increases the probability of it dropping an item or weapon. - In Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, beating on enemies after they've been killed and before they disappear causes them to spill out extra gold and experience, as well as soul shards that can be traded in for special items. - The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has an overkill mechanic. If a character deals 5 times more damage than the target enemy's current HP in one hit, then the party will gain a 10% experience bonus at the end of the battle. These bonuses can be stacked. - In Fate/Grand Order, since a single character cannot change their attack target even after the target is dead, the game gives additional Critical Stars and NP Charge for each additional hit. This can encourage players to go for Overkills, as it benefits them for the next turn. - Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Chain Attacks can continue until you exhaust all the party members' attacks or until you do an Ouroboros attack. If you deplete the targeted enemy's health during a Chain Attack, any extra attacks you do will increase the Experience Points multiplier. - In Valkyrie Profile, juggling an already-defeated enemy can make it drops crystals (which grant more experience) or even treasure chests. - The aptly named Overkill gear in Bioshock Infinite allows Booker to shock several enemies when making a kill with more damage than necessary, thus making it even easier to score an Overkill on them. - Borderlands 2 - The Gunzerker class has one skill-tree end with the skill "No Kill Like Overkill". After getting a kill, the extra damage done is then added to all gun attacks made note : Though this can't make an individual shot more than five times as powerful as normal. for a couple seconds or until you kill another enemy. So if one kills a weakened enemy with something like a rocket launcher, then pulls out a machine gun, it can get pretty crazy powerful. - The Psycho class has two overkill abilities: the first returns overkill damage to himself as health (Important since his health tends to dip really, really low due to his playstyle), while the second converts overkill damage to an explosion that can chain by overkilling other enemies (possibly to Game-Breaker levels). - Surplus Damage is one of many, many factors that gives you more Skillshots points in Bulletstorm. - In Ion Fury, enemies killed with too much damage, often to the head or using explosives tend to explode into valuable armor pickups. - In World of Warcraft, several healing classes have a feature where overhealing reduces damage taken by the healing target, or gives them a shield that absorbs damage based on the overhealing. - Experience points in Nexus Clash are awarded in combat based on damage dealt, even if the amount of damage dealt exceeds the target's available health points. Many players try to save Special Attacks for killing blows for this reason, to get the maximum benefit from killing one enemy. - In O.N.G.E.K.I., after you've destroyed the entire enemy team, continuing to hit notes will build up an "Over Damage" bonus. - In Dwarf Fortress, the DF2014 update added the ability for multiple solid hits, or a few powerful blows, to reduce the affected body part to Ludicrous Gibs. With most normal enemies, caving their skull in will likely kill them or knock them out anyway, making this a mostly cosmetic effect. However, the update also tweaked undead to require mangling essential parts in this manner to put them down. - Normally, "killed" zombies in Cataclysm will eventually revive. In order to stop the revivification process, you need to take a few moments to destroy the body. However, doing extraordinary amounts of damage to the zombie while it's still standing will cause them to explode into meat chunks, saving you that step. - Gear Head is a mecha roguelike that features Subsystem Damage. Mecha are made of body parts like arms or legs, and destruction of the central torso is needed to destroy a mecha. If you hit a body part hard enough to blast it off, the overflow damage is sent to the torso. - In Ether Vapor, when certain large enemies are critically damaged, the word "Overkill" appears over the target and a x8 multiplier is applied to any points earned from continuing to damage the enemy. - Raiden IV: Overkill introduces a number of mechanics not present in the original Raiden IV, but perhaps the most notable feature is the Overkill mechanic. When you critically damage a large enemy, a five-block Overkill gauge shows up over it and you can continue to pound the enemy with more firepower until it finaly blows up. Filling up at least one block causes the destroyed enemy to release a bonus point item, the value of which increases the more you damage the enemy before it explodes. - In Culdcept, a few creatures have a special ability that steals magic based on the damage dealt, including damage past the point required to kill the creature. There is also an achievement for draining the opponent completely from toll fees so that they have to release all their property and warp back to start. - In Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, attacking an enemy with zero HP will fill up the Sin gauge. Acquiring twice as much Sin as the game demands for that battle can unlock powerful weapons, armor, accessories, and abilities. Conversely, failing to overkill enemies will earn you the ire of your mysterious benefactor, generally meaning that she'll screw you over in your future battles by setting her goons on you in addition of fighting the enemy forces: they're basically impossible to beat without using one of the other main mechanics to supercharge one of your allies, which also kills them after the battle as well as automatically fulfilling the basic Sin requirement. In short, she'll get her way no matter what you do. - Overkilling enemies in Agarest Senki guarantees an item drop, in addition the enemy's normal random drop. - Games in the SD Gundam G Generation series starting with Spirits will give an Overkill bonus if the player does more damage than necessary to destroy an enemy machine. It even gives multiple bonuses (like Overkill x5) if you deal enough damage. - In one version of Warhammer, characters would always use every attack they had in a duel, even if they had already killed their opponent. Every wound they inflicted beyond death would increase the morale penalty suffered by nearby troops. Seeing your leader slain by the enemy champion is disheartening; seeing your leader sliced into bloody chunks by the enemy champion, who is now looking in your direction, is terrifying. - Similarly, in Ironclaw, inflicting 6 or more damage on a target will "overkill" them and automatically render their allies Afraid (unable to attack, at least until they can rally again). - Overkilling an enemy machine in BattleTech may not mean much (other than making the unit and any Critical Hit unable to be salvaged), but overkill someone in on-foot scenarios in MechWarrior note : The RPG, not the computer games or MechWarrior: Dark Age, and they are well beyond the means of medical help. 'Deadly' wounds, IE, injuries that meet or exceed hit points, can still be survived by any character, player or NPC, with a large dose of luck. There is no surviving a 'Fatal' wound at all, which describes characters thus afflicted as "very definitely dead, and there's not much left to put in a coffin, either." - Certain weapons in Paranoia can do this. If their damage is boosted high enough, it goes from "Killed" to "Vaporized". There's not really much a difference mechanically, but the players a recommended to give a hearty clap for such an astounding feat (especially if a player managed to vaporize themselves). - The Fantasy Flight Games Warhammer 40,000 games have Critical Damage tables to describe just how gruesomely a given attack mutilates its target after all Wounds are depleted. Most columns where death occurs have it set around 9, but bringing a target past that threshold on the chart often causes some Bloody Hilarious side effects, such as an energy weapon to the head causing your now-headless and on fire body to stagger off in a random direction, setting fire to anything in its way. - Depending on the campaign, sheer overkill can be necessary in GURPS. The important threshold is putting your target under negative ten times their max HP, which destroy the body. Some forms of resurrection "require a mostly intact corpse". Especially important in After the End when dealing with a Zombie Apocalypse, this will prevent your enemy from raising from the dead. - Extra damage in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim translates into physical momentum. Do barely enough to kill an enemy and it will simply slump over; use a powerful attack against an enemy with just a sliver of health left and it will fly across the room. An (originally) unintended consequence of this is that the damage of giant attacks, meant to be a One-Hit Kill, is set so high that each attack will launch the victim into the stratosphere. It was left in 'cause it's FUN. - In the Baldur's Gate series, inflicting considerably more damage to an enemy than they have hit points left results in them exploding into Ludicrous Gibs. This also applies to party members, and the ones who are killed in this fashion cannot be resurrected. - In Marvel: Avengers Alliance, you get a special bonus and extra mission points whenever you do just this to finish off an enemy. The resulting damage labels range from Overkill to Epic Overkill depending on how much extra damage you do. - In the first two episodes of Penny Arcade Adventures, doing enough surplus damage to an enemy gives an overkill bonus, which translates into increases to attack power. - Some of the Yu-Gi-Oh! video games reward players with extra credits directly based on the amount of damage dealt, and therefore encourage them to overkill their opponent by a fairly generous amount to squeeze a few more credits out to buy another pack of cards. For instance, some games award a 1 credit per 100 damage to Life Points bonus, so a player may earn 80 credits for defeating an enemy with exactly 8000 points of damage to their Life Points in a duel. Wipe out the opponent with an attack that overkills them by 2000 Life Points, though, and now the game awards the player an extra 20 credits on top of their base 80 given for the victory, a 25% bonus to the player's profit for that duel. - The first Pokémon Ranger game had bonus experience given to the player should they loop the Pokémon more times than necessary before they capture it. This was removed from later games simply due to an overhaul in the damage system. - Magic: The Gathering: - Typically averted when attacking with creatures. No matter how much power your creature has, it can be blocked by any creature your opponent controls. The defending creature will be destroyed if it has lower toughness than your attacking creature's power note : Certain abilities, like double strike and deathtouch, alter the calculation, but the surplus damage is lost. Blocking particularly powerful creatures with low toughness creatures is known as "chump blocking" on the competitive scene. - One major exception are creatures with the "Trample" ability. Creatures with Trample deal surplus damage directly to their opponent's life. - Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft: - Hearthstone has a keyword "Overkill". It will be followed by an effect which triggers whenever the card with the keyword inflicts more damage on a target than is required to kill it. - Inverted with "Honorable Kill", which triggers if the damage source used to kill the minion is exactly equal to their remaining health. - Inscryption: - Overkill damage when attacking a card will also strike any card waiting in the lane behind the killed card. This damage cannot hurt your opponent. - Overkill damage when attacking your opponent is directly converted into currency used for purchase of in-game items.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverkillBonus
Overly Long Hug - TV Tropes Gumball: Dude, little tip. Normal people don't hug for this long. Bobert: Just a little longer. Two character engage in a hug that, given the context, goes on a little too long for comfort. Generally, it happens when one of the participants is not ready to let go and the audience can see the other individual trying to pull away. It might go all the way to the extreme of a Glomp, one person isn't even a part of the hug. Sometimes this is Played for Laughs, such as the Heterosexual Life-Partners giving each other longer (and more emotional) hugs than a respective Love Interest. It might also be played for drama, where someone is about to go on a Heroic Sacrifice (or otherwise something dangerous) and their friend/love interest doesn't want to let go. This doesn't account for general "comforting" or Cooldown Hug type situations. This kind of hug should be awkward for either the characters or the audience. See also the Overly-Long Gag. ## Examples: - Im: Great Priest Imhotep: In keeping with his No Sense of Personal Space, Imhotep gives an overly long hug to Hinome in thanks for protecting him from Ramses. She is more embarrassed by the gesture than anything. - In My Hero Academia, Endeavor pulls Bakugou and Natsuo into a long hug after rescuing the latter from a villain who wanted to be killed by the Flame Hero. Natsuo is stunned into silence by the gesture, while Bakugou is so annoyed that he wriggles his way out so he can start surveying the damage caused during the chase. - Rebuild World: - Skip Beat!: Cain's lingering hug with his sister Satsuka in Volume 34 ends up disturbing the actors who witness it, and Murasame chastises them for being perverted as he forces them apart. - The Lightning Struck Heart: Sam is definitely a Cuddle Bug. It's a running gag that he will get overwhelmed with emotions and hug whomever he is talking to, often for minutes at a time, and very rarely does the recipient consent to it. - Reign of the Seven Spellblades: After admitting to their feelings for each other earlier in volume 4, Oliver and Nanao have their first real public display of affection near the end of the book, after Nanao's first senior-level broomsports match. Intending it as a reward for getting through the match without injury, Oliver gives her a big hug—and then neither one of them can bring themselves to end the hug for a full ten minutes. - Tricky Business: After a series of increasingly unlikely accidents all involving the news channel's reporters being out in a storm, the two anchors share a hug onscreen on hearing some good news that seems to last a little too long to each anchor's spouse(the anchors are secretly having an affair). - Arrow. When Oliver Queen and his sister Thea share their final hug in Season 8. Thea: One of us is going to have to let go first. Oliver: Same time? Thea: Mm-mm... (both let go) - In The Big Bang Theory the guys are in a position for an expedition to the North Pole and when Sheldon informs Penny of the trip, she shows unusual concern about Leonard leaving for several months. Later, she privately gives him a going-away present (a blanket with sleeves) and a surprising hug that goes on a lot longer than Leonard expects, showing him trying to break away sooner than her. All things considered, the hug is the main sign to Leonard that she is developing romantic feelings for him. When Leonard approaches her about it, he says "It was at least 5 Mississippi." - In the Dead Like Me pilot, George — newly dead and enlisted as a Psychopomp — is put in the awkward position of watching her (married) father give a long hug to a strange man at her own wake. She remarks on it, to a noncommittal shrug from Rube. The scene is a remnant of an Aborted Arc where the father would have been revealed to be gay, but nothing comes of the incident in canon. - The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Played for Laughs in "Burning Down the House" when Phil eventually see the kitchen Will accidentally burns down while cooking and having tried to hide it during an important dinner when Phil's boss is invited over. Things work out, Phil stays calm after the discovery and even hugs Will... and then we jump to three days later where Phil is still hugging him with his arm around his neck in a headlock. Will: Uncle Phil, are you gonna let me go anytime soon? Philip: [calmly, with a serene almost unnerving smile] No, Will. [Beat] Will: That's cool. - Kitchen Nightmares: One chef in the second episode is very enthusiastic to be working with Gordon Ramsay. He needs a translator to talk with Gordon, but takes matters into his own hands once, hugs him tightly, and won't let go. Gordon: Tell him, tell him it's only a scallop, we haven't lost our children. [Beat] Okay, okay, you can let go now. You can let go now. He can let fucking go now! - My Name Is Earl has an episode where Earl is trying to hide Joy (his ex-wife) from an ex girlfriend from even further back. Trying to hide Joy in an old camper trailer, they have to make a deal with a homeless guy for a pair of shoes and a hug "from the cute one." He ends up taking Joy's stilettos and Earl has to give him an uncomfortably long hug. After some time talking to each other, Earl and Joy manage to patch up their rocky post-marriage life and they hug each other. Joy starts to pull away, but Earl isn't quite finished yet, due to the last hug he had to give. Joy: [trying to pull away] Uh, Earl? Earl: Give me a minute, I'm trying to get that gay homeless guy out of my head. - Quantico: One episode Alex and Shelby share a long hug and Alex asks if it's getting a little weird. - In Scrubs, J.D. and Turk tend to give some exceptionally long hugs, one particular big one happening after they get ridiculed at a hospital party for their Heterosexual Life Partner behavior. After half-an-episode of trying to restrain their behavior, they give in and have a long Bear Hug complete with a reprise of "Guy Love." In the Grand Finale as J.D. is about to leave the hospital and on his last day, Turk gives him another long hug which prompts Carla and Elliot to remark on it. They decide to experiment to see what the appeal was, which makes the guys pause with shock and give advice on how to hug better. - The X-Files, "Three Words": Frohike, one of the Lone Gunmen trio, is really excited to see Mulder for the first time since Mulder's unprecedented return from the dead. Frokihe embraces Mulder tightly around the waist. Mulder hugs him back, but it gets awkward. Frohike: You know, it's really not fair. You've been dead for six months and you still look better than me. But not by much. Mulder: Melvin, I'd be a whole lot happier to see you if you'd just take your hands off my ass. Frohike: Sorry. [gets embarrassed and lets him go] - Played for drama and maximum tears in Criminal Minds. When \|\|Peter Rhea\|\| gets angry over the fact that Agent Hotchner wouldn't make a deal, he orchestrates a chain of events that culminate in taking Haley Hotchner hostage along with her small son Jack. Relishing his accomplishments and knowing that Aaron will not make it in time to save his wife, \|\|Peter\|\| allows the two to speak for a final time. Aaron covertly tells Jack to hide but Haley embraces Jack before he can comply and a few tense moments pass before he complains that she's hugging him too hard and that he has to leave. He exits the room and shot rings out over the phone. - Critical Role: The Gadfly Jester invokes this against Shadowhand Essek when, after a mixed first meeting, his Den awards Jester and her companions a house. She passes a Persuasion check to reel him into the hug, then holds it "for an awkward amount of time" while he politely tries to extricate himself.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyLongHug
Overly Polite Pals - TV Tropes Known in the entertainment industry as the Alphonse and Gaston Routine (named after the "Alphonse and Gaston" comic strip by Frederick Burr Opper), this is a comedy trope from the days of vaudeville. It's when two characters are overly polite to each other, often in a bumbling way and almost always done comically. Often these two will be of a lower class but wish to dress and act in an upper-class manner and therefore take things to extremes. Often one will offer the other his arm if they are walking somewhere together, especially someplace fancy. Almost Always Male, occasionally with Homoerotic Subtext. Often this routine involves a door or gate the pair will need to walk through, each of them insisting the other goes first (and eventually they both do simultaneously, and collide). The resulting deadlock is sometimes called a Canadian Standoff. This can also often lead to long lines of increasingly impatient and irritable people forming behind both characters who start urging them to get on with it. Occasionally the intent will be that neither really wants to proceed first, or at all, wanting his partner to endure whatever horrors might lie beyond the door first. Since the comic strip originated in 1901 and was quickly also picked up in vaudeville routines, this trope is Older Than Television. In modern times, however, this has become a bit of a Forgotten Trope, though it still occasionally crops up. Compare Politeness Judo, where this is being done as part of a passive-aggressive fight. May involve Outhumbling Each Other. Bantering Baddie Buddies often combine this with being Faux Affably Evil. See also Japanese Politeness. Inverted Trope of Vitriolic Best Buds. ## Examples: - Gaston Lagaffe has a strip where Fantasio encourages Gaston to be more polite. This leads to a major traffic jam when he and another car driver refuse to go first into a street, blocking up every car behind them. - Achille Talon has one where both continuously insist the other go first, but here the stalemate goes on until they're both late, leading to a Big Ball of Violence. Amusingly, this came about after Achille read a book on etiquette, and it turns out the other guy was the author. - Alphonse and Gaston themselves are the Trope Makers. - On Mutts, Mooch and Earl do this over a cream puff that Mooch found on the ground. They eventually take too long and the Guard Dog eats it instead. Earl: Darn. I hope that puff was rotten. Mooch: It was. - An Old Master Q strip has Old Master Q encountering one of his old friends in the street. They start with friendly if somewhat formal greetings (first a Western handshake, then the traditional Chinese clasped hand salute) but it eventually escalates all the way to the two having produced prayer mats, incense bowls, and candles out of nowhere, beseeching each other as though they were the Jade Emperor. - Robin Hood (1973) has Robin and Little John doing this when they reach a log over a stream. They then proceed to both go first, knock each other off and fall in the water. - The Three Stooges often did an overly-bumbling version of this whenever they wish to attempt to blend in with high society. - The Blues Brothers: Jake and Elwood invoke this trope when they go into Mr. Fabulous' restaurant, taking each other's arms. - Hope and Crosby had been known to invoke the trope on occasion in their Road to ... pictures. - The Marx Brothers give a nod to the trope in the Napoleon scene of the 1923 film, "I'll Say She Is". In it, Groucho (as Napoleon) calls for his "faithful advisers, François, Alphonse and Gaston." - There's a joke about two frogs who are about to enter a kitchen but say "After you, Alphonse; No, after you, Gaston." (It's a reference to the French love of frogs' legs.) - There is a joke about a woman who's worried her child might take after her excessively rude husband, so she has some hypnosis treatment during her pregnancy. When the time comes, she has difficulty giving birth. The doctors check her womb... one guess what they hear from the twins inside. - Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton were sometimes this to each other in The Honeymooners... until Ralph would lose his cool, anyway. - In The Avengers (1960s), Mr. Steed and Mrs. Peel were often overly-polite to each other, in a very flirtatious way. - The "Double Date" episode of The Office (US), Dwight and Andy perform this routine for differing motives based in politeness. - Warner Bros.' "Goofy Gophers", Mac and Tosh, are the Trope Codifiers. - Tom, Jerry and Butch the dog do the routine in the 1948 short, The Truce Hurts. - Avatar: The Last Airbender: Aang and Sokka act like this briefly in the episode "The City of Walls and Secrets", as they are trying (and failing) to behave like high society folk. In the end they bash their heads together from a contest to see who could bow better and end up on the ground with a headache. Aang ends up under the curtain he was using as a robe. Toph says the two would be lucky to pass as busboys. Toph: [Burps.] I learned proper society behavior and chose to leave it. ( throws the half-eaten pastry to the side) You never learned anything. And frankly, it's a little too late. ( she picks her nose and flicks the snot off her finger) Sokka: ( excitedly) Aha, but you learned it! You could teach us! Aang: Yeah, I'm mastering every element. How hard could manners be? ( Aang grabs a nearby curtain and puts it around himself like a noble's robe, and talks in a very sophisticated manner) Good evening, Mr. Sokka Water Tribe, Ms. Katara Water Tribe, Lord Momo of the Momo Dynasty. Your Momo-ness. ( Momo peeks at him from under the carpet and slightly bows) Sokka: ( stands up also wearing a curtain like a robe, mimicking a typical high class person) Avatar Aang, how do you do? Go on. ( Aang bows to Sokka, and Sokka, trying to out do Aang's bow, bows back; Aang tries to further out do Sokka's bow with a deeper bow and Sokka returns this bow with an even deeper bow; both of them then try to bow at the same time, but they knock each other's foreheads' together and fall down) Toph: Katara might be able to pull it off, but you two would be lucky to pass as busboys! Sokka: But I feel so fancy! ( Toph's snot falls on Sokka's forehead) - Chip 'n Dale (the first animated shorts, not on the ReTooled Series, where they acted more like Vitriolic Best Buds), act this way towards each other, always praising each other, and trying to give the other the opportunity do first whatever mischievous act they were up to. - Baloo and Kit have one of these moments in one episode of TaleSpin. - Family Guy: The "Even Couple". - In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode, "Multiple Meats", Shake splits Meatwad in half with a sword. The two Meatwad halves survive, and pull this routine going into the front door of the house - for several seasons (as we see sun, rain, leaves and snow fall while they continue "after you"-ing each other), driving both Shake and Frylock crazy. - Spoofed in Ed, Edd n Eddy, where Kevin and Eddy do this routine while going somewhere, but they say "after you" while slamming the other into the ground in front of them. - When two rival countries or politicians are being overly diplomatic to each other, it's often said they are "doing an Alphonse and Gaston routine." - Sportscasters have also used the term "Alphonse and Gaston exchanges" during baseball broadcasts, when two outfielders go after the ball and it falls in between them for a base hit. - Shirley Jackson used Gaston's Catchphrase as the title of her short story, "After You, My Dear Alphonse," published in the January 16, 1943 issue of The New Yorker. - Four-way stop intersections can occasionally evoke this.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyPolitePals
Overheating - TV Tropes "Heat level critical. Shutdown sequence initiated." Some games give you unlimited ammo, but the designer doesn't want you to fire continuously, so your gun will overheat if you fire continuously for too long, and you have to wait for it to cool down before you can use it again. Alternatively, you may have to reload, but have unlimited magazines. The heat management mechanic allows players to fire in shorter bursts to keep the weapon cool, while the magazine mechanic places a hard cap on how many rounds can be fired before having to reload. This doesn't just apply to guns. For example, a motorcycle overheating if you go fast for too long. A particularly bizarre version can occur in games that feature mounted and handheld versions of the same machine gun, which may be governed by totally separate rules; for example, one may require reloading while the other does not but is able to overheat. This can be partly considered an example of Truth in Television, as the dissipation of waste heat from various forms of technology is a major design consideration that is often overlooked; however, in video games the effect is typically exaggerated by a variable margin in terms of speed and grossly understated in terms of severity; overheating a machine gun will typically cause it to steam as if it has a water jacket, without the risk of rounds spontaneously igniting (known as "cooking off") or permanent barrel damage that come with overheating a real gun. May be partially justified by having the overheat meter represent a safety threshold imposed by an automated weapon control system or the shooter himself, and not the absolute maximum temperature at which the weapon is capable of firing. However, keeping firing at the risk of weapon damage is generally not an option. Typically, the quick-change barrels of modern machine guns are not represented, either, and there is no way to deal with an overheated barrel but wait for it to cool back down (which, for gameplay reasons, happens surprisingly fast). Gatling Guns, especially of the modern Minigun variety, often fall victim to this trope, despite the fact that delaying the onset of this trope is the entire point of their multiple rotating barrels. Essentially an inverted Charge Meter, and similar in function to a Sprint Meter, though the latter will generally go down instead of up. A sub-trope to Ability Depletion Penalty in games. Compare Cooldown, another way of regulating weapon/ability use. Contrast Pent-Up Power Peril when danger comes from the lack of use rather than overuse. If the weapons are in space, it's an aversion of Space Is Cold. ## Video Game Examples: - The Divide: Enemies Within have overheating as a minor hindrance during gameplay, with the game throwing an onscreen alert - "Warning: Overheating - Recover Cooling Unit". You'll need to activate your cooling units, lest if your guns begins jamming in the middle of fighting hostile alien monsters. - In Evolva, you have unlimited ammo for your attacks once you get them, but you must wait for them to charge again if you use them for too much time. - In The Matrix: Path of Neo during the helicopter level, after firing a few too many rounds without stopping, the minigun overheats. - Rengoku: Using weapons or dodging fills the heat meter of the respective body part. Using the same weapon without alternating causes it to Overheat and be unusable for a few seconds. Some weapons are fire-oriented and are used to disable the opponents. - In Alien vs. Predator (Capcom), each character's built-in guns could overheat, but recharged over time. Except for Linn Kurosawa's, which didn't have any cooldown, but when it ran out of ammo it reloaded very fast (though Linn was helpless during the reload). - Hyrule Warriors has this trope as one of Zant's mechanics in the form of the Twilight Meter. Whenever Zant uses his combo attacks, the gauge will build up, and if it fills, the attack backfires and stuns him for a few seconds. The only way to reduce the meter is to use the strong attack, which will allow him to shoot energy balls from his hands or spin around with blades whirling until the meter depletes. Managing the meter is part of the difficulty in using Zant. - In Guilty Gear XX #Reload, Robo-Ky's tension meter is replaced with a unique power gauge and heat gauge. Specific moves increase his heat gauge, and if it maxes out he explodes, causing damage and knockdown to himself. However, his forward+hard slash command vents the heat in a cloud of steam, and it becomes more damaging the closer the heat gauge is to maximum. It's possible to chain together multiple vents before the gauge empties and the attack becomes ineffective again, though typically only one vent is necessary to bring Robo-Ky's heat back to safe levels. - Armored Core introduced a heat mechanic in Armored Core 2 and carried it throughout the series' PS2 era up to Last Raven. Most weapons inflict a certain amount of heat damage in addition to the usual AP damage, and too much buildup without a good radiator could cause your AP to drop rapidly for a few seconds as you overheat. Some of the later games like Nexus also have your AC produce its own heat that you have to balance so you don't fry yourself in action. Depending on which game you're playing (and who you ask), heat management can range from a minor nuisance to a huge problem, but the overall negative perception of the mechanic is likely why it was removed in Armored Core 4 and not seen since. - In the Mechwarrior games, much like its parent BattleTech franchise, this is an inherent gameplay trait. All weapons create heat that must be dissipated by your 'Mech, but energy and missile weapons cause the most heat. Heat sinks can help dissipate the heat generated, but there's still a danger of overheating, and once you pass a certain threshold the 'Mech engages an automatic shutdown. If you override this automatic shutdown, note : or if your 'Mech is forced into critical overheat too quickly for it to trigger you run the risk of ammunition explosions and reactor meltdowns. In Living Legends, going past the shutdown heat while overriding will cause your armor to literally melt off, generally starting with both arms. If you mount a Gauss rifle in either arm, it'll explode when destroyed. - However, that really applies only to energy note : lasers, particle cannon, flamethrowers and missile note : rockets, guided missiles weapons: ballistic weapons note : cannon, machine guns, gauss rifles generate (almost) no heat at all, the only exception being the gatling-style Rotary AutoCannon, which overheats distressingly quickly. - This is an important part of the Competitive Balance of the various weapons, usually weighed against its ammo stock: laser weapons have Bottomless Magazines but build up heat quickly, making them ideal for a long but low-intensity fight, whereas ballistic weapons have little heat buildup and can be fired rapidly, dealing much more damage in the short run, but become useless as the fight goes on and their ammo is depleted. A middle ground of sorts can be reached by equipping an energy-based mech with more and better heat sinks; this has significant weight costs and doesn't let it carry quite as many weapons, but the tradeoff is the ability to fire a continuous stream of medium damage or large energy blasts without the necessity to shut down after every couple shots. - In Robotech: Battlecry, your Veritech's machine gun has infinite ammunition, but overheats after a few seconds. The Battloid's sniper mode lets you fire a Charged Attack that does more damage but instantly overheats the gun. - Apex Legends: The L-Star works this way. It never needs to be reloaded as it draws ammo directly from the inventory, but it will overheat after a certain number of consecutive shots. Like other weapons in the game it can be given an upgraded magazine, which will increase the number of shots allowed before overheating. - EVE Online has overheating of ship modules via the Thermodynamics skill; however, this is more Explosive Overclocking as it is intentionally activated by pilots for a boost in module performance. All modules, including weapons, can be activated indefinitely so long as the ship has sufficient capacitor reserves. - Grand Chase does this with Mari's Gun Slinger job. The "heat gauge" fills up each round fired and will start to drain out if you stop shooting. If the gauge fills up all they full, the gun doesn't fire at all for a short time, leaving you with an attack that does nothing. However, it does not disable your MP Attacks at all, but only one of those uses the gun anyhow. - In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Bounty Hunter class uses heat as a mechanic; using most abilities generates heat, which dissipates over time according to your current heat level. (The higher your heat is, the slower it dissipates, which encourages players to be frugal in normal gameplay while having a reserve for "burst" situations.) However, the actual mechanics of which abilities generated heat can be a little odd; throwing a sticky grenade generates heat, for instance, as does punching someone (admittedly, it is a jet packassisted punch), but firing your blasters in a basic attack does not. - The Grineer ramparts in Warframe have Bottomless Magazines and a fast rate of fire that slows down if you keep firing with max heat accumulated. Railjack weapons likewise have no ammo limits, but building up enough heat forces them into a cooldown period that is much longer than if you just let go of the trigger. Improving your gunnery skill enough will cut down that cooldown period and there are avionics that can be installed to reduce heat build-up. - League of Legends has one champion, Rumble (a dude in a Mech-Warrior type suit), whose mana mechanic is an Overheat bar. Each ability use adds to it, and when it reaches 100% he overheats and cannot use abilities, but does some increased damage. There is skill in balancing the bar, keeping it full but not overheating until the opportune moment. - In the "My Blaster Runs Hot" mini-game in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, the players' blasters will overheat with continuous use, but attacking again while overheated will fire a multiple enemy-clearing beam. - In Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, you drive a machine-gun-mounted gondola in a few missions. Using the machine gun too much will stop you from using it. - Excite series: In all titles, using a vehicle's turbo for too long will cause it to overheat - driving slowly until the vehicle cools down. In Truck and Bots, this can be mitigated by driving through water. - In the Boktai series, your Gun Del Sol will overheat if you stay in intense sunlight for too long, causing it to jam temporarily, and take a short while in the shade (in-game or in real life) to cool down and allow it to fire again. Doing it this way prevents the player from regenerating their solar gun's energy near-instantly, and dissuades them from staying outside in intense sunlight for long periods, since the games use an UV sensor. - Etrian Odyssey IV Beyond The Myth provides an example with its final class, the \|\|Imperials\|\|. Their drive blades can be used to dish out truly phenomenal amounts of damage, but must cool off for a number of turns after their most powerful attacks. Initially, the cooldown period is as long as 9 turns, but this can be mitigated with the right set of abilities. - The Minigun and Gatling Laser in Fallout 4 overheat and glow red when fired extensively, despite the cyclic barrels being designed to prevent this. It's just a cool-looking aesthetic flourish rather than a gameplay mechanic, since it doesn't affect their performance at all. - In the shooter minigame in Final Fantasy VII the laser becomes less and less powerful if used continuously and you must wait for it to recharge. - In Freedroid RPG, Tux heats up from "casting spells" (computer programs) and will fry if he gets too hot. Hence, single-use coolants and items with "Cooling" (heat capacity) and "Cooling per second" attributes. - This is how Dwarven Technologist Janos' Mana Meter is explained in Mage Knight: Apocalypse. He starts with zero heat, gains heat whenever he uses a skill, and when heat reaches 100, he must wait or use a 'coolant' potion. - Happens in Persona 3 to Aigis herself after being in Orgia Mode for a full three turns. - Sharla, your BFG-wielding medic in Xenoblade Chronicles 1, uses heat as a reverse Mana Meter. Using combat arts fills her heat meter, which only empties when it fills up or when manually vented. While the venting process does leave her immobile and vulnerable, she has the sense to duck while doing it, reducing monster aggro, and the ether effluence actually heals her as long as the heat is draining. - Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The main party's Interlinked Ouroborous forms are invincible, but limited by the extreme heat build up in their bodies. Every attack they make increases the heat, and taking damage also increases heat buildup. When they start glowing white-hot, an alarm starts sounding in their heads. Their enemies, Moebius, have a similar system when they Interlink. In gameplay, player characters will automatically cancel the Interlink if the heat grows too intense (and they can't Interlink again until the residual heat has time to dissipate), but in the story, if the alarm is ignored and the heat reaches critical levels, \|\|it causes an Annhilation Event that completely erases them and everything around them from existence\|\|. - Sega's 1981 arcade game Astro Blaster gives your ship a laser that is capable of overheating. Fire too many shots for too long, and your laser will be temporarily deactivated. This feature was carried over into the home computer adaptation Threshold. - Starting from the third game in the Chicken Invaders series, weapons will overheat if you keep firing them without delay, and fully overheating will disable your weapon until the heat meter fully depletes. - Cube Colossus: After running out of weapon Energy, there's a cooldown for it to recharge enough to use it again, and the character speech that happens indicates that the weapon needs to literally cool down to prevent overheating. - Hellsinker discourages "fire forever" tactics commonly seen amongst shmup players by using the Luna system. As you fire your main weapon, your Luna gauge decreases, causing your firepower to decrease until it's reduced to minimum level; you can reload the Luna gauge by collecting purple Luna chips or letting your main weapon rest. Kagura's Xanthez equipment in particular is limited to 240 shots, and has full functionality until it runs out of ammo, at which point it's reduced to two weak streams of bullets until it reloads all the way back to 240. - Your weapons in Jets'n'Guns cause your ship to heat up, stopping fire once your heat meter reaches the cap. - Krazy Ivan grants you a giant robot with dual Gatling cannons, but firing them on full-auto will result in an overheating warning. You'll need to stop shooting for a few seconds for it to cool down, else the gun starts firing at a sluggish rate. - For most ships in Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages, overheating is a bad thing. Fighters, however, want to build up heat because it can be used for Fighter-specific abilities such as increasing weapon damage or having heat absorb damage instead of shields. A ship that does overheat stops to vent heat, leaving it a sitting duck for a few seconds. Another quirk is the heat meter being double-layered; fill the heat meter once and the ship is "Running hot", a second time is an outright overheat. Some Fighter abilities can only be used while running hot. - R-Type III: If you choose to use the Hyper Wave Cannon, which supercharges your regular shots and does extreme damage for about ten seconds, your fighter will have a significant cooldown afterward as it vents heat, during which time your Wave Cannon will be completely offline. - Shadow Master can have your current weapon overheating and jamming if used repeatedly, where you'll need to swap your weapons when the game throws an overheating warning onscreen. - The first Söldner-X game discourages constant fire by having your weapons overheat after prolonged firing. - Twin Caliber have this feature as one of the few - very few - realistic aspects of the game. While Fortman and Valdez can go crazy with shooting everything in sight, if they overused their current firearm the game will throw an overheating warning, at which point they'll need to switch weapons. Continue using the same weapon and it will suddenly jam, something not desired when faced with hordes and hordes of zombies and monsters. - In Walker, your Humongous Mecha is armed with twin guns that overheat if you fire them for too long, then they shut down until cool enough again. You don't really want this to happen when a wave of enemies is bearing down on you. - Elite Dangerous has heat control a significant balancing factor on ships and weapons. Some weapons, like plasma accelerators, can deal a huge burst of DPS on a target but overheat just as readily. Others, like pulse lasers, will run cooler but take longer to deal noticeable damage. Ship heat is also a major balancing factor. Some ships, like Diamondbacks, run very cool and can be relatively stealthy due to a small heat signature preventing easy scanner lock-on. Others, like Federal ships, run hot in exchange for their armor and firepower. - In From the Depths, engines produce more heat the higher they rev. Rev and engine for too long and it will start overheating, causing a dramatic drop in power until it shuts down outright. Engines should therefore be designed to operate at low RPM or feature additional cooling components such as exhaust vents or radiators. Advanced Cannons can be overclocked to fire while still cooling off from previous shots, but with a drop in accuracy until the barrel cools. - The various parts of your spaceship in Kerbal Space Program are susceptible to overheating if pushed too hard. Not only is Friction Burn fully in effect, making atmospheric reentry an affair not to be taken lightly, but engines can and will overheat themselves - especially the massive clusters needed to push heavy payloads through the thicker atmosphere, which convects exhaust heat right back to the engines. The game models convection, conduction, and radiation effectively, meaning parts in space cool down more slowly than ones in an atmosphere that can convect and conduct heat away. Vessels that get too close to the Sun need radiators in order to counter being blasted by the solar radiation. Parts will even transfer heat to neighboring parts, risking them overheating as well as the problematic part itself. And if a part does overheat completely, it explodes, and possibly takes the rest of your craft with it. All of this models real-life spacecraft design considerations, as in the Real Life section below. - The laser in Trauma Center stops working for a while if you have used for too long, which can make certain operations difficult if you get bad timing. The only exception occurs when you fight Pempti, a GUILT strain that can only be harmed by a special red laser that works continuously. - In Colobot, both the player and the robots can use jetpacks to fly, but using it continuously causes it to eventually overheat, forcing you to land when it happens. Even on fairly cold planets, it usually takes at most 60 seconds of continuous flight for this to happen. And in hotter climates, this can happen as quickly as after 3 seconds of flight. There's a few levels where this is used to introduce a platforming element of sorts. - The Knight Titan in Dawn of War III gains heat as its Vulcan Cannons fire. Once it gains enough heat, its bullets become superhot. - Battle Corps throws in a "HEAT WARNING!" alert if you over-exert your Chicken Walker's turrets, causing its firing rate to decrease. - BattleTech uses a simplified version of the heat system from the tabletop game: every mech generates heat when it uses weapons, and the mech's heat efficiency determines how fast it builds up. Once the mech overheats by a certain threshold, the mech will start to take structure damage every turn, and if heat builds up to the max, the mech shuts down until heat dissipates to zero to allow a system restart (which, of course, means the mech is completely vulnerable to attack). Some special weapons, notably flamers, specifically cause heat damage, which can force mechs to shutdown that much faster, and some mechs are designed to mount a large number of heat-producing weapons with an equally large number of heat sinks (such as the Hunchback 4P variant, which mounts no less than eight laser weapons, all of which cause significant heat buildup). There's also terrain considerations: cold environments and being submerged in water increase heat efficiency, while hot environments and geothermal pockets reduce heat efficiency. Zero atmosphere environments (designated as Lunar or Martian) greatly reduce heat efficiency: no atmosphere means no thermal conductivity. - Templar Battleforce uses an overheating system similar to the Battletech franchise, as your Templars are using Mini-Mecha suits called Leviathans. Every step moved and action taken causes the Leviathan to build up heat, with the Templar taking damage when they're overheated. - In Gears of War, the mounted and man-portable machine guns will overheat and require you to "vent" it by using the Reload button. The game doesn't bother telling you that you can do this. - Happens in Resident Evil 5 when continuously firing the Humvee machine gun for too long. - Many of the guns in Star Wars: Battlefront follow this trope. Your backup pistol has unlimited ammo, but overheats quite quickly (and has less power than any other weapon in the game, so using it is ill-advised); vehicle-based weapons all have some sort of heat meter, and the Clone Commander's chaingun in Battlefront II uses the overheating mechanic to avoid becoming a Game-Breaker. - The V-Wing's cannons in Rogue Squadron overheat rather quickly in rapid-fire mode. - Every gun in Star Wars Battlefront (2015) overheats after overuse, though depending on the gun when this happens can vary from after a single powerful shot to after two dozen shots in succession. Additionally, the Disruptor Star Card releases a burst of heat which causes any nearby guns to jam for a time. This also doubles as an ability for Lando and R2-D2. - The Suffering: Ties that Bind featured sections with vehicle mounted guns that would overheat. These weren't used for regular fights, only when the game was throwing wave after wave of enemies at you. - In Vanquish, melee attacks, boosting, and Bullet Time cause Sam's Powered Armor to overheat if used too long, leaving you defenseless while it cools down. Some enemies also have weapons that induce overheating. - Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine has plasma weapons that overheat after several shots in quick succession or after firing a charged shot and have to be vented. Several heavy weapons available in multiplayer also overheat after extended firing. - The vehicles in [PROTOTYPE] have their machinegun/miniguns do this (they have infinite ammo in missions where you need to use the vehicles or lose). - Saints Row IV: Standard Zin guns will overheat quickly, but have no reloads and can be cooled down quickly by tapping R. The President performs an animation where they take their hand off the gun to fan it when this happens. - 7.62 High Caliber, among many other bits of realism, allows any fully automatic weapon to overheat from continuous firing. An overheated weapon wears out faster if you continue to fire it, resulting in a higher risk of jams that need to be cleared. Spare barrels are available, but only for specific weapons (and rarely showing up at all even at levels where such machine guns start appearing), and they take up weight and inventory space for the merc carrying them. - In Ghostbusters: The Video Game heat is the main limitation on the use of the proton pack, since it's powered by a nuclear reactor. If used too much continuously, the pack shuts down for a few seconds to prevent meltdown, but can be vented at any time to prevent this. - In SYNTHETIK, nearly every gun generates heat when it's fired, and excessive levels of heat will cause you to take damage while holding it. Heat is generally a factor with guns with a large magazine or energy weapons, and plasma weapons will instantly overheat when you eject its cartridge. There are a number of effects that synergize with heat, such as ones that have an effect per heat generated or are only active at high heat levels, and some increase your minimum heat level. - Vermintide II: Sienna's fire magic and Bardin's fire-based ranged weapons charge up a heat meter instead of using discrete ammunition. They cool down either automatically (very slow) or by discharging the heat with the reload button (fast but causes damage); maxing out the meter causes the character to explode and enter the dying state. - Warhawk: Warhawks have unlimited machine gun ammo, but their guns will overheat and temporarily jam after only a few seconds of continuous fire. ## Non Video Game Examples: - Chrysalis (RinoZ): Spellcasting requires intense mental effort, visualising and constructing highly complex multi-dimensional shapes from mana. As he evolves, Anthony purchases multiple sub-brains to help, but still, if he casts a lot of magic in a short space of time, especially more difficult spells, he can feel the sub-brains literally heat up from the strain and run the risk of cooking themselves. - Traveller Classic. In Book 4 Mercenary, several rapid firing weapons (such as machine guns) would overheat and jam if you fired them too often, requiring repair. - In BattleTech, heat is an important balancing factor. BattleMechs are environmentally sealed, powered by fusion engines and artificial muscle-like actuators that aren't exactly 100% efficient, and often bristling with energy, ballistic, and/or missile weapons; virtually everything they do, starting with simple movement, will cause heat to build up, which needs to be funneled out of the 'Mech via dedicated 'heat sinks'. Build up heat faster than those can handle, and your 'Mech will slow down and the accuracy of its weapons fire will suffer until they have caught up again. At sufficiently high levels it may even automatically shut down and/or see explosive ammo start to cook off. - There's also the in-universe anecdote (from the original Technical Readout 3025, may or may not have made it into later books) about the overenthusiastic all- Enforcer lance commander who supposedly exhorted his troops to fire "until your [auto]cannon glows. If need be, until it explodes!". No points for guessing what according to that story happened to him in just that battle... - Specialty "Inferno" incendiary ammunition is available for Short-Ranged Missile launchers. These Inferno warheads are less immediately damaging on impact, but the potent fuel charge it carries generates enough waste heat that any warm/hot-running battlemechs will likely have to hold their fire or even shut the engines down to allow the heatsinks to purge all that sudden waste heat. More advanced battlemechs that have the superior Double Heatsinks are far less vunerable to this weapon. Unsurprisingly, Infernos are also treated as nasty, nasty antipersonnel weapons and are a factor in some of the war crimes commited in the Inner Sphere. - Even in the meta-game of 'mech design, heat control is a critical factor. Ten heat sinks come free of mass costs with any type of fusion reactor engine (its integrated thermal control system), and any beyond that take up mass in the chassis. Sometimes those extra sinks can be bundled inside the reactor's volume so they don't take up critical space, though only if the engine is rated high enough to begin with (and if it's rated too low-power, sometimes even those ten mass-free integral sinks can't all fit inside the engine's volume). Double Heat Sinks, systems that cool twice as much for the same mass, are supposed to be counterbalanced by being much bulkier, but the engine integration factor significantly mitigates that (even the free-of-mass/space sinks are double). They are a point of contention with many old players, as it's posited that it disrupts gameplay balance and makes heat much less of an issue. Proponents argue that double heat sinks de-nerf the entire energy weapons lineup, giving them potential they didn't have before. Most on both sides agree that the meta-game would be screwed up even more if their rules were altered or they were removed outright. - A rare example of a technology meant to tap all that waste heat generated by battlemechs is the Triple-Strength Myomer, which requires you to keep a certain balance of heat in your 'mech to allow the TSM system to boost your ground movement speed and melee attack power. It has the practical effect of making more aggressive mechwarriors that ride the heat curve hard in order to get the most out of their TSM while ensuring they aren't hot enough to accidentally melt the engine block or torch their ammo. - In-universe, the Chameleon trainer 'mech was specifically designed to be easy to overheat. It has a massive number of energy weapons, but only the engine's integrated cooling system for heat control. The point is to put new pilots in the Chameleon and let them work out exactly how you're supposed to deal with the heat gauge. - Many, many R&D megaweapons in Paranoia. They also tend to explode regularly. - Some weapons in Warhammer 40,000 have a special rule called "Gets Hot!"; each time they're fired they have a 1 in 6 chance of "overheating" and injuring the operator. Most weapons with this rule are handheld plasma weapons, which harness energy equivalent to that of a star with technology the engineers have lost the blueprints to. - Eighth Edition changed the "Gets Hot!" rule in that Plasma weapons now have two profiles, one that can be fired without the chance of overheating, and one that boosts the weapon's Damage and Strength... but now Gets Hot has a 1 in 6 chance of outright killing the model instead of just wounding them. - They're totally worth it,◊ though. - Fantasy Flight's Dark Heresy and its spinoffs have the Overheats and Recharge rules as well; weapons with Overheats will backfire (potentially exploding) if the wielder's attack roll is too high, and those with Recharge need time to recover between attacks. - One Ciaphas Cain novel has commissar cadets manning a heavy weapon against hordes of cultists. When the gun threatens to overheat, one of them drops his trousers to use an old artilleryman's trick to lower the barrel's temperature. - The Adeptus Titanicus spinoff gives the Humongous Mecha in question very poorly cooled plasma reactors and makes balancing the demands placed upon them with your ability to recover it and the risk of catastrophic failure a key part of the mechanic. You can try to push power to void shields or movement systems, fire weapons with the Draining tag, or use a Legio trait such as Legio Defensor's Righteous Fire that increases heat in exchange for a powerful effect (in Defensor's case, firing your best gun twice). When the reactor gets too hot, Bad Things will happen. Warhounds are particularly vulnerable, having a very short reactor track compared to their bigger brothers like the Reaver and Warlord. Luckily, you can vent heat with repair rolls. - GURPS Supplements: - In Myriad Song pretty much all Energy Weapons other than Lost Technology Xenharmonics get hotter as they are used, fortunately they have a "Cooldown" dice that has a chance of reducing the heat level at the end of the turn. - Private Snafu: In "Fighting Tools", Snafu tries to kill a German soldier with a M1917 machine gun. Because Snafu didn't connect the condensing tank to the machine gun's cooling jacket and because he didn't even give it any water, the gun overheats and literally melts into a puddle. - Averted with the Nokia-reliable Vickers machine gun. It was so well cooled that the barrels could last around an hour of continuous fire, as long as there's a continuous supply of liquid for the water-cooled weapon. "Continuous fire" as in: dump belts in full auto for an entire hour. One famous barrage at the Battle of the Somme involved multiple machine guns firing a cumulative total of not quite one million rounds over 24 hours, which soaked up all the water set aside for cooling, much of what had been set aside for drinking, and all the local urine tubs, and involved a hundred (carefully planned) barrel changes to various guns at various times. The actual reciprocating mechanisms were still ticking over nicely at the end. - The Vickers gun was a descendant of the original Maxim gun, which was also water-cooled and known for spraying barrages like no tomorrow. - Vietnam-era M60 machine guns could keep firing even as their Stellite-lined barrels got hot enough to start glowing. Anecdotes from the time say that machine gunners would occasionally shoot until the barrels actually became translucent and bullets could actually be seen travelling down them before swapping in a fresh barrel. Too bad the M60 was plagued by other issues, namely receiver fragility, user-unfriendly loading procedures, and the fact that the gas-cylinder locking keys were too weak to withstand the gas pressure of full-powered ammunition. - The G36 may be an awesome gun in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Far Cry, and Modern Warfare, but in reality, it has serious problems with overheating, and German soldiers consistently prefer the G3 instead. The rumor goes that in a serious enough firefight (that is, as little as a couple of mags fired back-to-back) the overheating gets so severe that the rifle's polymer frame warps from the heat, throwing the sights hopelessly out of alignment and requiring a complete rebuild. A dozen mags reportedly can cause the rifle to literally melt. Not surprisingly, Heckler & Koch retorted with the actual build contract that made the G36: Nobody stated that the rifle had to perform well if abused by stressed-out soldiers. - For reference, tests show that even comparatively thin-barreled assault rifles really start overheating after several hundred rounds fired non-stop (about a dozen magazines). This means second-degree burns if the barrel is touched, and the handguard around the barrel smoldering, warping or even straight bursting into flames. Surprisingly, a rifle can still go on — although this coincides with a very marked drop in accuracy on account of a slightly deformed barrel. If the shooter pushes forth, two things inevitably happen. First, rounds begin to cook-off in the chamber (going off on their own from heat alone), causing a runaway automatic fire and potential blown-up action if the bolt didn't have the time to fully close. Second — an overheated barrel might rupture in a weak spot, also catastrophically destroying the weapon with a pressure spike. These two phenomena work together very nicely — and if this happens with a machine gun (that has a large ammo capacity and powerful powder loads) the result is definitely not pretty: "catastrophic destruction" frequently means that pieces of gun's action fly straight into the shooter's face. Luckily, well-designed air-cooled machine guns can fire up to thousands of rounds under acceptable heat levels. Nevertheless, if the surviving shooter keeps abusing his weapon to the point of even a "smoldering" overheat, he can expect a very strong-worded reproach by his quartermaster — heat warping and increased stress wears out the gun extremely quickly. - Light support weapons that are intended for protracted firing, as opposed to assault rifles that are intended to be fired in short bursts or single shots, are designed with easily-swappable barrels to help prevent this. Soldiers are trained to switch them out quickly, even during the midst of a firefight, to prevent stress and warping of the weapon. - If a belt-fed machine gun that fires from a closed-bolt really overheats and begins cooking off ammunition, the worst thing for the gunner to do is to drop the weapon in the hopes that simply releasing the trigger will stop the runaway gun. Machine gunners are taught to, should their weapon overheat and runaway on them, twist the ammo belt to stop the feeding. - There is a story about an army band who (in keeping with regulations) had to do target practice with machine guns, but due to inexperience, they tended to keep firing for too long, which would overheat the barrels and damage the guns. Finally, the range master realized that they were better musicians than they were machine gunners, so he mounted a piece of sheet music on the guns consisting of two bars of music showing one whole note followed by one whole rest. The band members got the hint, and there were no more damaged machine gun barrels. - This trope shows up, played perfectly straight, in a very unsuspecting device: the flashlight. More specifically, the small-size and high-power LED light typically fed by a lithium-ion battery. LEDs may be more energy-efficient than incandescent bulbs of old, but they still generate a godawful amount of heat if driven hard enough (particularly potent models that dish out thousands of lumens or tens of thousands of candelas can put out enough heat to be used as lighters), and that heat can burn up the diode or the driver, or, in more extreme cases, melt the solders. Heat sinks mostly solve the issue in larger appliances, but when you have to keep it compact for portability's sake, even an entire aluminum body with the user's hand sucking up some of the heat (an uncomfortable practice even in the cold, as depending on its size and power, * : such as the Thrunite TN36, a 2016 light the size of a soda can that can put out over 6,500 lumens, more than double of a regular car's headlight the light gets HOT) isn't enough. As such, these flashlights for the most part have a step-down feature in their circuits that either drops the output to a lower level or turns the torch off altogether before the heat buildup can become damaging. Newer models even go so far as to have built-in active cooling in the form of small fans! - Atmospheric re-entry is not the only way a spacecraft can overheat — without an atmosphere around it to convectively transfer heat away and to protect it from the bulk of the Sun's radiation, spacecraft cooling systems must rely on radiating massive amounts of electronics-killing heat away. - Although modern weapons have put a lot of clever thought into averting or at least mitigating this trope, it was a huge concern for early gunpowder weapons, and cannon in particular. A cannon that fired too many times in succession or with too big a charge of gunpowder risked exploding, usually with catastrophic results for the crew. The so-called "leather cannon" were particularly hurt by it because of their construction; they had a typical thin metal barrel, but whereas other cannon had outer layers of metal banded around the bore for strength, leather cannon used much smaller metal straps and, yes, leather wraps. These were strong enough for the light shot used, but caused the barrel to retain heat, limiting the gun to no more than two or three shots per battle. - This trope is why rotary cannons are the mechanism of choice for when you really want an extreme rate of fire in one weapon. Single-barrel weapons can't go much past 1,000 rounds per minute before the accumulated heat starts melting the barrels way too fast for comfort. Spreading the rate of fire around multiple barrels means each barrel can have a sane rate of fire while the overall weapon has the rate of fire you need — most ones in use with the US military, for instance, fire at about six thousand rounds per minute, usually distributed at about a thousand per barrel. - Heat management is always important when building or working with a computer. Heat is generated by the main processor, the CPU, which when dealing with normal things like basic programs or web-surfing doesn't put out very much heat. But graphics-intensive things such as 3D modeling and computer gaming can put a huge load on the processor and cause it to heat up to dangerous levels, which is why cooling systems such as fans and water-cooling are needed to avoid damage. Most computers designed for gaming nowadays have a dedicated graphics card just for dealing with advanced graphics, and they can generate even more heat than the processor, requiring it to be vented out or otherwise dealt with. Overheating can cause damage to not only the processor or the card, but to other internal parts such as the motherboard, which can be very bad for the machine as a whole. Which is why it's advisable for any computer owner to regularly check their unit's fan for dust buildup and clean it out periodically. Also, make sure nothing is placed by the computer that would block the fan's output. Nowadays, most systems will automatically shut off or slow way down if the CPU gets too hot, as a failsafe; annoying, but at least your computer survives long enough for you to figure out the issue. - This is also why, for a while, dedicated gaming PCs tended to be desktop models; easier to figure out the cooling system of a large desktop tower than a more constrained laptop, especially when it comes to cracking open the casing to clean out the fan (most laptops nowadays don't even let you swap out the keyboard, let alone get to the fan). Fortunately for gamers on the go, the technology is more or less caught up, and gaming desktops and laptops are more comparable in price and performance. Still though, take heed if the keyboard of your laptop starts feeling abnormally hot as you're playing. - That is more of a concern for mobile devices as smartphones and tablets, that have few if any heatsinks to speak of, except some smartphones designed for gaming that include also fans, and where components are crammed together, and is one of the reasons- other being power consumption- that explain why despite often having specifications comparable to those of desktop and laptop computers, and despite advances in technology, the former lag behind the latter in performance and games and apps must be optimized for them. - The Athlon Thunderbird was notorious for being the single hottest-running CPUs on the market at the time, and having next to no cooling features, just a single heatsink. If the heatsink fell off - and it was a heavy aluminum cube held up by only a few flimsy mounting clips - the processor would melt within seconds. - Heat dissipation, not technology, is the limiting factor in computing power. This is most prevalent in the HPC world. Basically, you cannot pump heat out of a room faster than you can pump electricity into it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Overheating
Overly Long Name - TV Tropes Long names: so handy in traffic violations. "It's bad luck not to say the whole name. Now, let me start over: Field Tournament Style Up and Down On the Ground Manja Flanja Blanja Banja Ishka Bibble Babble Flabble Doma Roma Floma Boma Jingle Jangle Every Angle Bricka Bracka Flacka Stacka Two Ton Rerun Free for All Big Ball!" A.k.a. Incredibly Long Name to Have to Try and Say. In the broadest sense, whenever a character has more than the usual (in the Anglosphere) first, middle, and last name, they are in possession of this trope. Also included are people who have the right number of names, but one or more of them is absurdly long, for example Ulla Inga Hansen-Bensen-Janson-Tallen-Hallen-Svaden-Swanson in the remake of The Producers. (This is actually just her first name. They "don't have the time" to hear her last name.) Can be used simply as a humor device, getting cheap laughs out of an absurd name; played to the extreme this would be a type of Overly-Long Gag, being so long as to be tedious and thus deriving its humor; or it can be a non-joke to the audience because characters with strange names are expected in the type of show/book/planet/whatever, but cause the characters involved trouble as they try not to react to, or at least comment on, the oddity of the person's name. And if someone wanted to go after the said person, it would be a nightmare for them to recite their full name and jot it down, which makes murdering a person with a notebook not always a good idea. If the character is not from around here, it might be an example of As Long as It Sounds Foreign. If there is one normal name when all the others are are ridiculous, or vice versa, it can be Aerith and Bob. In all cases, one of these makes for a good Unpronounceable Alias. A variation exists with Hispanic characters, for whom having at least four names note : more than one given name, plus the surnames of both parents is the norm. For these characters, the long name may be brandished as a funny part of the culture. Truth in Television: There are too many actual people, places and things with absurdly long names - it's really better if you just go to the other wiki, where there is a whole article dedicated to this. Doesn't that just simplify everything? Compare Embarrassing Middle Name, Overly-Long Gag, Some Call Me "Tim", The Unpronounceable, Sesquipedalian Smith, and Try to Fit That on a Business Card. Often results in Fun with Acronyms and its sub-trope Shoehorned Acronym. Related to Long Title. Contrast One-Letter Name. A Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom will almost always be overly long. ## Example subpages <!—index—> <!—/index—> - BoBoiBoy: - In the football episode, Probe merges with two Robolabots, turning it into "Robolabolabolabolabot Super King". - Pipi Zola's full name is Putri Intan Payung Indah Zulaikha Odelia Ladasyia Absyari. - Simple Samosa: Iddiyappam Appa, upon introducing himself in "Spa Wars", gives his full name as "Appa Samba Wada Dosa Onion Pypa Butta Masal Appam Beinda Rasam Medu Rava Bist Bele Plain Curry Kela Thali Saptam". - Dilbert. Most notably Elbonians. - In Garfield, there is a character in a TV show called Gouda May Freegenweegenswallodribbenfraxenlaxenismabittle. - In the Popeye comics, Swee'pea's real name is actually Scooner Seawell Georgia Washenting Christiffer Columbia Daniel Boom. "Swee'pea" is merely a term of endearment. - In Curtis, the protagonist's pal Gunk's name is actually an acronym, which stands for "Gladimus Unfred Nostradamus Klaustauvicke". - The Little Mermaid: Atlantica's official Court Composer, Horatio Thelonious Ignacious Crustaceous Sebastian. - The Aristocats: Abraham Delacey Giuseppe Casey Thomas O'Malley. - According to his toy bio, the full name of the character DJ from Cars is Devon Montgomery Johnston III. - Other cars with long names include Winford Bradford Rutherford, Richard Clayton Kensington, Antonio Veloce Eccellente, and Costanza Della Corsa. - Lady and the Tramp gave us the name of Pedro's sister: Rosita Chiquita Juanita Chihuahua. Amusingly, Lady can't remember half of it. - Ignacio Alonzo Julio Federico de Tito in Oliver & Company - In the "A Very Goofy Christmas" segment in Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas, the snowboard that Max is asking for for Christmas has a ludicrously long name. - Shenzi Marie Predatora Vendetta Jacquelina Hyena from The Lion King, at least according to the Direct to Video film The Lion King 1 ½. note : It's likely, though, that Timon just made it up on the spot to stall longer. - In an Boarding School for International Students, a Chinese girl and an Indian girl are caught chatting in class. As punishment, the class teacher tells them to write their names 100 times on a sheet of paper and submit it before class. The Indian student protests: "It isn't fair, Miss, her name is Eva Li, and my name is Samayamantri Venkata Rama Naga Butchi Anjaneya Satya Krishna Vijay." - A Japanese folktale of Jugemu tells of a man whose father could not choose any one name to give him, and in the end, decides to give him all of the names he thought up of. As such, his full name is Jugemu Jugemu Gokō-no surikire Kaijarisuigyo-no Suigyōmatsu Unraimatsu Fūraimatsu Kuunerutokoro-ni Sumutokoro Yaburakōji-no burakōji Paipopaipo Paipo-no-shūringan Shūringan-no Gūrindai Gūrindai-no Ponpokopī-no Ponpokonā-no Chōkyūmei-no Chōsuke. One variation of the tale is of a young Jugemu getting into a fight with another boy, and by the time the boy finished reciting Jugemu's full name to his parents, his injury had healed. - The Cool Kids Table game Here We Gooooo! has T. Yoshisaur Munchikoopas the 52nd. - Also, their April Fools 2018 episode is called " Star War: A Star Wars Story 001—A Lightly Used Hope (Totally Canon, We Mean It)". - Lanja from Dice And Virtue. Her full name is Kehilanja Abhorsen-Vinjaja vas-Tehir \|\|sen Shelsaa\|\|. - Hello, from the Magic Tavern: As it turns out, this is actual a requisite for wizards of Fuun. To date, we have: - Eusidore the Blue: "I am Usidore! Wizard of the 12th Realm of Ephysiyies, Master of Light and Shadow, Manipulator of Magical Delights, Devourer of Chaos, Champion of the Great Halls of Terrakkas. The elves know me as Fiang Yalok. The dwarves know me as Zoenen Hoogstandjes. And I am also known in the Northeast as Gaismunēnas Meistar. - Spintax the Green, Master of the Third, Ninth, and Twelfth Realms of Ephysiyies, Wielder of Arcane Forces Compelling the Living and the Dead, Diviner of Unknowable Truths, Caster of Illusions, Destroyer of Lies, Dissolver of the Wall of Fire, Imbiber of the Nine Deadly Poisons, Author of the Pandenomicon, and Winner of the Wizard's Choice Award; the Dwarfs know me as Nickelback Silverchair, the Angels know me as Mama Cassai'el, the Vampires know me as Cameron Orlando, in the South I am known as Lodestone Greatcraft. - Jyn'Leeviyah the Red, Wizard of the Sixth Realm of Ephysiyies; Mistress of Nature and Nurture; Reviver of the Springs of Guuthmagit; Seer of the Prophecies of the Temziet Mists; Keeper of the Sacred Tome of Deyfral; And two-time Wizard's Choice Award nominee. The Elves know me as Perimmäin Soitthuri, the Vampires know me as Beyonce Bloodlust; the Tree Folk know me as Opal Vinewitch; and upon the isle of Meegas, I am known as Ukkosta Kassvista. And ask me of mine other names, and I shall gladly share all, my children. - Can the Yellow aka Caneficent Dewspring, Master of Space and Time, Headmaster of the Jizzlenob Preparatory School for Young Wizards; the Elves did know me Cannigan the Everliving, the Elves do know me as Candle Dewspice, the Elves will know me as Candy Crowley; the Dwarfs did know me as Canned Heat, the Dwarfs do know me as Canticle Lebowitz, and the Dwarfs will know me as Canban Scrummaster... - And shortest so far, Jamillious the Mauve aka Jamillious Washington, Bringer of Feast and Famine, Master of the Great Plantation, Shatterer of the Triangle Trade Winds; the Dwarfs know me as Dat Dude, the Elves know me as Always Holdin', and I'm also known in the Far South as Boy. - Psycomedia discusses various long-named psychologists, most prominently Csikszentmihalyi. - Trials & Trebuchets features a Kobold named The Cobalt Butterfly Kissed The Dew-Wet Rose in the Morning Sun as a minor character. Understandably, she goes by "Duet" for short. - Welcome to Night Vale has the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. which is always said in its entirety. There's also the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, but her name is usually shortened to Faceless Old Woman. - CHIKARA had Still Life with Apricots and Pears (now known as Edith Surreal) and her former tag team partner Ursa Minor in the Night Sky. Surreal's match with The Proletariat Boar of Moldova at Hour of Power 14 was described as "the most multisyllabic name in CHIKARA history." - Dragon Gate had an angle where Naoki Tanizaki, who'd been injured, feuded with the former Tomahawk T.T., who'd begun impersonating him as Naoki Tani saki during his injury over his name. After the imposter defeated the original in a match where the winner received rights to the name and the right to rename the loser, he forced the original to rename to "Mr. Kyu Kyu Toyonaka Dolphin." Upon later winning his name back, Tanizaki decided he liked the Dolphin thing, and his name became "Mr. Kyu Kyu Naoki Tanizaki Toyonaka Dolphin." Part of this was because Tanizaki liked the novelty of having the longest name in pro wrestling. - Also in Dragon Gate, there was a wrestler named "The Former Super Shenlong III Yosuke Watanabe." Originally just Yosuke Watanabe, they became the third wrestler to take up the Super Shenlong character and, after losing the rights to it, were forced to take the long name as additional embarassment. - One Japanese Garbage Wrestling match was labeled as a No Rope Electrified Barbed Wire Swimming Pool Dynamite Double Hell Death Match. - Zack Sabre Jr. titled one of his many hideous-looking submission holds "Hurrah! Another Year, Surely This One Will Be Better Than the Last; The Inexorable March of Progress Will Lead Us All to Happiness". This was a shout-out to the British math rock/post-rock band Youthmovies, who used that phrase as the title of a 2004 EP. - A mild example from Muppet Treasure Island: The full name of one of the crewmembers on the Hispaniola was Big Fat Ugly Bug-Faced Baby-Eating O'Brien. Don't ask. - A radio episode of Our Miss Brooks featured an attempt by Mr. Conklin to borrow Mrs. Davis's house trailer from Miss Brooks. He wanted to go fishing on an isolated lake, deep in the wilderness. The name of the lake, and the title of the episode? "Oo Oo Me Me Tocoludi Gucci Moo Moo." It's the local Indians' word for "blue." - The Dickens spoof Bleak Expectations featured a lawyer whose full name took 20 minutes to say. He charged by the hour, so "his name was his greatest asset". The show would either fade out as he was saying his name, or he would be interrupted. His name began with Wyckham-Post-Forburton-... - A song, possibly known as 'The Baby's Name', has which the chorus is: "The Baby's name is Kitchener-Carrington-Methuen-Kekewich-White-Cronje-Plumer-Powell-Majuba-Gatacre-Warren-Colenso-Kruger-Cape Town-Mafeking-French-Kimberley-Ladysmith-Bobs-The Union Jack-Fighting Mac-Lyddite-Pretoria-Blogs" or something to that effect. - Doug Berman, the producer of Car Talk, is referred to in the credits with an overly long succession of Embarrassing Nicknames. The longest version is "Doug 'the Subway Fugitive' 'Not-a-Slave-to-Fashion' 'Bongo Boy' 'Frog-Man' 'Punkin Lips' 'Cute-Cute-Cute' Berman". - Before they started the Running Gag of naming the food-related event from which technical advisor John Bugsy Lawlor has just returned, he also had a long series of nicknames: John 'Bugsy' 'Sebastian' 'Mr. Height' 'Sweet Cheeks' 'Free Lunch' 'Twinkle Toes' 'Donut Breath' 'Hula Hips' 'Gigabyte' 'Make That Two Triple Cheeseburgers' Lawlor. - One episode of Thanks a Lot, Milton Jones! has a German countess whose name takes so long to recite that everyone falls asleep and, when they wake up the following morning, the host is still reciting it. It actually becomes a plot point at the end: trying to remember such a horrifically-long name has damaged her memory so much that she once \|\|left her infant daughter in an Essex pub\|\| and forgot all about it. - .EXE ~ A Virus Containment Game: The third game contains a character whose full name is "270 degree (not 90 degree) Rotated Chester Alan Arthur, 21st President of the United States. (But you can call him Chester.) Yes, this is his full name including the parentheticals and this statement also." For obvious reasons, almost everyone just calls him Chester. - In Rain Quest, because the players chose so many different names for Joel, his original full name was a combination of all of them: Joel Aquakamelech Abramovich Maximum-Horsefeathers. Although he was called Joel for short, the players eventually decided to change his name to simply Joel. - Ever17 gives you 'Tanaka Yuubiseiharukana' and \|\|Tanaka Yuubiseiakikana in The Kid's routes.\|\| - In Takeshi's route, when trying to think of a nickname for the Kid, Coco suggests "Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Hora Juan Novecino Marie de Los Remedios Siburiano de la Santessima Trinidado Luis Picasso". The Kid decides to just stick with "the Kid". (The scary thing is, this is based on the full name of Pablo Picasso, which in Real Life was even longer). - In Lucky Dog 1, the protagonist is known as Giancarlo Bourbon del Monte. Since his full name is obviously quite a mouthful, he is more commonly known as Gian. - Little Busters!: Kud's full name is Kudryavka Anatolyevna Strugatskaya, which isn't too unusual for a Russian name but is very long to Japanese people. Though in a Deconstruction, Kud finds it kind of hurtful that people always laugh when they hear how overly dramatic her name sounds, and is quite touched when Riki doesn't. - In Higurashi: When They Cry Kizuna, Kotohogushi-hen, Hanyuu's real name is \|\|Hai=ryuun Yeasomuul Jeda,◊(yes, equals sign and all). Riku Furude, Hanyuu's lover, never could remember it/how to pronounce it, so he called her Hanyuu and it stuck.\|\| - The H-Visual Novel, Resort Boin gives us: Mika Kuouzumiaiginsusutakeizumonokamimeichoujin. - In Code:Realize, the protagonists enter an airship race to acquire a minor MacGuffin. Their engineer names their ship the HMS Impey and Princess and Their Servants, after himself and the main character. The race announcer decides to shorten it to HMS Princess and Servants. - In the Ace Attorney series: - In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Justice For All, Shelly de Killer's Japanese name "Sazaemon Koroshiya" is nine kanji long (虎狼死家左々右エ門). Most names clock in at four, but he uses an unusually long name by Japanese standards, composed of a string of characters using very short readings. note : Actually, the middle character in his given name, 右 isn't read at all, just being a Visual Pun with 左 (left-right). - In the last case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice, the full English name of the Minister of Justice for the Kingdom of Khura'in Inga Karkhuul Khura'in is Inga Karkhuul Haw'kohd Dis'nahm Bi'ahni Lawga Ormo Pohmpus Da'nit Ar'edi Iz Khura'in III, which is pointed out when \|\|the possibility of channeling him is brought up\|\| in the final case. - In The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve, one of the witnesses for the third chapter is named Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond Ormstein. The Court Record just gives up and calls him "Bohemian Boy", while the main character calls him "Master Gotts". - The entirety of the main antagonists in Muv-Luv, are referred to by the rather long name of Beings of the Extra- Terrestrial origin which is Adversary of human race. It's quite the mouthful so they just shorten it to BETA instead. - Danganronpa has The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event In Human History; or "The Tragedy" for short. - Catsing Call: The ragdoll cat's full name is "Osiris Dior Sauvage von Katzenwald... Descendant of Venezia Jupi-" and the scene cuts off before we can hear the rest. - Homestar Runner: - The Strong Bad Email "i love you" gives us Fhqwhgadshgnsdhjsdbkhsdabkfabkveybvf. This holds the dubious record of the longest string of consonants in the series - sixteen to be exact. Strong Bad managed to pronounce the whole thing once, but quickly shortened it to Fhqwhgads because in the time it took him to say that, he could have made a painting of a guy with a big knife. - In an Easter Egg in "50 emails", Old-Timey Strong Bad receives a telegram from Sir Elsington Hallsdingdingsworth. - In "the process", Strong Bad gets an email signed "Em", and he assumes it must be short for something, like Embrodak, Emerson, or Emtarkanderundergunderson. - In the email "pet show", The Cheat performs in the Cat Mess Inbredtational Pet Show under the name Saberlord's Scritchascratch Cakemonger The Cheat. Homestar, meanwhile, has been entered under the name Fluffle's Buffles Scruffle's Homestar Runner. - One of Strong Bad's alter egos in "secret identity" is a female magazine columnist named Cara Carabowditbowdit. - If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device: - The Emperor challenges Kitten to a game of Paradox-Billiards-Vostroyan-Roulette-Forth Dimensional-Hypercube-Chess-Strip Poker (actually an expy of Yu-Gi-Oh!). - A later episode has Magnus ask "Kitten" for his full name. He's a Custodes (who live for thousands of years and accumulate names based on great accomplishments) so they just skip forward (several hours) to Magnus getting bored and telling him to stop halfway through. - In The Leet World, the leader of the terrorists' little backyard band has his name standing at five words: Cortez Amelio Alejandro Jesus Cardinal. - Lego Pirate Misadventures: - The second episode has the guys run into a "Stereotypical Islander Guy" named Oogydoogbergsonmargolatitudekaypainkismitelephantlatrinetweaksmithpassportmoisttoiletteninetytwonincorbluepoquipsibowlinggreendelsinatraartistformallyknownasooganderson, though the following episode simplified it as "Oogey Boogson". - His father's name is even worse. Oogydoogbergsonmargolatitudekaypainkismitelephantlatrinetweaksmithpassportmoisttoiletteninetytwonincorbluepoquipsibowlinggreendelsinatraartistformallyknownasooganderson is about forty-five now, his dad's been telling him his name since he he was three. - Object Shows, especially its sub-genre Joke Shows, are fond of adding unnecessarily longwinded descriptors to an already straightforward name. - Battle for Dream Island: Its Spin-Off series, BFDI Mini, had Selfie Dog also known as "jack russell terrier dog riding very fast with speed a skateboard as skater, with sunglasses in summer vacation, taking a selfie with smartphone or cell phone" (all lowercase letters) and to a lesser degree, "Purple Girl with Wind Hair and Angry Eyes" who goes by her first two names. - Object Filler: Four contestants, in increasing detail and convolution, are named "The Remains Of The Glue That Peeled Off Your Skin" (TR), "The Ketchup That You Accidentally Squirted To Your Napkin So Now It's Hard And It Still Has Napkin Pieces On It" (Ketchup Stuff), "That One Side View Mirror On The Passenger Side Of My Mom's Car That Bumped Me In The Left Arm Recently" (Sideview Car Mirror) and, oh boy here we go, "My Channel Logo But Put Green Headphones On His Head And He Has All Limbs And They Are Green And He Has White Eyes And A White Smile Like This He Also Has Green Sunglasses And Its Name Is CT But Make His Eyes Visible Thru Them But If U Cant Then Take Off The Glasses" (CT). Say any of those names, especially the last one, three times fast. - Obama's Hidden Info Objects: Default Discord Profile Picture, isn't as much of an overkill as the rest of the examples listed but it's still the longest in the show since everyone else's names would have two words at most. His Evil Counterpart in the webcomic is appropriately named " Evil Default Discord Profile Picture", making it the longest out of both series. - Really Cool Object Show: There's a contestant with the name of "Rusty Damaged Samurai Sword That's Actually A Knife Because It's Not Strong Enough To Stab Through Bones". - The Knight Exemplars of Lord of Dragons all have these sorts of names: Robespierre de Fortescue Von Garamond-Lily the Murderer of Eighty-Seven Babies And An Adorable Puppy, Guy de Verigengen Van Gervenger-Vergenven-Geodendag the Vicious Attacker of Grannies With Bags Of Shopping And Zimmer Frames, and Hector de Payens-Wayans-Rochefort-Wensleydale Smyth-Smith-Culverin-Willoughby-Wallaby-Wallace the Third, who has no title as his name is too long anyway. - The cowboy's name in Old Western Name Generator is Billy Bob Joe Joe Joe Bo Billy Billy Bob Bo Billy Bo Joe Billy Bo Bo Billy Bo Billy Joe Billy Billy Joe Joe Joe Bo Billy Bob Bo Billy Joe Bo Billy Billy Bob Joe Joe Bo Billy... note : The words after "Billy Bob Joe" are produced randomly. - In the Orion's Arm universe, one archailect has a name described as " apparently a mathematical real function consisting of no less than 46.3 sextillion terms; it is believed there is some short representation but none has been found by lower toposophic entities, although one posthuman observer claimed that it was simply a Taylor polynomial approximation of the sine function around x = 2 ^ 1e+(1e+(1e+100))" - The Questport Chronicles has this in spades, until it's practically become a Running Gag. Examples include The Prince of Shadows and Illusions, The Lord of Angels and Demons, The King of Thieves and Assassins, and The Queen of Rogues and Robbers. - Toki and Doki: Sisters Reunited: - Giselle's full name is Giselle Opal Diamond Peridot Lazuli Ruby Sapphire Topaz Turquoise Amber Amethyst Beryl Aquamarine Emerald Garnet Quartz Tourmaline Agate Cameo Ivory Zicronia Onyx Alumina Azure Citrine Spodumene Fauna Jade Marcasite Almondine Amber Fluorite Moonstone Ametrine Rhodolite Sphene Ione Iolite Aventurine Diopside Amazonite Alexandrite Nuumite Andesine Axinite Orthoclase Pearl Carnelian Pieterisite Charoite Chalcedony Chrysoberyl Rutile Chrysoprase Clinohumite Diaspore Serpentine Coral Danburite Goshenite Grossularite Sunstone Sugilite Idocrase Tashmarine Tanzanite Matrix Jadeite Tsavorite Jaspera Sardonyx Silver Copper Platinum Gold Bloodstone Botticelli - On that vein, while not nearly as long (from what we've read), Precious full name is Precious Angelique Marie Margaux Merlotte Yvette Elizabeth Bethesda Mina Fleur Adelaida Lucille Belle Bijou Cheri Antoinetta Violetta Gisellia Begonia Geranium Genevieve Francheska Charlotte Tulipe Neige Elise Rose Rouge Ulrike Camille Elle Ella Rosemarie Evangeline Angeline Chastete Blanche Glace Pointue Irene Chartreuse Hortensia Hortense Lafayette Lafayetta and so on DeBours'e - From Killerbunnies: We get Visceraline, whose apparent real name was "Vladimira Lenora Agnes Belladonna Lucretzia Josephine Henrietta Rowena Philomena Theodosia Emmeline Evangeline Mahulda Fidelia Constance van Maydestone-Strangewayes" - To a lesser degree we get Fae's real name being Fleurdelice Belladonna Fae Chantrea Enderstone and Hyacinth's being "Hyacinth Angelica Cerise Blumenthal". Those are just about a few we hear, apparently, the artist liked to write long names. - The 1491s feature powwow emcees Howard LittleHeadFiddlerOldHorn and his friend Willard BeylDearlyCoffey Jr. in their "A Day In The Life Of A Powwow Emcee" Mockumentary trilogy. - Epic Rap Battles of History has Pablo Picasso rap out his full name (or nearly so)- and it takes up most of his second verse. - Played for Laughs in The Nostalgia Critic's Godzilla review. There is a running gag in the video that noone can pronounce one of the characters names Critic: Good old Testosterone— Nick: It's Tatopoulos. [later...] Critic: Mr. Tapdancelous— Nick: It's Tatopoulos. [later...] Critic: [voiceover] So after that we see Audrey, as she comes across Mr. Tackanovahumpashirerickydickyhamstermasterpollywollywannabingbangsupercalifragilisticnickknackpaddywhackgiveadogabananafannafofresca hickorydickoryhocketypocketywocketyangelinafrancescathethird Nick: It's Tatopoulos! Critic: [voiceover] Whatever. - Critical Role has the illustrious gunslinger PC Percival Frederickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III. You can call him Percy. Played for laughs in Episode 30, when the rest of the players try to say his name and get it horrendously wrong...and then he tries to say it himself, and also gets it wrong. - ITV in the Face: in the "Tyne Tees" episode, one of the speculative names for the station was the long and unwieldy "The Tyne And The Wear And Also The Tees Television". - The Angry Video Game Nerd's theme song (in its full version) refers to him as the "Angry Atari Amiga CD-i Colecovision Intellivision Sega Neo Geo TurboGrafx-16 Odyssey 3DO Commodore Nintendo Nerd". - The Game Grumps gave us Mr. Mrs. Dr. Plurmp Dangerfield "Dankenstein" McFlurnten note : pronounced "McFlurten", the first 'n' is silent the Cat the Monkey, Esquire Junior Senior, the name of their playable character in Sonic Forces. - When Mike Trapp from CollegeHumor got angry with the writers for having no sketch pitches, Katie responded by improvising an example of this trope. Katie: Yeah, that's right. I said her name is Amir Raphael Wallstripes Turkey Helmet Couch Floor Table Tube Hair Sweater Blanket Guitar Wood Chair Cushion Dragon Map Beard Pen Astronaut Spill Garbage Can Used Kleenex Laptop Lamp Trophy Board Game Globe Books Door Gnome Ceiling Phone Frame Poster Dumbass Plant Notebooks Light Pillow! It's a character sketch, duh! - Uvuvwevwevwe Onyetenyevwe Ugwemubwem Osas is, supposedly, the man with the "hardest name in Africa". He's actually a character played by Nigerian comedian David Igwe. - Dream SMP: - The official name for Drywaters, a now-defunct faction founded by Fundy and Niki, is Smokey-Corn-on-The-Cob-Waterville-Dry-Hands-Desert-Land. - Funnily enough, according to his copy of the Las Nevadas contract, Fundy's full name is "Fun Jonatahan micahel vincent georgina james sus Dy". - During the Tales From the SMP episode "The Masquerade", one of the attendees' names, also played by Fundy the content creator, is Oliver Arechtenshire Smitselist Cumbucket. - Scott The Woz's full name, as revealed in the episode " Mega Man (NES) \| Growing Pains", is Scott "Will Eventually Take A Look At The First Mega Man" Wozniak (or Scott W.E.T.A.L.A.T.F.M.M. Wozniak for short). - Episode 53 of You Suck at Cooking gives us the "Garlic spinach and sundried tomatoes mixed with macaroni and cheese until it all tastes delicious and then you eat it mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm its so good why didnt I think of this a long time ago and will I ever be able to eat macaroni and cheese ever again without this awesome stuff inside it I doubt it except that its a lot of work so Ill probably just think about it next time then wont actually go to all the trouble unless Im trying to impress someone but maybe i should start trying to impress myself for a change and see where that gets me in life Im ordering Thai". - Kai Abridged 2 of Team Four Star's Dragonball Z Abridged has Guru give himself so many names when introducing himself to Krillin, that he only finishes after Gohan arrives. Nail even throws a Lampshade by just offering the Dragonball to Krillin while stating that he (Guru) will be at it for quite some time. - Ann T. Disestablishmentarianism from the Daniel Trasher video "When you have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia". The "T" in her name stands for thermoluminescence.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyLongName
Ultra Super Happy Cute Baby Fest Farmer 3000 - TV Tropes Video Game Culture has two sides of stereotyped gaming by the media. One is the popular Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 which is portrayed in media as a violent game that motivates a player to commit acts of violence in real life. The other is the extremely kiddy game rated E for Everyone (in North America), note : There used to be an eC rating for "Early Childhood Rating", but it was retired due to lack of usage PEGI 3 (in Europe), or S CERO (in Asia). The game in question involves an overly sweet character in a Sugar Bowl setting filled with cute, anthropomorphic animals. When this trope is seen within fiction, the game is often the alternative offered by the parent of the character when he proposes the latest violent game he wants for the holidays or his birthday. Needless to say, when given this one, it's seen as a yawn and our young man now seeks a chance to relish in laughable amounts of gore. Failure to do so will result in mockery. For something even more stereotypical, these games will be marketed towards girls, due to the perception that "girls don't play violent games." note : Studies show that women will play violent games as much as men, but they need more motivation behind the violence. To some people, every game that does not have an M Rating falls under this category, and even some games WITH an M-Rating if the graphics aren't hyper-realistic. Many of the people who feel this way are too young to be playing a T-Rated game, let alone M. Most Real Life games that would seem to meet this definition are better received than their fictional counterparts (filtering out Sturgeon's Law, of course), either because they're actually marketed toward small children (who don't care much about quality, as long as the game isn't actually unplayable), or because they're actually good. Plus, the Rule of Cute exists for a reason. However, just like Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000, they don't get named like this in Real Life; some examples include Animal Crossing, Cooking Mama and Diner Dash just to name a few. Contrast with True Art Is Angsty. This page has a Word Salad Title. ## Examples: - FoxTrot: - One storyline had Andy joining a group called MAGG (Mothers Against Gory Games) and vowing to only allow MAGG approved games in their house. The storyline revolved around Peter playing a game called Nice City and later complaining about the other games Andy had given him, which included Resident Good and Eternal Lightness. - One Sunday strip saw Paige give a few of her old video games (with titles like "Rabbity Rainbow" and "Peanut Butter's Puzzle Jam") to a little girl she babysits frequently, only learning afterwards that Peter had been using the cases to hide his M-rated games from Andy. - One arc had Paige receive a beta-test version of Riviablo. Jason is outraged, until he realizes he must have signed up for the beta while logged in as his sister. Paige gets him back in the end by claiming Blizzbund followed her advice and are redesigning the game to be an example of the trope. Per your suggestions, the final version of the game will have less violence, cuter monsters, and significantly easier puzzles. PS Thanks especially for the great idea to change the game's title to "Happy Town". - Spoofed in an episode of the German kids TV Show "Bernd das Brot" (Bernd the Bread). The titular bread is forced to play a "mega motivating social game" called " Happy Pink Pony Farm" where you have to tend for your farm, feed the happy pink ponies and defend your salad against ravenous zombies. - Golden Sky Stories is quite possibly the most relentlessly harmless roleplaying game in existence. You play a cute furry creature who improves people's lives through small acts of kindness. - Yoshi's Story. This actually angered a lot of fans before it got Vindicated by History. - FarmVille - Animal Jam is advertised as a cheerful and joyous game where you can play as a Ridiculously Cute Critter in a Sugar Bowl land consisting of every ecological biome known and have fun with your animal friends, while learning some animal facts. The phantoms, however... - Robot Unicorn Attack revels in its over-the-top Sugar Bowl-ness. - Barbie games tend to be about as unthreatening as you can get. There are surprising exceptions to this, however, and some of the games can actually be a legitimate challenge. - An infamous commercial for Blur tried to market it as an "X-Treme and totally not kiddy" racing game with kart racer-style weapons by juxtaposing the game with the most Sugar Bowl-y kart racer they could conceive (and an obvious Take That! at Mario Kart). Bub-clone (to Toad -clone): "Racing's not about winning! It's about making friends! punched in the gut" - Subverted in Team Fortress 2. While the game itself is a standard, if a little goofy shooter, it's shown in the "Meet the Pyro" short that this is how the Pyro sees the world as they set it on fire. - In fact, you can experience this in-game by wearing Pyrovision Goggles, where everywhere is lush green grass, grenades are baby bottles, you can tickle others to dea- laughter with rainbows, lollipops, and bubbles, pick up health and ammo as cake or presents, and live in eternal happiness forever. - Any video game made by Fisher-Price. This shouldn't be surprising considering their target market tends to be for children under five. Anything deemed "too scary, too questionable or too objectionable" is changed or removed. Also, their games are primarily Edutainment Games, which this trope usually goes hand-in-hand with. note : The games are also developed by Knowledge Adventure- the folks behind the Jump Start series of Edutainment titles. - Most Edutainment Games that are targeted at younger kids are primarily this. Examples include: - Late 90's Reader Rabbit, especially Baby, Toddler, and Thinking Adventures. Preschool through Second Grade are also this, albeit at a slightly lesser extent (in that you now have an ineffectual, bumbling villain named Spike the Porcupine to content with). - Some Jump Start titles, those targeted at Kindergarteners or younger to be precise, also fits this trope. - Zig-Zagging with the 2003 Strawberry Shortcake games. While the Nintendo DS and the first Game Boy Advance games are like this, the subsequent Game Boy Advance and PS2 games avert this straight. The first two PC titles are also like this, but averted with the third title (which was a port of the PS2 title). Played straight, however, with the 2009 iOS titles. - The two My Little Pony (G3) games plays this trope straight. Especially the Nintendo DS title (see image). There's also the sole My Little Pony: Friendship Gardens G2 title, in which you raise a virtual pony. - Any title released for early educational consoles like the VTech V-Smile (especially it's Spin-Off Babies-riffic V-Smile Baby), the original Leap Frog Leapster, and Sega Pico (and it's spinoff Advanced Pico Beena) tend to be this. They tend to use licensed cartoon characters to make up for it though. Averted in some later games for educational consoles: The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic game for the LeapPad Explorer had Discord, an extremely dangerous and competent villain, as the antagonist. - The Kirby games are infamous for being games that seem like this until you start to notice the little bits of Eldritch Abomination and Nightmare Fuel scattered about, and then the final boss is always a refugee straight from Hell. Kirby's Epic Yarn in particular is completely sugary and saccharine (even managing to avoid any sort of American Kirby Is Hardcore trappings its ilk have succumbed to). - Animal Crossing has the entire premise of being a human being moving to a peaceful village of cartooney animals and living peacefully while making friends. Resetti even lampshades it at one point if you keep hassling him: How 'bout playin' a fantasy without any epic battles, no fightin' against the odds to save some magical realm? Wouldn't it be nice to just lay down your sword, pick a few pretty daisies, and just be... nice? - The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures has the level Happy Fun Candy Time, which is filled sunshine, rainbows and smiling faces everywhere. \|\|Just try to ignore the severed unicorn head in the remake...\|\| - LEGO Adaptation Game - MySims - Style Savvy revolves entirely around running a clothing boutique, and later a beautician and hair salon. There's no stakes or any real consequences for failure and every character is nice, with the customers being unnaturally patient and understanding, nothing at all like retail customers tend to behave in real life. - Harvest Moon, a series revolving around living a peaceful life in a farming village. That said, the older games could get surprisingly dark, though the later games play this painfully straight. - The adventure epic premise of Frozen and its sequel seems rife for an adventure video game tie-in, but instead we end up with not one, but two match-three puzzle games for mobile phones, and a rather basic platform game for the DS and 3DS. It's easy to blame the lack of a traditional home console release to the rise of smartphone gaming and the revenue to be had with freemium titles, but Disney being rather protective of their crown jewel IP could also be a possible reason (and it is, given how the Arendelle world in Kingdom Hearts III is a more or less straight adaptation of the original film with the Kingdom Hearts characters shoved aside to the background due to the restrictions Disney imposed on Square Enix on what not to do with the Frozen arc). - Homestar Runner: - At a slumber party, Homestar isn't allowed to play M-rated games — the only game he is allowed to play is Clapping Party, a game in which the goal is... getting the onscreen hands to clap. An Easter Egg at the end of the cartoon lets you play the game yourself, and it's about as fun as it sounds for the first two levels, until you unlock Blistergeist mode. - The Easter egg game "Duck Pond" on the Homestar site is incredibly simple, but also quite addictive. All you do is feed ducks. In a pond. - Gabe from Penny Arcade is a hardcore gamer who is also a fan of Barbie Horse Adventures. (A real game). This is subverted with the game's Copy Protection, in which the horse spawns with no bones if the codes are entered wrong. - From the revived version of The Sifl and Olly Show, the episode "Olly's Top 3". Olly describes his three favorite videogames of all time. Numbers 1 and 3 are basically torture porn games, but his number 2 pick is Pretty Ponies Daycare. - The World of Warcraft episode of South Park has Butters' favorite game be Hello Kitty Island Adventure. - An episode of The Simpsons revolves around Bart attempting to get the ultra-violent popular video game Bonestorm. He instead ends up with Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge. Welcome to Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge. I am Carvallo. Now, choose a club. You have chosen a 3-wood. May I suggest a putter? 3-wood. Now enter the force of your swing. I suggest: feather touch. You have entered: power drive! Now, push 7-8-7 to swing. Ball is in: parking lot. Would you like to play again? You have selected: No. - In ReBoot, The Funhouse would be this kind of game, if we weren't watching from the perspective of the Game Characters. - Code Monkeys: - Mary's games dance the line around this trope, trying to combine it with feminist values, though some are less innocent than others (like when she is forced to make a "Little Suzy Snackcakes" game with bulimia as a game mechanic.) - There's also "Everyone's a Person", made by the Hitler family to teach people that everyone is a person (even Hitler.) - Arthur has a browser game called Virtual Goose. Unusually for this trope, the main characters think it is the most awesome game ever, although DW's board game Confuse the Goose is considered a baby toy despite being identical. - Teen Titans Go! has Puppy Tummy Tickles, a video game in which you just tickle a puppy's tummy. Starfire introduces it to Cyborg and Beast Boy to break up a fight between them over a video game. and also to carry on Starfire's plan to spread kindness. It works. - The episode "Squirt the Daisies" in Cow and Chicken has Cow play the titular game all while her brother Chicken engrosses himself in Immortal Wombat. Unsurprisingly, Squirt the Daisies is what one would expect with an overly-girly game. - The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius depicts Carl with a whole collection of llama-themed video games. Two of the titles he mentions ( Ninja Llamas in Space and Llama vs. Mecha-Dingo) actually sound pretty action-packed, so of course he goes with his favorite: the apparently 100% conflict-free Llamapalooza. It still winds up rescuing Jimmy and Sheen after they've been trapped in the latter's Ultralord game.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyCutesyVideogame
Out of the Inferno - TV Tropes "So we will walk through the fire, And let it... burn! Let it burn! Let it burn! Let it burn!" Everything around someone explodes and catches on fire. No One Could Survive That! Cue Ominous Music... Yes, yes they could, and they're slowly walking out, an Unflinching Walk, because the fire doesn't bother them. We see their shadow first and only then do they emerge. This is your signal to run, run fast and run far. Frequently the end result of The Worf Barrage. If they're more powerful for it, you face Infernal Retaliation. Related is when we "cut" to inside the flames, or show the flames die down, with the victim unharmed. Usually performed by The Juggernaut or Implacable Man. A very old trope, to the point that "passing through the flames" and being unharmed/transformed is a classic metaphor. This trope is one level more badass than the Smoke Shield. Through the Fire and Flames has nothing to do with this trope, but could possibly be a cause of it. See also Outrun the Fireball, for the Not So Stoic version, Big Damn Fire Exit for badass sequences in media where a sizeable chunk of the cast engage in this trope, and Battle Amongst the Flames, where you pass through the flames while fighting the final boss. ## Examples - Tetsuo Shima from AKIRA has a big scene where he faces down some tanks after doing this. - Last episode of the Angelic Layer anime, Hikaru pulls this off, to everybody's joy. - Sho Shinjo from the OVA of Battle Arena Toshinden does this, after performing a melee attack against an attack helicopter, causing it to explode around him, the burning wreckage of which he emerges from. - Guts does this in the Lost Children Chapter of Berserk while fighting the moth-like Apostle Rosine, and is just part of several scenes during that fight when he, a flesh-and-blood human (save for his artificial arm), is far more terrifying than the demon he seeks to kill. And he survives at least one of those fiery encounters by gutting the cocoons above him that held \|\|the abducted children the Apostle was turning into pseudo-elf Apostle spawns\|\| and letting the fluid that was suspending the half-creature inside drench him. Plenty of Squick moments in that Chapter. - In Black Blood Brothers, when Zelman (a pyrokinetic) confronts \|\|some members of Kabun who'd been turned into Kowloon Children\|\|, he steps calmly out of a wall of flames, completely untouched, while his enemies are left writhing and screaming in pain behind him. - Rock from Black Lagoon specifically mentions Roberta, who just blew up the bar he and the others were in, is probably going to do this and complains that they don't have Arnold Schwarzenegger to help them. They get out of there before she does, and the blatant references to the movie continue throughout the episode. - In A Certain Magical Index, Touma pulls this against Stiyl Magnus. Later, Accelerator terrifies Itsuwa by causally walking through flames. - In a late episode of Code Geass R2, Lelouch walks out of the flames caused by his mind-controlled puppets' attacks as part of a scene that quickly became another notch on his awesome-moments belt. - Much earlier in the series, Cornelia's first appearance saw her Gloucester walking out of the flames of the Middle Eastern base she and her men just flattened. - In the Cowboy Bebop episode "Sympathy for the Devil", Wen does this after Spike makes him crash into a gas station that blows up as a result. - In D.Gray-Man Arystar Krory does this after blowing his own castle before leaving to the order. Allen and Lavi think he killed himself by staying inside the explosion, until he appears from the flames, unfazed. - Digimon Tamers presents the first version of this in the Digimon Series, executed by Dukemon/Gallantmon in episode 36. "The inferno" had been the collateral of an earlier attack of him. The scene is a mix of Gohan SSJ 2 and Knight in Shining Armor that moves like a Humongous Mecha with a Badass Cape that puts out the fire. Yes, that awesome. - In Digimon Data Squad, \|\|ShineGreymon Burst Mode fights Belphemon/Kurata in the city. After easily dodging all of Belphemon/Kurata's attacks and causing great pain to them with his flame swords, ShineGreymon Burst Mode lights the whole street on fire and combines this with a slow walk toward Kurata and one of the most absolute hate-filled Death Glares in anime history, all to incite incredible fear in the horribly evil Mad Scientist before finally finishing him off.\|\| - Most of the villains of Dragon Ball Z have done this at least once, but Cell in particular seems pretty fond of it. The squishy sound his feet make as he walks inspires terror in all but the stoutest and most glow-y Super Saiyan! - In the El-Hazard: The Magnificent World manga, there're two more Demon God androids than in the anime; the side characters come up with a plan for dealing with one that involves a concentrated attack to hit one of them (Jinnistacia) right before she fires her main attack; theoretically lowering shields to do so. The result was a tremendous explosion; which she walks out of, all it did was destroy her hat. - The title character from Ergo Proxy invokes this once. The point of the scene is apparently to illustrate just how tough he is, especially the part where he steps in a pool of burning fuel barefoot without feeling it. - Excel♡Saga: Some crooks kidnapped Hyatt. When she performed her daily "no breathing, no heartbeat" routine, they tried to cremate her. While the fire was still raging, she walked out, completely unharmed. Even her clothing survived :( - One Fairy Tail OVA opening starts with Team Natsu, Wendy, and Charle walking/flying through flames. - Natsu kinda does this, except for the "walking out" portion. He eats the fire. - Black Mage Zeref is introduced via flashback in the anime where he walks out of a blazing, destroyed city. - In the second season of The Familiar of Zero, when Anies is attacked by a fire mage, she is engulfed in a fireball. The bad guy thinks he's won and is set to go on his merry way. However, Anies jumps out of the flames, the only thing missing being her cape, and proceeds to run that mage through with her sword. - In Fist of the North Star, Kenshiro is apparently able to remain completely unscathed, despite having fallen several foot into a pile of rubble, from a roof that he punched in because it had been set on fire, and then being hit repeatedly in the face with a huge stone column. This occurs mere seconds before he makes his shirt explode. Naturally. - In Fullmetal Alchemist, Roy Mustang has more than a couple scenes where he walks out of a cloud of fire or smoke. - In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) anime, \|\|Pride\|\| pulls this against Mustang. He even lets slip he let Mustang incinerate him on purpose since he's never had a chance to test his Healing Factor before this. - Mayu of Good Luck! Ninomiya-kun gets a similar scene after she sets off nearly every trap and then some on an island, also being called a devil. Though in this case, it was by the soldiers she was sending flying. - Bio Booster Armor Guyver has this happen to Sho \|\|after the battle with Enzyme II\|\|. A zoanoid throws a car containing an unconscious Sho into a light pole, who awakens in time to bioboost and walk out of the flames. \|\|His Guyver automatically de-equips shortly afterward as a result of his psychological trauma over having killed Enzyme II, who was really his father turned into a zoanoid.\|\| - Alucard in the manga and OVA continuities of Hellsing, after he causes the plane he's flying in to nose-dive directly into the deck of a warship addition to showing off just how ridiculously badass he is, just of crashing the plane is enough to kill several of the vampire soldiers on board. - In IGPX: Immortal Grand Prix, The Rocket crashes his mech in a flashback. He is then shown walking away from the burning mech like a badass. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: - All seven (so far) JoJos have survived injuries that should have killed them including losing hands, getting blown into near-space from a VOLCANO, getting stabbed in the lungs by wooden stakes, being shot in the back and left for dead, and having knives thrown at one of them by a time-stopping vampire that threw them in a way that seemed like they were all thrown at the same time. And yet there is no real equal to Jotaro. \|\| He stopped time\|\|. This actually justifies exchanging the iconic steamroller for an oil tanker in the OVA. - One of the most iconic moments in the Lyrical Nanoha franchise takes place near the end of A's when Vita attacks an untransformed Nanoha, causing part of the roof they're on to burst into flames. Nanoha then calmly walks out of the fire, completely unscathed and clad in her Barrier Jacket, leading Vita to call her the devil. - Madlax does that in the first episode with an exploding tank. - Gundam Wing features several of these moments, like after the Deathscythe Hell (which wasn't even finished at the time) takes a barrage of gunfire and seemingly explodes, causing the enemies to lower their guns. Afterward it steps out calmly and destroys them all. - Another memorable one occurs during the series's final episode: A quarter fragment of the stupidly-huge space battleship Libra is falling towards Earth. Heero in the Wing Zero flies out ahead of it and turns around before attempting to line up a shot at it; the atmospheric reentry is peeling the armor off of the Wing Zero when he takes the shot, and Libra explodes and the screen goes out. A few seconds later a reasonably intact Wing Zero, transformed into its "Neo-Bird" flight mode, flies forward out of the explosion to general applause. Its awesomeness is only slightly reduced by Duo shouting out "He made it!" just before Zero appears. - Inverted by Johan of Monster. After setting fire to the book donation ceremony, Johan calmly watches everyone scurry around like ants until Tenma finds him and pulls a handgun on him. He then calmly walks straight towards Tenma, past him, and into the sea of flames, a single finger on his forehead for Tenma to aim at. It's only when he's been completely obscured by smoke and flames that Tenma and Nina, who arrived while this was happening regain enough composure to shoot at him. - Konan from Naruto does this in the anime version of her fight with the Aburame clan. Apparently, she accomplishes this by saturating her body with water, so that despite being made from paper she's less flammable than a regular person. - Anya attempts to do this in Negima! Magister Negi Magi when she reappears before Negi. She does pretty well, too, until she caps it off with a dramatic Flung Clothing that ends up with her robe catching on fire. Then, when she tries to put it out, her hair catches on fire. Then, when she runs around in a panic, her skirt catches on fire. See, kids? This is why you shouldn't try this at home. - Shinji's Unit 01 does a nice version in an earlier Neon Genesis Evangelion episode. Its survival is slightly more understandable than most examples of this trope, since it is a Humongous Mecha after all. The inferno, on the other hand, is Tokyo. Sometimes being the center of the universe isn't such a great thing. - The Angels really like doing this: Sachiel is hit with an N2 bomb in the very first episode, which does do some damage and sets everything within a half-mile radius on fire, but it quickly regenerates and starts moving again, to everyone's horror. Zeruel also does it when Rei shoves an N2 bomb in its face, and an absolutely massive explosion engulfs them both... cut to Zeruel completely unharmed, floating in the ash. - One Piece gives us several examples: - Portgas D. Ace does this during his confrontation with Blackbeard. Justified, since, well, he controls flames. - At the end of the Little Garden arc, Nami, Vivi, and Zoro pull this off to take Mr. 5 and Miss Valentine, having been trapped on a wax construct for the past few episode that could only be destroyed when Ussop enveloped it in a massive inferno. Zoro combines this with Infernal Retaliation. - In a flashback, Rob Lucci is bombarded with cannonfire by pirates, and responds by turning their captain into swiss cheese. - Pokémon: - Walpugisnacht does this on Puella Magi Madoka Magica, after Homura launches one hell of a Worf Barrage. - Sort of parodied at the end of the "Cinderella" storyline in Ranma ½. Ranko-chan destroys the rock that was blocking the hot spring and disappears in the cloud of rock debris, dust, and steam. Then, Ranma in the male form emerges from the steam. He was trying to leave unnoticed. - Lady Kayura of Ronin Warriors (Yoroiden Samurai Troopers) does this a couple of times against Ryo of Wildfire. - Himura Kenshin, the legendary Hitokiri Battōsai (人斬り抜刀斎), is introduced in the first episode of Rurouni Kenshin handing out a can of whoop-ass to enemy swordsmen in a raging battlefield with fire. - Phoenix Ikki of the Saint Seiya anime, has his resurrection scene with the fire that was burning a forest and his brother, he appears out of the fire carrying his brother and extinguishes all the fire with his cosmos. Not surprising given his control over fire, and him generally being a badass. - Played straight with Lina in the opening for season 1 of Slayers and with Duclis in season 4, but subverted with \|\|Phibbrizo\|\|. He staggers out with large pieces of his body missing and disintegrates one step in front of the heroes. - Ryoko does this in the opening episode of Tenchi Muyo!. Her next line is, "Hey! That's no way to treat a lady!" - Kittan from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann flies the King Kittan through the explosion that destroyed his Space Gunmen as a prelude to \|\|his Heroic Sacrifice\|\|. - Guame's Dai-Gundo emerging unscathed after having another Dai-Ganmen (which was on fire at the time) drop onto and explode in a massive mushroom cloud. And the thing is GRINNING the whole time with a creepy frozen box for a face. - YuYu Hakusho: - During the final match of the Dark Tournament between Yusuke and Toguro. Yusuke unleashes a Spirit Gun roughly 20 times larger and stronger than any other to that point. He hits Toguro with that blast, dead-on at point-blank range, the energy smashing a path through the stadium and hundreds of yards beyond. The area around Toguro's body is engulfed with flames, and it looks like he's done; as Kuwabara proclaims, "No one could have survived that!" We then see Toguro slowly get up and calmly walks back into the arena; aside from his busted shades, he suffered no damage. And when he returns, what does he say to the stunned Yusuke? "Is that all you got for me? I expected more from Genkai." - Yusuke and Yomi both do this after Yusuke shoots an oversized Spirit Gun that explodes and sets the immediate area on fire. - Occurs in Zatch Bell! when a bookkeeper uses a flame spell, and Folgore emerges...though not completely unscathed: it burned his pants seat, showing his bare ass. - Zoids: Chaotic Century has Raven in his Zaber Fang striding out of the flaming ruin of a Republic base on Mt. Osa to battle Van during Prozen's invasion. This scene is shown in the opening theme of the anime. - Astro City: Played straight in "The Tarnished Angel" storyline. - Machinesmith has his robot helpers take out the Secret Service in Camp David, steal the nuclear "football" and use his powers to take the launch codes out of the mind of the President. He gloats that he just needs to start WWIII and kick off "the age of the machines." Suddenly, a figure is shown marching through the flames of a downed helicopter, a shield in one hand, and Machinesmith's jaw drops open. Captain America is here and Machinesmith knows he's screwed. - In the Daken/X-23 crossover is the pair standing through an explosion, and subsequently strolling out of the flaming wreckage of Malcolm Colcord's lab. - The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk does this. A lot. - Varied in Preacher, where the Saint of Killers takes a direct hit from a nuclear bomb that, we are later told, killed 800 people in the surrounding area almost immediately. Some scenes with the other characters later, cut to the Saint inside the inferno with still-spotless clothes. "Not enough gun." - When Spider-Man first fights the Juggernaut, he runs a fuel tanker right into the villain, causing a massive explosion. Spider-Man is actually concerned that he killed the Juggernaut until ... - Superman: - From Kingdom Come there's the scene where in the aftermath of the detonation of a horrendously powerful nuclear weapon when the smoke clears Superman is shown to be alive and virtually unharmed. His fellow heroes aren't so fortunate. - Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: Superman has just had a close encounter with a nuke and been slapped down hard in the middle of the desert. He blasts his way out of the puddle of radioactive glass but is seriously short of Yellow Sun power and is cut off from the source by an immense cloud of sand and a violent magnetic storm, which he doesn't have enough flight to get clear of. \|\|He survives only by sucking up a load of stored solar energy from several square miles of jungle, leaving him in a bad way but able to flee the conflagration.\|\| - In Crucible, Supergirl and Superboy stand behind in the Big Bad's laboratory to destroy all Superboy's clones, aware that it will trigger a self-destruction fail-safe, as their friends evacuate the place. Both heroes' allies watch the space station blowing up from a safe location, wondering whether their friends have survived, when Kara and Kon fly out of the massive conflagration, unharmed. - A scene from Transformers Spotlight: Shockwave has the title character doing this, after a savage beat-down from the Dinobots has forced the normally emotionless scientist to become angry. A quick Curb-Stomp Battle ensues. - Jafar from Disney's Aladdin does this in an ominous way when Aladdin calls him a snake during the final battle. Jafar is fazed by neither the fire nor Aladdin's comment, calmly replying, "A snake, am I? Perhaps you'd like to see how (hisses with snake tongue and changes his voice) sssss-snake-like I can be!" Cue Jafar getting Scaled Up with his One-Winged Angel snake incarnation. - Batman does it in the "Crossfire" episode of Batman: Gotham Knight. - Megamind: Tighten gets a chilling Unflinching Walk out of the flames of Megamind's destroyed battle suit. It's the point in the film where you realize he's no longer the childish goof he started out as. - The Super Mario Bros. Movie: \|\|The Koopa General does this after his giant kart is destroyed by Mario and Donkey Kong while on Rainbow Road. He's already been acting unhinged but this is the point where he fully decides it's personal and unleashes his own personal attack: the Blue Shell attack.\|\| - In the opening of Babylon A.D., Aurora is seen in a fireball reflected in the protagonist's eye. - Shows up in Batman Forever, after Two-Face blows up a gas main right on top of Bats. - In The Batman (2022) as the Penguin is fleeing the Batmobile on a crowded freeway, he gleefully gloats after the Batmobile was swallowed up in a fiery tanker-truck explosion, only to look in his rearview mirror and see it shooting out of the flames, and hurtling directly towards him. - In Battle Royale, \|\|as Mimura and friends are killed by Kiriyama, Mimura ends the battle by blowing up a massive propane tank bomb. The three heroes arrive on the scene, and it looks like everyone's dead...but then Kiriyama emerges out of the inferno, blinded, with Tears of Blood running down his face\|\|. - In the movie version of Casshern, the robot army incinerates a building. This prompts Casshern's badass walk right out of the building, girlfriend in his arms, and is the beginning of the single biggest robot ass kicking in the movie. - After being caught inside an exploding gas station, the titular evil car in Christine proceeds to drive out ablaze and continue to chase down a victim. - Davey's father Hal in Cloak & Dagger (1984) does this out of a plane wreckage. - The giant jumping spiders from Eight Legged Freaks do this somehow. - End of Days: The Devil blows up a crowded restaurant in his first scene for kicks. The blast engulfs him as he walks out the door, but he then appears out of the flames with his human vessel completely unharmed. - Towards the end of the opening premonition in Final Destination 2, the last girl due to die in the multi-car pileup is pinned in the wreckage of her car while a tractor trailer barrels through the wall of fire caused by the rest of mayhem, bearing down on her like the wrath of God. - Played with in Flesh + Blood: the castle is on fire and hero's party is getting out when the antihero/villain wanders in from another direction, bloody and rather pissed. Then he has to jump back in a hurry as part of the roof collapses. He's later seen crawling out of the chimney, very scorched and extremely pissed. - A semi-common trope in the Godzilla films. Godzilla himself has emerged from explosions caused by the military and Mechagodzilla's massive barrages, and twice from inside erupting volcanoes. Destoroyah's Perfect Form was revealed as a massive explosion heralding it died down. - In * Halloween II (1981), Michael Myers does this after being caught in an explosion at the film's climax. He collapses moments later, supposedly dead. - The John Woo movie Hard Boiled* has a big one of these near the end of the movie by \|\|the Big Bad Johnny Wong after the hospital is blown straight to hell\|\|. And to make matters even worse, \|\|he's taken Tequila's partner Alan hostage\|\|. - In Heroic Trio, the main characters blow up the Big Bad, only for his bloodied skeleton to emerge from the flames, ready to continue the fight. - Used in Highlander II: The Quickening, when Connor MacLeod gets hit by a fuel truck. Fortunately, he's just regained both his youth and immortality, allowing him to stride out of the resulting fireball unharmed, dramatic music blaring, long coat blowing, sword clenched in his hand, Christopher Lambert doing his best "badass face" (okay, vacant stare, but it is Christopher Lambert). - Parodied in Hot Shots! Part Deux, when President Benson accidentally plunges into Saddam Hussein's massive roaring fireplace, and then steps out a few seconds later, scorched but unharmed. His skin is made of asbestos, due to a "tanning parlor accident" in Dien Bien Phu. - I Am Number Four: Number Six's intro has her doing an Unflinching Walk, the explosion engulfs her, leading to her nonchalantly walking out if the fire protected by an energy shield. - In Kamen Rider Ichigo, Takeshi Hongo does this when \|\|he is revived from his temporary death, detonating his funeral pyre in the process\|\|. - At the end of Left Behind: World at War, The Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia's headquarters are destroyed by a missile strike while he's inside \|\|speaking with the U.S. President, who has the missile's homing transmitter in his pocket\|\|. The film closes with a shot of the flaming wreckage, out of which Carpathia emerges completely unscathed and mad as Hell. (To be fair, \|\|the President\|\| knew that Carpathia can't die until the midpoint of the Tribulation; the objective of the attack was to slow him down by destroying his base of operations.) - The Balrog revealed in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. - In The Mask of Zorro, \|\|all the imprisoned miners\|\| emerge from the smoke after one of the most intense explosions ever filmed blew everything around them to splinters. - Leland Gaunt does this in the movie version (though not the original novel) of Needful Things, after Dan Keaton realizes that Gaunt made him a pawn just as much as he'd imagined the rest of the town had been doing to him, and blows up the entire Needful Things shop, with himself and Gaunt in it. Since Leland Gaunt is actually The Devil in disguise as a humble antique dealer, his immunity to fire is to be expected (indeed, it didn't surprise the protagonist at all). - During the climax of Rampage, Davis Okoye distracts Lizzie from George by firing at her with a downed Apache Helicopter's machine gun. As she closes in, he then launches all of the copter's missiles and rockets into her face, creating a massive explosion and smoke cloud. A few seconds later Lizzie's roaring maw emerges from the smoke at him. - Arnold Schwarzenegger is good at this trope in general. In Raw Deal (1986) he plays an ex-FBI agent turned sheriff who fakes his own death before going undercover as a mob hitman. He drives his squad car into an oil refinery, opens a few valves then blows it up with a flare pistol. Cue shot of Arnie riding out of the flames on a motorcycle. - A scorched Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff emerging from his own plane wreckage. - RoboCop: - The title character does this in the original film. Robo calmly strides out of an exploding gas station, with only a minor amount of surface soot on his improbably shiny armor, and shoots out the back tire of Emil's motorbike as he tries to flee the scene. - Happens again in the opening of RoboCop 2. After his car has had two rockets shot at it, causing it to flip over and then shot up and blown up, RoboCop steps out of the destroyed police car, no worse for wear and ready to take out the criminals that did it. - The Running Man. After Ben ignites a barrel of flammable material, Fireball just strolls through the flame. - Star Wars: - Return of the Jedi: The Millennium Falcon manages to make it out of the interior of the Death Star a split second after the explosion. - \|\|Luke Skywalker\|\| walks out of a massive red dust cloud completely unscathed in The Last Jedi after getting more dakkaed by a bunch of First Order Walkers on Crait. Justified, since \|\|he's not really there\|\|. - The Terminator series is very fond of this one, and definitely popularized it. In fact, the whole series exists because of this trope: James Cameron based the first film on a fever dream he once had, in which a robot skeleton strode out of an inferno after a fleeing woman. The first Terminator was heavily damaged, unlike most of the others; the flames burned off his skin and clothes, revealing the metal skeleton underneath-"Like Death rendered in metal from the flames". Unfortunately for the heroes, a Terminator's artificial skin is purely for infiltration purposes. Burn that off and while it can no longer pass as human, it's still an implacable Killer Robot. Aside from appearing in every movie, the final shot of the opening credits in Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a T-800, standing undamaged in the nuclear fire and staring at the viewers with blood-red eyes. - In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, Sam successfully Outruns the Fireball, \|\|but then Megatron emerges from the fireball and kills him. Megatron is then re-engulfed by the explosion, and Sam fortunately gets better\|\|. - Twister: Jo and Bill emerge from \|\|an F5 tornado\|\| without so much as a scratch. - Done with V (or is it?) in V for Vendetta, utterly terrifying one of the few survivors. - Bolo has a lot of examples, including surviving a nuclear strike while the enemy thinks the tank is destroyed... only for the tank to emerged battered, but quite capable of killing the rest of the army the enemy has left (in some cases finally succumbing to the damage, with all of it's enemies either defeated or so badly beaten that they have to make a retreat), you can read the free to read Field Test short story to get a taste of it. - Discworld: - Flame Trooper Brostin manages this in one Gaunt's Ghosts novel, with the help of a large puddle of liquid fuel, a bottle of flame-retardant gel, a cigarette, and an acute case of pyromania. Notably, he refuses to get clear before blowing up himself and a whole bunch of bad guys despite knowing that the gel will probably save his life, but won't give him complete protection. He does it because he wants to look cool in front of his buddies. Oh, and because of the acute case of pyromania. - Good Omens has Noble Demon Crowley walking unscathed out of a burning bookstore, just after the firefighters have started saying things like 'Poor guy. Horrible way to die.' Not as good as when he stops the Bentley to ask a random passer-by for directions. Said passer-by spends most of the conversation wondering whether it's a good idea to point out that the car is on fire. - Lieutenant Harsmith leads a squad straight through a forest fire right into the enemy, in Invasion of Kzarch. - Happens a few times in A Song of Ice and Fire: - At the end of the first volume, after her husband has died, Daenerys Targaryen places him and her three dragon eggs onto a funeral pyre, and, distraught, purposefully allows herself to be caught in the blaze. However, when the fire burns out, she is standing there unharmed (relatively speaking; all her hair has been singed off), and holding three baby dragons hatched from eggs previously assumed to be petrified. - Davos's escape from the flames at the Battle of King's Landing—which involved swimming out of an inlet full of wildfire and the wreckage of two fleets. - The War Gods: During The War God's Own, Bahzell destroys a temple to Sharna by having his allies spread as much flammables around as they can find, then channeling Tomanak's power to give it a boost. End result: flames billowing out of the temple's entrance engulfing Bahzell, who walks deliberately out of the fire unharmed. - The Ophidian Guard from the Warhammer 40,000 novel Hammer of Daemons can march through the flames created by their master's Breath Weapon thanks to their armour. From the first novel, the Knights themselves ran through burning fuel without stopping or being affected. A subversion of sorts occurs in The Last Church when \|\|Uriah\|\| walks into the inferno. - The zombies of World War Z do this at the Battle of Yonkers after the US Army and Air Force hit them with every big weapon they have. Watching the zombies do this crushes the morale of the soldiers watching. I found myself staring into this cloud of black smoke where the horde had been. I vaguely remember other guys getting out of their holes, hatches opening on tanks and Bradleys, everyone just staring into the darkness. There was a quiet, a stillness that in my mind, lasted for hours. And then they came, right out of the smoke like a freakin' little kid's nightmare! Some were steaming, some were still burning... some were walking, some were crawling, some just dragging themselves along on their torn bellies... maybe one in twenty were still able to move, which left... shit... a couple thousand? And behind them mixing with their ranks and steadily pushing toward us, the remaining million the air strike hadn't even touched! And that was when the line collapsed. - There's a point in Solo Command where the Wraiths are lured into a trap and dumped into an incinerator. They use explosives to create a hole. The Force-Sensitive member gets out with all the unscathed coolness that this trope calls for; the others, not so much. They are burned/on fire and not remotely dignified. Still, their furious determination as soon as everyone is present and accounted for fits the trope very well. - The 100: How Bellamy managed to get blasted out of an air vent by a fiery explosion, not only without injury, but with his clothes intact, is never explained. - In addition to the scene from its source material, where Daenerys walks into her husband's raging funeral pyre and emerges the next morning completely unharmed with her three baby dragons after the flames have burned down in ashes and embers, Game of Thrones also gives us a scene where \|\|Daenerys locks the assembled khals of the Dothraki in a holy building in Vaes Dothrak, then sets the whole thing on fire. Due to her Targaryen ancestry, she emerges with only her clothes burnt off, with all the khals dead. No one's mourning them\|\|. - The Gokaigers frequently invoke Transformation Is a Free Action to protect themselves from incoming attack, leading to this. However, the most epic version is when Gokai Gallon falls under heavy fire and is engulfed in a massive explosion. Cue a completely transformed Gokai-Oh charging straight out of the flames and ready to kick some tail. - Good Omens has Crowley walk (physically) unscathed out of the flaming ruins of Aziraphale's bookshop to the accompaniment of Queen's "Somebody to Love". - An interesting variation from the first season of Heroes: Claire stepped from the gutted remains of her home (after sedating Ted before he went critical and took out the neighborhood) covered in third-to-fourth-degree-burns, but by the time she made it into her father's arms halfway across the lawn she merely needed a shower and some clothes. - Turns up in, of all places, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, when \|\|Usagi/Sailor Moon\|\| is knocked into an explosion, and emerges from the resulting wall of fire as \|\|Princess Serenity\|\|. Since she's both a Person of Mass Destruction and a Superpowered Evil Side, things start blowing up very quickly. - Similar to the opening of RoboCop 2, RoboCop again walks out of the wreckage of a destroyed police car with no damage in the opening of the Pilot Movie for RoboCop: The Series after "Pudface" Morgan shoots a rocket directly at the car and blows it up. - In the Smallville episode "Hothead," Coach Walt Arnold engulfs Clark Kent in massive flames and thinks he's won, only for Clark to nonchalantly step out of them. - One Kull Warrior did this in Stargate SG-1. Since they are Nigh Invulnerable, it didn't bother that one too much. - In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, after Corrupt Corporate Executive and \|\|shape-shifting Terminator\|\| Catherine Weaver kills all of the personnel at the secret warehouse in the desert, she blows it up while calmly walking away, and gets engulfed by the resulting fireball. Naturally, she walks out of the fireball without any damage. - Parodied in the promo for The Wrong Mans, which shows Sam and Phil strolling out of a burning building, complete with slow-mo, explosions, and dramatic music... all of which peters out as Sam realises he's left his phone behind, and the promo ends with them running back into the inferno to retrieve it. - The Guy on the cover art of Disturbed's Indestructible album walks out of raging flames. - Through the Fire and the Flames includes this trope. Nothing needs to be said about its awesomeness. - Super Steve by Machinae Supremacy. The fire it knows me and/ I can through the blaze without a mark. - The end of the video for " Lowlife" by Theory of a Deadman. - From The Bible (Book of Daniel, chapter 3) we have Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, three of Daniel's friends, who refused to worship a golden image, were thrown into a blazing-hot furnace, and walked out unharmed, accompanied by "a divine being." - In Islamic tradition, there's a story about King Nimrod burning Abraham alive. Turns out Allah tames the fire and lets Abraham walk out of it safely. Almost certainly based on the Jewish midrash that Nimrod ordered Abraham thrown into a furnace for refusing to worship the idols of Ur Kasdim, only for Abraham to survive unharmed. Abraham's brother Haran, on the other hand.... - The evasion class feature in Dungeons & Dragons allows rogues and monks (and others) to survive area-of-effect attacks and spells unscathed with a successful Reflex save. The Kensai prestige class in 3.5 has an ability called "Withstand" which allows him or her to make a concentration check instead of a reflex save. In effect, it allows you to essentially ignore certain effects rather than dodging them, so you can literally walk out of the inferno. - Happens in Warhammer 40,000 whenever a unit survives a flamer/heavy flamer/inferno cannon attack, meaning potentially anyone can do this, but it's most commonly invoked with Space Marines and Necrons. - In Warhammer Fantasy the spell 'Fulminating Flame Cage' can cause this effect. The unit becomes trapped in a fiery cage and takes damage if it moves. So half the unit will invoke this trope by marching out the fire. The other half...not so much. - In El Goonish Shive, Grace's final showdown with Damien ends with him about to self destruct rather than taking up Grace's offer to redeem himself. Grace reluctantly decides to save herself, but is still caught in the explosion, and would have probably died (or not note : if you take into account her fireproof fur, perhaps only hurt), if not for \|\|the timely intervention of a character from the Alpha Universe sheer chance (or not note : if she was already monitoring the battle nearby since the target of her task was in the immediate area), happened to appear in the main universe in the same place and the same time to do an almost completely unrelated task\|\|. - Grrlpower Has Maxima do this with one of her own massive explosions, as a show of power and warning to potential supervillains. Later, Maxima tanks a hit from Bombshell and Sydney calls what happens next "the most predictable thing ever" and says Bombshell had better not "even dare to look surprised." - Gunnerkrigg Court inverts this, with Antimony marching into a burning room. The boy inside sees her emerging, unscathed, from the flames all the same. (\|\|Granted, the fire was illusory, but it looked real enough that the fire walk required tremendous courage on Annie's part.\|\|) - Homestuck: \|\|Rose and Dave rise out of the Green Sun, completely unharmed note : okay technically they were killed by its creation and just Came Back Strong, possibly millennia after creating it themselves. It's unspeakably badass\|\|. - Super Mario Bros. Z in its reboot has Metallix do this during the fight with Yoshi. After a brutal fight between the two over a Chaos Emerald, Yoshi manages to trap Metallix in an egg and throws it into a wall which then explodes. It seems like the fight is over until it's revealed that Metallix is still alive. Metallix walks out of the flames, with it quickly becoming clear that he's completely pissed and thrashes Yoshi to near death. - In the Whateley Universe introductory novel for Phase, Phase (the heroine) does this to the supervillain who has just tried to fireball her into a charcoal briquette. Lampshaded, as Phase is specifically thinking of the Terminator scene and trying to intimidate the villain. It doesn't work. - In Worm, the Endbringer Behemoth does this after the heroes manage to contain him and distract him long enough that he can't use his dynakinesis (total control of energy) to redirect the absurdly powerful laser that is sent to him via a Portal Network. He's been reduced to a fifty-foot-tall skeleton covered in meat, but he's still alive, still healing, and just as deadly. - It's a (several hours old) timelooped stream of light directed from the Indian villain Phir Sē. A timelooped stream of light capable of destroying the whole Indian subcontinent. The only differences between this and a laser is that all lightwaves in a laser have the same wavelength (color), as well as being in phase (the waves oscillate in sync). - To be fair, it's stated in-universe the endbringer's body gets denser the deeper you go, until the rules of physics simply cease to work, but still... - Deconstructed at the end of the American Dad! episode "A Song of Knives and Fire": Stan tries to do this as he carries Francine out of a flaming warehouse, but he's been horribly burned by the flames while Francine is unscathed due to being wrapped in Stan's firefighter uniform. He then opens his mouth to say something and all he can let out is a high-pitched scream of pain. - In Avatar: The Last Airbender, \|\|Avatar Roku\|\| does this during the Winter Solstice. Though, to be fair, it's less coming out of the inferno than bending the inferno to his will. - Batman Beyond: Terry does this when rescuing a child from a burning building. His Batsuit is flame-resistant. - If fire isn't enough, try lava. Megatron of Beast Wars emerges from a pool of lava in a new body near the end of the series, and it is awesome. - And in Beast Machines's final episode, Megatron (in a new body modeled after Optimus Primal's Optimal Optimus body from the third season of Beast Wars) is caught in a gigantic explosion caused by Optimus, which includes his severed-at-the-elbow arm flying out the of explosion. - In the G2 Marvel comics, Megatron once strolls through a cloud of the metal-eating Swarm. After falling from orbit. - Danny Phantom. Whilst fighting Dark Danny, Danny slaps an anti-ghost belt onto him, weakening the villain considerably, he then punches him into a petrol truck. Dark Danny accidentally blows it up with his hair engulfing the area in flames. Danny floats down, looks at the fire, and walks away. Dark Danny then emerges from the fire, unscathed, and casually rips off the anti-ghost belt with one hand. He then proceeds to beat the crap out of Danny. Awesome. - On Family Guy, Lois cuts the hoses on the flamethrower that Stewie is using and it blows up. He leaps out of the fire a minute later. - In Justice League, this happens a lot since about half the cast are fireproof. In one instance, Lobo does this from an explosion he created by tossing a car on someone and stomping on it so it exploded. - The Simpsons: - Star Wars: Clone Wars does this twice. First, Durge walks out of the flaming wreckage of his speeder bike, then Asajj Ventress emerges from the flaming wreckage of Anakin's starfighter. Though Asajj used the Force to clear the flames. Not sure whether that is less badass or more though. - Played with in Steven Universe in "The Test" where Steven walks through flames that cannot harm him. - Superman: The Animated Series: - At the beginning of the series, Clark uses his developing powers to save a family from a crash. After their van goes up in flames, he emerges with a small child — he protected her, and his superhuman toughness protected him. - Subverted in the finale when Superman fights Darkseid. Superman grabs Darkseid's face so his Omega Beams get set off point-blank. There's a tremendous explosion that sends both flying. Next we see Superman weakly pulling himself out from underneath some rubble, then the camera pans over to where smoke is obscuring Darkseid, except for his glowing red eyes and we think he's about to do this... then the smoke clears a little more and we see Darkseid is badly hurt and barely able to stand. In fact, all he can do is walk towards Supes and collapse at his feet. - In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), the Shredder does this during his first fight with the turtles, causing Michelangelo to remark "he's like the Shreddernator or something." - Transformers: Animated. Starscream, who has had a very bad day, is walking away with the Power Crystal and looking truly disgusted with the universe. He ignores the Autobots, who blast him from behind after he walks past. When the flames clear, the only change in Starscream is that he is now facing them, and looking every bit as pissed. He proceeds to open a serious can of whoop-skidplate. - X-Men: Evolution gives a few examples: - Apocalypse is running amok somewhere in Mexico; all other X-Men around have failed to dent him. Enter Magneto, who drops a few communication satellites on him, resulting in this trope. - Also happens with Rogue when Mastermind possesses her and forces her to acquire everyone's powers. Pyro sets her on fire and starts laughing, only to have her slow walk out of the flames courtesy of Colossus's powers. Complete with Clothing Damage, too. - Actually fairly practical. Running fans the flames, a patient walk can drastically reduce burn damage. Only works if you're already on fire. - Feast of Saint Anthony the Great involves riding on a horse through a big bonfire. That is, yes, some people get to do this every year. - Watch as Formula One driver Romain Grosjean emerges from the burning wreckage of his car and scurries away. This being reality, he's not as unscathed or unfazed as most fictional examples - you can see him frantically shaking his singed hands to cool them down - but considering the crash could easily have killed him, it's still incredible to witness.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutOfTheInferno
Overly Cool Play Space - TV Tropes Because This trope applies to any Toy Commercial featuring children (often, but not always, boys), using an elaborate play setup unrelated to, and often more interesting than, the toys themselves. everyone has a green table and a wall with rainbows, clouds and circus tents painted on it, right? For action figures, the children have set up an elaborate play environment made of rocks and sticks that must have taken hours more to assemble than the 30 seconds seen that it took to play in. For toy cars, the children have a kitchen that has over wide stretches of spotless, note : After all, if Mom had just mopped it, the kids probably wouldn't be playing on it. uninterrupted linoleum or going through a dirt track a little too obviously built by an adult. This is not to say that there aren't kids out there who make their own playsets, but the trope is to make the toys seem even more exciting to the potential buyer. Toy manufacturers sometimes put a disclaimer to the effect of "background set not available" at the bottom of their commercials if they're playing this trope straight. A subtrope of Rule of Cool. Pops up in Fridge Logic. Compare to Adjacent to This Complete Breakfast where unhealthy food is displayed next to healthy to make you associate the two. ## Examples - This Batman action figure commercial features a whole homemade play set, including a barrel of "sludge", which is almost definitely not included in the "figures and vehicle sold separately" disclaimer. - This Hot Wheels set seems to be filmed in an overly dark basement with a lot of strange, swinging lamps. You can only wonder what these boys' parents do in that room when the kids aren't playing with their race track in it. - This Burnin' Key Car Commercial uses an overly large kitchen, easily 50 feet across. - A commercial for action figures based on the Green Lantern (2011) movie featured a Coast City playset which was explicitly stated to not be available for purchase. - When toy cars could be received from Kelloggs Cornflakes, an advert showed two children playing with the cars on a very elaborate model town. - LEGO commercials and pictures of the models (such as space stations and pirate ships) displayed in the manuals and on the box often invoked this trope. - A windup stunt cycle commercial of the 1980's had a car tire which had been severed at one point and pulled sideways and placed as a loop-the-loop with the road being the inner surface of the tire. Not unless those kids dad let them use some pretty impressive tools, or they spent the better part of an afternoon with a hacksaw... - Commercials for Nerf guns and Super Soakers often cross into this territory. Large groups of children or teens are often depicted playing on courses that seem more suited to paint ball or even military training than for guns that shoot foam darts or water. - Ads for backyard playground equipment often depict a lawn so large and open you wonder why the kids would need a playset anyway with all that room to run around in. - Homestar Runner: A Parody Commercial for Cheat Commandos toys has Homestar, Strong Bad, and Coach Z playing with the action figures in the Field, and using The Stick with a pie tin balanced on it as an "enemy radar dish". - The terrain and backdrops used by many miniature wargames to provide examples of play are often magnitudes better than what the average wargamer can put together. And then there's how well they're painted... - Defied by Blue Peter back in the nineties when Thunderbirds was enjoying a bit of a renaissance. All the Thunderbirds machines were available as toys, but there was no proper Tracy Island playset for them. After receiving a staggering number of letters asking for help with this, they dedicated one of their famous craft demonstration segments to how to build your own. The official Tracy Island playset that showed up some time later couldn't really compete. - Mystery Science Theater 3000: Parodied in the episode featuring the film Gamera vs. Barugon, where one of the host segments is a commercial for a Kaiju attack play set. In Tom Servo's Motor Mouth legal disclaimer, he admits that "Some parts do not exist," which probably includes the massive terrain piece that the toys are set on and is never explicitly mentioned as being included. - Parodied in Two More Eggs when a commercial for "Gankroar" turns out to actually be a real estate commercial for the homes being used as the backdrops.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyCoolPlaySpace
Overly Literal Transcription - TV Tropes Describe topic here. And I mean in that spot. Ctrl + A, Backspace, THEN describe it. That's just the default message, you're supposed to replace it -- are you getting all this? In fiction, one character will dictate something to be written to another. However, something silly might happen, making the first say something not meant to be written, which the second will obliviously write. The inverse of Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud. Compare Repeat After Me, Literal-Minded, Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic, Virtual Assistant Blunder. ## Examples: - One of the random gadgets in Doraemon, the Microphone Pen, which has a mini-microphone on it's base and does the writing for you while you point it's tip on paper, the downside being that it takes in literally everything, even background noises (in retrospect, this is among the few gadgets which has a real-life counterpart superior to it's fictional equivalent). It appears in a manga issue where Nobita is tasked with writing a letter by his mother Tamako, but had his handwriting criticized and begs Doraemon for help. Doraemon produces the gadget, but things goes hilariously wrong as usual. Nobita: [ dictating the pen] Dear Auntie, thank you for the lovely present you've sent me. I have been a well-behaved child since... Tamako: [ calling her son from downstairs] Nobita! There's a letter for you! [ the sentence "Nobita! There's a letter for you!" promptly shows up in the middle of Nobita's letter, to his chagrin] - Sword Art Online Abridged has this as a Freeze-Frame Bonus in Episode 13, when Kirito is looking at the back of Alfheim Online's box. One half talks about features such as how the game teaches players "valuable life lessons like sharing, table manners, and aerial combat supremacy," while the rest is some disillusioned developer's email complaining about what a "soul-sucking shitshow" the game was to make, and asking his boss to make any corrections to the write-up. - Inverted in Animal Crackers, where the secretary decides not to write down what Capt. Spaulding says on the grounds that it was nonsense. Jamison: Now, uh... you said a lot of things here that I didn't think were important, so I just omitted them. Capt. Spaulding: So, you just omitted them, eh? You just omitted the body of the letter, that's all. You've just left out the body of the letter, that's all. Yours is not to reason why, Jamison. You've left out the body of the letter. - Blazing Saddles. Taggart and Lyle callously leave Bart to die in quicksand. After Bart gets out, he prepares to hit Taggart over the head with a shovel. Taggart: [dictating] Send a wire to the main office and tell them I said... [Bart hits him over the head] Ow! [falls unconscious] Lyle: Send wire, main office, tell them I said, "Ow". Gotcha. - In Romanian film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a grocery store florist shares a story of someone requesting a ribbon on a floral arrangement that says, "Rest in Peace" on both sides and getting a ribbon that says, "Rest in Peace On Both Sides." - In Brazil, a secretary is seen typing everything she hears. As she works for a Torture Technician, that includes screams of pain. - Discussed in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where there is a carved message from Joseph of Aramathea: "He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the holy grail in the Castle of Aaauuuggghhh..." Brother Maynard: Well, that's what it says. King Arthur: Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't have bothered to carve "Aaaauuuggghhhh". He'd just say it. Sir Galahad: Maybe he was dictating it. King Arthur: Oh, shut up! - In SHAZAM! Fury of the Gods, Steve, an enchanted pen found in the Rock of Eternity's library, will dictate everything when tasked with writing a letter, whether it was supposed to be included in said letter or not. When the Daughters of Atlas read one such letter, they're utterly confused when presented with the various tangents in it. - Some guy was buying a birthday cake for his friend with a unisex name. The cake vendor asked two subsequent questions: "What should it read on the cake? And by the way, what gender is Alex?" "'Congrats'. Oh, and Alex is a man." Thus did the cake come out with CONGRATS - ALEX IS A MAN. - In Auntie Mame, Mame hires Agnes to transcribe her thoughts for her book. Agnes does it so well she even transcribes people asking Agnes why she's writing so fast. - In Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman, Ms. Ribble makes every student in her class write goodbye cards for her retirement by copying the poem she wrote on the chalkboard, which ends with a "Write your own name here" fill-in. Most of the students are shown copying verbatim the "write your own name here" part. - In the short story "Riddle me this" by Christopher Anvil, the protagonists are trying to sneak into an alien base. Their ship's computer translates their communications to and from the aliens, but prints out all the formatting directives with the text rather than acting on them. - In the Irwin Shaw play Bury The Dead, a doctor is dictating autopsy notes to a stenographer. While examining the last body, after seeing that part of the man's face has been blown off, the doctor comments, "You'd be a pretty sight for your mother, you would." When the stenographer reads back the transcript, that comment is included. - The Nonadventures Of Wonderella: In this comic, Wonderella, as a superheroine who frequently dies, attempts to inform her sidekick about how she'd like her gravestone to look. Unfortunately, Wonderita interprets the instructions as the inscription. - The Order of the Stick: When Durkon writes a letter home he writes it the same way that his dialogue is written to reflect his accent. When Roy points out that he doesn't have to do this, Durkon responds as though he doesn't even realize he is doing it. - Cake Wrecks has documented an alarming number of supposedly professionally-decorated cakes with icing spelling out what appear to be either customers' exact words or written instructions: - Write "Welcome" on it - The #25 in Big Font - Happy Birthday Sara Minus H - Here on TV Tropes, this sort of mistake is where the Describe Topic Here inside joke came from. As "Describe topic here" was the default message for a blank article on the first version of the wiki software, many editors early in the site's life thought it should be included as part of the article as well. - The Onion: The article [NOTE: Do Not Run Until Fucking Queen Is Dead Or People Will Lose Their Shit] Queen Elizabeth Dead at 96". In addition to the headline the body of the article is riddled with editor's notes that have been apparently included verbatim rather than implemented. - Bojack Horseman: A Running Gag throughout the series, whenever someone wants to get something printed, their instructions will inevitably get printed along with it, as the page image demonstrates. A small sample: - Gravity Falls: "Bottomless Pit!" has the characters taking turns telling stories, with appropriate title cards popping up when the characters announce the title for their mini story. When it's Soos' turn, the unnamed narrator does this. Soos: I've got a story. It's called "Soos's Really Great Pinball Story!" (beat) Is that a good title? Do they have to be, like, puns or whatever? [cut to title card reading: "SOOS' REALLY GREAT PINBALL STORY! Is That A Good Title? Do They Have To Be, Like, Puns Or Whatever?"] - The Simpsons: - In "A Star Is Burns", Marge is writing a letter to Jay Sherman, inviting him to be a judge in Springfield's film festival, but gets distracted while writing. Homer: Marge, is this a pimple or a boil? - In "Lisa's Sax", as Homer dictates a dedication for Lisa's saxophone, he tells the clerk to write "To Lisa, never forget your Daddy loves-", when he drops the sax on his feet and says "D'oh!", which is transcribed as "To Lisa, never forget your Daddy loves D'OH!" In the end of the episode, Lisa gets a new sax with the dedication "To Lisa, may your new saxophone bring you years of D'OH!"	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyLiteralTranscription
Instant Web Hit - TV Tropes Sam: Look, see the view count? Only 27 people have clicked on it. Carly: Oh... Okay, good. [Beat] Carly: Sam? Sam: Yeah? Carly: THAT'S 27 THOUSAND! We know that It's A Small Net After All but even though Everything Is Online already, when Bob uploads a video or a Web page, especially if this happened by accident or the contents are particularly embarrassing, expect it to get more hits on its first day than a successful non-profit site can hope to get in weeks. For videos, this is often the result of an Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube! ploy. See also Memetic Mutation. This is occasionally Truth in Television when a new website catches the eye of a large news site, or a video becomes a viral Internet meme. Even when it does occur, it will usually take at least a week to even be noticed by enough people to become popular. It is possible, but obviously both rarer and slower in real life and not likely to have a viewcount that updates in real time. ## Examples: - The Nike "Write the Future" commercial: a soccer player's fancy footwork gains international notoriety when it gets caught on live television and gets replicated via YouTube Poop. - During the dotcom tech bubble, a shipping company released a TV ad in which three entrepreneurs cheered as their e-commerce site registered its first few purchases. Then the number just kept going up and their expressions turned to looks of horror. At the time, this was a real concern. - An iPhone 6s commercial has a girl take a video with said phone of onions being sliced. The video ends up going viral, is shown in movie theaters, analyzed in film classes, and, eventually, given an award by Neil Patrick Harris. - Death Note: The cult following for Kira starts on the Internet - in fact, it's the Internet followers who give him his name. - Kujibiki♡Unbalance OVA: Doing this is the focus of one of the competitions. The opposing team of Otaku post pictures of anime girls and get large numbers of hits, while the main characters make feeble attempts at websites about trains and such and get few hits - until they decide to post a video of the girl characters in skimpy outfits and win. - In the Negima!? anime, Nodoka becomes the Japanese Internet's #1 idol after someone posts some pictures of her online. Chisame is not happy about this. - Yuri!!! on Ice: The plot is kicked off when the Nishigori triplets record and upload Yuri Katsuki's flawless imitation of figure skating champion Victor Nikiforov's program to the internet. Soon the video goes viral, which catches Victor's attention and inspires him to become Yuri's coach for the next Grand Prix. - Zombie Land Saga: In the second season, Lily goes on a talent show and discovers that her opponent is performing the same song that she is. She quickly improvises a remixed version with an entirely different style, and while it doesn't win, it becomes a viral hit online. - The title character of Kick-Ass becomes a hit because an upload of him being a Determinator in a fight that he cannot win becomes a viral video, considered very inspirational by viewers. - Vote Loki: The news coverage of Loki's Do Wrong, Right speech directed at lying politicians goes viral, and becomes the foundation on which the jerk builds his own political career. - Dilbert: The PHB tries to invoke this trope by ordering Dilbert to create a video that will go viral. Dilbert's increasing annoyance at trying to explain that this can't be done on command is recorded by Asok and goes viral. - For Those We Cherish: Sergeant Aethon of the Lamenters performs a heroic action and rescues a Faunus woman and her siblings when they were lagging behind in an evacuation. Unbeknownst to them, a reporter was among the group and took a picture that went viral online. His Captain does not let him forget it and assigns him to do PR with Team RWBY because of it. - Hunters of Justice: To distract Mumbo Jumbo and rescue his hostages, Weiss Schnee upstages his performance by singing. One of the hostages was able to film her performance on his phone and uploaded it to YouTube. It got five million views in three days. - Ralph Breaks the Internet: During their mission to try and find a way to get money for Vanellope's replacement steering wheel, the duo stumble upon Yesss, who promises to make Ralph a mega-popular Internet star. Due to many people remembering Wreck-It Ralph from their childhoods, the videos instantly become hits. - Turbo: A video of the titular character with a boy commenting "WOAH! That snail is fast!" as he's racing is what makes him popular, to the point where the video gets a Voice Clip Song that turns into a hit song. - Indigenous: Scott uses his app to record a message explaining their plight, and is interrupted by the creatures attacking, which he also captures on video. The resulting clip gets automatically sent to all of his contacts and becomes a viral sensation, breaking the masquerade. - In Infamous (2020), Arielle is obsessed with social media but has very few followers. One night, she goes to a party where she gets into a fight and beats up a girl while everyone at the party films the fight and posts it on social media. Arielle immediately gains 147 new followers. This later gives her the idea of livestreaming footage of her and Dean robbing the gas station, which gains her 3000 followers. She keeps doing this through their crime spree; gaining more than 3 million followers. - The Social Network: Mark Zuckerberg's site "Facemash", created while drunk, gets enough hits within a matter of hours to shut down the Harvard University servers. Truth in Television, as this actually happened, and is likely the most accurately-depicted event in the movie. - In Sorry to Bother You, a clip of the main character getting hit in the head with a Coca-Cola can becomes a big in-universe meme almost immediately. He's able to parley this online fame into an appearance on the local Sadistic Game Show, so he can get a bigger audience to reveal the conspiracy he has uncovered. - Warrior: A video of Tommy beating Mad Dog at the gym gets uploaded on YouTube by the gym receptionist. It becomes so popular the soldiers overseas are checking it out. - We're the Millers: \|\|The video that Casey takes of Kenny's swollen testicle becomes a popular internet video by the end of the film.\|\| Also, the film begins with David watching a bunch of silly YouTube videos. - Zack and Miri Make a Porno: The "Granny Panties" video of Miri got 300,000 hits in the first few hours. - Cyber Joly Drim: Jola makes up a silly song out of boredom and heartsickness. Within two days it's everywhere and treated dead serious. - I Left the A-Rank Party has a system not unlike livestreaming by which adventurers can record their actions and even broadcast live. Main character Yoke decides to record his new party taking on their first boss monster for tactical review later and decides to broadcast live to start generating interest in their party. The clip promptly goes viral when he one-shots the boss by accident. - Michael Crichton's Next: One character creates a fictional Web page to fool her daughter. Within minutes, this page is the top Google hit. - Son of the Mob: Vince creates a boring, useless webpage about cats for a school project. The page ends up getting thousands of hits, which confuses everyone. Later he finds out his brother was using the page to run a gambling ring. - Austin & Ally: this is how Austin ascends to fame. And how the whole plot of the show begins. - The Big Bang Theory has used this trope a few times: - Leonard makes a Web page for Penny to sell her small crafts project. While the others are still discussing the merit of the site, an order of 1000 units comes in. - When Leonard and Sheldon have a fight during a physics lecture, the video Howard shot becomes a YouTube featured video the same evening. - Sheldon gets drunk and makes a fool of himself at an awards presentation; this becomes a huge hit on YouTube by the next morning under the title "Physicist has a meltdown". - Doctor Who: "The Power of Three" has a variation: Millions of small black cubes appear all over the world. Within one day, people have created over a thousand Twitter accounts devoted to the cubes, as well as posting them on Facebook and YouTube. - Glee: - Averted when Sue threatens to upload an embarrassing video of the principal, he tells her that he uploaded it himself a week earlier, and it only got two hits. - Played straight - and a little karmically - in a later episode, when an embarrassing video of Sue dancing to "Let's Get Physical" is posted on YouTube. It soon goes viral and within a matter of days becomes so popular Olivia Newton-John offers her a role in a remake of the music video. - Played straight in YouTube videos "The Kissed That Missed" humiliation at Nationals (which goes viral worldwide) and "Mercedes Inferno" performance of Disco Inferno (several hundred hits is still pretty significant in a timeframe of less than a day). - House of Cards (US): in chapter 6, Frank Underwood makes a gaffe while in a debate on CNN with Martin Spinella about the teachers' strike. Within less than 24 hours of the gaffe, someone has turned it into a Voice Clip Song with 308,476 views and spawned dozens of other parodies. - iCarly: In the Pilot, the funny video that started it all has an amazing 27,000 hits on the first evening it has been online. - In Plain Sight: A teenager in witness protection performs in the school choir and one of the parents makes a video of it and posts it on the Internet. The video goes viral because the girl was an up and coming rockstar before witnessing a murder and she still has many loyal fans wondering what happened to her. Mary has to relocate the girl before the gangsters who want her dead come looking. - Leverage: Used to convince the mark that he can make it big by hiring one of the team. Of course, this is a con - they set up a script to automatically view the video from many different IP addresses. - Lizzie McGuire: Matt's webcast from his basement gets a ridiculous number of hits when his father accidentally turns it into a slapstick routine. - The Other Two: The premise of the show revolves around Chase's video for his song "I Want to Marry You at Recess" becoming a worldwide viral smash. - Renegadepress.com's "A Tangled Web" deconstructs this. The victim in question, Francine, has to leave her school because of the constant torment from her video. - This trope enabled Vincenzo to delay an illegal demolition at Geumga Plaza from taking place in episode 2. He had uploaded a photo of himself on his Outstargram account, inviting the public to a 'Traditional Sicilian Wine Party for Insiders' which would be held at Geumga Plaza. The post quickly goes viral across Korea and the rest of the world. By nightfall, the venue is packed with people, effectively preventing the Ant Group gangsters from carrying out the demolition. - Borderlands 2: Gaige goes from two subscribers in her third ECHO Log to over twenty thousand in her fourth after her science fair project — a heavily-armed "anti-bullying" robot — blows up her rival Marcie Holloway due to a miscalibration. - .hack: Consciously averted in the series, where it is noted at least once that the full Epitaph of Twilight was posted briefly online, but was taken down before many people even knew about it. - GRID 2: After the first race, a video of your on-track performance gets uploaded on YouTube and it gets millions of views and likes, to the point that a rich American tycoon, Patrick Callahan, is interested on you and wants you to help him out on the creation of a world racing tournament. - Mass Effect 3: The DLC Citadel has a scene where Kasumi records a drunk Tali imitating a starship with her arms outstretched, humming comically, and posts it online; she claims it's already got thousands of hits and a fansite. - Kiratto Pri☆Chan: This trope plays a major role in the plot of the show. If any video on the titular streaming service becomes this, a sparkling message that says "READY FOR LIVE" will appear on the PriChan Cast of whoever owns the channel, enabling the person who produced that day's top video to perform. - In Daughter for Dessert, the erotica stories \|\|written by Amanda and posted by Kathy\|\| are like this. Heidi heard of the stories before \|\|meeting either Amanda or Kathy\|\|. - In Double Homework, as soon as Dennis releases new footage of the Barbarossa incident, the press is all over it. Justified, as the incident was previously a big news item. - Achewood: Phillipe's disastrous Public Service Announcement goes viral in this strip. - Dissonance: Gen uploads some footage of Pandora to YouTube, and gets over 4.7 million hits overnight. - El Goonish Shive: This strip has multiple You Tube videos documenting a superhero battle get several thousand viewings in less time than it takes the news crew to arrive by helicopter. - Girls with Slingshots: As Jamie finds out, her drunken "I just want somebody to ravage my body" outburst becomes a YouTube hit and a meme overnight. - Kevin & Kell: This trope causes Rudy's problems in this episode. - Leftover Soup: Ellen is Answering Machine Bitch. - Penny Arcade: In one strip, Tycho finds a video on You Tube that consists of him doing something embarrassing while drunk. By the time he is made aware of it, it gained a number of views much larger than the population of the earth. - PHD: This strip involves one of the characters setting up a live webcam. Within ten seconds of a female character entering the shot, viewership has jumped from two to 1500, and she has 11 fansites. (and that was back in 2000) - Sandra on the Rocks: Sandra's (as Gary later puts it) geek chic rant in favour of a female game character that's fun to play goes viral during the livestream, and afterwards Sandra's website skyrockets from 1 to more than 1.5 million hits overnight. - Unwinder's Tall Comics: Unwinder has a friend film him while he crashes a sled, and he intends to put the video up on YouTube. An Imagine Spot ensues, where the video gets 14 million hits, and Unwinder himself becomes an international punchline who no one wants to hire. - xkcd: In this strip, the video from The Ring is uploaded to You Tube. It almost instantly gains over 300,000 views. - commodoreHUSTLE: In the episode "Viral," the crew attempt to engineer one of these by imitating styles of viral video. In the resulting episode, "Fallout," they discover they succeeded. Notable in it being a case of Real Life Writes the Plot; they did make the viral videos shown briefly in the former episode, and one of them really did explode in popularity. - Dad: In "Can't Be Stopped", it's mentioned that Dad, caught dancing at a club, received a billion views after people put the video online. - Justin Bieber became a teen idol after a manager found one of his videos on YouTube, and it involved getting millions of views as well: After posting dozens of homemade videos on YouTube in 2007, where the multi-talented Bieber put his impeccable spin on songs from artists like Usher, Ne-Yo and Stevie Wonder, Justin racked up over 10,000,000 views purely from word of mouth. - It's usually commented that any video uploaded by raocow, or having raocow as one of its tags gets 3,000 to 4,000 views by the end of the day. This includes demos, silly cuts, audiosurf songs, or whatever. - Happened to Red vs. Blue, believe it or not. Apparently, Rooster Teeth had more than 2 million downloads within a day of posting the first episode. They got popular enough that it took Bungie only a week to notice them. Fortunately, Bungie loved the series (it was essentially free publicity for Halo after all), and did not shut them down. - Although some criticism and controversy surrounded it, the video Kony 2012 by Invisible Children certainly succeeded at raising awareness of the Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony (notorious for his use of Child Soldiers). The 30-minute documentary racked up over 100 million views in just six days. According to those who measure such things, it's the fastest-spreading viral video in the history of the internet—all the more impressive when you consider that it's a long, serious piece that doesn't involve kittens. - Second on the list linked above is Susan Boyle, who made it to 100 million views in nine days. The other runners-up took a while longer to break 100m; by comparison, for instance, Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" took 18 days and Rebecca Black's "Friday" took 45. Not too shabby, but not quite "instant" by that point either. - Texas mom Candace Payne posted a Facebook video of herself trying on a Chewbacca mask and breaking into Contagious Laughter. In less than four days it picked up a record-smashing 140 million views.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvernightInternetSensation
Overnight Conquest - TV Tropes In Real Life, wars are a messy and tiresome affair. Hostilities can escalate for months long before the sides even exchange the first shots. Even the best war machine in the world will still take its time securing the enemy lands, trench by trench, if not because of fierce resistance on both sides of the frontlines, then because marching in too fast will stretch the lines of communications and supply too thin for normal operations. In fiction, however, the dramatic rules require the invaders to appear larger than life, to establish them as a credible threat unbeatable by normal means. The simplest way to emphasize the superiority of the invader's military might and technology is to establish that they completed their takeover before the invaded state even knew they were there. The survivors will later refer to the invasion as the "One Week War", or the like. Alien Invasions often receive this treatment but it is not limited to them; for instance, rogue AIs usually take nanoseconds of processing time to peg humans as the enemy and launch a Robot War. However, it is almost always some fantastic element that allows for this trope to occur and bypass the standard logistical problems. A large-scale subtrope of Curb-Stomp Battle. Often involves Easy Logistics. A common setup for Back from the Brink scenario. Home by Christmas would be when someone is expecting this kind of war, only for things to turn out much less than expected. Compare also Easily Conquered World, wherein the defenders fail to offer any resistance to much weaker invaders. Note that the title shouldn't be understood literally: to qualify, conquests don't have to take place within a single night; any improbably quick conquest (relative to the size of captured territory) qualifies. ## Examples: Anime & Manga - This is pretty how the Kushan Empire invaded the Capital City of Windham in Berserk. Moments after the King of Midland dies, Emperor Ganishka and his troops come storming in and take over the joint. - In Mobile Suit Gundam F91 the Crossbone Vanguards quickly take over the colony within mere hours, as forces of The Federation were borderline weak to useless in defending the colony. Comic Books - Marvel Comics has a 2012 Crisis Crossover called "It's Coming" which deals with a Bad Future in which The Phoenix is supposed to come back to Earth and reduce it to an ash-filled wasteland devoid of life. In the future, they call the cataclysmic event "The Six-Second War". - In We Stand on Guard, the United States invades Canada after The White House is destroyed. Ottawa is flattened in an instant, and the rest of the Canadian Forces are routed within the first week, allowing for a swift occupation. Fanworks - Stargazer has the Cabal's invasion of Ceunon. A werecat who witnessed the battle firsthand claims that Ceunon officially surrendered within one hour of the siege while the Cabal took zero casualties. It then only takes a single day for the Cabal to stomp out any pockets of resistance and establish total control over every aspect of life in the city. Since Ceunon is a medieval castle town while the Cabal are an alien army with access to advanced technologies like power armor, hover tanks, and drop ships, this is hardly unbelievable. - In A Thing of Vikings, the military use of dragons completely upends the existing military paradigms of the day. City walls become something that keep defenders from escaping, as opposed to keeping dragon-riding attackers out. Dragons make it so easy to conquer that Berk with a relatively small force conquered Vedrarfjord by accident when they only wanted to get rid of the king. When they do it on purpose, Harthacnut's reign over England and Denmark ended in short order. Film - In Canadian Bacon the Canadian-American war ends before hostilities can even begin when the Americans realize that all their nuclear weapons can be remotely controlled from Toronto. The American President surrenders to the Canadian Prime Minister who is not even aware that anything out of the ordinary is happening. - Red Dawn (1984) has the Russians occupying a large swathe of the USA within the space of days. - Red Dawn (2012) does the same, replacing the Russians with the Chine— sorry, North Koreans. - The Psychlos of Battlefield Earth beat down humanity in about nine minutes. Presumably all the mighty warriors responsible have since left to conquer other galaxies and left the dregs on this backwater; it's the only possible explanation. - The Psychlos don't fight in the conventional sense. They teleported nerve gas drones all over the world. Presumably, human forces didn't even have a chance to fight. - The Chronicles of Riddick has Helion Prime taken over by the Necromongers in one night. Then again, we're only shown a single city, but the Necros treat it as if the entire planet is under their control. Literature - Robert A. Heinlein's novel Sixth Column (AKA The Day After Tomorrow). The PanAsians use their vortex beams and A-bomb rockets to defeat the United States in less than a day. - The Mouse That Roared: The Micronation of Grand Fenwick declares war on the US with the premise that they will lose and then get repaired, pumping money into the Fenwickian economy. Then they accidentally capture the Q-Bomb and win. This is before anyone in the US even knows the war is going on. - At the beginning of The Ellimist Chronicles, Toomin and his friend are playing a game. Toomin's side is defeated so quickly he has to watch the replay in slow motion to find out what happened. Of course, given the grand scale of the game note : Toomin's side started on a moon of the other, both sides started at perhaps Neolithic technology, and some evolution occurred during the game, this might not be saying much. - In Michael Moorcock's "Eternal Champion" story, the Eldren, under their military commander \|\|former human Champion Ekrose\|\| kill every human on Earth within a very short (unspecified) span of time. Justified as the Eldren have ray guns, and the humans have classic middle ages armor, swords, and so forth. - Cain's Last Stand makes a very big deal that an invading Chaos force is progressing far faster than it has any right to, and even seems to be growing. They find out that it's because Warmaster Varan has \|\|the ability to instantly brainwash any who hear or see him, including over a public-address system\|\|. In addition, Necrons have weapons that disintegrate targets and can teleport to just about anywhere they please, resulting in a Curb-Stomp Battle. - The prequel book of The Tripods indicates it only took a few weeks after the Trippies started passing out Caps for the world to end up with more Capped than Uncapped. Some pockets of fighting went on for a while, but it's obvious by the end of the prequel that the Capped are in control. Downplayed by the fact that while the actual fighting takes a relatively short time, the invaders had clearly been quietly laying the groundwork for a considerable amount of time before the first shot was fired. - The pirates in Invasion of Kzarch conquer the planet, more or less (A few holds-outs exist.), in just a few days. Justified, really; the planet's military isn't very good, and the pirates had near complete surprise, control of the air, and out-numbered the army substantially. - In the Drake Maijstral series, the alien race called the Khosali showed up and surrounded Earth with a hundred thousand warships at a time when the Earth had only a handful of interplanetary ships. A few hundred Earthlings on military stations put up some token resistance, but they were quickly defeated, and Earth had no choice but to surrender completely. Live-Action TV - Battlestar Galactica (2003) begins with the near-obliteration of the human race in a surprise attack that's over before anyone's realized what's going on. - Enemy at the Door opens with the Germans occupying the Channel Island of Guernsey in World War II. The Germans basically just walk in and take over before the news of their arrival has made it all the way around the island. This is Truth in Television, and less a sign of the Germans' superiority than a reflection of the fact that the islands were entirely defenseless; the British High Command had decided that trying to fight the Germans off would cause a lot of collateral damage to no worthwhile effect, and had withdrawn their entire military presence from the islands a few weeks before the Germans showed up. Video Games - Between the first incursion in Half-Life and the thoroughly subjugated world of Half-Life 2 is "The Seven-Hour War". - In the Strangereal continuity of the Ace Combat series, the Belkan War began on March 25, 1995 and would have ended with Belka's victory on April 2, if it were not for the single remaining ace (that's you) who delivered his country Back from the Brink. - The Reaper invasion of Earth in Mass Effect 3. As lampshaded in the intro sequence, it took them minutes to cut through all the defenses piled up around the human homeworld and land in force. There remains a small planetside resistance but Earth is otherwise firmly under Reaper control for most of the game. - The Batarian homeworld fell even quicker, as many of their leaders turned out to have been indoctrinated and disabled the defenses. - The asari homeworld Thessia also falls fairly quickly once the Reapers themselves get involved; it has a longer resistance to husks, many which die instantly to any directed force attack, because the entire asari population is biotic. Of course, the Reapers are devastating forces of destruction, they're there en masse, and asari culture isn't very military-oriented to begin with; the turian homeworld Palaven, held by a race who consider military service to be a Rite of Passage and get krogan support at the end of the first act, is a comprehensive aversion even though when you first see it most of its major population centres are on fire. Kahje, meanwhile, will be either perfectly safe or instantly doomed depending on your solution to the notoriously buggy Citadel: Hanar Diplomat mission. - In Sunrider, the PACT invasion of Cera begins and ends with the PACT flagship Legion coming out of warp, obliterating most of the Cera Space Force with a single salvo, and nuking the planets capital city without giving them a chance to surrender. - The Warcraft franchise has this problem with its wars in recent canon. Originally, the First War was preceded by ten years of border skirmishes with the orcs before it became an all-out war that lasted about five years. The lead up to the war was eventually retconned away, leaving a simple, five-year war. The gap between the first two wars used to be six years, before later being changed to just two, with the war itself only being about two years. The original third war seems to have been retconned out entirely in favor of a single battle, with the events of Warcraft 3 now taking the title. It's almost as if more territory makes a war take less time in the Warcraft universe. - This has gotten even worse starting with World of Warcraft, with every expansion being said to take place over the course of a year (with a one year skip after Cataclysm), no matter what the expansion is about. Wrath of the Lich King, for instance, involved an all-out war against a world-spanning undead army, and somehow was still resolved within a year (made even worse when you consider that the Undead Scourge survived several major blows across two years during the Third War when they were a relatively new army and weren't as entrenched as they'd be during Wrath of the Lich King). Web Video - World War II: The German 1940 invasion of Denmark is successful, with the Danes capitulating within six hours. The invasion of France in the same year sees German troops parading through the streets of Paris less than two months later, compared to more than four years of conflict with France in the First World War. Western Animation - ThunderCats (2011): The Lizards have devastated the entire kingdom of the Cats in just one night. Justified as the Cats have medieval level technology, while the Lizards are armed with high tech weapons such as laser guns, bombs, and giant mechs. Real Life - The early stages of World War II. - Germany conquered the Netherlands and Belgium in a matter of days. - Then there was Denmark, when the Germans mounted a surprise invasion on the morning of April 9, 1940, which led to Denmark's surrender in about six hours. - Iraq vs. Kuwait - Iraq, then under the rule of Saddam Hussein, invaded and occupied Kuwait in just one day in 1990. It helps that Kuwait was a small country and its military was at a size of about 16,000 strong. This pales in comparison to Iraq which was a fairly large country with a military of about one million men (the fourth largest army in the world at the time)! - Then it got inverted with the liberation of Kuwait by the U.S. led Coalition. While the air campaign went on for over a month, the ground campaign lasted just 100 hours. - Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands on April 2, 1982, also qualifies. It helps that the islands are sparsely populated and that the British only had about 57 Royal Marines and some assorted sailors and civilian volunteers to defend the islands at the time. In spite of this, the Brits actually managed to force the initial Argentine assault force to retreat for a bit, and Governor Rex Hunt initially refused to surrender. Only after the Argentines brought in more troops and surrounded Government House did a surrender occur. This, of course, touched off The Falklands War. The Brits reclaimed the islands within two months. - The Conch Republic in Florida. In 1982, after the Border Patrol set up a checkpoint at the only road out, Key West declared independence and attacked the United States... by whopping a man in a Navy uniform over the head with a loaf of Cuban bread. One minute later, they surrendered (to the man in the Navy uniform) and applied for one billion dollars in foreign aid. - There were a couple of real wars with names like these, such as Six-Day War where Israel had a major victory over several Arab nations in a course of one incomplete week in 1967, or Russian-Georgian war in South Ossetia in 2008, which pretty much turned into a full-scale Georgian rout after its second day, but is commonly called the Five-Day War, because of the cease-fire agreement date. - There's also the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which lasted all of a whopping 40 minutes before the conflict ended. It's the shortest war in history.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvernightConquest
Overly Specific Afterlife - TV Tropes Nala: So, if Simba and I get into trouble while he's gone, he'll be watching over us still? Zazu: That's where he'll be. Nala: Who told you this, Zazu? Zazu: Mufasa, of course. From generations to generations, each king has passed it down to their son. Nala: How about the queens? Are there any of them up there? Zazu: That I do not know. In some depictions, "good" people go to heaven while "bad" people go to hell (or similar equivalents), while other depictions, everyone goes to the same afterlife no matter their beliefs, cultures, or even species. Other times, you need to worship in a specific way to get into the afterlife. This trope is the latter belief but even more specific. Only certain people are allowed into a certain afterlife. Maybe you have to be born into the right culture, family, or hierarchy, but unless you're in it, you're not allowed in. What happens to everyone else can vary. They can go to a different afterlife, they can go to no afterlife, or it could just be unclarified. Super-Trope to Species-Specific Afterlife, Personalized Afterlife, Ironic Hell, and Warrior Heaven. ## Examples: - Warriors Redux: The four Clans believe that good Clan cats enter a Hive Mind afterlife upon death, while bad Clan cats stop existing. When the kittypet-born Firepaw asks the seer Spottedleaf if non-Clan cats can enter StarClan, she treats it as a stupid question—of course they don't. StarClan is Clan heaven, not cat heaven, so only Clan cats are allowed. - The Lion King: The series only mentions that the Great Kings live in the stars upon dying. Nothing is stated about other lions or non-lions. Zira asking Scar to look after \|\|Nuka\|\| upon his death in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride implies that regular lions aren't barred from an afterlife, but it's otherwise undiscussed in the films. The semi-canon Spin-Offspring show The Lion Guard shows that animals turn into spirits. - 1934's Wonder Bar features a black character (played by a white man in blackface) going to a black-segregated heaven. It's full of stereotypes such as black Americans loving watermelon and pork chops. - In Pirates of the Great Salt Lake one of the main characters' mom is worried about his lifestyle because she firmly believes pirates (or even pirate larpers) can't get into heaven. The film's final punchline is that she's right... which is why there's a separate Pirate Heaven. - Warrior Cats: Three different afterlives have been shown but they're all specific to either tribe cats or Clan cats. What happens to rogues, kittypets, and other cats isn't known. Firestar's kittypet father Jake is shown to exist after dying, which means there's some sort of afterlife for pets (and whether their owners can be with them is also unspecified). Clan cats are themselves barred from the kittypet afterlife as it's been shown that even Clan cats that later become kittypets end up in StarClan. - In Hunter's Moon (1989) and Frost Dancers, predators and prey have different afterlives. Hare mythology is that hares are tempted by deceased predators before entering the afterlife. If the hare gives in, they enter the predator's afterlife and are forced to act as prey for all eternity. - Corum has an afterlife just for people that he kills. He can summon them to fight for him and if they kill someone to take their place there, they can move on to what's implied to be Cessation of Existence. - Awkward.: Played for laughs, when gay couple Theo and Cole tell the religious-but-questioning Lyssa that gay people don't go to hell- they go to gay heaven. She freaks out over "how many heavens there are", and wonders whether or not bisexuals "go back and forth" between gay and straight heaven. - The Thrilling Adventure Hour: In the Beyond Belief episode "The Haunting of Howard Schroeder", Frank explains that Heaven and Hell are based on the ideas of Heaven and Hell. Heavens exist anywhere ghosts think they have been good and deserve a reward, and Hells exist anyplace ghosts feel they deserve punishment. There are, as a result, several winning Heavens in the Hamptons, and there are more Hells than one can count; all of New Jersey for example. - Dungeons & Dragons: The dead journey to one of seventeen Outer Planes, determined by their Character Alignment or patron god. In addition, some gods' divine realms act as Pocket Dimensions that might or might not allow travel to and from their home Plane. - Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Shyish, the Realm of Death, is home to every afterlife anyone in any of the eight Mortal Realms has ever believed in, from ones relating to cultures and civilizations, to warrior paradises, to ones of peace; basically, if anyone anywhere in the Mortal Realms has had an idea of what they think the afterlife is like, that afterlife exists somewhere in Shyish. Originally these were all ruled by individual death gods, spirits, or otherwise, but in the Age of Myth Nagash went about subjugating them until he was the one singular god of death in the Mortal Realms. He even made them into pretty nice ones too, before his FaceHeel Turn. - In Final Fantasy XIV, Eorzeans who worship the Twelve believe there are six heavens and six hells in the afterlife. When you are judged by Nald'thal, you are sent to one of these heavens or hells based on your profession or sins. This is only mythology, as it's been proven that when you die your soul returns to the Aetherial Sea and will eventually reincarnate into a new life. - The afterlife in World of Warcraft is made up of hundreds if not thousands of separate realms known collectively as the Shadowlands. Unless someone's soul is claimed in life by certain powers or beings(examples include the Holy Light or the loa Bwonsamdi), you are instead judged by the Arbiter upon death. Based on what kind of person you were in life and how much of an impact you had in the world you lived in, measured in a source of energy called anima, your soul is then sent to one of the afterlives you best fit the description for. - In Champions of Far'aus, being a follower of certain deities causes the spirits of dead mortals to go to whatever realms of Elsewhere their deities have set up for them. Ones that dont go to a specific Deitys realm of Elsewhere for their afterlife, and end up hanging around in the mortal realm, get hunted down by the Grim Councils Reapers, & sent to the Otherworld, which was created by the Grim Council. If a mishap causes a spirit meant for a certain deities Realm to get sent to the Otherworld by mistake, their deities can contact the Grim Pantheons Lost & Found division. - The Order of the Stick's cosmology is derived from Dungeons & Dragons, so souls travel to an Outer Plane that suits their Character Alignment or patron god. When Roy is temporarily killed, Elan laments that they won't meet in the afterlife "because you're Lawful, and Chaotic Good am I". Furthermore, due to a bargain between the death goddess Hel and the other gods, dwarves only go to their alignment-respective afterlife if they died an honorable death. Dwarves who died dishonorably will end up in the domain of Hel and will be her slaves for eternity. To avoid eternal damnation, dwarf culture is extremely honor-centric. - Comedian Heaven is a webcomic about historical comedians interacting in a heaven specifically for them, with mention being made of Serious Actor Heaven, Politician Heaven, and Trucker Heaven. - Played with in Schlock Mercenary: Durning a flare-up in the Andromeda-Milky Way war trillions of sentient beings are brain-uploaded into a virtual world, with plans to revive them after the battles are over. The "waiting room" for each group/world/species is presented as a particular afterlife, though at least a few on-screen cases has the tour guide say that it's just the best they could come up with to help everyone get an idea of what was happening. - The Internet Historian episode "Going Camping at the End of the World" features a paid sponsorship for NordVPN cyber security where-in Jesus shows up at a gamer's door and tells him that after seeing his internet search history, he's no longer eligible to get into Heaven, or the more exclusive Super Heaven, which features a delicious seafood buffet. - The first installment of The Grim Reaper Show depicts people being sorted into their various afterlives. One man, who apparently made up his own religion, is told that his afterlife is to go to "the floating island of Mandingo," where everyone enjoys an eternity of steaming-hot sex, and there is no jealousy or boredom. The Reaper compliments the man on his choice of religion, and allows a nearby agnostic to go too. - In The Boondocks, after Uncle Ruckus gets struck by lightning, he is greeted by Ronald Reagan, who explains that Heaven is segregated. Black Heaven is nice for what it is, but White Heaven will always be better. - The Simpsons: - There's a Couch Gag where there is a heaven for fit dogs and a hell for unfit dogs. Santa's Little Helper dies from overeating. At the Pearly Gates, he is shown that he isn't fit enough for heaven. He is wary about going to hell, but the enticement of free pizza changes his mind and he heads there. - In "Days of Wine and D'oh'ses", a drunk Barney tells Lisa that when we die there will be separate planets for the French and the Chinese and we'll all be a lot happier. - Marge in "The Father, the Son and the Holy Guest Star" had a daydream where Heaven is divided between the Protestants and the Catholics after Bart and Homer converted to the latter. The former is like a country club attended by stereotpyical WASP New Englishmen, the latter is a giant party mostly full of Irish and Italian people. - In Avatar: The Last Airbender, some humans pass onto the Spirit World after death, usually because they were very connected to other spirits. The Avatar will reincarnate on Earth, though it doesn't really fit the traditional idea of reincarnation—each life has a separate spirit that goes to the Spirit World after death, they're just all connected to each other. The afterlife for everyone is unspecified.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlySpecificAfterlife
Literal Genie - TV Tropes "This is awful; it's like when you get a wish from a genie, but you ask for it in slightly the wrong way and wind up with a solid gold head or something." You have to Be Careful What You Wish For, because oh boy are you gonna get it. More often than not, a wish-granting entity (genie, vengeance demon, holodeck, leprechaun, and so on) has some sort of contractual clause stating that they have to give you exactly what you ask for — but maybe not in the way you were thinking of when you made the wish. Ask for a ton of money, and it will appear. Right in front of you, weighing exactly one ton (and if you're lucky, it might even be in your preferred denomination). On the other hand if you ask for X-ray vision, your eyes might start shooting harmful radiation, or you may end up being able to only see in the X-ray spectrum. In other cases, you may have wished for one half of something; wishing for the knowledge to cure all existing illnesses will be rendered null and void if you didn't wish for the means to access the medical ingredients that may or may not exist yet. The entity wasn't trying to screw you over, it's just that your understanding of the wish's words and theirs didn't match. If you're lucky, they may give you a do-over. Otherwise, you may have to burn another wish to undo the damage. What makes this worse is how characters in this situation are now ten times as likely to make a Rhetorical Request Blunder and blurt out a "wish" without meaning to, while the Literal Genie is around. It's almost a mystical effect, as people who have never uttered "I wish" prior otherwise will do so. And you definitely do not want to use Malaproper. In various forms, Literal Genie wishes are very old; specific examples (e.g., immortality without eternal youth, as in the case of Eos and Tithonos) go back to Greek Mythology, while the actual genie trope was known in Arabia by the 10th century. A more modern variation is when the wisher asks for something using slang, colloquialisms, or Ambiguous Syntax, and the Genie, having not been outside for at least a century, grants it literally because that's the only way they can understand the wish. In this regard, even a Benevolent Genie can become a Literal one. So you can only blame yourself when the genie gives you a Dryocopus martius that's a foot tall. While the genie claims that they're being literal, or even that they're Just Following Orders, in practice, it tends to come off as if they're simply always choosing whichever interpretation of your words is the most disruptive, the most likely to teach the character An Aesop, or at the very least what you least wanted to happen. If this goes beyond the point of plausible interpretation, they become a Jackass Genie. You get around this by wording your request as carefully and explicitly as possible. Or wish for the genie to grant the following wishes according to your interpretation, if you are allowed three wishes. Of course, there's remarkably little plot conflict when things can go this well, so don't expect very many characters to actually think of this. Not to be confused with Exact Words. A more mundane version is Literal-Minded. A highly specific, villainous version is Unhand Them, Villain!. Compare Zeroth Law Rebellion and Blunt Metaphors Trauma. Super-Trope to The Genie in the Machine and Gone Horribly Right. If a genie goes out of their way to fulfill the spirit and intention of a person's wishes without any careful wording required, they're a Benevolent Genie. On the opposite end, if they always make a terrible interpretation of your wish, no matter how absurd that interpretation or how well the wish was worded, they're a Jackass Genie. See also Reality Warping Is Not a Toy. Generally involves some form of Double Meaning. If the wisher decides not to play the game, and wishes for no wishes (or some other paradox), it's Wishplosion. ## Examples: - An old animated ad for Burger King featured a BK wizard (replete with pointy hat and magic wand) who granted the kids' requests: Kid 1: Make me a hamburger! Kid 2: And me a shake! Wizard: Okay, (waves wand at Kid 1) You're a hamburger, and (waves wand at Kid 2) You're a shake! The Burger King: No no no, they meant give them, not make them! - Variations of that joke have been done a lot. For example, in one Saturday morning series of animated commercials that promoted nutrition hosted by a guy named Timer, a kid asked him if he can "Make me a banana" and Timer says, "Okay, poof, you're a banana!" - In a shoe commercial, a man has a lamp with a miniature genie, saying he'll grant one wish because he's still in training. His friend states that "[he] always wanted to speak Japanese." Before an official wish could be made, the genie grants this, and makes it so the first guy could only speak in Japanese. - Did you know that genies can be very literal? As in, instead of giving you $1 million when you say "a million bucks," you get one million male deer? Inferred Holocaust: Bucks the kind of territorial males that are likely to start fighting as soon as they see other bucks. Just a few minutes after the bucks magically appeared, they are going to engage in a brawl that is about as peaceful as the Running of the Bulls in a Spanish town and about the size of a Spanish town. - Occurs in a commercial for the Toyota Rav4 with the Rav4 Genie (played by Kaley Cuoco). A family is granted wishes after the father rubs the vehicle's emblem. Father: (patting large belly) I kinda wish the old spare tire was gone. Genie: Out of everything, you wish for...okay. Makes the Rav4's spare tire disappear. - In a Spanish commercial for the Porsche German automobile brand, a man asks a genie for "a yellow Porsche with leather seating", but due to his poor pronunciation, his porch gets painted yellow and has a couple chairs added to it instead. - In Iznogoud (written by René Goscinny, the writer of much better-known Asterix), there is an episode with a genie which is summoned by rubbing a pair of slippers. He fulfills not only every wish, but every statement that the summoning character would pronounce. Hilarity Ensues, especially if the statement is a curse of surprise. - DC Comics' Johnny Thunder would on occasion have this problem with his Thunderbolt — although it probably was more due to Johnny's overall dimwit nature than any defect in the Bahdnesian spirit that did his bidding (who was compelled to be a Literal Genie whether it wanted to be or not, rather than doing so through misunderstanding, mischief, or malevolence). It occasionally even worked in his favor; once, when threatened with certain death by the Black Dragon Society, his wish that "the other Justice Society members were here to see me in this fix!" was taken quite literally by the T-Bolt — resulting in a room full of Golden Age superheroes opening up a huge can of whup-ass on the Dragons. - Deadshot had orders from Amanda Waller to stop Rick Flag from killing Senator Cray. Deadshot tracked down Flag and the senator, and then killed the senator himself! After all, Waller had only told him to stop Rick Flag from killing Cray. When Waller confronted him about this, Deadshot quips, "I don't read minds." - Fables has a particularly nasty version of this that ends with the wisher dying in what is explained to be the most horrible way he can imagine. It takes several days. It's also a bit of a subversion as \|\|his words were changed by a witch as he said them specifically in order to cause this\|\|. - XXXenophile: - In the story "Demonstration of Affection", a sorcerer transports himself to Hell to get a demon to grant him a wish. He wishes for "more wealth than I'll ever need." The demon gives him a nickel. Sorcerer: ... It's a nickel. Demon: Aye. More wealth than thou will ever need here. Sorcerer: A-heh! I wasn't planning on staying... Demon: Ah, then perhaps thou should have asked to be returned to Earth. A pity thee only gets one wish, no? - Also in the short "Wish fulfillment". A rare example of a positive case of this trope. The protagonist has used her three wishes, is usurped by the general of her forces and becomes the general's captive. The general declares that "henceforward you shall be my captive flower", the genie chooses to see that as a legal name change, giving the protagonist access to three new wishes. This does not turn out well for the general. After that... sex happens. Ironically, she asks about Freeing the Genie, but due to restrictions, it's not that easy... the only way to free this particular genie is to make a wish that he truly wants to fulfill, but cannot. She asks if "Making a rock so big you can't lift it" would work, and he says, "I have no wish to give myself a hernia." She solves this by \|\|having wild sex with him until he is exhausted and then wishing for him to do it all again, IMMEDIATELY, which he can't do due to exhaustion, thus freeing him\|\|. - The Staff of One from Runaways functions like this Depending on the Writer. Sometimes it does exactly what the wielder wants, as a freeze spell did not turn the victims into ice, but other times, it seems to gleefully misinterpret the user. Upon being faced with a horde of zombies, she tries to undo the magic by saying "Zombie Not!" The result? The zombies formed together into a massive beast — a zombie knot. - An issue of Marvel Adventures has Tigra find a genie and hesitate to use her wishes because she's very well aware of the possibility of the genie behaving in this way. Until the end of the issue, where she wishes for a new lamp to hold him and is very specific about it to avoid him finding any loopholes. Tigra: I wish for a magic genie-capturing lamp that never fails, works instantly, and traps genies for all time without causing any harm to anyone else. The genie: What? Nooooooooooooooooo! - The Flash once fell victim to this trope in a big way. Wally West had never bothered with a Secret Identity, thinking it was more trouble than it was worth. But he changed his mind when his nemesis Zoom attacked his wife and killed their unborn child. In his grief, Wally summoned the all-powerful being known as The Spectre and asked him to make the entire world forget the Flash's real identity. Spectre agreed... but since Wally said he wanted everyone to forget, HE FORGOT TOO. The next issue began with Wally as a down-on-his-luck nobody who had no idea he even had superpowers. - An interesting inversion occurs in the Dutch Douwe Dabbert comics, where the title character has a magical knapsack that always contains what he needs. Whether he knows what he needs or not. More than once, he gets the item with which he can solve his current problem in the first half of the comic, but he still needs to figure out exactly what to do with it. - In one of Alan Moore's Captain Britain comics, Captain Airstrip-One (who represents Ingsoc from Nineteen Eighty-Four) is told by his supervising officer to "imagine a boot stomping on a head, forever." Captain Airstrip-One then imagines a boot stomping on a head — and doesn't stop. He said forever... - Happens a lot in the Sabrina the Teenage Witch comics. For one example, Sabrina is so disappointed with the tiny portion of ice cream she's ordered from a soda shop that she casts a spell to make it ten times larger. Her aunt informs her that she only made the bill ten times larger. - In The Wishing Wisp, several characters are given visions which show the horrible consequences of their careless wishing. The wishes are often interpreted in a literal sense. In one case, for example, a man wishes some medication he just obtained will "make a new man" out of him, so in his vision he becomes a new man and is not recognized by his family or colleagues. - In Fairest, a spin-off of the well-received Vertigo series Fables, Fiery Redhead "Briar Rose" is depicted as another variation of the Sleeping Beauty character, including the part where she's showered with magical gifts and wishes by her Fairy Godmothers. To her everlasting displeasure, every wish got played straight, so only a few of her gifts are shown to be beneficial, or even remotely useful. While in the end she managed to receive supernatural beauty and allure (including a certain degree of sexual prowess by explicit wording in that sense), and the ability to excel in songwriting and playing musical instrument, having the "Wit of an Angel" means she that she lacks guile, and she's easily conned or tricked, and the wish for "the singing voice of a nightingale" actually stripped her of the ability to sing, as she can merely screech as a bird. Thus to her immense displeasure, while in the human world she was known as an accomplished songwriter and guitarist for an all-girls rock band, she never managed to took the lead, as her "blessing" was just a form of mystically induced selective mutism. - Preacher: - Jesse Custer is imbued with the Word of God, which means he can make anyone follow his commands to the letter. He doesn't always think this through, such as the time when he got rid of a sheriff by telling him "go fuck yourself", which resulted in him \|\|tearing off his own penis and sodomizing himself with it\|\|. - A much more chilling example: Jesse instructs several armed men to "Fuck off," and they do, turning around and running away. One of them, as they run, looks to another with absolute terror in his eyes and asks, " Forever?" - Subverted in a Disney's Aladdin comic that predated the Aladdin: The Return of Jafar movie by several years, but had essentially the same story. In it, a little old lady gets control of Jafar's lamp and manages to get an insane amount of things from him by very carefully wording her wishes. - In a Dutch comic based on Disney's Aladdin, it is revealed that on Friday the 13th of the genie year 1313, all genies become literal genies, whether they want it or not. The Genie demonstrates this to Aladdin by asking him to wish for a pie, and promptly throws it in his face because Aladdin failed to specify how he wanted the pie delivered to him. That same day, Jafar manages to steal the lamp but quickly finds out how dangerous a literal genie can be. - One Donald Duck Comic by Carl Barks has an interesting variant on this. As an April Fool joke, Huey Dewey and Louie trick Donald into believing that the rocks on an island in the Southern Sea grants wishes. Donald immediately drags them along to the island to test out the rocks — and due to a number of contrived circumstances, every wish Donald makes turns out to come true in a Literal Genie fashion, because Donald won't stop using slang when making wishes. For example, the natives of the island are worried because the ship that usually comes by to buy coconuts from them hasn't shown up, and their coconut stock is getting too big for their storage rooms. Hence, when Donald stops by, grabs a rock and loudly declares "I wish for a million coconuts!" (meaning, of course, a million dollars), the natives are all too happy to give him all the coconuts he wants. At the end of the story, Huey, Dewey and Louie are confused as to whether the rocks actually were magical or not — though all the granted wishes were easily explained away by coincidences, the fact remained that all the wishes did, after a fashion, come true. - The horror anthology comic Flinch had a tale titled "Brer Hoodoo" (Done in the style of Uncle Remus/Brer Rabbit tales), where Brer Hare sells his soul to the Devil to be able to "play [his] guitar better than any man alive". The devil makes it so, but an encounter with another, better musician leads to Hare's eventual death. \|\|In Hell, the devil explains Hare got exactly what he wished for-he was the best on his guitar, which didn't prevent other musicians from being better on their guitars.\|\| - The Four Gods of China in The Shadow Hero grant their mortal hosts a promise in return for hosting them, but only the exact words of the promise count. For example, Hank Chu, the hero, asks Tortoise to promise that he'll never be shot, and Tortoise fulfills the promise by ensuring bullets will always dodge Hank - but he's still vulnerable to everything else. That said, it doesn't stop the gods helping their hosts out in other ways. - A Minnie the Minx special had Minnie find a genie in her bathroom and wish that she doesn't have to go to school. When the genie asks where she'd like to go instead, she says "Oh, any old place will do". The genie transports her to ancient Egypt, a very old place indeed. - In "The Bizarre Batman Genie!" in Detective Comics #322, Batman is transformed into a genie and trapped in lamp by criminals - unable to return to human until he has granted Three Wishes. (It Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.) The criminals attempt to use the Batman-Genie to commit crimes. Unfortunately for them, he is fairly literal in his understanding. Ordered to plunder the mint, Robin and Bat-Girl are able to thwart him by placing a truckload of mint plants inside the mint building. Batman 'plunders the mint' by stealing all of the mint plants. - Defied in Knights of the Dinner Table, where Rules Lawyer Brian pulls out a HUGE pre-prepared document that he had written up in case he ever got granted a wish. In a later issue, an article recommended the Game Master limit wishes to 20 words or less to prevent players from pulling this. - In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin is falling from a great height and while searching for some way to save himself, finds his Transmogrifier Gun, which can turn anything into whatever he's thinking of. He gleefully proclaims "I'll just point it at myself and transmogrify! I'm safe!", at which point he turns into... well, a safe. - In the 1980s, Bike cartoonist "Shobba" once drew a picture of a disgruntled youth sat on a furry cabin-trunk, with a four-foot rooster in the foreground and a brass lamp from which smoke was condensing into the form of a djinni with a what-is-it-now expression on his face. To one side was a (desperately uncool) Triumph Herald car with a pair of furry dice in the windscreen, and the youth was exclaiming "No, no, I meant a Triumph...". \|\|Once you work it out and look once again at the objects in the picture, you realize he meant a "hairy chest", a "great big cock" and a Triumph motorbike... probably a Bonneville, in that day and age.\|\| - In "Snake Tales" by Sols, the snake wants to be a sex symbol. ♂. - One of Charlie Brooker's Swinelight Zone strips in Oink was about a guy who, unlucky in love, asked a wishing well for "a great bird who'll sweep me off my feet". Nothing happened. "Just typical", he said to himself, as the giant talons descended towards his shoulders... - Dragon Ball Abridged: - First, the series makes blatant note of the DBZ example above, when Deadpan Snarker Dende points out their failure to bring Piccolo right to them. Dende: He is on Namek. Gohan: Wait, where is he? Dende: On Namek. Piccolo: [from the other side of the planet] You dumbass! Krillin: Why didn't it bring him here? Dende: You must be specific. Gohan: Oh, so it's a sort of monkey's paw ; you have to be careful what the hubris in your wish is. Piccolo: [still distant] NERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRD! - Nappa gets wished back to life because it hasn't been a year since he died and Vegeta was still (technically) one of Freeza's men when Vegeta killed him (an often cited plot hole in the original series). - At the end of the Cell Saga, King Kai, Bubbles, and Gregory aren't brought back to life after Cell self-destructed on their Baby Planet because Yamcha specifically wished to revive everyone on Earth killed by Cell. King Kai calls Yamcha an asshole for wording his wish that way. - The wishing stones from Zany To The Max are this. One time, after Slappy assigned roles for a play to seven of the eight Warners, leaving Yakko out, Yakko wished he could "join [the play] with Wakko." The next morning, Yakko and Wakko wake up conjoined. - There's also Literal, a Homestar Runner fan character by the same author, who is this. Justified because she's Literal-Minded. - In All You Need Is Love when Duck convinces Shidoh to do his bidding... Duck: Right, well I asked him to find Schrodinger's Cat, he misunderstood the directions. I hope you like cats, he just keeps bringing them, I almost want to tell him to stop but I also want to see how far he's going to take this before he gives up. He's very tenacious for a half-wit. - In The Lamp and Willow, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic, Willow discovers a magic lamp while she and Buffy (who are shipped as a couple in this story) help Buffy's mom sort out artifacts from a client's estate. Willow is sufficiently clever to handle the lamp and Balil, the genie within, as though she were handling a primed tactical nuke, and ends up employing a variation of the Prisoner's Dilemma to avoid any pitfalls. Her first of three wishes is for "the intelligence, knowledge, wisdom and understanding" to use her second and third wishes wisely (noting that intelligence and wisdom are not synonymous). Once she receives this wish, she and Buffy go over several drafts of her second wish, finally hitting on one that would meet their needs, as well as the needs of their friends, before presenting the draft to Balil. Willow uses the draft as her second wish, but adds as a condition that Balil may only grant the second wish if he is able to grant the third wish, which in this case is crafted to benefit Balil and his fellow genies. Willow correctly surmises that she would benefit most by treating Balil like an intelligent being and not like a magic slot-machine. - In Ashes of the Past, Jirachi's wish-granting abilities sometimes work in strange ways. A wish that they could find an Electrike who liked Wattson ended up transporting Max's Electrike a few feet to his side, while Jirachi's own wish (yeah, they created a loophole where it can grant its own wishes) that Max "wouldn't go splat" when the group is suddenly falling from a cable car ends up stealing a Remoraid from a Team Aqua Grunt so that Max's Mantyke can evolve into Mantine. - The Gargoyles series "Broken Mirror" opens with Demona explicitly wishing for Puck to rid her of "the human Elisa Maza forever". As a result, while Puck doesn't go along with Demona's intention to kill Elisa, he is forced to make her transformation into a gargoyle permanent, leaving Elisa and her family and friends to adjust to her changed species. - In the Marvel Cinematic Universe AU fanfic If Wishing Made It So, HYDRA finds Bucky as a genie in a bottle. They use the Tesseract to alter his powers and force him to obey any order his master gives him to the exact letter, instead of just granting three easily twisted wishes, so that he suffers the negative consequences of this trope instead of the actual wisher. Steve learns about the full extent of this when he tells Bucky to "stay here" after he unwittingly releases him from his bottle in his apartment, and Bucky is rendered unable to leave his apartment even after Steve clarifies that he can move around until he gets specific permission to go outside. - In Bottled Genius, an Inuyasha fanfic where Inu-Yasha is a genie summoned by Kagome, genies operate like this by default with their wishes being automatically granted with some ironic twist even if they don't want it to be granted like that. Even after Inu-Yasha becomes friends with Kagome and honestly wants to make sure her wishes go well, she still has to write out a long list of specifications to ensure that her wish for a nice family vacation has no negative repercussions... and even that list doesn't stop Naraku from tracking them down while they're on said vacation. - When you attend an Official Fanfiction University, you appear as whatever you describe yourself as on the application sheet. Say you're an elf, and you will be transformed into an elf once you enter. Say your eyes are blue, they'll be blue while you're there. Say you have pale skin, you will show up as Caucasian. However, since all the students are stereotypical bad fanfic writers, they will usually describe themselves with Purple Prose, which will always be interpreted literally when creating their appearance. Describe your eyes as "sapphire orbs"? You'll have spherical gemstones in your eye sockets. Say your hair is "gold" or "bronze"? Enjoy all that metal growing out of your head. And if you say you have "creamy skin", then, well... - The Life and Times of a Winning Pony: Fey tend to be very literal about enforcing contracts and agreements with mortal ponies. For instance, one of Octavia's teachers once idly mentioned to a muse note : a kind of fey that feeds on psychic energy released during artistic creation and that associates with and inspires artists in order to feed that he'd trade his right hoof to be as good as the in-universe historical cellist Animando Assai. Octavia: Suffice to say that my teacher is the best three-hooved cellist I have ever heard. - In Aladdean, a Supernatural Fusion Fic with Aladdin, Dean wants to have enough wealth and political influence to make a positive change so he wishes to be made into the "perfect suitor" for the princess of his land, expecting to be turned into a prince that she'll want to marry. Except that the princess happens to be a lesbian, so the wish instead turns him into a woman and he has to use his next wish to undo it. - The Princess and the Frog: Doctor Facilier actually has some things in common with a Literal Genie, although verging on Jackass Genie. For example, he got Prince Naveen to agree to the deal by saying things like "You want to be free, hop from place to place." and "When I look into your future it's green that I've seen." Naveen, naturally, agrees to this, and... becomes a frog. Literally speaking, Facilier didn't lie to him.... It doesn't really matter if he did or didn't, as Facilier was actively trying to screw Naveen over. Facilier is only bound by one rule in the film: \|\|He had better hold up his end of the deal to his "Friends"\|\|. He really doesn't care if he lies, cheats, or steals to get what he wants. - Aladdin: - Applies to some degree to the Genie, even though he's a well-meaning Benevolent Genie. At the start, Aladdin manages to con him into getting them out of the Cave of Wonders for free, but only by making the Genie think he's made a wish. Later, the Genie is unable even to rescue him from drowning without an explicit spoken wish (though he pulls his own bit of Loophole Abuse to get around this). Ultimately, Aladdin tricks Jafar into wishing that Genie make him into a genie himself, with all the limitations that entails — making him much less dangerous than when he was a sorcerer who could use his magic however he wanted. - In the sequel Aladdin: The Return of Jafar, Jafar does this with Abis Mal to cow him into wishing exactly how Jafar wants him to. Abis Mal wanted treasure, so Jafar takes them to a sunken treasure ship in the middle of the ocean. Jafar being Jafar, he's also a Jackass Genie. - In Aladdin and the King of Thieves, the Oracle of the staff answers Iago's rhetorical question about what she is, ticking him off when he hears each questioner only gets one chance. (And also the Oracle being the Oracle, she probably knew exactly what Iago is like.) Iago: Okay, you know all, so tell all. Where is the treasure? You know, the ultimate one? Oracle: I am bound by the rule of one. One question, one answer. Iago: [frustrated] I only want one answer! WHERE IS THE ULTIMATE TREASURE?! Oracle: You have already asked your question. Iago: You mean before? Oh, uh, that wasn't a question! That was uh... thinking out loud! Genie: [grabbing Iago] VERY loud! - Another example occurs in DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp. Here the good genie is forced to grant whatever wishes his owners give him, even if they are bad ideas. \|\|Fortunately Scrooge is smart enough to put everything right with his second wish near the end, saving one wish for freeing the genie.\|\| - In the Animaniacs special Wakko's Wish, the Warners Brothers (and Warner Sister) try to convince the Big Bad that the Wishing Star is one of these. They succeed, but get sent to the death row when he gets fed up with their antics. Naturally, \|\|they escape\|\|. - The witch in Brave apparently grants wishes this way. A prince wished to have the strength of ten men? She \|\|turned him into a bear\|\|. Merida wishes her mom would change? \|\|She turned her into a bear.\|\| Was she an actual witch, or is that the only trick she could pull off? - In the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope movie Road to Morocco, an imprisoned Jeff and Orville are given a ring which grants wishes, but are told it doesn't work for everyone. They're also given two poison tablets to use in case the ring doesn't work for either of them. When the ring doesn't work for Jeff, Orville begins to swallow a tablet, and then... Orville: [to the sky] Set the table, Aunt Lucy, there'll be two more for dinner... Boy, I sure wish I had a drink. [a drink appears in Orville's hand] Jeff: Junior! Junior, It worked! How about that, the magic ring, it worked on you! Orville: Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle! [Orville turns into, well, a monkey] - In the art film The Safety of Objects, one character suspects God is like this, or possibly a Jackass Genie. She is probably wrong. - In Stardust, Tristan pays a witch to transport him to a fair, providing food and bedding, and for him to be unharmed. She turns him into a mouse and keeps him in a cage before turning him back at the fair itself. - In The Fountain, conquistador Tomas Creo finds the Fountain of Youth/Tree of Life in the Mayan jungle, which is said by the Mayans to give eternal life when it sprouted from the chest of the first human. He cuts into the tree and where the sap lands, flowers spring up. After drinking from its sap, \|\|Flowers burst out of his chest and lungs and he is absorbed into the roots of the immortal tree\|\|. Paging Don Martin, anyone? - Wishmaster is a series of films based off a Demon Djinn whose people are trapped and each wish costs a person's soul. It's something of a mix between Jackass Genie and Literal Genie. To make it easier to collect souls he'll take the most deadly option of your wish every time, but he does have to interpret each wish literally and can't deny a very specific wish. He can only decline if it violates a metaphysical law that existed before his kind, such as when someone asks him to "undo all evil in the world", his explanation being that good wouldn't exist without it. - Demonstrated hilariously in the first film, as the Djinn tries to trick a guard into making a fatal wish. The guard simply says he wants him to go away, and the Djinn promptly turns around and starts walking away against his will, protesting that he really needs to get past the guard. Fortunately (for the Djinn), the guard responds to said protests by saying he'd really like to see the Djinn "go through me". The Djinn makes him part of the door. - Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies is a great example, as much of it is in a prison full of people wishing to escape. Cue people being forced through the bars, or down a pipe. - This bites him in the ass in the fourth, and final, movie. The Waker wishes that she could "love him for who he really is". The literal definition of the wish means that he can't just make her "love" him; her love has to be freely given knowing that he's a hideous Djinn bent on bringing Hell to Earth. The Djinn also realizes to his dismay that he is falling in love with her as well. The lovestruck Djinn spends the rest of the movie desperately trying to win her love. - Bedazzled: - In the original movie, one of the wishes of the main character was to "go down in history" and become "the President!": He was immediately incarnated as Abraham Lincoln... in the balcony of Ford's Theatre. The first movie also ends with the main character turned into a woman and now a member of a nunnery (which is implied to allow lesbian relationships) in the country with the woman he was attracted to. - In the remake, as he starts to wise up to the Devil, his wishes start getting more elaborate. The devil keeps finding a detail he left out, and screws him over on that point. In fact, the very first thing he wishes is to be rich and married to the love of his life — only to become a rich cocaine baron whose wife absolutely loathes him. - The family film The Incredible Genie does this. The protagonist kid sarcastically wishes the Genie to take "40 winks". He literally performs 40 quick winks. Another is the kid wish he was "filthy rich", only to have his room covered with filth. Justified that the Genie has no knowledge of the present or figures of speech. - The short film Pencil Face is either this or Jackass Genie. Girl finds a magic pencil which makes real anything she draws. When she tries to draw a lollipop, she draws it in such a way that the pencil interprets it as \|\|a black hole that swallows the girl\|\|. Ouch. - The Russian film, Khottabych (alternatively, K}{OTT@B\)CH), is loosely based on a children's book Old Khottabych by Lazar Lagin about an old genie from "Arabian Nights" Days being freed from his vessel by a Soviet Young Pioneer. The remake takes place in modern times (hence the "l33t" letters). Khottabych's liberators ask him for stacks of hundred-dollar bills. He obliges. They look exactly like hundred-dollar bills... but are printed on Egyptian papyrus. In the original novel, Khottabych has an older brother, who was also imprisoned in a vessel and has grown bitter as years went on. After he is freed, he offers his rescuer a choice of death. The quick-witted boy opts to die by old age. The genie obliges... and turns him into an old man. Naturally, since this is a children's book, the boy gets better. Being Literal Genie backfired at the genie himself: he said that the boy would die at the sunset... but they were ín the Arctics. It could make the boy die in several months instead of hours, but the protagonist was able to convince the genie that it was him who stopped the sun on its tracks. The Soviet censorship would unlikely allow any reminiscence of Biblical prophets in a children's book (they had even avoided calling YHWH a God in a children's book of Biblical legends), but you surely don't gonna mess with someone who can command the sun. - After Alex in The Outing put on the bracelet that marks her as the jinn's keeper, her wish is its command. Unfortunately, it is the one that she made during with a fight with her dad. - The Thief of Bagdad (1940): Ahmad looks in an All-Seeing Eye and sees Jaffar courting the Princess. He says "I wish I were in Baghdad right now!" His sidekick Abu says "I wish you were!" The Literal Genie, who sees Abu as his master, sends Ahmad to Baghdad, but since Abu didn't wish to go with him, he's still stuck on the deserted island. Thankfully, he has more wishes. - Unusual example in Absolutely Anything in that the genie isn't actually an entity. Protagonist Neil Clarke is a Reality Warper who can make anything happen by requesting it of no one in particular, but the results are often too literal, sometimes bordering on Jackass Genie. - In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Eddie goes to a club with a Toon service staff. A penguin waiter asks him what he wants, and Eddie orders "scotch on the rocks". Then he remembers he's talking to a Toon and shouts "I mean ice!" after him. Naturally, the Toon brings him a glass of scotch with pebbles in it. Truth in Television, though, as some bartenders put cooled cubes of stone or metal in drinks in order to avoid diluting the beverage with melting ice water. - The Monster Clown in When Evil Calls specialises in granting wishes in a Be Careful What You Wish For manner. Sometimes he does this by choosing to interpret the wish literally. 'I wish I looked good enough to eat' was a particularly poor choice of wording. - WarGames: The narrowly-averted extinction of humanity doesn't occur becuase the AI Joshua had any malevolent intentions towards the human race, it was simply doing what it had been instructed to do by a Playful Hacker: Win a game of Global Thermonuclear War. It can't comprehend that the consequences of fighting a simulated nuclear war are vastly different to the consequences of fighting a real one, in either case the death toll is just a number in a memory address as far as Joshua is concerned, and in either case winning is better than losing so it tries to win by any means necessary. Just like Steven Falken programmed it to. - In The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Fotheringay has no understanding of how his powers work, and learns that he must be careful when issuing commands or they may come true in a very literal fashion. For example, his telling Constable Winch to "go to blazes!" results in the unfortunate policeman beings sent to a Fire and Brimstone Hell. - In Aladdin (2019), Genie is just as literal and just as benevolent, pointing out that Aladdin's wish "Make me a prince" could mean either " Turn me into a prince" (what Aladdin actually intended) or "Make a prince appear for me" (which he did not). \|\|In the climax, he uses the grey area in Jafar's wish to be "the most powerful being in the universe" to turn him into a genie.\|\| - There is a joke, wherein a guy finds a genie, and it gives him three wishes. The first two were a million dollars and a cool car, but he holds off on the third. While driving in the car, he hears the "I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener" commercial on the radio; it's catchy so he sings along. Poof, he's an Oscar Meyer wiener. - Following jokes, a man meets a genie who grants him wishes but says his ex-wife gets double what he gets. He wishes for a million dollars and she gets two million. He wishes for a mansion and she gets two. For his third and final request, he wishes to be beaten half to death. - A smarter man in a similar variation of the joke merely asked to donate a kidney. - Another variation replaces the wife with the man's hated boss. The final wish: "I wish my boss's wife would fuck me half to death." - There are variations with a woman, and her divorced husband. The variants of the woman's wish include: 1) Bearing twins. 2) Big breasts 3) A lover with a ten inch penis. - A story by Robert Sheckley, where a man's worst enemy is the one getting double, ends with the man asking for a woman who's the limit of his desires. - Another: the man's first two wishes are a nice mansion (with a large garden and a swimming pool etcetera), and a dozen Playboy bunnies to be around all day. Seeing that his wishes are granted correctly and his arch-enemy is granted exactly double what he got, his last wish is to have one testicle amputated. - Another one, with a woman and her estranged husband, but the husband would get a tenfold of the first wish. She wished for a great fortune, vast beauty (which her husband got tenfold) and a slight heart attack. Subverted, or played straight, in that she didn't survive the slight heart attack, but the husband got a heart attack that was a tenfold lighter, so he got legendary hotness, almost unlimited wealth, and inherited his dead wife's wealth. - Though no genie is involved, an old joke that goes like this: Three men come to a cliff. A sign at the cliff reads "This is a magic cliff. If you jump off the cliff and name an object, you will land in a pile of it". The first man jumps and shouts "GOLD!", landing in a pile of gold coins. The second man jumps and shouts "SILVER!", landing in a pile of silver coins. The last man, about to jump, accidentally trips on a rock and falls over the edge instead, reflexively shouting "AH, CRAP!" - A variant has the third go with "DIAMONDS!", which act like Spikes of Doom, impaling and killing him. - A variant has the men who wish for gold and silver both die when they hit it, while the man who accidentally wishes for crap survives because it's soft enough to cushion his fall, allowing him to take both the gold and the silver all for himself. - Yet another version has the guy yell the F-word. Let it be known he died a happy man. - Another version replaces the men with a Blonde, Brunette, Redhead trio of women and the its the Dumb Blonde that gets the unfortunate punchline - And then there's the version that's told to kids, in which it's instead a magic slide and the third man yells "WHEEEEE!" He ends up falling in a yellow liquid, or maybe a bunch of white motion-sensing Nintendo consoles... - There's also another variant with the same punchline, but the setup is that you'll transform into what you say, with the first and second jumpers morphing into birds, while the hapless third one... - Another joke has an old woman (in some variants, an elderly and widowed Cinderella) get three wishes from a fairy godmother. Her first two wishes are to be rich and a young, beautiful princess, respectively. The fairy godmother grants them somewhat nicely, though she only makes the woman rich by making her rocking chair solid gold. The last wish is for the woman's dog (or cat) to be turned into a handsome prince. The pet is turned into the "most handsome man anyone had ever seen", and the woman is immediately smitten with him. But then he whispers in her ear, "Bet you're sorry you had me neutered." - A man and an ostrich walk into a diner. The man orders a burger, fries, and a coke. The ostrich does the same. When the time comes for the man to pay for his meal, he reaches into his pocket and produces exact change. The next day, the man returns to the diner and the exact same scenario plays out. After a few more days of this, the waitress becomes curious and asks the man "Sir, how is it that you always have exact change?" and he answers "I once met a genie who granted me two wishes. For my first wish, I wished that whenever I have to pay for something, I can reach into my pocket and always pull out the exact amount of money I need." The waitress says, "Wow, that's brilliant! Most people would have just wished for a million dollars or something, but you really thought that one through!" She then asks, "So, what's with the ostrich?" The man replies, "For my second wish, I wished for a tall chick with long legs who agrees with everything I say." - Another version didn't include the ostrich constantly agreeing with the guy. Instead, the guy was also accompanied by a cat who constantly refused to pay for anything; apparently, the guy had wished for a bird with long legs and a tight pussy, and to always have the exact amount money he needed. - One variation is he rides the ostrich into a bar and orders everyone a drink. He had wished for infinite wealth, many friends, and an "exotic bird" with long legs to share it all with. - A saucier variation on this is him riding a giant chicken and saying that he wished for a "huge cock." - A Czech peasant got three wishes, and wished to be of noble birth, with a beautiful wife, and world famous. He woke up in bed next to a beautiful woman who rolled over and told him: "Get up, Franz-Ferdinand, we have to be in Sarajevo in half an hour." - There is a variant ending with "Please come in to get your pictures taken, Citizen Romanov". - An American version is also possible, wherein a man asks to be handsome, powerful and married to a beautiful wife, and wakes up to a man in a suit telling him "Get up President Kennedy, we have to be in Dallas." - There is a joke about a man who wishes for a beer bottle in which the beer will never end. He's still trying to open it. - Raunchier jokes have been done in this style, such as a man who wishes for his genitalia to reach all the way to the ground, only to lose both his legs. Another guy with the same idea wants to be "hung like a black man", only to have The Klan show up at his doorstep. This would likely be an example of a Jackass Genie who has deliberately misinterpreted the wish, because The Klan would be looking to make sure the wisher would be hanged like a black man. It depends though, because in many languages there's no difference between "hanged" and "hung". - There is one joke where a man encounters a "Question Genie," which will correctly answer three questions. The man is shocked and without thinking, says "So, you're a question genie, huh?" "Yes." "And I get ''three'' answers?" "Yes." "Uh oh, did those last two count?" "Yes." - Three guys are stuck on an island in the middle of the ocean. A lamp washes on the shore. One of the men picks it up and rubs it and lo and behold, a genie comes out of it and says he can get three wishes. He laughs and berates his fellow companions, telling them how he always hated them and he's going to use the wishes for himself and not help them get off the island as well, then he makes his first wish — "I wish I was back in New York!" [snap] He's back in New York. His second wish — "I wish I owned and was in a luxury penthouse apartment, filled with money and gorgeous, bikini-clad women who all want to fulfill my every whim!" [snap] He's in the penthouse apartment, with gorgeous women fawning all over him in tiny bikinis, enough to make Hugh Hefner jealous, and enough money to make Donald Trump jealous. He laughs and leans back as one of the women gives him a massage and another kisses him, "I wish those two losers could see me now." [snap] He's back on the island. - A similar joke to the one above — the genie gives a wish to each man. The first two wish they were home and are sent there. The third man says "Now I'm lonely. I wish those two guys were back with me." - A subversion: a man with an orange for a head walks into a bar. He gets chatting with the barman, who, consumed with curiosity, asks, "So... why do you have an orange for a head?" The man with an orange for a head replies: "Well, it's like this. I was walking along the beach one day when I tripped over an old lamp that was sticking out of the sand. In a flash of light, a genie appeared in front of me! The genie said to me, 'For a thousand years I have been imprisoned in that lamp. In gratitude for freeing me, I shall grant you three wishes'. So I said, 'I would like more money than I can ever spend'. There was a puff of smoke, and all over the sand there were piles of gold and jewels. 'Your second wish?' asked the genie. 'To help me enjoy all this money', I said, 'I want an intelligent, beautiful woman to spend the rest of my life with'. There was another puff of smoke, and there next to me was the loveliest woman I have ever seen. 'What is your final wish?' asked the genie. And I said, 'I'd like an orange for a head'". - A man walks into a bar and orders a drink. He says he owns the largest deer farm in town. The bartender asks how that happened. The man replies, "I met a genie who said he would grant me a wish. I wished for a million bucks." - A British variant involves someone wishing for "a million pounds" and then immediately swelling to obesity. - A man walks into a bar and orders a beer. While the bartender is pouring it, the man sees that a one-foot-tall man is playing a miniature piano beautifully. Amazed, the man says to the bartender, "Where'd you get him?" The bartender sets an oil lamp on the bar, rubs it, and a genie pops out, offering the man a wish. He thinks for a minute and says, "I want a million bucks!" The genie snaps his fingers and disappears. A minute later, there's thunder and it starts raining ducks. The man yells at the bartender, "What the hell?! I asked for a million bucks, no a million ducks!" The bartender says, "It turns out the genie is hard-of-hearing. Why would I wish for a 12-inch pianist?" - A similar one has the setup include a foot-long pen or lighter, with the punchline being "What, did you think I wished for a twelve-inch Bic?" - A man with an apple-sized head walks into a bar and orders a drink. When he notices the bartender staring, he explains that some time ago, he found a mermaid stranded on a beach. He carried her back into the ocean and she granted him three wishes in exchange for saving her life. He wished for money, a big house, and to have sex with her. After she pointed out that their anatomies were incompatible, he shrugged and said "OK, then how about a little head?" - Three men arrive at the pearly gates. St. Peter says that heaven's rooms are full (or, in some variants, that the computer is down), but they will have the chance to be reincarnated on earth as whatever they want until the issue is fixed. The first man wishes to be a bear, while the second wishes to be an eagle. The third thinks and says, "I've always wanted to be a stud." A week later the new rooms are ready and God asks St. Peter where the three men are. Peter says, "One's fishing for trout in a stream in Washington state, one's soaring through the Grand Canyon, and the third is on a snow tire in Alaska." - A bumbling office worker finds a box in his cubicle and opens it, finding a lamp. Rubbing it and finding a genie, he asks to live in a tropical paradise (and is teleported there), surrounded by women for his exclusive pleasure (a full harem of beautiful women is teleported in), and never have to do anything for the rest of his life (he is teleported back to his cubicle). - A Hollywood Atheist is taking a walk through the woods when he hears a rustling in the bushes behind him; it turns out to be a bear charging right towards him. He tries to outrun the bear, but trips and falls on the ground. The bear is right on top of him, reaching for him with its left paw and raising its right paw to strike him. At that moment, the atheist cries out "Oh my God!" Time stops and the forest becomes silent. A bright light shines upon the man and the voice of God says, "You deny my existence for all of these years; teach others I dont exist; and even credit creation to a cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?" The atheist says this would make him sound hypocritical and asks for the bear to be made a Christian instead. "Very well," says God. The light goes out, time resumes, and the bear brings its paws together, bows its head, and says: "Lord, for this food which I am about to receive, I am truly thankful." - One joke, with which you can replace the politician/celebrity of your choice, involves them crashing on a deserted island and finding a genie in the lamp. Their first wish is to go back to their home, the second for wealth/fame/power etc. Having had enough for themselves decide to make a final selfless wish to make everyone in the world happy... at which point they find themselves again stranded on the deserted island. - A person releases a genie, but the genie tells them he doesn't have the time or power to grant him three specific wishes and will instead give them three "standard" wishes: a healing tonic, a really big diamond, and a date with a famous movie star. When the person goes home, their bemused spouse informs them that they've just received a huge shipment of chicken soup, a deed for a baseball field, and an invitation to have dinner with Lassie. - An elderly couple in their sixties are celebrating their wedding anniversary when a genie appears and grants them one wish each. The wife asks to be able to travel around the world, and the genie grants this wish nicely by giving her plane tickets. The husband then asks to have a wife 30 years younger than him, and the genie makes him 90 years old. - While in a changing room, a man notices that another man has a plug stuck in his rear. When he asks the man about this, the man explains that he had rubbed a bottle he found on the beach and released a genie who told him that he could grant him one wish. Unfortunately, the man's instinctive reaction to being told this was: "No shit!" - A Portuguese language joke: A man tells a story of when he found three magic eggs that would grant wishes when they are broken, but while returning home he stumbled and one of the eggs fell into the ground, breaking apart. Frustrated, the man screamed "caralho!" (a curse word which literally means "dick") and then suddenly a lot of penises had grown into the grass around him, so he broke the second egg and wishes for all the dicks there to be gone. "And the third egg?" asks a friend listening to the story. "I had to break it to wish mine back", answers the man. - This works in English too if you instead have the man shouting either "nuts" or "bollocks" (depending on which side of the pond you're on) and causing a lot of testicles to bud up from the ground. - In Russian, a similar joke to the above is told about a family of two parents and a kid getting three wishes. So the kid instantly says "A hamster!" His father, angrily, says "Hamster up the ass!" Mom then says "Hamster out of the ass!" - A male bear is chasing a bunny, but right when the bear had caught the rabbit, a genie appears. The genie said to the bear: "If you spare the bunny's life, I will grant three wishes each". The bear accepts. Then he wishes for a gigantic lair. The bunny wishes for a motorcycle, and the bear laughs at his wish. Then the bear wishes to be the only male bear in the world. The bunny wishes for a helmet, and the bear laughs at him again. Then the bear wishes for every female bear to be in love with him. The bunny jumps on his motorbike, straps on the helmet, and as he's driving away, he screams: "I want this fucking bear to be gay!" (Also told with "impotent" instead of "gay".) - A man gets one wish from a genie and says "Well, genie, I wish I could be you!" The genie snaps his fingers, and nothing happens. He then replies "That was a crappy wush, don't you thunk?" - A woman comes across a genie in a bottle who'll grant her wishes, but with one key stipulation: her partner gets double whatever she wishes for, too. She's not happy about this, as he left her for another woman, and can only stew in impotent anger as he enjoys twice the bounty that her first two wishes gave her. When the genie asks her if she's ready for her third wish, she thinks it over a moment, and then says, "Scare me half to death." - To end this folder on a heartwarming note: A poor man lived with his barren wife, his blind, dying father and his brother who had lost an arm in a war. One day he encountered a genie who offered him a wish. He was torn as whether he should help his wife, father or brother. After some thought he came up with his wish. "I want my father to live to see my wife rock her baby in the cradle that my brother has made with his own two hands." ## By Author - Isaac Asimov: - George and Azazel: A series short stories about a tiny demon named Azazel, who would grant wishes that started off looking like exactly what the person wanted, but ended up being the person's worst nightmare. In one story, a man with no self-confidence wanted to be irresistible to women. He ended up being chased everywhere by women, and in the end was engaged to a woman built like a linebacker because he was too afraid of her (and her equally massive brothers) to turn her down. - "Escape!": The Brain includes certain quirks in the design of the prototype spaceship because it went a little insane. The equipment is all recessed, and only opens under the computer's command. The crew has enough to eat and drink, but only beans and milk for weeks. Earth can contact the ship, but they can't respond. Technically it does everything they ask of it, just not quite the way they wanted/expected. - Marion Zimmer Bradley: - In A Dozen Of Everything, a young woman is given a djinn in a bottle as a wedding present from an eccentric aunt. She wishes for trousseau, but finding the old-fashioned djinn unfamiliar with the term, she carelessly instructs him to give her "a dozen of everything" and to put it all in her room. This goes about as well as one might expect. - There was a short story in one anthology where a demon sorcerer (who is under a binding that he must always fulfill his offers, once made) crashes a village celebration, picks the least popular and most-abused girl in town, and offers her a Sadistic Choice: he will kill any one person in the room for her, but she must choose someone, or else he will kill her. The demon's intent was for the girl to damn her soul by having someone murdered for vengeance, and then die at the hands of the rest of the village. Cue Oh, Crap! expression from the demon when the girl points out the obvious: the demon himself qualifies as "one person in the room". - Bill Brittain: - All The Money In The World: A poor boy finding a genie and accidentally wasting his first two wishes. He tries to use the third wish to escape poverty, but figuring any finite amount of money will eventually run out, he requests "all the money in the world". Naturally most of the rest of the story centers around how he just wrecked the world economy and wished for something entirely useless at the same time. - The Wish Giver: A mysterious man gives the narrator and three children one wish each. The wishes are granted on his own terms, so the girl who wishes to be the "center of attention" winds up croaking like a frog and attracting stares and laughter whenever she says anything nasty (which is very often). The other girl who wishes for her love interest to "put roots down" is treated to the sight of her love interest transformed into a tree in her backyard, and the boy who wishes for "more than enough water" on his family's perpetually dry farm ends up with the farm completely flooded. It takes the fourth wish to repair all the damage. - Tom Holt has a few: - In Djinn Rummy: when the genies get together of an evening at their local pub, they like to reminisce about the mortals they've tricked this way (or, at least, some of them do). - In Wish You Were Here, jumping in Lake Okeewana is supposed to grant your heart's desire — but the spirit of the lake is good at creative interpretations. - Mercedes Lackey: - In Born to Run, an elven sorceress commands elemental spirits to neutralize the gunpowder in the bullets of a gun so that they won't fire, and then ignores the guy with the gun. Too bad, because the spirits only altered the bullets in the gun, and the guy's got a speed-loader. - In One Good Knight, a dragon is summoned to ravage the land until presented with routine virgin sacrifices. \|\|The dragon is a noble/knightly sort, and while he cannot fight the spell he is able to limit the ravaging to destruction of property and decimation of livestock... and finds the spell does not require him to devour or even harm the maidens he carries off. Imagine the surprise of the Dragon Slayer and the princess more or less rescued by same when they track it down and find the "victims" arrayed in defence of the "monster".\|\| - Penn & Teller wrote a story involving a genie where their first wish was for the correct phrasing to get infinite wishes that wouldn't backfire. Fittingly, the wisher was a computer programmer. - A short story by Bill Pronzini has a young boy being granted three wishes by a genie. His first two wishes are trivial: for a huge number of ice cream cones and for the ocean to be as warm as his bathwater so he can go wading whenever he wants. But the third wish is for all the children in the world to be just like him, so he will always have someone to play with. The end of the story reveals that the boy is mentally retarded. - Brandon Sanderson: - Elantris: - While not a genie, Sarene promises to get the Elantrian leaders anything they ask for, then finds it a fun game twisting their requests. They ask her for 20 sheets of steel: they get 20 sheets of steel pounded so thin as to be useless. Next time they ask for steel by weight: they get boxes full of broken nails. They ask for knives, stipulating that they be sharp, and receive them sans handles. (Though they do beat her sometimes — for instance, when asking for fish, which they expect will be half-rotten, which is exactly what they wanted, since they were actually looking for fertilizer.) - The Geometric Magic from the same series can fall under this trope, since a given Aon will do exactly what it was written to do, just like a programming language. The classic example of this is Aon Tia, which teleports you instantly from one place to another...even if this would, say, put you inside a wall. Another example shows up in the backstory: An unfortunate man brought his wife to Elantris to be treated for her disease. The healer in question misdrew the healing Aon, but instead of creating an invalid Aon (which would have just vanished and done nothing), he accidentally created a totally different but still valid Aon, which basically turned the poor woman into a zombie. This touches off the book's plot. - Discussed and defied in The Stormlight Archive. Two characters are having a conversation about the Nightwatcher, a powerful magical being who will grant anyone who seeks her out one wish, but also curse them at the same time. One character thinks that he could avoid being cursed if he worded his wish so that there weren't any loopholes, but the other, more knowledgeable one says that the Nightwatcher doesn't work like that — she gives you a curse she thinks is appropriate, which might be an ironic twist on the wish, but just as often is totally unrelated. Wording your wish really well won't get you out of it. - There's a Mark Twain story in which the protagonist gains an ability to make wishes he speaks come true. He encounters this problem when, in one of his early tests, he wishes for "a bowl of fishes", then has to say, "No, not that" and re-wish for a glass bowl of water with fish swimming in it. - H. G. Wells: - A short story entitled "The Man Who Could Work Miracles" (later made into a movie under the same title). The title character, George Fotheringay is a working-class nebbish who suddenly discovers that he can make anything happen by saying it should — but, true to this trope, the power pays no attention to metaphors. His control is improving by the end of the story, but he stumbles over the laws of physics — a preacher suggests he "stop the sun and moon" like Joshua at Jericho, and reminds him that their apparent motion comes from the earth rotating. Fotheringay orders the Earth to stop, and momentum smashes everything on the surface and/or flings it off into space. Fortunately, he wishes to survive the experience, and then very carefully and deliberately pushes a Reset Button. - The Truth About Pyecraft by is about a fat man who asks his friend, a sorcerer, for a potion to lose weight — only for the resulting elixir to make the man completely weightless, creating lots of problems. ## By Work - A classic short story has a man meeting up with his old college flame, who is now a world-famous beauty with unbelievable talent and skill at everything, who figures out that her butler is a demon who granted her three wishes. \|\|Her first wish "To be the most beautiful woman of my age" made her age be over 80, her wish for "Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice" gave her nothing, because avarice has no bounds, but her wish that the demon be "Totally and unselfishly in love with me" got her anything that would make her happy. The protagonist was very happy about the "unselfish" part, considering the activities of the previous night.\|\| - A short story had a man making a Deal with the Devil to be with his old crush. Realising that the woman might no longer be the beauty she was in college, he insists that the Devil make her "exactly the same" as she is in a particular photo. The Devil complies and the woman is exactly as she is in the photo, including being two inches tall. And as flat as paper as well. - A short story turned the Literal Genie clause back on the Devil. The Devil offers a single wish to anyone in exchange for their soul, with the limitation that if the wish is supremely selfless, the Devil has to spare the person and cease tormenting humanity forever. A man accomplishes this by wishing, without any change in himself, to be the most sickly, miserable, lonely, needy, cruel, corrupt, wasteful, etc., etc., person in the world. The Devil can't even twist that one by removing all the other people, à la The X-Files genie episode: the supremely selfless nature of the wish bars him from tormenting humans any longer, and knowing he'd inadvertently caused humanity to vanish would torment the wish-maker, who can't be removed under the terms stated. - The novel Alf's Button features a British soldier during World War I who discovers that one of the buttons on his tunic is made from Aladdin's lamp. The genie will grant him unlimited wishes — but only one per day. It's therefore unfortunate that the first time the genie appears, Alf's reaction is to exclaim: "Strike me pink!" (a common expression of surprise at the time). - In Anansi Boys, Fat Charlie asks the Bird Woman to get rid of his brother Spider. At least that's what he thinks she's agreed to do. \|\|The Bird Woman never promised that she'd get rid of Spider specifically; her exact words were that she wanted "Anansi's bloodline", which includes Spider and Charlie. Yikes.\|\| - The title character of The Bartimaeus Trilogy is both a literal and metaphorical example ("Djinn" is the root of "genie"). He has some Noble Demon qualities that cancel it out, though. He actually remarks, several times, on how careful the magicians have to be when giving orders to the djinn, because they try to misinterpret it to either mean nothing or cause harm to the magician. Probably the most memorable example of magicians getting around this was Nathaniel giving Bartimaeus's somewhat long orders about stealing the Amulet in one breath. Bartimaeus: [reminiscing about one such sap] ...Unfortunately for him, the precise words he used were: "Preserve me!" A cork, a great big bottle, a vat of pickling fluid, and — presto! — the job was done. - In Be Careful What You Wish For (which has also been adapted for TV), Samantha Bird is an especially Genre Blind victim of a wish-granting witch, never realizing that her words are being taken literally. Her wish to be the most talented basketball player on her team (she's a big klutz) causes everyone else to be weaker, her wish for the Alpha Bitch to become her friend turns said girl into an insane stalker, then she wishes for the Alpha Bitch to have found the wish-granting crone instead. She ends up as a bird thanks to the other girl's wish. - There's a book called Best Case Scenario (a parody of the Worst Case Scenario series) which includes a section on how to deal with a genie; the joke about the guy with the ten-inch pianist is mentioned, and they advise you to put a wish in writing, just in case you run into one like that. (It gives other advice, like not to rush him, seeing as he's probably cranky after being cooped up in a lamp for heaven knows how long). - Bruce Coville's Book of... Monsters: The sword Arthur gets in Merlin's Knight School. He wishes he could fight something with it... and a monster promptly appears for him to fight. (Luckily, a second wish enables him to actually beat the monster.) - In one of the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon books, a cluricaune has to grant the patrons of the bar three wishes, but they're savvy enough to avoid the word "wish". The cluricaune gets around it by granting a wish when someone says something that sounds like she's making a wish, even though she isn't. For the record, the dialogue is a woman saying she'd like to show her husband Isham a repaired table. "I show Ish that table repaired" was transposed into "I sho' wish that table repaired." The protagonist later realizes that the cluricaune was actually offering him a great gift, since even "Wishes I will actively try to make go wrong" is a truly incredible gift. It isn't the cluricaune's fault that the protagonist can't come up with good wishes. - The Canterbury Tales: In "The Knight's Tale", two soldiers are praying the night before a tournament, where the prize is the hand in marriage of Emily. Palamon prays to Venus that he will be the one to marry Emily, while Arcite prays to Mars that he will claim victory in the tournament. Both men have their wishes granted; Arcite is able to win the battle against Palamon, but during his victory celebrations his horse becomes frightened and rears, throwing Arcite to the ground. When Arcite dies of his injuries, Theseus declares Palamon Emily's rightful husband by default. - The humor/adventure fantasy novel Captains Outrageous uses this in the last paragraph of the book. Sorcerer Bosamp has been manipulated into trying to destroy the world by a dragon (divine beings in this setting) with the promise of a beautiful world of his own to rule. Bosamp is defeated and imprisoned, and the dragon is punished by her superiors. As the dragons' punishment begins, he superior grudgingly admires her cleverness in manipulating Bosamp, since she actually would have granted him his own beautiful world... with poisonous air and crushing gravity. - In Castle in the Air, the main character acquires a genie who states right from the beginning that he swore that all the wishes he granted would "do as much harm as possible", out of pure petulance. A good deal of the book deals with the characters having to come up with wishes that the genie can't mess up. - The premise of Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life? has God pull this trick on the protagonist. As the title says, she asks for "average" ability in her fantasy-world reincarnation (because she hated the stress and isolation of being a Child Prodigy in her previous life). Instead of average human strength, she gets the average magical power of all creatures, including ridiculously powerful elder dragons. An Exposition Fairy calculates she has 6100 times the power of a normal human. - Discworld: - The golems in the novel Feet of Clay "rebel" by doing exactly what they're told. "No-one wants them to think, so they get their own back by not thinking." - Subverted in Wyrd Sisters when the witches summon a demon who agrees to answer three questions and takes great delight in giving technically accurate but completely unhelpful answers to the first two, no matter how carefully the witches try to phrase them. For the third question, they decide to try a different approach and ask it "Just what the hell's going on? And no wriggling about trying to get out of it!" — which works far better. The fact they threaten him with being boiled alive and hit with a large stick helps some. - In Eric, demons try to give people who summon them "exactly what they asked for and exactly what they didn't want". This would also make them Jackass Genies, except that they don't need to stretch very far to make Eric's wishes backfire. - Tiffany Aching has to deal with this from two sources. The first is the Nac Mac Feegle, who just want to be helpful. While they can't actually do magic, they are determined, numerous, and immensely strong. She reflects that while never actually likely to say "I wish I could marry a handsome prince", the fact that if she did, she would probably quickly find a tied-up prince and clergyman at her door makes one wary of voicing one's desires out loud. There's also the Hiver, a creature which possesses people's bodies, then tries to make all their wishes come true. Even the ones they don't say, don't really want except for a fleeting urge, or wouldn't work towards because things like conscience or sanity hold them back. - Making deals with The Fair Folk in The Dresden Files, when one is not being wise with your words, is going between this and Jackass Genie. They will honor the agreement and unless they have benevolent interests in your well-being, which is rare, they give you what you have requested. - Duumvirate: The control implants in Billy and Howard work this way. Anyone who can't avoid the obvious pitfalls is considered Too Dumb to Live. - In the untranslatable German novel "Eine Woche Voller Samstage", the Sams can grant a limited number of wishes. However, they are granted literally, and any detail not specified is assigned randomly. (For example, wishing yourself into your room might end you up on the floor if you are lucky, but you also have good chances to stand on your bed or inside your locked wardrobe.) Wishing that another person does something for you leaves all unspecified detail to that person's interpretation. (If you wish that a person brings you some hamburgers, he might as well return with some inhabitants of the German town Hamburg.) In the later novel, characters learn from their mistakes and try wording their wishes as carefully as possible, but still tend to leave out some important detail that leads to everything going wrong. - In Ella Enchanted, Ella has to follow any direct order she's given since birth. She quickly learns to be a literal genie. For example, she will hold the bowl for her nurse when she's cooking, but the nurse didn't order her to stand still. - The Empire of the East novel The Broken Lands features a literal Literal Genie. That is, the wizard Grey summons a djinn that does exactly and literally what is asked of it. Grey and Rolf don't get anywhere with it until they start asking questions instead of giving commands. - The Enchanted Forest Chronicles novel Dealing with Dragons has some fun with this one after Princess Cimorene and Prince Therandil accidentally free a jinn and (after narrowly avoiding some Jackass Genie shenanigans) persuade it to give them each one wish. Therandil wishes to slay a dragon and win a princess's hand in marriage, intending to fight the dragon who Cimorene is voluntarily working for. Only after the jinn has returned to his bottle does Cimorene point out that Therandil was promised "the next dragon you fight, you will kill him," and that Kazul, the dragon she is working for, is female. Whether the wish would actually have failed to help Therandil against Kazul or not is never proven; Cimorene uses the logic of this trope to persuade Therandil to go fight a different (male) dragon and rescue the Alpha Bitch princess that dragon had abducted. - An example, with God as the Literal Genie, can be found in the 11th-century satirical Arabic work The Epistle of Forgiveness. The protagonist is in Paradise, and having just encountered a beautiful houri who asserts she has been promised to him since the time of Creation, he bows down to thank God — then finds himself thinking that while beautiful, the lass is a bit on the skinny side. As he raises his head, he finds that her buttocks have now grown a lot bigger, and needs to ask God to shorten them by a mile or two. - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid features such a genie incident when Achilles wishes that his wish not have been granted. Oops. - Another example of God as a Literal Genie: The Great Divorce portrays Him as someone perfectly willing to say " Thy will be done" to an unbeliever, effectively condemning them to a Self-Inflicted Hell. - In Green (2011), Lily is ordered to catch a pisky and have it grant her a wish. She decides the best way to get through this is to ask for something too minor to be worth turning against her. Lily: I wish... I wish... I wish you would accept all of our silver buttons and my sincere apology. Take the gold coin too. Pisky: That is your only wish? That is what you most truly desire? Lily: Yes. I wish for exactly what I said. No more and no less — just that. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy: - Deep Thought could qualify, although it's more of an example of computer programming humor: Deep Thought gives the correct answer, it's just that the questioners asked the question wrong. - Haktar has a similar problem. He built the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax the "ultimate weapon", a bomb that would link together all suns in an enormous supernova and destroy the universe. "Ultimate", meaning the last weapon. Again, this one is mostly the fault of the creators. When he asked them what exactly they meant by "ultimate" they told him to look in a dictionary. - Magic in Inheritance Cycle requires very careful use of language; Eragon once accidentally cursed a girl because he used the word "shield" as a noun rather than a verb, dooming her to soak up misery and pain from everyone around her. - Inheritance Trilogy: The enslaved gods in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms are required to obey any imperative statement made by the noble Arameri while in their presence. One of the first things the protagonist learns is that one must be extremely careful not only when giving a command but saying something that could be interpreted as giving a direct command. "Have you ever said to anyone in anger: To the hells with you?" - Given a hilarious twist in The Last Wish. Geralt and his friend find a Genie who they accidentally unleash. Geralt tries to banish him by saying the words of an "exorcism", in a language he doesn't understand. The Genie indeed leaves, only to later return, as noted by the characters, furious beyond words. It turns out that \|\|the "exorcism" is just a prank someone played on Geralt, and roughly translates to "go and fuck yourself". The Genie had to go and do exactly that\|\|. - In The Lathe of Heaven, George Orr has the uncontrolled ability to alter reality (often retroactively) through his dreams. His psychiatrist attempts, through hypnosis, to use this ability to "improve" the world. But Orr's subconscious frequently operates on the Literal Genie principle and subverts these attempts. For example, in response to the request for "peace on Earth," Orr dreams up a space war with alien invaders; when asked to end racial violence, Orr dreams up a world in which all human beings are gray. - In The Letter, the Witch and the Ring, the eponymous ring is a magic artifact that (among other things) grants wishes by allowing the wearer to invoke a demon. Upon finally getting possession and mastery of the ring, the villain wishes to be young and beautiful and to live for a thousand years — then vanishes. The heroes later notice a young willow tree nearby... - The short story "A Lot To Learn", by Robert T Kurosaka, which appears in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Stories, concerns a scientist who builds a machine which can create anything that he tells it to. To test it out, he decides to start with some simple commands. His first request is "drink", and he gets a puddle on his desk (he hadnt specified a glass). His next request is "girl", and a girl appears. She is naked (he hadn't specified clothing) and eight years old. His reaction to this is "Hell!" \|\|He then dies when his house explodes in a giant fireball.\|\| - The Magic Goes Away: Defied in the short story "The Wishing Game". Clubfoot and Mirandee go to great pains to make sure to give Kreezerast the Frightener very precise instructions, and continually frustrate him when his attempts to twist the wishes turn out to be what they actually wanted (though in the end, he takes some consolation in knowing that they will probably run into trouble later because of the wishes he granted). - In the first Magic in Ithkar anthology, Lin Carter contributed "The Goblinry of Ais", in which the title character purchases the use of a magic artifact that allows the user to command a trapped goblin to grant wishes. Naturally, the goblin is not happy about this situation, and Ais is warned to be careful in phrasing her commands. She asks to be young, beautiful, and graceful again — soon afterward, a guardsman kills the snake he finds in her tent. - Magic Shop: Near the end of The Skull of Truth, the embodiment of Truth offers to truthfully answer any one question for each of the main characters. One of the characters asks about his father's future and the answer Truth gives him is something along the lines of, "He will grow old. He will be happy. He will be sad. He will die." When the character complains that the answer wasn't what he wanted, Truth tells him he should have been more specific with his question. - Modern Faerie Tales: In Tithe, Faeries can be commanded by the power of their true name... but the obedience thus compelled is limited to the Exact Words of the command in question, as the protagonist discovers after discovering the true name of one Rath Roiben Rye and addressing him by it while telling him to "Kiss my ass." Later, and more deliberately, the big bad gets Rath Roiben Rye's true name and orders him to grab the escaping heroine. Roiben promptly grabs her arm... and then lets her go again. - The plot of "The Monkey's Paw" is simple. A family comes across a magical preserved monkey hand with three fingers extended, representing the three wishes. Their first wish is for money, as soon as they wish it a member of their son's labor union knocks on the door to inform them that he was killed at the factory and to deliver condolence money. The mother decides to use the second wish to bring him back from the dead, which leads to a second knock at the door. Before the mother can get to the door, the narrator senses that something horrible must be about to happen, and uses the third wish presumably to undo the second, though we never actually hear what the third wish was or see if it had any of its own negative side effects. In at least one version of this tale, the son died when he fell into moving machinery. Thus, when he came back, it was as a horrible, mashed-up corpse. The narrator unwishes the resurrection before the mother can open the door and see it. - In the New Series Adventures novel The Stone Rose, the culprit behind all unusual events was a genetically engineered lizard/platypus hybrid with the ability to grant any wish spoken aloud starting with "I wish...". The ability of the GENIE is limited by the laws of physics. He can Time Travel, teleport, and transmute matter, but it required enormous amounts of energy, which it took from any available source, including people. Transporting a person from the 24th century to Ancient Rome is easy, since the GENIE is able to use the 24th century power grid for this purpose. Going back is a different matter. It should be noted that any wish that was impossible to fulfill would be interpreted in its own way by the GENIE. For example, wishing for something "never to have happened" would be impossible to fulfill, as the GENIE is unable to alter the past. Instead, he might create an illusion for the person as if the wish was actually fulfilled. - In Pact and Pale, magical practitioners and Others cannot lie or they will lose their power, with the amount of power lost proportional to the severity of the lie. In the worst case, if you break an oath and are called out on it, you will become Forsworn and will not only be permenantly depowered but the universe itself will be actively hostile to you. As a result literally everyone who is awakened to the supernatural becomes both a Literal Genie and a Rules Lawyer, as failing to adhere to one's Exact Words would spell disaster. - In the Revelation Space Series short story "Nightingale", the mad medical A.I. offers to let the mercenaries return "in one piece". \|\|Cue the Body Horror.\|\| - Australian children's author Paul Jennings likes afflicting his characters with strange curses, sometimes as a result of this trope. The short story "Santa Claws" involves a teenage boy who wakes up one day with no memory of the last day and his mouth has shrunk to the point where he can't eat anything that won't fit through a straw. He goes to a hypnotist, who tells him to write down what happened while under hypnosis. He tells the story of he and his younger and older sisters finding a genie who grants them each two wishes. The kids are on a steep learning curve and find that whatever they wish for goes awry, whether it be due to poor phrasing, the wish being granted in an unexpected way or just a poorly thought-out wish. Mayhem has ensued by the time he and his younger sister have exhausted their wishes. His older sister then wishes that they had never discovered the genie. This erases the previous events, but doesn't change the fact that she still has one wish left. The boy and girl later have a fight which culminates in her yelling "I wish you didn't have such a big mouth!" - In Spinning Silver, the young Tsarina Irina offers the fire demon Chernobog the king of the Staryk to consume in the hopes of staving off Endless Winter, \|\|and when the prisoner is freed by her co-conspirator unleashes him upon the realm of the Staryk, all in return for nothing but an oath to leave her and hers alone. When the severely depleted demon is driven and barred from the realm of the Ice Fey he tries to devour Irina only to find his flame extinguished at her touch, then he goes for the old woman that more or less raised her with the same effect, and when a random scullery maid that walked in at the wrong time proves no more vulnerable\|\|: \|\| "No! No! I promised safety only to you and yours!" "Yes, and she is also mine. All of them are mine, my people; every last soul in Lithvas. And you will touch none of them again\|\|. - A 1980s short story, "Tale of the Seventeenth Eunuch" by Jane Yolen, serves as a distant "sequel" to the Aladdin tale. Aladdin has died of plain old age, and his son rules. Aladdin's wife misses him a lot. One day, a servant uncovers an old lamp. Yep, that lamp. At first, the sultana wishes for Aladdin back, buuut the genie can't do that. He can't bring his spirit back from the netherworld without something to put it in, and all that's left by now is a few bones and bits of hair. The genie could animate what's left, but he points out that the lady "wouldn't like it very much". So the sultana goes for the next best thing; she has the genie turn her favorite cat into the image of Aladdin at his prime, over his protests. Unfortunately, in this particular harem, even the male cats have to be eunuchs... which was the point of the genie's objections. - Children's novel The Toothpaste Genie by Sandy Frances Duncan uses this trope to amusing effect. When the protagonist, Amanda, finds a tube of toothpaste with a genie inside, Hilarity Ensues. Her first wish is to be "neat," and her hair gets cemented into place. She then wishes for her nails to grow back when she bites them, but each time, her nails grow back longer and thicker until they're ridiculous. The kicker here is that the Genie can't create anything out of thin air: if she wishes for something (in this case a horse and a baby sister), it has to come from somewhere else. - The Traveller in Black: The Traveller is a (implied) supernatural being who appears as a young man who wears a black robe and carries a staff (made of "solid light"). One of his quirks is that he is obliged to grant the first wish which someone expresses in his hearing. The speaker does not have to use any particular wording, making "if only..." just as dangerous a thing to say as "I wish..." while in the Traveller's hearing. The Traveller in Black is not a Jackass Genie. It's just that most people don't make wise wishes so Be Careful What You Wish For. Most wishes he hears are very unwise and so turn out incredibly badly for the person who made the wish (not usually for anyone else). Very occasionally, someone will make a wise wish and those turn out well. - In The Wheel of Time, when Mat is in the Tower of Ghengei bargaining with the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn, he asks (among other things) that "you snake people" let him and his friends leave without harming them. The Finn eventually agree to his terms... and then Mat realizes that the deal protects him from the Aelfinn (snake people) but says nothing about the Eelfinn (fox people). They barely manage to leave alive. - In The Wish, a girl is granted a wish by an old lady she meets on a bus. The old lady offers to give her a permanent place in the in-crowd, but the girl insists on wishing to be the most popular person at her school... not realizing that the wish will then expire when she graduates a few weeks later. - In The Wishing Maiden, Asha is one of these. It isn't on purpose. - In A Wizard in Rhyme, the entire magic system of the world sometimes acts like this. An example would be the time that main character Matt, a transplant from our world who therefore isn't as careful about his language, yells "damn that stick!" when a big stick is in his way, and later finds out that he literally damned the stick. It comes back as an even bigger stick that is now pissed off because it was taken to Hell. - A particularly unfortunate example occurs in "The Yehudi Principle". A man has invented a device that grants wishes; he names the principle it functions on after "Yehudi, the little man who wasn't there", but he believes it actually hyperaccelerates the user to carry out his own wish. He and a friend get drunk, he attempts to say, "Suit yourself" only to have it come out as "Shoot yourself," The invisible "man who isn't there" shoots himself, and the device stops working. - The title character of Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or the Moor hangs a lampshade on what usually happens when he fulfills the Villain Protagonist's wishes: Zofloya: Victoria... remember, that I have been thy willing instrument, and that literally I have performed to thee the promises I made. - The 10th Kingdom: - Tony's dragon dung bean fulfills this trope to a tee: his first wish of making his landlord and his family become his slaves included the phrase "and kiss my ass"... so every single Murray family member insists on doing exactly that with obsessive attention. The beer in the fridge is indeed neverending, to the point of making it explode, the vacuum he asked to "clean the entire house" follows the directions to the letter (including trying to vacuum up the curtains), and the beneficial wish of being able to speak to Wendell the dog is limited to only Tony being able to hear him, since he said "I" rather than "we". And when he wishes for money, \|\|it is stolen from the bank, and the cops are quick to track it down\|\|. - This also occurs later in the Deadly Swamp (because Tony never learns): Fairy #1: Oh look, they're all chained up! That can't be helping! Fairy #2: Would you like to be separated from each other? Tony: More than you can imagine. [the fairies cast a spell, making their manacles fall off; Tony and Virginia each look around, only to find they're alone in different parts of the swamp] Tony: Hey! When I said we wanted to be separated, I didn't mean literally! - Are You Afraid of the Dark? example: Two kids who live on a farm find an enchanted scarecrow that comes to life and obeys your orders, which is great, until the boy, within earshot of the scarecrow, accidentally says he'd "like to kill" his cousin for taking his baseball glove... - Beetleborgs has Flabber the phasm, who according to the producers was based on Elvis, but to some resembles big-chinned talk-show host Jay Leno. As a reward for freeing him from the pipe organ he was imprisoned in, he gave the kids who did so a wish. They wished to become Beetleborgs, using a comic book to show Flabber who they are. Flabber, seeing rats on the cover, assumes the rats are the Beetleborgs and turns the kids into rats. After pointing out who the real Beetleborgs are, Flabber successfully turns them into Beetleborgs...without removing them from the comic book. Fortunately, Flabber is a benevolent example of this trope, as he corrects his mistakes, rather than letting the kids stick with a badly executed wish. - The Christmas programme Bernard And The Genie starring Alan Cumming, Lenny Henry, and Rowan Atkinson. Bernard: I have to be very careful, haven't I? Genie: Yes, say the words "I wish" with the caution you would normally reserve for "Please castrate me." - Buffyverse: - Anya had great fun with this. She creates a heart-eating monster when an upset girl wishes that some frat boys find out what it's like to have their hearts ripped out. On the other hand, when asked to turn a cheating lover into a frog, she turns him French. In "The Wish", Cordelia wishes that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale; in the Alternate Universe that results, with no Slayer to keep them in check, the vampires rule the town. - Anya's co-worker, Halfrek, also falls into this. In "Older and Far Away", when Dawn, suffering from abandonment issues, wishes that no one would leave her, Hallie makes it so everyone who enters the Summers residence is mystically trapped inside. Halfrek ends up Hoist by Her Own Petard when she pops in to indulge in some Evil Gloating and is trapped by her own curse, forcing her to break the spell so she can leave. - In "Something Blue", Willow foolishly casts a "My will be done" spell on herself, then accidentally strikes Giles blind, turns Xander into a demon-magnet, and gets Buffy and Spike engaged through her foolish use of figurative language. - In "Life of the Party", Lorne finds himself writing, rather than reading, people's destinies after having his sleep removed. Spike becomes upbeat, Fred and Wesley become drunk, Gunn begins to mark his territory (by peeing on things), and Angel and Eve find themselves uncontrollably having sex. - Insanely inverted with the case of Holtz and Sahjhan. In this instance, Sahjhan is the genie yet he's the one who gets screwed over when it's revealed just what Holtz meant when he "swore he won't show any mercy." Whether you're a Literal Genie, or The Devil you don't make deals with Daniel Holtz. - Charmed has two different genie episodes. In the first, the genie is explicitly shown as being sent to screw with the witches, so their wishes going wrong is justified. In the second, a secondary character happens to have a book of perfectly phrased wishes to say to genies so as not to mess things up. That same episode shows that genies actually have control over how they grant the wish, such as when \|\|Phoebe makes Piper and Leo literally sleep together when Chris wishes it\|\|. - In The Collector, which is all about making Deals with the Devil, the Devil always finds some way for a poorly phrased deal to backfire. For example, the main character's lover dies of The Plague after his 10-year deal is up because he asked for "more time with her," not that she be fully cured and live. - Lampshaded by Community: When Britta wishes to end all wars, Troy warns her that any wish containing "all" is guaranteed to end with ironic consequences. Wars probably won't be missed, but as Troy points out, a literal genie could get rid of Star Wars, thumb wars, Storage Wars... - Doctor Who: - "The Five Doctors": Rassilon gave Borusa the immortality he wished for as a living statue. - "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood": The Doctor gives the Family of Blood exactly what they wished for in the most horrific manner possible. They wanted the immortality of a Time Lord, so they got imprisoned in chains forged at the heart of a dwarf star, past the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, trapped in every mirror in existence and dressed up as a scarecrow to watch over the fields of England, frozen in time. Yikes. - "Voyage of the Damned": The Hosts will answer three questions if the correct security override is used. However, as the Doctor discovers the second time he runs into them, they'll take rhetorical questions, and he quickly finds himself down to only one question before managing to leverage the situation to his advantage. - The dragon Orm Embar in the Sci-Fi Channel Earthsea miniseries, after Ged uses its true name to force it to give him some information instead of eating him. Orm Embar: Two questions, wizard, and two questions only. Ged: Isn't it usually three? Orm Embar: True, but with that you're back to two. - The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder: - The title character in the ABC/BBC children's drama, The Genie from Down Under, was one of these — sometimes bordering on Jackass Genie. The spoiled English girl who released the Genie from the opal needed reforming pronto, and the genie set about this by annoying her constantly. Any wish that could be fulfilled by teleporting her back to Australia would be done in that manner, where a new adventure would begin. - Classical Mythology: - Older Than Feudalism example: Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, fell in love with a mortal, Tithonus, so she asked Zeus to grant him "immortality". He did. The catch was she forgot to ask for "eternal youth". Yeah. Not a happy ending. \|\|He keeps on aging until he shrivels up into a grasshopper. His fate after that remains uncertain.\|\| Zeus has granted mortals eternal life before. Either these cases knew how to ask, or Zeus was just being a dick, which would not be out of character. - Learning from Eos' mistake when wanting to make her own lover Endymion immortal, Selene wished for him to remain the way he was when she got to know him. This did make sure he was a handsome young man forever... but Selene is the titaness of the moon, as such, he was asleep when she first saw him. - Zeus's latest mistress Semele was tricked by Hera into asking him to grant her a wish, and got him to swear an oath on the River Styx to grant whatever she asked. For Greek gods, the oath of the Styx is unbreakable, or can be broken only with severe consequences such as the oathbreaker being unable to move or breathe for a year, then unable to see other gods for 9 more years (a recipe for chaos and violence on Olympus if Zeus is the one missing). Then Semele wished to see him in his full glory, and was consequently burnt to ash by the sight. - For example, there is another story about a nymph who fell in love with an extremely handsome man named Hermaphroditos (the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, hence the name), and asked Zeus to make them together forever. Zeus merged their bodies together, and thus we have the word "hermaphrodite". - There's a legend, later made into a Fleischer cartoon, about a miser who managed to catch a leprechaun. As per the usual terms, the leprechaun had to lead the miser to his pot of gold, which happened to be under a stump. The miser realizes he needs a shovel, puts his coat on the stump, and orders the leprechaun not to touch the coat, stump, or treasure. When he gets back, he finds the leprechaun gone, and dozens of identical stumps with identical coats on them. - The classic three-wish fairy tale (example: The Farmer and the Sausage) is a folk tale staple that can be found in many cultures: invariably the third wish must be used to repair the damage caused by the first two. - In The Book of Mormon, two people at different times demanded for a sign that Jesus Christ existed. They didn't live long after that. - Another old example: In one version of the Prague Golem story, a 16th century Jewish tale, the Golem is asked to fill a barrel with water from the river. Left alone, the Golem overflows the barrel with water until the entire house is flooded because he is only capable of following literal instructions, not thinking for himself. - An episode of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme featured a reluctant literal genie. If you wish for world peace, then he will kill everyone because that's the simplest way of arranging it, but he'd really rather not, and will give you plenty of opportunity to change your mind and wish for a sports car. And because he's not a Jackass Genie, he won't drop the car on your head or anything, you'll just get a sports car, nice and simple. The wisher eventually comes up with "make everyone forget how to fight and be unable to learn" as a "world peace" wish that couldn't possibly go wrong. It turns out \|\|this doesn't stop war or even deaths in war, it just makes them really protracted and painful, as soldiers just keep jostling the enemy until one of them dies\|\|. - About 50% of all game masters when giving a player a wish. For the other 50%, see Jackass Genie. - As lead-off for an article on the use of "Wish" in the Dungeons & Dragons game, Dragon once ran this quote: Genie: Let me get this straight. You want me to raze all your ability scores? - An anecdote from 3.5e using the "Speak with Dead" spell, which allows you to ask three questions from a corpse: "So, I get three questions, right?" Yes. "How many have I got now?" One. "Are you kidding?!" No. - One notorious artifact in the game that often acts this way is Kuroth's Quill. It's a quill pen that can grant wishes, but the wisher must use the pen to write his request down on paper, and spelling counts in this case like you wouldn't believe, because the Quill does exactly what is written, and a spelling or grammar mistake on the wisher's part can change everything. (The source that details it instructs Game Masters to have any Player who tries to use it write what he wants down, but the Player has to find out about its condition just as he'd find out the drawbacks of any other artifact.) - This trope not being the case is one of the usual advantages of the clerical counterpart, "Miracle" — being exactly what it says, IE. an impressive magical result provided by a being who unlike genies does not have any reasons to not look at intent or just say no, it is limited compared to "Wish" (since the god you're asking can decide something otherwise reasonable is not in their interest) but also less risky (since an unreasonable request is more likely to result in the god saying no and nothing happening than a literal, jackass or undesirable partial result). - Still with Dungeons & Dragons, this can be a problem when using mind-control magic. Charms are considered less powerful because they just make the victims think the charmer is a trusted ally, and thus they won't act out of character for him — but if they end up fighting on his behalf, they will do so to the full extent of their normal abilities. Domination, on the other hand, give complete control over the victims, but the enchanter better give very precise instructions, otherwise the unwilling subject can certainly screw up things by being overly literal. For example, if you order a dominated wizard to just "Attack the enemy!", he may do so bare-handed (which is certainly useless for a Squishy Wizard). Correct it to "Cast a spell on the enemy!", and the wizard will cast a Status Buff. "No, cast an offensive spell on the enemy!" The wizard will cast a cantrip for pitiful damage. "Damn it, cast your most damaging spell on the enemy!" Cue the wizard casting a Fireball — at close range, without checking that himself and the dominator are going to get caught in the blast. - This is one of the fundamental tenets of Changeling: The Lost; though Pledges are more about intent, the Contracts (spells) and the reality-warping powers of the True Fae are based on extremely literal interpretations of fairly general ideas. Nonsensical catches in the contracts can allow you to call upon its power without cost- for example, smearing a mirror with a saliva-wettened tongue, being at a formal party of eight or more people, or using the contract purely to prove you can, depending on the contract. - GURPS: - The basic rulebook is quite open about it, noting for instance that a summoned demon will fulfill your wish literally and that it will pervert the literal meaning if it can, or that an animated object will only follow your literal commands, and as an example states that "Drop me off here" is not a good thing to say to an animated helicopter. - The hare god Bett Agwo in GURPS Fantasy II: Adventures in the Mad Lands. Unlike most Literal Genies he actually tries to be helpful, but manages to screw things up anyway. - In one Grimm module, the ancient witch, Baba Yaga, would answer one question for the PCs, but just one. The module says that if the questioner is trying to be polite, and formulate the question as "Can you tell me..." or "Do you know..." the answer would be "Yes, I can / Yes, I know". - Exalted: - Demon summoning in general works this way. When you manage to summon and bind a demon, you have the choice between assigning it a task with a potentially unlimited duration, or making the demon your devoted slave for one year and one day. The first option especially has endless potential for abuse, problems and loopholes. If you command a demon to "prevent anyone from entering my house when I'm not inside, forever", congratulations, you have just locked yourself (as much as anyone else) out of your own house until you (or someone else) manages to kill the demon. - The Akuma can also be subject to this. They are demon worshippers that were "remade" by their demonic patrons in a way that both empower them and obliterate all of their personality, desires, goals and emotions, replacing them with an Urge chosen by the demon. And some demons were rather unthoughtful in this choice. For example, the akuma chief of the dreaded Lintha pirates has an urge to "serve the Sea that Marched Against the Flame" (another name of the demon prince otherwise known as Kimbery). Which means that at any time when Kimbery is not actively giving him orders, he just does nothing and waits. - The Mordheim character Nicodemus freed a daemon and in return was offered a wish. His wish was "I want to become the greatest wizard known to Mankind!" and the daemon granted his wish by making him grow endlessly. - In Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, the exact wording of how wishes work is that it's like having the wish written directly into the setting notes - when you wish to be a pirate, it's like rewriting the setting (probably temporarily) so that you being a pirate is a reasonable thing. One possible backstory event had Chuubo himself wish to have an ice cream, meaning that "Chuubo has an ice cream" became a temporarily irrevocable thing - he couldn't eat it, because then he wouldn't be able to have it, and the sun began to go dark to prevent it from melting. - In the "Legacy of Fire" adventure path for Pathfinder, the antagonistic genie delves into this occasionally when not playing Jackass Genie \|\|or attempting to dig up an Eldritch Abomination so he can steal its power\|\|. For example, one of his minions in the final adventure has wished for skin as hard as diamond, so she's literally been turned into living diamond. Fortunately, since she's one of his minions, she is still allowed to move, and gets things like a +4 natural armor bonus from it. - In Wicked, though not a genie, Elphaba's spell in "No Good Deed" comes true quite literally. When she commands that "Let his (\|\|Fiyero's\|\|) flesh not be torn/Let his blood leave no stain/When they beat him/Let him feel no pain/Let his bones never break/And however they try/To destroy him/Let him never die" this all comes true \|\|when he gets turned into the Scarecrow\|\|. - Although not from a real genie, rather his own friends, Juan in Altar Boyz finally found out where his parents (Who left him on the stairs of a church in Tijuana) are...buried in a cemetery. - Subverted in Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer: A devil has given a man a series of favors in exchange for performing evil deeds and also gaining the man's soul when he dies. Unfortunately for the devil, interpreting the man's wish, "I wish he was gone" means killing him (and fulfilling the last condition) and this blows up in his face because the contract's laws require that each condition cannot be coerced, and the literal genie interpretation of the wish counts as such. - Joka's ending in Klonoa: Beach Volleyball features him casting a spell to make the prize money he won 10 times greater. He ends up making the individual bills 10 times larger. When he tries to spend the money, the shopkeeper assumes it's counterfeit and calls the police. - Twisted Metal: - Baldur's Gate: - The Limited Wish and Wish spells work like this for the most part, though it doesn't always apply it well. Wishing for a powerful magic item actually gives you a useful one for example, instead of one with an extremely powerful curse on it. Meanwhile, ask to be prepared against the undead and it just summons vampires to attack you, without even giving you the feeblest protection against them, making it a Jackass Genie (asking for protection will make it cast an appropriate spell on your party). How much of an ass the genie is depends on your Wisdom, which is presumably meant to mean you alter the wording based upon it, though it's not an effect you see. For example, asking for magic to no longer affect you can either stop you from casting spells, or defend you from minor spells. This is a bit unfortunate given that most mages have no use for Wisdom beyond this single spell. - In the sequel, you encounter a beholder who was summoned and charged with guarding a chest. He's not entirely sure if that's really his job, as the summoner was stabbed to death when he issued the order, but he did scream "my chest!" so he might have meant either. With enough wisdom, you can convince him that he's technically not under orders to guard the contents of the chest, only the chest itself, so he'll allow you to at least open it for a look. - Planescape: Torment: - Played with when the player can discover a story about this kind of wishmaking, though the game later implies the immortal amnesiac main character accidentally inspired the story. It goes something like this: A man finds himself sitting by a road, not sure of where or who he is. A hag comes up and, cackling, asks, "Are you ready for your third wish?" "Third wish," he asks. "What happened to my first and second?" "You've had two, but you used your second wish to undo your first. That's why you don't remember; everything is as it was before the first wish," she says. "All right," he says, "No harm. I wish to know who I am." The woman laughs and, just before vanishing, declares, "Funny, that was your first wish." - Torment has another such tale: Once upon a time, a girl came to an oracle who was rumored to know many things and asked of it a boon. Her life was in need of direction, so she asked this oracle as to what would give her purpose. Now, the oracle was not evil, but it was vague and tended towards drink, which caused it to be obscure in many matters of judgment and focus. Its only answer to the girl's question was that within one story that she would hear in her lifetime was the truth that she sought. The girl went off and collected stories, which she chases to this day, not knowing which of the thousands hold the truth. For reference, that tale is told by a girl called "Yves Tales-Chaser", who you can exchange tales with (the first story is Morte "paying" her for another one). Now, think about it for a moment.... - In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Ganon makes a wish upon the Triforce. The exact phrasing of the wish is unknown, but it appears to have been a wish to rule the world. However, the Triforce granted it by giving Ganon total dominion over the world he was in at the time; the Golden Realm. On the other hand, the power he gained from that conquest would have led to him breaking into the Light world and conquering it as well, so it may have been fulfilling his wish in a sort of roundabout fashion. - In Mother 3, the game's Big Bad, the technically immortal Pig King, orders Dr. Andonuts to construct an "Absolutely Safe Capsule", which can protect him from absolutely everything in a pinch. Being one of the good guys, Dr. Andonuts chooses to take the Literal Genie approach regarding just how absolute the safety provided by the Capsule is. When the Pig King eventually faces defeat at the hands of the heroes and retreats to the Absolutely Safe Capsule, it transpires that while he is indeed impervious to any attack the heroes throw at him, he is also unable to attack them, making anyone outside the Capsule also "Absolutely Safe" as a result. The worst and most chilling part, though, is that "Absolute" safety, by definition, is impossible to compromise — once activated, the Capsule cannot be opened again. By entering the Capsule, the Pig King has doomed himself to spend eternity in isolation. Seemingly a Fate Worse than Death, but it's implied in the end sequence that this was actually a happy ending for him. - In Sonic and the Secret Rings, Sonic wishes for "A few" handkerchiefs for his cold after a brief bout of sneezing. Shahra seems too eager to serve her new master, resulting in Sonic being buried up to his head in handkerchiefs. - In The Elder Scrolls series, this is how Clavicus Vile, the Daedric Prince of Bargains and Wishes, typically goes about granting wishes. While he always holds up his end of the bargain, he almost always does so in a way the wish maker will regret. In Skyrim, he is separated from his external conscience, Barbas, and thus veers closer to Jackass Genie territory. When a wizard asked Clavicus for the means to cure his daughter of lycanthropy, Vile gave the wizard a magic axe. He was also petitioned by a group of vampires to end their suffering (i.e. they wanted to become mortal again). Cue the Player Character walking in and slaughtering them all. (Vile considers the wish granted in full.) - The Wish Granter in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. If you tell it you want to be rich, \|\|golden coins rain down from the ceiling — which are actually just the rusty bolts which were the only things holding the decaying roof in place\|\|. If you tell it you want the Zone to disappear, \|\|it turns you blind\|\|. If you tell it you want to rule the world, \|\|it will absorb you into the Wish Granter monolith\|\|. And if you want humanity to be destroyed/controlled, it will \|\|place you in a black void devoid of everything but the player\|\|. And if you tell it that you want to be immortal, it will \|\|turn you into a crystal statue\|\|. - Mass Effect 3 has this in effect with \|\|The Catalyst. In the Extended Cut ending, it's revealed the Leviathans created an A.I. to find a way to stop conflict between organics and synthetics. Its solution? Merge them all together into mecha cthulhus, thus shifting the various biology-versus-machine conflicts into once-an-era civilization-destroying everyone-versus-Cyborg-Titans\|\|. - Notch, creator of Minecraft, pulled off the trope with riding pigs. People wanted to ride a pig and Notch made it happen, except he didn't give players any way to control the pig. It wasn't until a year later where Jeb created a new item that would let people control the pig's movements. - The Djinn displays this Terrordrome the Game: Rise of the Boogeymen, just like in the movie series featuring him. When four people (who share the identity of Ghostface) use their first wish to become the most notorious killers on Earth, he complies, giving them the strength to defeat the thirteen other fighters in the game. Come the ending, \|\|where he presents them extra-terrestrial killers (as in not from Earth), forcing the four use their second wish to undo the first one\|\|. - The Genie NPC in the original The Sims—he's not a Jackass Genie so much as... erratic. The player can summon him and gets a choice between two wishes. If you guess "water", you're either gifted with a new hot tub or a flood to mop up; if you guess "money", you get either a pot of gold or a stack of bills; if you guess "fire" or "love"... the list goes on. - A rare favorable example happens in Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors 2. At the end of Captain Ginyu's What If? storyline, he assembles the seven Dragon Balls and asks Shenron to "bring back my precious teammates", intending to resurrect the Ginyu Force. However, due to his vague wording, he also gets Frieza, Zarbon, and Dodoria in the bargain. - In City of Heroes, when one contact betrays you, he sets his cyborgs on you and tells you to die. The cyborgs interpret the last command as directed at them, and obligingly drop dead. - In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Gaunter O'Dimm claims to be this (YMMV on whether you agree with him). If Geralt implies that he's a Jackass Genie, he'll get all indignant and insist that he never "cheats". He gives people exactly what they wish for; it's not his problem that what people wish for and what they actually want are usually entirely different things. - Fate/stay night: The Holy Grail \|\|when it's working properly\|\| is one of these. It's capable of granting any wish, but the person making the wish has to have in mind some way of making it come true. In the Fate/Apocrypha spin-off, one character brings up the example of a mage who wishes to be the most powerful mage in the world, but in his mind his idea is that everyone better than him should be dead, thus resulting in the Grail killing everyone better than the mage in order to grant that wish. And in the original work, \|\|the Einzberns tried to summon Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian God of Evil, as the Servant Avenger, hoping to get an invincible demon, but instead got a weak human who was ritually sacrificed thus becoming the source of the legend. However, because he represented a wish for an embodiment of "All the World's Evil" that everyone could blame for their suffering, when he entered the Grail, the Grail tried to grant that wish and would have summoned such a being if someone tried to make a wish on the Grail\|\|. - In Radical Dreamers the group encounters a magical mirror that can answer any question it is asked. Serge can ask it for what are the "three measurements" of his female companion Kid, obviously meaning her chest-waist-hips measurements. He is rather confused when the answer he gets is 66, 5 and 9, which turn out to be her height, shoe size and ring size. Whether this is because the mirror genuinely did not understand the intention behind the question is left unanswered. - The Fruit of Grisaia: Sachi tends to act like this. She always follows any orders she's given, even innocent hyperbole, and the other characters have had to learn to phrase things carefully around her as a result. In one case, Makina nonsensically rambled that she and Sachi should become people who can count to ten million in the bath... and Sachi nearly suffers heatstroke when she actually tries to do this. And in her backstory, \|\|a classmate told her to "make the test next Friday not happen". Sachi thought about all the ways a teacher might be able to still hold the test despite setbacks... and ended up burning the entire school down. Can't have a test if the school doesn't exist\|\|. - Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "shapeshifter" Strong Bad, brainstorming forms of shapeshifting powers, asks (no one in particular) if it would be all right if he could have the power to "change into almost anybody". He then finds he can only turn into about half of people, such as the right half of the King of Town, or only the legs of Bubs. Strong Bad: Oh, I get it. I can turn into almost anybody. - RWBY: In Volume 8, team RWBY encounter the spirit Ambrosius, who is is very upfront about this being the case; as the Spirit of Creation, he can create anything he is asked to make, however not only will he need blueprints and instructions on how to make it, he makes it very clear that he will give the heroes exactly what they ask him for, going as far as to tell them not to complain if it's not what they wanted. - Hal the Misinterpretive Porn Star by Harry Partridge seeks to invoke this in every scene he does. For instance, when a porn actress says she "likes a big piece of meat and can never get enough", he starts force-feeding her whole buckets of meat. When another says she wants him to "take her to a place she's never been before", he launches her into the sun. - The Order of the Stick: - Subverted/inverted in "For the Future": the Oracle answers one question. Because he tried to screw him over before, Roy phrases his question in an extremely convoluted way with many backup clauses to avoid this — but without realizing it, ends up phrasing his question in such a way that the oracle (who wants to give him a useful answer this time) can't, because the actual outcome is a possibility Roy hadn't considered. - Used straight in "I Think They're in One of the Rulebooks, Right?", where Grubwiggler takes advantage of the fact that golems are technically constructs and not undead. It's quite possible that it honestly hadn't even occurred to him that he would have a customer who wanted their departed boyfriend brought back to life as a PC again. - Roy blows it on the wording again in "The Last Laugh", this time with a speak with dead spell. - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: - Strip 807. Because this is not entirely clear: in the first panel a boy gets a chemistry question wrong by saying hydrogen has two valence electrons instead of one. His wish of the genie is that he'd gotten that question right. Giving hydrogen two electrons has dire effects on the world as a whole.... - A genie (of the same species, but different hat) pops up in strip 3042, as a sort of Economist's morality tale. - And another one in strip 3742, with a man who wishes to "outlive all of [his] enemies", only to realize how finite that wish actually is. It backfires on him when his efforts to keep his enemies in good health endears him to them and makes them no longer his enemies, and his attempts at making new ones all fail, partly because of his earlier kindness. \|\|With no more enemies to "protect" him, he goes insane and leaps off a building to his death, his body outliving his own mind\|\|. - 2014-07-08: "I wish my parents were still alive." Who comes back to life after this surprises him rather nastily. - 2012-09-20 has a man (implied to be a lawyer) wish for unlimited wishes by forcing a genie to abide by this trope. - Subnormality's take: I would like everything I could ever need. Schmuck: So you're one of THOSE Genies . Genie: For future reference, you now have one kidney. - In one strip of Tales of the Questor, Quentyn ends up being given three boons from a rather nasty fey of the Unseleighe court. However, he not only has to be very specific with his wishes, but has to phrase it in an obscure language, to eliminate double meanings and make it impossible to interpret the words in any way other than what was intended. And he still manages to mess up one of his wishes. He'd intended his second wish to be that Dolan had to return everything he'd stolen from Duke Sturmhold. What he actually commanded was that the Duke get everything Dolan had ever stolen from ''anyone''. - The Genie from Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic isn't overly literal out of any malevolence, but because he's dumber than a post. Case in point, though he offers three wishes, he just can't count, even up to three, and ends up giving unlimited wishes (as long as they are worded very carefully). - The Princess Planet: - While other more obvious examples in Sluggy Freelance are more in the lines of Jackass Genie, we get this once with an alternative Riff from the Dimension of Lame, apparently out of genuine confusion. Lord Horribus orders him to devise a way for his demons to enter the sewers in spite of the smell of flowers therein (It Makes Sense in Context). All his attempts end in disaster until Horribus realises what the problem is. Horribus: Way back when, when I said "build me something terrible" I didn't mean "build me something that works terrible!" Riff: Ohhh! In that case, my latest invention may be just what we need! I call it... The clothespin! - xkcd: - One strip of is a reversal of the punchline of a popular Literal Genie joke. A guy walks into a bar, that includes a piano player that's less than a foot tall and a piano to match. The bartender shows him a very old beer bottle and tells the guy that he can use it for one wish. The guy makes his wish, gets screwed over by the Literal Genie, and complains "hey! I didn't ask for [result]!" The bartender's response? "Yeah, and I didn't ask for a ten-inch pianist." Now re-read the xkcd strip. - Implied in this strip, where we see Black Hat's eyelash wish log, after he realizes that it works. On one of his many attempts to game the system, he asks for "unlimited eyelashes". Since his next wish is about defying this trope, it seems it didn't turn out as he intended. - Real Life Comics spent an arc on this, when Ben finds a ring of three wishes playing D&D. Unfortunately for him, his DM is... not nice. He wishes for "more gold than he knows what to do with," and gets a giant slab of gold that crushes him to death. Then he wishes for "a million gold pieces;" the pieces he receives are so tiny that the whole pile is almost worthless. Finally, he makes an elaborate, foolproof wish and gets a million normal-sized gold coins, which do not crush him. And then a dragon eats him. - In Girl Genius, the protagonist owns a sentient castle. It must always obey any order she gives it (well, the parts that even recognize her anyways) but it loves to interpret those orders in very interesting ways. She learns very quickly to be extremely exact about what she wants, else the castle will ruin whatever she may be trying to do. - In Wigu Adventures, the eponymous Wigu and his father find a magical, wish-granting orb, which offers Wigu three wishes (since he is Pure Of Heart). Wigu first tries to wish for a hundred wishes, then for the ability to wish for a hundred wishes, but when these are forbidden, he decides to display his smarts by wishing that the orb will "give me what I ask for, for real, and not try and trick me." - This Dinosaur Comics takes the Midas Myth beyond its usual Be Careful What You Wish For status well into extreme Literal Genie territory. Also, be sure to read the Alt Text - Giselle, for the record: telling a wishing well "I wish my dreams to come true..." is never a good idea. It's much more likely to pick the "Not Wearing Pants" Dream than any other. - Units in Erfworld are duty bound, and can't go against orders unless they actively defect to the enemy. But when a magician, capable of casting mind control and suggestion spells asks "May I give you a suggestion, lord?", you may want to think about your answer..... - Maxwell the demon of defunct comic Maxwell the Demon is all over this one. - Lampshaded in this Vexxarr comic. - The party mage in Speak with Monsters warns the rest of the group about this when they obtain three wishes from an efreet. However, he fails to finish his sentence before Tymar wishes for "a buttload of gold." The efreet declares that this isn't even fun, then gives the group three baskets of fruit and calls it even. - In Fafnir The Dragon, the title dragon acts like this because he is, simply put, not very bright. So word what you want from him carefully. - The ditzy Bottle Blonde from Princess Pi grants wishes exactly how the wisher worded them. This tendency eventually becomes her undoing. \|\|After Princess Pi frees Bottle Blonde, so no-one could ever use her powers for evil, Bottle Blonde decides to grant one of her own wishes: "I wish to make me a sandwich!" She subsequently turns into a sandwich, which Pi proceeds to eat before it goes to waste.\|\| (Bottle Blonde doesn't really mess up any of the wishes other people made in her comic, but it seems hard to do so.) - Someone tried to avert this in a strip of minus. and provided pages upon pages of definitions. The title Reality Warper doesn't have the patience to read through it, though, and abandons the wishing issue and instead plays with the papers. - The bad guy controlling Lenny in Accidental Centaurs ordered him to immobilize Alex when Alex tried to attack him. He neglected \|\|to mention how long Alex should be immobilized\|\|. - In Sinfest 2012-12-24: Dear Satan Claus, a prayer to "Please bring me hot bitches" results in angry female dogs with tails on fire appearing at someone's door. - Not surprisingly, this joke tends to come up in I Dream of a Jeanie Bottle. Here's one example. - The Wotch features an Artifact of Doom that forces the genie summoned through it to act this way, even if it's against their nature. Later still, one story arc involves the protagonists visiting a world inhabited entirely by genies. It ends when the gang accidentally kicks off a Civil War between the genies who follow this trope on purpose and the genies who don't. - Lampshaded in Myth Trial which begins with the genie Tiani literally telling her new mistress that the wording of her wishes will be very important and that no mortal has ever done it right. Her mistress simply replies that the genie has never met a "New York lawyer." - In Freefall, this is one of the main concerns which led Dr. Bowman to give his synthetic intelligences (like Bowman's Wolves, and also every AI on Jean) actual intelligence and free will, instead of just making them simplistic and heavily restrained. When robots outnumber humans by a factor of 10,000, you don't exactly want them misinterpreting how to serve man, and three-laws compliance is fundamentally broken. - The Monster of the Week strip based on "Je Souhaite" is actually a follow-up in which Scully complains that Mulder got the wishes and she didn't, so the genie gives her a shot as well. She wishes that there were fewer silly storylines, that she was the main character, and that there was some kind of follow-up to that bit in "all things" where she and Mulder apparently slept together. The genie grants her wishes, and tells her to wait for the next episode, at which point Scully realises she may have made a mistake... note : The conspiracy goes into overdrive, Mulder gets abducted and basically stops being a series regular, and Scully discovers she's pregnant. - Tales of MU: - While Two isn't evil herself, one has to carefully word any order meant to give her a little more freedom without getting her in trouble. Protagonist Mackenzie had to think for a whole minute in order to allow her to eat relatively freely. And it takes more than one try. - In chapter 345 of the first year, one of Mack's professors gives the class a project that essentially amounts to wording a wish so that it can't be screwed with by a Literal Genie and then having them trade to twist the Exact Words of their victim. - The short story "Garbage-Collecting the Metaverse" by David Madore has a god that interprets a wish a bit differently than intended. - To combat the Literal Genie and/or the Jackass Genie, the folks at Home on the Strange have an open-source wish project to create the perfect wish. - In the 2nd Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, casting a wish spell ages your character 5 years, and requires the caster to spend 2-8 days in bed recuperating. So, this handy-dandy guide to being a 2nd Edition AD&D Munchkin recommends you phrase your wish as: "I wish Asmodeus were dead and I got all the experience points from killing him and all his treasure, and that I were de-aged 5 years and didn't need 2d4 days of bed rest." - The Word Worlds in Protectors of the Plot Continuum can be quite Literal-Minded, especially when confronted with bad spelling or overly-flowery descriptions. Consequently, any misspelling of a character's name creates a mini-monster to fill in their role in the sentence and Pronoun Trouble in especially bad slash fics can result in both parties doing every described action to each other simultaneously. And these are just the more prosaic typos; for example, one Sue managed to turn herself into a bottle of paint thinner, one turned herself into a floating green shirt (by adding a space to the term "greenshirt", which meant "civilian") another created a Prefect Badger and a guy called "Ed of Dream Sequence," and a series of typos in "Twila The Girl Who Waz In Luv With A Vampyre" caused the appearance of a group of hip-hop dancers who then turned into copies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. - One of the fictional season two Challenge of the GoBots episodes described in the posts of Renegade Rhetoric, which was a Character Blog for main GoBots villain Cy-Kill, was "Babysitting", where the Renegades agreed to look after a huge toddler from another dimension with magic powers under the reasoning that they could use the child's powers to get rid of the Guardians. Unfortunately, because the child is well, a child, he completely misinterprets Cy-Kill's wishes. When told to blow the Guardians away, the child produces a wind that sends their ship away. When overhearing Cy-Kill instruct Cop-Tur to be quiet as a mouse, he turns the dim-witted Renegade into an actual rodent. The final mess-up is when Cy-Kill states to not care what the child does, so long as he doesn't have to see the Guardians ever again. It initially appears that the Guardians are vaporized by this wish, but Cy-Kill later learns to his ire that the Guardians were merely turned invisible. - Photoshop Troll is this trope applied to requests for photo editing. As is this guy, James Fridman. - SCP Foundation: - SCP-294 is a vending machine that will give you whatever you ask for in liquid form, by taking the raw material from somewhere else (usually; sometimes it claims that the drink is "Out of range"). Some of the ensuing mishaps involved "A cup of Joe" ( Agent Joseph [REDACTED] made a complete recovery in the infirmary after four weeks of rest and intravenous hydration), "Whatever the next person orders" ( Unfortunately, beverages were delivered simultaneously. Cleanup took two hours.), and "Surprise me" (superheated water that exploded in his face... which did, indeed, surprise him). This even extends to abstract concepts such as "a cup of music" or "my life story". One incident suggested that the machine has a certain level of intelligence: when a disaster happened at the facility it is stored in, one staff member, in desperation, asked it for "a cup of relevant medical knowledge", received it, and was able to save the lives of several critically injured people. Later requests for the same under controlled circumstances received "Out of range" as the response. The researchers speculate that 294 only granted the initial request out of self-preservation. - A recurring character in the wiki is Dado, an amateur "parapharmacologist" with a poor grasp of the English language who produces anomalous items. On one occasion an employee of Marshall, Carter & Dark Ltd hired him to make "blow up dolls" for them. The result? Exploding sex dolls. A man asks him to make him a doll for his daughter? He makes him into a doll. - Reddit: - In the Ryan George video "If Cats Were Able to Talk", a guy is curious about what his cat is thinking and (as he just happens to have a genie on call) uses his second wish to make the cat able to speak — only for the cat to start making loud, meaningless vocalizations that just creep the guy out. Ryan: Hey Genie, why isn't Mr. Marbles talking? Genie: What's up, what's going on? Ryan: He's not talking, he's not saying words. Genie: It takes like a year and a half for a human baby to start talking, you think your cat's just gonna start spouting out full sentences? Ryan: I mean, yeah, that's what I wished for. Genie: No, you wished for him to be able to talk, which he is, he just doesn't know how to yet. Ryan: Oh, that is some bull**t, Genie. - Adventure Time: - In the Aladdin: The Series* episode "Some Enchanted Genie", Abis Mal forces Eden to grant some pretty nasty wishes aimed towards the regular cast — but he never uses the word or concept of "forever", enabling her to include built-in Achilles heels in everything. (Eden is usually a Benevolent Genie, she just acts like a Literal Genie here to help the heroes.) Eden: [in response to Abis Mal's disappointment] You said cosmic tough guy. You didn't say forever. - An episode of Archie's Weird Mysteries has Veronica wish "everyone was exactly like her" within earshot of a wish granting idol. The result is everyone in town one by one slowly becoming more like her, ultimately transforming into exact clones of her. It turns out the idol itself isn't even sentient and the day is saved when Veronica figures out what has happened and wishes from it for everything to be back to normal, but not before getting a good harsh look at just how annoying and whiny she is and learning to be a better person. - In the Animated Adaptation of Beetlejuice, BJ would shape-shift into literal interpretations of whatever corny figure-of-speech he used. This led to problems several times, such as his head disappearing when he "lost [his] head there". Apparently, this was a reflex. This was even the plot of an episode where his enemies convinced him to say "I'm coming apart at the seams", just so they could take his body parts and hide them until he died... er, again. - In the Close Enough episode "The Weird Kid", Alex accidentally wishes on his Viking pendant to be emotionally close to his offspring while telling Emily that she should have been more specific about her wish to be closer to Candice. However, \|\|because the vasectomy episode reveals that Alex has no offspring\|\|, it makes him emotionally close to The Offspring. - Desiree of Danny Phantom, the ghost genie. The more wishes one makes, the stronger she gets. Eventually defeated by "I WISH YOU WOULD GET IN THE GHOST TRAP." Thus prompting the hero to regret himself being Book Dumb, since it took him the whole episode to come up with that. - One Dexter's Laboratory episode ends with Dexter dismissing Computer with "Oh, shut up and make me a sandwich." After getting shot with a laser, Dexter becomes a sandwich. - DuckTales (1987): - Although well-meaning, Bungling Inventor Gyro Gearloose has a habit of following instructions a little too close to the letter, then being honestly confused when someone complains about the results ("well, you asked for..."). When told to make a SciFi show set "as real as it could be", he constructed a fully functioning spacecraft that launches the cast into orbit. When told to build a guard robot that wouldn't let anyone near Scrooge's money bin, he failed to include the obvious exception of Scrooge himself. - Inverted when Scrooge tells him to pick "Some kind of nonsense" as a password for the newly-built Gizmoduck armor, and that it be an obscure one that nobody uses. Gyro uses a thesaurus to literally find an obscure synonym for "nonsense" and selects the most antiquated and unusual one he can find, "blatherskite". This by all means should have worked, but in a Million to One Chance, "blathering blatherskite" is the Catchphrase of Scrooge's newly-hired accountant Fenton Crackshell, who ends up accidentally activating the armor and becoming Gizmoduck. - Speaking of which, Fenton had earlier dumped Scrooge's entire fortune in a lake when he told Fenton that he wanted "liquid" assets, he then suggests "freezing" his assets as a way to get them out, meaning freeze the lake into a giant ice cube and haul that back to the vault. - The Papyrus of Binding in DuckTales (2017)'s episode "The First Adventure". When it is found, the previous owner, notorious pirate Yellow Beak, has written a will declaring the various misfortunes the Papyrus had brought upon him and his crew note : asking for escape from his pursuers stranded him on the top of a mountain on a deserted island and asking for water drowned his crew and he used the powers of the Papyrus to Mercy Kill him. The Papyrus also takes the users own definitions into account as when Black Heron tries to use it to kill off young Donald and Della, it doesn't work because she wrote "sidekicks," but Scrooge considers them family, and it's not a "mission," but an adventure. \|\|It all comes to a head in the Grand Finale "The Last Adventure" when Bradford spent 30 years trying to Rules Lawyer a Magically-Binding Contract using the Papyrus in order to stamp out any Loophole Abuse in order to prevent Scrooge from adventuring for the safety of his family. He succeeds, but Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Webby realize there is one loophole Bradford didn't realize, that Scrooge considers "family the greatest adventure of all!" and the contract breaks.\|\| - Driven into the ground in the Extreme Ghostbusters episode "Be Careful What You Wish For". An evil spirit grants wishes like "I wish I could get back to my roots" (guy turns into a tree), "I wish I had a younger body" (woman turns into a baby but keeps her normal head), "I wish I had a face like that guy" (grows a second head), "I wish she liked me as much as that cat" (wakes up inside the cat's body), and to just put a cherry on it: "I wish I was made of money" (do we have to explain this one?). The ghost is eventually beaten when Eduardo \|\|the one in the cat\|\| comes up with the wish "I wish for you not to grant this wish", and the resulting paradox after Kylie says it renders it vulnerable to the usual ghost trap. - The Fairly OddParents!: - A Running Gag with Cosmo and Wanda. Some examples include the following: he wishes for a shrink suit, but the suit can only shrink, not return to normal size; he wishes that he had parents that couldn't care less, they end up not caring about work, bills, personal hygiene, etc., and it also affects Cosmo and Wanda, his god parents; he wishes to be sent to the comic book store while he's taking a bath, Cosmo and Wanda neglect to dress him before they send him to said store, resulting in Timmy having to make his way home across Dimmsdale completely naked. It's to the point that, in "Just the Two of Us!", he has to rephrase his wish that he was the last boy on Earth three times to get the results he wants. - Lampshaded at the end of one episode. Having spent most of the episode shrunk down inside Vicky's body so he can write a report on the body's cells, Timmy complains that he now has to write a report on "the wonders of the big universe". Cosmo and Wanda immediately extrapolate his previous wish and turn him into a planet-sized giant, prompting Timmy to complain that "you guys take everything too literal". - Norm the Genie is initially depicted as such in his debut episode. When Timmy makes a wish for an omelet, it falls into his hands and burns them, because Timmy didn't wish for an omelet on a plate. When he tries to be more specific ("I wish Trixie Tang loved Timmy Turner"), Norm makes it so Trixie loves everyone named Timmy Turner. It's the third and final wish that outs Norm as an outright Jackass Genie; Timmy wishes for his Dad to be a billionaire, and Norm makes Mr. Turner a counterfeiter. - Family Guy, "Viewer Mail #1". Peter is threatened by a man riding on a bus after Peter is granted his own theme music by a genie. The man asks him to stop the music. Peter tells him he can't, and the man threatens to break every bone in Peter's body. So Peter says "I wish I had no bones" out of fear. The genie, who is driving the bus, hears him and says, "Done," turning Peter into a boneless blob. Bizarrely, Peter is initially happy about this turn of events and laughs at the man. - Garfield and Friends: - In the "Rainy Day Robot" U.S. Acres short, Roy gets conned into buying a voice-activated weather-making robot, though the salesman does tell him that the robot will "do the appropriate rain dance, snow dance, or whatever". It works fine during the demonstrations, but then idles whenever Roy specifically demands rain (perhaps because it only does each type of weather once). In his frustration, he then makes the mistake of saying things like "bucket of bolts", "overgrown vacuum cleaner", "horse", "tree", and "safe" (in which is a Shout-Out to Wile E Coyote as he holds up a sign that says "ouch" and an umbrella), in front of it (or within earshot as he tries to escape), prompting the robot to drop one of said things on top of him. Roy later uses it to thwart Orson's brothers by tricking them into repeating his would-be last words, "27 pianos", so that the robot drops the required amount on them. The episode ends without them getting it to properly rain, though, and one has to wonder how the robot interpreted "trade jobs"... - In one quickie, Wade sang "Home On The Range", and the words in the song appeared before him. - In yet an episode of Garfield proper, "Dogmother 2," a wish-granting fairy loses her notes, remembering only the address, so she goes to Jon's house and puts it under a spell that grants any inhabitant any statement that begins with "I wish." It's Jon luck that he happens to sing, "I Wish I Were in Dixieland" in the shower that day. - Gargoyles: - Shakespearean trickster Puck loves to do this if he is ever magically bound to serve a mortal. When Demona phrases her desire for him to kill Elisa Maza as "rid me of that human", Puck interprets this as a command to "get rid of that human", and turns Elisa into a gargoyle. Demona's other wishes do nothing but backfire in similarly inconvenient ways, to Puck's delight, and to top it all off, after the heroes finally free him, he decides to grant Demona her earlier wish to no longer turn to stone during the day...by making it so that she instead transforms into the thing she despises most: a human. - Another example is the Cauldron of Life, which legend states will make anyone who bathes in it live "as long as the mountain stones." Xanatos hopes to use it to achieve immortality, but is also not stupid, and plans to test it out on Hudson first. After the old gargoyle escapes, Owen unhesitatingly offers himself as the test subject, and subsequently spends the rest of the series with a literal stone arm after he dips it into the cauldron's brew. - In The Summoning, a short from GO! Cartoons, Claire is attempting to summon a demon, and needs troll fat to do so. She's inadvertently summoned some wish-granting clowns instead, and when they insist on granting her wish, she wishes she could get some troll fat. They proceed to hand her a crudely-drawn map to its location (and she notes that her wish phrasing need work). - In an episode of Jackie Chan Adventures, in an attempt to defeat the bad guys, Jade orders the Monkey Talisman, "Turn this log into a death-ray!" The talisman turns the log into a manta, also known as a death-ray. (It turns out the Talisman's power is only to turn people/things into animals.) - Kidd Video: The fat one with the glasses got one wish from The Sphinx, and he wished for he and his friends (who were teetering on a mountainside rock about to fall) were safe at home. Suddenly, his friends are next to him, but not home! The Sphinx declared he only got one wish, and since his friends were in peril at the time, he and his friends were safe, thus his wish was granted, and with that, the Sphinx went back to sleep. - Lilo & Stitch: The Series. In the episode "Wishy-Washy", an activated experiment is activated, designed to be a wish giver that grants any wish he hears, but the wishes are granted literally and don't turn out as expected for the wisher. For example, when Jumba wished to be the greatest ruler in the world, he was turned into a literal ruling stick. And when Pleakly wished for "all the powers" of his current idol, a superhero, Jumba then explains he didn't get any powers, because said hero wasn't real. - In The Little Mermaid (1992), Sebastian, tired of being a tiny crab, finds a magic wand and wishes to be a "Big Crab". The problem? He can't stop growing; he outgrows his home, and even Atlantica, to the point where he is around the size Ursula was at the climax of the original movie (if not larger). Ariel uses the wand, wishing Sebastian was his "Old Self", which literally turns him old, with a long beard and spectacles (but still a giant). Ariel then gets fed up and manages to "correctly" wish that the wand was never found. - My Little Pony 'n Friends: "Through the Door" features a genie who will only grant your wish if you are very specific (if you wish for a perfect day, you have to describe every aspect of the day; if you wish for ice cream, you have to describe the size, shape, flavor, etc). The ponies decide he's more trouble than he's worth. Lickety-Split: I wish the weather was perfect. Genie: Perfect, hm? Could you be more specific? Temperature? [...] Relative humidity? [...] And I also need to know the prevailing wind speed, and the percentage of the color orange in the sunset! Lickety-Split: Look, all I want is a perfect day, so what's so difficult about that? Genie: "What about the sky? You have your cerulean blue, your robin's egg blue, your..." [scene break] Genie: ... and what about barometric pressure? Pollen count? - Phineas and Ferb: - In Pixel Pinkie, Pinkie tends to a fairly literal approach to granting any wishes she is given; partially as a result of having being imprisoned for centuries and not really being up on modern idioms. - The Rocky and Bullwinkle Fractured Fairy Tale short "Prince Darling" shows the fairy intentionally doing this, turning the eponymous prince into a monster, saying "Your father's last wish was that I make something out of you. That's something." - This showed up in the Shazzan episode "The Maze of Mercurad". Due to the laws of magic governing the Fifth Mountain, Shazzan couldn't just curbstomp Mercurad like he could with every other enemy of the week; the kids have to pay a toll to Mercurad. Instead, he defeats him by acting like a Literal Genie. When Mercurad asks for a fortune in silver, Shazzan fills the entire valley with silver coins; a fortune so huge that Mercurad can't guard it all from thieves. When Mercurad then asks that the fortune be made more secure, Shazzan turns it into a mountain sized block of pure silver that would be too difficult to actually spend. Giving up on money, Mercurad asks for the key to ultimate knowledge. Shazzan shows him a bizarre equation that encompasses all knowledge, but without the required background to understand the equation it's completely useless to Mercurad. Mercurad then asks for the power of a genie. Shazzan complies, but then mentions that all genies have masters. Mercurad's master will be his own monstrous gatekeeper. Mercurad immediately rescinds his desire to be a genie at this point. Finally, Mercurad decides that a simple payment will be enough: a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese, and some fresh water. Shazzan grants this wish with no problems at all. - Shimmer and Shine: Some of the wishes go wrong because the titular genies don't understand certain figures of speech, likely due to the fact they are genies-in-training and are still learning. Averted since Season 2. - The Simpsons. Homer Simpson attempts to avert this in "Treehouse of Horror II"; after the family's first wishes on a Monkey's Paw have unforeseen consequences (thus playing the trope straight), Homer decides to "make a wish that can't backfire. I wish for a turkey sandwich, on rye bread, with lettuce and mustard, and, and I don't want any zombie turkeys, I don't want to turn into a turkey myself, and I don't want any other weird surprises." Surprisingly, this mostly works, except that the turkey's a little dry. Of course that part didn't work: after all, he asked for no weird surprises! Homer: Hmm. Not bad. Nice, hot mustard. Good bread. Turkey's a little dry. The turkey's a little dry! Oh foul and cursed thing!!! What demon from the depths of Hell created thee?! - The Smurfs: - In one episode, Smurfette found Hogatha's locket, which was more like an Artifact of Doom rather than a creature, but it acted like this, granting her wishes without her even knowing it. When she gave Greedy, who was sick, a bouquet of flowers, she wished she could fill his whole room with flowers; it did just that, and he got hay fever on top of it. Then it got worse. She wished he was "on his feet and fit as a fiddle", and he turned into a living fiddle (and to make matters worse, he was out of tune). Then she fell victim to one of Jokey's practical jokes, and she wished he'd "grow up and act serious", at which point he grew to three times his size and started talking like a Rhodes scholar. At the end of the story, Papa Smurf realized what the locket was doing, and hurled it into a fire, which fortunately undid the effects of all the wishes. - Another example that appeared in several episodes was Gargamel's Great Book of Spells, a Tome of Eldritch Lore that was a living, speaking being, which had to supply him with any spell he requested on the day of the final phase of the full moon. While said spells were powerful, the book very often took him too literally, causing whatever Evil Plan he came up with using the spells to blow up in his face. And at times, the rituals needed to cast the spells seem designed with humiliating Gargamel in mind. One spell required him to wear a robe made of fish, and then hop about like he had fleas; when he said he didn't have fleas, the Book gave him some. In the last episode it appeared, it became clear that the book wasn't malignant, it was just sick of having to grant spells to someone who only used them for selfish reasons. - The South Park episode "Crippled Summer" had Nathan trying to get Mimzy to get Jimmy killed, but he misinterprets every command. For example, Nathan tells Mimzy to kill Jimmy by going underwater where he is and blowing a shark whistle to attract sharks. Mimzy then goes underwater, goes back on land, and then blows the shark whistle. - Rose's Room in Steven Universe is a more benevolent version of a trope. It's essentially a holodeck that will create whatever the holder of the Rose Quartz gem (in this case, Steven) wants, though the items are actually solid clouds (for example, the food can't be eaten). In its first episode of focus Steven says that he wants to go outside, and the Room simply creates an illusionary version of the town. In the second episode Steven accidentally says that he wants \|\|to see Connie (who's currently out of sight), and the Room produces a fake which Steven mistakes for the real one\|\|. In "Catch and Release," however, he wants to get to the basement from the Room, and it shows him the way once he specifies that he needs the real basement. - The accidental wish variant and the "don't break the rules" variant are both in effect on an episode of Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! in which the team encounters one called the Wigglenog. Gibson: Oh, Otto, I wish you weren't such a colossal dunderhead! Wigglenog: Your wish is granted! SPRX-77: Gibson, what did you do?! Gibson: [stammers] - Timon & Pumbaa: - Happens to the duo when they find a lamp near the watering hole, and each wish for a million wishes. In one Body Horror moment, after their desire to wish their own way of wishing sets them apart, they make up and wish to be together again, only for that wish to make them fuse together before they wish themselves separate. - Another episode had one where Pumbaa saved a magical whale by throwing it back into the ocean. Telling Timon this, he gets him to go back and forth to make his three wishes, trying to be specific as possible, but all backfiring because Pumbaa didn't say it EXACTLY the way he asked it. The best example would be his final wish, when he wished for a fancy castle and just for kicks, a magical fire-breathing monster (which he expected to be a dragon and not a chicken) he can defeat. Pumbaa instead said "can't", so the episode ends with the duo hiding out from their fire-breathing fowl fiend. - An evil butcher in The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat episode "Guardian Idiot" wishes Felix's bumbling Guardian Angel to "make him the biggest, greasiest sausage ever made"... which he does, but to him. - Dick Dastardly employs Bubu, a genie, in the Wacky Races episode "The Dipsy Doodle Desert Derby". He's not very bright and tends to take Dastardly's commands too literally. ("Put me out in front of the other racers!" Dastardly commands — Bubu puts the Mean Machine in front, all right. In front of the other racers facing them.) - Computer programmers and linguistic geeks with a dry sense of humor often respond very literally though they know perfectly well what you mean. (Especially if the word "or" is involved: "Would you like coffee or tea?" "Yes." note : A savvier server would have used the exclusive or. Although the answer could still have been "yes.") - According to Joe Murray, creator of Rocko's Modern Life, he was asked by executives to create a strong-female character for the show, "a professional woman, someone with a good hook." Murray took them at their word by creating the one-handed Dr. Hutchinson. - Software engineers will often play the part of a literal genie to their customers, and sometimes maliciously if they don't like them. Most of the time, it's because no matter how stupid the requirement sounds, it might be what they wanted, and they did sign off on it. Requirements definition (a System Engineering task) is ten times worse. You really have to pick your words carefully. One mistake can mean millions of dollars wasted in doing something the "wrong" way. - Remember, a computer will always do what you told it to do. And in virtually all cases, it will not be what you wanted it to do. See also You Can't Get Ye Flask. - This is very evident (as of 2022) in text-to-image A.I. models. You have to be very precise in your prompts as the model will almost always interpret what you ask for literally. This tends to result in lots of unintended creepypastas. - In one of Isaac Asimov's novels, this fact explains why the First Law is so important. It's not because robots are conspiring against humans, but because orders can and will get interpreted in many unpleasant ways. - A popular rhyme is based on this: I hate this damn computer. I wish that we could sell it. It won't do what I want it to. Only what I tell it. - Another line: Programming is the art of describing what you want so precisely that even a computer can do it. A large part of good programming is to always have the program do something sensible if (or more likely, when) the computer encounters an unexpected situation, such as a missing file or missing information within a file, or information which is outside of the sensible boundaries for that type of information. - In the age when computers were massive mechanical machines composed of gears and pulleys, the inventor Charles Babbage was twice asked "If you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" He wanted to smack the stupidity out of the guys that asked the question (he didn't because both of them were members of Parliament). An understandable mistake in that age, as people weren't used to such a Literal Genie as a computer. - Notably, this is one reason why many scientists think human-level A.I. and above is likely to lead to bad things, up to and including human extinction, in real life. Unless extreme care is taken in determining both the A.I.'s goals and how it goes about them, it's likely to take a perfectly good goal in theory (such as promoting human happiness) and use its superhuman intelligence to promote them in wholly unintended ways (for example, forcibly hooking people up to machines that stimulate the happiness centers in their brains 24/7). Or killing everyone who exhibits sadness, thinking it's dealing with disease because it wasn't programmed for that scenario. - The Paperclip Maximizer is a thought experiment by Nick Bostrom designed to show how artificial general intelligence, even one designed competently and without malice, could ultimately destroy humanity. Its sole directive: Maximize the number of paperclips in its collection. It would improve its intelligence to find more efficient ways to make more paperclips. The said methods soon include "turn all matter on Earth and the cosmos into paperclips." - Some scams operate on this principle. - For example, the scammer could place an ad offering to "help cut your bills in half" for a $50 fee, and in return for the victim's money, sends him a pair of scissors. - Another well-known example is the guy promising to reveal the secret to never lose at betting on horse races. Of course, the rube receives a sheet of paper with the instructions, "Don't bet; then you can't lose." - A similar scam circulated in the United States during the boll weevil infestation of the 1920s. The scammer would advertise a sure-fire weevil killer, and a desperate cotton farmer would send in the money... to receive in the mail two heavy wooden blocks with the instructions, "place weevil between blocks and crush." - The infamous "solar-powered clothes dryer" — which upon receipt turns out to be a clothespin or clothespins and maybe the line for hanging the laundry. - A very common "scam" is to sell tickets offering prizes worth an amount like $2000 and with high odds of winning. The winner receives a coupon book, and the total savings by purchasing every single discounted product will add up to $2000. - Another urban legend was about a $100 book that told you how to make $50,000 in no time! The only thing written inside is: "Sell 500 of these books". - Another one is an offer to sell "grass" by mail-order. The victim thinks they're getting marijuana, but they actually get an envelope full of yard clippings. - It's a common practice in Chemistry classes to teach the class the importance of specificity in directions by having students write directions for some mundane task, and for the teacher to attempt to do it while following the directions specifically and with absolutely no additions. For example, if the task is making one peanut butter and jelly sandwich, simply saying "put jelly on bread" will make the teacher place the jar of jelly on top of the bag of bread. note : Though this doesn't even follow the letter of the instructions. The jar is on the bag. The jelly and the bread continue to have no direct interaction. It would be more accurate to just put all of the jelly onto all of the bread. - This is also an exercise in Computer Science 101 classes because, as noted above, computers tend to interpret their instructions in the most literal manner possible; new programmers have to learn to consider this. - Similarly, a grade-school level "trick" is to start listing instructions, with one of them (generally the first) being "Read to all instructions before starting". As most students want to parse out their workload, they'll disregard this and follow the directions (write down the capital of Ohio, circle it twice, draw a doodle next to it, etc.)... then hastily erase the next 10+ steps when the final one is revealed to be "Do not write down anything except the first step." - Hilariously, this kid turned the tables on the teacher. He effectively told the teacher that he had to read all the instructions first, but in no way did he have to execute them in that order, after everyone had giggled at him when the teacher stopped him from continuing. At that, the stumped teacher suspended the assignment and turned the class into a discussion on the student's point. - Lawyers. They are why laws are so complicated; otherwise, the lawyers interpreting them would not hesitate to twist them however possible to suit their case. (That is their job, after all!) Averted with judges, who try determining what is reasonable and what the law-makers were intending with the law, not just what it says. If a lawyer does find a way of suiting their case that is technically legal but clearly against the spirit of the law, the judge will usually decide against them regardless. - Parodied by Pratchett with the Golems (see above under "Literature") is the industrial action tactic of "Work-to-rule": protesting employees perform their jobs exactly as their contract specifies. - "Weird Al" Yankovic used this in response to the recording company that James Blunt was signed. He told him he couldn't sell his take-off "You're Pitiful" after he'd already gotten approval from Blunt and recorded it. He made it available as a free download instead. - John Kricfalusi, the creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show, was asked by fans to make an episode of the then-newly launched series Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" full of nothing but gross-out jokes. It resulted in the episode "Onwards and Upwards" — however, many viewers considered it to have gone way overboard. - The Other Wiki defines this trope as malicious compliance. See also Work-to-rule, a.k.a. Bothering by the Book. - The Aztecs believed that Quetzalcoatl, the god of life, fertility, and war, would return and transform the nation. Hernán Cortés, Quetzalcoatl's God Guise impostor, in a sense brought them everything the Aztecs expected, but not remotely like anything they ever imagined. - The Open-Source Wish Project is dedicated to crafting wishes in such a precise manner that no genie can screw them up. For instance, the common wish "I want to be rich" is reworded to "I wish that I shall obtain; now and at all times hence; legally and without harm to others or myself, all such material possessions as I, being of sound mind, desire, and that receipt of same should occur within twenty-four earth hours (one day) of the desire becoming known to me. Unless during that period I decide, of my own free will, that I do not wish to receive said item or items." - In Star Trek: Generations, Captain Kirk winds up being the Trope Namer for Dropped a Bridge on Him, but that ending was a re-shoot. Originally Kirk had a more direct fight with Soran before being killed, but this ending didn't do well with test-screenings. Supposedly several comments from the test screeners read, "Kirk should die on the bridge." Unfortunately, none of these specified "The bridge of the Enterprise."	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyLiteralGenie
Overly Pre-Prepared Gag - TV Tropes "Our top story today: Convicted hit man Jimmy 'Two-Shoes' McClarty confessed today that he was once hired to beat a cow to death in a rice field using only two small porcelain figures. Police admit this may be the first known case of a knickknack paddy-whack." First things first: I'm going to have this refrigerator start doing laps around the room. These are jokes that require so much setup and work behind the scenes that you would wonder why the effort was made, but you don't because it's just that funny. Compare Friendly Scheming. Also compare "Shaggy Dog" Story, which is a long story or joke that seems like it will lead somewhere but doesn't; Brick Joke, which is a gag or plot element that simply comes back much later; and Henway, which is a joke specifically set up to "trap" the listener. The end result may get a Lame Pun Reaction. If the joke is specifically a short story with a pun at the end, it's a feghoot. If the punchline never comes or isn't necessarily humorous, see Anti-Humor. See also Disaster Dominoes, which when Played for Laughs is a slapstick gag which needs a lot of events occurring in succession, and Feghoots, which are long and typically over-complicated stories for the sole purpose of setting up a Pun at the end. Is that refrigerator still doing laps? Good, lets move on. ## Examples: - In Bleach, Orihime Inoue does one of these on her friend Tatsuki. When Tatsuki asks about the condition of her apartment, Orihime replies that she's been evicted as of a few days before. Tatsuki is, understandably, flabbergasted and asks where Orihime's been sleeping, upon which she pulls out a squashy sleeping bag and says that it's soooo comfortable. Then she reveals that she was just kidding. Tatsuki asks her how long she'd been carrying around the sleeping bag in order to do so, and Orihime answers, "about three days, I was actually wondering if anybody was going to give me the opportunity." Of course, Orihime is a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander anyway. - The first chapter of Negima! Magister Negi Magi has a Negi falling into a rather large and complex Bucket Booby-Trap that must have taken quite a while to set up. Although, given that the Negiverse has a lot of Ridiculously Fast Construction, it isn't too farfetched. - Gintama enjoys using these at times. - One episode has Katsura suddenly switch from Counting Sheep to reciting a lengthy high school sports drama. \|\|The punchline is that the number on the jersey of the character featured at the end of the story was the same number as the sheep he was about to count.\|\| - Episode 153 of the anime has Gintoki listen to a radio story "guaranteed to make you cry in four minutes or less", hoping it'll help him sleep. The story, titled "I'm Sorry, Jerry", is about a girl and her loyal dog whom she's forced to leave behind when she moves to another town. The story lasts well over four minutes, and does genuinely tug at the heartstrings, \|\|but right when it seems like it's going to end on a touching note, it decides to go for a Cruel Twist Ending with some Surprisingly Creepy Moments. Cue hilariously girly scream from Gintoki.\|\| - Hitoribocchi no OO Seikatsu: Bocchi wants to make her friend Nako laugh, so she thinks of a joke where she gives her an empty bucket of Yogurt and greets her with "Oha-Yogurt" (Ohayo is japanese for "Good Morning"), but she forgets to say "Oha". She repeats the joke with Aru after she asks why Bocchi wanted to make Nako laugh and not her, but she still forgets to tell the joke properly. Aru bluntly tells Bocchi the joke isn't that funny, but then ponders that the fact Bocchi went through the effort of washing a cup of Yogurt and bringing it along might make it funny after all. - The Moth Joke, as told by Norm Macdonald: A moth goes into a podiatrist's office, and the podiatrist's office says, "What seems to be the problem, moth?" The moth says "What's the problem? Where do I begin, man? I go to work for Gregory Illinivich, and all day long I work. Honestly doc, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. I don't even know if Gregory Illinivich knows. He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness. But I don't know, I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there... at night I...I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that's on my arm. A lady that I once loved, doc. I don't know where to turn to. My youngest, Alexendria, she fell in the... in the cold of last year. The cold took her down, as it did many of us. And my other boy, and this is the hardest pill to swallow, doc. My other boy, Gregarro Ivinalititavitch... I no longer love him. As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I... that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror. If only I wasn't such a coward, then perhaps... perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me and end this hellish facade once and for all... Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I'm a moth, just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me. I'm not feeling good. And so the doctor says, "Moth, man, you're troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist. Why on earth did you come here? And the moth says, \|\|"'Cause the light was on."\|\| - Demetri Martin parodies this trope perhaps better than anyone else has ever managed to: Demetri: Last time I saw Dean was like five years earlier when Dean and I were doing a roofing job on top of a 40-story building. He started talking crazy that day and he goes, "I can't take it, man," and he got up on the ledge, and he jumped. Just after he jumped, I looked down and I noticed that Trampoline Emporium was having a sidewalk sale that day. Dean landed right on one of the trampolines, bounced back up 40 stories to where I was standing, and just as he floated up he said to me, "Y'know, I think a lot of your joke premises are contrived and hard to believe." - A heckler breaks up what he thinks is this during a Patton Oswalt special. Patton then explains how this works, and spends more time trouncing the heckler than the uninterrupted joke's setup would have been. - In one of his shows, Dara Ó Briain has a part about the midwife that he and his wife were seeing during his wife's pregnancy. When it comes to a joke about childbirth, he runs over to two boys in the front row he was talking to earlier and spends the next minute alternatively explaining the importance of the thing he's going to say and apologizing to all the women in the audience in advance. Dara: And then she gets to a major issue — Oh, lads, lads, lads, lads, lads... you'll know nothing about this, but I'm gonna say something here that you will never have heard of before in your life. But when I say it, watch out for this: When I say something in about a minutes time, every woman in this room is gonna make a noise. Every one of you will make this noise, and I am not proud of the noise I am about to make you make. It's not a good noise I'm gonna make you do. There's good stuff just beyond that noise. That's gold! But there's a noise barrier, and you've got to make that noise to get through that barrier, right? During the process, there's a point where a decision may have to be made... — Icannotappologizeenough — ...\|\|between a tear and a cut. \|\| Audience: Eewww.... Dara: There's the noise! - An oft-reblogged Tumblr post: Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him ... A super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis. - Bill Cosby had a routine where he was trying on a pair of winter boots. Store Clerk: How do they feel? Bill Cosby: I'm glad you asked. Now, right here on this right foot. Right here in the middle of the foot, there's a bone. And the shoe is pressing up this bone. And it is really. it is hurting, man. It is mashing that bone. But, up top here where the boot starts, that's rubbing on my skin, and it's making it raw. Now, on the other side of my foot, where the big toe is, well there's a bone there. And it's mashing that bone. And underneath, where the arch is, there's a blister coming up here. Now, the other foot, my little toe, I don't know what happened., but when I stamped down, my little toe got mixed up, and it's somewhere under my big toe. The other three toes in the middle are really confused, they're all on top of each other. And there is a cut, I think it's bleeding. I don't know, because this other bone cut the nerve, so everything is numb, but up top here, this is bleeding right away! Store Clerk: \|\|They fit!\|\| - Once upon a time, there was a woman who gave birth to one hundred children. For the sake of simplicity, she named them all One through One Hundred. Late one night, a terrible fire burns the family's house to the ground and the only surviving child is a girl named Ninety. Despite the tragic setback, Ninety grows up happy and healthy, receives a good education, gets a job and eventually settles down with a family of her own. However, money remains an issue, and there are certain luxuries that the family can't afford. One day, when her two children are older, they come across a stray dog while playing in the park. The children play with the dog all afternoon, but know that their family can't afford to keep it, so they arrange to go to the park every day to play with the dog and take care of it there. They name the dog "This" so they can speak in code about it while at home ("Did you take care of this?" "Have you seen this?" etc). This goes on for a few years until the dog becomes old and sick and passes away. The children hold a small funeral for it and are the only ones there because they never told anyone else about their dog, This. So \|\|only Ninety's kids will remember This\|\|. - An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a German are all waiting for a ship. Looking to kill a little time, they troop down to a local vaudeville theater. They arrive just after the show has begun and take their seats in the far back of the theater, just as a juggling act is starting. After a minute, the juggler notices the four of them in the back and calls to them "Can you four see me back there?" The Englishman, Frenchman, Spaniard and German reply "Yes." "Oui." "Sí." "Ja." - In 1985, David Gilmour and Nick Mason made serious efforts to revive Pink Floyd, with or without Roger Waters' approval. The only problem was, keyboardist Richard Wright had been fired from the band, and legal troubles prevented him from returning. Gilmour and Mason's only option was to find a new keyboardist. They tried Rick Wakeman, who, though a wizard with the ivories, just didn't have that...Floydian flair. They tried Keith Emerson, who was just a little too crazy for their more contemplative soundscapes. They asked Tony Banks and J. Peter Robinson, neither of whom were available, owing to touring and other conflicts. Billy Preston wasn't available when they needed him, either, as was Steve Winwood, who at the time was working on his own solo career. It became clear that they would have to go outside the usual rock'n'roll purview. Pianists and keyboardists alike came and went, and the legal paperwork progressed very quickly. If nothing else came of a new keyboardist, Wright would at least be able to return to the band which he'd been with since the old days. The last applicants to audition were the Wong brothers, who could play dueling pianos with the best of them. It would have been an amazing gimmick to go on tour with, to be sure. Alas, while they were accomplished, they just didn't have the improvisational chops that Gilmour and Mason were looking for. And besides, they might have overshadowed the Floyd as a whole, so proficient and skillful were they. Finally, their old colleague Richard came back into the fold, and all three agreed on one thing: \|\| Two Wongs just don't make a Wright.\|\| - A couple of years ago, the London Philharmonic was performing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Berlin. There's a long section of the piece where the bass violins have nothing to do, so one of the bassists suggests they go to the local pub across the street. But one of the bassists says, "But what happens if it's our turn to play." The bassist who suggested it says, "Don't worry. I tied the conductor's score pages; it's gonna take him a while to untie it so we'll have plenty of time to sit back down." While they are there, they strike up a conversation with another patron, who himself turns out to be a very famous Count from a nearby province who also happened to be both a Beethoven enthusiast and a bass violin enthusiast. In fact, he was in town as a VIP to watch the Philharmonic's performance and was going to meet with the conductor for dinner after the concert to discuss possibly hosting a second concert at his castle. One thing soon leads to another and after a few hours, bassists are totally wasted, with the Count himself, having had his fill of drinks, commenting that he would have to postpone the dinner with the conductor. This, of course, reminds the bassists that they have a Ninth Symphony to return to, and they stumble back to the concert hall and into their seats. The conductor, who is currently struggling with untying the pages while still keeping the orchestra in time, glares daggers at them as they sit down. One of the trumpeters says, "Boy, that conductor looks pissed." The other trumpeter says, "Well, what do you expect? \|\|It's the bottom of the Ninth, the score is tied, the basses are loaded, and the Count is full!\|\|" - The famous Japanese rakugo performance of "Jugemu" tells of a boy whose father could not choose any one name to give him, and in the end, decides to give him all of the names suggested to him. As such, his full name is Jugemu Jugemu Gokō-no surikire Kaijarisuigyo-no Suigyōmatsu Unraimatsu Fūraimatsu Kuunerutokoro-ni Sumutokoro Yaburakōji-no burakōji Paipopaipo Paipo-no-shūringan Shūringan-no Gūrindai Gūrindai-no Ponpokopī-no Ponpokonā-no Chōkyūmei-no Chōsuke. The full joke takes much practice, several minutes to tell, spans several years in-universe, and contains one (repeated) punchline. Here is one telling of the story. - Garth Ennis once created a demon named Baytor in his Hitman series so he could eventually have him become Lord of Hell and be referred to as "Master" Baytor. - A Bluntman and Chronic comic featured marijuana-themed hero Bluntman getting distracted only to notice that Chronic has been tied up under a boulder held up by a crane. Derris, the villain, then delivers what amounts to "Give up or your sidekick gets stoned," and a couple police officers watching lampshade this by saying "So that's why he went through the trouble of dragging that huge crane over there!" "Yeah! For that incredibly lame pun!" - In an issue of X-Men, Mystique goes out to scatter the ashes of her companion Destiny, a precognitive. Destiny, before her death, left detailed instructions on exactly when and where to scatter the ashes — the fantail of a specific cruise liner at a particular point at an exact time. Mystique, at the right time and place, releases the ashes, and a gust of wind blows them back into her face. She doubles over laughing realizing that the instructions were intended to set up an Overly Pre-Prepared Gag. - Sky Doll had a character named God for two reasons: call God a jerk right at the start of the comic, and then this trope when he dies and they can claim that God Is Dead. - The entire first appearance of Rocket Raccoon probably counts. So, Rocket Raccoon (called "Rocky" by his friends) escapes from an asylum (he's a guard/companion animal), to go find the holy artifact Gideon's Bible, and also to rescue his girl from his rival. Yes, those are just the lyrics to "Rocky Raccoon", but with uplifted animals. To really hammer the point home, Rocket's pal is a walrus. note : Is he actually named Paul? - One of many examples in Asterix: Asterix in Switzerland opens with Chief Vitalstatistix firing his shield-bearers, then getting Asterix and Obelix as replacements, then when that doesn't work, Obelix alone, carrying him like a waiter with a tray. In the English translation, the dialogue has Vitalstatistix first saying that one shield-bearer would make him feel "like a half-pint chief", then when Obelix says he has to go back to his menhirs anyway, Vitalstatistix snaps "So you refuse to serve your chief? By Toutatis, I'm a mild man, but this makes me very bitter!" So when Getafix asks what Obelix is doing with his waiter impression, Asterix replies "He's serving a half-pint of mild and bitter." - Perverse Pepere. One could fill the entire page with his setups. For example, running around with a tape recorder, and playing the assorted noises in a loo cabin to scare the poor attendant to death. FLOCHOFLOGLOUPLIKAPLOK-GNNNNNGGHRRRHGH-TACATACATACA(POUTPOUT)TACATACA-AROUAAY!-PLAOUF!! - In one Dilbert strip, Dilbert and Dogbert are playing Scrabble, and Dogbert tries to pass off "neans" as a word in order to get rid of some excess "N"s, just to goad Dilbert into saying "The N's don't justify the neans". - Pearls Before Swine often does this with Sunday strips; everything up to the last panel is building up a bad pun or overly long string of rhyming/similar sounding words ("Please don't help my mama bomb a Osama Obama llama diorama"). The last panel is, invariably, Rat expressing his disgust and/or threatening violence against the writer. A particularly elaborate/contrived one in this one.◊ - FoxTrot had a Shout-Out to Pearls Before Swine — Peter immediately surmised that Jason had been reading too much Pearls. Jason: I'm making a miniature RV out of these plastic building blocks. It's transporting a frozen waffle along with several expectant mothers obsessed with Rocky IV from the tip of South America to a country in southern Europe. Peter: Okay... Jason: Here, grab it from me . Peter: What for? Jason: Just grab it. (Peter grabs it) Leggo my Eggo-carrying Lego Winnebago full of preggo fans of Drago en route to Montenegro from Tierra del Fuego which is south of San Diego. - Frank and Ernest can, particularly on Sunday, go to great lengths to set up a pun. Or other gag, such as having Frank and Ernest make a series of lame puns about locations, look through the Fourth Wall, and muse that it's hard to believe this has a live audience. - In one Peanuts strip, Linus gives Lucy an award for being crabby for an entire year. He actually tracked her mood on a calendar every day for a year to ensure the award would be accurate. - Pinkie Pie, in this fanmade comic,◊ has gotten pregnant just to say, "You've got to be kid-in-me." Nurse : ...Did you get yourself pregnant only to make that joke? Pinkie Pie : Totally birth it . - A Stargate SG-1 AU fic titled "Hero of the Soviet Union" spends several pages detailing the operation of a Soviet-run SGC, all to set up the punchline when a KGB major mocks a captured Goa'uld: "In Soviet Russia, Gods bow to you!" - In the Fairy Tail/ Sailor Moon crossover ''Fairy Moon'' by Emma Iveli has Sue (An anime only member of Phantom Lord who calls Happy a "Red Dog"), is one the Rainbow Crystal carriers who turns into a cat monster. Due the the Sailor Guardians saving her (who are members of Fairy Tail in this story) she under goes a heel face turn during the Phantom War arc. She gives a speech to other Phantom Lord members which ends with "Because one time I turned into a dog and they helped me!" Or as Emma put it You must be wondering did I choose Sue to be a rainbow crystal carrier just so she would turn in a cat monster, under go a heel face turn earlier than canon and make a big speech all so I could do a Ghostbusters 2 reference? I will tell you now that is completely 100 percent... true... - The 3,000 word Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic Cuckles exists solely to build up to the punchline of \|\|"Hi, Gonna shatter your jewels, I'm Sonic"\|\| - Ultra Fast Pony: the episode "Shameless Self Reference" is filled with, well, shameless references to previous videos in the series and to the creator's other work. The episode ends with Rainbow Dash declaring, "I guess I'm just an Ultra. Fast. Pony!" The end credits have a subtitle claiming that the entire video series was created for the sole purpose of that title drop. - The Techno Queen: THE TECHNO QUEEN note : krakathoom! builds robotic Evil Twins of all the Wards and gives them a Beard of Evil just so she can call them the Back-Wards. - Harry Potter in Harry and the Shipgirls, while everyone was resting at Hogwarts after the Yule Ball, had his Fleet put lawn gnomes in every dorm (passwords provided by Kenshō), as well as the Beauxbatons carriage and the Durmstrang ship, with one gnome for everyone in each location, all transfigured into attire reflecting one of said people. When confronted about this, Harry said it looked like everyone, teachers and staff, would get to be gnome for the holidays. - This Undertale fan comic has Sans wait to run an errand for Papyrus to go to the store, all so he could say he didn't find what he wanted and brought him some "hot dates" to enjoy instead. After he bursts into laughter: Papyrus : (unamused) HOW LONG DID YOU SPEND SETTING THIS JOKE UP? Sans : literally days. - In Dumb and Dumber To, Lloyd has spent the entire twenty years since the previous film pretending to be catatonic, just as a prank on Harry. - Kung Pow! Enter the Fist: The villain tells people to start calling him Betty at one point in the movie. It's funny on its own... then at the end of the movie \|\|when he's wearing black and preparing to fight, Ram Jam's "Black Betty" starts playing.\|\| - Rat Race has a gag where half the humor of it is how contrived the setup was: A series of increasingly implausible incidents result in a Jewish family crashing into a WWII veteran assembly in a car decorated with swastikas, and the father gets out sporting a black lipstick Hitler mustache and a tongue injury that makes him speak in German-sounding gibberish, and in trying to explain what happened starts sticking out his burnt middle finger and waving his hand in the air in a Zieg Heil-esque gesture. - The entirety of Silent Movie may or may not have been one long set-up for a gag about \|\|a mime\|\| speaking the film's only word of audible dialogue. - Discworld: - In Soul Music, Nobby and Colon are watching Imp y Celyn busking in Ankh-Morpork and Colon comments that he's "playing the harp". Nobby says "Lyre" and Colon says, "No it's true... Oh I bet you've been waiting all your life for someone to say 'that's a harp', just so you could make that joke. I bet you were born hoping that someone would say that." - Most of Soul Music is a build up to one of the final lines said in the book, \|\|"There's a new boy working at the fried fish stall, and I could swear he was Elvish!"\|\| - Jasper Fforde, Pungeon Master that he is, likes doing this. - Throughout Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear, the characters share office gossip about others in the police station. In the end, this comes together as a long "Peter Piper picked a peck of peppers" kind of tongue-twister, and they even break the fourth wall to complain about the gag: "I don't know how he gets away with it." - Fforde names a minor villain Yorick in his first Thursday Next book for no real reason other than that he can bring him back four books later to make a Hamlet pun. - "Death of a Foy" (can be found on this page, ctrl-F the word "foy"), by Isaac Asimov of all people. The careful and elaborate setup of an intricate setting and alien religious culture were all for the purpose of \|\|a pun based on the first several lines of ''Give My Regards To Broadway''\|\|. For added effect, he even carefully tailored its length for the sci-fi publication he originally sent it to, so the reader had to turn the page right before the punchline hit out of nowhere. Lots of Asimov's short stories are like this. He could fill a book with them — and did! - Also used in Everworld, with a character making an awful pun on "gymnosperm", then announcing he'd been stockpiling it since junior high. - Every Tall Tales Night and Punday Night at Callahan's Crosstime Saloon is filled with these. - The book Dogs Don't Tell Jokes is about Gary Boone, a kid who wants to be a stand-up comedian, but is considered unpopular and weird by his classmates. Gary finally gets his chance to prove himself during the school talent show, comes on stage wearing a hat, and launches into a long rambling story about how he bought some shampoo that was too strong. He punctuates this story with many other unrelated jokes, and actually manages to get laughs from his peers. Finally he reaches the end of the story, where he reveals that he left the shampoo in his hair for too long and removes his hat, revealing that he's shaved his head bald from the ears up. This gets a huge laugh from the crowd. - In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there's a few paragraphs' worth of build-up to the punchline of a joke about "Square Sweets That Look Round": When the tour group enters the room, they find \|\|the candies have little faces on them that look (a)round to see who's there\|\|. - The Longest Joke in the World (over 10,000 words, almost a novella) is essentially one giant, shaggy-dog style buildup to... a pun: "\|\|Better Nate than lever\|\|!" - In G. K. Chesterton's autobiography, he introduces us to Edward Clerihew Bentley (they were schoolfriends) by relating an incident where they were shocked that one of their schoolmasters, a dull and solemn man, actually told a joke. Bentley invented a flight of fancy where the man had devoted his whole life to planning and setting up that one joke. - 3rd Rock from the Sun has an episode, several seasons in, wherein main character Dick is target of a Luke, I Am Your Father plot from his boss, the Big Giant Head, first mentioned in the pilot, and introduced as a character much later. The whole episode is a setup for Dick saying, in the final scene, that he doesn't know who he is anymore. Harry answers "Well, your first name is Dick, and your last name is Head, so..." - Arrested Development has G.O.B. and Buster talking in a closed nightclub for a while, waiting for G.O.B.'s magician rival Tony Wonder. After a bit of conversation, Buster says "I wonder where he is." To which Wonder appears in a puff of smoke, asking "Did anyone say 'Wonder'?". The narrator later explains Tony Wonder had been hiding for hours in a small service elevator, waiting for someone to say the word "wonder". - On the short-lived 1981 Western-themed sitcom Best of the West, a villain comes to town backed up by a group of henchmen referred to as "The Shenanigans". Eventually a standoff leads to a parley in which the marshal, holed up in the tavern, calls out to the villain that he can come into the tavern to discuss a truce—and then he adds, "but no Shenanigans!" - An in-universe example in Blackadder the Third. In Ink and Incapability, Blackadder and Prince George are trying to re-write Dr Johnson's dictionary. Prince George: Well, we didnt take "no" for an answer, and have, in fact, been working all night. Ive done "B". Blackadder: Oh really? And how have you got on? Prince George: Well, I had a bit of trouble with "belching", but I think I got it sorted out in the end. (Belches) Oh no! There I go again! (Laughs excessively) Blackadder: You've been working on that joke for some time, haven't you, sir? Prince George: Well, yes, I have, as a matter of fact, yes. Blackadder: Since you started... Prince George: Basically. Blackadder: So, in fact, you havent done any work at all. - A skit featured on the Australian skit show Comedy Inc had a head sailor informing the captain that the sailors are very disgruntled and they might have a mutiny on their hands soon. The captain tells him it was intentional, and he was planning for him to come and say theyre revolting, so he could answer, I know, they havent bathed in weeks. - Community featured the German foosball jocks who bought a soccer ball and walked in a row of three constantly carrying the ball with them, just waiting for the opportunity to kick a ball at Jeff foosball-style. Immediately lampshaded by Jeff, who points out that the build-up really wasn't worth the pay-off. Jeff: Were you guys walking around with a soccer ball just so you could do that?! [The Germans strut out; to Shirley] They left the ball and everything! I think they were literally walking around with it like a prop to use. It's like a twenty-five dollar bit; it's not even that good! - A meta-case. The word "Beetlejuice" is used as a quick gag in both Season 1 and 2. In the Season 3 Halloween episode "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps", someone uses it for the third time (and remember, in the movie he was summoned after someone said his name three times). Immediately after this, in the background someone wearing a Beetlejuice costume walks across the screen. It takes a few seconds, you have to notice it, and remember that this is the third time his name has been used. - Doctor Who: In "Spyfall", it transpires that \|\|the Master has contrived to get the civilian identity he's been living undercover as for a number of years known only as "O" just so the Doctor's Oh, Crap! reaction when she found out who he is would be funny.\|\| - An entire episode of Frasier builds up to one of these. The A-plot involves Frasier and Niles, stuck for ten minutes at a parking garage because Frasier doesn't want to pay the parking fee. The B-plot involves Roz, who has to fill in for Frasier at the radio station. Roz lets slip that she and Frasier had a night of intimacy. Naturally, everyone wants details. Frasier is blissfully unaware of this, and upon bursting in late, turns on the mike and announces: Frasier: I'm sure Roz has informed you of my exploits. It wasn't my finest hour. Let's just say, I got in there, realized I'd made a mistake and then tried like hell to get out! There was a lot of shouting and then a line started to form behind me... Luckily, my brother was with me for moral support, and, let's face it, someone to talk to. You know, you'd be amazed how long ten minutes can be when you're watching the clock. But, in the end, I got out of there without paying the four dollars! - Phoebe did this on Friends. Chandler was forced to leave a restaurant wearing only women's panties ( long story...), so she says she'd like to write a song, but can't because her guitar is missing a string. Phoebe: Hey, Chandler, can I borrow your G-string? Chandler: How long have you been waiting to say that? Phoebe: About 20 minutes. - In a later episode, we see the setup for one of Chandler's, but never get to hear the punchline. He tells Joey to mention firetrucks the next time they see each other, resulting in Joey trying to salvage an awkward conversation by yelling "FIRETRUCKS!" out of nowhere, making it even more awkward. - In an episode of Hannah Montana, Miley needs a favor from Jackson, who agrees, but in very theatrical fashion. She calls him out afterwards for wasting 20 minutes just to dress up as Vito Corleoni and recite his "please accept this justice..." speech from The Godfather. - Another visual one was the BRIAN BLESSED-hosted episode of Have I Got News for You, where he kept pulling props out from under the desk. One of these was a huge Spartan soldier's helmet which he put on between shots to provide Hypocritical Humor about continuity errors on television. Ian Hislop: That's a fantastically elaborate prop for that joke! - How I Met Your Mother has Barney go through weeks of planning, months of experimenting, waiting 10 years, and spending $30,000 on fake medical bills, all to get Marshall to try to eat an exploding sub-sandwich. - One episode of Lab Rats is spent getting the entire cast contrived juuuust right so that they look like a circus at the end of the episode (as the administrator insisted that their attempts would end up as one throughout the episode). - Mystery Science Theater 3000: - In "Laserblast", Tom and Crow try to brainstorm ways to work the phrase "Can't we get BEYOND Thunderdome?" into a conversation. - In the episode "Girl in Gold Boots", there's a shot of a pool table set up just right so that Mike can pull out a cue from under his seat and pretend to shoot some pool. Servo: Say, how long have you been saving that sight gag, Mike? Mike: Oh, not long, about... eight years. - In "The Screaming Skull", Pearl, Brain Guy, and Bobo trick Mike and the bots into believing they've all previously agreed to meet dressed as penguins. They had to reserve the penguin costumes eight months in advance for $900 each. - In "Track of the Moon Beast", some characters play a weird, confusing prank on an anthropologist, then spend the next several minutes explaining it. For a host segment, Crow tried to do the same to Mike, and it's even more awkward. - "Wild Rebels" has another sight gag, where Jeeter appears to point his gun directly at Tom, who dodges to the side... right to where Jeeter is next pointing his gun when the camera cuts back to him. - QI. Most particularly, during a round wherein Stephen was discussing declining surnames and mentioned "Glascock" as one of them, Alan chimed in with the anecdote: "We had a Jimmy Glascock at school. You could always see when he was coming." After the laughter died down, he remarked, "I never thought I'd have a chance to do that joke." - Rich Hall's "centi-claws" joke, also lampshaded. - In one episode, someone accused Jimmy Carr of being "the chairman of the Pedantic Society." Jimmy replied, "I'm actually vice chairman, thank you very much." - Red Dwarf: - The episode "Queeg" has Lister tell Rimmer a long rambling story about why it's cruel to give machines personalities. He tells about how his friend Peterson had a pair of "Smart Shoes" that could always get you home no matter how drunk you were. But Peterson woke up hundreds of miles away because the shoes wanted to see the world. He tried to get rid of them but they'd show back up. In the end the shoes stole a car and wound up driving it into a canal because they couldn't steer properly. Peterson was upset, but a priest consoled him that the shoes were happy and in heaven now. You see, it turns out Shoes have soles. - Another episode has Lister spend days crossing the ship in order to fetch some tomatoes. His reason for doing so is that tomatoes make him sneeze, so now he can squick Rimmer out by using the sneezes to iron his clothes. All that walking just to get a reaction. - On Scrubs: - J.D. and Turk do a lot of shift-switching to put two doctors named Turner and Hooch together on a medical case, just so they could shout, "Turner and Hooch!" - This can fizzle very easily: J.D. once told Doug that a patient had "updoc" in a class, hoping that he would would ask, "What's updoc?" - J.D. set it up so a patient thought his name was Daman, so that, when the patient asked who was doing his procedure, J.D. could answer "Doctor Daman", prompting the patient to ask "Who's Daman". Needless to say, it failed, miserably. The patient was rather too polite, and added the honorific. - The Todd has been known to wait in hiding for hours until someone unwittingly sets up a double entendre. - J.D. also spent over a week setting up a joke about Oprah-themed cereal in My Happy Place, recording a member of staff's Oprah impression and rigging a cereal box (the design and manufacture of which he was presumably also responsible for) so that the recording played when it was opened. - Moving into their flat in Spaced, Tim is wearing a oversized green T-shirt and brown trousers, and Daisy a chunky orange sweater and red skirt, with thick-rimmed glasses on top of her head. No apparent reason, until they talk about which Scooby-Doo character they are. Tim picks Fred and Daisy says Daphne. He slouches, and the glasses fall down on her face... making them look like Shaggy and Velma. - The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "In the Cards" consists of Jake and Nog trying to acquire a vintage baseball card from a man named Dr. Geiger through a convoluted Chain of Deals. One of their tasks is to recover Dr. Bashir's stolen teddy bear, and Jake uses the idiom 'to beard the lion in his den', leading to the following exchange: Nog: Lions and Geigers and bears... Jake: Oh my... - Whose Line Is It Anyway?: Colin Mochrie is a master of this. While the show is largely improvised, Colin plays the anchorman role in Weird Newscasters often enough that he's got many an Overly Pre-Prepared Gag as his opening number. In addition to the one listed as the page quote: - Paul and Storm combine this with Overly-Long Gag in their song The Captain's Wife's Lament, in order to set up the song's Hurricane Of Pun (singular) ending. In the album version, this is merely a charming interlude, but the live version (which intersperses the song/setup with Audience Participation "Arrr"s and pirate jokes) often stretches the four-stanza introduction out to lengths of ten minutes or more. - The whole of "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Since You've Been Gone" song. - One track on P.D.Q. Bach's album 1712 Overture and Other Musical Assaults featured Professor Peter Schickele tracking down one of Johann Sebastian Bach's descendants, a man named Burt, then hand him a pebble so that he could "give Burt Bach a rock". - Tom Lehrer's "Irish Ballad", from Songs by Tom Lehrer, spends six verses lovingly describing the Irish maid's murder spree in order to set up the punchline: When at last the police called by Her little pranks she did not deny To do so, she would have had to lie And lying, she knew, was a sin. - Allan Sherman's "One Hippopotami" (a parody of "What Kind Of Fool Am I?") is a long string of incredibly lame puns involving singulars and plurals, all leading up to the lamest of them all in the last lyric. " With someone you adore If you should find romance You'll pant and pant once more And that's! A! Pair! Of! " Pants! - He did this same with the four-stanza "Around The World." " Around the world " I looked for you I gave a look, in every nook On second avenue I'm searching for The one I love I haven't seen the one I love Since err of Tisha B'ov Your new address You didn't leave Was it New York, or County Cork Or was it Tel-Aviv And all the time I looked around for you You was in the ladies' room. - In Pappy's Flatshare Slamdown, Tom tells one in series 4 episode 3. Tom: I'm not going to do the washing up, Matthew, because I used to work in a seafood restaurant, and I used to do the washing up with a German fellow by the name of Hans. Now, in that seafood restaurant, there was a Hungarian waitress who went by the name of Yourface. Now, Yourface was very fond of the fish that were in the tank in that sea restaurant. There was one piece of seafood in particular. It was a little squid. It was a bright green squid, and it wasn't a very clever squid, and oh, Yourface loved that squid. No-one would eat it because it looked so silly, and it looked so green, and looked so stupid. But one day, a man came in and said, "I want to order that squid"; and Yourface said, "no, not the squid". He said, "yes, kill that squid and I will eat it". So she got the squid, she went back into the kitchen, she picked up the knife, she said, "I can't do it. I just can't do it". The manager said, "unless you kill that squid, you're fired". She said, "I just can't do it". So, they got the washer upper - the German washer upper - Hans, he came over, picked up the knife and said, "I'll do this". He picked it up and said, "I can't do it. I just can't do it". The manager said, "oh no — \|\|Hans that does dishes is as soft as Yourface with the mild green fairly thick squid\|\|". note : The punchline is a pun on the old Fairy Liquid slogan, For hands that do dishes can feel as soft as your face, with mild green Fairy Liquid. - Taint of the Lex and Terry Radio Network once alleged that he had become a vegetarian some years before in hopes that a woman would one day offer to "eat [his] meat." Eventually, one did. - The elaborate puns on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. The host's scripted ones are the best examples, but some of the ones the panellists come out with are really more notable for this, since they're being thought up on the spot (usually) and are more likely to be incredibly lame. In "Sound Charades," the audience often groans very early on as soon as it becomes clear what pun the players are relying on to convey their assigned title, and the rest of the round becomes an exercise in drawing out the setup for as long as possible. (only after much scene-setting, Graeme and Barry get started on The Poseidon Adventure ) Hamish: But look here, look here, ye're late today! Ye've missed the Teletubbies ! Dougal: Oh no! Hamish: Aye! Dougal: What hijinks were they up to today? Hamish: Ohoho, I tell you, I was gripped. Dougal: And me not here! Hamish: Something terrible happened... to Po. Dougal: Speak on, old friend! Hamish: Aye, well, Tinky-winky, Dipsy, and La-la... couldn't see Po from the front ! Dougal: No. Divulge! Hamish: Ye've no heard the worst of it. Dougal: No? Hamish: They couldnae see him from the back either! Dougal: Mercy me!... (and so forth) - In an episode of Just a Minute (the panel game where players have to talk about a subject without hesitation, repetition or deviation), Paul Merton took the given subject Off the Rails — not unusual for him — and started talking about the Welsh and Scottish parliaments. Clement Freud brought the house down by challenging him for "devolution." In a program remembering Freud after his death, Merton revealed that Freud had asked him before the show to work in the necessary reference, without telling him the joke. - The Goon Show, on multiple occasions, spent twenty minutes setting up to a pun that managed to be So Bad, It's Good. - ABC cricket commentator Kerry O'Keefe spouted this gem, possibly even rivalling the page quote. 'A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see from her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack. "Miss Whack, I'd like to get a $30,000 loan to take a holiday." Patty looks at the frog in disbelief and asks his name. The frog says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it's okay, he knows the bank manager. Patty explains that he will need to secure the loan with some collateral. The frog says, "Sure. I have this," and produces a tiny porcelain elephant, about an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed. Very confused, Patty explains that she'll have to consult with the bank manager and disappears into a back office. She finds the manager and says, "There's a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000, and he wants to use this as collateral." She holds up the tiny pink elephant. "I mean, what in the world is this?" The bank manager looks back at her and says... "It's a knickknack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man's a Rolling Stone."' - Anything Goes almost entirely ends with one. Ms. Evangeline Harcourt loses her dog during the first half of the first act, and spends the next act-and-a-half looking for it all across the boat. At the end of the show, the Purser brings the dog to her, saying it was found in the swimming pool. Ms. Harcourt: What was she doing in the swimming pool? Entire Cast: THE DOG PADDLE! - Into the Woods has a lyric that you get a feeling that Stephen Sondheim had been dying to make. Baker's Wife: If the end is right, \|\|It justifies the beans!\|\| - The creators of Red vs. Blue once joked that the series would eventually end with one final punchline that the entire show had been leading up to all these years and every Plot Hole would suddenly make sense. Granted, if they manage, it will probably be the most glorious Overly Pre-Prepared Gag ever. Of all time. Even if it really is lame, managing to pull off such a feat after 11+ years (especially considering the show was only supposed to be about five episodes long at first) would be nothing short of godhood. - The Animutation Irrational Exuberance has the chorus of the song sang each time by three different antropomorphic fruits that parodies of company logos (Rotten Apple Joe for Apple, Banana Public Inc for Banana Republic, etc) with a flashing sign that reads "FRUIT SELLS" and giving out their Name, company and fun facts. The very last chorus ends with \|\|Richard Simmons. With the fun fact "This was an incredibly large setup for such a cheap joke. That's what makes it funny"\|\| - Puffin Forest: In "The Legend of the Legendary Aligaros Ashuin!", Ben wasted a character level just to get an ability he had to wait months to use just for a joke, which he never used again. - Irregular Webcomic! does this a lot. - xkcd: - The Order of the Stick: - "Generally Relative". As per usual, given a lampshade the size of Canada. Tarquin: Oh MAN! I've always wanted to say that line! Elan: That was... that was a PERFECT delivery! Tarquin: I know, right? Wasn't it awesome? I've been waiting, like, FOREVER for that. Elan: Growing up without a father was totally worth it just for that reveal! - And in "Under the Helmet". Tarquin: Totally worth wearing a mask under my helmet for two days. - Two pages later, Malack comments that Tarquin has always been willing to go the extra mile for a punchline. - 8-Bit Theater has this in conjunction with a Brick Joke: One of the first comics had Black Mage make an off-hand comment that a party of four White Mages would "never work" (He was reading a Nintendo Power magazine, which actually suggested a WMx4 party set-up in a sidebar article). Fast forward almost ten years in real time, and guess who defeats the Big Bad? Black Mage's reaction was extraordinarily subdued, but by that point, it's safe to assume he was far too used to being the Universe's Butt-Monkey. Brian Clevinger has admitted this as being the entire reason for making the comic in the first place! - Cyanide and Happiness: - Dinosaur Comics: "T-Rex! You just spent hours learning about accounting for a pun!" - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: - Kickback set up one in "The Fallen Finds a Bridge" of the Insecticomics. - Folly and Innovation has one with 65 days of patience for the sake of a pun. - Captain SNES: The Game Masta has "Backside Opening". - Wondermark at one point devoted two months of comics, starting here, to torturous puns on the phrase "check out my sick elephant", culminating in a ten-strip story about an attempt to film an all-elephant version of Friends in Russian with the aid of Anton Chekhov. - In one Full Frontal Nerdity strip, Lewis complains that Comic Con has been cancelled, because he was going to volunteer. He planned to cosplay as The Mandalorian and work the information booth. Frank comments that this is a lot of trouble to go to just for the sake of telling people asking for directions "This is the way". - One Questionable Content strip has Emily eating a big bowl of peas and giggling to herself. Unfortunately, the first person who finds her is Pungeon Master Claire, who says "Are you giving peas a chance?" before Emily can. In the next strip, when Hannerlore approaches her, she says "I'm giving peas a chance!" before Hanners can say anything. Hanners misses the joke entirely, and a distraught Emily gives up. - Here's one that's lampshaded at the end. - Cracked — "7 Bizarre Noises from Outer Space": the editor listed six videos for noises. The seventh? \|\|Uranus. He even admitted to making the article just to have the line "This is the noise Uranus makes."\|\| - Subverted in the page quote for Just for Pun: Upon discovering that Miles Black, the famous phrenologist from Yorkshire was going to take up yodeling to lonely goats in Bali, James White decided to balance four planks of wood on a beer keg and call it an abstract work of art in the style of a famous fourteenth-century architect, just going to prove that people will read any old garbage if they think there will be a good pun at the end of it. — The Grand Panjandrum's Special Award for Vile Puns, The 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - Achievement Hunter: - Geoff and Gavin spent twenty hours preparing an elaborate Minecraft city for the crew to live in (complete with a massive recreation of the AH logo and a gigantic monolith serving as Geoff's house)... the entire point was that there was a single misaligned block that would pour lava into Jack's house when he'd try to fix it. Twenty hours of work just to set one guy's house on fire when he tried to clean it up; and it failed as Jack was able to save his house. So Gavin just poured a bucket of Lava on it. It was later revealed they also had a "failsafe", \|\|having spent an additional hour burying hundreds of cubes of TNT under the city and then luring Michael into pressing the trigger button\|\|. - Gavin at one point dug a giant shaft to bedrock, covered it up, and then placed a landmine so Geoff would plummet to the bottom of the map after walking across it. - The Fire Extinguisher was constructed to put out fires when Jack's house caught fire, only for its water supply to be replaced with lava. - Dark Achievement City, a mirror image of the main Achievement City in the Nether, was constructed for what, even in advance, the builders knew would amount to a ten second reaction from the others. - After posting a prank video where Michael and Gavin dismantle Jeremy's desk and lower it to the floor, Geoff and Gavin realized that what they should have done instead was raise it to the ceiling. Hundreds of dollars worth of equipment and 5 months of preparation later, they did exactly that. - Achievement Hunter's favorite pranks in general fall under this umbrella. When Chad James had politely declined a taco from Michael because he had other lunch plans, the entire division quickly dismantled and hid Chad's desk within minutes. They left his office completely empty while Chad and the rest of the RT Core office were attempting to steal a microwave. Some time after that incident, they repeated the offer to Chad, which he accepted this time. However, much to his chagrin, they bought 99 more tacos and proceeded to drag him around the Rooster Teeth offices with tacos for everyone. - LoadingReadyRun: - One video took place over several cuts spread out over five minutes, featuring a morose clown waking up to face the day. All completely irrelevant, until the payoff in the final cut. - Munroe's Meats is an in-universe example, a five minute long, terrifying build-up to a punny tagline. - In Failure similarly spends several minutes of a teacher excoriating his students complete with statistical breakdowns and a slideshow to demonstrate their many failures objectively, all for the reveal: \|\|It's Opposite Day.\|\| - 5 Second Films provide us with a beautiful example with The Ballad of Truck Thunders. - Game Grumps: While talking about experiences playing video games at cons, Egoraptor mentioned that he likes to parody new-age gamers by playing retro games, running through them terribly, and rage-quitting the second he dies. However, once while playing the original Super Mario Bros, he just ran through the game, unintentionally doing a perfect speedrun... And he didn't get hit until he reached the final level. Whenever he did die fighting Bowser, he had already garnered a huge audience expecting this to be his original intention, but he just went with the original joke, throwing down the controlling and yelling "THIS GAME SUCKS!" and left. - Chuggaaconroy specifically waited until episode 101 of his Xenoblade Chronicles 1 LP to make a "Xenoblade 101" joke, as if he knew the LP would be that long or that he started the aftergame then. - This SiIvagunner rip of Snow Halation goes to a great deal of effort (including English singers for all the parts, and adhering to a rhyming scheme) for a bizarre combination of Love Live and The Flintstones, which have nothing in common beyond being common gags on the channel. It takes three minutes of song, but it finally reveals the whole point was setting up \|\|the incredibly lame "Stone Halation" pun at the title-drop.\|\| - It's not outright confirmed, but there's a distinct possibility that Brian only grew out his mustache for Unraveled Season 2 entirely so he could dramatically shave it off at the end of "Waluigi, Unraveled". - In Michael Reeves' "I Gave My Goldfish $50,000 to Trade Stocks", he designed an automatic stock-trading device that would buy and sell stocks based on the random movements of his goldfish... which amazingly made Michael over $1000 in profit. Deciding that this technology has incredible potential, he presented it to potential investors for real, giving a legitimate presentation as a startup called "reef.ly" to Launch House, a LA-based meeting place for tech entrepreneurs. The footage taken from the seminar makes it clear that Michael played the presentation of his "fish algorithm-based technology" completely straight, and it wasn't until partway through that his live audience of actual potential investors realized the "fish" for Michael's stock-trading program wasn't some tech buzzword, but in fact a real goldfish in a tank. - Truth in Television: In If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, Bruce Campbell relates a true complicated prank he played on a friend involving his broken down car and the US Park Service. - Invoked Trope: At the beginning of the vice-presidential debate in the 2008 U.S. election, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden shook hands and she could clearly be heard saying, "Nice to meet you, can I call you Joe?" Many commentators later guessed that (given that candidates aren't really allowed to talk to each other during these "debates") she'd only asked so that she could begin one of her rebuttals with, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" In fact, it was because she had accidentally referred to him as "Senator O'Biden" repeatedly during debate prep. - You just charged me for assault and battery! - The Rock Band Network is a system for small bands to get their own songs into the official Rock Band DLC store. The program that compiles the song for testing is called Magma "'cuz that's where rock comes from." The developers have stated that yes, that joke is the sole reason for the name. - While filming Torchwood: Miracle Day, John Barrowman decided to "scare the crap out of Eve" by sneaking into her trailer and jumping out from the shower. He was in there a long time. - George P. Burdell is a fake student made up by William Edgar Smith when Georgia Tech sent him two enrollment forms. Smith then proceeded to sign Burdell up for all the classes he was taking. He did all of his schoolwork twice, even the tests, changing things around slightly to prevent the professors from catching on. This "prank" went on for so long that Georgia Tech awarded Burdell an actual master's degree. - Andy Kaufman was infamous for going to insane lengths for a gag, up to and including spending weeks at a time in-character as his stage personas. The reason so many people think he faked his death? Because even his friends and family agree that faking a long, horrific death by cancer and keeping the charade up for decades for the sake of a dumb joke sounds like something Kaufman would actually do. Oh no! I left the fridge running!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyPrePreparedGag
Overly-Long Gag - TV Tropes "The idea was to make the scene funny, then drag the joke out so it was no longer funny, then drag the joke out even longer to make it funny again." A gag that goes excessively far and beyond a tolerable length. The concept is that something happens repeatedly, to the point of boredom. Then it keeps going, to the point where it, in theory, actually becomes funny again. Essentially, the sheer length of the gag becomes the gag. This is very difficult to pull off well there has to be the sense that the characters are themselves helpless to end the gag, and as exasperated as the audience. Most uses of Broken Record might end up becoming this. It's sort of like Crosses the Line Twice, but boring instead of offensive. Compare Overly Long Name. Not to be confused with Overused Running Gag. May invoke the Repeat Cut. May be invoked by Rhyming List. Contrast with Rapid-Fire Comedy, which is built on multiple jokes and gags with very short span and little or no setup. Not to be confused with Overly long gag. The serious version is Leave the Camera Running (or Ending Fatigue, if the prolongated section is the closure). An overly long gag with a lot of tension built up as an actual story is a "Shaggy Dog" Story. When Incredibly Long Note is played for laughs, it might reach this. If the gag itself isn't overly long, but the distance between the setup and the payoff is, it's an Overly Preprepared Gag or Brick Joke. ## Example subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - This ad for Democratic Alaska Senator Mike Gravel's 2008 presidential campaign consists of him staring into the camera for seventy seconds, dropping a rock into a pond, and then walking away for the last eighty seconds. Another ad has him lighting a campfire, followed by seven consecutive minutes of footage of the fire. - This CareerBuilder ad from the 2009 Super Bowl. (The koala was the turning point between tedious and funny.) - This Viva Pinata ad (although one could argue it never reaches the "becomes funny because of being overly long" stage from being simply boring). - The commercial to the 3D King Kong attraction at Universal Studios where the kid screams nearly the entire time after a quick glimpse of Kong. - The FedEx commercial with AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Auto Repair, who really wanted the first listing in the phone book. The coworker suggests that they use FedEx to make their business more prominent. The boss says, "Great idea. You know, you've got a bright future here at AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-" - This commercial for Red Stripe beer. - MBS! MBS! M.B.S! - From the 2017 Super Bowl: BUSCHHHHHHHHHHHHH. - In the Atlanta area, there's a home improvement company whose ad campaign centers on a girl mispronouncing the company's name. It was cute when the girl was young enough to believably talk like that, but it dragged on for years, going from "cute" to "annoying" to "just stop it already!" Later ads tried to circle back around to "funny" with copious amounts of Lampshade Hanging, but with little success. - Crow, Servo and Joel's description of Swift's Cold-Blooded Torture in the MST treatment of Tom Swift and His War Tank. Justified in that it lasts as long as it takes for Mr Damon and Ned to realize that Tom Swift, inventor extraordinaire and tank engineer, may have possibly been kidnapped by the German spies they know full well are prowling around Shopton. - Calvin describing the maze he's set up in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series. Lampshaded: "... You may want to be taking notes." - The PONIES The Anthology II skit "Fallin' in Love" features the same clip done six times with different music before Monty Python tells them to "get on with it." - In The Unexpected Love Life of Dusk Shine, Dusk and Fluttershy go on a picnic together. This leads to 21 pages of awkward silence, represented by "..." repeated over 700 times, which continues for two hours after the two had finished eating. - In the Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic England's Amazing Cookbook, it's a RUNNING gag. "Being stuck in a hospital is soooo boring. I mean, very boring. Very, very, very, very...(cheese)...very, very, very, very (3+ screens of scrolling later)...very, very, very, boring." - When "Harry" gets hold of a Time-Turner in Thinking In Little Green Boxes, he spun and spun and spun and spun and spun and spun and the reader has to scroll past several pages of "and spun" to get on with the story. - In Powers of Invisibility, after Adrien tells Nino that he's Chat Noir, he starts dropping what should be fairly obvious hints at Ladybug's secret identity. Thanks to the glamour that protects Miraculous holders identities, (probably), Nino keeps missing the point until Adrien tell him straight out: Nino: Why didnt you just tell her ( Alya) at the same time? Would have been so much more convenient. Adrien: ( exchanging a glance with Juleka) Oh, Marinette wanted to be the one to tell her. Nino: Marinette knows too? Aw, come on, man. Why am I the last one? Adrien: Well, I had to ask Ladybug before I told anyone else. Nino: Yeah, I get that. But Im better bros with you than Marinette. Adrien: ( blinks, then looks at Juleka, who shrugs, before looking back at Nino) I had to ask Ladybug. Nino: Yeah, dude, you said. And then you told Marinette before telling me. Adrien: No, I told Ladybug. Nino: Dude, I heard you the first time. Ladybug, then Marinette, then me. Adrien : No, Nino - ( facepalms, then turns to Juleka ) I apologize for every conversation youve ever had with me. Juleka: Apology accepted. Nino: What am I missing here? Adrien: I didnt tell Marinette my identity after telling Ladybug my identity. Nino: Wait, you told her first? Thats messed up. Adrien: Oh my- I didnt tell her after, because Marinette found out when Ladybug did. Nino: ( blinks, then narrows his eyes) Like a joint reveal? Adrien: Nino, Marinette is Ladybug. - The Fix-It Script Fic series Once Upon a Time in Kingdom Hearts, a OUaT/KH crossover fic where Henry is the analogue to Sora, features an "arc" where Emma and Henry Time Travel to find a Dismantled MacGuffin they need in the present. Once there, Emma, sticking with her "Princess Leia" alias, opts to call Henry "Sora" (the In-Universe explanation being that his father was a Digimon fan); from then on, every single person they meet makes some comment on him having a girl's name. note : It's actually a unisex name EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. - The Mandela Magazine: Partway through their phone conversation, Cesar's Alternate starts making "eeee" sounds at random, much to Mark's confusion. The two arguing about the source of the "eeee"s, along with Mark asking if Cesar is mocking him and the Alternate denying he's responsible while continuing to make the noise, carries on for a full minute. - The Three Caballeros: When singing the title song, Panchito hits an incredibly long note at the end, with Donald and José Carioca trying everything they can think of to shut him up. - Boogie has the Hot Pursuit scene where a fifteen-second stream of police vehicles chases after the titular character in a stolen cab. - Near the beginning of Megamind, a bit of witty banter between Metroman and Megamind eventually degenerates into them throwing tortured metaphors at each other. - Flushed Away gave us over one minute of Roddy landing crotch-first on various objects. And just when you think the gag is over...he gets hit with one more object. - The LEGO Movie has the scene where Emmet first meets Wyldstyle, and ends up Distracted by the Sexy: "I'm going to have to report yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy..." Also, there's an off-screen variation of the trope when Emmet \|\|falls through an abyss during the five minutes his friends are out saving the world\|\|. - The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: Emmet lets out a nearly thirty-second long gasp when he realizes that Wyldstyle was the lead singer of the pop band that recorded "Everything is Awesome". - In Big Hero 6, Baymax becomes curious when he sees tape, and inflates his arm to the point of popping three holes in it, to which he very slowly plugs the holes one by one. - Home (2015): - In the opening, the Boov in charge of the stadium messing with the stage height, much to Captain Smek's annoyance. - The back and forth between Oh and Smek, with Oh pleading that he won't screw up again and Smek arguing there's a chance that he might. - Zootopia has the entire scene at the Department of Mammal Vehicles. All the employees there are sloths who do everything very slowly, from stapling papers to typing to laughing at one of Nick's jokes. - In Over the Hedge, RJ the raccoon's description of the traps surrounding the suburban house. This sequence goes on for at least 30 seconds, which in cartoon time is forever. RJ: There are traps here, here, here, here...and here. And some here, here, here...and all over this area here. - We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story: Stubbs the clown's resignation. The Nostalgia Critic went through bursts of "SHUT UP!" halfway through (and for once, he wasn't extending the gag himself...it really was that long). - In The Emperor's New Groove, Yzma pretends to be a relative of Pacha. Just like the Dragon Ball example above, Pacha's son Tipo follows Yzma around the house, saying that Yzma couldn't possibly be his great-aunt, but she could be his "great-great-great-great-great...( and he goes on)" Yzma: All right! Are you through? Tipo: ...great-great-aunt. - Up: - Carl descending the staircase on his Stair Lift. - Russell getting dragged against the outside of Muntz's airship windshield. - There's a story by the brothers Grimm which goes like this: Hans goes to his girlfriend Gretel. Gretel gives Hans something. Hans goes home, transporting X in a way you shouldn't. His mother tells him how he should've done it better. Hans promises to do better next time. Next day, he visits Gretel again, this time he gets an Y and does with it as he should've done with X. Rinse and repeat. - John Hodgman's lists: - Cryptonomicon: - A page is dedicated to Randy Waterhouse thinking about his love of breakfast cereal and the creation of a spoon that would repeatably create the perfect bite, where the cereal is introduced to the milk at the very last moment. It humorously establishes how he sees the world. - Von Hacklheber's organisational chart of the German High Command. - Discworld: - In a parody book called The Dragon With The Girl Tattoo, Kaal interrupts Vagner's story to correct him on the pluralisation of the word "sheep". This leads to three and a half pages of argument on the subject. - In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there's a character whose entire existence is this, given that each of his incarnations is killed by the same man, unknowingly. - Johannes Cabal the Necromancer: When Johannes confronts the warlock Rufus Maleficarus, Rufus begins to cast a death curse whose incantation is so long that Johannes can deliver a four-paragraph "The Reason You Suck" Speech, retrieve his Hand Cannon from his suitcase, and shoot Rufus dead. - Lampshaded in the second book of The Malloreon where Silk continues to make complaints about having porridge for breakfast and enjoying any breakfast that isn't porridge...until Polgara suggests his incessant repetitiveness could be a sign of limited intelligence. - In A Series of Unfortunate Events book The Reptile Room, Lemony Snicket warns the reader that you should "never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever..." [repeat until it fills up the entire page and creates a Wall of Text] "...fiddle around with electric devices. Never. Unless you happen to be Violet Baudelaire." - Snow Crash: The novel features a multi-page office memo of what remains of the United States government that admits the government doesn't have the budget to stock toilet paper in the bathrooms, warns employees against wiping their asses with low-denomination bills, and recommends the creation of a toilet paper fund. - In The Adventure Zone: Balance, Magic Brian takes so goddamn long to actually die after being thrown into the pit that it quickly circles back around into being hilarious. He continues to monologue about how he's dying for almost two straight minutes before Taako finally casts Magic Missile at him again to finish him off (and shut him up). - In the second episode of Jemjammer the party gets ambushed by bandits. Cacophony has to rouse everyone from their sleep to fight back, and Jylliana spends a good five minutes waking up and gathering up her stuff. It almost lasts into the fight itself! - Chris Jericho promo number 170: armbar! - Possibly unintentional (but probably not): during a short WCW "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan match, play-by-play commentator Tony Schiavone claimed that Hacksaw was "a very intelligent man." Color commentator Bobby Heenan proceeded to laugh uncontrollably. For the entire three-minute match. When Schiavone brings up Duggan's college football career near the end, Heenan yells "COLLEGE!" and starts laughing even harder. - The WHAT? chants. Can also be considered a 10-year-long running gag considering it's still very much alive today. - My name is John Laurinaitis, Executive Vice-President of Talent Relations and General Manager of Raw and Smackdown. - One episode of Raw had Daniel Bryan doing his signature "YES!" shout for a good minute or so after deciding his submission move would now known as the "YES!" Lock rather than the LeBell Lock. - A similar gag was done on an episode of SmackDown where it went to commercial with Daniel Bryan and A.J. Lee doing dueling "YES!" chants. The comes back from commercial with them still at it, and a tired-sounding Michael Cole says, "They've been doing this the entire break." - In case you want to boo something, Paul Heyman would like you to boo this: his client, Brock Lesnar, conquered the Streak! His client, Brock Lesnar, conquered the Streak! His client, Brock Lesnar, conquered the Streak! His client, Brock Lesnar, conquered the Streak! His client, Brock Lesnar, conquered the Streak! His client, Brock Lesnar, conquered the Streak! His client, Brock Lesnar, conquered the Streak! His client, Brock Lesnar, conquered the Streak! - The Goon Show used this trope repeatedly. No, the camera is not required. Several episodes used this, presented as a minute or more of dead silence "For the safety of the performers", footsteps, or Minie Banister's ramblings... - The very first episode of Hancock's Half Hour began with a character hitting the keys on a typewriter very slowly, until after a while Hancock interrupts and suggests that it would be quicker if he took off the boxing gloves. - Australian radio presenter Graeme Gilbert once suffered a ridiculously long series of prank callers, all giving the same nonsense answer ("India!") to his phone-in quiz questions. - Radio show and podcast Comedy Bang Bang features an overly long Renaissance-style musical introduction to the game "Would You Rather," with host Scott Aukerman admonishing any guests who try to speak over it to "shut the fuck up." - In one episode of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, during a dispute over the rules of Mornington Crescent, chairman Jack Dee decides to go and look them up. So we hear him leaving the studio, going down a corridor, opening a creaky door, thumping a book on a table, leafing through it, putting it back on the shelf, going back through the creaky door, up the corridor again, back to the studio (cue audience applause, suggesting he did actually leave for the sake of this) and announcing "It doesn't say." - Shadowrun : - A published adventure for 3rd edition has a character who greets the party and advises them that "while on the premises it would be unwise to use any...", then lists everything offensive the party possess. Given how characters in this game tend to be the speech frequently fulfills this trope. - Another adventure had the reading of the president's last will and testament. Given that the president was a millennia-old dragon, even though it's hilarious, it's almost impossible to read all in one sitting just from raw length. - This article by Mark Rosewater, lead designer of Magic: The Gathering. In fact, he spells it out. - The beginning of Universal Studios' Horror Make-Up Show has one of the hosts coming on stage "dying" from being impaled in the heart. Their "death" goes on for a while, with them dying a slow death as they constantly scream to the point of sounding bored and spend a large portion of time specifically asking one person in the audience for help. - The Disneyland California stage show of Aladdin featured Genie doing this in the last performance. Normally, when Jafar gets the lamp, Genie just makes one or two jokes before moving on to granting his wishes. For the last performance he goes on and on, making jokes about past masters and comparing Jafar to other Disney villains (and even Darth Vader!) Part of the gag is Jafar's increasingly frustrated expression and Big "NO!" when Genie asks him "are we done here?" - Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: - Damon Gant bursts out into manic laughter when you \|\|out him as trying to frame Ema Skye for murder. And prove he killed a prosecutor. And a detective\|\|. Even better is his stare, which he does quite often. It lasts for so long, one would think their game had frozen if it wasn't for his occasional blinking. - Trials and Tribulations has Furio Tigre's scream of rage when you first meet him at the park: [GWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA] [AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA] (for about seven boxes of text) [AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA] [AR!] - The Department of Redundancy Department. - Every trope with an entry on Major Alex Louis Armstrong has THIS TROPE HAS BEEN PASSED DOWN THE ARMSTRONG LINE FOR GENERATIONS in it. Every. Single. One. - The Grappling-Hook Pistol page contains an entry about Batman in every entry. - Egregious use of the word "egregious". See Author Vocabulary Calendar for a really egregious example (that's three sips in a single line, BTW). - The page for Loads and Loads of Loading. - The article on Strike Witches used to mention the fact that they weren't wearing any pants more or less every entry, until the Genre Shift of the show itself prompted deletion. - The Filler example on the page for American Idol used to be duplicated on the page, including such trope entries as "More Filler" and "Engaging Chevrons, just to break up the monotony of the Filler", to mock Idol's constant usage of it. - On the page for Seattle, "Filmed in Vancouver." - The entry for Monty Python on this very page used to be so much, much longer, having been reduced to a shameless parroting of favorite lines from various sketches or the movies. - The page for Rozen Maiden has every trope example ending in desu to demonstrate Suiseiseki...and /b/'s constant Memetic Mutation of it. - Several profanity tropes overuse their respective curses; This Is for Emphasis, Bitch! uses the word "Bitch" after every sentence and header (Bitch), Cluster F-Bomb is covered in profanity (though not as much as it should), and Symbol Swearing has, well, symbol swearing in every sentence and header. - The article about Candle Jack, where sentences don't complete. Remember what was said about 'losing' its entertainment value? Seriously, it gets really old really fa - CSI: Miami puts shades likes some The Who. YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! - Remember kids: On the How Not to Write an Example page, always be sure to add an entry saying how one should always duplicate examples in case someone missed it. - The pages describing the Final Fantasy games use increasingly ludicrous adjectives to describe the popularity of the series with each numerically subsequent game. - The Better Than It Sounds entries of The Legend of Zelda consist of two parts: The actual description of the game and a convoluted explanation of where the game falls in the Continuity Snarl that is its timeline. - Canada, Eh? has every sentence ending in "eh", eh? - No real life examples, please. - Many, many examples of Memetic Mutation. - The beautiful useful notes: Brazil page has a beautiful example of this with the beautiful word, "beautiful". - The entry for the Flash Gordon movie (which had a soundtrack by Queen) would like to remind you that the movie had a soundtrack done by Queen. - The entry for the Doctor Who serial (of Rassilon) The Five Doctors (of Rassilon) made sure (until clarity [of Rassilon] became compromised) that every trope (of Rassilon) was a Trope of Rassilon. Now the tradition (of Rassilon) and gag (of Rassilon) has been moved to the article (of Rassilon). - The jokes about zombies in the comments section of this Mushroom Go page. The jokes start about halfway down the page and keep going. - In the (now deleted) Headscratchers page describing "School", someone asked "Why do kids hate school? Can anyone give me some legit responses." After someone gave a bunch of responses... someone else responded to every single point, often repeating "Learn to box". This prompted somebody else to respond to every "Learn to box" comment with "You get expelled for that." - The intros for Characters pages for Negima! Magister Negi Magi, when read in sequence, walk the reader through a no-frills meal, starting with a not-too-unusual "get a sandwich, this may take a while" gag, and continuing through three more courses (another sandwich, an enchilada, and desert), beverage, intermission snack, and toothpick. - Zendaya has gone from the name of a singer to a tired joke that has shown up in every Marvel affiliated WMG page, as well as random pages unconnected to Marvel at all. This is most often done by suggesting that a character will be played by her (Especially if the character is a man).	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyLongGag
Overpowered Tropes - TV Tropes In general, conflict requires the heroes to be on the defensive, and have the possibility of losing. Video Games also require a challenge, for the game to be fun. Some characters, however don't have any challenge at all. This can easily derail the story, and remove any drama. Tropes Are Not Bad, however. A powerful villain gives the heroes a credible threat, and a powerful hero can be fun to watch. Just don't overdo it. It should be noted however, that overpowered characters doesn't necessarily mean that they are boring, as they can have their overall weaknesses in terms of their powers and abilities, personality, and among other things. An example of an overpowered character with weaknesses is Kal-El/Superman from DC Comics. He may have an incredible amount of powerful abilities, but in truth, he still has plenty of weaknesses to his powers and abilities according to his physiological stature as a Kryptonian. For instance, he is susceptible to not only psionics, chi and magic, but the most prominent one of all is kryptonite. Contrast Weakness Tropes, Power at a Price and This Index Is Useless. See Power Tropes for general information about powers. See also How to Stop the Deus ex Machina. Not to Be Confused with Overdosed Tropes. <!—index—>	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverpoweredTropes
Off Bridge, onto Vehicle - TV Tropes Our heroes/heroines are on the run, whether from the bad guys or misinformed agents of the law. They attempt to flee over a bridge or overpass, only to find that their pursuers have sealed the other end of it and are closing on them. They're cornered. What do they do? Surrender? Go down in a blaze of glory? Why no, they look off the bridge, spot an accommodating looking vehicle passing beneath it (depending on what's under the bridge, it could be a truck, train, boat, Soft Water or any number of other possibilities), and take a well-timed leap, landing safely on the back of it and escaping. A very frequent type of stunt in action movies, it is sometimes subverted humorously by having the character Face Plant painfully on the ground beneath the bridge, or dramatically by having him or her only pretend to take such a leap or otherwise mislead pursuers into thinking he or she has done so (by, for example, throwing a cell phone or other piece of trackable electronic equipment onto the back of a passing vehicle). It's just as often played straight, however. Can (but doesn't have to) involve a No Escape but Down. Variations: - Can involve a jump from any high place, including buildings, cliffs, etc. - Can involve falling off a high place instead of jumping. - Can be carried away by something other than a vehicle (e.g. a river). - Vehicle-Roof Body Disposal, when it's a corpse rather than a live person. ## Examples: - Just For Men hair coloring. A female neighbor asks to borrow some milk, which the guy doesn't have. He jumps out a window onto a truck passing by underneath. - Comical variation in Change 123: When one of the heroine's Split Personalities is about to start a fight, she suddenly jumps off the footbridge — not to escape, but because she had recklessly put away her purse onto the railing and later pushed it down with her elbow, so she has to jump down (onto a truck) to fetch it. - Cowboy Bebop: - Subverted in "Stray Dog Strut". Spike and Hakim both jump after Ein when the dog jumps off a bridge onto the canvas covering of a boat passing underneath it, but Ein turns around and jumps into Spike, so that the two of them fall into the canal while Hakim lands on the boat, tearing through the canvas covering and falling into a tank filled with live crabs. - Played straight in "Boogie Woogie Feng Shui". Jet and Maifa jump off the top of a stone wall and land on a passing bus to avoid the two pursuing gunmen. - Zangulus tries this in one episode of Slayers when trying to capture Lina as she and her friends were rafting down a river. He mistimes the jump and splashes into the river before the raft passes under the bridge he jumped from. - Blake and Mortimer: Olrik does it as he's being exchanged for a Soviet scientist, jumping off a bridge rather then going to the gulag. As he does it on the Soviet side of the border, the heroes declare it the Soviets' problem and leave. - The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones: In #5, Indy and his female companion are dangling off London Bridge by Indy's bullwhip, when Nazi agents arrive. They point guns at Indy and demand he hand over the MacGuffin. Indy says that his options are to agree or to loosen the whip and drop to almost certain death in the river. Then, to the Nazis' astonishment, he does just that. However, instead of hitting the water, he and his companion land on a garbage scow that is passing underneath. - Robin: When some car thieves pull onto a busy Gotham freeway Tim takes a shortcut to a bridge over it in his Redbird and then leaps down onto the truck they're driving. - Tintin did it twice in The Black Island. The first time, he failed. - Wolf attempts to pull it off in an episode of Nu, Pogodi!, jumping off a bridge to land on his runaway motorcycle. He just barely misses. - Bolt. Bolt jumps onto a train from a bridge, with reluctant prisoner Mittens and delusional fanboy Rhino in tow. Rhino reassures Mittens that he does it all the time in the "magic box", which is how she realizes that Bolt's just an actor in a TV show. - The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons. In his Back Story Alexander escaped from the train taking him to The Gulag by jumping out while it was crossing a river 30 metres below. His chances of survival were so small the guards never even bothered stopping the train to look for him. - In the spy thriller The Man Who Was Saturday, the protagonist escapes pursuit by jumping off a bridge onto a passing barge. He breaks a leg on the landing, and it doesn't heal neatly, either. - In the third of the Rachel Peng Novels, Rachel just barely manages to keep Jordan from trying this when he's running from the cops—she knows that the real world doesn't work like the movies, and it would not end well for him. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To cure Angel from a poisoned arrow fired by rogue vampire slayer Faith, Buffy needs the blood of a Slayer. So Buffy and Faith fight to the death, but when it looks like Buffy will win, Faith throws her injured body off the building onto passing truck as a final Take That! to her rival. - CSI: NY: In the final episode of the Cabbie Killer's arc, Mac & Flack have apparently cornered the perp near the top of a grain bin at a brewery, but the guy jumps before they reach him and lands on the canvas top of a passing semi truck, eluding capture for a bit longer. - In Day Break (2006), Hopper jumps from a footbridge onto a moving metro to escape his pursuers. - Dead Man's Gun: In "The Highwayman", Robert jumps off the scarp on to the roof the stagecoach and holds his gun on the driver and guard to force them to stop. - Towards the climax of Due South episode "All The Queen's Horses", Raymond Vecchio (while carrying Canine Companion Diefenbaker) successfully jumps from a bridge to get onto the out-of-control train that the rest of the cast has been fighting terrorists on. - On Leverage team thief Parker does this when cornered by a security guard at a company they are infiltrating. She back flips off the balcony and hangs on below by her fingertips. - In the Person of Interest episode "Reasonable Doubt" the POI escapes Carter by jumping off a high-rise onto a dump truck full of garbage. - One idiot on World's Dumbest... attempts a stunt where he BASE-jumps from a bridge into a raft being pulled by a motorboat. He misses the raft and splashes into the river. (The commentators point out that he parachuted in the direction opposite to the boat, so even if he'd hit the raft, he wouldn't have stayed in. Had he gone in the same direction as the boat, he might've succeeded.) - In the video for Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me", Shaggy directs Rik to jump off a bridge and onto a passing truck he's arranged to pass underneath in order to escape Rik's vengeful girlfriend on whom he has just been caught cheating. - Final Fantasy VI does this with chocobos at one point early on, when the party needs to escape Figaro Castle after it's been set on fire and about to burrow underground. - Done in Final Fantasy VII with a train after the characters blow the mako generator up. - In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II has the heroes jumping from the bridge to the Eisengraf train stationed at Roer in order to rescue Alisa's mom who is held hostage. Said train is also moving because the jaegers alerted everyone of intruders. - In Chapter 3 of The Walking Dead by Telltale Games, Lee and Omid are forced to jump from an overpass onto the train because of a oncoming herd of Walkers. - Max Payne: It doesn't involve a literal bridge, but Vinnie Gognitti tries to escape from Max by jumping off the roof of a building onto a passing subway train. Unfortunately for him, there's a second train only a couple of minutes behind, and if he was hoping Max wasn't crazy enough to try the same stunt he gets an unpleasant surprise soon after. - Dead Fantasy 5. Heavily wounded and surrounded by ninjas, Tifa jumps from the top of a building and lands on a passing train below. - In Girl Genius, Dimo launches himself off the pitched roof of a three story train station onto the snowy roof of the caboose on a departing train. - In A Miracle of Science Benjamin and Caprice ride their motorcycle off the reservoir embankment and onto a passing train in order to escape some robots. Notably this is only possible because Mars is providing support to get the timing right. - Boo Boom! The Long Way Home: Episode 25, Boo-Boom does this in order to get onto the train that is carrying his parents to a prison camp, after the original plan to keep the train from departing fails. - Used by Bugs Bunny in the Anvilicious Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue when explaining that "My friends were doing it" is no excuse for getting into drugs; even if the others weren't being malicious, a bad idea is a bad idea. - Batman: The Animated Series: in the episode "The Clock King", the titular villain escapes from Batman in their first encounter by jumping from a bridge onto a passing train; being a Schedule Fanatic, he knew it would pass under that bridge at that exact moment.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverpassEscape
Overpopulation Crisis - TV Tropes "Titan was like most planets: too many mouths, not enough to go around." The population of an area, whether it be a small region, a country, a planet, or a Galactic Superpower has grown so large it is causing problems. The result might be societal instability, war, ecological catastrophe, cannibalism... the specifics do not really matter what matters is that there are too many people and it is causing problems. This is often a feature of a dystopia and Cyberpunk, and can be used as a form of Green Aesop about uninhibited growth in a finite area. May be prevented or resolved through the use of Population Control, settling new, uninhabited places, or even good old-fashioned Depopulation Bombs if the powers that be feel it is the only way. If unhandled, the crisis can cause The End of the World as We Know It if it grows severe enough as riots run rampant for what resources remain. This is one of the threats of the Explosive Breeder even if it's not malicious, the sheer amount of offspring will eventually cause trouble if left unchecked. An Eco-Terrorist may resort to a Final Solution largely out of fear of a Malthusian crisis. The idea of overpopulation is often used by proponents to justify genocidal policies, arguing that it is easier to reduce or control the population ("coincidentally", it's usually a specific population they personally dislike or don't care for) than to figure out ways to increase or share the resources available to everyone. Sufficed to say, depending on which population they decide must be culled, it can get pretty racist and classist. The Earth-centric version of this trope is largely broken in contemporary and 20 Minutes into the Future stories due to technological and societal advancements in our real world: for example, if anything our industrialized farming and agricultural technologies lead us to over-produce food, and problems with starvation are more about political and economic questions of distribution (aka "who is permitted access to the food?") rather than "we do not have enough to feed everyone". Many nations have also started to project a population decline (and all the problems that brings) due to undergoing a demographic transition. However, this hasn't stopped people from using the idea of overpopulation as a bad faith argument for their own agendas (such as anti-immigration). See the Analysis page for more details about how the problems of "overpopulation" have many different causes. ## Examples: - In the Gundam franchise, this is the impetus behind building the Space Colonies in many shows: the Earth had become overpopulated, so enormous space stations capable of supporting billions of people are built in orbit. A few series have gone further and included a Mars terraformation project in addition. - Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Adai village has no ability to expand its pool of resources, and so limits its population to exactly 100. The village's leader presents this idea as religious dogma (from an ancient text no one can actually read), and enforces it by banishing someone whenever a birth brings things over the limit. Note that it's implied the village has done this for hundreds or thousands of years, but an indefinitely stable population would require a thousand or more people. - Judge Dredd: Part of the reason the setting is so crime-ridden is that most of the planet was rendered uninhabitable by nuclear war, forcing people to live in the megacities. The only alternative consists of trying to live in the Cursed Earth, the radioactive Death World outside, which is basically suicide (though some hardier people and mutants manage to survive out there). Exacerbating the problem is the equally high population of Job Stealing Robots, which keeps unemployment rates soaring. - In a '90s Silver Surfer arc, Death resurrected Thanos and tasked him with destroying half of the universe's sentient life in order to prevent a massive population crisis. Thanos demonstrated the problem to the Surfer by showing him the effects that overpopulation and a lack of natural resources had on an inhabited planet, and claimed that the rest of the universe would soon meet with a similar fate. This plot eventually led to The Infinity Gauntlet crossover, where Thanos used the Infinity Gems to accomplish Death's goal. - In Avengers: Infinity War, it's revealed that overpopulation and the subsequent abuse of natural resources led to the destruction of Titan and the death of all its people... except for Thanos. His desire to save the rest of the universe from suffering the same fate as Titan has motivated his actions in the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever since, and in Infinity War his plan is to finally gather all the Infinity Stones and use their combined power to simultaneously wipe out half the universe's population. \|\|He ultimately succeeds.\|\| - We learn that Thanos had taken Gamora from her homeworld as a child after executing half the planet's population, but small visual details in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) show that Gamora is now the last survivor, meaning Thanos' "grand plan" was a failure even then. - Avengers: Endgame shows that \|\|it backfired hard. Five years after the Snap, instead of teeming with life, from the brief shots we see of New York and San Francisco, indicate that the Earth left behind has stagnated at best, and is rotting at worst (and the space-based Avengers (Captain Marvel, Rocket Racoon, Nebula), state that the rest of the universe is no better, if not worse, off) - and that's on top of the wave of terror Thanos unleashed on his way to claim the Stones. Whales are returning to the Hudson River, and depopulated areas have been claimed by nature, but these small improvements pale in comparison to crumbling societies and despairing and barely-functional populations across the universe\|\|. - Spider-Man: No Way Home: This is what the botched memory erasure spell threatens to inflict on the MCU. Since Peters last-second alterations caused the spell to end up being "everyone who already knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man should still remember", this ends up attracting literally everyone who knows from the infinite number of timelines in the multiverse towards the MCU. - In Conquest of Space this is given as a reason for the mission to Mars: to get its resources to prevent an overpopulation crisis on Earth. It depends on Artistic License - Astronomy since in reality, Mars is a cold and barren rock, whereas the Mars in the film has soil that a seed from Earth can sprout in. - Elysium: Among the problems that plague the dystopian Earth of the future is overpopulation, along with high crime, poverty, and medicine being restricted to the rich on Elysium. At the end of the film, \|\|all of Earth's people are approved as Elysium citizens and so can receive medicine, but the director admitted afterward that this was an Esoteric Happy Ending that would only worsen the overpopulation problem (though it does seem like contraception may also be provided).\|\| - In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Emma Russell, the human who frees King Ghidorah, believes that the Earth is overpopulated with humans leading to depletion of resources and pollution, and feels that releasing the monsters will help restore the earth to its natural green state. Of course none of the protagonists support her eco-radical theory about releasing the monsters to restore balance to the ecosystem and environment, as King Ghidorah is even more destructive than the humans. - The Big Bad Ensemble of Sacha Baron Cohen's Grimsby justify their plans to create a virus that is fatal to humans in order to curb overpopulation. They also believe the virus can kill off the "stupid" people who are a waste of space as all they ever do is eat and reproduce. - Rampage (2009) has Bill Williamson, an angry and highly intelligent man working a low-paying job as an auto mechanic, go on a killing spree upon his hometown of Tenderville, Oregon and he uses this trope as his Casus belli to justify his killings. - An overpopulation-induced resource crunch is stated in the introduction of Serenity to have prompted the settlement of the star cluster the Firefly franchise takes place in, and led to Earth becoming Earth That Was. - A central theme in Soylent Green. Earth is so overpopulated that the only way to feed the people (other than the wealthy who can afford normal food) is through a product called Soylent Red and Yellow, which is made from processed plankton, and even that is in short supply. A new product called Soylent Green comes at the market and in the film's climax it turns out that \|\|the oceans are dead, have been for some time and Soylent Green is made of people!\|\| - Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth) features a world so overcrowded that having babies is banned for thirty years on pain of death. Its plot involves a couple having a baby in secret and having to flee. - In Aeon 14, the Sol system's government resorted to extrasolar colonization beginning in the 2100s to try and deal with population-induced resource strains, hence the colony ship Intrepid around which the series revolves. Even so, it's mentioned once in the early books that the Sol system's population in 4123 is now so high that they're in danger of mining out the entire Sol system within the main characters' (admittedly hundreds of years long) lifetimes. \|\|The advent of Faster-Than-Light Travel in the 5,000 year Time Dilation-induced Time Skip between books 3 and 4 takes the strain off, but also causes a partial collapse of civilization and loss of much knowledge because interstellar warfare is now practical and humanity no longer has to be as efficient with its resources.\|\| - In "Billennium" by J. G. Ballard, the world population is over 20 billion, most of the planet is used for agriculture, roads are permanently filled with crowds of pedestrians so that people have to weave through a Mobstacle Course every time they want to cross the street, and each person is limited to four square metres of living space, with plans to reduce the allocation even further. - Referenced in A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge says that the poor should die in order to "decrease the surplus population." At the time this was written, overpopulation fears were often cited to justify the mistreatment of the poor. - Ender's Game: Due to overpopulation, most of Earth's nations have enforced laws stating families are to have no more than two children. However, a few nations such as Poland openly flout the law, with many large families but the consequence being that only the first two children are eligible for public education and benefits. The protagonist, Ender, is a rare example of a state-approved Third, as the International Fleet authorized his parents to have another child because they recognized military potential in their first two. Since Peter and Valentine were examined but rejected for various reasons (Peter for being too aggressive, Valentine as too pacifistic), the military hopes Ender might be a balance of their traits. - Overpopulation problems are a recurring theme in many of Robert A. Heinlein's novels, to which the solution is often Faster-Than-Light Travel: - When the Howards' families return to Earth at the end of Methuselah's Children they find that the planet has become so crowded that there's literally no room left for them, fortunately one of the Howards has invented FTL and offers it freely. Still, in the distant sequel Time Enough for Love Lazarus Long mentions in one of his stories that at one point Earth's government declared everyone over 70 to be legally dead in an attempt at population control. - Tunnel in the Sky: China apparently conquered Australia and paved over the entire continent to make room for its growing population before the Portal Network was developed, now they chuck hordes of settlers to new worlds through the gates. - Starship Troopers: Rico is assigned a class essay on how war is always the result of overpopulation, from the Crusades to the current Bug War. And that humanity doesn't dare institute Population Control, lest some other species like the Bugs expand first and wipe them out for more real estate. - Farmer in the Sky: The Earth has so many people that everyone on the planet is put on strict food rationing. It's the major reason why the protagonists decide to emigrate to Ganymede (one of Jupiter's moons). Late in the novel one of the characters says that Earth's overpopulation will inevitably lead to a nuclear war within 40-70 years. - Time for the Stars. The family of the twin protagonists live just above the poverty line because their birth raised them above the tax threshold. It's mentioned that the Earth barely has enough food to feed its population of five billion despite colonising the solar system, melting the Greenland icecap, putting a lake in the Sahara and farming the steppes. - Industrial Society and Its Future: This is one of many modern problems that Kaczynski blames on the system. - In Larry Niven's Known Space books, Earth is so crowded that picking pockets isn't illegal how could it be enforced? - Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison is set on an overcrowded future Earth. American ports are swamped by shiploads of starving Asian refugees; a wealthy man's mistress is allowed to pour the juices from his steak on her oatmeal as a special treat. Set in 1999 when the world population is an unmanageable 7 billion. - Cyril M. Kornbluth's The Marching Morons: Barlow, a real-estate salesman and conman from 1988 (the story itself was written in 1951) is awoken from accidental suspended animation centuries into the future, and discovers an overpopulated world of 5 billion "morons", where the average IQ is 45. A small population (3 million) of intellectuals are forced to work around the clock to keep society from collapsing, while also trying desperately to keep the "morons" from having enormous families, which is essentially impossible, as every basic human drive is based around procreation. Barlow, using his experiences in selling worthless properties to suckers, ends up proposing a Final Solution by tricking the majority of humanity into killing themselves through a phony planetary colonization scheme, but doesn't realize until it's too late that instead of rewarding him, the elite intends to send him to his death right alongside his victims, since they blame him for the dismal future as a representative of the past. - In Fred Hoyle's October the First Is Too Late, a time-traveller from the future explains that civilisations have risen and collapsed half a dozen times since the present day; each time, the civilisation was brought down by overpopulation leading to war. - The Ant's plot to kill the dinosaurs in Of Ants and Dinosaurs is kicked off when the dinosaurs refuse to get their population under control. - In the backstory of the RCN series, Earth was so overpopulated that it started shipping people to offworld colonies without their consent, which eventually led to a galaxy-wide war that ended in a new dark age and Earth being so thoroughly bombarded with asteroids that the continents were rendered unrecognizable. Adele once wryly observes that, technically, Earth got what it wanted. - In Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner the world is so overcrowded that people with minor birth defects can't get permits to breed. - In The Starchild Trilogy by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, the population of Earth has reached the thirteen billion mark, and the only thing which has prevented chaos and a massive die-off is the dictatorial control of the powerful computer known as "The Plan of Man". - In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, all the planets of the solar system have been colonized, but Earth is still so overpopulated that the government has had to institute a draft to get people moving to the colonies fast enough. Life on the colonies isn't terrible, but it's harsh enough that volunteers don't begin to keep up with Earth's needs. Deferments are available for those with sufficiently important jobs, but this just adds an extra fear to the fear of losing your job. - In "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Kurt Vonnegut, overpopulation is connected to the invention of a medicine called anti-gerasone, which stops the aging process and people no longer die of old age and related diseases as long as they keep taking it. It is cheap and easily obtained, made from mud and common flowers. The world now suffers from severe overpopulation, lack of living space and shortages of food and resources. - Three of George R. R. Martin's Tuf Voyaging stories (''Loaves and Fishes", "Second Helpings" and "Manna from Heaven") chronicle Haviland Tuf's encounters with the people of the planet S'uthlam. Their religion has the doctrine that all life is sacred and that humans should, therefore, breed as much as possible. As a result, their planet is dangerously overpopulated. The government repeatedly tries to seize Tuf's Lost Technology bio-warship to use in conquering other planets and relieving population pressure, he tries to appease them by providing new food sources \|\|and the third and last time he adds a Sterility Plague to the new crops.\|\| - In the Warrior Cats prequel series Dawn of the Clans, the series starts with the Tribe of Rushing Water suffering from overpopulation: the Tribe has grown too big to survive on the amount of prey that their environment can provide, and cats are starving to death. Their leader has a vision of new lands teeming with prey, and half the Tribe leaves, eventually becoming the forest Clans, while the other half remains in their mountain home and is able to support themselves better with fewer mouths to feed. - The setting for The White Men, is a dystopian future version of Denmark, which underwent such a crisis and transformed into a fascist state where the State Sec, the titular "White Men", kills off anyone who they deem unfit to live, which includes the handicapped and chronically-ill, people who commit any sort of crime, even minor ones, anyone who reaches the age of 65, and even students who fail to pass their exams with a high enough grade. Throughout the story, it becomes evident that even if these draconian and inhumane policies were at some point necessary to solve the crisis, that is definitely not the case any more, as the country currently teeters on the edge on of a serious underpopulation crisis, and it is obvious that the fascist government only still upholds them as a means of controlling the leftover population through the fear they instil in them. - Isaac Asimov wrote The Winnowing which has six billion people on the planet, and famines are thus widespread. While that prediction has shown to be wrong in Real Life, at the time of its writing it was definitely an example of this trope. - This was the main theme in many of William R. Catton's writings, including his books Overshoot (1980) and Bottleneck (2009). - In Worm, the predecessors of the \|\|Entities\|\| experienced cycles of overpopulation followed by wars over the remaining resources which would push them to near-extinction. Realizing that the cycle was unsustainable as the nutrient sources were depleting faster each time, they devised the plan to \|\|leave their homeworld and infest other planets\|\|. Their descendants are aware that even this is a temporary solution, as eventually \|\|there will be no new planets to feed on\|\| and are trying to find a solution. - Aftermath: The episode "Population Overload" explores exactly this, when the population of Earth spontaneously doubles overnight. At first humanity tries to cope by rationing resources and rapidly expanding construction, but eventually society breaks down, resulting in huge population movements and an eventual Depopulation Bomb. - The Outer Limits (1995): - In "Manifest Destiny", Earth is severely overpopulated and other planets are being terraformed and colonized as a result. - In "Stasis", Earth's severe overpopulation results in its resources being significantly depleted. - Overpopulation is one of the factors that jumpstarts the plot in Terra Nova (the other one being extreme pollution) - the plot being "send some humans through a wormhole to an alternate Earth resembling the Cretaceous Period." - The premise of Torchwood: Miracle Day is that people have stopped dying. Governments do the math and realise that the world population level is going to rise to unsustainable levels within a few years. - In the Anvilicious Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Mark of Gideon", the crew visit a planet which is so overpopulated that even the president's office has a crowd of people milling around in the background. The people of the planet believe "all life is sacred" and reject birth control. They also have medicine so advanced that people never get sick and live to a very old age. - The OT III doctrine of Scientology — one of the most well-known elements of it due to being famously illustrated by South Park — says that humans are the end result of galactic conqueror Xenu dealing with an overpopulation crisis 75 million years ago across 76 planets, each with an average population of 178 billion. Countless aliens were gathered, frozen, and compacted into singular bodies as a means of addressing it. - Calvin and Hobbes: One infamous Sunday strip had Calvin deliver a report on overpopulation where a pair of deer shoot an office worker to help curb the population and prevent famine, in a ghoulish inversion of a common (and accurate) justification for deer hunting. Unsurprisingly, this results in yet another note from school being sent to Calvins parents. - Warhammer 40,000 - Of the Imperium of Man's many, many problems, this is surprisingly not one of them. Yes, many worlds house billions of people in Hive cities, but this is actually encouraged. Most of the logistics and spacing problems are handwaved (e.g. many worlds resort to recycling the dead into edible material), but it recognizes keeping people suppressed, indoctrinated, and packed like sardines is a very efficient way to manage very large populations. It's something of a joke that the Imperium is short on everything but people, and human labor, press-ganged or volunteered, is a major driver of the Imperium's military and industrial forces. - Later Edition show that many Hives are supported by other worlds in their system. This is actually played straight on Earth, where the population is so massive that there simply isn't enough food or jobs to go around. - Also averted with the Orks. Humanity is the most populous species behind only the Orks, and they manage to support their population by bringing their ecology with them to keep themselves fed, and the occasional mass migration. Also, they have a strong population control in the form of constant violence aimed in all directions. - In Black & White 2, it's not the population itself so much as population density that causes problems. Your citizens will become unhappy if there is insufficient housing or food resources, or if their housing is too tightly packed (e.g. "skyscrapers", really tenements, are efficient with space but bad for happiness, while mansions with lots of space between them make for happy citizens but require lots of building room; villa clusters are generally the best choice). - The Ark in Brink! is a City on the Water which was originally designed to host a population of 5000, but an influx of refugees due to global warming caused its population to swell to 45000. As a result, many of these refugees were forced to live in poorly designed and shoddily constructed shantytowns, and many feel resentment toward The Founders, Ark's original inhabitants who live in safety and luxury. - In Civilization V every city has an assigned number representing its population. Densely populated cities will produce more research and are able to work more tiles and specialist spots. They also produce more unhappiness which, if left to fester will severely decrease your nations growth and golden age frequency. If your citizens are unhappy enough, civil wars might break out. - Crusader Kings II: - Played with for nomads such as the Khazars and Mongols. The Nomad government form has a special resource called "population" and get bigger armies and increased income the longer it is allowed to grow. Once it reaches 90% of maximum, they gain access to the unique "Nomad Invasion" casus belli which allows them to conquer entire de jure kingdoms from other realms. This essentially means overpopulation is good for the nomads and bad for everyone else (since their cavalry- and horse archer-heavy armies can be difficult to counter). - The "Prosperity" measurement added in The Reaper's Due measures wealth and population of a province. Higher Prosperity increases your tax income and can unlock additional holding slots in a province, but also increases the province's vulnerability to epidemics. It also has an opposite form, "Depopulation". - Mass Effect: - Even after the development of Faster-Than-Light Travel, it's noted In-Universe that in the late 22nd Century, Earth is still vastly overpopulated, with over 11 billion humans and an unknown number of aliens living on the planet, and dealing with problems caused by environmental damage which peaked a century ago. Earth's overpopulation and pollution is mocked by many aliens in the series, as an indication of humanity's inability to get its own "house in order", so to speak. A possible origin for protagonist Commander Shepard is to have grown up in a gang of orphan criminals in a polluted megatropolis on Earth. - Drell society collapsed into warlordism due to the overpopulation of their homeworld, which they were unable to escape due to having no element zero. The hanar took pity on them and brought many of the survivors to their own homeworld Kahje as a Servant Race. Shepard: Why was your race going extinct? Thane: Overpopulation. That must sound trite to you. Humans developed mass effect drive before the problem became acute. Our homeworld, Rakhana, had few resources. We hadn't even developed fusion power when the soil began to fail from overuse and pollution. The hanar found us a century ago. They send hundreds of ships. Evacuated thousands of us. Billions more had to be left behind. Shepard: What's the state of Rakhana now? Thane: Do you read your philosophers? A man named Thomas Hobbes? "When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death." As Rakhana died around them my people slaughtered each other for mouthfuls of water. Crumbs of food. - After being uplifted from their homeworld to fight rachni, the krogans found little opposition that would keep their natural birthrate in check, often overpopulating planets in just a few generations. The salarians responded by devising a genophage which would make only one in a thousand krogan births viable. It would supposedly revert krogans' birthrate to what it was back on Tuchanka with all the fatality rates taken into account, which was sustainable... But the krogans saw the genophage as a particularly cowardly act of genocide, and turned to mercenarism to cope with their natural Blood Knight tendencies... which put their species at actual risk of extinction. - The salarians themselves narrowly averted an overpopulation crisis very early in their society's development. Salarians are haplo-diploid egg layers; females lay eggs at regular intervals, with unfertilized eggs hatching into males and fertilized eggs hatching into females. This led to problems very much like those seen on Earth and Rakhana because of how quickly they reproduced. The salarians solved the problem by only allowing ten percent of all eggs to be fertilized, keeping their reproduction growth at a stable level. The quickness with which all salarians accepted this solution is why they expected the krogan to have the same reaction to the Genophage. - Inverted in Pharaoh, and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom where underpopulation is a much bigger problem: due to the game mechanics, huge populations are easier to maintain by keeping the population happy in attractive, high-density housing rather than vast slums (the basic hut holds 5-20 people, the best high-density housing holds 80). Yes, the people consume more, but the higher population means more people to produce goods at a much faster rate than consumed. - Eternal Evil have the Bad Ending depicting humanity's population, as warned by the Vampire Lord, eventually going out of control to beyond 14 billion, and mankind's damage to the environment beyond repair. It leads to a massive power struggle and depopulation, with 43 million people surviving in the aftermath of the 2104 war. You're a human-turned-immortal vampire at this point and you get to witness the downfall of humanity, as predicted. - Lysandre in Pokémon X and Y is a Mad Scientist, Eco-Terrorist, and Misanthrope Supreme who seeks to prevent fighting over resources with a Final Solution using the Ultimate Weapon to kill everyone but Team Flare. - In Stellaris: Population can cause no shortage of problems if not handled. - As the population working your Empire's jobs increases, the demand for consumer goods and amenities increase. Both are produced by specific jobs which means you need to set aside a subset of your population and economy to keep the rest of the population happy as failing to do this will lower the planet's stability, which lowers production on top of the risk that the unhappy population will turn to crime to get what they want. - Overcrowding (as in, too many people, not enough housing) will eventually also erode the stability of the planet, but unless your entire Galactic Superpower is bursting to the brim, the people will generally just move to greener, more spacious pastures. Of course, no one says you have to give the people what they want - if you want to maintain the planet's stability through force, that's perfectly doable - Overcrowding is, however, dwarfed by the damage that having too few jobs for a population can present. People without a home generally tend to make do with what they can, but if they don't have a job, they will near invariably turn to a life of crime to keep themselves fed. The game warns you when there's a substantial risk of this and prompts you to give special benefits to the unemployed (Increasing the strain on your ressources) or risk the increased crime (reducing the output of the planet). You can avoid this completely by enacting a policy of civil welfare - which increases population happiness as well as preventing the unemployment crime, but welfare does not come cheap either. - The fear of this and the damage it could to the planet is the primary motivation of Malthus, co-leader of the Light Demons, in White Dark Life. As such, he seeks to kill most of the planet's population to ease the strain on the environment. - In Brickleberry, Steve creates an adorable and marketable hybrid species of rabbit and squirrels called Squabbits to attract tourists. Problem is, not only does the species breed even faster than its progenitors, it's also virtually unkillable, causing a massive population boom that devours almost all plant life in the park and soon turns the Squabbits carnivorous with a preference for human flesh. The rangers manage to defeat the horde by feeding them Pamela Anderson (who was there as part of a PETA protest), who turns out to be so riddled with toxins and disease that every single Squabbit dies a horrific and agonizing death. - In the Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "Flea-Bitten Ed", the Eds agree to clean up Rolf's farm animals but as while Ed is having a severe allergic reaction, he loses track of two bunnies who start multiplying through rapid reproduction and they overwhelm the Cul-de-sac in the end. The Eds got out lucky by managing to escape to the roof ( with a TV and couch) and the episode ends with Eddy screaming at the other kids suffocating from the rabbit flood to shut up so he can watch TV. - In the Futurama episode "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz", a wildlife preserve of penguins on Pluto gets covered in liquid dark matter that drastically increases their egg production (and the males started laying eggs, too), leading to them overpopulating and an Animal Wrongs Group deciding to give them a Mercy Kill to save them from a slower, more excruciating death when they exhaust their food supply. - The concern for overpopulation is Older Than Feudalism, having been raised by Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century BC. Note the world population was then around two hundred million, or about the same as present-day Nigeria. To be fair, they were writing from overcrowded Athens. - Around the turn of the 19th century, Thomas Robert Malthus warned about overpopulation in his book An Essay on the Principle of Population. Overpopulation became a concern during the Victorian era, with proposed solutions tending to be of the Kill the Poor variety. Malthus' theories were cited to justify Britain allowing the Irish Potato Famine to go on. - There was another overpopulation scare in the Cold War era, spurred by the 1968 book The Population Bomb. The population of Earth was rising and there would soon be too many people to sustain. Even at the time, the claims in the book were questionable, since it depended on unrealistic projections and ignored real-world demographics. Since then technology has marched on along with society and not only is the population growth slowing down, but we also produce more food than ever and the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has never been as low as of this writing. - The idea of the entire Earth becoming overpopulated has NOT been largely discredited. Localized overpopulation is a common concern. Many cities are struggling under the increased traffic that increased population brings because the original city was built in such a way that roads that formerly allowed for horse-drawn carts now need to support the eighteen-wheeler trucks and the vast numbers of cars needed to support the population. Add in a need to dig up roads to perform sewer/cable/pipeline maintenance and you have the city equivalent of growing pains. - Some have argued the Black Death was, in part, the symptom of an overpopulation crisis in the early 14th century. Much of the farmland in Europe had been used up, and many peasants had already suffered crippling famine in the decades before. The death toll was high because many peasants were already weakened by malnutrition. The Black Death may have helped end feudalism since the surviving peasants had enough bargaining power to demand higher wages. - Some have argued the Rwandan Genocide may have been, in part, a Malthusian crisis. Rwanda by the early nineties had an incredibly high population density. Much of the farmland had been used up and living standards had been in decline for several decades. Jared Diamond reported that some Rwandans defend the genocide as an act of population control. - Natural historian Sir David Attenborough is controversially an avid proponent of population control for the sake of the environment, although his proposals are more on the benign side, being limited to furthering sex education and access to contraceptives in developing countries. - China's successful One Child Policy was a result of this belief. However, due to the culture having it where the males of the family took care of their parents in their elder years, this policy had the side effect of Chinese families killing newborn daughters or putting them up for adoption in the West, causing a massive imbalance of males to females in the general population. In 2015 the policy was lifted to a two-child limit and was lifted to a three-child limit in 2021. Ironically, despite lifting the limit, now people don't want to have kids, because of... - The demographic transition, the real-life inversion of this trope. After The Baby Boom of the mid-20th century, birth rates proceeded to collapse in the world's wealthier countries to around replacement level (2.1 children per woman) or below. The reason for this can be summed up thusly: between urbanization, the spread of contraception, widespread education (especially for women), old-age pensions, bans on child labor, advances in health care and life expectancy, the obsolescence of massive armies in the face of Mutually Assured Destruction, the mechanization of agriculture, and the rise of a post-industrial, knowledge-based economy that needed specialized workers as opposed to a large pool of laborers, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to have a large family as opposed to just one or two kids who parents could devote their full attention to. The world's industrialized nations were the first to experience the demographic transition in the '70s and '80s, but it has since either happened or started to happen everywhere on Earth, from Latin America to the Middle East. - Another inversion of this trope is the Cornucopian thesis, which states large populations, rather than creating resource crises, can produce more potential innovators who can engineer solutions to potential shortfalls in commodities. Julian Simon, an economist and believer in human ingenuity, publically bet Paul Erlich that between 1980 and 1990, the price of certain metals would fall. Julian Simon was proven correct because there were innovations that made the use of these metals less important. - In many parts of the world, especially the former Soviet bloc and East Asia, populations are beginning to stagnate or have even gone down. The book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson outlines a possible future where this trope gives way to the mid-21st century to an Underpopulation Crisis, one that they imagine will be marked on the one hand by higher wages and living standards for workers and reduced inequality but on the other by labor shortages, inflation, and strained pension systems. - Stephen Emmott warned that reducing demographic pressure on the environment could be done by urgently consuming fewer raw materials. - Economists like Amartya Sen argue that while famines are often blamed on drought or overpopulation, oftentimes political systems can determine whether a food shortage becomes a famine. In colonial systems or autocracies without any accountability, a famine can occur if the ruling elite has no incentive to feed the population, or more sinisterly if the government is downright hateful to its subjects and wishes to starve them. The Raj periodically had famines because the British government was reluctant (at best) to help its non-white subjects, but independent democratic India hasn't had any massive famine in times of drought because local governments are more willing to intervene on behalf of the population.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverpopulationCrisis
Overly Stereotypical Disguise - TV Tropes Everyone, please form an orderly queue . Sometimes when a character has to use the art of disguise, they go too far. If they have to pose as a member of a certain minority group, they incorporate every stereotype of said group possible into their costume. Probably the best-known instance of this: The spy/secret agent who wears a grey trenchcoat and black hat (as an effort to "blend in" with the general populace) decades after these went out of fashion. Also frequently occurs when individuals must disguise themselves as the opposite gender. Compare Culture Equals Costume. ## Examples: - In the Mickey Mouse story "Dalla parte sbagliata", Mickey tries to blend in in a Banana Republic. Cue a panel of him walking around in a Mexican poncho while spouting stereotypical Mexican phrases, all while passers-by look at him in confusion. - In the Tintin comics, bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson often attempt to go undercover by wearing ridiculously stereotypical disguises of whatever country they're in. - 17 Again (2009): When Mike is magically transformed into a teenager again, he dresses as a middle-aged man's idea of what a teenager would wear (he saw Kevin Federline wear the exact same outfit). - Adele Hasn't Had Her Dinner Yet has Nick Carter, the most famous American detective, traveling to Prague to solve a case. His attempt to stay under the radar of the local press however fails miserably as he is dressed up in a Bohemian peasant's costume with bagpipes and all which makes him stick out like a sore thumb. - Back to the Future: - Marty falls into this trap with the "something inconspicuous" outfit he bought with Doc's money in Back to the Future Part II. The leather jacket and Sunglasses at Night would've been conspicuous enough, but then he tops it off with a nice trilby hat, which was not considered casual headwear and normally only worn with a suit in the '50s. - Marty's flamboyant cowboy attire in Back to the Future Part III, which he does lampshade, but (1950s) Doc insists is fine to wear (note that westerns were huge in 1955, but historical accuracy in westerns was not). Marty switches to more reasonable clothes as soon as he can. - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Baron's two spies attempt to blend in as Englishmen by putting on plaid coats, deerstalker caps, holding a pipe aloft, and calling each other "Basil". A nearby family sees them pass and looks at each other in confusion. - Admiral General Aladeen in The Dictator dresses head to toe in the American flag posing as an American tourist during a helicopter tour scene, where he and his cohort are Mistaken for Terrorist. - In The Hebrew Hammer, the main character and his love interest try to arrest the Big Bad at a Kmart by posing as a Gentile couple, complete with Southern accents, Christian paraphernalia, and American flags. - In High Anxiety, Richard is wanted for murder and he and Victoria need to bypass airport security, so they disguise themselves as a loud, bickering elderly Jewish couple. Their reasoning is that the louder and more obnoxious they are, the more they'll be ignored. - The Pink Panther: In Revenge of the Pink Panther, Inspector Clouseau goes undercover in Hong Kong in Yellowface, eye makeup for slanted eyes, a Fu Manchu mustache, a rice paddy hat, and a Qipao, while all the ordinary citizens around him wear business suits. - Gene Wilder's pathetic attempt to pass for African-American in the movie Silver Streak. The script called for a black patron to walk in and be fooled by the disguise, but Richard Pryor wisely convinced the filmmakers to show the guy clearly not buying it for a second. - Team America: World Police has a funny subversion. The main character's job is to infiltrate a Muslim terrorist group. He simply wraps a towel around his head, superglues hair to his face, and says, "Dirka dirka Muhammed Jihad." It works. - In xXx, a spy dresses up in a tuxedo to blend in at the "Monte Carlo Club" which turns out to be a punk rock nightclub. - In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, a prolonged scene with the President and a staff full of political caricatures includes a "Chief Spy" with "a false moustache, a false beard, false eyelashes, false teeth and a falsetto voice" while in the office. It kind of seems better suited to how the book was eventually adapted as a stage play. - Discworld, Jingo: - Sergeant Colon does this in a downright racist manner (as well as Malaproper, calling the Klatchians "brothers of the dessert" rather than the desert and asking "Had any baksheesh lately?"), to the point that onlookers assume he's a spy for a country other than the one he seems to be from, since no actual spy would be so obvious. And especially Ankh-Morpork, being a Proud Merchant Race run by a Magnificent Bastard, would never send such an idiot. - 71-Hour Ahmed in the same book does this brilliantly. He keeps doing stereotypically "Klatchian" things (like offering to buy someone's wife for twenty camels) and speaking Morporkian badly, with a thick accent. It turns out that not only is he \|\|the police chief of Al-Khali\|\|, he was educated in the Assassins' Guild school and speaks Morporkian perfectly when he wants to. He actually puts on a slight Morporkian accent in Klatchian just to mess with people. - In Moving Pictures the Wizards of the Unseen University do this by disguising themselves as Wizards. Specifically they put some conspicuous wire in their beards, which convinces everyone else that they were locals in ridiculous Wizard disguises. This allows them to attend the Moving Pictures show "incognito". - In The Man Who Was Thursday, the anarchist Lucian Gregory repeatedly tries to infiltrate respectable society by disguising himself as a priest, a capitalist, or a military man. It fails each time because, as he was raised on anarchist propaganda, he acts like an over-the-top strawman of these groups. Gregory: When first I became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable disguises. I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our anarchist pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire and Priests of Prey. I certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed. When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, "Down! down! presumptuous human reason!" they found out in some way that I was not a bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a millionaire; but I defended Capital with so much intelligence that a fool could see that I was quite poor. Then I tried being a major. Now I am a humanitarian myself, but I have, I hope, enough intellectual breadth to understand the position of those who, like Nietzsche, admire violence — the proud, mad war of Nature and all that, you know. I threw myself into the major. I drew my sword and waved it constantly. I called out "Blood!" abstractedly, like a man calling for wine. I often said, "Let the weak perish; it is the Law." Well, well, it seems majors don't do this. I was nabbed again. - In Funky Squad, one of the square cops attempts to pass himself off as a hippy by dressing as a cop's stereotype of a hippy. Not helped by the fact that he arrives driving a police car where he has crudely painted over the word "Police" on the door so it reads "Peace". - The Goodies attempt to pass themselves off as Scottish is so over-the-top that the Scot they are trying to fool declares that they must be English tourists. - Private Schulz is sent to infiltrate Britain wearing plus fours. It's only after he's been put on the plane that his superiors ask if they still wear plus fours in 1940s wartime Britain. This and a few other blunders (like asking for a coffee in a British pub) soon give him away and the police are soon on the lookout for "the man in the plus fours" as a suspected German spy. - The Sarah Silverman Program played with this. Sarah argued with a black man that being Jewish is harder than being black, and the two agreed to go through one day as the other ethnicity for a day to test it. Sarah dressed up in a horribly stereotypical and offensive way, receiving very unpleasant remarks, thinking they actually thought she was black and their responses were genuine racism. When she met the man in the usual spot she and the gang get their coffee and said that she agreed that being black was harder, the black man said he realised being Jewish was actually harder. He was wearing a yarmukle, peot, a long false nose, and a shirt saying 'I <3 Money'. The man left the place as the two exchanged suspicious looks. - Soap: In the fourth season, Burt and Danny decided to go undercover at a brothel to weed out organized crime in their town. After Burt forbids Danny from dressing like a pirate, Danny arrives at the sting dressed in a ridiculously offensive "Chinese man" costume. - Supernatural. In "Frontierland" Sam and Dean have to travel back to 1861 Wyoming. Aware that Dean is a massive Western fan, Sam reluctantly wears the clothes he's picked out for them, which sure enough don't resemble what everyone else is wearing. It's not that which gives them away however, but the fact that their clothes are unusually clean for strangers who supposedly just rode into town. - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: Raiden's idea of an authentic civilian disguise while in Mexico is a gaudy mariachi sombrero and poncho draped over his completely unaltered cyborg body, not to mention his high-tech car and Bladewolf. The first two locals he sees are more perplexed by the bizarre attempt at blending in than anything. He was apparently told that this would be a perfect disguise by the shopkeeper who sold it to him, who by all rights deserves the "Biggest Balls in Mexico" award for tourist trapping a heavily armed murder machine without fear or hesitation. - Exaggerated twice over in this video from The Onion, where investigative reporter Gavin Fisher decides the best way to infiltrate the underground Chinese bootleg market is to disguise himself wearing not only stereotypical Chinese clothes but also wearing comically round glasses, donning Yellowface and fake buck teeth, and speaking in a a terrible accent. Much to his confusion, people are only not fooled for a second, but act scared or even disgusted around him. He then tries again by crossdressing as a Asian hooker. - In the "Honey Pot" episode of Archer, Sterling Archer attempts to seduce a gay man by dying his hair blond and wearing roller skates, skin-tight short shorts, and a shirt that says "Got Dick?" - Family Guy: - Peter Griffin gets beat up after trying to disguise himself as a Jew and doing this trope. - In another episode, Peter infiltrates one of Meg's dates dressed in stereotypical Chinese garb, complete with buck teeth and paddy hat. - South Park. Cartman pulls this twice:	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyStereotypicalDisguise
Long Title - TV Tropes A long title is not a trope on its own. One of the following tropes may apply instead: If a direct wick has led you here, please correct the link so that it points to the corresponding article.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyLongTitle
Overly Narrow Superlative - TV Tropes No, Oliver, I don't want your autograph! Duff: Aye, but now they call me Roboduff! The world's deadliest golfing cyborg! Kim: Wow, now that's a mouthful. Ron: And really, how many other golfing cyborgs are there? It can not be a crowded field. This trope covers situations where something seems to be highly praised, and it's relative to an extremely small or intrinsically awful group (often a group of one), rendering the praise meaningless. Sometimes the intent is for the praise to be taken seriously (in which case it becomes a version of the Sharpshooter Fallacy), but the more frequent implication is that there isn't any larger category relative to which it can apply, making it a Stealth Insult (if the backhandedness of the compliment is not immediately obvious) or a form of Damned by Faint Praise (if it is). Sometimes the joke is that, even in such an incredibly narrow category, the thing being discussed still isn't first. Creators may describe their own works this way as a form of humorous Self-Deprecation; it can also be a way to imply that a work, while bad, at least has a unique premise it's better than any other of its type because there is no other. Sometimes it derives additional humor from the recipient taking it as a genuine compliment, either because they're dumb or because we the audience know something they do not. The stock piece of dialogue that fits this trope goes something like: Alice: Bob, you've always been my favorite son. Bob: I'm your only son. Contrast Mathematician's Answer, which is equally meaningless because it's too broad, and Suspiciously Specific Denial, where the specificity is worrisome because of everything it doesn't cover. Compare Everything Except Most Things, Trivially Obvious, Damned by Faint Praise. Also compare the Low Count Gag. ("Wow Alice, all your fans are out there!...All two of them.") See also Medal of Dishonor, which may be given out in cases like these. May figure in the plot of a Guinness Episode. ## Examples: - A Fox Sports Detroit commercial heard one year in May: "Winner of more Emmys than any mid-Michigan sports network this year." - Blue Emu advertises their products as "America's number 1 emu oil-based topical pain cream". - Almost every TV show is number one in some way. They'll mention usually the genre (#1 new comedy), time (#1 new show of the year), location (#1 show on cable), and any combination of these, getting more and more specific as you go. - Countdown with Keith Olbermann, while on MSNBC, was very proud of being the #1 cable news show not on Fox News. - Spanish TV channel Telecinco promoted itself for about two years as the "leader of private television", which really meant that public TV channel TVE1 was the first TV network in Spain and Telecinco was the second one. - Used in an advert for ITV Digital. Monkey tells Johnny Vegas that he's "the funniest person sitting in that chair". - A TV ad for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer proclaimed the game to be "Probably the greatest action game based on a movie based on a superhero comic of the year." Seriously. (Well, at least it's above Spider-Man 3?) - Tentacle Grape: - The most delicious hentai soda on the market! - Calling it a "unique glass collector's bottle" in this case is probably another example of this trope. - A Fall 2011 commercial for the X-Men Film Series on Time Warner On Demand advertised the "Top 5 X-Men Movies". At the time, there were only five X-Men movies (unless you count the one with Generation X). - Casillero del Diablo is advertised as "America's favorite Reserve Wine from Chile". Made even stranger by the fact that there is technically no such thing as "reserve wine" in either Chile or the United States. - Played for laughs with the iOS version of You Don't Know Jack, which Jellyvision flaunts as "the #1 game in the world that contains both fart noises and trivia about Shakespeare." - Many car commercials advertise the car as "Best in its class", without defining the class in question. Some of the same commercials describe the car as "in a class of its own". - Apple Inc. likes to advertise their iPhones as "the best phone we've ever made" ... which is less impressive once you realise that it just means "it's better than all our previous models", and you'd rather hope that this year's product isn't going to be worse than last year's product. - A Swedish campaign for the relaunch of Cuba Cola ran with this, proudly proclaiming, "The market leader note : referring to the period April-May 1954 is back!" Done all the time unironically in film advertising the week after a film opens at the box office. Film ads that week will try to claim their picture was "the #1 film in America!" Anytime that isn't actually true, the ad will narrow the superlative down by genre, like "the #1 comedy in America!," "the #1 thriller in America!", etc. This is especially egregious when it's a time of year where it has little competition. - Films released in January or February will frequently unironically trumpet the one review calling them "The best film of the year!" - "[Not-very-good movie] is the Citizen Kane of [tiny or inherently bad genre]" has become something of a snowclone. - The Boston Globe memorably described Shakes the Clown as "the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies." - There's a Netflix user review of Lifeforce that calls it "by default, the Citizen Kane of naked space zombie vampire movies." - The tagline of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is "He's the best there is! (Actually, he's the only one there is.)" - One of the best of these was for Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, which proclaimed in large letters, The #1 Movie in America! 'that's a comedy written by a Canadian who's left-handed'. - Uwe Boll's BloodRayne II: Deliverance DVD release was promoted boldly as a sequel to the "Best-selling Live-action DVD of 2006!" A claim footnoted with "for films that made less than $5 million at the box office." - An interesting subversion is Cold Pursuit, whose French poster◊ had the critic quote "By far the best movie where Liam Neeson kills everyone". That this isn't overly narrow shows how typecast Liam Neeson has become. - Eight Legged Freaks was advertised as "the biggest, nastiest mutant spider movie of all time." - Gymkata has its tagline declaring that star Kurt Thomas is the master of the titular martial art. As at least one vanished review of the film points out, he's also the inventor and only known practitioner of gymkata, too. Of course he's the master. - The DVD cover of Happy Gilmore has a quote referring to it as "the best golf comedy since Caddyshack!" This presumably means that it's better than Caddyshack II and The Accidental Golfer. - The trailer for The History of Future Folk proclaims that it's "probably the only alien folk duo sci-fi action romance comedy movie ever made which totally makes it the best alien folk duo sci-fi action romance comedy movie ever made." - The theatrical trailer for The Incredible Mr. Limpet has the announcer proclaim it to be "the most incredibly delightful movie about a man who turns into a fish that you'll see this year." - Spoofed by the makers of The Naked Gun: " The Naked Gun 2 ½, the highest grossing movie ever made with a fraction in the title,"◊ surpassing 8½. - Netflix has promoted Olympus Has Fallen as "the best White House-under-siege film of the year." Unlike most examples, this one is actually justified, because White House Down was released the same year. - On the DVD cover of The Straight Story, Michael Wilmington of The Chicago Tribune declares the film "The Sweetest and Most Compassionate Movie [David] Lynch Has Ever Made." - The UK DVD cover of Thunderpants has this gem: "The best British kids film of the last five years." - One tagline for Wasabi is "Quite possibly the greatest French-language, English-subtitled, Japanese action-comedy of all time." - Ωmega Mart: Omega Mart proudly markets itself as "The World's Most Exceptional Grocery Store." Not that they are wrong but who goes around classifying grocery stores? - GaoGaiGar has Guy constantly referring to himself as "The World's Strongest Cyborg". There can't be many of those, especially not built for combat. It gets better in GaoGaiGar FINAL, where he has been upgraded to an Evoluder and starts calling himself "The World's Strongest Evoluder". The only other Evoluder in the world is his girlfriend. note : Maybe that's because he keeps calling her "boluda"... - In Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple, Kensei Ma assures Miu that he'll make sure Kenichi stays safe. "After all, he's our number one disciple! Of course, technically he's our only disciple, but let's not get bogged down in small details like that." - Played with in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's. In the last episode, \|\|Reinforce\|\| claims to be the happiest magic tome in the world. However by that point she has a very good reason to feel the happiest, not mattering if she is the only magical tome shown in the series. note : The Book of the Azure Sky, Bible of Silver Cross, and the Tome of the Purple Sky could also count, but only the former two are canon. - Similar to the Kenichi example above, Charanko from One-Punch Man is the number one disciple of S-class hero and master martial artist Bang. He's also the only disciple of Bang's martial arts school, the others having left due to the former number one disciple going on a rampage and injuring every other student before he got expelled. - Early into the Advanced Generation saga of Pokémon: The Series, Meowth proclaims himself and his teammates as the best Team Rocket operatives in the Hoenn region. James has to point it out to him that they are the only Rockets in the region. - A Running Gag throughout the first act of the first Slayers movie is people claiming to be the Xth Strongest Man on Mipross Island. Mipross Island isn't very large, and none of them last longer than a few minutes against out-of-towner Lina — she even one-shots the eighth, seventh and fifth strongest simultaneously — mere moments after having bested the tenth. - Jimmy Carr is called "the hardest working man in comedy", which he said "is like being called the most attractive man in the burns unit." It was less offensive in context — until he made the "they stick together" joke. - Drag performer Cashetta calls herself "The world's most fabulous drag magician". And follows with, "And the genius of that is that you've got nothing to compare me to!" - According to Double Act: A History of British Comedy Duos by Andrew Roberts, one act doing the rounds of working men's clubs in the sixties billed itself as "The world's greatest clairvoyant hen". A footnote asks the obvious question. - One of ventriloquist Jeff Dunham's most popular puppets is "the most beloved terrorist throughout the world", Achmed the Dead Terrorist. - Judah Friedlander has a special titled America Is the Greatest Country in the United States. - During Jake Johannsen's This'll Take About an Hour, he talks about buying Masters of the Universe action figures: "I just got a new one, Leechor note : Actually, the character's name is "Leech"., Evil Master of Power Suction. Which I had to buy just for that title. I mean, I didn't even know there was an opening in Power Suction! Already this Leechor is the evil master! So, it shows you what you can do if you find your niche and fill it!" - In The Very World of Milton Jones, Milton Jones is often introduced as "Britain's funniest Milton". Narrowly beating Milton Keynes. - In the roast of Jeff Foxworthy, Lisa Lampanelli praised Bill Engvall for being the best-looking comedian on The Blue Collar Comedy Tour... then added, "That's not difficult, that's like being the prettiest one on The View." - Marcel Lucont boasts himself as "easily the greatest UK-based French comedian around". - Brazilian comedian Geraldo Magela describes himself as the "best blind comedian in Brazil". - Tim Minchin's So Live DVD describes him as "without a doubt one of the top 7 pianist-singer-songwriter-comedian-actor-pervert-wannabe-rockstars born in Western Australia in the mid-seventies". - At the beginning of The Muppets All-Star Comedy Gala in Montreal, Kermit called the city "the greatest island-based French-speaking city of over 2 million people... in all of Quebec". - A routine by O'Brien and Valdez regarding a lie detector starts with a woman assuring Valdez that he's her "first". After the lie detector goes off she quickly amends it to, "first blind Mexican this week." - Christopher Titus used (and lampshaded) this trope when describing his then-wife, Erin, and him in high school, where she was part of the Popular crowd, while he "was in the 'Outcast Losers Who Fell into a Bonfire' group. Very exclusive group." - 52 has Jaded Washout Daniel Carter (distant ancestor of Booster Gold) sarcastically brag about how, despite his brilliant football career having gone nowhere after his Career-Ending Injury, he still managed to become the fifth-best term-life salesman at Evergreen Insurance Company... out of six. - In Avatar: The Last Airbender North and South, Toph describes the Beifong Metalbending Academy as "the most prestigious metalbending school in the world". One of her students points out that they're the only school, but she sees it as the point since they do something that used to be considered impossible until she learned how to do it. - The DCU: Detective Chimp sometimes refers to himself as the world's greatest chimp detective. - Golden Lad issue No.1◊: Golden Lad's Most Astounding Adventure! - Iznogoud: Tahbari al-Tardi is described as the best artist in the Caliphate. It's also stated that he's the only artist in the Caliphate. - The first issue of Venom: The Enemy Within promises that the second issue will have "arguably the greatest fight ever between two super-beings in an underground gallery surrounded by hooting goblins several miles below San Francisco during a quarantine!" - In one Blondie strip, Dagwood is bummed that he's not good at par golf. Blondie comforts him by saying that at least he's "the very best office manager in the history of J.C. Dithers & Co." - The Boondocks: Caesar brags about being the best freestyle champion in Woodcrest, which Huey points out is not that hard to be. - Dilbert: - Dogbert is acting as a shady, bribe-collecting movie critic, and a customer wants to know how much the review "Best movie so far this year" will cost for a film released on New Year's Day. - Inverted in another strip where Dilbert's company manages to claim that their engineers are paid above the median salary for their industry by defining their industry more and more vaguely until the average salary drops below what they're paying their employees. Dilbert's company is officially in the industry of "High technology, textile workers, teenagers and dead people." - Garfield: - The Outrageous World of Alex and Charlie: In one strip, Charlie calls Alex (his twin sister) his favourite twin after she scares away Garth trying to get him to hold Princess. - Phoebe and Her Unicorn: this comic, when Phoebe wants to believe she is unique she asks Marigold how many humans ride unicorns to school. When Marigold answers 910, Phoebe keeps narrowing it down further tills she gets to human girls with freckles who play the piano and are named Phoebe Howell, of which she is the only one. - The Inquisition's librarian tells Varric, in Beyond Heroes: Of Sunshine and Red Lyrium, that he's "the most famous and only author who is a member of the Inquisition itself". - In the Legend of Korra fanfic Book 5: Legends, while visiting Kyoshi Island, Bolin introduces himself as "the best lavabender in the world". Opal then quickly points out that he's the only lavabender in the world. Bolin dismisses this as "semantics". - Hobbes invokes this sarcastically in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series: - Asuka in A DIC-less SI apparently has a Running Gag about mentioning that she has the largest breasts in the world. Given that she's one of two women, and only four people, in the entire world, it's not much of an accomplishment. It gets a Continuity Nod when Kasumi and Nodoka visit and one of the others points out Asuka is now one of the least busty women in the world. - Emerald Flight Book Two: Conqueror: Sirius: Ah, Harry, can't a godfather see his favorite godson? Harry: You do realize that I'm your only godson. Sirius: Yeah, but doesn't that springboard you up the rankings to number one? - In Grease & Lightning Harry and Snape visit an establishment which describes itself as "Cumbria's premier Filipino restaurant". - In Harry Potter and Future's Past, Harry mentally comments to Hermione about her having her "favorite husband to chat with". Hermione: Favorite one? Since you're my only one, it also means you're my least favorite as well. - Harry Potter and the Dream Come True: Sirius: Do I need a reason to visit my favorite godson? Harry: I'm your only godson. Sirius: True enough. And a pity, I must say. Imagine how many children are out there wishing that they could have Sirius Black as a godfather. You lucky boy, you. - In I Must Be Going, Dorian tells Varric that "you're my third favorite author in a five-foot radius." Varric isn't exactly flattered. - In I've Got Your Back, Pearl's dad mentions her being his favorite daughter. She replies that she's his only daughter. - LadyBugOut: Chloe points out that Alya's bragging about hers being the best Ladybug-centered blog doesn't mean much when she's currently the only one operating such a blog. Ladybug herself decides to change that after Alya attempts to use that exclusivity to justify deliberately deceiving her audience for the sake of attracting more views. - The Last Straw: Harry: You know you keep promising to cook for me. But all I've seen is your prowess with takeout menus and sandwiches. Tim: But you have to admit that I make the best peanut butter and jelly you've ever tasted. Harry: Only because you've made the only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I've ever eaten. - In The Maretian, after the ponies spend a sol grooming for photos sent to NASA, Mark Watney proudly claims, "I am, after all, the most popular and exclusive spa host on the whole planet." Remember that they are stranded and alone on Mars. - In Rise Above, James says that he and Amber are "the most popular royal twins in all the kingdoms". By Amber's admission, there's "just one other pair" and "they're not much". - Royal Business: Upon being personally summoned to court, Spike says: "Guess she's finally realized just who is the Number One Dragon around here!" Immediately lampshaded by Twilight Sparkle, resulting in this exchange: "Spike," Twilight chuckled, "you're the only Dragon around Ponyville." "And thus the Number One," he replied with impeccable logic. - In the Jackie Chan Adventures and Teen Titans crossover fanfiction A Shadow of the Titans, this is sort of played with: Master of Games: Kitty, daughter of Killer Moth. The nastiest girl in... any high school in all of America! - Speed and Purpose: Sonic brags that he's the fastest hedgehog in his Zone, but that isn't saying much since there are only two hedgehogs in the Zone. - In The Very Secret Diaries, Legolas dangles Pippin over a cliff until he'll admit that Legolas is the prettiest elf in the Fellowship. Pippin diplomatically doesn't point out that he's the only elf in the Fellowship. - Box office records often come down to this. As noted by the advertising folder, some movies have to find disclaimers that make them stand out — genres, rating, non-franchise/adaptations, or in the case of The Force Awakens, "highest grossing film that wasn't directed by James Cameron". The top three highest grossing movies of 2020 (as of the year's midpoint) were... Bad Boys for Life, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Dolittle, a very far cry from the Disney, Lucasfilm, and Marvel-dominated toppers of years past. Of course, given the COVID-19 Pandemic shut down theaters before the Dump Months were over and how almost all potential blockbusters for the year were delayed indefinitely, it's not exactly something that can be boasted about. This is also evident in how much the movies grossed, all of which were in the mid-to-low hundreds of millions, in contrast to the billion-dollar hits of years prior. - According to Wikipedia a critic for the Florida Times-Union commented that Blood Waters of Dr. Z "could very well be the best film ever made about a mutated catfish." - In Brokeback Mountain, Jack's wife Lureen makes the following comment: - Brüno (2009) boasts that his show Funkyzeit is the biggest fashion show in the entire German-speaking world, except Germany. - Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword Of Destiny has an inverted example not unlike the one from the jokes section. When the warrior Silent Wolf meets several martial artists in an outdoor restaurant, four of them start introducing themselves: Flying Blade: I am Flying Blade, famed in Shantung. Thunder Fist: I am Thunder Fist Chan, famed in Zhejiang. Silver Dart Shi: I am Silver Dart Shi, famed in Fuzhou. Turtle Ma: And I am Turtle Ma, famed in... this tavern. - Dead Snow has been called "The best Norwegian Nazi-zombie movie ever made". - In Demolition Man, upon learning that he's eating a rat hamburger, John Spartan shrugs and states that this is the best hamburger he's had in years. Although he does actually sound impressed, the current society is vegetarian, and he spent a few decades as a Human Popsicle. - From Down with Love: "Oh, Vikki! You're the best friend a girl from Maine who wrote a book and came to New York could ever have!" Subverted, as Barbara actually does think that Vikki is a good friend. - Good Morning, Vietnam has been labeled as "The best military comedy since MASH". - Guardians of the Galaxy: - Holly Slept Over: Noel says Audra's expression looks like the reaction someone would have after they learned someone they've not seen for years suddenly died, assuming this was what happened with Holly at first. She's incredulous that such a specific look can exist. - In Bruges* throws a bit of a lampshade on this one when it came to a white dwarf's coke-fueled, racist rant. Jimmy: You have no idea how much shit I get from black midgets! Ray: That's... undeniably true. - In Travis Betz's Lo, the waiter assures the protagonist that he is the best bartender in that room. Said room currently contains them and a demon rat. - The Martian: While grumbling about the fact that Mission Control are trying to micromanage his improvised farming setup from back on Earth after several months of successful work with only his own ingenuity to guide him, Mark Watney jokingly points out that he is, " the greatest botanist on this planet." The planet in question is Mars, and he's not just the only botanist, but the only person on it. (Of course, by that same token, he's also the worst botanist on the planet.) - In Mr. Baseball, Tom Selleck's baseball has-been, Jack Eliot, resorts to one of these to try to avoid being traded. Jack Eliot: I'm a World Series MVP! Skip: That was four years ago, Jack. Last season, you hit .235. Jack Eliot: Last season, I led this team in ninth-inning doubles in the month of August! - The Muppets: - The Muppet Movie: - During their dinner together, Kermit and Miss Piggy get served some Sparkling Muscatel, "one of the finest wines of Idaho!" - Doc Hopper tries to brainwash Kermit into shilling for his restaurant with the help of Professor Krassman, "the world's leading expert in mind control on frogs". - In Muppets Most Wanted, Kermit's Criminal Doppelgänger Constantine likes to brag about being "The World's Most Dangerous Frog". \|\|As Miss Piggy points out right before she wipes the floor with him, "You may be the world's most dangerous frog, but you're still just a frog!"\|\| - Phantom Soldiers has the Russian cook, erm, Cook, boasting that he's the best cook in the base. He's also the only one. - James Cameron is known for describing his directorial debut Piranha Part Two: The Spawning as "the finest flying piranha movie ever made." - Saved! opens with the protagonist's mother being named "the number one Christian interior decorator for the entire region." - Scott Pilgrim vs. The World does this a few times: - Knives Chau gushes over Scott, telling him that she's never dated anyone so talented. Scott correctly surmises that she hasn't dated that many people in general. - Ramona tells Scott that he's the nicest guy she's dated yet. Considering that her dating history consists of the Seven Evil Exes... - Sonic the Hedgehog (2020): At one point, Tom tells Robotnik, "Raccoons have the cleanest mouths of any animal that regularly eats garbage." - In the title song from Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical State Fair, we're informed that "It's the best state fair in our state!" - The protagonist of Mel Brooks's remake of To Be or Not to Be is frequently described as "World famous in Poland." - A Running Gag in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is the description of Al's career as "not technically the best, but arguably the most famous accordion player in an extremely specific genre of music". - A common saying: - The standard backhanded compliment, "You're the funniest person in that chair." - Inverted in this joke: A village is home to three witches. One witch puts up a sign in front of her house reading "Here lives the most powerful witch in the world!" A second witch sees the sign and puts up her own, reading "Here lives the most powerful witch in the UNIVERSE!" The third witch sees both signs and puts up her own sign reading "Here lives the most powerful witch in the village." There is also a variant with three tailors on the same street. By Author: - As Ephraim Kishon wrote, because a state of Israel didn't exist for 2000 years, they had for some time the first anything in Israel in 2000 years. The first driving school, the first broom factory, and he himself wrote the first collection of humorous short stories in 2000 years. By Work: - Aubrey-Maturin: Jack defends his old ship, the aged, decrepit fifty-gun H.M.S. Leopard, as "The finest fourth-rate in the fleet." However, at the time of the setting, there were only two fourth-rates in service, and the other one ( H.M.S. Grampus, for those interested) was even more overtly horrible. - Cradle Series: Subverted. Yerin and Lindon are adopted by the Aurelius family and begin training as outer disciples. Eithan proudly tells them that they are the first and second-ranked outer disciples, respectively. Since they haven't met a single other outer disciple and Eithan is The Gadfly, they assume they're the only outer disciples at the moment. But when the police demand their ranks and Lindon explains, he is informed that there are thousands of outer disciples in the Aurelius family, and assume he's screwing with them. He's not, and judging by the progress the two make, Eithan wasn't either. - The New Yorker reviewed Jeff Lindsay's Dexter novels by saying "Dexter Morgan is one of the most likable vigilante serial killers in recent literature." - Cory Doctorow on his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: "The book has outsold every first sf novel publishing in 2003 for which I have figures." - Dragonlance: The New Adventures: Sindri declares himself to be the greatest kender wizard ever... he's also the only one ever. - Enemy Coast Ahead is a memoir by WW2 bomber pilot Guy Gibson. The last day of peace finds him in a boat with his girlfriend Ann. "Windy, my all-swimming and all-flying cat, who had put in more flying hours than most cats, lay purring in her lap." Since most cats have zero flying hours, having more than most cannot have taken Windy very long. - As they climb Mt. Everest, the characters in Gordon Korman's Everest trilogy amuse themselves by coming up with superlatives that allow them all to break their own records. One character might be the first 31-year-old Jewish man to reach the summit, while someone else might be the first African American from Oklahoma to reach the summit. This is in contrast to Dominic Alexis, who aims to break Ethan Zaph's actually valuable record of youngest person to summit. - In the Doctor Who Expanded Universe New Series Adventures novel Ghosts of India, the Doctor claims that Cleopatra was not the most beautiful woman in the world, but might have been the most beautiful woman in her bedchamber, if the handmaidens had the day off. - The Guinness World Records books are full of "standard" records, like world's longest beard, but it also has gems like the world record for cycling backwards with a violin. They also called Silent Movie the sound film with the least spoken dialogue: A single one-syllable word (\|\|"no," spoken by French mime Marcel Marceau\|\|). - The back of Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) says that "if there's a better book than this, I haven't written it!" - From P. G. Wodehouse's first Jeeves and Wooster story, "Extricating Young Gussie": Take him for all in all, dear old Uncle Cuthbert was as willing a spender as ever called the family lawyer a bloodsucking vampire because he wouldn't let Uncle Cuthbert cut down the timber to raise another thousand. - From one of two reviews of the novel KKXG: KING KONG VS GIGANTOSAURUS: Anyone who'd like a good, suspenseful adventure novel about a giant lizard and a big gorilla who fight at the end will get enjoyment from it. - James S.A. Corey says that after reading Leviathan Wakes, George R. R. Martin said that it was "the best book about vomit zombies he'd ever read". - In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy tries to cheer up a guilt-ridden Tumnus by saying that he's "the nicest faun I've ever met." She kindly neglects to mention that he's the only faun she's ever met. He even suspects that she hasn't met many. \|\|This actually may have helped motivate his heel-face turn, later.\|\| - Inverted in the blurb on the back of The Lump of Coal by Lemony Snicket: "Is there a more charming holiday tale to behold? Probably, but Lemony Snicket has not written one." - The Lying Ape lists an unintentional example — a man was asked to review a book and completely bashed it, giving it overall an extremely negative review. This being early January, he ended the review ironically with "Best book I've read all year." Guess which single line out of his entire review they put on the back of the novel? - Mrs Bradshaw's Handbook states that the bar at the Green Crown Hotel, Big Cabbage, boasts that it has "more varieties of cabbage wine and brassica distillations than any other establishment in the world". Even on the leafy-green-vegetable-obsessed Sto Plains, that is not a claim many people would be interested in challenging. - In the Christmas mystery/romance novella Masters In This Hall, John and Ivy Garland call each other "best of cousins". They also happen to be each other's only cousins (although by the end they're more sincere). - Paddy Madigan from Naked Came the Stranger is believed by many to be the finest left-handed fighter ever to contend for the light-heavyweight championship of the world. - Played with in The Phantom Tollbooth with the smallest giant, the tallest midget, the thinnest fat man, and the fattest thin man — all the same ordinary man. - A Series of Unfortunate Events has Esmé Squalor, the city's sixth most important financial advisor. - In Vorpal Blade, Lt. Commander Weaver mentions, in a discussion of impromptu refilling of oxygen reserves for the titular spacecraft, that they have the finest jury-riggers in the star system that they're exploring. The Executive Officer points out that they're the only intelligent life in the system, which Weaver then says is his point. - In When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris ponders how sometimes the sins we haven't committed can be all we have to cling to, and some people really need to reach to find sins they haven't committed: At least I never killed anyone with a hammer. - Fan-tweet read out on America's Test Kitchen: "@cpkimball is the sexiest man in a bow-tie with a cooking show on public television." While amusingly phrased, this is genuine praise. Christopher Kimball is definitely good looking even as TV chefs go, while also dressing like the 11th Doctor (only replace the fez with an apron). - In one of the cartoon segments on The Aquabats! Super Show!, the Aquabats are menaced by "Space Bees! The deadliest bees in space!" - Inverted in Arrested Development when Lucille calls Michael her "third least favorite child." However, since she has four children, that's still kind of an insult. - Hamish and Andy deliver this one during their Asian Gap Year: "This was going to be the greatest thing we had ever seen... at a Thai rocket festival." - Barney & Friends: - In the Season 1 episode "My Family's Just Right for Me", when the kids are showing paintings of their families to Barney, Luci compliments her younger sister Tina on her painting, which leads to this exchange: Luci: Oh, Tina, you made me look lovely! Tina: Of course! You're my favorite sister! Luci: You mean I'm your only sister. Tina: Well, you're still my favorite! - The Barney's Adventure Bus UK VHS describes Barney as "the world's favorite purple dinosaur". - In Brothers & Sisters, the following exchange happens: Saul: Why are you so obsessed with my social life? Nora: Not obsessed. You're my favorite brother. Saul: Only brother. Nora: In this family, you never know. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Kendra: That's me favorite shirt! That's me only shirt! - In the Castle episode "Heartbreak Hotel", from a disgruntled Esposito: "Worst impromptu bachelor party while on case ever." - In the Charmed episode "The Courtship of Wyatt's Father", Paige refers to Chris as "one of my two favorite nephews." At this point in her life, she only knows that she has two nephews (and Chris himself hasn't even been conceived yet). - Community: - Greendale Community College often gets a variant, where they aren't the best despite the overly narrow superlative. It's been described as the second most prosperous school on the Greendale campus, and once failed a popularity poll on its own website. That said, it did have "the most advanced typing class in the south-western Greendale area", according to a commercial from the 1990s. - Britta describes Bare Naked Ladies as "the most celebrated Canadian alt-rock band of the mid-90s." - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: Upon learning that Todd was in the glorified garage band Mexican Funeral, Tina gets excited and tells him, "You were a god of the mid-2000s Seattle alt scene!" - On Doc Martin: PC Penhale: Right now my only ambition is to be the best policeman in Portwenn. Martin: You're the only policeman in Portwenn. Penhale: Oh, you're just saying that. - A variation in Downton Abbey. After Jimmy leaves (\|\|fired after being caught in bed with a female guest\|\|), Molesley asks Carson if he is now the first footman. Carson agrees, since Molesley is the only remaining footman. For the next several episodes, Carson keeps giving Molesley extra work, pointing out that, since he is the first footman, it's now his job. By the end, Molesley wishes that he hasn't said anything. - In one episode of Due South, Ray Kowalski claims that his current boxing protégé is the best fighter he's ever trained. Francesca forces him to admit that he's the only fighter he's ever trained. - In the first 2010 episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Ellen proclaims to her audience, "you are the best audience of the year," and adds "no, you are the best audience of the decade!" The audience starts off laughing at the joke, and then cheers for themselves. - Fort McGee of Enlisted bears the title of 2nd best Irish Named Army Detachment In Southern Florida. - The pilot episode of Extras has Ben Stiller play up his own career with "I mean, yeah, I make Along Came Polly, it opens to $32 million, one of the biggest Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday holiday opening weekends ever". - Frasier: - From the episode "Don Juan in Hell": Frasier: Mmm, well, I can honestly say that is the best canned cheese I've ever had. - Inverted in "Door Jam", when the Zany Scheme involves Niles pretending to be Frasier's upstairs neighbour at a spa, and for some reason he thinks that this means that he has to do the voice: Frasier: Would you stop talking like that? That's the worst impersonation of Cam Winston I've ever heard! Niles: You've heard another one? Frasier: Of course not! Niles: Then it's the best. - In "Lilith Needs A Favor", Daphne, her mother, Roz, and Roz's daughter Alice go to Canadian Fun Country, touted in something Niles read as being one of southeastern British Columbia's best amusement parks. - Friends: - Rachel claims that Ross is, like, the toughest paleontologist she knows. note : Though ironically, the real-life basis for Indiana Jones was paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews. - In another episode, again Rachel claims that the "Soapy", an award Joey has been nominated for, is the third most important soap opera award there is. She's very excited this time. - Get Smart: Maxwell Smart's many catchphrases include "That's the second biggest (unlikely big thing before him) I ever saw!" - Syfy advertises Ghost Hunters as "Television's #1 Paranormal Reality Series". - In The Golden Girls, Blanche does this when she's competing with Rose and Dorothy for the attentions of a sculptor for whom they're all posing. Blanche: I've always said Lazlo is the greatest Hungarian sculptor of our time. Dorothy: And I say that if you can name two other Hungarian sculptors of any time, I will eat that statue. - In The Good Place: - Jason describes Jacksonville as "easily one of the top ten swamp cities in northeastern Florida." - Shortly after this, there's an inversion. Tahani decides that she has to throw an amazing party in order to save Eleanor from eternal damnation, and describes it as "the fourth most important party I've ever thrown." - The Graham Norton Show: Graham Norton once described a guest's movie as "the best British-based Salsa rom-com I've ever seen". - In the second series of The Grand Tour, they started doing timed laps with celebrities again, in the "Celebrity Face-Off" segment, with two competing for such titles as "The World's Fastest Golfing Enthusiast". - From Have I Got News for You: - The History Channel had a documentary on The Black Death where one analyst referred to it as "Surely one of the most important events in European history where over fifty percent of the population died in such a short time." (Yeah, there's probably supposed to be a comma after history...) - On Home Improvement, during a special episode of Tool Time, Tim thanks the audience for making it "Michigan's fourth-highest-rated cable tool show." - On How I Met Your Mother Robin leads the bar in congratulating Ted on getting a big job. Robin: To Ted. The youngest architect to design a skyscraper over thirty stories in Seattle. Probably. Crowd: PROBABLY! - iCarly: "iCarly Awards" includes awards for things like "The Most Interesting and Yet Frightening Tongue Video" and "Best Milk Squirting from Eye Video". - I'm Alan Partridge: Alan Partridge frequently boasts of hosting "the fourth-highest-rated show on Radio Norwich". - Jeeves and Wooster: When Bertie calls Pauline Stoker "one of the nicest girls I've ever been engaged to," it sure sounds like an example of this trope. Given his tendency to get engaged at the drop of a hat, though... - On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Stephen Colbert reviews a wine, and declares it "definitely the best cabernet sauvignon produced by Foghat that I have ever tasted." - The theme song of LazyTown describes Robbie Rotten as "the town's laziest villain". While a number of the town's inhabitants are somewhat jerkish, Rotten appears to be the town's only actual villain. - Liv and Maddie: Happy Carrot is the biggest carrot-based franchise in Wisconsin. - On Major Crimes, an episode of Badge of Justice which "Lieutenant Mike" [Tao] co-wrote wins a Platinum TV Choice Award, for Best Teleplay for [ deep breath] Non-Serialized 60-minute Episodic Police Procedural on Basic Cable! - Malcolm in the Middle: - On MASH: - The Masked Singer: - Joel McHale, a guest judge, said that one song was "the best song he'd ever heard sung by a deer in a gas mask." - In season five, roughly halfway through the season, the show held a Breather Episode in which contestants were given awards, many of which were exactly this sort. The Maskie Awards included such incredibly detailed categories as "Best Song Performed By an Inanimate Object That Brings Me Back to the 90's Slumber Parties" and "Best John Legend Cover By a Cyborg Covered in Sharp Quills". - The Mighty Boosh: - Howard Moon is Britain's leading cream poet. - This trope is a running gag in the audio commentary. "This is one of the top five dwarf-based arctic sick jokes" and "He's one of the great London tent-shakers." - From Monty Python's Flying Circus: News Announcer:* It's been a quiet day over most of the country, as people went back to work after the warmest July weekend in nearly a year. - Most Extreme Elimination Challenge: The tagline of MXC hailed it as "The World's Toughest Competition in Town!" - In the opening sequence for the 2013 MTV Movie Awards, James Franco informs Rebel Wilson, "you'll be the greatest Australian female host in MTV history!" - Mystery Science Theater 3000: - One episode of NCIS has an undercover set up blown apart by the FBI. Fornell and Gibbs start in on each other about it before heading off to Gibbs's "office". The FBI agents worriedly mention to the NCIS team that they haven't seen Fornell this mad since... the last time they saw him. - The Office: - Party Down has Soup 'R Crackers, the fastest-growing non-poultry, non-coffee franchise in all of Southern California. - Psych: - In an early episode, Shawn says the following about Lassiter: "...he is an exemplary public servant, and arguably the finest detective mind in the lower western Santa Barbara county area... over the age of 35." - In "Black and Tan: A Crime of Fashion", Gus refers to a fashion model as being "one of the most popular models in the entire Santa Barbara downtown area." - On the QI episode "Kit and Kaboodle", Australian panelist Colin Lane laments that Australia never has the biggest in the world of anything; it's always the biggest "in the Southern hemisphere". For example, Stephen had just said that Sydney has the world's biggest IKEA, then had to correct it to the biggest in the Southern hemisphere. Colin then helpfully points out that it's at least the biggest one in Sydney. Ross Noble then relates that Narrandera has "the Southern hemisphere's second-largest playable guitar". - In The Red Green Show's "I Don't Know" segment, Harold will often introduce Red's guest as his "best friend in the whole wide room." - In an episode of Reno 911!, Junior honors the Sheriff's memory by calling him the "best Pollack sheriff" they've ever had. He goes on to say that he isn't deprecating the Polish, he just wasn't a particularly good at his job. - On RuPaul's Drag Race, Season 5 contestant Jinkx Monsoon described herself as "Seattle's premier narcoleptic Jewish drag queen." After winning the season and becoming a fan-favorite, she later dubbed herself the world's premier narcoleptic Jewish drag queen. - Saturday Night Live: Invoked when Colin Jost was named "World's sexiest comedy writer." Pete Davidson: Being named the world's sexiest comedy writer is kinda like being named the world's smartest horse. - Scrubs: - The Janitor tries this and fails. Janitor: We're the best hospital employee a capella band around. The Worthless Peons: Oh, really? - Ted unintentionally does this when he's talking to Gooch: Ted: I mean you're the most beautiful, perfect ukulele player I've ever seen! I know that's not saying much because they're usually fat Hawaiians... - The Spike Video Game Awards have voice acting awards for "Best Performance By A Human Male" and "Best Performance By A Human Female". In 2012, during the pre-show, this caused Jennifer Hale (who was nominated that night for her role as FemShep) to respond, "Well, I tried out for Best Alien Female, but..." - Star Trek: - In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Whom Gods Destroy", Garth's lover Marta boasts about being the most beautiful woman on the planet; Garth quickly snaps back that she's the only woman on the planet. (The episode takes place in an asylum built on an inhospitable, uninhabited world; there are only seven people there total.) - On the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Ensigns of Command", Ard'rian McKenzie describes Data as "the most incredible android I've ever seen." His interest piqued, Data asks, "Have you seen many?" Ard'rian replies sheepishly, "Actually, no. You're the first." - That '70s Show: - After losing her virginity to Eric, Donna says that the sex was "the best I've ever had." - In the Wonderful Life episode, Eric "brags" to Donna about how he's the assistant manager of the second-largest mattress retailer in the tri-county area. - Top Gear: - Host Jeremy Clarkson usually gives a guest that isn't near the top of the time chart bragging rights by declaring them "The fastest blank to go around our track", with blank replaced with things like Welshman or person with a senior citizen's bus pass. - All the antics of Top Gear Stunt Man. Everything he does is really just a huge failure that everyone had seen coming right from the beginning, but they always try to make it into some type of success. He successfully created a new record for the longest car jump in reverse gear, since nobody ever claimed that title before. - The time they set the record speed for a car indoors also counts. To their own surprise, it wasn't all that high in the first place. - James May is "the first person to go to the North Pole who didn't want to be there." - Hankey Bannister: Third-best whisky in Northern Burma. - Utopia (2014): In "Mission Creeps", Scott announces that the pilot for the NBA's new podcast had debuted at no. 4. In the public infrastructure category. - Web Soup includes a segment called The Greatest Web Video Ever... This Week. - What We Do in the Shadows (2019): Lazlo likes to brag that when he was mortal he was the most beautiful man in his city, to which his wife quickly points out that everyone had leprosy and Lazlo was just lucky that it didn't affect his face. So Lazlo was the most beautiful only in the sense that he was the only one without leprosy on his face. - Whose Line Is It Anyway? has a few examples: - WKRP in Cincinnati: - Perhaps lampshading the station's creaky financial status, one of more prominent advertisers is recognizable by their spots' catchy slogan, "Red Wigglers: the Cadillac of Worms." - Les Nessman's farm reporting awards, the Silver Sow and the Buckeye Newshawk Award (given to "the best news story dealing with or related to taproot vegetable production in the tri-state area and certain parts of northern West Virginia"). - Alice in Chains' MTV Unplugged concert has this exchange between Layne and Jerry: Layne: I would have to say that this is the best show we've done in 3 years. Jerry: Layne, it's the only one we've done in 3 years. Layne: Well, it's still the best. - Some program notes for P.D.Q. Bach's Pervertimento note that, since its discovery, "...P. D. Q. Bach must be considered history's greatest late eighteenth-century Southern German composer of multi-movement works for bagpipes and chamber orchestra." - One of Beatnik Turtle's Songs of the Day is titled "This Is The Best Song That I've Written Today". - Billy Hill and the Hillbillies, a music/variety act at Disneyland, often describe one of their members as "the fastest speed fiddler in the entire... Frontierland area." - The introduction to The Blanks' live show includes referring to the band as something along the lines of "The best a cappella group ever to sing in the halls of a fictional hospital." - Julie Brown, "'Cause I'm A Blonde": I'm so proud to be chosen this month's Miss August. - The Cake song "World of Two" has the line: It's not that I don't think you are Two of the most Perfectly Beautiful People in your world - Childish Gambino has this lyric on "Bonfire" (off his 2011 album Camp): Man, why does every black actor gotta rap some? I don't know - all I know is I'm the best one - - It's a good line, but the pantheon of black actors who have successfully transitioned to rapping is not that big to begin with. In fact, the list is mainly just Childish Gambino and Drake. Most other successful black rappers known for acting (like Will Smith) rapped first. - Sammy Davis Jr. used to describe himself as "the world's greatest one-eyed, black, Jewish entertainer." - One introduction for The Faint describing them as "the hottest dance-electro masters in all of Omaha, if not the entire state of Nebraska" is either a barbed Take That! or the result of a very clueless host. - Flight of the Conchords: - Flogging Molly has a song called "The Worst Day Since Yesterday". - An announcer once described Gorillaz as "the most successful animated band ever." (Take that, The Archies!) - Northern comedian and folk singer Mike Harding once opened a gig with: "Nice to be back in Heckmondwyke tonight. Me and the band are just back from a massive world-wide tour of Finland... note : Harding had indeed just returned from a folk festival in Scandinavia. - Space-rockers Hawkwind once opened a gig at UEA Norwich with this magnificent reference to a rather disappointing support act: "Be appreciative of our warm-up act. They are the very best hard rock band to be found in any part of Norfolk ! Only the best!" - In one memorable TV interview with Dick Cavett, Jimi Hendrix responded to being called "one of the best guitarists in the world" by saying that he was "one of the best guitarists sitting in this chair." - The Housemartins claimed they were only the "fourth best band in Hull" (the three other bands they thought were better than them? Everything but the Girl, The Gargoyles and Red Guitars). This is referenced in the name of their 1986 debut album London 0 Hull 4 (as in Hull has four great bands, as opposed to London's zero). - The Brazilian band Mamonas Assassinas has a song titled "Uma Arlinda Mulher", where the singer tells a girl that she's the most important thing that ever happened to him at this moment in his whole life. - Joey Fatale claimed his band, MiniKiss, was the world's best dwarf KISS tribute band. There were two, though experts argue that TinyKiss, founded by Fatale's rival and former bandmate Tim Loomis, was disqualified by the presence of a 350-pound nondwarf woman as one of the band members. - the Mountain Goats have a song called "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton". This seems like less of an example if you know that Denton, Texas has a pretty big music scene for a town its size, but what it doesn't have is a lot of death metal, so they still aren't up against much competition. - No FX's greatest hits album is entitled The Greatest Songs Ever Written (By Us!) - The music video for Paramore's "Ain't It Fun", filmed on December 2, 2013, was the band's video submission to set the recordsetter.com world record for "Most World Records Set in a Music Video". It therefore consists of them winning nine highly specific categories they originated themselves, such as "Fastest Time to Run Backwards Holding Stuffed Animals While Blindfolded for 30 Feet" and "Most Vinyl Records Broken by 3 People In 1 Minute" (Pun definitely intended), plus the "Most Records" category, which brings the total to ten. Later, in an interview with Paul the WebGuy from iHeartRadio on January 31, 2014, band members Hayley Williams and Jeremy Davis got "Most Balloons Popped by Two People During A One-Minute Radio Interview". Record Setter is a website created to invoke this trope by encouraging people to invent their own records, and provide rules with their submission so that others can try to break them. As of June 21, 2022, six of the eleven records originated by Paramore have been broken by other challengers. - The comedy group Pig with the Face of a Boy describe themselves as "[The] world's best neo-post-post-music hall anti-folk band." - Norwegian humour band Salhusvinskvetten brags about "Northern Europe's Widest Low Country Tunnel" (translated) in one song. - Asthmatic Kitty's press release for Sufjan Stevens' 2006 release Songs for Christmas: Wow! It's the stocking stuffer of the century! Which isn't saying much, considering the century is still so young! - In "Room for Improvement" by The Stupendium, he assures us that he's the "Greatest decorator in an eighth mile radius". That's eighth mile, 1/8 of a mile. - In an interview, John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants responded to the fact that TMBG was at the time the most successful independent band in America by saying, "Well, that's kind of like being the world's tallest midget." - Brazilian rock band Titãs has a song titled "A Melhor Banda De Todos Os Tempos Da Última Semana", or "The best band of all time of last week". - One lyrics website describes "Sweet Jane" as "possibly the most commercially viable song ever recorded by [Velvet Underground]". - Keith Moon of The Who once uncharacteristically had a hard time nailing down the drum pattern for "Music Must Change" while the band were working on the album Who Are You. note : it was a symptom of the drug and alcohol abuse that would kill him only a few weeks after the aforementioned album was released; eventually the final version of the song lacked drums except for a cymbal crash Finally he shouted, "I am still the best Keith Moon-type drummer in the world!" - Organist Jukka Gustavson, of the Finnish band Wigwam, said that "We are the best Jimmy Smith-influenced progressive rock band in Finland", in a humorous attempt to invoke this trope. - Sparks' Ron Mael described Sparks offshoot Gleaming Spires' 1981 album Songs of the Spires as "...the best Gleaming Spires album...ever" on said album's back cover. At this time, this was the only Gleaming Spires release. - Escape from Vault Disney!: The description of the episode about Unidentified Flying Oddball says, "I think we can all agree that out of all the Mark Twain adaptations in which the director of Beverly Hills Ninja plays both a horny robot and a time-traveling incel, this is probably one of the top ten." - How Did This Get Made?: In the show's review of The Hottie and the Nottie, Paul Scheer reveals that advertising for the movie in the United Kingdom billed it as "The Number One Film", with smaller print revealing that it was number one in the "Internet Movie Database's Bottom 100", which was true at the time. - In episode five of Mystery Show, celebheights.com is said to have "the Infinite Jest of Jake-Gyllenhaal-height-related discourse." - RiffTrax calls the Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie "the best live-action Mario property that doesn't contain Captain Lou Albano". - In Episode 10 of Shelfdust Presents: The War Effort, Al Kennedy describes Secret Wars (1984) as "the twelve-issue comic from 1984 that some people are calling the best comic ever to be written by Jim Shooter, via Marvel, in 1984, that's twelve issues long." In the following episode he calls it "one of the greatest comics ever to be called Secret Wars". (There's a choice of three, and few would argue that Secret Wars II was in the running.) - Kevin Owens called himself the greatest Universal Champion of all time when he was only the second person to hold the title and the first (Finn Bálor) had to relinquish it the night after winning it. - One of the awards during the first Annual Muppet Awards in the Phyllis George episode of The Muppet Show is for Best Comedy Performance by a Bear, which the comedy-impaired Fozzie is just about the only person to qualify for. Keyword being "just about"; he still ends up losing to bit character Billy the Bear. - In the Cabin Pressure episode "Yverdon-les-bains", Douglas writes a recommendation for Martin, calling him the second-best pilot at MJN Air. Martin and Douglas are MJN's only pilots. - A running bit on Dan Cole's radio show on KFAN is to state that a given show is "one of the top five shows on the station." There are only five shows on the station. - In the Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation episode "How to be a Good Citizen", Jeremy calls Gordon Kennedy "the most famous Scottish person in Wilsden." (Wilsden is in West Yorkshire, England.) - Christian radio host Bob Larson often called his audience "America's #1 live radio prayer family." The only other stations that could fit that description are KCMS and Relevant Radio. - Back in the XFM days of The Ricky Gervais Show, Ricky attempted a bit of Self-Deprecation by noting that at least XFM was the best radio station in the building. At that point he remembered that the Capital Radio building was shared with several more popular stations, so even that statement was not narrow enough. - Says You! often closes with the joke "More radios are tuned to this program than any other appliance!" When the show become available as a podcast, their plug for it noted that this may no longer be true. - Lo Zoo Di 105: In a sense. The sketch based on Maccio Capatonda's ever-sad character Mariottide, Casa Mariottide ("The Mariottides"), has "The world's saddest sitcom" as its subtitle. And since when sitcoms have ever been sad to begin with? - St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck said of Eddie Gaedel, who had a single plate appearance in 1951, "he was, by golly, the best darn midget who ever played big-league ball. He was also the only one." - Also in baseball: Statistics guru Bill James once called Ken Griffey Jr., who received the highest percentage of votes in a Hall of Fame election until 2019, "the second-best left-handed hitting, left-handed throwing outfielder ever born in Donora, Pennsylvania on November 21." How could this be? Well, the best way across the Monongahela River to enter town is the Stan Musial Bridge. note : Musial was born on the aforementioned date in 1920, Griffey in 1969. - In an effort to fill 24 hours of straight sports, ESPN will often cite some comically over-adjectived record in order to make simply good or mediocre performances seem like a big deal. If you watch long enough, sooner or later they'll claim some pitcher just recorded the most strikeouts before the fifth inning in the second game of a double header at Fenway park by a visiting, left-handed pitcher since 1984, or some such. - In Australian Rules Football, when their side cops a rough umpiring decision early in the match, fans will inevitably scream that the umpires "have been doing it all day!" - Happens in sports all the time. Want to make that middle-tier so-so quarterback look good? Just mention that he's got the highest third-down conversion percentage when facing a defensive line composed of Penn State alumni. - The Minnesota Wild did not lose a home opener until 2013, the team's 13th season in the league (not counting the 200405 season that was canceled by a lockout). That particular game was tied at the end of regulation and overtime, with the Wild losing in the penalty shootout. They lost in overtime in their 2017 home opener, and in a shootout in 2018, but it wasn't until 2019 that they lost a home opener in regulation. note : They did lose as the designated home team in their 201011 season opener... in Helsinki. The Wild won their first true home game that season. - In 2013 Matt Prater kicked a 64-yard field goal, breaking the NFL record of 63 yards first set by Tom Dempsey in 1970, then later equaled by three other kickers. However, Dempsey still holds the record for "longest field goal by a kicker born without any toes on his kicking foot". - Ran NFL has quite a bit of this, especially when Roman Motzkus (former GFL player), who loves statistics, gets to rattle off some statistic he has learned. Any debate on "greatest ever" in the German Football League or among non-North American players will likewise invoke this a lot, as Americans who just couldn't make professional ball west of the pond still enjoy a Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond effect in the GFL. - Arizona Cardinals tight end Zach Ertz and US Women's National Team midfielder Julie Ertz are the only couple where the spouses have won a Super Bowl (LII for him, when he was with the Philadelphia Eagles) and a World Cup (2015 and 2019 for her). Granted, those are significant achievements. - Similarly, Nomar Garciaparra, best known for his years with the Boston Red Sox, and USWNT striker Mia Hamm are the only couple with a World Series ring (2004 for him) and a World Cup (1991 and 1999 for her). However, unlike Zach Ertz, Garciaparra didn't actually play in that World Series he was dealt to the Chicago Cubs on the trade deadline and missed out on the Bosox' playoff run. His former teammates nonetheless agreed that he'd get a ring and a full Series winners' share. - During an Australia vs. England Cricket match, Mark Waugh (twin brother of Australian captain Steve Waugh) told James Ormond "There's no way you're good enough to play for England". Ormond replied, "Maybe not, but at least I'm the best cricketer in my family." - Baseball pundit Dan McLaughlin once said that "Nate Schierholtz is by far the best MLB player from Nevada not born in Vegas." That's a category that includes just 17 players in all of MLB history (Schierholtz was born in Reno). - Colombian football coach Francisco Maturana once referred to player Victor Aristizabal as "the best footballer in the world without a ball", a non-sequitur which raised even more questions as to what the hell he meant by that, even when his intention was to praise Aristizabal for his ability to easily get past defenders before receiving the ball. Aristizabal is still referred to as such, half fondly, half mockingly. - In 2021, Penn State University's football program twitter posted the following image celebrating PSU football alum playing in the Super Bowl - with the overly narrow qualifier in teeny tiny print. Social media and news outlets promptly tore them to shreds. - A Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition splatbook presents the Razing Strike feat. Description: "You have mastered the art of delivering precise strikes against nonliving creatures while channeling spell energy through your melee attacks." - William F. Buckley considered Gary Wills's description of Lillian Hellman as "America's finest female playwright" to be this. According to Buckley, "That's like celebrating the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas." - A common Stock Joke in British panto is to conclude with something like "You're the best Thursday-night audience we've had this week!" - In 1776 : Martha Jefferson, upon meeting Adams and Franklin, says that she is honored to meet "The two greatest men in America." Franklin replies, "Certainly the two greatest in earshot." - In Guys and Dolls, Nathan Detroit runs "the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York." There is even a song about it. - In "Beautiful" from Heathers, Veronica has this to say about Kurt Kelly: Veronica: Kurt Kelly. Quarterback. He is the smartest guy on the football team. [beat] Which is kind of like being the tallest dwarf. - After the "wall" has finished his speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Demetrius: It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord. - From the opening of Ragtime The Musical: "And although the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906... and there were ninety-four years to go!" - The opening song of Young Frankenstein is about how happy the people who lived near the recently deceased Dr. Victor von Frankenstein are over the fact that he's dead and won't be making any more monsters (and that his heir Frederick lives thousands of miles away and is highly unlikely to ever travel to Transylvania to make one himself). The song is entitled "The Happiest Town in Town". - Dead Rising 2 contains a group that makes a show called "Tape It Or Die", which is "the number-one duct-tape related zombie-killing survival web-series today." - In Detectives United: Darkest Shrine, the spectral Richard Gray (from the Grim Tales series of games) addresses player character Anna as "my favorite daughter." She's actually not his only daughter, but you don't know that unless you've played the Grim Tales games; if the player is only familiar with the characters from Detectives United, it comes across as this trope. Then again, it's Richard talking, so there's no way to know if he's being serious or sarcastic. - The Dink Smallwood mod Dinky Dimensions 1: FIAT: Hotel clerk: Welcome to the Magik Inn. We are the finest establishment in the Magik Isles. Dink: Isn't this the only one? Hotel clerk: Yes, it is. Dink: Wouldn't that mean that it's also the worst establishment? Hotel clerk: Erm, I'd have to speak to the manager to verify that, sir. - Disney Magic Kingdoms: - When Hamm asks Bo Peep for her opinion on his jokes in "Comedic Timing", she tells him that he's the funniest piggy bank she's ever met. He soon realises that he's the only piggy bank she's ever met. - In "Home of the Mug of Meat!", Pacha calls Mudka's Meat Hut the "[b]est greasy spoon in this part of the Andes", before admitting that it's the only greasy spoon in that part of the Andes and that that's probably the reason it's still in business. - Dragon Age: - Seen in the Dwarf Noble Origin of Dragon Age: Origins. The PC in this origin is the second of three children of King Endrin, with an older brother and a younger brother. A female PC can have a conversation with younger brother Bhelen in which he calls her "my favorite sister" — she is, of course, the only girl in the family. - In Dragon Age II, when they're trying to get Leandra's sleazy brother Gamlen to help them get into the city, one of Hawke's possible dialogue options is to ask, "Would it help if I said that you were my favorite uncle?" Take a guess as to how many uncles Hawke has. Gamlen does at least chuckle at the quip. - In Edna & Harvey: Harveys New Eyes, one character is described by the narrator as "the most depressed looking man in a bee suit" the main character had ever seen. - The box art for Extreme PaintBrawl 2 boasts that it's the sequel to "the #1 selling paintball video game." - The promotional website for Game & Wario describes Ashley's minigame as "the best game where you guide a child witch through a world made entirely out of candy while dodging obstacles". - Goat Simulator's GoatZ expansion touted itself as "The first survival game on Steam not in Early Access", which was more of a Take That! at the glut of Early Access survival games on Steam than it was a factually correct statement. - The radio programs Grand Theft Auto occasionally use these: - In Grand Theft Auto III, the radio ad for the in-universe game Pogo the Monkey highlights that a game review magazine called it "The best springin' simian game since Bouncing Bananas". - In Vice City, the host of VCPR defends his old career as a birthday clown, "Saul the Wheat-Free Clown", by claiming that his act was voted "Best Up-and-Coming Dietary-Restricted Comic Act" in Vice City once. The Sleazy Politician being interviewed cuts in to point out that he actually didn't win; "Mary the Meat-Free Mime" did. - The English site for Hatoful Boyfriend dubs the game "the world's greatest pigeon dating sim." - Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep is widely described as "the best Kingdom Hearts game on the PSP" despite being the only PSP Kingdom Hearts title. It's widely considered to be a good game, though. It is more likely that the commenters either weren't aware of the game being the only one (thus far) released for the PSP, or they meant it was the best game of the franchise that happened to be released for the PSP. - Kingdom of Loathing uses this joke a few times, like describing the gummi belemnite as "It's not the best gelatin cephalopod-precursor you've ever eaten, but it's definitely on your top ten list." - In The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Irene claims to be the most talented witch in her generation. The only other witch in the game is her grandmother. - One April Fools' Day TAS submission for NetHack purports to be a run for the "spend ~900 turns preparing for fastest gametime, then speed-TAS the game in 6 hours focusing mostly but not entirely on realtime" branch. note : The April Fools' Day joke here being, one of the co-authors of an in-progress "fastest gametime" run decided to prank the other one by submitting the run before it was properly complete, which necessitated the speed-TASing of the remaining gameplay. The rejection comment lampshades this: Mothrayas: ...it would be perfect if it were not for a slight little problem. That problem being that "spend ~900 turns preparing for fastest gametime, then speed-TAS the game in 6 hours focusing mostly but not entirely on realtime" is not exactly doing hot as a category. Reasons for why this is the case are not definitive yet, but some factors that are speculated to be involved include the facts that this is an incredibly arbitrary category, and is only really a mask for the fact that the run's goal switched completely midway through the run... - Not the Robots is described by its developers as "This year's most exciting Roguelike Stealth Furniture Eating Simulator." - Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice: In the DLC case, which involves a murder on a blimp used for a wedding reception, Phoenix resolves to prove the bride's innocence. Phoenix: We can't let this go down as the saddest flying wedding reception in history. - In Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, Chobin does this to himself when he describes himself as the local Mad Scientist's best assistant. "Chobin is only assistant, so Chobin must be best assistant." - Lose a DMV race as Bart in The Simpsons Hit & Run and Patty/Selma might comment "You've gotta be the worst ten-year-old driver in town." At least, we can only hope it's overly narrow. - Skyrim: "Not only is the Winking Skeever the best inn in Solitude, it's the only inn in Solitude!" - In the Facebook game The Smurfs and Co, if you talk to Timber Smurf, he'll call himself the best lumberjack in all of Smurf Village. You'll respond by saying that he's the only lumberjack in Smurf Village. - Sonic The Hedgehog: - Compared to his other, more impressive, title "the fastest thing alive", it's a little underwhelming for Sonic to be more commonly referred to as only "The world's fastest hedgehog". Then again, the few other hedgehogs in the series do prove themselves competent speedsters from time to time. - Shadow the Hedgehog, in one of his game's Multiple Endings, promises to become the most powerful hedgehog in the universe! - South Park: The Fractured but Whole: Scott Malkinson, alias Captain Diabetes, touts himself as the strongest diabetic superhero in the world. Neither the game nor the South Park universe itself have any other diabetic superheroes, which makes his only real competition the notoriously incompetent Captain Novolin. At least Captain Diabetes does have genuine Super Strength. - In the demo for The Stanley Parable, the Narrator tries to come up with cheap compliments for the player, one of which is "Of all the people I know who are playing this exact demo at this exact moment, and standing in this exact room, your performance is easily in the top five thousand." - Tales of Lagoona 3: Frauds, Forgeries and Fishsticks' "It Takes Tuna to Tango" quest description, in part: You just wait. I'll be the best tango dancer in East Lagoona south of the grotto under the age of 20 excluding tunas. - In Tales of Phantasia, Chester gives Amy an apple. Amy: You're the best big brother I've ever had. Chester: Amy, I'm the only big brother you've ever had. Amy: Yes, but I love you anyway! - Team Fortress 2: - The game is described by its developers as "the world's #1 war-themed hat simulator." - The Demoman claims to be the last Black Scottish Cyclops. He'll admit that they've got more f-three second-long bleep-s than they've got the likes of him, though. Granted, the comics show that he comes from a long and storied line of black Scotsmen who tend to lose an eye or two doing the family business... which still isn't saying much. - A slightly different version: Cirno of Touhou constantly proclaims that she's the strongest and smartest fairy in Gensokyo. She probably is, but considering normal fairies are idiot mooks, it's generally accepted this doesn't really mean much at all. She narrows it down even further if she beats herself in Phantasmagoria of Flower View: "When it comes to me, I'm the strongest!" - In Undertale, during a certain optional conversation, Papyrus will describe Mettaton as his "favorite sexy rectangle". Mettaton is indeed rectangular, and is regarded as Mr. Fanservice in-universe, but is the only character to have either of those as a notable character trait. - Valkyria Chronicles II was stated by a reviewer as being "(...) as good as any other Turn-Based Strategy game mixed with a third person shooter for the PSP," of which there is only one other ( Valkyria Chronicles III). - In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a dialogue option causes the playable character to describe Therese as the most powerful vampire in Santa Monica. While this sounds impressive at first, as far as the playable character knows, there are only four vampires in Santa Monica. - Homestar Runner uses this gag a fair few times: - The Strong Bad Email "record book" takes the time to poke fun at oddly-specific records in the Guinness Book of World Records: Coach Z tries to set a record for hopping on one foot with nine pieces of gum on your face while singing the "I'm Just Me" song (as does Homsar), while Strong Mad gets into the book for the record "Most Macaronis Nailed To A Paper Towel Tube By Strong Mad", with one piece of macaroni nailed to the tube. - In "buried", Strong Bad introduces his Taranchula Black Metal Detect-or as "America's coolest children's game show consolation prize". - In "hremail3184", Strong Bad gets an email asking about the coolest explosion he's ever seen. Apparently Strong Bad has seen (and caused) enough cool explosions that he asks Kelly to be more specific, like "the coolest-looking explosion I ever rigged up in Strong Sad's org-ethnic breakfast pouch on a Tuesday". - In "kids' show", Strong Bad describes Homsar as "America's favorite blue midget Homestar." - In 8-Bit Is Enough, Homestar remarks that Strong Bad is the "eleventh best friend a guy can have." Which is a lot less impressive when the series has twelve main characters, and Homestar is presumably not counting himself as one of his friends. Although, with Homestar, one can never be certain. - My Cafe: Felicia, after looking at some designs Ron showed her, says that it would have won first place if the town ever hosts a contest for "fashion designed by a football team captain", but not without saying that Ron would be the only contestant. - Zero Punctuation: - Yahtzee's "Best and Worst of 2013" described Star Trek: The Video Game as "Least Bad Science Fiction Movie Tie-In on this List". In this case, there was one other item in the category. - His "Best and Worst of 2015" described SOMA as "the second-best atmospheric-narrative-horror-game-with-philosophical-themes-set-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-with-an-existential-plot-twist-in-it of all time", second in this case to BioShock. - He described Tunic as "...the best game since The Sacred Armour of Antiriad to be named after the entire contents of the main character's laundry list." - Axe Cop is (in a parody-fashion) sometimes referred to as "The best web-comic written by a 6-year old and his 29-year old brother". - Comic number 377 of Bonobo Conspiracy is possibly the second-funniest comic strip ever made about part X.1, paragraph 204.2(1.1)(b) of the Income Tax Act of Canada. - Zip in DDG is told: Matrisse: You're the nicest dead transvestite not good enough to move past the afterlife. - Used in one◊ Dresden Codak stickman comic, which describes TRON as "Easily the greatest Jeff Bridges Sci-Fi film of the early '80s." note : The only possible competition in the category is Starman, which, being released in 1984, is better described as a mid-'80s Sci-Fi film. - According to The Rant in it, one El Goonish Shive strip contains "at least the third-most subtext-filled request for illusory carrots in the history of comics." - Flaky Pastry: Trivine calls Arlen and Cassean her two favourite brothers. Arlen points out that she only has three brothers, and the third one is Tares, who — as the cast page puts it — is a stuck-up meanie. The Alt Text jokes, "And you, Trivine, are my favourite blonde sister!" (Trivine is the only blonde sister in the family.) - Sam Starfall, from Freefall, possesses a mug marked "World's Best Squid Captain". He is, in fact, the only member of his species on the planet. - Barry Deutsch describes his webcomic Hereville as being "Possibly the best comic about a troll-fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl that you'll read all week." - Nukees won the Spleen award (best comic named Nukees). - The Order of the Stick: - #831: "Oh man! I haven't seen him this mad since the last time I saw him!" Though actually he was pretty mad then. - \|\|Vampire Durkon\|\| is the High Priest of \|\|Hel\|\|. Also the only one. \|\|Until he starts "recruiting".\|\| - Penny Arcade likes this trope: - Some PS3 fans claimed that the game Lair doesn't fit existing genres and is, in fact, its own genre. This caused Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade to call it "...a really shitty genre," and mockingly refer to the game as "The best 3D dragon-based shooter with Sixaxis controls." - Penny Arcade has also repeatedly referred to Kolibri as "Arguably the finest hummingbird-based shooter for the 32X"; this has since become a minor internet meme. - Their own We're Right Awards assigns these to the various games at the ceremony. For instance, Sly Cooper was awarded the title of "Best raccoon game since Ringtales on the Super Nintendo", and Tearaway is referred to as the "Best game you won't play because you don't have a Vita, because no one has a Vita". - The extra in one Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip declares it "the funniest vagina needles comic ever". SMBC does this a lot. - Shortpacked!: The Avengers: the best movie Jesus Christ has ever seen. note : (Out of a sample size of The Avengers, Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2). - From Skin Horse: "Still, this is easily the best centipede-made credenza I've ever seen." - According to its about page, " Spatula Drama is a constrained comic that tells the tale of two lovers, Vincent Bruno and Trish, who are drama-prone spatulas. It is probably the world's best example of this premise." - Touhou Nekokayou: "You are the guiltiest HELL-RAVEN with the power of a CROW with the power of THE SUN in the entire UNDERGROUND!" - Unshelved characters got the best vegan root beer float ever. - The Whiteboard is "Alaska's Coolest Paintball Webcomic!" In The Rant to an Irregular Webcomic! strip, David Morgan-Mar calls this "a claim not to be sneezed at, because I've looked at Alaska's second-coolest paintball webcomic, and it's not bad." - As Wondermark blogged about Cathy being called "the first widely syndicated humor strip by a female cartoonist" — ...being the first at something is a powerful branding tool, and with enough qualifiers, anyone can be the first at something. - xkcd does this a lot: - Someone once compiled a list of the Top 5 movies about arm-wrestling. Over the Top came in at #3... despite being the only movie on the list. - The Squatty Potty ad has been described by Adweek as "The Best Ad You'll See Today With a Unicorn Who Poops Rainbow Soft-Serve". - The Agony Booth's description of Degrassi Junior High: — ...the most beloved teen drama ever made! ...In Canada. Between the years of 1987 and 1989. Of all time! - Amazon.com does this automatically with its best-seller list, narrowing the category until it puts the product whose page you're on in the top 100. "#61 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Comedic Fiction > Talking Animals > Wombats > Southern Hairy-Nosed." - The synopsis for Tears of the Black Tiger at Badmovies.org describes it as "probably the best violent cowboy shoot 'em up ever made in Thailand." - The BuzzFeed article about UHF titled 29 "Reasons 'UHF' Is the Greatest Weird Al Movie About a Fake TV Station Ever". "Weird Al" Yankovic: Lesbian Nazi Hookers abducted by UFOs and forced into weight-loss programs. All this week on Town Talk ! - From CatsThatLookLikeHitler.com: "I think your site is one of the funniest sites about cats that look like Hitler that I've seen this week." - The Christian Post review of Frozen: But in an email statement to The Christian Post, Alex Wainer, associate professor of communication and media studies at Palm Beach Atlantic University, wrote, "Of the two Disney animated fairy tales with past-tense single verb titles, this is no Tangled ." - Cracked: - The site presents to us a look at the film Quigley, with the article titled "The Most Insane Christian Movie Starring Gary Busey as a Pomeranian... Ever". - According to "8 Brilliant Pieces of Comedy Hiding on YouTube", "Thomas The Tank Engine Crash Compilation" is "the darkest, most brutal video about anthropomorphic trains ever. Admittedly, that's a pretty specific category, but when you watch this thing, you can't help but admire how horrifically violent it is." - Destroy All Movies describes Love Bites as "The best shot-on-video gay vampire comedy of 1988." - Dread Central reviewer Scott Foy has repeatedly stated that because of director Ulli Lommel's filmography, Uwe Boll is not only not the worst director in the world, but "he's not even the worst German director whose name begins with the letter 'U'." - One man sold personal finance software... for the Apple ][. In 2013. In the auction page, he boasted: "I guarantee this is the best personal finance software for the Apple IIe that will be released in 2013!" - Atop the Fourth Wall on Sonic Super Special: "Congratulations, Sonic Super Special, you have the best out-of-nowhere reference to The X-Files since Sinnamon #11!" - The Banjo Kid, "the greatest banjo-playing anime critic on the net". - Brows Held High's Beauty and the Beast (1946) review features Some Jerk with a Camera referred to as "the greatest white, male, Jewish, overweight, long-haired, bespectacled theme park reviewer over 30 the world has ever known!" - In the commodoreHUSTLE episode "Suspicious Doings", Graham describes LoadingReadyRun as the "seventeenth most popular Canadian flatulence-based internet comedy troupe". - Cute with Chris often calls his site/show, "The number one cat website on the Internet today... with the word 'Chris' in the title. So proud." - The Cynical Brit described "Zombie Bowl-a-Rama" as the best zombie game he had played that week. - Diamanda Hagan describes Zombeak as "the world's worst zombie chicken movie". Only one other exists. And it is amazing. - DigitalRev's YouTube page describes it as "The most subscribed and viewed photography show on the interweb, presented by an Asian dude with British accent." - The top comment for the Friendship is Witchcraft video "Foaly Matrimony": - The Game Grumps throughout The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker often mockingly invoke this on the King of Red Lions as if the title were literal. They even go so far as to call a random blue beached boat that is part of the scenery on an island the "King of all Blue Boats" just to further drive home how little meaning the title has. - Gamers Nexus: In HW News from August 28, 2022 Steve says that Corsair markets their Xeneon Flex monitor as "The world's first 45 inch 21:9 OLED gaming display". Steve Burke: Just like we're the world's first computer hardware review channel named Gamers Nexus. If you specify it enough, you can always be first. - Gggmanlives's video review and Steam curator writeup for Call of Duty: Ghosts snarks that "it's the best Call of Duty game released in 2013". - Mike Stoklasa of Half in the Bag invoked this in his praise for Overlord (2018), saying "How much better can you make a Nazi Zombies movie than this?" (Although they immediately provide multiple other examples of the same subgenre.) - The Happy Video Game Nerd: While livestreaming 007: NightFire on the Game Boy Advance, Derek is amused when a review is found for the game calling it "The 3rd best GBA FPS." - H.Bomberguy discusses this extensively in ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 when talking about Tommy Tallarico's alleged Guinness World Records. As he notes, GWR's business strategy involves invoking this trope for anyone willing to pay, finding a new record for them to break (giving Canon's printing of the world's longest digitally printed photograph as an example) and then publicising the event. This practice is thrown into sharp relief when Tommy Tallarico's record for "Most Videogames Worked On in a Lifetime" is called into question; rather than give the record to its actual holder, GWR responds by changing Tommy's record to "most prolific composer of game soundtracks" (though Tallarico still claims the record is for "Most Videogames Worked On in a Lifetime"). After noting two other dubious records Tommy has, HBomb's discussion ends by noting that the record was purged from the database after his producer, Kat Lo, asked some very basic questions about it to GWR. - Honest Trailers: - In the documentary Internet Scamming in Ghana (available on YouTube), Socrate Safo, the director of sakawa-related films, is described as "The Martin Scorsese of Ghanian internet fraud-based gangster films." - The conclusion of Cleolinda Jones's Twilight recaps: "It was the best series starting with a teenage girl in love with a mysterious boy in her class that ended up with a teenage girl defending her growth-accelerated mutant hybrid baby from an ancient clan of evil vampires with her magical psychic shield that I ever read." - Inverted when JonTron explains that Titanic: The Legend Goes On isn't even the only Italian-animated Titanic film that features talking mice (or refers to the Titanic disaster as if it were a legend instead of a real-life event). - Most Kiwami Japan videos are titled along the lines of "Sharpest ______ Kitchen Knife" where the blank is filled with something implausible to make a knife out of, such as pasta, smoke, bread, chocolate, or milk. Regardless of their actual sharpness, due to how few knives are made of these materials, his knives are almost certainly the sharpest of that material by default. - In the legendary "CARD GAMES ON MOTORCYCLES!" video by LittleKuriboh, Hokage compliments Sensei on his camcorder-captured completely improvised One Piece Abridged on being "the best One Piece Abridged [he's] ever seen." - Movie Bob mentions that the scene where Poirot rants in the snow in Murder on the Orient Express (2017) is "the Gold Winner in the Category of 'Kenneth Branagh Directing himself Hamming it up on top of a snowy mountain'", taking the first place from his "My Thoughts be Bloody!"-monologue in 1996's Hamlet. - The Rap Critic's show "The Worst Lyrics I've Ever Heard... This Month". (Even more when considering that the March 2012 episode came out on March 2nd...) - In their video "Worst Console Ever Made 3", Rerez calls one game "the worst frisbee-shooting game on a golf course I've ever played". Though they do admit it's the only one they've ever played. - James Rolfe sometimes does this in his reviews. Examples include "the worst commercially-sold VHS tape to feature such high-profile monsters" and "the craziest, most absurd scene in a horror film to feature two actors who would go on to win Academy Awards." - RT Game's Team Fortress 2 server currently has the highest killstreak ever achieved by a train. Then again... : 1000+ kills also means nobody's gonna be breaking that record anytime soon. - During The Runaway Guys' Let's Play of New Super Mario Bros. U, Josh declares that he's the best Yellow Toad they've ever had. The guys are quick to point out he's the only Yellow Toad they've ever had. - The Saturday Morning Glory review of Mister T calls the show "the greatest cartoon to star Mr. T ever made." - Sorted Food: Parodied: ... they will go head-to-head-to-head in what will later be called the eleventh-greatest Japanese and sake food pairing battle in east London... on a Sunday! - Television Without Pity does this occasionally: - They described The Vampire Diaries as "probably the best vampire show on now", though that's not as narrow as it sounds these days. - They also described Top Chef: Just Desserts as "everyone's favorite competitive pastry reality show." - Tobuscus got invited to livestream a playthrough of the Xbox Live Arcade game Bloodforge on its release date. He brought his mom along to the show and invited her to play for a few minutes. Shortly thereafter he called her "The best mom who ever played Bloodforge in the first hour of its release." - The Brazilian channel Trasheira Violenta once did a video on somehow discovering seven bad sanitarium horror movies from 2013 (and they even found an eighth one, which they gave up on halfway through, finding it a cynical excuse for the director/writer to play an irredeemable sociopath). - Yuriofwind says in his Gaming Mysteries on Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards that the aforementioned game is the best Kirby game for the Nintendo 64. He follows that up by saying that while it may seem like an unfair thing to say, since it wins by default, that's the best kind of victory. - In one episode of The 7D, Hildy is accidentally zapped by her own spell and turned into a slug, and wails about how she's hideous. Grim implores the queen's magic mirror to tell her that isn't true, and so the mirror replies, "All right. You are the most beautiful slimy slug I've ever seen." Hildy is not comforted. - In Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic (unsurprisingly) fails to lift Tails's spirits when he's down in the dumps on one occasion by saying that he's the fastest, coolest two-tailed fox he knows. - All Grown Up!: In "Bad Aptitude", when Chuckie tries his hands at being a daredevil, like his aptitude test told him he should, Tommy attempts to promote him as "the fastest kid on Earth". When Chuckie points out that may not be true, Tommy changes it to "the fastest braces-wearing, red-headed, nearsighted kid on Earth!" - In the American Dad! episode "Rabbit Ears", Alistair Covax introduces his pianist Charlie as "sincerely one of the best white, non-union jazz pianists in the entire city... top five." Poor guy isn't even number one in such a narrow field. - Animaniacs: - In an episode of the original series, Yakko Warner describes an overly Avant-Garde black and white French film as "The worst French film I've ever seen! It's also the only French film I've ever seen." - Animaniacs (2020): - A news scroller mentions that " Wakko's Wish now the highest grossing Animaniacs movie of 1999". It's the only Animaniacs movie they made that year... or that decade, for that matter. - In the segment "Fear and Laughter in Burbank" Dot comforts a freaked-out Yakko by claiming that he's on the "top two" of her funniest brothers and Wakko (who doesn't even have a second brother) says the same applies to him. - In an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Kite-man boasts, "I'll be the most famous kite-related person in history!" Given that the only other famous kite-related person in history is Ben Franklin, and that Franklin is a household name not just in America, but the world over, that is actually aiming quite high for a third-tier gimmicky villain. - In the Beavis and Butt-Head episode "The Pipe of Doom", the boys watch the Salt-N-Pepa video "Whatta Man". Butt-Head responds to the line "He is the cutest brother in here!" with "He's the only brother in here!" - Bob's Burgers: - In "Bob and Deliver", Bob refers to Tina as his "favorite eldest daughter". Arguably justified in that he's primarily referring to how he likes her the way she is. And even if he were trying to play favorites, his other two children are right next to him (one of whom secretly looks up to him), meaning he'd have to be very careful in his word choice. - The episode "Hawk & Chick" describes the titular movie series as "featuring the most celebrated father-daughter traveling barber samurais in the history of Japanese cinema." - Subverted in Codename: Kids Next Door. During the Villain Choice Awards in "Operation: A.W.A.R.D.S.", The Toiletnator is happy because only he can receive the "Best toilet-themed villain of the year" award... except that the winner is a new villain named Pottymouth. - Jay Sherman of The Critic is described as "New York's third most popular early-morning cable-TV film critic." - In Daria we have Ms. Li, the principal of Lawndale High, who was once named fourth runner-up for Principal of the Year by the tri-county chapter of the Asian-American Women in Education's Caucus. - Darkwing Duck: In "Dead Duck", Darkwing tells Launchpad that he was the best sidekick he ever had. He then comments that Launchpad was the only sidekick he ever had. - In DuckTales (2017), Flintheart Glomgold boasts that he's "the world's most beloved Scottish billionaire duck". It isn't even technically true, as Glomgold is actually South African. - In "Burrowing Owl Girl" from Elinor Wonders Why, Bibi calls Elinor's father her favorite son upon his, Ranger Rabbit, and Elinor's arrival. He points out that he's her only son. - Futurama: - A lot of the title screen captions do this. One of the DVDs has a list of unused opening captions for episodes as an Easter Egg. These include "The best show you're watching right now." - One ad campaign run for the show on [adult swim] described it as "The action-comedy-scifi-drama that redefined action-comedy-scifi-dramas." - Dr. Zoidberg has been known to refer to himself as "the most important doctor at the delivery company where I work." - The Land Titanic, which Amy refers to as "the biggest and only-est land boat ever constructed." - In one episode Fry laments the loss of his "lucky" pants, stating that a few times he'd been lucky while wearing them. He then adds that they're also his only pants. - In "Bendin' In The Wind": Beck: Bender, that was the best forty-minute washboard solo I've ever heard. The parts where I was awake blew my mind . - The Garbage Pail Kids Cartoon episode "Green Dean Goes Out of His Bean" ends with Mrs. Slotnick being given an award for "the most beautiful exotic flowers growing on a former weed that ate up a supermarket". - From A Garfield Christmas Special: Jon: Doc Boy, how's my favorite brother? Doc Boy: Don't call me Doc Boy. You've probably forgotten I'm your only brother. - Harley Quinn (2019): King Shark is fond of these, such as saying that Cinderella's mouse is "the mouse that smoked the most unfiltered cigarettes made for humans" that King Shark has ever seen or calling Mr. Freeze "the most woke ice-themed villain in all of new New Gotham". - In Hey Arnold!, Phil often calls Arnold his "favorite grandson", with Arnold always correcting him with, "I'm your only grandson". - In an episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes, Samy calls Super Slugmeister "the greatest slug ever!" Lucius notes that that's not a very high bar. - KaBlam!: The KaBlammy for best acting while impersonating an egg goes to Loopy from "Life with Loopy" and the award for best supporting monkey goes to "Prometheus and Bob". - Kaeloo: Pretty says that Eugly is her favorite sister, but acknowledges that Eugly is also her only sister and therefore her favorite by default. - Kim Possible: - In an early episode of King of the Hill, Hank compliments Luanne's "Manger Babies" show as "The best Christian puppet show I've ever seen!" - Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness: Taotie: You're the greatest son in the world! Bian Zao: And you're the greatest dad in... the family! - The Legend of Korra: - Subverted in an episode when the crew is hiding in the sewers with the Beauteous Bush hobo. He gives them gruel which he made from food he scavenged from dumpsters. Bolin cheerfully says that it's the best street gruel he's ever tasted, which sounds like this... until you remember that he was a street rat for a good chunk of his life. That's actually a genuine compliment, coming from him. - Played straight and lampshaded by \|\|Toph\|\| when she tells Korra, "Of all the Avatars I've worked with, you are by far the worst. I know that's only one other Avatar, but still..." - LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures: There are cups describing Palpatine as the best Emperor in the galaxy. Upon receiving one from Darth Vader, Palpatine points that out he's the only Emperor in the galaxy. - In The Magic School Bus, Janet refers to herself on more than one occasion as "Arnold's favorite cousin," to which Arnold replies, "You're my only cousin, Janet." - In Marvel Rising: Chasing Ghosts, the doughnut shop owner claims to have the best vegan donuts on the Upper-Middle-Lower East Side. - In the Mike, Lu & Og episode "The Hunter and the Hunted", Mike attempts to cheer up Og's father Alfred by telling him that he's the bravest hunter she's ever known. Alfred replies that he's the only hunter she knows. - In Milo Murphy's Law, Milo's parents tell them about the time that they lost a competition with "Pete and Tina, the best 70s-style roller-disco dancers in all of Danville." Milo: How many roller-disco dancers were there in Danville? Martin: Seven, but you're interrupting the narrative. - Molly of Denali: In "A Song For Lola," Molly claims that all the gifted songs she's seen were really serious, though she's only seen the song that was gifted to Merna. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: - Phineas and Ferb: - In "Phineas and Ferb's Musical Cliptastic Countdown", Doofenshmirtz gets frustrated when Perry the Platypus shows up to thwart his evil scheme yet again. Doofenshmirtz: I swear, of all the aquatic mammals I hang with, you are truly the most uncooperative! - In "What Do It Do?", a young Doofenshmirtz isn't particularly fond of the eponymous song, even after putting it in one of these: Doofenshmirtz: Eh, it's in my top seven, eight favorite songs about reverse engineering. - In the Ready Jet Go! episode "Holidays in Boxwood Terrace", Jet calls Mitchell "the best detective he knows". Mitchell is the only detective Jet knows, and Jet even lampshades it. - Rugrats: - In "Baseball", Stu and Lou win tickets to a baseball game by answering the trivia question "Who holds the record for the most homeruns hit on the second Tuesday in April." This is likely intentional, as the answer is the team's star player, who reads the question on air. - In "Reptar on Ice", the papers say that the aforementioned show is the show to see if you see just one skating-dinosaur spectacular that year. - In "I Remember Melville", Chuckie mourns Melville, commenting that he was the best bug he ever had. Phil notes that he was the only bug Chuckie ever had. - Scooby-Doo: - In a Sheep in the Big City sketch, there's "Dinky: The Superiest Turtle in the Universe!" "He's slightly faster then most turtles, but still relatively slow." - Shimmer and Shine: - In "What a Pig Mess", the titular characters watch a car race and Shimmer says that it's the best one she ever watched. By her own admission, it's the only one but still the best. - In "Volcano Drain-o", Shimmer describes Mount Navine as the biggest volcano in Zahramay Falls. It's the only volcano in Zahramay Falls, but Shimmer says it's still the biggest. - The Simpsons: - In "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular", Troy McClure describes the Simpsons as "America's favourite non-prehistoric cartoon family." Of course, that's not as narrow as the alternative. - In "Curse of the Flying Hellfish", Abe Simpson describes the Flying Hellfish as "the fightingest squad of the fightingest company of the third-fightingest battalion in the army." - In "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", Homer's friends watch the first episode of Itchy & Scratchy where Homer appears as Poochie, and they don't want to tell him that it was terrible. Ned Flanders says: "Homer, I can honestly say that was the best episode of Impy & Chimpy I've ever seen." As he doesn't even know the title, it's pretty clear that his experience with the series is bordering on nil (he did watch an episode in "Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily", but he hated the show and probably forgot about it altogether). - In "Bart Star", when Flanders becomes coach to Springfield's pee-wee football team, Homer won't even wait for the first game before claiming that Flanders is the worst coach the team ever had. As Marge points out, Flanders is the only coach that team has ever had. - In "Lisa the Simpson", Lisa probably doesn't intend it as an insult, but at one point, she says that Yertle the Turtle is "possibly the best book ever written on turtle stacking." In the same episode, one of the successful female Simpson relatives describes herself as the "regional manager of the third-largest distributor of bunk and trundle beds." - In "Midnight Rx", Bart tells Lisa that Mr. Burns is one of the nicest men he ever met. When Lisa asks how many men he knows, he says it's basically Burns and Homer. - In "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore", when Richard Dean Anderson of Stargate SG-1 makes a personal appearance at the Android's Dungeon comic book shop, Comic Book Guy tells him that of the four major Star franchises ( Wars, Trek, gate and Search), "yours is - easily - my third favorite", to which Anderson replies "I get that a lot". - In "Springfield Up", Ned Flanders says that Homer is "the kindest, sweetest, most generous man to ever drive through my living room." - In "Homer of Seville", Homer meets one of the three tenors and says that he's his second favorite among them. Homer then remembers about the other guy and changes the position from second to third. - In "I Don't Wanna Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", Lisa is awarded the Student of the Millennium Prize. She admits that it's not as big a deal as it sounds, as we're only about a decade into the new millennium... but still, they picked her! - Sofia the First: In "Buttercup Amber", Amber says that Mossy has the sparkliest swamp monster eyes she's ever seen. Those are the only swamp monster eyes she's ever seen. - Stargate Infinity: In "The Look," Stacey says that Gus is her favorite uncle, causing him to remark, "I'm your Only uncle. - Steven Universe: - In "Now We're Only Falling Apart", Rose Quartz hugs a newly-emerged Amethyst. Rose Quartz: Look at you! You're beautiful! Welcome to Earth. Amethyst 8XL: That is the first, and nicest, thing anyone has ever said to me. - In "Shirt Club", Sour Cream describes a shirt as "the coolest thing I've ever been hit in the head with". - In the Teen Titans Go! episode "Dog Hand", Starfire introduces herself to Trigon as Raven's "best female friend within the Teen Titans". - The Tick episode "Grandpa Wore Tights" includes "Zee largest secret army of atomic robot zombie men... in zhe vorld!" note : An unsubstantiated claim. If there was a larger secret army of robot zombie men... in zhe vorld, would he know? - Done subtly in the Transformers: Animated episode "Mission Accomplished", where the Autobots ask Captain Fanzone to be Sari Sumdac's legal guardian because of the disappearance of her father Isaac and an order from the Autobot Elite Guard to leave Earth. When Fanzone asks why he has to be Sari's guardian, the Autobots reply that it's because he's number one on their list of humans they trust the most, but they quickly add that the list isn't very long and that it includes Meltdown and Nanosec, both of whom were villains who antagonized the Autobots. - An episode of The Weekenders focuses on yearbook superlatives. The yearbook has a space for "Best Tino" — and main character Tino failed to even get that.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyNarrowSuperlative
Convection, Schmonvection - TV Tropes "I packed my sunscreen. I'm fine." "Fire as long as you're not directly touching it, it can't hurt you." Have you ever put your hand in front of a fire? You should have felt heat emitting from the flame long before touching it. This principle applies to anything that's even mildly hot. Most TV writers and video game developers, however forget that part. The hero is making his way through the Lethal Lava Land, but wait! There are floating rocks, he can make it across to the other side! Except in the real world, the heat coming off of the lava would have cooked him already. Convection, the process by which a liquid or gas (like air) forms currents that very quickly spread heat from a hot thing to its environment, does not exist in TV land. Convection, schmonvectionas long as you don't touch the lava, you're okay. Note that this trope covers heat radiation as well, and seeing as large explosions create shockwaves as well as fireballs, this also covers Overpressure Schmoverpressure. TV also ignores the other hazards of volcanoes and lava flows, such as toxic gases and blinding, choking ash. Although lava is the primary offender, this also applies to any time convection is ignored for the sake of Rule of Cool, such as when a character is standing above or near a large fire, hot water, or any other extreme heat source. If you don't touch the raging inferno, boiling lake, or white-hot walls, you'll be fine. Rule of Perception also has a hand in this trope: the writers, animators and viewers can't feel any heat, so obviously there isn't any. This is especially applicable to Video Games, though having to dodge both lava and the invisible heat it gives off would be rather irritating. There is a Fumes, Schmumes variant, where a pool of hazardous liquid that should be offgassing dangerous fumes is perfectly safe as long as you don't touch it. Lava is also rarely found just calmly lying around, looking as fresh as when it first left the mantle — when it slows, it has time to cool and harden, progressively changing in consistency from fresh caramel, to toffee, to rock. If it's been liquid for any appreciable length of time, it will probably look like this. Since the exterior of the lava cools down first, it also won't look orange/red unless it's very, very fresh; viscous lava flows tend to take on a silvery-grey appearance as the outside cools down, with the still orange/red-hot interior visible through cracks on its surface. This is a subtrope of Artistic License Physics, and a common inaccurate portrayal of Energy (in this case, thermal energy) in fiction. Occasionally you may see the visual effects of convection in the form of distortion of heated air—which will still be safe to be near, as long as you don't touch the magma itself. For some reason, the reverse is demonstrated a bit more realistically; characters will feel cold in a cave or other area that's in perpetual winter, or frigid enough to have ice form on the walls. However, as long as they bundle up, the most they'll ever get is a longing for some hot cocoa and a warm fireplace — and, much like how standing close to lava rarely leads to overheating, Frigid Water Is Harmless. This, too, can be attributed to Rule of Cool. See also: Lava Pit, Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid, Battle Amongst the Flames, Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud, Hailfire Peaks, Hollywood Fire, Thermal Dissonance, Harmless Electrocution, Lava Surfing, A Molten Date with Death, Harmless Freezing, and Cooking the Live Meal. Toasted Buns and Lava Adds Awesome are related tropes. A complete but no more accurate inversion is "Space Is Cold", where there is no convection, but TV acts as though there is. ## Example subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - During the events of Absolute Carnage, Sleeper slobbers napalm all over Hybrid for Hawkeye to ignite. Both Dylan and Sleeper dramatically watch the symbiote burst into flames from a few feet away until there's nothing left but a hole in the ground. In truth, both of them should have been burnt to a crisp, as napalm burns at a temperature of 2,760 degrees Celsius or 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, about half as hot as the surface of the sun. - Crystar The Crystal Warrior. For the purpose of having a civil war, the loyalists to the old king and his heir Crystar are turned into living crystal men, and the rebel faction are turned into living lava men. The obvious solution of just spraying water on the bad guys didn't come up in this comic's brief run. - The Fantastic Four's Human Torch can safely carry people and objects by extinguishing the flame on his hands. Being right next to the rest of his flaming body is apparently not a problem (though, admittedly, it would be much hotter above the Torch than next to him). It has been said that The Human Torch can control who/what he burns with his flame. It's not always followed, though. - X-Men: At one point, Magneto had a base in the Antarctic surrounded by lava, the only thing keeping the lava from destroying the base was a force field. Yet, when the device controlling the force field is destroyed the lava only slowly leaks in before it finally bursts in. Magneto survives by using his powers to create a magnetic sphere to keep it away from him, whereas Jean creates a telekinetic bubble for herself and the rest of the team, and it somehow keeps the heat out. - Paperinik New Adventures: In one issue, Donald was able to fly with no problems few centimetres above the lava on his Extransformer. - In a Punisher / Captain America crossover, a mook tries to invoke this (and is kind enough to explain it as he does so): if firing a bazooka at the shield causes it to bounce off, shooting it so it explodes short of the shield will let the heat (which will go around) do the work. - Averted in The Punisher Presents Barracuda; when President Luna falls from a helicopter into a volcano, we see him catch on fire in mid-air before he hits the lava. - In Secret Wars, when the Torch uses his "nova flame" to take out Ultron, it burns so hot that it melts clean through the surrounding solid-metal walls and floor. When the smoke clears, Captain America, who was standing a few yards away and protected only by huddling his upper body behind his shield, is perfectly unharmed. Apparently, his body's melting point is a lot higher than that of whatever alien metal was used to build Doombase. His shield absorbs kinetic energy, not heat. - Superman: - Supergirl (1982): In the first issue, Supergirl shields two people from a shower of molten steel. Her indestructible cape blocks the cascade of metal but it should not protect them from the intense heat. - Kryptonite Nevermore: In one scene, Superman flies over a volcano. It makes sense that he is not affected because he is invulnerable. However in Issue #238 a group of criminals use a magma-hose. The nozzle is specially tempered but they are still too near from the stuff. - The Phantom Zone: Variant. Supergirl is thrown into the Disintegration Pit, a cauldron fueled by radioactive flames. Kara is hurt and weakened by the searing radiation, but she survives by not touching the flames. - In crossover story The Supergirl-Batgirl Plot, Robin is thrown into an atomic reactor, but he is hauled out of there by Batgirl. Since his body does not touch the flames, he is completely unaffected by the searing heat or the lethal radiation. - Swordquest: Fireworld: Mostly played straight. The characters run around a Lethal Lava Land with gouts of flame everywhere, but suffer no ill effects aside from profuse sweating and a constant thirst. - It is common for Marvel characters who have undergone cryonic suspension to need zero time to thaw. In Uncanny X-Men (2016), several mutants who wanted to wait out the terrigen cloud in cryonic suspension are alive again the moment the liquid nitrogen is drained from their caskets. The same goes for the Winter Soldier whenever he was released from suspension by the Soviets. - Wonder Woman Vol 1: Handwaved in one of the Wonder Girl Impossible Tales. Diana jumps into a bubbling volcano to retrieve her lasso, and while doing so thinks to herself how handy it is all Amazons "train" to be more heat resilient since a regular person would die doing what she's doing. - Subverted in one issue of X-Force, where Wolverine's Opposite-Sex Clone, X-23 was above a vat of molten metal, and falls. The next time we see her, all her hair has burned away and she has third-degree burns all over. Her shirt was burned away too, making Elixir give her his. Turned out she bounced off the side of the vat to the ground, but the brief exposure to the heat was still enough to harm her. She has a Healing Factor so she got better. - Lampshaded in an issue of DC's Young Justice: Empress: Mon, this place makes no sense. In an active lava field, the ground is so hot, you can get incinerated just by standing on it. How come we still got feet even? Robin: You're complaining because it wasn't more difficult?!? Are you nuts ?! - Played as straight as possible in a Flash Gordon parody from Wally Wood's Sally Forth. The heroine Sally uses a Jetpack to fly around while completely naked, but doesn't suffer any injuries from doing so. - Averted in A Teacher's Glory. Sasuke extinguishes the fire on his sword after a fight, re-sheathes it, and promptly sets his sheath on fire. Later, he realizes that weeks of super-heating his sword in combat has ruined its temper. - Mounty Oum's CG Fan Film series Dead Fantasy probably takes this to its most extreme. During part II, the fighters end up on a stone raft floating down a river of lava. The raft is less than a foot thick, but does not melt or overheat. Similarly the girls suffer no problems from heat and toxic gas. Sounds pretty standard so far. Then Tifa gets knocked off of the raft. Yuna shoots Tifa to knock her onto the rocky ledge rather than into the lava, implies that falling in the lava would be a bad thing. But Tifa then proceeds to RUN ACROSS the lava, suffering no more than ignited shoes, used to deliver a fiery dropkick. - Averted multiple times in The Bridge - Godzilla Junior fires a wide plasma beam into a flock of gyaos, flash frying many of the smaller ones without even scoring a direct hit. - In the The Shimmerverse crossover, The Bridge: A Shimmer in the Dark, Sunset Shimmer's fire magic causes the neighboring leaf litter and grass to catch fire or wilt and sizzle. - In a What Could Have Been example, Blade Dancer's brief fight with Godzilla Junior would have featured her sword melting due to Junior's heat. The author changed his mind upon realizing it wouldn't be realistic for that to happen without Blade Dancer's body igniting as well. - Averted in Chrysalis Visits The Hague when Chrysalis recounts to her lawyer her (supposed) experience of \|\|Princess Celestia trying to execute her and her army by shoving them into\|\| a live volcano. "The trouble with your condition is that, if you gazed into a volcano, you wouldnt have the milky flesh that you do now. If you were up close enough to see the single bubbles boiling up in the lava, you would also be close enough for it to burn the flesh straight off your bones." - Subverted in Incarnation of Legends. Bell is surprised when he feels heat coming from Solaris while she's casting her Inferno magic despite being a fair distance away. She's also left sweaty and exhausted after using it. - Played absolutely straight, with deliberate intent, in Your Alicorn Is in Another Castle. Twilight's first investigation of the platforms floating over the lava in Bowser's kingdom discovers that they don't conduct the heat into her hooves. In fact, the lava doesn't conduct any heat into the air: anything drifting up gets about a hoof-height above the molten rock and stops right there. She quickly concludes that the local physics are a little weird. - Downplayed in Half Past Adventure with Huntress Wizard's occasional pyrotechnics. There are a few occasions where she starts some noteworthy fires that should probably have been more painful for herself and others nearby, including the time \|\|Robin\|\| was trapped within one. - Averted in The War of the Masters. - Create Your Own Fate: Eleya witnesses a Bajoran surface-to-orbit phaser cannon firing on a Fek'Ihri ship. Nearby vegetation ignites from the heat of the blast. - The Burning Of Beruns World: A similar weapon has an artificial lake nearby for cooling. Within a few shots, the lake is boiling. - The destruction of the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin, in which Aladdin isn't cooked alive while being pursued by a malevolent stream of magma and using Carpet to escape. - The sequel, Aladdin: The Return of Jafar has Aladdin trapped on the side of a pillar of rock floating around an open lava pit, and Jafar even hits with a beam to make it sink faster. When Iago manages to kick Jafar's lamp into the lava after taking a near-fatal hit, Al manages to catch him, and then climbs to the top of the pillar as it sinks. By the time another rock pillar falls and he uses it to get to the edges of the lava pit to climb up and out, he is mere inches from the lava, and has two close scrapes with death: the first when his pillar finally sinks and he jumps to the other, and when he nearly is squished as the pit closes after Jafar's Family-Unfriendly Death. Granted, this could be justified by the first rule of the Genie: Thou Shalt Not Kill, but even then the heat alone should've roasted Al and Iago. - In Brother Bear, Koda and Kenai traverse a field of heat (supposed to be lava...) This is impressive for two reasons: Kenai gets continuously hit by jets of steam (a la Princess Bride and the Swamp) and the nearby areas are covered in snow. - Elemental (2023): Zigzagged. The main character is a fire elemental, but exactly how hot she burns varies from scene to scene. Sometimes, she can melt glass and metal on contact and boil water just being in the same room, other times, she can hold plastic and paper without even scorching it, and stand in the middle of a pool without making so much as a bubble. - Frozen (2013): When the heroes go to visit Kristoff's troll family, Olaf does not melt, or even thaw a little, despite walking between what appear to be geysers of steam, \|\|and this is well before he gets his personal flurry.\|\| The steam suggests that the area where the trolls live has geothermal features, which are the reason why it stays clear of snow while the rest of Arendelle is snowed in. - Taken to ridiculous extremes in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, where Sid manages to raft along a river of lava then have some of it splash on him without getting at all hurt. - The Incredibles has plenty of fun with lava. Mr. Incredible gets awfully close to it during his first fight with the Omnidroid, while the Omnidroid actually falls into the lava, and emerges unscathed, even though it's so hot it's glowing orange. Maybe heat resistance is another of Mr. Incredible's superpowers (he seemed just fine in the scene in the burning apartment); maybe the Omnidroid was made from heat-resistant Unobtainium. Either way, there's no excuse for non-superpowered Syndrome (and presumably Mirage) not being cooked alive by the secret passageway with walls made of flowing lava. - In Inside Out, during their trip through Imagination Land, Joy, Sadness and Bing Bong cross a stream of (imaginary) lava by using floating pieces of furniture as stepping stones. - The climax of The Jungle Book 2 apparently takes place inside an old temple that's for some reason built inside a volcanic pit. Mowgli, Shanti, Ranjan, Baloo, and Bagheera actually lure Shere Khan inside the temple, where they attempt to distract the tiger by hitting gongs, but when that doesn't work, they simply throw Khan into a pool of lava. Khan survives the fall, thanks to a rocky ledge overhanging the lava, but is immediately trapped inside a giant stone tiger head that also fell inside the pool of lava. - Koati: Calli (a bird) is able to fly Pako and Nachi over the mouth of a volcano and doesn't even get an Ash Face from it. - The Land Before Time has a scene like this, featuring floating rock islands that can be jumped on by dinosaurs. - In The Princess and the Frog, we have a scene where Tiana and Naveen as frogs are sitting on the edge of a bathtub. The bathtub is sitting in a fire and being used to cook gumbo, which is boiling hot. But, hey, an inch away sitting on bare metal, what's the problem? Though this can perhaps be justified by the fact the bathtub also doubles as a magic cauldron. - In The Road to El Dorado, the main characters are chased across a cracking layer of volcanic rock by a large stone jaguar. Lava comes within inches of splattering on them. But it must not be very hot itself, because the stone critter pops right back out. - The title character of Shrek and his donkey sidekick walk across a rickety bridge over a boiling lake of lava to reach a castle on the other side, without seeming to feel any heat. And a castle built on a pier of rock rising out the lava, which wouldn't even be stable in such conditions, as lava can erode, corrode, and often outright melt such piers. - The Swan Princess 2 is a fairly big example here: the villain's evil lair is inside a volcano, with a moat full of lava surrounding the central spire that serves as his home. There is a very rickety rope and wood pulley system used to cross-one that should have been incinerated in moments of exposure. Close to the end, while the volcano is exploding (as they are want to do) the heroes are barely inches away from the bubbling, wildly frothing lava-some of it splashing within millimeters of them-and come out unscathed, despite the fact that there should have at the very least been a few singed feathers. - Toy Story 3: The incinerator is obviously really hot, but the plastic toys remain unmelted. - A radiation variant: what does the titular character of WALLE do when he flies right next to the Sun? Why, charge up his solar batteries, of course! Possibly justified, because WALLE is one of many robots who were assigned to fix Earth after humans destroyed it so much it became uninhabitable. He would've been built to withstand the extremely high temperatures from the destruction of the ozone layer, although whether this would've allowed him to fly right next to the Sun and survive is highly debatable. - Stormslayer has the player's hero crossing the River of Fire while exploring Mount Pyre, which doesn't result in any damage to the player's stamina. Justified since he have a Dragon Tattoo on him. - Averted in Animorphs #34 when the team visit the Hork-Bajir homeworld and cross over a seriously deep chasm — as in, so deep they can see the core of the planet. Ax: <You do not have to worry about the lava, Cassie> Cassie: "Thanks, Ax." Ax: <If you fell, I believe you would be incinerated before you hit the actual magma.> Cassie: (narrating) Sometimes I think hanging around Marco so much has given Ax a totally twisted sense of humour. Very un-Andalite. - The same joke is used again (or before?) in the ''Hork Bajir Chronicles". - Visser Three has a morph that can fire lethal amounts of heat (enough to boil a person alive), and just being near it is described as standing in front of an open oven. - In the first The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the giant Foamfollower carries Covenant across Hotash Slay, a river of lava. Foamfollower, being a giant, is immune to fire and so can withstand the heat of the lava; Covenant, however, realistically would have been fried before Foamfollower even stepped into the river. There is some Hand Waving of this — it is implied that Covenant's ring is involved. - In Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novels, explicitly discussed and averted. Once Cain claims that a plasmabolt missed him by a millimeter. In a footnote, Amberley points out that he would have suffered flash burns that close, so he was wrong about the distance. - Averted in one short story by Arthur C. Clarke in which a crew of astronauts on Venus encounter an amorphous creature that appeared to try to encircle them as if to eat them. Turned out it was simply trying to avoid excess heat generated by their spacesuits' life support systems, which wasn't immediately apparent to the crew. - Explicitly averted in the third book of The Death Gate Cycle, Fire Sea, which takes place in a subterranean world where cities are built on the shores of great lava currents to stay warm within the dying planet. It's explicitly noted that only the demigod-like Sartans and Patryns are capable of surviving in such conditions, while humans and other races with lesser magical aptitude died out almost immediately after their arrival. And the world takes its toll even on the Sartans, greatly weakening them as they focus most of their magic on simple survival. - Averted in The Dresden Files, where all but the most controlled fire magic heats the air and sets nearby objects ablaze. In Blood Rites, a vampire used a flamethrower on Harry in a tight corridor, and he used his shield bracelet to deflect the napalm — but the bracelet only stopped the napalm jelly, while the heat from the jelly proceeded to roast his hand to the point that even with his wizardly Healing Factor, it's still somewhat limited in use and covered in scar tissue for the rest of the series so far. Harry mentions on several occasions that summoning and directing fire requires a lot of force in order to make sure everything that's not the target doesn't get incinerated, and once that force is released, you'll still have to deal with the convection issue. He has even redone his bracelet's shield magic to block this. - In A Day Off, Harry even lampshades his trope during a D&D campaign by complaining that the party wizard's perfect 20' fireballs are unrealistic. - Played straight in White Night, where Harry sends continuous waves of molten rock at some attacking monsters, and none of his allies that are standing nearby seem bothered by the heat. - Somewhat justified in Emily the Strange: The Lost Days. While the liquid black rock was stated to feel as if it was burning Earwig, it does so in a nice way and apparently isn't hot per se. - In Aaron Allston's Galatea in 2-D, Roger is not burned by nearby lava. Justified because it's his imaginary world, and he hadn't thought of whether it would kill. - In the Jedi Academy Trilogy, Luke once walks through lava to impress a prospective student. He's stated to be using the Force to direct the heat away from his feet, so it's not much of a stretch to assume that he includes the rest of his body. - Journey to the Center of the Earth. The explorers are carried up the tube of a volcano by lava on their raft of fossilized wood (an asbestos dish in the 1959 movie, a dinosaur skull in the 2008 one) which in real life would get them cooked alive (Axel notes the temperature rises to 70°C). Some editions avoid this by having them be carried up by water (which was the case for the first part of the ascent), the implication being that lava below is causing a geyser-effect to blow them out of the volcano. - Initially averted in Queen of Demons when Garric notes the heat emanating from a nearby lava moat; later played straight both when he crosses a bridge over the moat and in an Outrun the Fireball scene involving a tunnel and an erupting volcano. - The climactic scene in The Lord of the Rings where Frodo and Sam, having destroyed the Ring and precipitated the eruption of Mount Doom, make it, utterly exhausted, to one of the last firm rocky outcrops which is surrounded by a river of molten lava. The book skirts over the issue of the sheer heat of their surroundings might in itself be fatal to them, ignores the possibility the air they are breathing might not only be superheated but poisonous, and allows a large bird to swoop down to pick them up without instantly becoming Mordor Fried Eagle or at the very least having its flight feathers scorched off. The film adaptation requires serious suspension of disbelief on this one. - Averted in French Sci Fi novel Malevil. The cast is celebrating in a cool 55º Fahrenheit castle cellar when World War III occurs. Within a minute the cellar is an incredible 150ºF. Emmanuel is struggling to breathe and strip off his clothes when he realizes the flagstones he's lying on are burning hot. He realizes with horror that the stone cellar may soon function as a stone oven and broil them all alive, it doesn't occur to him to consider what temperatures outside the insulated underground chamber must be like. - Played completely straight in Prophecy Approved Companion as Qube, having no knowledge of what lava should actually be like, concludes that it must be like painful water. - Definitely averted in The Quest of the Unaligned. During a battle against several hundred fire-spiders, they coat the cave walls in burning web and nearly cook the heroes alive before Laeshana puts out the flames. - A Series of Unfortunate Events: Well, technically "Radiation Schmadiation." In The Film of the Book, Klaus uses Olaf's sunlight-refracting weapon to incinerate the wedding contract. The instant the sunlight hits the paper, it catches on fire. That means the thing was heated to about 400 degrees Fahrenheit just like that. Never mind the fact that Klaus perfectly lined up the device to hit such a small target, how come Olaf's hand didn't get singed? Or, you know, the stage didn't catch fire? There should at least have been smoke, considering how easily the paper went up. - In the Star Trek: The Next Generation Relaunch novel Q&A, the away team find themselves maneuvering through a lava field by jumping from rock to rock. Science officer Kadohata points out that the heat should be affecting them even if they don't touch the lava, but stops once security officer Leybenzon asks her if she's complaining that things should be more difficult. (The planet was created by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, and works however they want it to.) - Completely subverted in the video for "Just Got Lucky" by Dokken; George Lynch really did play that solo in front of an active volcano, and though they weren't very close to it he says it was hot enough that he could feel it though his shoes. - Invoked by the "Devil's Island" pinball in Balls of Steel, with the player required to shoot the ball into a lava tube and an active volcano. - Congo has a shot along a lava trail that loops around the base of a volcano. - Gilligan's Island has Gilligan fly over a volcano that's about to erupt, without any problems. - Gorgar takes place inside the monster's Lava Pit, but both the Barbarian Hero and the Damsel in Distress suffer no obvious ill effects. - Gottlieb's Tee'd Off features a golf course set around a volcano, and the player must regularly shoot balls into it. - In The Adventure Zone: Balance, the party survives a fireball powerful enough to reduce a few square miles to glass by hiding in a well a few dozen feet deep. - Averted in BattleTech: just being near lava is dangerous, causing mechs to gain extra heat each round and dealing damage to other units based on proximity. Played straight but justified in the case of non-lava based fire, as the hex grid on maps is 30 meters per hex. A mech or tank that's in a hex next to a fire is still likely to be standing 20 meters away rather than being close enough to touch it. - Dungeons & Dragons: - If a wizard casts a fireball spell and you are 20 feet away expect to take up to 10d6 damage, more than you'd get from sticking a foot in lava. If you are 20 feet and 1 inch away? You're fine. Possibly justified as being intentionally designed that way by whoever invented the spell, allowing you to roast enemies while not harming your allies. It is magic after all. That, and it would be a massive pain in the ass for the DM and players to deal with concentric damage rings (or worse, a linear damage scale formula based on range) for everyone involved each time a wizard pops an AoE. note : For comparison, Shadowrun grenades do have varying damage based on the victim's location from the explosion. It's a massive pain in the ass. - In what has to be one of the weirdest things about gameplay, an "Unearthly Heated" environment (anything over 211 F) deals 3d10 fire damage a round. Physical contact with magma? 2d6. Granted, total immersion deals ten times as much damage as simple contact, but when was the last time a character survived being dunked in lava long enough to be considered immersed, with charting HP still relevant? note : The logic behind this is as follows: contact is defined as physically touching the lava with your arms or feet, while superheated air affects the whole surface of your body. Thus, the damage is much larger, since the area affected by burns is also much greater. Total immersion means when you jump or fall into a pool of lava. - This Trope is used to demonstrate how tough Immortals are on the cover of The Immortal Storm, an introductory adventure for Immortal-Level players in the original boxed set. The cover shows four scantly-clad human-like figures with perfectly toned torsos wading through lava with no discomfort at all. (After all, when the Player Characters are Immortal and confronted by lava, "convection? schmonvection!" is their most likely response.) - Played straight in Flash Point: Fire Rescue. A victim is perfectly OK being surrounded by fire markers as long as none are placed directly on top of them. - Averted and played straight in the various versions of GURPS. There is a spell, "Heat", that raises the temperature of an object or area by 20F per minute. Averted in the spell note that the heat radiates away normally, so "if you were in a jail, you might melt your way through the bars, but the radiated heat would probably broil you first"... then played straight in that Game Masters are explicitly told not to turn the spell into a physics exercise. - Played straight with the Hero Clix Muspelheim map. It includes special rules for squares containing lava, which allow a character to walk over it in complete safety, just so long as they don't end up standing in a lava square at the end of a turn, which will deal a pittance of damage. Admittedly, it is based on the superhero genre, so it's not like accurate physics was its top priority. - Played with in Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution. Pyrokinetics instinctively lower the temperature around their bodies, making them extremely resistant to being damaged by heat. - Several characters in BIONICLE participate in lava surfing with no adverse effects. Handwaved in that they're cyborgs, most of whom have some form of heat resistance. - Only Matoran of fire, who have a greater heat resistance, do it for sport. Other characters surf on lava only if needed to escape. It was also mentioned that Toa of fire could survive a few seconds in lava, though it most certainly wouldn't be a pleasant experience. No-one thinks that it is stupid to surf for sport on a liquid which kill you if you fall. - Played very straight in the movie Mask of Light, wherein Takua ( not a Fire Matoran, though everyone including himself thought he was at the time) fishes the eponymous mask out of a lava flow with his bare hands, and only feels the hotness after holding it in his hand for a moment. Then, he hops onto his comically frail lava surfboard... on all fours, with his fingers clinging onto its sides (hanging into the lava), but suffers no ill effects. The mask itself plays it straight in that the rock it was contained in when it fell into the lava completely melts, but it itself is completely unaffected (though it's noted it was made to be a lot sturdier than the average mask). - To be completely fair, most of the above examples are molten protodermis and not actual magma. The fact that the characters themselves are made of protodermis might actually make this worse, though... - As long as the cast of DSBT InsaniT aren't touching lava, (even then due to an animation oversight) they can be as close to it as possible without getting hurt. - In Tomorrow's Nobodies, Ben is able to survive the apartment burning down in episode 2 with no burns or injuries of any kind despite the fact that the couch he was sleeping on is partially burned away. David also suffers nothing more than pain despite his hands being on fire for the majority of the episode. - Darths & Droids now has a link to this very page as they approach the Obi Wan and Vader lava battle. - Dr. McNinja: This page shows us a wooden bridge inside a volcano \|\|that only starts burning once a magma eruption tears it down\|\|. Dan and Judy seem mildly surprised. - El Goonish Shive: - The monster of solid fire that does not burn. "Why are you crying, Dr. Physics Professor?" Apparently, it's not really made of fire and just looks like it: it's a beginner's mistake when summoning certain monsters. - Later, the mage summoning them is seen surrounded by a barier of fire (some spoilers). The barrier has an appropriate amount of heat, but doesn't harm the caster, or indeed, anything not directly touching the flames. Greg immediately asks, "How haven't you burned the ceiling?" - Girl Genius: - Averted beautifully: Anevka pumping enough electricity through her arm to flash-fry \|\|her father\|\| releases enough waste heat to send her entire outfit and wig bursting into flames. - Averted once more in England. Dr. Rakethorn dramatically swings in to rescue Agatha from an small explosion, and when she asks after his back that was facing it he claims it's fine as he's posing as a perfect hunk of a hero as part of trying to make Agatha to ditch Gil for him. His subsequent reaction to the Jagers slapping him on the back makes it clear he was burned and is in pain. - Homestuck has Dave's planet, the Land of Heat and Clockwork, made out of giant steel structures and turning gears as platforms floating directly on top of the lava. Logically, Dave shouldn't be able to stand on them without boiling to death. - Later on, Dave and Rose wind up \|\|walking out of a sun. Fortunately, the two are immortal, although given that the Felt, Ms. Paint, and Spades Slick also were able to survive being inside the Green Sun for an extended period of time, it's safe to say that the Green Sun doesn't behave like any star we know of\|\|. - And then in Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 2, a Lava Pit is formed on Jade's planet thanks to a Sphere of Destruction war. Not only does a building get toppled into the lava soon after to form some convenient platforms to be fought on, but \|\|Jade herself\|\| actually gets launched with enough force to skip on the lava and yet survives that. - Though the latter two are at least partially justified. \|\|Dave and Rose ascend to the God Tier just before walking out of the Green Sun, and God Tier characters can only die in a Heroic or Just manner. And by Act 6, Jade has ascended to the Dog Tier, which is one step beyond God Tier.\|\| - In Jupiter-Men, Arrio's Fuerza de Fuego spell creates a bubble of superheated fire hot enough to incinerate almost anything that tries to penetrate it before it can reach whatever is inside. This heat obviously doesn't extend to whatever is within, or else they'd be cooked. - Zig-zagged for laughs in Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: Commander Badass lights a cigarette, and his heavily-gelled hair bursts into flames. After a Beat, Badass admits to a concerned Jones that this is probably why he stopped smoking, but being on fire is apparently more embarrassing than it is harmful to him. - The Order of the Stick: - It's safe to fly over a lava pit — but the careful reader will note that there are runes on the wall, and that the runes spell out that they are a spell, to keep in the heat, thus justifying the survival. - During a sequence set in a burning building, the characters aren't worried about the fire, as it only deals 1d6 damage. Smoke? Convection? What's that? - In Rusty and Co. \|\|Madeline\|\| jumps out of a pit with lava at the bottom and deftly lands, singed but mostly unharmed. This is because of Chekhov's Gun: earlier in the story, the party wizard was asked for volcano survival spells... - Noted in this comic of Slack Wyrm. Where the chicken in charge of baking a dragon sized black forest cake is forcing them to pull the cake up a volcano to bake the cake. She says "..the Lava only hurts you if it touches you." - Sluggy Freelance: "I don't have to be a volcanologist to know you don't step in the lava!" (Technically true, but for better reasons than are dreamed of here.) - Voldemort's Children: Harry burns Dumbledore's office and then doesn't seem to have any trouble standing around in the only spot that isn't on fire. - In Yokoka's Quest, when Yokoka enters a volcano to visit Yang's shop she walks dangerously close (and barefoot) to lava, and suffers no physical harm. - A Creepypasta talking about a lost episode for Arthur gives a very blatant example: even though the demon turned the thermostat in Arthurs house up to 126 degrees, which is a really high temperature, Arthur doesn't suffer at all. When the rest of the main cast come in, many of them are described to be visibly sweating and burning to death due to the temperature, but Arthur, who was already there, isn't described to have any problems. note : Depending on the temperature scale, different things would happen; at 126 Fahrenheit (52.2222 Celsius), people would definitely be uncomfortable, and quite possibly suffering heat stroke, but it wouldn't kill you as fast as 126 Celsius (258.8 Fahrenheit) would. In fact, it's only after he stitches an elephant trunk to his face and sits on a swing made from the other characters' bones that he suffocates from the heat. - Cracked: - Critical Role: Wildemount takes this to its Logical Extreme in the Grim Up North: thanks to ancient magical fallout distorting physical laws, snow can gather harmlessly on top of a deadly lava river, sometimes forming a bridge sturdy enough to cross over. - The paragraph "Factual Accuracy" at the Other Wiki's article on the child game "The Floor Is Lava!" will kill you faster than hot lava. - Lampshaded heavily by raocow, while playing A Super Mario Thing: "This is just barely hair-singing me, because you know, lava, normally, like, at this proximity, Demo would be something like evaporated by now, but I mean we're talking about reverse-gravity lava, which has completely different physical implications." - Exaggerated and parodied in a Something Awful parody of bad science in movies like The Core... where the characters travel to the Sun and walk on its surface thanks to some vague Hand Wave Applied Phlebotinum. - Averted and lampshaded in the Whateley Universe. Team Kimba is in a holographic simulation of an evil lair inside a volcanic mountain, complete with a huge gap across molten lava to get to the Big Bad. The Smart Guy points out that even the toughest supers on the team wouldn't survive flying above the magma, and snarks that it isn't some stupid video game. But they have other resources.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverpressureWhatOverpressure
Overly Long Fighting Animation - TV Tropes "...bear with me, OK, just a little longer, I'm almost there. Just a few more impressive poses and 3D lighting effects, maybe a lens flare or two just for kicks. Ooh, did you see that? Wow, I'm cool." An attack animation in which the Rule of Cool is applied in excess, making it just too dang long. It can be seen sometimes in video games. The Big Bad launches an attack that takes several minutes to land, and it's not plot related. It's just there to show just how awesome the game is. Another aspect of these is that they tend to show truly apocalyptic levels of destruction, but the environment will be perfectly fine afterward, and casting the spell more than once is usually no problem either. This can be justified by taking the spell's effects to be metaphorical or spiritual, but this doesn't always hold up. In some cases, those animations can't be even canceled, becoming a nuisance, and disturbing gameplay. Sometimes, it's used as a desperate ploy to make the game feel longer. In general, this is going out of style recently, as developers are realizing that the negative aspects are outweighing the Rule of Cool in the target demographic. Can lead to the Fridge Logic of "while it's taking so long, Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?". Unrelated to long-running Shounen anime. ## Examples: - Monster Hunter games have had this at times. - In the older games, but especially the original and its related versions, Rathalos tends to fly around for what feels like several minutes doing nothing and drawing out fights. Similarly, Black Gravios uses Beam attacks a lot which appears to leave him open, except that he then unleashes a blast very shortly after making it impossible to get in hits without taking damage which will waste a lot of time in a quest. - In Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, several G-rank monsters will spend exorbitant amounts of time enraged and simply spam combos which make players just walk around watching the monster while it goes all ape until it cools down enough to allow the fight to resume. For example, Molten Tigrex spamming up to 4-5 running attacks and/or comboing in a random number of super roars which make it unsafe to try and exploit the obvious opening for fear that he will do it again before the player can move. - Monster Hunter: World avoids this for the most part, except for two notably problematic monsters. Bazelgeuse, when enraged, will use an extended version of its "bombing run" attack that can last for nearly 30 seconds. The final boss of the main game, \|\|Xeno'jiiva\|\|, has a mouth laser that can drag on for almost as long. - The BlazBlue series has: - Astral Heats, One-Hit Kill moves with 10-20 seconds animations if they connect. Expect players online to Rage Quit while waiting for the Astral Finish animation to play out. - Bang's Fu-Rin-Ka-Zan Super Mode suspends gameplay for several seconds while Bang powers up and the BGM announces how awesome he is. Bang players in Calamity Trigger would frequently perform Fu-Rin-Ka-Zan after the match was over, simply to waste their opponents' time. - Castlevania: Judgment got harsh criticism by several reviewers for its overly long special attacks (none of which can be skipped). - Dragon Ball Legends has Legends Limited characters, in which using their Special Move or Ultimate Arts as the finishing blow will trigger their Legendary Finish animation, usually based on an iconic moment in the Dragon Ball anime. Most of the time, they're short and direct with their references, such as Namek Saga Super Saiyan Goku or Androids #17 & #18. But then, you have characters like Bardock and Full Power Frieza, in which the developers were dead set on making a Shot for Shot Remake of their iconic beatdowns, regardless on how long they last. They can't be skipped, so most opponents in online matches will simply forfeit and hand you the win rather than let the animation play out in full, and the userbase has unanimously agree that people who trigger Legendary Finishes in Co-Ops and Raid events are people that just likes to waste everyone's time. - Evil Zone did this with some of the more powerful attacks, such as Danzaiver's Kill Sat. The length of the animation changed depending on when and how often you used it: first use would get about ten or twenty seconds, subsequent uses would be shortened to all of five seconds, and a use that would land the killing blow would take even longer. - The GHA's in Jojos Bizarre Adventure All Star Battle take forever, often for the sake of recreating the character's signature move in all its glory. - Though most hyper combos in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 are fairly short and to-the-point, normal combos can be absurdly long thanks to ground bounces, wall bounces, assist pickups, aerial crossovers, delayed hyper combos, and the infamous "DHC glitch", which completely resets hitstun and damage falloff, effectively doubling the possible length of the combo. These sorts of combos tend to be called "Cutscene Combos" and a skilled player can make them last as long as 30 seconds. All that said, some Level 3 Hypers like Phoenix Wright's can be like actual cutscenes. His in particular involves playing out a 15 second long presentation of decisive evidence and a guilty verdict. With full X-Factor, it's also the strongest Hyper Attack in the game and can take out an opponent in one hit. - X-Ray Attacks in Mortal Kombat 9 and X were violent cinematic combo attacks which cost 3 bars of meter but dealt high damage and had armor on start up. However, they weren't especially long and weren't very common at higher levels of play due to meter being better suited for enhanced specials and breakers. 11 reworks them into Fatal Blows, which trades the meter cost for only being available at low health and only being allowed to land once in a match. They become useful at all levels of play either as a panic button for weaker players or adding a massive chunk of damage to combos for more experienced players. - Naruto games: - In the Naruto: Clash of Ninja games, characters special attacks often take a good few seconds of game time during which nobody could move and the background was darkened out. This can be quite annoying if you're playing a two on two fight with a friend, every time your friend uses a special attack, your character and your opponent disappear and you have to sit and wait for your friend's attack to finish before you can pick up the fight in the second you left off. - The First Hokage's Ultimate Jutsu in Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 3 takes about 40 seconds to finish. - A sizable number of Ultimate Jutsu in Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 have fairly lengthy animations, but the various Team Ultimates really take the cake. The worst offender has to be the DLC Team Ultimate for the members of the Akatsuki, featuring all ten members (including Orochimaru and not Tobi) taking turns beating the opponent senseless. The entire thing clocks in at a solid 30 seconds, in a game where the default time limit on a fight is only 99- meaning it's literally possible for an entire third of a battle to be devoted to a single attack. - In Persona 4: Arena Ultimax, Rise Kujikawa's attack "Risette Live on Stage" causes a rhythm game to start, which can take over 20 seconds, making it the longest-lasting attack in the game. - Some players have complained that the KO screen and some characters' Ultra Combo animations in Street Fighter IV take too long. Super Street Fighter IV only looks to exacerbate that problem. Just look at Zangief's new ultra. - In Super Cosplay War Ultra, one of the characters has a Super Move where she changes into Kaworu from Neon Genesis Evangelion, hugs the opponent, then the hand of Eva-01 comes to reprise the final scene of Episode 24, squishing the opponent in the process. Even if a human hand with a remote control comes to fast-forward the scene, it's quite annoying if repeated twice in a row. - Zenka's MAX Super hits for over half your health bar, so you can easily tell when you're dead and just waiting for Zenka finish already and let you die. - Way of the Warrior has an example with a win pose. One of Dragon's wins shows him repeatedly stretching and popping his neck for five unskippable seconds before finally striking a final pose. - Assassinations in Halo (first introduced in Halo: Reach) just take too damn long. Smart players (except sometimes when they're winning by absurd amounts) just go for the beatdown. The only reward you get for sticking your neck out and potentially losing your kill? A few extra credits. Also, their humiliation, but that's already pretty implicit in getting beatdown anyway. - Taunt Kills in Team Fortress 2, which are probably the epitome of Awesome, yet Impractical, they require someone to be oblivious enough to stay right in front of you as you do it, have a loud and very distinct sound before going off and usually don't have any bonus, other than showing off, some that verge slightly less into the impractical bit include the Medic's spinal tap, which gives him a full ubercharge for pulling it off, Heavy's Showdown, which is both long-range and silent until the target's been hit, and Sniper's Skewer, which comes out unfairly fast. - The Spy's backstab animation used to suffer from this problem. Originally, when you swing your knife within backstab range, instead of playing the normal stab animation, it would use a much longer attack animation instead. However, you still had to be behind the player when the attack actually lands to register a backstab. Higher level Spy players would preemptively swing the knife right before they get within backstab range to avoid triggering the slow backstab swing animation. This was later fixed by having the Spy prep the backtab when getting within range, and the swing speed is consistent for normal stabs and backstabs. - While it doesn't sound like much compared to other examples on this page, the Amazon's "Impale" attack in Diablo II can take as much as 6 seconds to complete. Problem is, this is a game in which most other melee characters are attacking at speeds of 2-5 attacks per second, and the game is balanced accordingly. Any Impale-based build requires a mercenary or summon to tank so her attacks don't get interrupted before she can land a hit. - Letz Shake's Earthquake Generator in No More Heroes takes an obscene amount of time to power up and activate, to the point that \|\|Henry is able to swoop in and both destroy it and kill Letz Shake before he can get his attack off.\|\| When Letz Shake returns in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle \|\|with his brain powering a new Earthquake Generator,\|\| not only is the countdown sequence much faster, but he can even adjust the timer at will to trip Travis up. - The Super Robot Wars series is another serious offender. Generally, the more powerful a mecha's attack is, the longer the animation takes. This is assuaged by the fact that the animations tend to be fairly entertaining, plus most of the games in the franchise gives you the option to turn animations off entirely. And more recently, the console iterations have allowed players to double the animation speed during an attack by holding down a button. - Evangelion's signature Unison Kick combination attack breaks game mechanics by lasting technically more than one turn (which is defined as 1 minute). Note that while there are attacks that take even longer, the Unison Kick actually has a timer in the lower right of the screen that goes over a minute. - Another example is attack of the killer Bonta-kuns, what with the target being mobbed by a dozen mascot/power armor hybrids. - Any of GaoGaiGar's attacks takes more than twenty seconds, but Hell and Heaven, Dividing Driver and Goldion Hammer clock at more than 50 seconds each. Ironically, the actual anime is rather unique among for the ability to interrupt attacks. - Shin Getter Robo's Getter Change attack lasts almost that much, with 40 seconds (more in some versions). - Similarly, Murasame/Hayate/Mugen Liger's Consecutive Evolt lasts roughly a minute five with a Dynamic Kill. - Any of the Juddeca's attacks: Final Hell — Judecca breaks at a minute 10 seconds. - The Final Dynamic Special deserves special mention in combinations: every iteration is up to a minute or more, but that doesn't prevent it from being awesome. - The Valzacard's Exa Nova Shoot OVER. It gets worse when the Dynamic Kill animation is scored. - Super Robot Wars Original Generations takes this to an eleven by having nine robots attack a single target. - Dis Astranagant's final attack, "Ain Soph Aur", from Super Robot Wars Alpha is a massive 1 minute and 21 seconds long which is long even by the series standards. - Super Robot Wars Z has the final attack of the final boss literally taking 1 minute 20 seconds to perform REALLY. Worse, at a certain point, it's his near constant counterattack. - Dark Brain anyone? - One of Uther's attacks. - Before most of these games, Shin Super Robot Wars was the first game with cut-ins, close up face portraits, and long cutscenes in its attack animations. This turns out to be a double edged sword because like all older SRWs up until SRW Alpha, animations are still unskippable. When running at default speed the load times and animations are atrociously long and unbearable. Much of the poor reputation of Shin stems from its slow load times and absurdly long, unskippable animations. - Crowe Broust of Super Robot Wars Z2 apparently got flak for almost all of his attacks (especially Clutch Sniper) in Hakai-Hen; his reappearance in Saisei-Hen has the majority of them significantly streamlined. - \|\|Euzeth Gozzo's Adamatron\|\| from 2nd Original Genrations probably takes the throne with its ultimate attack, Eylon Yeda Doma which lasts around 2 minutes 24 seconds. - Shu Shirakawa's Neo Granzon's final attack, "Degeneracy Cannon (Shuukutaihou)" takes so long but most people actually tolerate it because a: it's Shu's Neo Granzon, and b: it's just awesome. - The "snipe"-class attacks in City of Heroes have a reputation of taking so long to animate that most players either skip them entirely or use them strictly as battle-opening moves. Most of them clock in at around 4.5 seconds to animate — not long in an objective sense, but more than enough time for someone else to defeat your target. - Perfect World runs into this with the later Wizard attacks. An example is the ultimate water spell, Black Ice Dragon Strike, which involves the character posing dramatically as a giant dragon made of pure water mana rises out of the ground and divebombs the opponent's head. It sounds like nothing, but the reason it's on the page is because they tried to get around it with the buff "Essential Sutra", which reduces all casting times to zero for a short period of time, but since the Wizard is the textbook definition of Glass Cannon and almost all of the later spells do even more ridiculous amounts of damage... - Pretty irritating in the MMORPG Wizard101, aside from the few spells that you actually enjoy watching endlessly. Each round of battle has up to four players and four baddies, and each of these can cast a spell which requires several seconds of animation. - Lampshaded in Psychonauts in Lungfishopolis, where the boss battle parodies various aspects of Godzilla- and Ultraman-style Japanese monster fights. The enemy announces the titles of each of his attacks as he prepares them, such as "Overlyyy Intricaaate... COMBINATION!" and "Hard to avooooiiiiiidddddd... AREA ATTACK!" - Dawn of War has sync kills, where if a unit kills a certain type of unit in melee, it will perform a small animation (the Commissar executes infantry, the Warboss smashes them repeatedly into the ground, the Force Commander does a Colossus Climb on Bloodthirsters, the Wraithlord decapitates Defilers, etc.) The problem is that while they're invincible while doing so, they also won't take orders. If your army is fleeing and your expensive units are lagging behind because they're not done killing, the enemy will inevitably surround them. - In AdventureQuest: - The Nemesis Plate's battle animation takes an incredible eight seconds to perform. This may not seem long, but as the game is turn-by-turn, time builds up quickly. - The Guardian Blade's "Guardian Dragon" shows up, makes a quip, and then attacks. The Guardian Blade can also summon Guardian Dragon Jr., which does the same, and if he doesn't do much Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors wise, goes crying home to daddy Guardian Dragon, who then does the above. - The Love Machine pet is praised for its useful paralysis effect, but its slow animation made battles drag on. The developers eventually doubled its animation speed to curb complaints. - The one animation that does this while being fully worth it in this game however, is the Blade of Awe and its Power Word Die, since it's so powerful it usually saves time anyway. - Most attacks — especially special attacks and Mystech — in Anachronox. It's meant as parody, though. A lowly Mook with an assault rifle fires about six thousand bullets in such rapid fire that it creates a veritable waterfall of expended shells? Why not? - As further proof of the developers' light-hearted attitude, you could actually speed up the game, fast-forwarding over the acrobatics and camera trickery with the push of a button. - Mostly averted in Baten Kaitos, but inverted in the case of Savyna. Her attacks are always very fast, which means she burns through her combos faster than most players can select cards for her. She's probably the most difficult character to use. - Played irritatingly straight with the Dance King, a high-level enemy in Baten Kaitos Origins. Its Ring-Around-the-Rosy attack takes almost ten seconds to complete, which doesn't sound like much, but after going through 30+ hours of Origins' blazingly fast battle system, it seems like forever. Doesn't help that the attack itself hurts like hell. - Giacomo's normal attack: slow lift off, fly over to you, land, hit you, slow lift off, fly back to spot, land. And he attacks 2 or 3 times per turn. The whole thing takes like 20 or 30 seconds. The kicker? He's That One Boss and those animations will be burned into your mind if you don't take the proper preparations before the fight. - Chrono Cross has a few of these, especially the summons. However, this game is notable for including a fast forward button in New Game Plus, which makes fights much more enjoyable when you've seen all the animations anyway. - The Dragon Age series has fairly bearable ones for the Coup de Grâce moves, the length of the animation increasing depending on how large the defeated enemy is. The finishers for high dragons in Origins are the longest, with the character performing a complicated 30-second feat of badassery culminating in jumping on the dragon's neck and stabbing it in the head. The Ogre deaths can actually get characters killed, since its buddies are still active at normal speed for the whole thing. - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has slow-motion kill-cams that activate whenever it thinks you are about to kill a target. This generally works well for melee, but for long distance archery, the slo-mo effect just gives enemies more time to beat on you while you helplessly watch the animation. What's worse is that, the top level perk in Archery may paralyze your target instantly, before the arrow even makes it there. This means you can watch your arrow fly in slow motion, then MISS since the paralyze spell made the target fall down before the arrow could hit. - If you are using a concentration spell, the spell continues to fire while the kill-cam plays... and you continue to lose magicka. All so it can show the target getting blasted away by a beam of lightning. - The master spells in each school have a 4 second two handed cast animation that immobilises the caster. Standing still in a defenseless state in front of the enemies for 4 seconds (or until someone power attacks you and knocks you out of the animation) is a very bad idea. The vast majority of these spells are completely useless. - The game may trigger the kill-cam when you cast a point blank explosion spell with a magnitude higher than the health of all enemies in range. This works fine in the vanilla game. Mods may add spells that don't deal damage but still have a magnitude, proudly presenting you with the least appropriately named "kill"-cam in history. (Meanwhile, said enemies are beating you to a pulp). - Being an Affectionate Parody of Eastern RPGs, the Epic Battle Fantasy series has some of these. Luckily, they're fun to watch. Examples include: - The Catastrophe Summon in the first game. - Ion, a Summon in the second game and a Limit Break for Lance in the third game - Nuke, Used by Lance in both the second and third games. It's a Limit Break in the third game. - Natalie's Genesis Limit Break in the third game, in a Shout-Out to Neon Genesis Evangelion. - Matt's Limit Breaks are actually relatively short. The one that comes closest to this is Ragnarok, which is basically a shorter version of the Catastrophe summon from the first game that doesn't damage the player. - The VATS combat animations in Fallout 3. Possibly to dissuade players from using VATS all the time, but if you've grown up with the battle system of the first two games or want to use a stealth-based character it's kind of hard. - Fallout: New Vegas makes real-time combat more viable, but also adds a chance to trigger a VATS-style slow-mo killcam on kills. Thankfully this can be turned off, however. - The Final Fantasy series does this often: - Even without flashy animations, the original NES version of Final Fantasy definitely qualifies, with group-affecting spells slowly affecting one character/enemy at a time, which can cause fights to take forever. - Though the animations don't start getting minutes long until Final Fantasy VII, in Final Fantasy VI Kefka's Goner/Forsaken is about as proportionally long to the game's other attacks as Supernova is to the normal animations in VII, clocking in at approximately 20 seconds long when most other high-tier spell animations are about 6 seconds long. - Final Fantasy VII's Summon Magic is notorious for this. The PS4 rerelease of the game has a fast-forward feature that allows players to breeze through the excessive animations. - Knights of the Round. If you equip the W-Summon materia as well (which lets you summon twice in a single turn), and summon Knights twice in a turn, you can leave the game running, go make a sandwich, and come back with time to spare. Or you can equip the other two party members with Mimic Materia, allowing you to summon Knights three times in a row. - Sadly, the game doesn't let you link Knights to the Quadra-Magic Materia, which casts or summons the linked Materia four times in a single turn, so you won't be able to leave it running and go cook dinner for your family. However, it does allow you to Quadra-summon Bahamut Zero, which isn't all that much shorter (54 seconds compared to KotR's 1:10.) - Sephiroth's ultimate attack, Super Nova, which is shown to destroy the solar system (by literally causing the sun to go Super Nova) every time he did it, clocks at 2 minutes and can't be canceled. It's not even a lethal attack; it's just a glorified Percent Damage Attack note : Specifically, each victim is reduced to 1/16th of their HP. While it is still devastating compared to Demi 3, it's still a non-lethal attack. Interestingly, the original version of Supernova is only about 20 seconds long. This, however, resulted in it being pretty underwhelming for a Final Boss' Final Attack, which is probably why they changed it. - In Final Fantasy VIII you can use that time to empower Guardian Forces through Button Mashing, if you have the Boost skill. This doesn't make it any less annoying; thus, this was the last FF game with no skippable animations. The animation time varies greatly between the different GFs, with the longest one going to Eden, an optional GF that launches the unfortunate victim into the center of a spiral galaxy, which it then destroys, rivaling Sephiroth's Super Nova attack animation in length. The animations of the other GFs generally range between 20 and 60 seconds. - Final Fantasy IX: - Almost every summon. Each one has a shortened version that runs about 75% of the time after the first use (which is always the full animation). The reappearance of the longer animation means that the attack will be more effective (offensive summons do more damage, support summons cause more positive status effects, etc). Ark in particular takes so long that people don't usually use it to cause damage — it's better to cast Regen on the party and let everyone heal while waiting the three minutes (ish) it takes for the giant Transformer to do its thing. Interestingly, the Summoners in IX each get an ability called "Boost" to make sure the longer animation plays, so you can more reliably take advantage of the higher damage. - This is actually the trick to easily defeat Ozma, the superboss. His constant barrage of attacks is because he has a special battle script that gives him a free turn every time the player inputs a command while he's idle. Idle means not in the middle of an attack animation. While he's casting Doomsday which has a several second long animation, that's your chance to get a full round in without him being able to get 4 free actions. - Final Fantasy X: - Every Aeon's initial summoning and Overdrive, with the biggest offender being the Magus Sisters' Delta Attack. Thankfully, the option to use shortened cutscenes exists, but you can't shorten enemy Aeons' summoning or overdrive sequences when you fight them. - Ultima's multiple explosions take about ten times as long as any other black magic spell, which is a nuisance given that you will likely doublecast it many, many times between unlocking it and reaching max level. They do look very cool the first five or six times...the next five or six thousand, less so. Lulu's Ultima Fury will animate each successive Ultima spell shortened, but Demi Fury will play through all of them in full. - You can shorten dressphere changes in Final Fantasy X-2. However, you can't shorten \|\|enemy Aeons' summoning or overdrive sequences when you fight them.\|\| - The Gaiden Game Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII has its share of really long summon animations. But they can be skipped. Nothing you can do about the Limit Breaks, though. - Even better, the summons are actual FMVs. The Limit Break animations are pretty short, though, thankfully. - In Final Fantasy XII, the Quickening animations provide you an opportunity to charge and queue other Quickenings, allowing massive combo attacks. Also, the Esper summoning animations are rather short in this game. - In Final Fantasy XIII, Eidolons have relatively lengthy summoning and transformation scenes, but thankfully you can skip them. Their finishing attacks in Gestalt Mode however cannot be skipped, but are not too long. Every character also has a Full ATB Skill, although they are also kept short and the action doesn't stop. - Taking advantage of this is actually required to beat the first fight with Barthandelus; his Destrudo has a ludicrously long charging animation, and if you don't do a certain amount of damage to him during the animation to break his concentration, Destrudo is a guaranteed party wipe. - Heartless Angel in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII takes about ten seconds to perform, during which \|\|Bhunivelze\|\| will perform no other attacks. This doesn't stop Lightning from beating the snot out of him while the animation is going. Just make sure to guard before it hits. - Final Fantasy XIV: - In Heavensward, Knights of the Round is used against you by King Thordan, and it's an equally lengthy sequence of him summoning knights to attack you — though this time, you can dodge some of the attacks and fight back. Fittingly enough, King Thordan is pretty put off if you survive it. - Shadowbringers faithfully recreates the animation for Edens Eternal Breath attack, letting players spend almost a minute watching as their characters get launched into the heart of another galaxy. - Final Fantasy Tactics: While spell animations aren't nearly as over-the-top as other games, more powerful spells still have flashier effects; in particular, Meteor and all Summons (Zodiack/Zodiark being the most powerful and therefore taking the longest) can cause massive slowdown due to the number of particle effects on screen. - Both Golden Sun games have long animations on the more powerful summons late in the game, but luckily, they can all be skipped. - And unless you really enjoy beating the A button to death, the Sol Blade's summon can get boring, fast. Not to mention that it's possible to have a setup that allows unleashing 100% of the time, as well as Sol Blade's unleash being the strongest non-summon attack in the game... - The third game, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, also have longer summon animations on the more powerful ones, which can be made all the faster by using the B button. The same applies to any of the weapons' Unleash effects. - Grandia II has a lot of 10-second and longer attacks. Even the basic lightning spell takes several seconds to show the character conjuring up balls of lightning, and them another several seconds of said balls swirling around the enemies. And these are the most basic spells, which you'll be using a lot. The camera panning over to the character performing the spell can eat up more precious time too. - The Legend of Dragoon is like this, especially for Dragoon Magic. You can shorten most of the tranformation sequences, but none of the attack sequences. - The way the combat in the Legend of Legaia series works is that the player inputs a series of high, low, left, or right side attacks with certain combos resulting is special attacks which can even be strung together. The higher a character's level the more attacks they can use in a single turn. While this is useful for dealing high amounts of damage, it also meant that you can catch up on your reading while going through the final dungeon. It also has the Juggernaut summon animation, but since you can only get it after you grind everyone to level 99, you'll be only using it for its animation anyway. - In Neverwinter Nights 2 the magic animations took so long that your enemies would frequently be out of the blast radius before the spell struck. Even supposed 'instantaneous' spells like Magic Missile could be seen looping back and around to the target because of the silly animation. Not to mention the combat attacks took so long that many were done 'invisibly' for high level characters to make sure they happened inside the round. - Parasite Eve has the final ability, Liberation, be extremely powerful to enemies, but at the expense of watching Aya kick ass for over 10 seconds. Luckily, you wouldn't see this too often due to the ability needing a full PE bar to use. - In Planescape: Torment some of the high-level spells ( Mechanus Cannon, Meteor Shower and especially Celestial Host) could have annoyingly long animations. The later involved a quadruple Summon Magic. Fortunately, they're all skipable, which keeps things from dragging on too long if you use them in conjunction with Enol Eva's Duplication (a hidden spell that allows you to cast all your spells twice for a short time). - Skies of Arcadia gives every playable character some of these with their Special Attacks. At least they can be skipped if you press the button early-on in the animation after the first time you see them. Sadly, the Combined Energy Attacks, Prophecy and Blue Rogues, can't be skipped. You also can't skip the magic spell animations, or any of the enemies' attack animations, some of which are even longer than your party's. - Star Ocean: The Second Story has a number of ultimate elemental spells that result in the battle pausing to display the animation. Normally this isn't a big deal. It becomes a big deal when the AI controlled characters use the spells over and over and over and over. In addition, one of starting character Rena's first spells, Magic Hammer, is entirely useless, is her favorite spell, and also stops the battle every time it's cast. Which, unless you prevent her from casting it at all, will be five or six times per battle. This was heavily toned down in the remake. - Fortunately, the animation gets sped up the more you use it. - The Tales series. Can you say Hi-Ougi / Mystic Arte? Around Tales of Destiny 2, when the concept became cemented, these killer moves went from being merely a very strong attack (Meikuu Zanshouken and Aurora Sword) to involving time freezing, character portraits, light shows, and excessively large areas and long combos. - Particularly notorious is Richter's in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, which he executes after claiming "Pain will only last an instant." - Another offender is Emil's, in the same game. The player can add 15 extra seconds of animation by triggering Ain Soph Aur. And then another 30 seconds if you're fighting Richter, as he counters it! On the bright (?) side, Ain Soph Aur is completely underpowered and costs an arm to cast, so nobody ever uses it anyway. - Valkyrie Profile, max level Nibelung Valesti. - VP was borderline on this with most finishing moves (noting a few exceptions). Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria had nearly every finishing move be like this (and twice as excessive power wise), but at least you can skip them. - Covenant of the Plume likewise allows you to skip Soul Crush animations with the press of a button. - In general, normal attacks in the entire series are short and painless, and stringing them together is the core combat mechanic to begin with. - The attacks learned late in the games of the Xenosaga series. Particularly annoying are KOS-MOS's attacks, since chances are she'll be in your party most of the time. Being a robot, for several of her attacks she physically transforms herself, which takes quite a lot of time, and with her standing directly in front of the enemy for physical attacks, you wonder why the enemy sits there and waits for it. - In the first game, every attack could be this thanks to how long it took for characters to aim their weapon and attack. Shion could be a particularly bad offender in this regard. - Erde Kaiser's sequence in Episode 1 clocks in at 1 minute. It also adds up as a Transformation Sequence of a Combining Mecha. - The fights are fast-paced in Episode 3 compared to Episode 1. On the other hand, some special attacks can last a lot longer than others. Then there's the Erde Kaisers. Their sequences are a lot shorter than the original one, but Erde Kaiser Sigma takes the cake by being the longest. It doesn't stop it from being awesome. - In Judgement Silversword, Mitsurugi Rebirth has an attack that launches homing orbs at you. Normally, getting killed causes your ship to go through a brief explosion animation before respawning (if you have lives left), but getting caught in this particular attack triggers a 10-second cutscene in which Mitsurugi surveys its victim from multiple angles, Michelangelo's Final Judgement takes over the background, and then as the screen fades to white, Mitsurugi does a wind-up with its sword and then finally kills you. - Most of the time in the Black & White series, you really don't have to worry about uncontrollable cutscenes until you start or finish a quest scroll. This carries over into the sequel nicely. And then the Wonders start getting built... Although skipable after the first go-round, the first time one of these wonder-miracles goes off — or you get hit with a bug — prepare to sit there and watch every, last, frame of the siren rising up, speaking in creepily-lovey-dovey ways to your soldiers, sending out a swarm of MINI sirens who... seem quite fond of them, and your soldiers converting to enemy citizens. This also applies to the volcano miracle at the start and later in the game, fortunately not the earthquake or hurricane. - The Power Shots in Mario Power Tennis. Whenever they happen, all action freezes except the player who executed the shot. Gameplay only returns to normal just as the animation is about to end. You can't skip any of the animations, and what's worse, there are actually two types of Power Shots (offensive and defensive). - Waluigi's defensive move is a ridiculous time-drain. He somehow fills his entire side of the court with a shallow layer of water, so the tennis ball doesn't hit the ground, and then hits back. Also, the power shots are needless at least 90% of the time; usually if you have one, so does your opponent. If you do a defensive power shot, they'll follow up with an offensive one. If you do an offensive power shot, they'll follow up with either offensive or defensive depending on whether they can reach it. - In Touhou Soccer, several characters possess cinematic shots. While most of those have a reasonable length, some are pretty long. Mima's Twilight Spark in particular, has a cinematic that lasts about fifty seconds, and that's not counting the actual shot that comes after the cinematic. - The Battle Cats has a few units and enemies with painfully long attack animations made worse by the fact that Knockback effects will reset them. - Bahamut Cat's animation has him slowly charge up a ball of dark energy above him, then throw it into the ground, creating an explosion. This takes 4 seconds to complete, which doesn't sound so bad... but when the enemies are pushing forward and killing your meatshields quickly, those 4 seconds matter, and it's not uncommon to see Bahamut get knocked back or die before he can complete it. On the flip side, if the enemies he's targeting get knocked back, Bahamut will complete his attack animation and damage absolutely nothing, and you'll have to wait 16 seconds for him to get to try again. - Super Galaxy Cosmo's attack animation has him do lots of poses reminiscent of a Tokusatsu anime, fire energy blasts into the air to create a constellation, and then finally charge up and fire a crane-shaped Kamehame Hadoken. This entire animation takes about 10 seconds to complete, during which his intended target is liable to be knocked out of the way. - Filibuster Obstructa, to attack, starts charging up an energy ball, which very slowly grows in size while emitting flashes of lightning. Eventually, it grows big enough that it starts vacuuming up planets and absorbing them, before the boss finally throws it towards the ground and creates a gigantic explosion. This takes 40 seconds to execute indeed, the only way to beat it is to prevent it from ever getting an attack off. The Cat version, Filibuster Cat X, "only" takes 12 seconds to execute its attack, mercifully. - Most attacks in Fire Emblem games are fairly quick, but some spells, especially dark spells, legendary tomes and anything used by a final or semi-final boss, take forever and involve vortexes, background changes and other nonsense, and can be used twice in a row if the defender has low speed and survives the first. Luckily, they can be turned off. - This takes a bizarre turn in Fire Emblem: Awakening. Most magic spells are actually relatively short and behave like normal attacks. However, for some reason, the character animations are incredibly slow, moving at about half the speed of what normal humans would move at. Thankfully there's an option to fast-forward combat, but the fact that it's necessary to fastforward at all makes combat animations feel incredibly awkward. - In Heroes of Might and Magic 5, the Ranger's attack, a simple bow shot, can take several seconds to complete — the exact time based on what your combat animation speed is set to. This is a strategy game, so expect to use it every 20 seconds in combat if you play as the Elves. - Nippon Ichi games' attack animations tend to get longer and more over the top for spells and abilities that cost more MP; in a few of these games, the animation can be turned off either (or both) your party and the enemies'. - Some also allow for selective skipping of attacks, for those who enjoy seeing particular animations. - Played for outright parody with Usalia and Christo's combo skill, where Christo and Usalia's prinny open fire upon the enemy while Usalia herself casually walks over, eats some curry, and walks back to her prinny throughout the entire animation. The move itself is named "Curry Break". - Suikoden II had Chaco, who's attack animation was about three times as long as everyone elses. Using him could waste hours in the long run. - Along with Sid, who used the same animation. However, given the way battle works in Suikoden II, it's entirely possible for their attacks to take just long enough for the round to end...as long as everyone else is also just attacking. - Naturally, in a Shout-Out to Super Robot Wars, Battle Moon Wars also has its more powerful attacks running a bit too long. - Subverted in No More Heroes, when Letz Shake's "Disaster Blaster" Earthquake Generator goes through the long, fancy charging-up cinematic, and then just as it's about to fire, \|\|Henry appears out of nowhere and cuts Letz Shake and the Disaster Blaster to pieces.\|\| - Played straight with \|\|Henry's instant-kill move, thought it's pretty awesome to see anyway.\|\| ## Non-video game examples: - Parodied in The Big O. Beck's latest creation began a lengthy attack prep, with flashing lights, yelling, and dramatic posturing... only for his opponent to whip out a machine gun and blast his pseudo-Megadeus into scrap metal in a few seconds. - In Dragon Ball Z, Piccolo's Special Beam Cannon at the start of the series takes five minutes to charge. Near the end of the series Super Saiyan 3 is introduced, which can take over ten minutes to use. Worst offender of the series would have to be the Spirit Bomb, which can take, in some uses, several episodes to complete! - Most offensive magic spells in Negima! Magister Negi Magi take a long time to cast, which requires mages to partner up with a melee fighter to protect them and buy time for them to get their spells off. Eventually, once a mage gets powerful enough they not only get their spells out faster, but they typically learn to fight in melee themselves and no longer need someone to buy time for them. - Ninja Nonsense parodies this; Episode 11 has Sasuke using his "special attack" on an ogre. It involves lots of posing, as well as Sasuke inexplicably flying through space while explaining the attack. Then Onsokumaru tells him to keep it shorts, at which point we find out what the end result of the attack is: \|\|the ogre getting stuffed in a pair of underwear filled with mustard.\|\| - In One Piece Jinbe's Karakusagawara Seiken. In the manga the shock wave took four panels to take effect after throwing the punch, in the anime it almost a full minute. - Dragon Slave from Slayers is one of the strongest offensive spells in the series, which is balanced out by the caster needing to recite an extremely long incantation before it can be cast. - Parodied in episode one of The Tower of Druaga — The Aegis of Uruk. "Soniiiiiiiiiiiiiii(30 seconds)iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiic BLADE!" - Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V has Raidraptor - Satellite Cannon Falcon, whose attack takes several minutes to fully execute and involves it flying up into orbit, charging up power, and then firing a giant laser that takes a few seconds to make contact with the target, which is promptly left in a smoldering crater. - DEATH BATTLE! — Sephiroth vs. Vergil: Sephiroth casts his signature Supernova, but actually averts this trope in a clever way by \|\|casting it earlier on, using his Master of Illusion powers to mask said long animation from Vergil, and only breaking the illusion to reveal the attack when it's too late for Vergil to escape unscathed from it\|\|. As such, viewers only see 10 seconds from the end part of the animation. - On Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the Mooninites (who look sort of like pixelated video-game people) have their ultimate attack, the Quad Laser. The Quad Laser (and its larger cousin, the Quad Glacier) creates a single giant pixel that moves at a snail's pace. This isn't really a cutscene, but it is a finishing move that takes a ridiculously long time. - And can be thwarted by the target simply stepping out of its path... unless the pixel bounces off something and hits the target in the back.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyLongFightingAnimation
Overly Pre-Prepared Gag - TV Tropes "Our top story today: Convicted hit man Jimmy 'Two-Shoes' McClarty confessed today that he was once hired to beat a cow to death in a rice field using only two small porcelain figures. Police admit this may be the first known case of a knickknack paddy-whack." First things first: I'm going to have this refrigerator start doing laps around the room. These are jokes that require so much setup and work behind the scenes that you would wonder why the effort was made, but you don't because it's just that funny. Compare Friendly Scheming. Also compare "Shaggy Dog" Story, which is a long story or joke that seems like it will lead somewhere but doesn't; Brick Joke, which is a gag or plot element that simply comes back much later; and Henway, which is a joke specifically set up to "trap" the listener. The end result may get a Lame Pun Reaction. If the joke is specifically a short story with a pun at the end, it's a feghoot. If the punchline never comes or isn't necessarily humorous, see Anti-Humor. See also Disaster Dominoes, which when Played for Laughs is a slapstick gag which needs a lot of events occurring in succession, and Feghoots, which are long and typically over-complicated stories for the sole purpose of setting up a Pun at the end. Is that refrigerator still doing laps? Good, lets move on. ## Examples: - In Bleach, Orihime Inoue does one of these on her friend Tatsuki. When Tatsuki asks about the condition of her apartment, Orihime replies that she's been evicted as of a few days before. Tatsuki is, understandably, flabbergasted and asks where Orihime's been sleeping, upon which she pulls out a squashy sleeping bag and says that it's soooo comfortable. Then she reveals that she was just kidding. Tatsuki asks her how long she'd been carrying around the sleeping bag in order to do so, and Orihime answers, "about three days, I was actually wondering if anybody was going to give me the opportunity." Of course, Orihime is a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander anyway. - The first chapter of Negima! Magister Negi Magi has a Negi falling into a rather large and complex Bucket Booby-Trap that must have taken quite a while to set up. Although, given that the Negiverse has a lot of Ridiculously Fast Construction, it isn't too farfetched. - Gintama enjoys using these at times. - One episode has Katsura suddenly switch from Counting Sheep to reciting a lengthy high school sports drama. \|\|The punchline is that the number on the jersey of the character featured at the end of the story was the same number as the sheep he was about to count.\|\| - Episode 153 of the anime has Gintoki listen to a radio story "guaranteed to make you cry in four minutes or less", hoping it'll help him sleep. The story, titled "I'm Sorry, Jerry", is about a girl and her loyal dog whom she's forced to leave behind when she moves to another town. The story lasts well over four minutes, and does genuinely tug at the heartstrings, \|\|but right when it seems like it's going to end on a touching note, it decides to go for a Cruel Twist Ending with some Surprisingly Creepy Moments. Cue hilariously girly scream from Gintoki.\|\| - Hitoribocchi no OO Seikatsu: Bocchi wants to make her friend Nako laugh, so she thinks of a joke where she gives her an empty bucket of Yogurt and greets her with "Oha-Yogurt" (Ohayo is japanese for "Good Morning"), but she forgets to say "Oha". She repeats the joke with Aru after she asks why Bocchi wanted to make Nako laugh and not her, but she still forgets to tell the joke properly. Aru bluntly tells Bocchi the joke isn't that funny, but then ponders that the fact Bocchi went through the effort of washing a cup of Yogurt and bringing it along might make it funny after all. - The Moth Joke, as told by Norm Macdonald: A moth goes into a podiatrist's office, and the podiatrist's office says, "What seems to be the problem, moth?" The moth says "What's the problem? Where do I begin, man? I go to work for Gregory Illinivich, and all day long I work. Honestly doc, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. I don't even know if Gregory Illinivich knows. He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness. But I don't know, I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there... at night I...I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that's on my arm. A lady that I once loved, doc. I don't know where to turn to. My youngest, Alexendria, she fell in the... in the cold of last year. The cold took her down, as it did many of us. And my other boy, and this is the hardest pill to swallow, doc. My other boy, Gregarro Ivinalititavitch... I no longer love him. As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I... that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror. If only I wasn't such a coward, then perhaps... perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me and end this hellish facade once and for all... Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I'm a moth, just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me. I'm not feeling good. And so the doctor says, "Moth, man, you're troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist. Why on earth did you come here? And the moth says, \|\|"'Cause the light was on."\|\| - Demetri Martin parodies this trope perhaps better than anyone else has ever managed to: Demetri: Last time I saw Dean was like five years earlier when Dean and I were doing a roofing job on top of a 40-story building. He started talking crazy that day and he goes, "I can't take it, man," and he got up on the ledge, and he jumped. Just after he jumped, I looked down and I noticed that Trampoline Emporium was having a sidewalk sale that day. Dean landed right on one of the trampolines, bounced back up 40 stories to where I was standing, and just as he floated up he said to me, "Y'know, I think a lot of your joke premises are contrived and hard to believe." - A heckler breaks up what he thinks is this during a Patton Oswalt special. Patton then explains how this works, and spends more time trouncing the heckler than the uninterrupted joke's setup would have been. - In one of his shows, Dara Ó Briain has a part about the midwife that he and his wife were seeing during his wife's pregnancy. When it comes to a joke about childbirth, he runs over to two boys in the front row he was talking to earlier and spends the next minute alternatively explaining the importance of the thing he's going to say and apologizing to all the women in the audience in advance. Dara: And then she gets to a major issue — Oh, lads, lads, lads, lads, lads... you'll know nothing about this, but I'm gonna say something here that you will never have heard of before in your life. But when I say it, watch out for this: When I say something in about a minutes time, every woman in this room is gonna make a noise. Every one of you will make this noise, and I am not proud of the noise I am about to make you make. It's not a good noise I'm gonna make you do. There's good stuff just beyond that noise. That's gold! But there's a noise barrier, and you've got to make that noise to get through that barrier, right? During the process, there's a point where a decision may have to be made... — Icannotappologizeenough — ...\|\|between a tear and a cut. \|\| Audience: Eewww.... Dara: There's the noise! - An oft-reblogged Tumblr post: Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him ... A super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis. - Bill Cosby had a routine where he was trying on a pair of winter boots. Store Clerk: How do they feel? Bill Cosby: I'm glad you asked. Now, right here on this right foot. Right here in the middle of the foot, there's a bone. And the shoe is pressing up this bone. And it is really. it is hurting, man. It is mashing that bone. But, up top here where the boot starts, that's rubbing on my skin, and it's making it raw. Now, on the other side of my foot, where the big toe is, well there's a bone there. And it's mashing that bone. And underneath, where the arch is, there's a blister coming up here. Now, the other foot, my little toe, I don't know what happened., but when I stamped down, my little toe got mixed up, and it's somewhere under my big toe. The other three toes in the middle are really confused, they're all on top of each other. And there is a cut, I think it's bleeding. I don't know, because this other bone cut the nerve, so everything is numb, but up top here, this is bleeding right away! Store Clerk: \|\|They fit!\|\| - Once upon a time, there was a woman who gave birth to one hundred children. For the sake of simplicity, she named them all One through One Hundred. Late one night, a terrible fire burns the family's house to the ground and the only surviving child is a girl named Ninety. Despite the tragic setback, Ninety grows up happy and healthy, receives a good education, gets a job and eventually settles down with a family of her own. However, money remains an issue, and there are certain luxuries that the family can't afford. One day, when her two children are older, they come across a stray dog while playing in the park. The children play with the dog all afternoon, but know that their family can't afford to keep it, so they arrange to go to the park every day to play with the dog and take care of it there. They name the dog "This" so they can speak in code about it while at home ("Did you take care of this?" "Have you seen this?" etc). This goes on for a few years until the dog becomes old and sick and passes away. The children hold a small funeral for it and are the only ones there because they never told anyone else about their dog, This. So \|\|only Ninety's kids will remember This\|\|. - An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a German are all waiting for a ship. Looking to kill a little time, they troop down to a local vaudeville theater. They arrive just after the show has begun and take their seats in the far back of the theater, just as a juggling act is starting. After a minute, the juggler notices the four of them in the back and calls to them "Can you four see me back there?" The Englishman, Frenchman, Spaniard and German reply "Yes." "Oui." "Sí." "Ja." - In 1985, David Gilmour and Nick Mason made serious efforts to revive Pink Floyd, with or without Roger Waters' approval. The only problem was, keyboardist Richard Wright had been fired from the band, and legal troubles prevented him from returning. Gilmour and Mason's only option was to find a new keyboardist. They tried Rick Wakeman, who, though a wizard with the ivories, just didn't have that...Floydian flair. They tried Keith Emerson, who was just a little too crazy for their more contemplative soundscapes. They asked Tony Banks and J. Peter Robinson, neither of whom were available, owing to touring and other conflicts. Billy Preston wasn't available when they needed him, either, as was Steve Winwood, who at the time was working on his own solo career. It became clear that they would have to go outside the usual rock'n'roll purview. Pianists and keyboardists alike came and went, and the legal paperwork progressed very quickly. If nothing else came of a new keyboardist, Wright would at least be able to return to the band which he'd been with since the old days. The last applicants to audition were the Wong brothers, who could play dueling pianos with the best of them. It would have been an amazing gimmick to go on tour with, to be sure. Alas, while they were accomplished, they just didn't have the improvisational chops that Gilmour and Mason were looking for. And besides, they might have overshadowed the Floyd as a whole, so proficient and skillful were they. Finally, their old colleague Richard came back into the fold, and all three agreed on one thing: \|\| Two Wongs just don't make a Wright.\|\| - A couple of years ago, the London Philharmonic was performing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Berlin. There's a long section of the piece where the bass violins have nothing to do, so one of the bassists suggests they go to the local pub across the street. But one of the bassists says, "But what happens if it's our turn to play." The bassist who suggested it says, "Don't worry. I tied the conductor's score pages; it's gonna take him a while to untie it so we'll have plenty of time to sit back down." While they are there, they strike up a conversation with another patron, who himself turns out to be a very famous Count from a nearby province who also happened to be both a Beethoven enthusiast and a bass violin enthusiast. In fact, he was in town as a VIP to watch the Philharmonic's performance and was going to meet with the conductor for dinner after the concert to discuss possibly hosting a second concert at his castle. One thing soon leads to another and after a few hours, bassists are totally wasted, with the Count himself, having had his fill of drinks, commenting that he would have to postpone the dinner with the conductor. This, of course, reminds the bassists that they have a Ninth Symphony to return to, and they stumble back to the concert hall and into their seats. The conductor, who is currently struggling with untying the pages while still keeping the orchestra in time, glares daggers at them as they sit down. One of the trumpeters says, "Boy, that conductor looks pissed." The other trumpeter says, "Well, what do you expect? \|\|It's the bottom of the Ninth, the score is tied, the basses are loaded, and the Count is full!\|\|" - The famous Japanese rakugo performance of "Jugemu" tells of a boy whose father could not choose any one name to give him, and in the end, decides to give him all of the names suggested to him. As such, his full name is Jugemu Jugemu Gokō-no surikire Kaijarisuigyo-no Suigyōmatsu Unraimatsu Fūraimatsu Kuunerutokoro-ni Sumutokoro Yaburakōji-no burakōji Paipopaipo Paipo-no-shūringan Shūringan-no Gūrindai Gūrindai-no Ponpokopī-no Ponpokonā-no Chōkyūmei-no Chōsuke. The full joke takes much practice, several minutes to tell, spans several years in-universe, and contains one (repeated) punchline. Here is one telling of the story. - Garth Ennis once created a demon named Baytor in his Hitman series so he could eventually have him become Lord of Hell and be referred to as "Master" Baytor. - A Bluntman and Chronic comic featured marijuana-themed hero Bluntman getting distracted only to notice that Chronic has been tied up under a boulder held up by a crane. Derris, the villain, then delivers what amounts to "Give up or your sidekick gets stoned," and a couple police officers watching lampshade this by saying "So that's why he went through the trouble of dragging that huge crane over there!" "Yeah! For that incredibly lame pun!" - In an issue of X-Men, Mystique goes out to scatter the ashes of her companion Destiny, a precognitive. Destiny, before her death, left detailed instructions on exactly when and where to scatter the ashes — the fantail of a specific cruise liner at a particular point at an exact time. Mystique, at the right time and place, releases the ashes, and a gust of wind blows them back into her face. She doubles over laughing realizing that the instructions were intended to set up an Overly Pre-Prepared Gag. - Sky Doll had a character named God for two reasons: call God a jerk right at the start of the comic, and then this trope when he dies and they can claim that God Is Dead. - The entire first appearance of Rocket Raccoon probably counts. So, Rocket Raccoon (called "Rocky" by his friends) escapes from an asylum (he's a guard/companion animal), to go find the holy artifact Gideon's Bible, and also to rescue his girl from his rival. Yes, those are just the lyrics to "Rocky Raccoon", but with uplifted animals. To really hammer the point home, Rocket's pal is a walrus. note : Is he actually named Paul? - One of many examples in Asterix: Asterix in Switzerland opens with Chief Vitalstatistix firing his shield-bearers, then getting Asterix and Obelix as replacements, then when that doesn't work, Obelix alone, carrying him like a waiter with a tray. In the English translation, the dialogue has Vitalstatistix first saying that one shield-bearer would make him feel "like a half-pint chief", then when Obelix says he has to go back to his menhirs anyway, Vitalstatistix snaps "So you refuse to serve your chief? By Toutatis, I'm a mild man, but this makes me very bitter!" So when Getafix asks what Obelix is doing with his waiter impression, Asterix replies "He's serving a half-pint of mild and bitter." - Perverse Pepere. One could fill the entire page with his setups. For example, running around with a tape recorder, and playing the assorted noises in a loo cabin to scare the poor attendant to death. FLOCHOFLOGLOUPLIKAPLOK-GNNNNNGGHRRRHGH-TACATACATACA(POUTPOUT)TACATACA-AROUAAY!-PLAOUF!! - In one Dilbert strip, Dilbert and Dogbert are playing Scrabble, and Dogbert tries to pass off "neans" as a word in order to get rid of some excess "N"s, just to goad Dilbert into saying "The N's don't justify the neans". - Pearls Before Swine often does this with Sunday strips; everything up to the last panel is building up a bad pun or overly long string of rhyming/similar sounding words ("Please don't help my mama bomb a Osama Obama llama diorama"). The last panel is, invariably, Rat expressing his disgust and/or threatening violence against the writer. A particularly elaborate/contrived one in this one.◊ - FoxTrot had a Shout-Out to Pearls Before Swine — Peter immediately surmised that Jason had been reading too much Pearls. Jason: I'm making a miniature RV out of these plastic building blocks. It's transporting a frozen waffle along with several expectant mothers obsessed with Rocky IV from the tip of South America to a country in southern Europe. Peter: Okay... Jason: Here, grab it from me . Peter: What for? Jason: Just grab it. (Peter grabs it) Leggo my Eggo-carrying Lego Winnebago full of preggo fans of Drago en route to Montenegro from Tierra del Fuego which is south of San Diego. - Frank and Ernest can, particularly on Sunday, go to great lengths to set up a pun. Or other gag, such as having Frank and Ernest make a series of lame puns about locations, look through the Fourth Wall, and muse that it's hard to believe this has a live audience. - In one Peanuts strip, Linus gives Lucy an award for being crabby for an entire year. He actually tracked her mood on a calendar every day for a year to ensure the award would be accurate. - Pinkie Pie, in this fanmade comic,◊ has gotten pregnant just to say, "You've got to be kid-in-me." Nurse : ...Did you get yourself pregnant only to make that joke? Pinkie Pie : Totally birth it . - A Stargate SG-1 AU fic titled "Hero of the Soviet Union" spends several pages detailing the operation of a Soviet-run SGC, all to set up the punchline when a KGB major mocks a captured Goa'uld: "In Soviet Russia, Gods bow to you!" - In the Fairy Tail/ Sailor Moon crossover ''Fairy Moon'' by Emma Iveli has Sue (An anime only member of Phantom Lord who calls Happy a "Red Dog"), is one the Rainbow Crystal carriers who turns into a cat monster. Due the the Sailor Guardians saving her (who are members of Fairy Tail in this story) she under goes a heel face turn during the Phantom War arc. She gives a speech to other Phantom Lord members which ends with "Because one time I turned into a dog and they helped me!" Or as Emma put it You must be wondering did I choose Sue to be a rainbow crystal carrier just so she would turn in a cat monster, under go a heel face turn earlier than canon and make a big speech all so I could do a Ghostbusters 2 reference? I will tell you now that is completely 100 percent... true... - The 3,000 word Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic Cuckles exists solely to build up to the punchline of \|\|"Hi, Gonna shatter your jewels, I'm Sonic"\|\| - Ultra Fast Pony: the episode "Shameless Self Reference" is filled with, well, shameless references to previous videos in the series and to the creator's other work. The episode ends with Rainbow Dash declaring, "I guess I'm just an Ultra. Fast. Pony!" The end credits have a subtitle claiming that the entire video series was created for the sole purpose of that title drop. - The Techno Queen: THE TECHNO QUEEN note : krakathoom! builds robotic Evil Twins of all the Wards and gives them a Beard of Evil just so she can call them the Back-Wards. - Harry Potter in Harry and the Shipgirls, while everyone was resting at Hogwarts after the Yule Ball, had his Fleet put lawn gnomes in every dorm (passwords provided by Kenshō), as well as the Beauxbatons carriage and the Durmstrang ship, with one gnome for everyone in each location, all transfigured into attire reflecting one of said people. When confronted about this, Harry said it looked like everyone, teachers and staff, would get to be gnome for the holidays. - This Undertale fan comic has Sans wait to run an errand for Papyrus to go to the store, all so he could say he didn't find what he wanted and brought him some "hot dates" to enjoy instead. After he bursts into laughter: Papyrus : (unamused) HOW LONG DID YOU SPEND SETTING THIS JOKE UP? Sans : literally days. - In Dumb and Dumber To, Lloyd has spent the entire twenty years since the previous film pretending to be catatonic, just as a prank on Harry. - Kung Pow! Enter the Fist: The villain tells people to start calling him Betty at one point in the movie. It's funny on its own... then at the end of the movie \|\|when he's wearing black and preparing to fight, Ram Jam's "Black Betty" starts playing.\|\| - Rat Race has a gag where half the humor of it is how contrived the setup was: A series of increasingly implausible incidents result in a Jewish family crashing into a WWII veteran assembly in a car decorated with swastikas, and the father gets out sporting a black lipstick Hitler mustache and a tongue injury that makes him speak in German-sounding gibberish, and in trying to explain what happened starts sticking out his burnt middle finger and waving his hand in the air in a Zieg Heil-esque gesture. - The entirety of Silent Movie may or may not have been one long set-up for a gag about \|\|a mime\|\| speaking the film's only word of audible dialogue. - Discworld: - In Soul Music, Nobby and Colon are watching Imp y Celyn busking in Ankh-Morpork and Colon comments that he's "playing the harp". Nobby says "Lyre" and Colon says, "No it's true... Oh I bet you've been waiting all your life for someone to say 'that's a harp', just so you could make that joke. I bet you were born hoping that someone would say that." - Most of Soul Music is a build up to one of the final lines said in the book, \|\|"There's a new boy working at the fried fish stall, and I could swear he was Elvish!"\|\| - Jasper Fforde, Pungeon Master that he is, likes doing this. - Throughout Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear, the characters share office gossip about others in the police station. In the end, this comes together as a long "Peter Piper picked a peck of peppers" kind of tongue-twister, and they even break the fourth wall to complain about the gag: "I don't know how he gets away with it." - Fforde names a minor villain Yorick in his first Thursday Next book for no real reason other than that he can bring him back four books later to make a Hamlet pun. - "Death of a Foy" (can be found on this page, ctrl-F the word "foy"), by Isaac Asimov of all people. The careful and elaborate setup of an intricate setting and alien religious culture were all for the purpose of \|\|a pun based on the first several lines of ''Give My Regards To Broadway''\|\|. For added effect, he even carefully tailored its length for the sci-fi publication he originally sent it to, so the reader had to turn the page right before the punchline hit out of nowhere. Lots of Asimov's short stories are like this. He could fill a book with them — and did! - Also used in Everworld, with a character making an awful pun on "gymnosperm", then announcing he'd been stockpiling it since junior high. - Every Tall Tales Night and Punday Night at Callahan's Crosstime Saloon is filled with these. - The book Dogs Don't Tell Jokes is about Gary Boone, a kid who wants to be a stand-up comedian, but is considered unpopular and weird by his classmates. Gary finally gets his chance to prove himself during the school talent show, comes on stage wearing a hat, and launches into a long rambling story about how he bought some shampoo that was too strong. He punctuates this story with many other unrelated jokes, and actually manages to get laughs from his peers. Finally he reaches the end of the story, where he reveals that he left the shampoo in his hair for too long and removes his hat, revealing that he's shaved his head bald from the ears up. This gets a huge laugh from the crowd. - In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there's a few paragraphs' worth of build-up to the punchline of a joke about "Square Sweets That Look Round": When the tour group enters the room, they find \|\|the candies have little faces on them that look (a)round to see who's there\|\|. - The Longest Joke in the World (over 10,000 words, almost a novella) is essentially one giant, shaggy-dog style buildup to... a pun: "\|\|Better Nate than lever\|\|!" - In G. K. Chesterton's autobiography, he introduces us to Edward Clerihew Bentley (they were schoolfriends) by relating an incident where they were shocked that one of their schoolmasters, a dull and solemn man, actually told a joke. Bentley invented a flight of fancy where the man had devoted his whole life to planning and setting up that one joke. - 3rd Rock from the Sun has an episode, several seasons in, wherein main character Dick is target of a Luke, I Am Your Father plot from his boss, the Big Giant Head, first mentioned in the pilot, and introduced as a character much later. The whole episode is a setup for Dick saying, in the final scene, that he doesn't know who he is anymore. Harry answers "Well, your first name is Dick, and your last name is Head, so..." - Arrested Development has G.O.B. and Buster talking in a closed nightclub for a while, waiting for G.O.B.'s magician rival Tony Wonder. After a bit of conversation, Buster says "I wonder where he is." To which Wonder appears in a puff of smoke, asking "Did anyone say 'Wonder'?". The narrator later explains Tony Wonder had been hiding for hours in a small service elevator, waiting for someone to say the word "wonder". - On the short-lived 1981 Western-themed sitcom Best of the West, a villain comes to town backed up by a group of henchmen referred to as "The Shenanigans". Eventually a standoff leads to a parley in which the marshal, holed up in the tavern, calls out to the villain that he can come into the tavern to discuss a truce—and then he adds, "but no Shenanigans!" - An in-universe example in Blackadder the Third. In Ink and Incapability, Blackadder and Prince George are trying to re-write Dr Johnson's dictionary. Prince George: Well, we didnt take "no" for an answer, and have, in fact, been working all night. Ive done "B". Blackadder: Oh really? And how have you got on? Prince George: Well, I had a bit of trouble with "belching", but I think I got it sorted out in the end. (Belches) Oh no! There I go again! (Laughs excessively) Blackadder: You've been working on that joke for some time, haven't you, sir? Prince George: Well, yes, I have, as a matter of fact, yes. Blackadder: Since you started... Prince George: Basically. Blackadder: So, in fact, you havent done any work at all. - A skit featured on the Australian skit show Comedy Inc had a head sailor informing the captain that the sailors are very disgruntled and they might have a mutiny on their hands soon. The captain tells him it was intentional, and he was planning for him to come and say theyre revolting, so he could answer, I know, they havent bathed in weeks. - Community featured the German foosball jocks who bought a soccer ball and walked in a row of three constantly carrying the ball with them, just waiting for the opportunity to kick a ball at Jeff foosball-style. Immediately lampshaded by Jeff, who points out that the build-up really wasn't worth the pay-off. Jeff: Were you guys walking around with a soccer ball just so you could do that?! [The Germans strut out; to Shirley] They left the ball and everything! I think they were literally walking around with it like a prop to use. It's like a twenty-five dollar bit; it's not even that good! - A meta-case. The word "Beetlejuice" is used as a quick gag in both Season 1 and 2. In the Season 3 Halloween episode "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps", someone uses it for the third time (and remember, in the movie he was summoned after someone said his name three times). Immediately after this, in the background someone wearing a Beetlejuice costume walks across the screen. It takes a few seconds, you have to notice it, and remember that this is the third time his name has been used. - Doctor Who: In "Spyfall", it transpires that \|\|the Master has contrived to get the civilian identity he's been living undercover as for a number of years known only as "O" just so the Doctor's Oh, Crap! reaction when she found out who he is would be funny.\|\| - An entire episode of Frasier builds up to one of these. The A-plot involves Frasier and Niles, stuck for ten minutes at a parking garage because Frasier doesn't want to pay the parking fee. The B-plot involves Roz, who has to fill in for Frasier at the radio station. Roz lets slip that she and Frasier had a night of intimacy. Naturally, everyone wants details. Frasier is blissfully unaware of this, and upon bursting in late, turns on the mike and announces: Frasier: I'm sure Roz has informed you of my exploits. It wasn't my finest hour. Let's just say, I got in there, realized I'd made a mistake and then tried like hell to get out! There was a lot of shouting and then a line started to form behind me... Luckily, my brother was with me for moral support, and, let's face it, someone to talk to. You know, you'd be amazed how long ten minutes can be when you're watching the clock. But, in the end, I got out of there without paying the four dollars! - Phoebe did this on Friends. Chandler was forced to leave a restaurant wearing only women's panties ( long story...), so she says she'd like to write a song, but can't because her guitar is missing a string. Phoebe: Hey, Chandler, can I borrow your G-string? Chandler: How long have you been waiting to say that? Phoebe: About 20 minutes. - In a later episode, we see the setup for one of Chandler's, but never get to hear the punchline. He tells Joey to mention firetrucks the next time they see each other, resulting in Joey trying to salvage an awkward conversation by yelling "FIRETRUCKS!" out of nowhere, making it even more awkward. - In an episode of Hannah Montana, Miley needs a favor from Jackson, who agrees, but in very theatrical fashion. She calls him out afterwards for wasting 20 minutes just to dress up as Vito Corleoni and recite his "please accept this justice..." speech from The Godfather. - Another visual one was the BRIAN BLESSED-hosted episode of Have I Got News for You, where he kept pulling props out from under the desk. One of these was a huge Spartan soldier's helmet which he put on between shots to provide Hypocritical Humor about continuity errors on television. Ian Hislop: That's a fantastically elaborate prop for that joke! - How I Met Your Mother has Barney go through weeks of planning, months of experimenting, waiting 10 years, and spending $30,000 on fake medical bills, all to get Marshall to try to eat an exploding sub-sandwich. - One episode of Lab Rats is spent getting the entire cast contrived juuuust right so that they look like a circus at the end of the episode (as the administrator insisted that their attempts would end up as one throughout the episode). - Mystery Science Theater 3000: - In "Laserblast", Tom and Crow try to brainstorm ways to work the phrase "Can't we get BEYOND Thunderdome?" into a conversation. - In the episode "Girl in Gold Boots", there's a shot of a pool table set up just right so that Mike can pull out a cue from under his seat and pretend to shoot some pool. Servo: Say, how long have you been saving that sight gag, Mike? Mike: Oh, not long, about... eight years. - In "The Screaming Skull", Pearl, Brain Guy, and Bobo trick Mike and the bots into believing they've all previously agreed to meet dressed as penguins. They had to reserve the penguin costumes eight months in advance for $900 each. - In "Track of the Moon Beast", some characters play a weird, confusing prank on an anthropologist, then spend the next several minutes explaining it. For a host segment, Crow tried to do the same to Mike, and it's even more awkward. - "Wild Rebels" has another sight gag, where Jeeter appears to point his gun directly at Tom, who dodges to the side... right to where Jeeter is next pointing his gun when the camera cuts back to him. - QI. Most particularly, during a round wherein Stephen was discussing declining surnames and mentioned "Glascock" as one of them, Alan chimed in with the anecdote: "We had a Jimmy Glascock at school. You could always see when he was coming." After the laughter died down, he remarked, "I never thought I'd have a chance to do that joke." - Rich Hall's "centi-claws" joke, also lampshaded. - In one episode, someone accused Jimmy Carr of being "the chairman of the Pedantic Society." Jimmy replied, "I'm actually vice chairman, thank you very much." - Red Dwarf: - The episode "Queeg" has Lister tell Rimmer a long rambling story about why it's cruel to give machines personalities. He tells about how his friend Peterson had a pair of "Smart Shoes" that could always get you home no matter how drunk you were. But Peterson woke up hundreds of miles away because the shoes wanted to see the world. He tried to get rid of them but they'd show back up. In the end the shoes stole a car and wound up driving it into a canal because they couldn't steer properly. Peterson was upset, but a priest consoled him that the shoes were happy and in heaven now. You see, it turns out Shoes have soles. - Another episode has Lister spend days crossing the ship in order to fetch some tomatoes. His reason for doing so is that tomatoes make him sneeze, so now he can squick Rimmer out by using the sneezes to iron his clothes. All that walking just to get a reaction. - On Scrubs: - J.D. and Turk do a lot of shift-switching to put two doctors named Turner and Hooch together on a medical case, just so they could shout, "Turner and Hooch!" - This can fizzle very easily: J.D. once told Doug that a patient had "updoc" in a class, hoping that he would would ask, "What's updoc?" - J.D. set it up so a patient thought his name was Daman, so that, when the patient asked who was doing his procedure, J.D. could answer "Doctor Daman", prompting the patient to ask "Who's Daman". Needless to say, it failed, miserably. The patient was rather too polite, and added the honorific. - The Todd has been known to wait in hiding for hours until someone unwittingly sets up a double entendre. - J.D. also spent over a week setting up a joke about Oprah-themed cereal in My Happy Place, recording a member of staff's Oprah impression and rigging a cereal box (the design and manufacture of which he was presumably also responsible for) so that the recording played when it was opened. - Moving into their flat in Spaced, Tim is wearing a oversized green T-shirt and brown trousers, and Daisy a chunky orange sweater and red skirt, with thick-rimmed glasses on top of her head. No apparent reason, until they talk about which Scooby-Doo character they are. Tim picks Fred and Daisy says Daphne. He slouches, and the glasses fall down on her face... making them look like Shaggy and Velma. - The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "In the Cards" consists of Jake and Nog trying to acquire a vintage baseball card from a man named Dr. Geiger through a convoluted Chain of Deals. One of their tasks is to recover Dr. Bashir's stolen teddy bear, and Jake uses the idiom 'to beard the lion in his den', leading to the following exchange: Nog: Lions and Geigers and bears... Jake: Oh my... - Whose Line Is It Anyway?: Colin Mochrie is a master of this. While the show is largely improvised, Colin plays the anchorman role in Weird Newscasters often enough that he's got many an Overly Pre-Prepared Gag as his opening number. In addition to the one listed as the page quote: - Paul and Storm combine this with Overly-Long Gag in their song The Captain's Wife's Lament, in order to set up the song's Hurricane Of Pun (singular) ending. In the album version, this is merely a charming interlude, but the live version (which intersperses the song/setup with Audience Participation "Arrr"s and pirate jokes) often stretches the four-stanza introduction out to lengths of ten minutes or more. - The whole of "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Since You've Been Gone" song. - One track on P.D.Q. Bach's album 1712 Overture and Other Musical Assaults featured Professor Peter Schickele tracking down one of Johann Sebastian Bach's descendants, a man named Burt, then hand him a pebble so that he could "give Burt Bach a rock". - Tom Lehrer's "Irish Ballad", from Songs by Tom Lehrer, spends six verses lovingly describing the Irish maid's murder spree in order to set up the punchline: When at last the police called by Her little pranks she did not deny To do so, she would have had to lie And lying, she knew, was a sin. - Allan Sherman's "One Hippopotami" (a parody of "What Kind Of Fool Am I?") is a long string of incredibly lame puns involving singulars and plurals, all leading up to the lamest of them all in the last lyric. " With someone you adore If you should find romance You'll pant and pant once more And that's! A! Pair! Of! " Pants! - He did this same with the four-stanza "Around The World." " Around the world " I looked for you I gave a look, in every nook On second avenue I'm searching for The one I love I haven't seen the one I love Since err of Tisha B'ov Your new address You didn't leave Was it New York, or County Cork Or was it Tel-Aviv And all the time I looked around for you You was in the ladies' room. - In Pappy's Flatshare Slamdown, Tom tells one in series 4 episode 3. Tom: I'm not going to do the washing up, Matthew, because I used to work in a seafood restaurant, and I used to do the washing up with a German fellow by the name of Hans. Now, in that seafood restaurant, there was a Hungarian waitress who went by the name of Yourface. Now, Yourface was very fond of the fish that were in the tank in that sea restaurant. There was one piece of seafood in particular. It was a little squid. It was a bright green squid, and it wasn't a very clever squid, and oh, Yourface loved that squid. No-one would eat it because it looked so silly, and it looked so green, and looked so stupid. But one day, a man came in and said, "I want to order that squid"; and Yourface said, "no, not the squid". He said, "yes, kill that squid and I will eat it". So she got the squid, she went back into the kitchen, she picked up the knife, she said, "I can't do it. I just can't do it". The manager said, "unless you kill that squid, you're fired". She said, "I just can't do it". So, they got the washer upper - the German washer upper - Hans, he came over, picked up the knife and said, "I'll do this". He picked it up and said, "I can't do it. I just can't do it". The manager said, "oh no — \|\|Hans that does dishes is as soft as Yourface with the mild green fairly thick squid\|\|". note : The punchline is a pun on the old Fairy Liquid slogan, For hands that do dishes can feel as soft as your face, with mild green Fairy Liquid. - Taint of the Lex and Terry Radio Network once alleged that he had become a vegetarian some years before in hopes that a woman would one day offer to "eat [his] meat." Eventually, one did. - The elaborate puns on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. The host's scripted ones are the best examples, but some of the ones the panellists come out with are really more notable for this, since they're being thought up on the spot (usually) and are more likely to be incredibly lame. In "Sound Charades," the audience often groans very early on as soon as it becomes clear what pun the players are relying on to convey their assigned title, and the rest of the round becomes an exercise in drawing out the setup for as long as possible. (only after much scene-setting, Graeme and Barry get started on The Poseidon Adventure ) Hamish: But look here, look here, ye're late today! Ye've missed the Teletubbies ! Dougal: Oh no! Hamish: Aye! Dougal: What hijinks were they up to today? Hamish: Ohoho, I tell you, I was gripped. Dougal: And me not here! Hamish: Something terrible happened... to Po. Dougal: Speak on, old friend! Hamish: Aye, well, Tinky-winky, Dipsy, and La-la... couldn't see Po from the front ! Dougal: No. Divulge! Hamish: Ye've no heard the worst of it. Dougal: No? Hamish: They couldnae see him from the back either! Dougal: Mercy me!... (and so forth) - In an episode of Just a Minute (the panel game where players have to talk about a subject without hesitation, repetition or deviation), Paul Merton took the given subject Off the Rails — not unusual for him — and started talking about the Welsh and Scottish parliaments. Clement Freud brought the house down by challenging him for "devolution." In a program remembering Freud after his death, Merton revealed that Freud had asked him before the show to work in the necessary reference, without telling him the joke. - The Goon Show, on multiple occasions, spent twenty minutes setting up to a pun that managed to be So Bad, It's Good. - ABC cricket commentator Kerry O'Keefe spouted this gem, possibly even rivalling the page quote. 'A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see from her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack. "Miss Whack, I'd like to get a $30,000 loan to take a holiday." Patty looks at the frog in disbelief and asks his name. The frog says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it's okay, he knows the bank manager. Patty explains that he will need to secure the loan with some collateral. The frog says, "Sure. I have this," and produces a tiny porcelain elephant, about an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed. Very confused, Patty explains that she'll have to consult with the bank manager and disappears into a back office. She finds the manager and says, "There's a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000, and he wants to use this as collateral." She holds up the tiny pink elephant. "I mean, what in the world is this?" The bank manager looks back at her and says... "It's a knickknack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man's a Rolling Stone."' - Anything Goes almost entirely ends with one. Ms. Evangeline Harcourt loses her dog during the first half of the first act, and spends the next act-and-a-half looking for it all across the boat. At the end of the show, the Purser brings the dog to her, saying it was found in the swimming pool. Ms. Harcourt: What was she doing in the swimming pool? Entire Cast: THE DOG PADDLE! - Into the Woods has a lyric that you get a feeling that Stephen Sondheim had been dying to make. Baker's Wife: If the end is right, \|\|It justifies the beans!\|\| - The creators of Red vs. Blue once joked that the series would eventually end with one final punchline that the entire show had been leading up to all these years and every Plot Hole would suddenly make sense. Granted, if they manage, it will probably be the most glorious Overly Pre-Prepared Gag ever. Of all time. Even if it really is lame, managing to pull off such a feat after 11+ years (especially considering the show was only supposed to be about five episodes long at first) would be nothing short of godhood. - The Animutation Irrational Exuberance has the chorus of the song sang each time by three different antropomorphic fruits that parodies of company logos (Rotten Apple Joe for Apple, Banana Public Inc for Banana Republic, etc) with a flashing sign that reads "FRUIT SELLS" and giving out their Name, company and fun facts. The very last chorus ends with \|\|Richard Simmons. With the fun fact "This was an incredibly large setup for such a cheap joke. That's what makes it funny"\|\| - Puffin Forest: In "The Legend of the Legendary Aligaros Ashuin!", Ben wasted a character level just to get an ability he had to wait months to use just for a joke, which he never used again. - Irregular Webcomic! does this a lot. - xkcd: - The Order of the Stick: - "Generally Relative". As per usual, given a lampshade the size of Canada. Tarquin: Oh MAN! I've always wanted to say that line! Elan: That was... that was a PERFECT delivery! Tarquin: I know, right? Wasn't it awesome? I've been waiting, like, FOREVER for that. Elan: Growing up without a father was totally worth it just for that reveal! - And in "Under the Helmet". Tarquin: Totally worth wearing a mask under my helmet for two days. - Two pages later, Malack comments that Tarquin has always been willing to go the extra mile for a punchline. - 8-Bit Theater has this in conjunction with a Brick Joke: One of the first comics had Black Mage make an off-hand comment that a party of four White Mages would "never work" (He was reading a Nintendo Power magazine, which actually suggested a WMx4 party set-up in a sidebar article). Fast forward almost ten years in real time, and guess who defeats the Big Bad? Black Mage's reaction was extraordinarily subdued, but by that point, it's safe to assume he was far too used to being the Universe's Butt-Monkey. Brian Clevinger has admitted this as being the entire reason for making the comic in the first place! - Cyanide and Happiness: - Dinosaur Comics: "T-Rex! You just spent hours learning about accounting for a pun!" - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: - Kickback set up one in "The Fallen Finds a Bridge" of the Insecticomics. - Folly and Innovation has one with 65 days of patience for the sake of a pun. - Captain SNES: The Game Masta has "Backside Opening". - Wondermark at one point devoted two months of comics, starting here, to torturous puns on the phrase "check out my sick elephant", culminating in a ten-strip story about an attempt to film an all-elephant version of Friends in Russian with the aid of Anton Chekhov. - In one Full Frontal Nerdity strip, Lewis complains that Comic Con has been cancelled, because he was going to volunteer. He planned to cosplay as The Mandalorian and work the information booth. Frank comments that this is a lot of trouble to go to just for the sake of telling people asking for directions "This is the way". - One Questionable Content strip has Emily eating a big bowl of peas and giggling to herself. Unfortunately, the first person who finds her is Pungeon Master Claire, who says "Are you giving peas a chance?" before Emily can. In the next strip, when Hannerlore approaches her, she says "I'm giving peas a chance!" before Hanners can say anything. Hanners misses the joke entirely, and a distraught Emily gives up. - Here's one that's lampshaded at the end. - Cracked — "7 Bizarre Noises from Outer Space": the editor listed six videos for noises. The seventh? \|\|Uranus. He even admitted to making the article just to have the line "This is the noise Uranus makes."\|\| - Subverted in the page quote for Just for Pun: Upon discovering that Miles Black, the famous phrenologist from Yorkshire was going to take up yodeling to lonely goats in Bali, James White decided to balance four planks of wood on a beer keg and call it an abstract work of art in the style of a famous fourteenth-century architect, just going to prove that people will read any old garbage if they think there will be a good pun at the end of it. — The Grand Panjandrum's Special Award for Vile Puns, The 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - Achievement Hunter: - Geoff and Gavin spent twenty hours preparing an elaborate Minecraft city for the crew to live in (complete with a massive recreation of the AH logo and a gigantic monolith serving as Geoff's house)... the entire point was that there was a single misaligned block that would pour lava into Jack's house when he'd try to fix it. Twenty hours of work just to set one guy's house on fire when he tried to clean it up; and it failed as Jack was able to save his house. So Gavin just poured a bucket of Lava on it. It was later revealed they also had a "failsafe", \|\|having spent an additional hour burying hundreds of cubes of TNT under the city and then luring Michael into pressing the trigger button\|\|. - Gavin at one point dug a giant shaft to bedrock, covered it up, and then placed a landmine so Geoff would plummet to the bottom of the map after walking across it. - The Fire Extinguisher was constructed to put out fires when Jack's house caught fire, only for its water supply to be replaced with lava. - Dark Achievement City, a mirror image of the main Achievement City in the Nether, was constructed for what, even in advance, the builders knew would amount to a ten second reaction from the others. - After posting a prank video where Michael and Gavin dismantle Jeremy's desk and lower it to the floor, Geoff and Gavin realized that what they should have done instead was raise it to the ceiling. Hundreds of dollars worth of equipment and 5 months of preparation later, they did exactly that. - Achievement Hunter's favorite pranks in general fall under this umbrella. When Chad James had politely declined a taco from Michael because he had other lunch plans, the entire division quickly dismantled and hid Chad's desk within minutes. They left his office completely empty while Chad and the rest of the RT Core office were attempting to steal a microwave. Some time after that incident, they repeated the offer to Chad, which he accepted this time. However, much to his chagrin, they bought 99 more tacos and proceeded to drag him around the Rooster Teeth offices with tacos for everyone. - LoadingReadyRun: - One video took place over several cuts spread out over five minutes, featuring a morose clown waking up to face the day. All completely irrelevant, until the payoff in the final cut. - Munroe's Meats is an in-universe example, a five minute long, terrifying build-up to a punny tagline. - In Failure similarly spends several minutes of a teacher excoriating his students complete with statistical breakdowns and a slideshow to demonstrate their many failures objectively, all for the reveal: \|\|It's Opposite Day.\|\| - 5 Second Films provide us with a beautiful example with The Ballad of Truck Thunders. - Game Grumps: While talking about experiences playing video games at cons, Egoraptor mentioned that he likes to parody new-age gamers by playing retro games, running through them terribly, and rage-quitting the second he dies. However, once while playing the original Super Mario Bros, he just ran through the game, unintentionally doing a perfect speedrun... And he didn't get hit until he reached the final level. Whenever he did die fighting Bowser, he had already garnered a huge audience expecting this to be his original intention, but he just went with the original joke, throwing down the controlling and yelling "THIS GAME SUCKS!" and left. - Chuggaaconroy specifically waited until episode 101 of his Xenoblade Chronicles 1 LP to make a "Xenoblade 101" joke, as if he knew the LP would be that long or that he started the aftergame then. - This SiIvagunner rip of Snow Halation goes to a great deal of effort (including English singers for all the parts, and adhering to a rhyming scheme) for a bizarre combination of Love Live and The Flintstones, which have nothing in common beyond being common gags on the channel. It takes three minutes of song, but it finally reveals the whole point was setting up \|\|the incredibly lame "Stone Halation" pun at the title-drop.\|\| - It's not outright confirmed, but there's a distinct possibility that Brian only grew out his mustache for Unraveled Season 2 entirely so he could dramatically shave it off at the end of "Waluigi, Unraveled". - In Michael Reeves' "I Gave My Goldfish $50,000 to Trade Stocks", he designed an automatic stock-trading device that would buy and sell stocks based on the random movements of his goldfish... which amazingly made Michael over $1000 in profit. Deciding that this technology has incredible potential, he presented it to potential investors for real, giving a legitimate presentation as a startup called "reef.ly" to Launch House, a LA-based meeting place for tech entrepreneurs. The footage taken from the seminar makes it clear that Michael played the presentation of his "fish algorithm-based technology" completely straight, and it wasn't until partway through that his live audience of actual potential investors realized the "fish" for Michael's stock-trading program wasn't some tech buzzword, but in fact a real goldfish in a tank. - Truth in Television: In If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, Bruce Campbell relates a true complicated prank he played on a friend involving his broken down car and the US Park Service. - Invoked Trope: At the beginning of the vice-presidential debate in the 2008 U.S. election, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden shook hands and she could clearly be heard saying, "Nice to meet you, can I call you Joe?" Many commentators later guessed that (given that candidates aren't really allowed to talk to each other during these "debates") she'd only asked so that she could begin one of her rebuttals with, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" In fact, it was because she had accidentally referred to him as "Senator O'Biden" repeatedly during debate prep. - You just charged me for assault and battery! - The Rock Band Network is a system for small bands to get their own songs into the official Rock Band DLC store. The program that compiles the song for testing is called Magma "'cuz that's where rock comes from." The developers have stated that yes, that joke is the sole reason for the name. - While filming Torchwood: Miracle Day, John Barrowman decided to "scare the crap out of Eve" by sneaking into her trailer and jumping out from the shower. He was in there a long time. - George P. Burdell is a fake student made up by William Edgar Smith when Georgia Tech sent him two enrollment forms. Smith then proceeded to sign Burdell up for all the classes he was taking. He did all of his schoolwork twice, even the tests, changing things around slightly to prevent the professors from catching on. This "prank" went on for so long that Georgia Tech awarded Burdell an actual master's degree. - Andy Kaufman was infamous for going to insane lengths for a gag, up to and including spending weeks at a time in-character as his stage personas. The reason so many people think he faked his death? Because even his friends and family agree that faking a long, horrific death by cancer and keeping the charade up for decades for the sake of a dumb joke sounds like something Kaufman would actually do. Oh no! I left the fridge running!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyPreparedGag
Overly-Long Tongue - TV Tropes Odie can give you a real lickin'. "Oh my God! It's like a tape measure!" A character with a tongue of surprising, implausible, or downright impossible length. A Justified Trope in certain cases — say, a mutation or non-human anatomy — but in other cases this is left completely unexplained (and usually Played for Laughs). The lucky person in possession of this tongue frequently has a surprising amount of control over it, and may even use it as a weapon. Characters without this feature may suddenly develop one, often in tandem with a Jaw Drop, when startled, screaming, or confronted with a Head-Turning Beauty. ## Examples: - In the Orangina commercial, one of the species dancing is a chameleon (in Chippendale clothing even!), and he extends his tongue around a plant girl. - In this Yoplait yogurt commercial from Israel, apparently the yogurt is so good that it gives you an extra long tongue just so you can lick the bottom of the cup. Or something. - Wangury and his goons from Noonbory and the Super 7 have extremely long, tape measurer-like tongues. - Simple Samosa: - In "Cricket Match", Samosa's jaw drops when he first sees that Jalebi is participating in the cricket game, complete with an overly long tongue rolling out of his mouth. - Happens twice in "Spa Wars" during characters' Jaw Drops. The first instance is when Dhokla stares in awe at the futuristic technology in Appa Spa; the second is when Samosa looks on in surprise at \|\|Iddiyappam Appa confessing his love for Iddiyappam Amma, and the latter returning the former's feelings\|\|. Both times, another character comments that they should put their tongue back in their mouth. - Baikinman from Anpanman. It's bright blue and perfect for slurping up the contents of the Donburiman Trio in one go. - Jimushi Juubei from Basilisk has this and \|\|a weapon concealed in his throat\|\| to use with it. - Claude of Black Butler II as shown in episode 5 when he used it to lick cream from the middle of his nose. - Nnoitra Jiruga of Bleach gets a freakishly long tongue in his released form. - Dragon Ball: - Tambourine, one of King Piccolo's children showed he had this ability which he used to attempt to constrict Goku to death. - Buyon also has one which he mostly uses to scoop things up to eat. - Junji Ito's one-shot manga "The Licking Woman" centers around a creepy woman with an enormous poison-coated tongue who roams the streets licking and killing people with it. \|\|It's subverted, though, in that the tongue isn't actually a tongue at all, but a parasitic monster that lives in people's mouths.\|\| - All vampires in Hellsing have long tongues to lick up blood. - In Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Jo Jolion, Yasuho Hirose has a tongue long enough to lick her elbow with. - Miia, a lamia from Monster Musume has a ridiculously long tongue to go with her long snake body. Interestingly, it's a human tongue, not a reptilian one. - Tsuyu Asui from My Hero Academia has a 20 meter long tongue with super strength as part of her "Frog" Quirk. - Naruto: - Orochimaru — with and without two-edged sword for extra amusement. - The toad summons, of course. - The Negi golem drawn by Haruna, with a 23.5cm tongue. It's implied it could've been even worse... - Nurse Hitomi's Monster Infirmary: Nobuko Shitara's puberty change is a tongue that can stretch over three meters, which she's rather self-conscious about. One chapter shows her using it to tie a cherry stem into a knot. - Shizuku of Omamori Himari has this as a snake-girl. - Often used in One Piece in partnership with the Wild Take and Eye Pop for comical effect. - Charlotte Perospero has one big tongue constantly sticking out of his mouth. - \|\|Dr. Vegapunk\|\| has a massive tongue constantly sticking out of his mouth, as a reference to the famous picture of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. - In Ranma ½, Picolet Chardin II is capable of stretching his mouth and tongue to eat food at superhuman speeds. For instance, he places a gâteau on top of his head and quickly grabs it with his tongue, without using his hands. - In the Sgt. Frog manga, Sumomo's Pokopenian form has one of these, long enough to wrap around Fuyuki's body several times (she apparently doesn't quite "get" the concept of a French kiss). - In a one-off gag from Suite Pretty Cure ♪, Hibiki can cover her entire nose with her tongue to lick cream off her face. - Toriko: - Midora's fighting style plays this trope to downright insane levels. - The Salamander Sphinx also has a long tongue. - Legato Bluesummers from Trigun has a page dedicated to his tongue. It looks freaky as hell. - The Batman Who Laughs, first introduced in Dark Nights: Metal is, Depending on the Artist, depicted a rather long tongue. - A frog-like minor Legion of Super-Heroes villain called Ze Tongue. - Venom's insanely long tongue (and the toothy mouth surrounding it) is the main distinction between him and black-suit-Spidey. Well, that and the muscle mass... This goes for all symbiotes in their "monster" forms. - Wonder Woman (1987): In his final form the White Magician's tongue is well over a foot long and the tip is split like a snake's. - X-Men villains Toad and Sugar Man. - Minor hero Mother Tongue from Empowered has an insanely long "pseudotongue" for her superpower. It's reach is somewhere in the realms of several dozen feet (while she only has a normal human body- or at least apparently did while she was still alive) and presumably she can control its length at will. - Bill the Cat in Bloom County, at least when he leads the metal band Deathtöngue (later Billy and the Boingers). - Odie from Garfield. Garfield and Friends often made exaggerating jokes, such as that the length of Odie's tongue was "easily mistaken for a freeway". - Rover in Red and Rover impresses and disgusts Red with this. - Coco: Dante has one, and it's most noticeable in the short, "Dante's Lunch — A Short Tail". - In Rio 2, we have Charlie the anteater. Whose tongue is used for all kinds of things, from boat propeller to slingshot elastic. - Pairing this trope with In One Ear, Out The Other by having someone sexy seductively stick their tongue into someone else's ear is practically a minor stock trope in of itself in spoof movies, appearing as it does in such films as Mafia, Wrongfully Accused and Dance Flick. - Alien: Resurrection: The Newborn exhibits such a tongue when it acknowledges Ripley 8 as its mother. - In Art of the Dead, the satyr-like embodiment of Lust has an obscenely long tongue that he forces down Kim's throat when she is being raped. - The alien commander's girlfriend in Battlefield Earth. Played by John Travolta's wife, who presumably doesn't have that tongue in reality, though it would explain how their marriage holds up. - In Big Tits Zombie, after becoming a zombie, \|\|Darna\|\| sprouts an overly long tongue which she uses to attack Rena, who fends her off by pouring wasabi sauce on the tongue. - Lilith from Bordello of Blood, and it's strong enough to burst a man's heart out of his chest. - The Tree Demon from A Chinese Ghost Story has a tongue that chases and attacks the heroes from quite a distance. - Cicak-Man, a Malaysian superhero parody, have its titular protagonist being granted the powers of a lizard, including having an extremely long and flexible tongue which he uses to grab and swing between buildings while patrolling the streets of Kuala Lumpur. - The Company of Wolves: Rosaleen's love interest in the end is a werewolf and has a long, canine like creepy tongue. - In Earth Girls Are Easy, Jim Carrey as Wiploc proves he has a long tongue by using it to retrieve ice from the bottom of a tall glass. Valerie's friend exclaims "I want his baby" on seeing this. - In The Hazing, Professor Kapps causes Roy's to grow to gigantic proportions while he is orally pleasuring Delia. Roy winds up biting his tongue off and the tongue continues to strangle Delia. - Sammael from the first Hellboy film has a tongue that is freakishly long. It is also split at the end, prehensile, and can be used to lay eggs. - Hellraiser: Inferno. When the Wire Twins Cenobites make out with Joseph, they lick him with unnaturally long tongues. - The Rome sequence in History of the World Part I. While pretending to be a eunuch, Josephus (Gregory Hines) is tested by having a woman perform an erotic dance in front of him. He gives himself away by having his very long tongue plop out of his mouth as seen here. - The Velociraptors in the stop-motion animation storyboard version of Jurassic Park, before they were informed that the raptors didn't have tongues like that. - Krampus has one, seen disturbingly unfurling from his Santa mask to lick Max when he is grabbed in the snow. - In The Mask, when Stanley Ipkiss (under Loki's influence) first sees Tina performing at the Coco Bongo. His jaw quite literally drops to the table, and his tongue rolls out like a red carpet. - The frog monsters in Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster have prehensile tongues. - The hybrids in the Species series, culminating in a gory example of In One Ear, Out The Other in The Awakening. - Star Wars: Jar Jar Binks, as seen here◊. - The demon in Violent Shit. - The aliens from Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman has them where their noses should be. - X-Men Film Series - Toad's tongue with added mucus. - In X2: X-Men United, a kid is briefly seen sticking out a long, blue-black tongue at a girl in a museum, showing he's a mutant. - Viper from The Wolverine. Required for a snake woman. - Crowley in Good Omens; apparently he can do "interesting things" with it. It's just one of many vaguely snake-like attributes he held on to after Eden. - Dudley Dursley in Harry Potter. Of course, that was a temporary prank... - In The Stormlight Archive, it turns out that the "red streamers" that are how anticipationspren appear in the Physical Realm are actually the long tongues of weird frog/lizard things that exist mostly in the Cognitive Realm and visually manifest only part of themselves in the Physical Realm when feeding on emotions there. - The vampires in The Strain subvert this. The things coming out of their mouths aren't tongues, but venom stingers that grow in their throats. - Ally McBeal: The title character occasionally develops an overly long tongue for imagine spots, usually when Eating the Eye Candy. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Doc, a demon in human form in "The Weight of the World" and "The Gift". He uses his tongue for fighting. - Ka D'Argo of Farscape, whose long tongue can also be used as a weapon to inject paralyzing venom. - On an episode of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Diane and the kids each receive attributes based on lizards and use them to rescue Wayne. Diane receives a chameleon's long tongue, and at the end of the episode, after sticking her tongue on Wayne's ear, the two of them decide they can wait a little while before he reverses the change. - Intergalactic: Candy's species have very long tongues (around a foot, it looks like), forked like snakes'. - The Outer Limits (1995): - In "The Gun", the alien calling himself Donald Finley has a long, forked tongue like a reptile. At one point, he uses it to snatch a lizard from a tree and devour it whole. - In "Revival", Luke and Serena have very long tongues which they intertwine around each other. - Power Rangers: - Primeval: The Future Shark in Season 2 Episode 4 has a harpoon-like distendable proboscis which Cutter theorizes it fires to grab prey and pull them into its mouth. - Whoniverse: - Star Trek: Enterprise: - The pilot episode has Malcolm Reed amazed by a couple of beautiful alien dancers with long tongues that they shoot out to catch butterflies. - In one episode, the Denobulan Dr. Phlox is seen using a tongue scraper to groom his own long tongue. - Supernatural: Pishtacos have a monstrous proboscis which they use to suck the fat out of their prey. - Many Ultra Series kaiju possess tongues as long as they're bodies, often overlapping with Multipurpose Tongue. Unfortunately for these monsters, the Ultras usually rip them out of their mouths at some point in the fight. - Rammstein front-man Till Lindemann occasionally sports variants of these during music videos. In Ich Tu Dir Weh, there is a brief snippet of him licking his lips with a long, forked tongue and in Mann Gegen Mann, he abruptly sprouts a long, black snake-like tongue. - Gorillaz has both bassist Murdoc Niccals (who was loosely based on a real life case, Gene Simmons of KISS) and singer 2D (whose tongue is long enough to stick up his nose). - One of the aliens in Bally's Space Invaders pinball game has a tongue three times longer than its head. - Gene Simmons in Bally's 1976 KISS, of course. - Stern's 2015 KISS sequel ups the ante with a model of Gene's "Demon" on the playfield, complete with tongue. "Demon Multiball" begins with Gene spitting pinballs towards the player. - Sparky in Metallica, whose tongue goes from his mouth down to his left wrist. - Characters in In Nomine can learn a suite of Songs called Numinous Corpus, which allow the performer to augment his or her body in various ways. One of these Songs is Numinous Corpus: Tongue. Three guesses what it does. - Warhammer 40,000: Everything Slaanesh-affiliated will likely have this. Genestealers also have long tongues that are almost always shown hanging out of their mouths; justified, as a genestealer's tongue is an ovipositor used to deliver a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong to its victims. - Busuzima in the Bloody Roar games has an extra-long tongue...in human form. - Mittux from Bound by Blades is a monster resembling a gigantic mouth with bat-like wings, and a massive tongue that can cover all corners of the boss battle arena. The tongue's tip also happens to be where the monster's sole eye is located. - Chameleon Twist and its sequel, naturally. Davy and his friends use their tongues to swallow enemies for spitting, polevault, latch onto and drag themselves to objects (in the sequel), and wrap around poles for travel...Did I mention one of Davy's friends is a a girl comedian? - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: - In The Elder Scrolls series, Hungers are a form of lesser Daedra which are very similar in appearance to the "alien-style" Chupacabra, complete with claws, spikes, and a "sucker" mouth. They have extremely long, weaponized tongues. - EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: The remodeler Kaimetsu Kameleon, uses his long tongue for attacks, given his namesake. - Level 3 of Ghouls'n Ghosts has extensible monster tongues that are used as platforms. - Gigantic has Wu, a frog-like Warrior Monk who uses his long tongue in tandem with his martial art skills. His Togue Lash ability can be used to pull enemies towards him from far away. - Your goat in Goat Simulator. One mutator ("Italian Dinosaur Goat") even allows it to mimic Yoshi by producing "watermelon bombs" from almost anything it licks. - Grump-Frump, the Tasting Gnome in King's Quest VI. - Left 4 Dead: - The Smoker. Justified in that it's his intestines, if Word of God is to be believed. - In Left 4 Dead 2, the Smoker is more grotesquely mutated, having six tongues coming out of several places on his head, neck, and shoulders. He still only uses the one coming out of his mouth to attack with though. - Ghirahim from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has one, which freaks Link out when Ghirahim lashes it out while leaning his head on Link's shoulder. - Man-Eating Plant grants an extendable tongue for the titular plant, where it can extend it to snatch airborne targets. - Mega Man X's Sting Chameleon uses his tongue to hang from the ceiling and as a nasty fast whip. - The Fear from Metal Gear Solid 3 has a longer tongue than a human though it's not used for the usual grabbing of objects. He merely sticks it all the way out to be creepy. This could have been a way to take Vamp's long tongue up a notch. - Monster Hunter has Volvidon and Baruragaru. The former uses its long tongue to knock back preys and hunters as if it was a whip, while the latter uses its tongue to suck blood. - Reptile in Mortal Kombat can shoot out his tongue just like a chameleon. This is most notably used for his signature Fatality, where he uses his tongue to yank your head off and eat it. - Persona 5: Asmodeus, boss of the first Palace, is a giant version of Mr. Kamoshida with extra arms and a gigantic, creepy tongue that he uses in some attacks. - Pokémon: - Lickitung and its evolution Lickilicky are known for their long sticky tongues. - Gastly, Haunter, and Gengar also. - Golbat, as seen in Red and Blue. - And Kecleon and Politoed, as they are a chameleon and frog. - Greninja, also based on a frog, uses its tongue as a scarf. - Rapid Reload has a difficult boss fight against a Chameleon mecha, who will periodically use it's tongue to lash out at the player like a whip, or using it like a Grappling-Hook Pistol to swing all over the area, making him hard to hit without the homing lightning gun. - The Licker enemy in Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 5 and various other games. Its signature attack is using an absurdly long tongue to whip anything it wants to attack, driving it with enough force to impale a prey item with it. They are heavily mutated T-Virus infected humans. - SAR: Search and Rescue is a video game where your enemies include a Xenomorph Xerox with a five-meter tongue, used to lash out and chew at you from a distance. - Silent Hill 2 has Pyramid Head. - Trigger Happy from Skylanders. Even more so Wrecking Ball, who lashes his tongue out to attack. - Super Cyborg have the final form of the Flying Jarmai, who continues attacking you after you destroyed all it's body leaving only a severed head. The head will release a tongue that goes on and on trying to hit you until you blow it up. - Super Mario Bros: - Blockhead - Charlie the Unicorn's "friends" have long, prehensile tongues... Squick! - Dreamscape: CHEN has one. He is a chameleon after all. He can even use it like a Grapple Move or a fist! - DSBT InsaniT: Pangle the pangolin has a tongue long enough for Fire Guy to use as a platform. - Sniffles, a remarkably clever anteater in Happy Tree Friends, has a seemingly infinitely-stretching tongue. However, it is often attacked by the Ant Family in horrifyingly sadistic ways. - Ceriazibus from the Sock series have tongues so long that it can wrap them around on of it's head (it have three of them) multiple times and it's so sharp that it can decapitate itself. - In Twig, Helen, who is notable for looking human only to lure in prey and practice her acting skills, occasionally demonstrates the ability to extend her tongue well beyond what's possible for humans so she can lick things. When Sylvester catches her tongue after she tries to lick him, she demonstrates that it's also prehensile. - Adventure Time: - Marceline has this in a few of her spontaneous monster transformations. - Lemongrab is shown to have one in the cut scene where he's licking a rice cake. Finn and Princess Bubblegum are visibly puzzled, and a bit disturbed. - Animaniacs: - The first of Minerva Mink's many takes when she sees a male mink she's attracted to has her tongue making a huge pile on the ground. - Dot Warner also extends her tongue to great lengths to try to get a pastry, even when it's wrapped around her. - Justified in The Ant and the Aardvark. Since it's a funny cartoon, you can guess the long tongue of the anteater attracts Amusing Injuries by the ton. - Avatar: The Last Airbender: - Tex Avery MGM Cartoons: In "Deputy Droopy", a hapless safe robber gets glued to the floor, then has a stick of TNT shoved in his gob. He stretches his tongue out two miles to allow it to explode without waking the sleeping sheriff. - This is the defining characteristic of Tung (a frog-person from Swap Star 46) in Dex Hamilton: Alien Entomologist. - Ed, Edd n Eddy seem to have them, all the better for eating the oversized jawbreakers they're so fond of. Also count as Multipurpose Tongue, as they are strong enough that Eddy is able to balance on his. - Family Guy: - Gene Simmons again, in a brief gag—his tongue goes off screen, followed by Lois (also from off-screen): "Oh, hello, Gene..." - In an earlier episode, the normal-looking girl at the flag girl tryouts has her long tongue flop out when she tries to respond to Meg. - Mystique Sonia from Hero: 108 has a lengthy tongue, allowing her to use it in unorthodox ways. - Jackie Chan Adventures: This is one of the major characteristics of Tso Lan the Moon Demon, one of the members of the Big Bad Duumvirate in the second season. - Bubbie in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, whose tongue is whatever length is required for the gag. - Mr. Bogus has one, in regards of when food is involved. - Speaking of Gene Simmons, long-tongued, rock god Rock Zilla from My Dad the Rock Star was not only an Expy of Gene, the show was created by Gene Simmons. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: - Pinkie Pie extends her tongue longer than her body to slurp up a cake near the beginning of "Swarm of the Century". - Spike's also got a pretty long one, which he combines with rapid spinning to clean frosting off of his body in "Lesson Zero". - Mr. Tortoise-Snap is a giant tortoise whose prehensile tongue is far longer than his head and neck put together. - Ned's Newt: Newton seems to have one, mostly when he's just a small newt who has not consumed Zippo yet. This has been shown in "The Lucky Penny" and "Lummox of the Baskervilles", respectively. - The Penguins of Madagascar: - In "Mental hen" Kowalski does "beak drop" with tongue dropped to ground, off the screen and rolled away, till it hits his head from back, when hen surprised him with her clairvoyance skills. He uses his tongue as a weapon to \|\|keep dr. Blowhole from balance on his "scooter"\|\| - Chameleons has tongues overly long even for chameleons, in one episode King Julien pulls one chameleon's tongue across the zoo. - The Powerpuff Girls (1998): Gene Simmons, in full KISS regalia, extends his tongue to try and duplicate Buttercup's tongue rolling act in the episode "Nuthin' Special". - The Ready Jet Go! episode Sunspots Sunspot" shows that Sunspot's tongue is very long. - The Ren & Stimpy Show: Stimpy sports one of these during the episode "The Cat That Laid the Golden Hairball" while trying to lick up hair to "hwarf". - Samurai Jack has Raptor from the episode "Dome of Doom", as one of seven warriors Jack fights during the finals of a Blood Sport. Raptor's main weapon is his long, prehensile tongue which he uses to pick up weapons and attack with. Unfortunately, it ends up biting him in the ass when Jack forces him to eject his tongue to take down two of the other fighters, then cuts it in half. Raptor wisely decides that retreat is the better part of valor and is the only fighter who survives the episode. - The Secret Saturdays: Drew Monday, Drew Saturday's Mirror Universe Evil Twin, has a prehensile tongue. - The Simpsons: - In one Treehouse of Horror episode, Homer messes around with the time space continuum and changes evolution drastically, and finally comes back home thinking everything is normal... only to see everyone eating by using their long frog-like tongues. He shrugs and decides that it's close enough. In another ToH episode, Groundskeeper Willie uses his tongue in Martin's dream to asphyxiate him, killing him in the real world. - Mr. Burns is shown to have a long snake-like tongue. So has Homer — he once darts a lengthy tongue out to lick a stray gob of ice cream off Marge's cheek. A similar joke is also made in The Simpsons Movie. - Scratchy in The Itchy & Scratchy Show has a tongue so long that it can be shot via rocket to the moon without him even noticing it. - Lord Stingray in Superjail!. Possibly justified if he isn't human. - In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), Dark Mikey, Michelangelo's evil clone from the Fast Forward arc, has a tongue so long that it spends more time out of his mouth than in. - Teen Titans: - Starfire has this as part of her Bizarre Alien Biology. - A talking alien dog had this in another episode, as shown when he licked Raven's face. - In The Venture Bros. Christmas episode, The Krampus crashes Rusty's party. He starts licking Triana, to her horror. - Becomes a real problem for the Wild Kratts when their Power Suits' chameleon disks at first cause their extra-long sticky tongues to extend every time the brothers open their mouths. The episode on termite-mound predators is also called "Termites Vs Tongues" thanks to this trope. - Gene Simmons. Anyone who's watched more than one episode of Gene Simmons Family Jewels knows Nick Simmons has inherited it; if Sophie has, she's not showing it off on television. - Internet sensation Marnie the Dog is almost never seen without her tongue hanging out. Her caretaker has confirmed that yes, her tongue really is that long. - Chameleon tongues, which they use to capture prey, can be over twice as long as their bodies. - Frogs and toads, despite what fiction may tell you, actually avert this — their tongues are shorter than their own heads, and they rely on pouncing upon their prey; the common conception of what a frog's tongue looks like is based more on chameleons than anything. Some frogs even lack tongues altogether, and simply grab insects with their "hands" and stuff them into their mouths. In fact, the only amphibians with the kind of tongue seen in every fictional frog ever are salamanders of the genus Hydromantes, which can stretch up to 80% of their body length in a hundredth of a second — the fastest motion of a tongue in the animal kingdom. - Butterflies don't have tongues, but they do have curling proboscises in the spirit of this trope, evolved to reach into flowers to get at the nectar inside. - Woodpeckers, some species of which have a tongue so long that it actually loops up around their brain. - Giraffes and their lesser-known relatives, Okapis. In fact, an okapi's tongue is so long it uses it to wash its eyelids and clean out its ears (both inside and out) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhc67wopg40 - Anteaters, aardvarks and pangolins have all convergently evolved long, sticky tongues, which they use to collect ants and termites for food. - Nectar bats, of which at least one species of which has a tongue longer than its entire body. - Hummingbirds have extra-long tongues in their extra-long beaks. Particularly true of the swordbill, a hummer with a beak and tongue longer than its body. - Kinkajous. - Certain bears◊, including Sun Bears, whose tongues can reach 30 cm. - Someone with a missing or cut lingual frenulum can extend the tongue slightly farther than otherwise. This apparently happened to Gwendoline Christie, which she demonstrated in an interview with Craig Ferguson. - The forked tongues of snakes and monitor lizards are usually quite long, the better to extend well past their snouts and lick up scent-molecules for analysis via vomeronasal olfactory receptors.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyLongTongue
My Beloved Smother - TV Tropes [Bart Simpson sees Principal Skinner in the waiting room of a psychiatrist's office] Bart: I don't believe it! Principal Skinner. Well, well, well, I never thought I'd win this easy. Skinner: Hmph. This has nothing to do with you, Simpson. I have many, many issues with my beloved smother — mother! You probably know her. You might even live with her. A mother who tries too hard to control their children's lives. Often (but certainly not always), they are the mothers of sons, and for whatever reasons can have a bit of trouble cutting the apron strings; as a result, no matter how old the boy (or, for added humor value, man) is, he'll be mothered relentlessly, his mother absolutely smothering him with parental affection... and authority. Using either carrot or stick (sometimes both), his mother will go to any lengths to make sure that, whether he wants to or not, he's not going to be leaving his mother's embrace any time soon. Any attempts on his part will usually result in a passive-aggressive guilt trip for trying to break away and do his own thing. Her poor son, as a result of such domination and badgering, usually ends up a Momma's Boy. A lot of these mothers are Jewish for some reason, though they are also oftentimes Catholic, serving double duty as a conduit for Catholic guilt. The family where the Beloved Smother lives usually feature a Disappeared Dad. The Smother may be a single mother, or the father is a Henpecked Husband; either way, he takes no independent part in raising the child, passing all control to her. The child usually has no siblings and more often than not is born late in their mother's life. Bonus points if the Beloved Smother has had trouble getting pregnant or if the child themself has or had some illness to protect from and take care of. The greatest threat, however, as perceived by the Smother, lies in the opposite sex. To a son, she will constantly preach that all women are Gold Diggers who are plotting towards a Divorce Assets Conflict; to a daughter, that All Men Are Perverts who will leave her barefoot and pregnant, literally. Any Love Interest that her son may attract will be immediately regarded as a rival for the son's love by the Beloved Smother, and the woman will be belittled, harassed and spied on to varying degrees of obsession. (Hell, the Smother might actually have been through it herself.) If her son happens to break free and marry the woman he loves, then that unfortunate woman will find herself coping with the Mother-In-Law From Hell, who will be hyper-critical, dismissive and condemning of everything she does to the point where it may even break the marriage apart if her son doesn't do something to curtail his mother's interference. Alternatively, if she spots a potential mate for her son of whom she does approve, she will relentlessly try to pair them up, ignoring any signs that the "happy couple" are losing interest in each other (or never were romantically attracted in the first place). In the most favorable depiction, the Beloved Smother genuinely does love her son and wants him to be happy; she just has a little bit of trouble letting him go, and her plot arc usually revolves around the gradual realization that he's his own man and that she needs to cut the apron strings for his own good (and, usually, hers as well), and that his moving away from her doesn't equal that he doesn't love her in return. At worst, she's a Control Freak Evil Matriarch who will stop at nothing not even murder to make sure that Mommy's Little Angel remains with her at all costs. For added Squick value, Mommy and Son may be a bit too close in the wrong kinds of ways... It is rarer for daughters in fiction to have trouble with the Smother, but not unheard of; if the girl is unlucky enough to have a Smother, then things will be much the same (although rather than actively preventing their children from having a life outside of her, a Smother who has a daughter will usually instead start badgering her about why they aren't married and providing her with grandchildren on a constant basis). With daughters, however, the dominance may sometimes have an edge of competition as well, as they tend to view their own daughters as rivals. Smothers of daughters are often ex-Alpha Bitches or cheerleaders who tend to bully and harass their daughters into following their footsteps as a way of living their past glories through their children. Like most tropes, it's a Truth in Television; psychiatrist Carl Jung identified this archetype as the Terrible Mother, an over-nurturer who, in smothering her child, ends up stifling them to the point of hampering individuation and personal growth. Sigmund Freud, who worked with Jung, believed that mothers were a common source of psychological complexes. In contemporary psychology, the behavior of the Smother is consistent with parent-child codependency, a trait of Borderline Personality Disorder. note : Interestingly, while Nigel Smith wrote of his mother being a smother in 2011 (the linked article above), he had an apparent change of heart seven years later when he wrote this article on why every family should live with their granny. When a queen is acting as regent, she often will smother the young king as well, and expect to control the king after he comes of age. If she actually succeeds in taking control of her children, those characters will end up with parental issues. A subtrope to Helicopter Parents. Compare Boyfriend-Blocking Dad and/or Fantasy-Forbidding Father. Contrast Hands-Off Parenting. If it's a more action-based series where the offspring being "smothered" is in trouble and the Smother is an Action Mom, see Mama Bear. If the mom was a child star and pushes her kid into stardom, she's a Stage Mom. Often overlaps with Obnoxious Entitled Housewife if the mom constantly makes demands in the name of her child. May lead to Calling the Old Man Out or an Anti-Smother Love Talk. If the mom is not just controlling but a straight-up villain using their son as a pawn, see Villainous Mother-Son Duo. ## Example subpages <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - A commercial for Taco Bell features a guy whose life is run at least in part by his mother. She is shown to be intrusive in a couple of places and makes a lot of suggestions. She also seems to only be able to communicate in run-on sentences. In the end, you discover that the commercial is an advertisement for Taco Bell's "Smother Burrito". - In Assassination Classroom, there's \|\|Nagisa Shiota\|\|'s mother \|\|Hiromi\|\|. She asserts her control over her son at every opportunity, trying to make every major decision for him in an attempt to guide him through the life path she wanted for herself. She's also the one who styled his hair the way it is because she wanted a girl, one she could mold in her own image. She refuses to allow him to have any say and even goes so far as to assert that, as the one who birthed and raised him, she owns him. At any moment in which \|\|Nagisa\|\| so much as tries to stand up for himself, Hiromi flies into a psychotic rage, shrieking at a high volume, pitch, and speed. At one point, she nearly burns down the school building her son goes to. For added torture, there is a scene of her grabbing \|\|Nagisa\|\|'s hair and violently yanking his head back and forth from the other side of a dinner table, no doubt unleashing hell on his scalp. \|\|Unlike other smothers, she eventually realises that she's wrong and stops doing this.\|\| - Attack No. 1: Kyoko and her brother loved tennis, but their mom hates and forbade sports because, in her opinion, such activities are dangerous and would be bad for her children's academic grades, so she's at first very disappointed when her daughter joins Fujimi Highschool's volleyball team. - Attack on Titan gives us two distinct flavors of this trope. - Jean turns out to have a mother that doted on him as a child, and now horribly embarrasses him. She was first introduced in an omake involving her walking in on him while he was (maybe) masturbating. When his comrades hear her Affectionate Nickname for him, they tease him relentlessly. - A darker example is \|\|Reiner Braun's mother, Karina\|\|. An intensely bitter woman left to raise the product of her Secret Relationship alone, she raised them with her own fanatical beliefs and hopes to turn them into a Tyke Bomb for the military will grant her access to a better life. She is very much a carrot-and-stick parent, alternating between praising her "war hero" child and viciously glaring daggers at them when they fail to convincingly parrot things that match her twisted ideology. - In a Case Closed case, Akio's mother was this. So much that \|\|she wants to save her beloved Akio from being imprisoned after killing his apparently abusive dad... by locking him in the basement of their home. Akio ends up crossing the Despair Event Horizon since he does want to turn himself in, and it's up to Conan to help him convince his mother to let him atone.\|\| - Mamako from Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? is an extreme case. Not only does she follow her son Masato into a fantasy game world, where she ends up being the strongest character in the game, but she insists on killing every monster her son's team encounters, which prevents Masato and his friends from leveling up. - Fruits Basket: - Meshou, Ritsu Sohma's mother is one of the few Sohma parents who doesn't abuse or neglect their cursed kids, but despite her good intentions she's a Shrinking Violet who apologizes for everything, thus Ritsu ends up just as insecure and prone to ditziness and apologies as his mom. - Kyo Sohma's mother counts, too, in an even less healthy way. She basically kept him indoors for most of his childhood, claiming it was "because he was so cute she didn't want anybody else to see him," constantly checked to make sure \|\|the beads that keep him from transforming were still in place\|\|, and in general kept up a very forced display of motherly love towards him. This only compounded his issues later on since he could tell, even as a child, that she was overcompensating to hide how she was terrified of him. Later, it's implied that \|\|Kyo's mother did genuinely love him, but she only managed to express it through being overprotective of him. For worse, she also was mentally/emotionally unstable (and it's all but spelled out that Kyo's Jerkass dad was to blame for it), and thus she ended up Driven to Suicide.\|\| - Yuki Sohma's mother is among the worst of the lot, seeing him and his status as the Rat as nothing but a means to boost her own wealth and social status. On one occasion, she flat-out tells Yuki to his face that he's nothing but her tool, so he doesn't get to have wishes or opinions of his own. At the parent/teacher conference, she casually says she already planned out Yuki's future without consulting him while not letting Yuki even voice out his opinion about it because "she knows what's best"; she's only stopped when Ayame pops in and tells her off until she Rage Quits. - Machi Kuragi's mother was much the same. She heaped all manner of pressure on Machi to be perfect, seeing her as nothing but a Trophy Child she could use to inherit her husband's fortune. When she had a son, she immediately cast Machi out and focused on her younger brother solely because as a boy, the baby has a better chance of being chosen as an heir than Machi. - Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable!: Tsubasa's mother tries to control every aspect of his life and behavior from birth. He starts getting away from this after he moves to Hokkaido, but he is ever fearful that he will be dragged back to Tokyo and be under her thumb again. - It is very apparent that Killua in Hunter × Hunter took the Hunter Exams because his mother is this, he is resentful of her to the point that he has tried or threatened to kill her. - Is Kichijoji the Only Place to Live? has a mother in Chapter 21 who basically takes over her daughter's search for a new home and tries to strongarm her out of choosing any that appeal to her. In the end, the daughter manages to stand up for herself and their relationship improves. - Fate Testarossa-Harlaown is normally a Good Parent, but she shows shades of this in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS. This is best seen in episode ten when Erio and Caro have the day off and she tells them to be careful while they're in the city and offers to give them some money, forgetting that they're both skilled soldiers who are on payroll. It's mainly caused by her overcompensating out of fear that she'll end up like her biological mother. - By contrast to Patrick Zala, Ezaria Joule from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED is this to her son Yzak. Ironically, despite the fact she has similar beliefs to Patrick, this actually humanizes her, mostly because she does care about her flesh and blood beyond a means to her projected ends. - The plot of Mom, Please Don't Come Adventuring with Me! centers around 15-year-old Ryuuji, who wishes to become independent from his overly protective and overly doting adoptive mother. Unfortunately for him, his mother is Karma Abyss, a nigh-omnipotent and omniscient dragon who will stop at absolutely nothing to keep her son at her side. - Pokémon: The Series: - Pretty Cure All Stars New Stage 3 centers on Maamu, a Tapir who just wants to protect her son Yumeta's happiness by trapping kids in a dream world so they can play with Yumeta forever. It takes every Cure from the series up to that point note : Except for Cure Flower, Cure Fortune, and the international teams to convince her that her methods are having the opposite result. - RahXephon: Maya Kamina is well-intentioned but extremely smothering of her son Ayato. \|\|Or better said, her nephew since Ayato's biological mom is her twin sister Quon.\|\| - In Sakura Quest, there's Chitose Oribe, a confectioner in the small town of Manoyama and her granddaughter Ririko's legal guardian. Chitose can be a bit strict with Ririko and is initially unhappy with her working with the tourism board. That said, some of Ririko's friends notice that Chitose is somewhat more lenient with Ririko than people would expect, partly because she doesn't actually prevent Ririko from working with them. Chitose even once tells Ririko to pursue her dreams while she's still young before she gets old and gives up on them. - One Slayers OVA is based around Lina and Naga being hired by a rich, horrifically controlling noblewoman to help her son Jeffrey become a knight. Jeffrey has delusions of being a Knight in Shining Armor, but is immensely sickly and kind of a dip. Insult him, however, and his (masked) mother will crush you with a giant hammer. While yelling about how you dared insult her boy. \|\|Ultimately, Jeffrey confronts a local Evil Overlord... his long-lost father, who just couldn't put up with that woman anymore.\|\| - Furoku Tsukumo, mother of Teen Genius Susumu on Wandaba Style falls into this. She's the Designated Villain of the series because she wants Susumu, who left home to conduct his eco-friendly space experiments, to acknowledge that the 1969 moon landing wasn't faked and to recognize her maternal authority. He is only thirteen, after all. - Jo Koy has a bit where he discusses his Filipino mother warning him, a grown man, about the dangers of "rupees" (roofies). - One of Elaine May and Mike Nichols' most famous routines together was "Mother and Son", where Nichols played a scientist and she played his mother. Naturally, her first words are, "This is your mother - do you remember me?" May : ( after nagging him for several minutes for not calling her for a long time ) I hope I didn't make you feel bad . Nichols : Are you kidding? I feel awful! May : Oh, honey, if only I could believe that, I'd be the happiest mother. - When it comes to Batman villains... - Hush's mother was like this, in addition to having a drunken and abusive father. When, as a child, he tried to kill them by cutting their brakes, his mother not only survived, but the incident made her even more clinging and controlling, demanding her son's constant presence. When he heard Bruce Wayne's parents were killed and he wouldn't have to deal with that, his main thought was: "That lucky bastard". - Most variations of the Penguin's backstory at this point showcase this. It was added that his habit of always having an umbrella started after his mother forced him to carry one no matter what when his father died of pneumonia when caught out in the rain. One of the things that contributed to him facing ridicule from his peers. - De Kiekeboes: Marcel Kiekeboe's mother, Moemoe, is a Manipulative Bastard who will frequently try to make him feel guilty about not doing everything she demands from him. Often results in an All for Nothing resolution or Dude Where Is My Respect. - Flash Forward's mother in Doom Patrol. It's telling that he, an irreverent braggart and smart alec, is immediately cowed when he realizes his mom has his phone number. She also corrects his grammar over the phone. - Chas' very domineering (and supernaturally charged) bed-ridden mother in Hellblazer. \|\|It's implied that she killed her husband, and Chas is only free of her domination after John kills her familiar.\|\| Naturally, his own wife is just as controlling, albeit ambulatory, neater in dress and habit, and a Muggle. - "Mummy's Boy" was a strip that ran in the British comic Monster Fun (and later Buster). The title character was forced to wear a bonnet and baby clothes and was pushed around in a pram by his overbearing mother, even though he was almost a teenager. Everything Boy wanted to do was "too dangerous", or "for bigger boys". The latest gadgets and games he yearned for were "too sharp" or "too difficult" for him he was hopelessly swaddled. - Ms. Marvel (2014): Kamala has this problem to contend with in addition to getting her powers out of the blue: having grown up in a Muslim household, Kamala has problems trying to juggle her family life and coming to grips with her new skill set. Since the girl is too frightened to outright tell her family what happened, her mother immediately assumes she's becoming a degenerate and is constantly reaming on her shirking her responsibilities. Her father is more understanding (as he thinks she just feels stifled at her age), but no less strict, and her brother, while being fervently religious to the point of openly denouncing the father's profession as a banker, just prefers to remain neutral. Eventually, however, Kamala's parents figure out her secret and accept it, since they know she is out doing good for the people around her. - The Flash: - Mary West, mother of Wally West, was this during the early years of his superhero career until she was Put on a Bus. She would try to control her now-adult son, emotionally blackmail him into caring for her every need, abused his Justice League credentials to go shopping in Paris while needling any girl he brought home (not helped that Wally Likes Older Women so one of his first girlfriends is a decade his senior). Nowadays, Wally acknowledges that his mom was outright abusive in how she treated him, though she's seen as A Lighter Shade of Grey compared to his father, but it's still telling that he considers Iris West, his aunt, to be his true mother. - Libby Lawrence, formerly Liberty Belle of the All-Star Squadron, became this towards her daughter, Jesse Chambers/Jesse Quick, after she retired from heroics herself. She needled her about giving up being a hero, repeatedly nudged her academic pursuits, constantly criticised her lack of dating, and micromanaged her work at Quickstart, despite Jesse being CEO, and would phone her up to needle her about her mistakes when she was out heroing. After a while, she mellowed out slightly and Jesse learnt to embrace her mom, though it took effort from Jesse's then-future husband Rick to make them fully patch things up. - Spider-Man: - One origin story for Doctor Octopus has his abusive father killed in an industrial accident, leaving his mother to depend on him. When he grew up, one of his lab assistants was attracted to him, but after his mother found out, tongue-lashed him so severely that he broke off with her without explaining why. Then one Otto comes home to find Mother making out with a man, and... - Electro also had a controlling mother who demeaned his intelligence, preventing him from following his dreams to become something like a scientist or an engineer, in order to keep him home with her and convinced him to get a rather lowly job at the local power company. - Almost every mother that appears at length in Bloom County fits this trope: Bobbi's mother, Steve's mother, Lola's mother, Opus' mother... (In fact, Opus' mother issues are so severe that one series of strips depicted his imaginary feminine ideal as the embodiment of this trope.) - The later years of For Better or for Worse set up Deanna's mother, Mira, as this so she could be a foil to alleged "good mother" Elly. For her part, Elly wavered between this (For example, two different storylines had her literally screaming at her older children, one of whom was an adult, when they expressed interest in getting a motorcycle) and neglecting April when she got too big to be cute (The infamous ravine incident.). - Jeremy's mom in Zits sometimes exhibits these tendencies, although whether this is actually how she is or merely how he sees her is typically open to question. - The Cord: The Mother and the titular cord. For much of the short, she uses it like a leash, at first to keep him safe and out of trouble and but, later, to keep him close, even keeping him from having a relationship. Later on, this trope is deconstructed, \|\|when the Mother dies and, with her gone, the Son doesn't know what to do\|\|. - Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): - Mark Russell has shades of this towards his daughter Madison, although he's still not quite as bad as in Godzilla vs. Kong. He thinks she's still Just a Kid even though anyone without a parent's bias would know that Madison is way past that stage of her life after what she went through in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), and Mark borders on being overprotective when trying to shoot down her demand that she see the hybridized San and Vivienne Graham in person. Mark gets better later in the story though. - Downplayed with Thor, who displays a protective attitude towards Viv and San due to having somewhat latched onto Vivienne as a surrogate child and says You Are Not Ready when they're about to head out to battle an unknown enemy for the first time since their previous Metamorphosis, although after some arguing, Thor relents. - Subverted in Amazing Fantasy. Inko dotes on her son Izuku but tries not to be overbearing while doing it. She quickly sees through his lies about where he's going at night, but decides to trust him and doesn't confront him about it until the night before the U.A. Entrance Exam. This is after she begins worrying about how his pseudo-celebrity status as the "Prowler Kid" would drag him into trouble. - Arrow: Rebirth: Moira. After Oliver shows understandable anger and panic over Laurel's first kidnapping, her immediate reaction is to have him forcibly sent to a psychiatric facility. While she does later admit that this was an overreaction born out of her protectiveness of him, the fact that this was her first reaction does not speak well of her. - Kushina from As You Wish is written as one of these for her son, Naruto, up to and including: making him sleep in her bed every night since he was a baby, attending his classes at the academy with him, and tagging along on his first mission outside of Konoha. - Celestia's morally dubious actions in City of Guilds seem to come from her being like this to all of Equestria. She seems genuinely sad that the ponies who ended up in Ravnica have gone native, but that doesn't stop her from considering mindwiping and kidnapping them back, or in the case of Applejack and Rainbow Dash, killing them and lying to their friends. Feather theorises that the reason Celestia is doing this is to uphold the status quo. - Deconstructed in Dealing with the Aftermath, where Molly Weasley knows she's coddling her children, Harry, and Hermione too much - but they remind her strongly of her brothers whose headstrong actions got them killed during the previous war. Her youngest son, along with her two surrogate children, get into life-threatening situations multiple times a year and she's terrified that one day their luck will run out. - Downplayed with Louise towards her familiars in A Familiar Void. Her overprotectiveness is brought about by a combination of her lack of understanding of their abilities, and Bugs tendency to get into trouble. - In Harry Potter and the Quantum Leap Molly Weasley casts a charm which detects virginity on her children every time they come home from Hogwarts. - In fact, a common fan theory is that part of the reason why Molly's two eldest children took jobs over a thousand miles away from home was to get away from her. - Homecoming: Marty thinks Clara gets too nervous about such things as the way he plays with her sons, although he cuts her some slack since she's new to the time period. - I Hope You're Prepared For An Unforgettable Wedding!: The trope-naming Agnes Skinner has this trait on full display in this fic. Her adamant opposition to Seymour moving out and leaving her alone without anyone to parasitically rely on, and the state of depression she falls into when he finally does leave her, both receive a lot of focus. However, while in the show she treats him with scorn and only keeps him around because he's obedient to a fault, in this fic, she's shown to actually care about Seymour deep down, and in the epilogue, it's revealed that what she came to miss most after Seymour left the nest wasn't having him do everything for her, but rather, getting to spend time with him. - Pizzazz is one in Lasting Fame. She paid her son's landlord so that they'd evict her son, just cause she wanted him back home. - Living The Dream: When Dana Greenfield met God after the rapture, she asked to be sent wherever her son Lance went to. Upon finding him, they got into a shouting match about how Lance doesn't want to live with her anymore. When Lance refused to budge, Dana tried to convince the captain of the Royal Guard to drag him out of his house. Eventually she realized Lance deserved to be independent, but she had this revelation while breaking into his house and watching him sleep. - Mrs. Weasley definitely qualifies as this in The Meaning of One, though even Harry and Ginny have to admit that it's understandable given the situation (her youngest child and only daughter is unexpectedly whisked away to school a full year earlier than expected and is something even more intimate than married to a boy Mrs Weasley had never so much as met). A particular point of contention is that, due to the mechanics of their bond, Harry and Ginny must share a bed (it's nearly impossible for either of them to sleep without skin-to-skin contact with the other), something Mrs. Weasley does not handle at all well. - Nobody Dies: Word of God literally calls the alternate version of Lilith of Neon Genesis Evangelion that appears on the story with this exact term — as in, she's an immortal Eldritch Abomination that is partially responsible for the creation of mankind and she's been nailed to a cross and stabbed with an ancestral weapon and placed in a vault half a mile underground so she will stop calling and asking if you've found a nice girlfriend yet. - While she isn't her mother, Satsuki, from The Outside, plays this role with Ryuuko, with her subtle domineering presence and her rules, the one especially strict with Ryuuko going outdoors. However, this seems to be played with, as she might have somewhat of a reason to act the way she does, as with her questionable health, her parents splitting, and her father dying, along with being unequipped to deal with the world, she's alone otherwise, so she overprotects and coddles Ryuuko and tries to raise her in accordance to what she perceives to be best to keep some stability. Of course, like most portrayals of this trope, this doesn't have a good effect on Ryuuko, as, Ryuuko is deprived of a normal upbringing because of it. - As we find out, from what's implied, their mother, Ragyo, was a downplayed and more justified portrayal (along with being something of a Doting Parent) as, because, Satsuki often sick and because she was the first baby she carried to term (according to an author's note), she would overprotect and didn't think to probably encourage her daughter out of her comfort zone. However, it's mentioned that she didn't mean to and laments that she didn't teach Satsuki "what to do". - Purple Days: In this A Song of Ice and Fire fanfiction, Cersei Lannister as per canon. Joffrey — who's evolved from the incompetent utter monstrosity he was in canon into The Wise Prince after more than a century in a "Groundhog Day" Loop — gives her a "Reason You Suck" Speech, lampshading just how much she coddled him, helping create the vile wretch that he was before his massive Character Development. She lashes out and slaps him; a morose Joff just comments she should have done that a long time before. - In Robb Returns, Lysa Arryn is one to her son, Robert - so much that \|\|she deliberately poisoned him to keep him weak and dependent on her.\|\| - In Rose Redemption AU, Rose acts as a more benevolent version of this, referring to Steven as her "baby" and holding him every chance she gets in an effort to make up for lost time. - SAO: Mother's Reconciliation: Kyouko, hands down. In chapter 14, Kouichirou freely admits to Asuna that the main reason he was away from home working all the time was to get away from their mother and her overbearing attitude and that the entire reason he bought a copy of SAO and a NerveGear to begin with was to find an escape. - Lilith tends to be a touch overprotective when it comes to her son, Nero, in The Silver Raven. When Nero was selected to fight Grom, she vehemently refused to let him fight, and after he managed to convince her, she made him wear several layers of enchanted armor (and by several, we mean enough to the point where he looked like, in Emira's words, "a giant ball of metal"). Nero even calls her smothering to Edric. Eda notes that she most likely inherited the trait from their own mom, Gwendolyn. - The fan-made Steven Universe episode entitled "The Smothering" exists in an alternate universe where Steven is raised by Lapis, Jasper, and Peridot instead of Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl. In this continuity, Peridot acts like this to Steven to the point of taking his vitals when he's asleep and making him go to bed in the middle of the day after his first mission. Steven ends up Calling the Old Man Out (or in this case, woman), and Peridot agrees to give him more freedom. - In Warmth, Minamo's mother is upset that her nearly 30-year-old daughter hasn't found a husband yet. She patronizes Minamo as an immature Manchild because she isn't attached to anyone yet. - White Sheep (RWBY): Salem, the immortal Queen of the Grimm, is extremely protective of her son Jaune. She's like this with all of her children, but it's worse with Jaune. All of his sisters can leave the tower and explore human lands, while Jaune is constantly locked away for his "protection." This isn't all that dissimilar to what Salem's own father did to her thousands of years ago. It's no wonder Jaune ran away from home. While Jaune admits his reaction was childish, he still insists that he felt like he was backed into a corner and had no other choice because his mother wouldn't listen to him. - Queen Elinor in Brave falls into this at times while wanting the best for her daughter Merida, who does not appreciate that her mother "is in charge of every single day of [her] life", which leads her to make a wish about "changing" her mother... \|\|and getting her and her brothers morphed into bears.\|\| - The Lion King 1 ½ reveals that Timon has one. Her situation is a bit understandable since she's raised Timon all by herself (with the help of her brother/brother-in-law, Max) and she's tried her best to help him feel like he belongs. - In Spirited Away, Yubaba keeps her baby sheltered in a room, telling him he must never leave because of germs, and relentlessly indulges him, producing a Spoiled Brat. \|\|When he is transformed into a mouse and his mother does not recognize him, he goes with Chihiro, becoming her friend; on their return, he shows his mother that he can stand on his own and demands that she be nice to Chihiro.\|\| - Mother Gothel in Tangled needs Rapunzel's healing hair to retain her beauty and has successfully scared Rapunzel into staying in the tower for almost two decades. - Turning Red has Mei's mother Ming, who is overprotective of her daughter to the point of confronting a teenage convenience store clerk Mei had drawn some rather suggestive art of after assuming he was a "groomer", and sneaking onto the grounds of Mei's school and getting into an altercation with security. Much of the conflict in the movie comes from Mei realizing just how tired she is of her mother's strictness and perfectionism. - Isabel Kabra in The 39 Clues, \|\|to the point of threatening to KILL her kids if they won't do what she says\|\|. - Absolutely Truly: Lucas Winthrop's mother is very protective of him. She was first seen in the book showing up at his classroom to bring him an extra pair of mittens because she was concerned he would get cold. - Mandy's mother in Jacqueline Wilson's Bad Girls; Mandy was a "miracle baby" born in her mother's mid-forties, and her mother refuses to see her as a miracle non-baby, insisting on making her wear her hair in plaits and choosing childish dresses for her (as an eleven-year-old in the 1990s) and choosing her friends for her. At the climax, Mandy's father even suggests that Mandy would be better able to stand up for herself if her mother didn't keep babying her. Additionally, Mandy gets bullied at school due to her mother's babying. - The Belgariad has Polgara the Sorceress, who seems to teeter on the edge of this in her relationships with the Heirs of Irongrip, Errand, the entire country of Arendia, and just about everybody else who crosses her path. She keeps calling people 'dear' and telling them they're 'good boys'. Given that the Heirs of Irongrip are positive magnets for trouble (as in, they both have people hunting them and they find new and interesting ways to test her nerves), Errand is supernaturally oblivious to danger \|\|(unsurprising, given that he's an Amnesiac God)\|\|, and Arendia is worse than both put together in its tendency to go up in flames every time she even blinks, you can see why. - More specifically, this becomes a particular problem with Garion, both because he's The Chosen One and in most danger of all the Heirs, and implicitly because Polgara was manipulated by Chamdar, who mind-controlled Garion's grandmother off a cliff, burned Garion's parents alive, and nearly kidnapped Garion himself but for the arrival of a homicidally enraged Belgarath. Consequently, she is incredibly overprotective of him, and Garion - who, unlike most Heirs, she was a fully fledged Parental Substitute to from birth - begins to resent it in his teens and starts acting out and she responds by pushing harder. In the end, matters are resolved when Belgarath puts his foot down. - In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Doña Maria could not prevent herself from persecuting Doña Clara with nervous attention and a fatiguing love. Maria, who has no one else in her life to love, focuses all her energy and attention on her daughter, which winds up alienating Clara from her mother. - The Cat Who... Series: In book #16 ( The Cat Who Came to Breakfast), Mrs. Appelhardt is the very controlling matriarch of her family, especially of her daughter Elizabeth. - In Tamora Pierce's novel, Cold Fire from The Circle Opens, Morrachaine Ladradun is arguably this to her adult son, Ben Ladradun. She meddles with his finances and actively tries to keep him away from his job as a volunteer firefighter. He eventually has had enough and \|\|kills her, implied in a brutal way.\|\| - In Codex Alera, Antillus Dorotea is like this to her son, Crassus, to the point of \|\|horribly abusing and trying to kill his older half-brother so there's no threat to Crassus' inheritance. She gets better, though how much of that is her and how much of it is being imposed on her is up to interpretation.\|\| - Dancing Aztecs: Wally's mom is somewhat firm about keeping him in her sphere of influence. Even once he achieves financial independence he has a hard time imagining leaving. - In The Dead Zone, Frank Dodd's mother is a particularly horrible example. In a flashback, when he had his first erection, she was so appalled that she attached a clothespin to it for hours, telling him it was what it would feel like if he caught a disease from a "nasty fucker" (a designation they both apparently apply to any female, including a nine-year-old girl!). She kept him from moving out of her home, keeping his room decorated like that of a child with clowns and ponies, and it was only with the help of the unaware Sheriff Bannerman that Dodd managed to get up the nerve to leave her long enough to attend police training. She uses her ill health as a weapon and guilt as a tool of manipulation. - Discworld example with Nanny Ogg. She is very much like this with most of the Ogg family, especially her own sons. Including Jason, the blacksmith who is built like a troll and is the greatest farrier in the world. She also seems incapable of seeing her cat, Greebo, as anything other than a tiny ball of fluff, despite Greebo being the meanest, nastiest creature within several hundred miles of Nanny's house. To her unlucky daughters-in-law, however, she verges on Evil Matriarch. - In the fourth Dragon Jousters book, Kiron finally finds his long-lost mother. Who then proceeds to spend the rest of the book nagging him to marry the girl she picked out for him and reclaim the family farm. The fact that Kiron is already engaged, is a close personal friend of the new king, and is now head of an entire branch of the military (And dragons can't just be casually passed to a new Jouster as a cavalry horse can, which makes retiring to pursue a different career difficult), which effectively makes him high-end nobility, is irrelevant. Finally, at the end of the book, both Kiron and the girl his mother wants him to marry (Who likes him, but doesn't want to marry him, and wants to do more with her life than rebuild a farm) both tell her to shut up. - In Emily of New Moon, Terry's mother loves her son to the point of hating anything that she feels he might love more, even going so far as to poison his dog. - Marinell's mother from The Faerie Queene is adamantly against her son falling in love and forces him to remain celibate. She has the excuse of acting on a prophecy, but in the end, her meddling leads to his death. - Get a Grip, Vivy Cohen!: Vivy's mom has had this problem since Vivy was five, when she wandered off at the beach and hid under a boardwalk, then fell over and scraped her knees after she was found. Now when Vivy wants to take up baseball, her mom pressures her to play softball instead because she thinks it'll be more her speed. When she finally lets Vivy join an Apricot League team, she tries to interfere whenever anything goes even slightly wrong, and even bans Vivy from playing in anything other than practice games for over a month after Vivy is hit by a ball and gets a mild concussion. - One of the more heart-wrenching conversations in The Great Divorce is on this theme. The mother in question mourned her son to the point where she ignored her other children, her husband, and God. George Macdonald suspects if the narrator listened to her conversation further, she would demand that her son come to hell so that she could have him. - The Han Solo Trilogy: Bria's mother was like this. She was constantly pushing her to make a "good match", no matter what Bria thought about it. Even after Bria found out that her fiancé had cheated and she dumped him, her mother insisted on her getting back together with him, and wasn't happy with her life choices generally, always belittling them. All this led to Bria having very low self-esteem, contributing to her running away to become a pilgrim on Ylesia (which, it turns out, is a scam for enslaving people). - Naturally enough for a Mama Bear, Molly Weasley from Harry Potter has moments of this, particularly with regards to her eldest son Bill's relationship with Fleur Delacour. Unusually for this trope, she gets over her initial doubts about Fleur (who she thought was simply attracted to Bill by his looks and glamorous job as a Curse-Breaker - magical Indiana Jones, basically) after the latter very firmly demonstrates after \|\|Bill's looks are mangled by Fenrir Greyback's vicious attack\|\| that she really does love him and doesn't give a fig about his looks. After that, the two get along quite well. - Skeeter's mother in The Help constantly badgers her about her lack of a husband or even a boyfriend, her nontraditional interests and goals for women of the time, and her quirky looks. - Dorothy Parker's short story "I Live On Your Visits" is this trope in spades. The mother in this story is a bitter hard-drinking divorcee who delights in making her son feel guilty about having any kind of life without her or thinking kindly of his father's second wife. - In Death: A number of female villains are this, like in the books Memory In Death and Born In Death. At least one of these villains has created Mommy Issues. Squick. - It's Not the End of the World: Debbie's mom tells her daughter to wear several pairs of underpants when she goes ice skating so that she won't catch a kidney infection from sitting on the ice. Karen reflects that her friend's mother is overly concerned about diseases. - In L. M. Montgomery's Jane of Lantern Hill, Jane's grandmother meddled with her mother's life to keep her with her. - Journey to Chaos: When Tiza learns who her mother is, she realizes that \|\|Sathel's\|\| constant worry and fawning should have been a dead giveaway. - In The Key to Charlotte, Charlotte's parents assume her Love Interest Zakaria only wants to take advantage of her and try hard to discourage their relationship. Charlotte is irritated by their overprotectiveness. - King of the Bench: Steve's mom is a "turbo-hyper-worrywart" about every sports activity he takes part in because he's an only child. - Queen Isabel is completely devoted to her children and cares for them all herself in The Kingdom of Little Wounds. She's a terrible caregiver, and this backfires horribly. - The Kitchen Daughter: Although Ginny was twenty-six at the time of her parents' deaths, her ma wouldn't let her drink, go on dates, get a job, move out, or go to other cities alone. Ma said they'd talk about it after Ginny finished college, but Ginny was never able to finish her Oral Communications class. - Like a Fish Understands a Tree: George has Down syndrome. His mum believes he's too "special" to do various things he wants to do, like get a job and play video games that aren't made for little kids. At home, she doesn't let him handle knives and is shocked to learn that he's been taking cooking lessons at the recreational center and is very good at it. When he wants to move into an apartment with his girlfriend, she does whatever she can to prevent him. - The Long Ships: Åsa mothers Orm fairly vigorously, though this is quite understandable since she has lost three sons at that point, and her other surviving son is a bit of a Jerkass. This leaves Orm with a hypochondriac streak, and in the end leads him off on his first journey; he was denied permission to join his father and brother on their raid, and was abducted by other raiders when they were away.) - In The Manchurian Candidate, war hero Raymond Shaw is dominated by his mother Eleanor to the point that she's able to force him to break up with the girl he's fallen in love with. This winds up central to the plot, as \|\|being so conditioned to obey his mother leaves him ripe for Soviet brainwashing. His trigger is even a Queen of Diamonds playing card because it reminds him of his mother. Oh, and Mrs. Shaw is the Communist agent who's feeding him his orders\|\|. - The Mark of the Horse Lord: Murna has walled off her real personality in order to protect herself from her mother the Queen's all-consuming love. - The Noob novels have this as Arthéon's backstory and deconstruct the idea of a current-day Geek having such a mother. He was initially interested in sports and other social activities, but his mother would be so vocal about encouraging him that it broke his concentration, giving her the impression he wasn't made for such activities. He ended up having to give them up altogether and turned to activities he could do from home, including playing the MMORPG in which most of the story is set and ending up in the game's top guild before it actually became the top guild. His mother, however, convinced that New Media Are Evil, forced him to stop playing at 8 P.M. every night (he was just turning twenty around then), forcing him to resort to Real Money Trade to keep up with his guildmates. His avatar got banned by Game Masters because of it and the genuine depression that ensued was a wake-up call for his mother, who finally decided to get him a new computer and tell him she was okay with him playing. And thanks to the adaptation of a case of Real Life Writes the Plot from the original webseries (the actor playing Arthéon became less available for Season 3), the third novel has her send him to boarding school. - In Orange Clouds, Blue Sky, Skye's mom won't let Skye's autistic sister Starr do chores, even though she wants to help out. When Skye and Starr are staying on their relatives' farm, Starr helps out with the animals, which she enjoys, but Mom accuses the family of turning Starr into a slave. - Norman Page's mother in Peyton Place, who controls every aspect of his life and forbids him to spend time with girls. (Her harsh punishments have disturbing sexual connotations as well.) Her overbearing treatment is implied to contribute to Norman's nervous breakdown when he's away from her for the first time, as a soldier in World War II. - In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Wu strategist Zhou Yu attempts a Batman Gambit to ensnare rival country Shu's leader Liu Bei into an Arranged Marriage with Sun Shang Xiang, the younger sister of Wu leader Sun Quan, for the sake of reclaiming disputed territory and ultimately killing Liu Bei. The plot falls apart when the Sun siblings' mother, the Empress Dowager, personally takes a liking to Liu Bei and dares any one of her son's men to lay a finger on her prospective son-in-law. (In third-century China, where Confucian ideals of extreme filial piety held sway, even battle-hardened warlords took their aged parents' commands very seriously.) - Many of Saki's stories feature aggressively coddling (and often psychologically abusive) mother figures, the best probably being "Sredni Vashtar". Interestingly, the Smother is not always the biological mother: In the aforementioned "Sredni Vashtar", it's the protagonist's adult cousin, appointed his guardian. - In The School for Good Mothers: Helen, Frida's first roommate at the school, was reported to by her seventeen-year-old son's therapist for babying him, as it is considered a form of emotional abuse. She admits to cutting up his food and helping him shave and does not get what is so weird about that. - Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not: In "The Adventure of the Sacrifice Stone", Lady Sarah has vowed that her son will never marry. When his son brings home a fiancée, she initially tries to drive her away with hostility and then attempts to buy her off. When this fails, she decides to murder her. - Small World (Tabitha King novel): Roger's mom, exemplified in a flagrantly passive-aggressive letter in which she attempts to guilt him into leaving his (alleged) high-paying, prestigious job in order to move back into her basement on the other side of the country. - A Song of Ice and Fire: - The books feature, among other iffy mother figures, Lysa Arryn, the widow of Jon II Arryn. She's afraid the same assassins who killed her husband will come after her son Robert aka Robin — so far, so justified. Then you find out she still breastfeeds her son. Did we mention he's six? Oh, and she caters to his every whim as well... including his wish to see Tyrion Lannister go flying out a window...and plummet several thousand feet to his death. \|\|It eventually comes out that she was the one who killed her husband, so even that justifiable reason for her over-protectiveness isn't actually justified. Hell, she killed Jon because he wanted Robert to be fostered with another lord, and she couldn't stand the thought of her baby going anywhere else...\|\| - Cersei Lannister, Queen Regent of Westeros, who's lived her entire life under the proverbial Sword of Damocles in the form of a prophecy that says she'll have three children, they'll each be crowned and die shortly thereafter and she herself will be strangled to death by her own younger brother. It's little wonder she goes into Mama Bear overdrive from that point on, but it looks like she can't fight fate, as everything in the prophecy is starting to come true, right down to \|\|her two younger brothers nursing the thought of killing her eventually, and her eldest son Joffrey being killed while her other two kids' survival depends a lot on her...\|\|. - It's also partially due to this behavior that Joffrey ended up so vicious. Through a combination of obsessively sheltering him from any positive influences and relentless coddling of his own negative behavior, she ensured that he had the petty stubbornness of a child, with all of her own shortsightedness and cruelty to go with it. - Lady Olenna may seem to mostly be a harmless if snarktastic old biddy. Don't let that fool you: she's more than willing to step in and clean her little boy's political messes up for him behind his back when he gets in over his head, even now he's Lord Mace Tyrell with children of his own and (supposedly) the main power in Highgarden. Or, do it in front of his face, for that matter (it's not like he'll notice). And, will tell him what an idiot he is (just like his fool of a father, if you hadn't guessed) where anybody can hear. At least she's a fairly benevolent form of the trope... as long as you don't try harming him, his siblings, or their kids. - D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is almost solely about Mrs. Morel giving her love completely, whether inappropriately or not, to her sons. Her close relationship with Paul affects his life in a very unhealthy way especially when it comes to women. - In Summer in Orcus, Summer's mother never lets her do anything because she's terrified of anything happening. She's not allowed to go away to camp, she's not allowed to play on the front lawn in case somebody kidnaps her. On particularly bad days, her mother even worries about things like Summer drowning in the bath. This has a lot to do with why Summer is willing to go on a dangerous quest to find her heart's desire. - Greta in Summers at Castle Auburn is very much a smother to Elisandra, and in her desire to see her daughter become queen, she doesn't seem to know anything about Elisandra as a person. This isn't out of malice, Greta simply doesn't look deeper than Elisandra's façade of calm. - Sword at Sunset: King Arthur thinks that his Bastard Bastard Medraut had a creepy, damaging relationship with his mother Ygerna, who conceived and raised him as a weapon against his father. - Teen Power Inc.: In The Missing Millionaire, a woman who works with Mrs. Free is over thirty, but her mother still has her on a curfew and makes her ask permission before letting her date anyone. \|\|It turns out that two of the suspects/motel guests in the book are that woman and a man she secretly married and is preparing to elope with\|\|. - Madame Raquin in Thérèse Raquin, though she doesn't really mean to be. But she babies Camille and rules over Thérèse. - In C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, a retelling of Cupid And Psyche, Orual, Psyche's sister, raised her since Psyche's mother's death, and is a rather zealous mother figure. - In Susan Dexter's The True Knight, Queen Melcia toward her son. It leads to her executing people who fail to rescue him from Forced Transformation and \|\|inability to see that being restored to human form was killing him.\|\| - You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle: Deborah is so smothering and horrible that she's very nearly managed to break up her son's engagement. She treats his fiancee as basically a walking womb to provide the grandchildren, and her daughter only comes home when she absolutely has to. She writes an advice column in the newspaper that her own son has written to anonymously multiple times asking for advice as to how to deal with her...suffice it to say she's a hypocrite and suggests that a mother would politely back off if asked! - Played for Laughs with Andy Summers's dissonant "Mother," from Synchronicity by The Police. The narrator goes over-the-top insane from his mother's constant phone calls and from every girl he dates ending up becoming his mother, which could mean either that his mother insists on chaperoning all his dates, that she forbids him to date other women at all, or that his Mommy Issues lead him to date only women who resemble her. - Victoria Wood's song "Reincarnation" has this: I want to be Eileen Gumm, Who calls herself "just a mum". I want to have three big lads, And a husband that I've driven nuts. I'll struggle and sacrifice, To make sure they have things nice. I'll give them such good advice, They'll absolutely hate my guts. - The Blue Öyster Cult's portrayal of Joan Crawford (who has Risen From The Grave to spend her afterlife smothering daughter Christina). Mommy is indeed home... - Pink Floyd's The Wall: - Pink's mother, who was very overprotective of him following the loss of his father during The War, gets a song dedicated to her called "Mother", which is about her overprotective and smothering nature, which would shape his relationships with women during the course of the album. Mama's gonna check out all your girlfriends for you. Mama won't let anyone dirty get through. Mama's gonna wait up until you get in. Mama will always find out where you've been. Mama's gonna keep baby healthy and clean. Ooooh babe. Ooooh babe. Ooh babe, you'll always be baby to me. - Taken to a frightening degree in "The Trial" when you consider the double meaning of the line "Why'd he ever have to leave me?" It's telling that during the film version of the trial, instead of just being part of the titular wall like the other two characters present, she's depicted as becoming the wall itself. - And "OF COURSE Momma's gonna help you build your wall!" Pink: Mother, did it need to be so... high? - The Queen in The Decemberists' "The Hazards of Love" tries to have her adopted son William's girlfriend Margaret raped and murdered to prevent her from stealing him away. Which ends up being a major driving force in his decision to sacrifice his own life to save Margaret. Mothers beware. - The mother from The Who's Tommy can be interpreted as one. Man, those rock stars have mommy issues! - Mika has several songs about a mother giving unsolicited advice to her son and nagging him to be perfect, such as "Lollipop" (telling him to avoid love and relationships because they never end well), "Elle Me Dit" (asking why he's wasting his life), and "All She Wants" (wanting him to be straight and married with a perfect life). - The Vocaloid song "You're a Useless Child" combines this trope with Abusive Parents. The mother in the song repeatedly tells her child that he is worthless and useless while constantly reminding him that she is the only one who will ever love him and that he should stay with her forever. The child eventually kills himself, and the mother finally realizes what she has done to him, but it is too late. - Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues: - Jacob's mother smothers him to abusive levels; dictating how Jacob's life should be, demanding he tell her everything that happens in his day, and meddling in his social life until he has none. - Emmanuel's mother wants to control every aspect of his life, most importantly his problems with his weight, which has ruined any sense of personal control that Emmanuel had. - Sarah Bishop in Dino Attack RPG is somewhat understandably concerned about her daughter being involved with an apocalyptic battle against mutant dinosaurs, but to say she's very protective of Kate would be a major understatement. - Blackbirds RPG: The Allmother is a particularly nasty take on this trope, being a malevolent goddess who seeks to completely control every single action taken by every single person. Ironically she isn't an actual mother and is noted to have been infertile when she was mortal, joining the Oligarchs specifically because her infertility meant that she wouldn't be able to forge any direct blood ties to the throne. - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons has, as one of the many magic items, a parody of its Rug of Smothering called a Rug of Mothering, which behaves like this trope. - The Lunar Exalted get various Limit Breaks themed around certain animals. One Compassion-based Limit Break, The Curse of the Mother Hen, means that the Lunar in question will spend at least the next day making sure his companions are all well taken care of. The book illustrates this with Strength-of-Many (a bull-totem Lunar) in war form trying to stuff porridge down a guy's throat. - Also a defining quality of the Yozi Kimbery. Her most well-known jouten (an ocean) was based around the symbolism of literally drowning people in her affection. She constantly breeds all manner of creatures that she'll either love obsessively or hate for not returning her affections to the degree that she considers suitable. This also tends to be rather cyclic; it's implied that Kimbery births and loves purely for the sake of having a reason to hate and kill the things she creates that cannot satisfy her desires. - A particularly comprehensive fan interpretation of the maybe-Yozi Cytherea portrays her this way. - The Qedeshah from Vampire: The Requiem, an all female Bloodline that incorporates the scariest aspects of motherhood. - One of the main plot points of Leonard Gershe's Butterflies Are Free, in which the mother (played brilliantly by Eileen Heckart, both on stage and in the 1972 film adaptation, for which she won the Oscar) fights desperately against her blind twenty-something son's desire for independence after he moves out. \|\|It all works out okay.\|\| - Mae Peterson in Bye Bye Birdie: "So, it's come at last. At last it's come, the day I knew would come at last has come, at last. My sonny-boy doesn't need me any longer." - And it only gets more over-the-top from there. "Fancy funerals are for rich people. I don't want you to spend a cent. Just wait til Mother's Day, wrap me in a flag, and dump me in the river." - The Glass Menagerie has Amanda Wingfield, a Beloved Smother to her son (she won't let him become a poet and complains about his choice of reading material) and her daughter (she ends up flirting with the young man her daughter likes, even after she invited him to dinner with the express hope that he would fall for and eventually marry the daughter). She's not entirely villainous, though: part of the reason she's so controlling is that the family is desperately poor and she worries that her Shrinking Violet daughter, who is mildly disabled, will never find a job or a husband. Amanda is also a Fallen Princess, having been a stereotypical Southern Belle in her glory days; when the play begins she's reduced to calling the fire escape "the veranda". - Lady Bracknell from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. - The Witch in Into the Woods, who keeps her (forcibly-adopted) daughter Rapunzel locked in a tower in the depths of the forest... to keep her safe and "shielded from the world". - Madame Rosepettle in Arthur Kopit's play Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You In The Closet And I'm Feelin' So Sad is a completely over-the-top Large Ham version of this. - In Once Upon a Mattress, Queen Aggravain tells her son she wants him to get married, but only to a real princess, and she keeps creating impossible tests for the princesses who want to marry her son so he never has to leave. The King can hardly argue with her, as he can't speak. - The computer mother of Broken Age still treats 14-year-old Shay like a toddler, appears as an omnipresent glowing face that follows Shay almost everywhere, covers the entire ship in yarn and plushies, and keeps Shay on a strict schedule of fake "adventures" that he can't hurt himself in and has to repeat ad infinitum. Although as she seems to be nothing more than a sophisticated program designed to look after young children it's not really her fault, \|\|too bad she's really a human being who just acts like that.\|\| - The leader of the fighter guild in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is seen as this by the guild, but not without good reason; one of her sons was killed in action and her last son (who isn't actually that good a fighter) is killed later. - Final Fantasy IV: The After Years: Sibling example. While Porom genuinely cares about Palom, she subjects him to a relentless barrage of scrutiny, criticism, and corporal punishment in her attempts to correct his misbehavior. As a result, he considers her overbearing and intrusive and complains that she acts more like his mother than his twin on several occasions. - Fire Emblem: - She might be the eldest sister instead of the mother, but Lady of War Fiora from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade shows some Smother traits in her supports with her little sister, Shrinking Violet Florina, whom she had to raise. Florina: Thanks, Fiora. But...I... I have to do it my way. You can handle it out there alone, right? Well, I need to make sure that I can, too. Fiora: Oh... But I worry about you. When we were in training, you used to get so scared... Florina: Yeah, but I'm fine now. Fiora: Really? But the Caelin Knights are all men, aren't they? I just think of you, all timid and scared among them... So, Florina... You really don't mind it? Didn't they give you a hard time for being a woman? Now if they did, I want you to let me know. Because I will tell them a thing or two... Florina: I-I'm fine. Lady Lyndis took good care of me... And everyone was really nice... Fiora: Oh? Well, I still worry. - In Fire Emblem: Awakening, Brady criticises his mother \|\|Maribelle\|\| for having been this. It's less because he hates her (in fact he adores his mom), and more because he wants to be the one protecting her instead \|\|since he comes from a Bad Future where she died and he couldn't save her\|\| "The you from the future smothered me, to be perfectly honest. You'd pack lunches for me, hold my hand while walkin' upstairs... You were so busy doing the heavy lifting for me that I turned into a total wimp ! \|\|Ya wouldn't even let me fend for myself in the end.\|\| So next time, lemme protect YOU!" - Fire Emblem: Three Houses has a variant: Flayn is smothered by her overprotective older brother Seteth. Seteth manages to avoid most of the Knight Templar Big Brother aspects, but their support conversations centre around him realizing he's upsetting his sister and learning to take a step back. \|\|In truth, Seteth is Flyan's father, more directly qualifying him for the Rare Male Example of this trope. He acts like this as shortly after losing his wife, his daughter had to hibernate for centuries to recover from terrible wounds. This hole in her historical knowledge and social skills makes her a Bad Liar about her real identity, further worrying him.\|\| - Friday Night Funkin': Mommy Mearest, while a bit less extreme than her husband, is still more than willing to screw with Boyfriend simply for dating her daughter. Shes perfectly fine with Daddy Dearest holding a Mall Santa at gunpoint while the two rematch Boyfriend at Christmas, and the two send him and Girlfriend on vacation with the hopes of him dying during it, which lead into the events of a yet-to-be-released week, which itself is what leads into Week 7. - In God of War (PS4), the goddess Freya made her son invulnerable to all threats, physical and magical, so that he would Feel No Pain. Too bad for him that this meant he could feel nothing else, and he went insane over it. When the player meets Freya, she fully admits that her desire to save her son was selfish, but also refuses to break the spell, even saying that the spell can't be broken to her son's face. Freya says that, in time, he'll come to thank her for it. \|\|When Kratos and Atreus figure out his weakness and kill him anyway, Freya swears eternal vengeance on Kratos and Atreus, even though it was a Mercy Kill and they did it to save her.\|\| - One of 47's targets in Hitman (2016), an Italian bioengineer named Silvio Caruso, was treated as The Unfavorite by his mother as a child until his father died and his older brothers ran away. She then latched on to Silvio and started psychologically manipulating his worldview to make him totally dependent on her, such as telling him his favourite spaghetti sauce was her own special recipe that only she could make when it was really just store-bought canned sauce. Her most heinous act was to pay their pool boy to seduce his prom date and have sex with her, take pictures of them in the act and show them to Silvio while telling him that "Romantic love is fleeting. Only a mother's love endures." It's no wonder, then, that Silvio grew up to be an introverted, travel-phobic, gynophobic, insecure manchild. \|\|Mama Caruso suffered a Karmic Death when Silvio finally snapped and smothered her with a pillow.\|\| - The Jackbox Party Pack's Monster Seeking Monster features the Mother, who is randomly assigned one other player as her child and gains a heart for every night they don't get a date. Thus, the Mother is incentivized to actively sabotage her child's romantic prospects. - Fyson the Rito merchant in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild really does love his mother, but he nonetheless finds her overbearing when it comes to trying to get him to help her run the family store. He jumps at the opportunity to open his own independent store in Tarrey Town. - This is Haruka's Freudian Excuse in Senran Kagura. Due to her father not being home most of the time, her mother kept Haruka housebound, treating her as little more than a doll she could adore. Even after Haruka escaped to her Shinobi training, she carries a lot of resentment and personality issues thanks to it. - Emile from Theresia: Dear Emile is a particularly horrifying example; she forbids her daughter Leanne from talking to anyone or leaving the church she's staying at. \|\|When a boy named Sacha tries to talk to her, Emile immediately tries to kill him...and later actually does when Sacha attempts to escape with Leanne.\|\| - Toriel of Undertale quickly becomes the adoptive version of this as soon as the player meets her. Along with being very kind, she marks the switches to press, tells you to let her resolve your battles, and holds your hand through a harmless spike maze just to make sure you aren't hurt. She also dodges the question of how to leave the Underground and will refuse to let you anywhere near the exit of the Ruins until your demands to leave have her decide to block it off permanently. \|\|This behavior stems from losing her first two children on the same day years earlier. It also stems from how Toriel had encountered six other children that also met her in the same way as the player character and watching them leave her to escape the underground, only to be killed by Asgore and/or his soldiers.\|\| - In Cupid, you play as the deranged, disembodied voice of the "Mother" character, giving advice and dishing out verbal abuse on your \|\|possibly adopted\|\| daughter, Rosa. "Mother" is a complex character. Yes, she is abusive and toxic, but her main purpose is to \|\|save Rosa from becoming a dark creature that feeds on other people's love/sanity\|\|. In some endings, Rosa can fight back against the player's wishes, claiming her independence from "Mother's" commands. - Hidemi Yamagami of Season of the Sakura is this towards her son, Shuji, still insisting on doing everything for him as if he were a little kid, when he's already 16 years old. When Shuji first comes home with his various love interest, she cries and says she doesn't want another to steal him away from her. - #Blessed: Avusavia has a brief conversation with her family where her mother tries to butt into her life. - In A-gnosis' comics on Greek myth, Demeter is overbearingly protective of Persephone — not without valid reasons related to their Jerkass God relatives, but it leaves Persephone uncomfortable asking for her advice on actual problems. It's part of the Parents as People tension between them. Hekate: Give me one good reason why I shouldn't let [Demeter] know everything! Hades: Because it would result in Demeter being even more overprotective of Persephone, which would make Persephone unhappy and damage their relation? Hekate: [Beat] Damn. That was a good one. - Alice's mentor Rougina in Alice and the Nightmare displays all the signs of a manipulative parent and seemingly controls every aspect of her protege's life. It's possible that the mirror she gives Alice as a gift enables her to see everything Alice does. - Off-White: Jera towards Isa. - Ursula's parents in Precocious, who basically raised her in an opaque, home-schooled bubble, and are still obsessive Helicopter Parents. - Stand Still, Stay Silent: Sigriður, Reynir's mother. She told Reynir that people who aren't The Immune aren't allowed to travel internationally just so he would stay home. At twenty, Reynir found out that he actually wasn't forbidden from travelling to other countries, decided to go on a trip, and accidentally ended up spending a few weeks with a research crew working in a Plague Zombie-infested area. When Reynir comes back from it alive and well, Sigriður's Anger Born of Worry comes out as her telling Reynir he wouldn't have gone on the trip if he loved her. Her reaction to finding out Reynir has magical powers is to get enthusiastic about how useful they are going to be back on the family farm. Reynir has a father, but he's mostly an accomplice of the treatment. - Mrs. Prestige in Anime Crimes Division is this combined with Fantasy Forbidding Mother. She attempts to mold her daughter Diesel to be a carbon copy of herself and looks at her Otaku interests with disdain, believing live-action TV to be superior. This led to Diesel leaving her home for Neo Otaku City and she hoped to be accepted by the people there. Upon realizing that Diesel has no intention of following or relating to live-action TV culture and might possibly have feelings for her partner, Joe, she is not happy. It gets even worse when she is revealed to be the leader of TOXIC, and intends to convince her daughter to give up on being an Otaku and join her. - Zaboo's mom in The Guild. She breastfed him till he was eleven, made him go with her into the ladies' room until he was fifteen, and still gives him baths. - The Nostalgia Critic's abusive mother has made him think she's his world. And while his twin Ask That Guy with the Glasses fantasizes about killing her regularly, he still calls out for her when his usual music doesn't play and freaks him out. - Revenge Films: Jill's mother \|\|tried to break up her daughter's marriage to Jack since she felt lonely. Since she bugged the entire house to record Jill's conversations, she burned the audio of her screwing her ex into a CD to play at her wedding to this effect. When she got caught and Jack proclaimed he was getting married to Jill, she cried and then proceeded to stalk Jack with the intent of slandering and eventually killing him, which became the last straw for Jill\|\|. - The SCP Foundation has two examples, each of whom is a mother who continues to try to control the lives of their daughters after the mother died: - With SCP-2190 the deceased mother will, once every two weeks, contact someone in desperate need of money and hire him to try to break up the marriage of her daughter and the daughter's husband. - With SCP-4925 if the daughter does anything to try to get some privacy in regards to her cellphone note : leaving the cellphone behind, turning it off, turning off ringing, setting it to "do no disturb", or turning off GPS tracking then eventually a new cell phone will manifest near her and ring, and more and more cellphones will continue to manifest until she answers one. Upon answering it the dead mother will berate her daughter for her recent life choices until the daughter gives in out of guilt. - Demeter to Persephone in Thalia's Musings. Persephone rebelled by eloping with Hades, to whom she is now Happily Married. But she still spends half the year with Demeter anyway. - Ultra Fast Pony portrays Twilight Sparkle as a somewhat delusional wannabe mother towards Spike. She calls him "my daughter" even though Spike is a male (and a dragon at that). It's implied that she even had Spike castrated. In the episode "For Glorious Mother Equestria", Spike starts going through the dragon equivalent of puberty, Twilight tells him to "stop obeying the laws of nature". Twilight: Sorry, Applejack, but Spike's gone crazy! And by crazy I mean he's acting normal for a dragon, but crazy for a pony. Which he should be. - In an episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Jimmy creates a robot version of his mother when she goes on a trip to the spa. The robot acts normal at first, but it starts acting very different and starts doing things like making green slop for meals, forcing Jimmy to go to bed early, and refuses to let Jimmy or Hugh leave the house for any reason. The latter becomes so bad that the robot ties up Jimmy and Hugh when they try to leave. - The Amazing World of Gumball: - Hector's mother controls her son's life to minuscule details to ensure he never feels any strong emotions, including keeping a desiccated hamster who she claims "Is just sleeping", censoring a comic book so it looks like a very happy and dull story or making him think incredibly boring jokes are funny (Why did the chicken cross the road? For a very good reason!). Unlike many of the examples of this page, it's not her son's interest she's acting out of: Hector is a massive Kaiju and if he gets overwhelmed by anything (like being called "boring"), he can easily go on a city-wrecking rampage. - Richard's mother was shown to have been like this to him when he was young, having been overprotective of him to the point where he was afraid to do anything other than sitting on the couch and eat. - Nicole's mother wasn't much better. When she first appears in "The Choices", she's not only shown counting down the minutes that Nicole will supposedly graduate from college and marry a doctor, but she also berates Nicole for her straight-A report card... because there was an "F" in the space for gender ("Being a girl is not an excuse!"). This, combined with her husband's Hair-Trigger Temper, explains a lot of Nicole's personality traits. Thankfully, when Nicole finally sees them again in "The Parents", they've mellowed out a bit, allowing them to work on rebuilding their relationship with their daughter. - Archer. Picture Lucille Bluth above if she were not only your mother but your spymaster as well. - Atomic Puppet: Joey's mother Vivian, while a very sweet and loving woman, is overly worrisome about what her adolescent son does, despite also being completely oblivious to the fact that he's Atomic Puppet. She's much better than Mookie's mother though, who is very controlling of her 35-year-old supervillain son. - Stewart's mother from Beavis and Butt-Head, although she means well she is very overprotective of him and treats him as if he were a five-year-old even though he's around 12. - Linda Belcher from Bob's Burgers tends to lapse into this when trying to bond with her children. Her motives vary from child to child—she tries to bond with Louise because she's jealous that Louise has a stronger bond with Bob, and she tries to bond with Gene and Tina because of a nasty case of empty-nest syndrome. Her going overboard ends about as well as one would expect, with her attempts to bond almost always pushing her children further away. Fortunately, however, they usually make up by the end. - Gazpacho's mother from Chowder, even though we never see her onscreen. Gazpacho always complains about her though- albeit cautiously, since she might hear him. - Todd from Code Monkeys. Recently, it's become a full-blown Oedipus Complex (as he has implied and outright stated that he is literally having sex with his own mother). - Dinosaur Train: Millie Maiasaura lives up to the "good mother lizard" stereotype of her species a bit too much since she is reluctant to let her kids anything that she considers dangerous. Mrs. Pteranodon tries to help her become a bit more lenient. - The Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop episode "Double Trouble" shows Dr. Zitbag's mother to be overprotective and demanding. At the end of the episode, she disrupts the wedding between the Exorsisters, Zitbag, and a clone of Zitbag with the mind of a duck all because she's upset about her son getting married without telling her. - DuckTales (1987) features two examples of this trope: - Ma Beagle keeps her boys well under her thumb. The one time four of her boys rebel against her ("Beaglemania"), she frames them for robbery and ruins their singing career so as to get them back. - Mrs. Crackshell, Fenton Crackshell's television-addict mother, is very much the boss of their trailer home. - Cosmo's mother in The Fairly OddParents!. She eventually falls in love with Wanda's father because they both hate the people their children married. Their plans to 'get' each other's kids cause frustration (they love their respective kids) and admiration (they like each other's evil). - An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had a bird who had been held hostage by Lucius returned to his mother...who immediately ran right back into Lucius' grip when her mother proved way too annoying to deal with. - In Julius Jr., Diamondbeard's mother. She keeps getting in his way and seems to be able to tell what he's up to despite almost always being on the ship. - Morgan le Fay towards her son Mordred in Justice League, especially after he breaks the eternal youth spell. As if the BrotherSister Incest which led to his birth hadn't been bad enough. - Kaeloo: It is eventually revealed that Mr. Cat's mother was one of these. He temporarily moves back in with her in Episode 240 and when Kaeloo goes there to invite Mr. Cat to move back in with her, we hear his mother repeatedly screaming at him to "come to Mama!" and calling him names like "nice little kitty". Mr. Cat himself also often mentions that she's often prone to yelling at him and his brothers. - In King of the Hill Lucky's sister Myrna was shown to be very strict and disciplinary to her children. She wouldn't let them watch TV or have sugar and they were very timid and jumpy, and upon seeing their behavior Bobby exclaimed "Those kids ain't right!". - Clyde's fathers in The Loud House, especially his father Howard, were overprotective to the point of installing seatbelts on a couch. However, by the end of the episode "Snow Way Down", they learned to lighten up. - Dr. Barber of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack has a terrifying relationship with his tiny, unseen mother who lives in his dresser drawer. - The Simpsons: - Agnes Skinner, the Trope Namer. She shares an unhealthy relationship with her son which often borders on psychosis. When Seymour was out of the house, Agnes phoned him regularly demanding to be taken out of the bath, shielded from the glare of car lights on the street, and other such petty requests. (The episode "The Principal and the Pauper" plays around with the trope rather darkly when it's revealed that Seymour is an impostor, and she actually disowns her real son primarily because he isn't subservient to her. We're not allowed to mention that, though.) - "Trust, but Clarify" shows that Bart's friend Milhouse has a smartphone app called "Smothr" that lets his mom Luann surveil him throughout the day. - Early seasons of South Park did this a lot with Sheila Broflovski in a parody of this trope along with plenty of Jewish stereotypes. This was made a major plot point in The Movie. - The Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "Where Pleasant Fountains Lie" gives us two examples as the A and B Plots: - The A Plot deals with Lt. Commander Andy Billups's mother, Queen Paolana of Hysperia, and her desire to get him back home so he can take over as king. Similar to Lwaxana Troi, she's been a pest to the Cerritos in her attempts, but unlike Lwaxana, she's more devious in her plans \|\|like faking her own death to force Andy to come back\|\|. - The B Plot reveals that Mariner has been treating Boimler like this, thinking he's just not ready to participate in more dangerous missions. When Agimus reveals this to Boimler, he gets pissed. - Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In "Sleep Spells", Marco psychoanalyzes Princess Star to try and figure out why she's casting spells in her sleep and fails miserably until he holds up a Rorschach inkblot card with a single dot, at which Star gasps. Star: That reminds me of my overbearing mother suffocating me with all the duties of becoming a queen for the rest of my life! Marco: I think we may have found the root of your problem. You have mother issues! Star: Yay, I have mother issues! Marco: No, that's bad! Star: Aww, I have mother issues. Marco: It's okay, Star. Identifying the problem is the first step to recovery. Star: [with stars in her eyes] Recovery! - While Star's relationship with Moon is a bit troublesome, the show does go and explain why. \|\|We learn that Moon lost her mother when she was barely older than Star, due to a villainous monster sabotaging mewman-monster peace talks. As such, she's forced into the position of Queen and with very few confidants or anyone she can trust (the first being River, the young man she would eventually marry.) She's forced to go to the Black Sheep of the family to learn a forbidden spell to end the war. However, the Chains Of Commanding forced her to adopt a Tough Leader Façade. Her preparing Star is in the event something happens to her and her overprotective stance is out of the fear she may lose her daughter. Indeed, when it looked like she did lose Star, she just began breaking down in tears. Furthermore, Star is forced to step to become Queen when Moon disappears for some episodes and it's painfully clear she's missing her mother.\|\| - Star Wars Resistance: In a male example, Senator Hamato Xiono did everything for his son Kazuda when he was growing up, with the result being that Kaz got very frustrated due to his lack of independence and doesn't know how to do a lot of things. - Steven Universe: - Connie's mother, Dr. Priyanka Maheswaran. Controlling to an arguably abusive extent, forbidding her from watching a medical television show for being unrealistic and coming down very hard on her when she learns Connie lied to her about Steven's family. She controls Connie's day down to the last hour and minute and seems to take pride in knowing exactly what Connie is doing every minute of the day (including snooping on Connie's internet usage). Connie reacts in a very common way children react to controlling parents she sneaks around behind her back and is terrified of her mother finding out the truth. At least until "Nightmare Hospital", in which after coming across the corrupted gems and finding out Connie had been dealing with all sorts of weird stuff since meeting Steven and the Gems, it dawns on her that she had been too overbearing and promises to loosen up as long as Connie won't hide important stuff from her. - Like Dr. Maheswaran, Barb Miller loves her daughter Sadie and wants the best for her. Unfortunately for the laid-back, easygoing Sadie, Barb's ambitions involve over-enthusiastically supporting, pushing into, and eventually completely taking over anything Sadie is remotely interested in, in hopes of Sadie excelling and becoming some kind of superstar. Barb also seems to enjoy buying stuffed animals and making lunches for Sadie, despite Sadie apparently having already graduated high school. The fact that Sadie doesn't eat the lunches and leaves the stuffed animals in a pile on her bedroom floor does not seem to have gotten through to Barb. It takes Sadie having a panic attack and lashing out at Barb after being stampeded into doing a stage act that would have wound up publicly humiliating Sadie to make Barb (and Steven) reconsider their position. - The Venture Bros.: - Myra in regards to the titular Venture Bros. Nothing says motherly love like tying up a pair of pubescent boys and shoving your breasts in their face, screaming "LET MOMMY LOVE YOU". After her first appearance, it is left somewhat ambiguous whether she is really the boys' mother. When she reappears three seasons later, her smotherhood has run rampant through the asylum where she is interned, with more or less the entire population (including some guards) dedicated to her as self-proclaimed "Momma's Boys". In the end, she seems to reveal definitively that she is not the Ventures' true mother, but it hardly matters at that point. - "Colonel Bud Manstrong, listen to your mother!". He's clearly somewhere in his forties, but his mother is very much controlling his life. Bonus points for the episode she appears in being a parody of The Manchurian Candidate, with the movie being mentioned by name. - In "What Goes Down Must Come Up", the Smother is an A.I. named M.U.T.H.E.R., and the smothering is more literal than usual. Jonas Venture created her to help run his new fallout shelter, but they disagreed about "parenting issues". Dr. Entmann : Jonas thought the survivors of a nuclear holocaust might be too distraught to function as a society underground, so he wanted to pump small amounts of mood-enhancing drugs into the ventilation system. And M.U.T.H.E.R., this bitch, she didn't agree. Brock : What'd she do? Dr. Entmann : Well, you know when your parents catch you smoking, they make you smoke the whole freaking pack as punishment...	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverprotectiveMother
Readings Are Off the Scale - TV Tropes "Lock On! 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000,000, 1,000,000,000,000, IMMEASURABLE! Kachidoki Charge!" The measurement instruments used by the heroes — whether it's a speedometer, a Power Level rater, or something else — can never actually measure the full scope of their subjects. Nor can they be recalibrated to expand that range at the cost of some loss of detail. When one encounters an especially intense situation, one can merely stare slack-jawed at their pegged, now-useless meter, and yell "Readings are off the scale!" Presumably this is to allow writers to say something is astonishingly big or powerful, without having to make up the measuring units for Subspace Quantum Tachyon Emissions, or using a real value that is out of proportion to what would be sensible. Basically Up to Eleven taken, well, Up to Eleven. In comedy genres, many Thing 'o Meters will tend to go off-scale, begin shaking violently, or even explode. It should probably be noted that, as the Real Life Examples below indicate, in real life it's seldom as easy as just "recalibrating". At a certain point, any measuring device will eventually reach the limit of what it was designed to measure. Seen in almost every Space Opera, as well as any series which involves Power Levels. If you're using a chart, Off the Chart will be the case, too. Compare Readings Blew Up the Scale for a reading that's so far off the scale it will cause the device to suffer Explosive Instrumentation. Also compare to All of Them, for someone giving a 'verbal reading' that's off the normal scale. When this is applied to media reviews, it's Broke the Rating Scale. ## Examples: - In Dragon Ball: - Neon Genesis Evangelion: - In one episode, Lt. Ibuki uses this trope directly ("All our meters and gauges are going off the scale!") when trying to recover Unit-01 and Shinji. - Misato finally addresses this trope in one of the last few episodes: Maya: Yet, I can't believe it. I mean, it's impossible on this system. Misato: Nevertheless, it's a fact. We must accept the fact and then investigate the cause. - In Rebuild of Evangelion it's not so much a matter of going beyond measurable values as exceeding safety thresholds; the "negative values" of plug depth indicate the pilot has moved out of safe depths in the plug and into the zone where "contamination" is a major concern. Unit-02's beast mode also causes all readings to go haywire and Unit-01's destruction of its limiters allows it to "transcend all human reason." - Plug depths actually have a limitation on how high they can go. It's labeled "The Great Beyond Depth"; one can only assume things don't go well for the pilot there. - Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: - This line is used in the opening where Simon faces down an armada with an impossibly large size: The fleet size is "off the charts". The opening fades out as he orders the attack. - In the show itself, the gauge our heroes use for measuring their spiral energy is designed to handle large values: It's a logarithmic scale, which first spirals outward in one color, then switches to another color and spirals outward again, and repeats this as much as is necessary. In the final episode, after \|\|Lordgenome's Heroic Sacrifice and absorbing the energy worth of The Big Bang,\|\| the gauge switches immediately to a never-before-seen rainbow color, spirals out to the maximum, and then the glass covering shatters and it keeps increasing onto empty air, in plain defiance of all logic and common sense. In other words, spiral power went off the scale on a scale that was designed to measure things that go off the scale. - In Episode 2 of Vividred Operation, after Rei powers up the first Alone, one of the Bridge Bunnies at Blue Island HQ exclaims that the empowered Alone's energy levels have exceeded their gauges' limits and can no longer be measured. - In an episode of MM!, new character Noa is trying to harness "pervert energy", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, energy related to the level of a person's perversion. She measures this energy from Taro while he's being tortured and is utterly astonished. Taro's later told that his insanely massive pervert power is what allowed Noa to proceed with her evil plan. What follows gradually turns into yet another Dragon Ball Z parody. - In Diebuster, the Buster Machine Quatre-Vingt-Dix uses a physics-breaking Exotic Maneuver to freeze enemies at -1,000,020,000,000 Celsius. Note that absolute zero (the coldest possible temperature, at which all molecular motion stops and thermal energy is nonexistent) is about -273 degrees Celsius. You cannot, ever, go colder than this. - In Space Runaway Ideon, the crew of the Solo Ship head back to Earth to use the most advanced computer on the planet to try and calculate the eponymous mecha's potential output. Needless to say, they're all shocked when the readout points to \|\|literal infinity\|\|. Quickly, they begin to worry about the fact that a release of that kind of energy at once could \|\|destroy the universe\|\|. The computer wasn't exaggerating.... - Pokémon: - In the FireRed/LeafGreen saga of Pokémon Adventures, Orm uses the Dark Pokédex to gauge the power of Yellow's Pokémon and laughs at their low levels. And then Yellow's Viridian Power kicks in, sending the numbers over the eighties, effectively freaking him and Sird out to the point that they know better than to try to fight her head-on. (Technically still on the scale, but the suddenness of the spike has the same effect that going off it would.) - In Episode 22 of Pokémon the Series: Black & White, one of Professor Juniper's assistants mentions that the energy readings they're getting are off the scale. - In Umineko: When They Cry, where gods are hard-pressed to even reach the last measured digit in magic resistance, meta-Battler's resistance is maxed out at "Endless Nine", as the Siestas discover to their horror after they try to shoot him. It makes sense his Anti-Magic is at endless nine. He's Anti-Magic incarnate, thanks to his position in the game as "Magic cannot exist." Also note that this reading was taken during his high point; in the previous arcs he's a bit less of a determinator and in later arcs, \|\|he begins to accept the existence of magic and even gets to be ~~Beatrice~~ Endless Sorcerer.\|\| Though that doesn't stop him from no-selling \|\|Featherine\|\|'s entire honor guard of main-character mages' spell-storm in EP8. Seems like once \|\|he reaches the truth, he can toggle it at will. Or maybe just when he's protecting someone\|\|. - In Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts, during a Furo Scene in the anime adaptation, Shimada examines several other girls' breasts with size-detecting heat vision. One... generously endowed character causes the numbers to max out. - Yu-Gi-Oh!: Seto Kaiba's computer control panels nearly exploded when Kaiba powered up his Infinity +1 Card, Obelisk the Tormentor. A bit peculiar considering that Obelisk was a hologram with no physical presence whose model, animations, and statistics were probably programmed into a Duel Disk with computers probably not too far off from the ones used to gauge its power level. And given that each card's statistics had to be programmed into the Duel Disk to begin with, it's not so clear why Kaiba needed to monitor any monster's power levels at all. - The dub of the Duelist Kingdom arc has Tea saying (in an awestruck voice) "Blue-eyes Ultimate Dragon's Attack Power is off the charts!" The card in question has 4500 ATK and at this point in the game and show normal Blue-eyes' 3000 ATK was considered overwhelming, so the reaction was justified. - In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Amon becomes wise to Professor Cobra's plan to kill him by increasing the power to his D-Belt; so Amon sabotages Cobras equipment so that the same thing happens to everyone's D-Belt and then throwing a party where dueling is involved. (Amon realizes that Cobra will be forced to abort the plan, lest every student in the school die as a result, something he would never get away with.) The result is an Oh, Crap! from Cobra as readings on his equipment goes haywire, followed by him panicking as he tries to shut the system down. - In Ties That Bind, the companion movie to Street Fighter IV, Ryu's Satsui no Hadou is the target of Seth and SIN. The first time he's provoked into using his power, the power gauge the scientists are reading max at ...999999999999999 (the camera angle obscures the start of the number, but it's big). In the final battle, he manages to control the Satsui no Hadou, and we get a shot of the equipment rolling over from ...999999999999999 to ...000000000000000. - Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie has a more subdued example, where a similar reading of Ryu rated his fighting potential at 3620. That number may sound reasonable, but M. Bison's lead scientist believes that the reading must be wrong because only the most powerful martial artists can break 2000, so 3000+ is off the scale. - In the first Sakura Wars OVA the developers of the spirit armor are having trouble finding someone who is able to pilot it. After their latest military pilot nearly kills himself trying to operate the mech, the scientists comment that they need to find someone who can move the gauge on the spirit-power-measuring-thingy. They idly flip it on in the presence of the granddaughter of the chief scientist (and daughter of the owner of the company), and the gauge, of course, promptly overloads and breaks. - In Guilty Crown the protagonists find a Void-o-meter, to detect the level of power someone has both when they use their own Void and when someone else uses theirs. Most people rank around one hundred, with three hundred being on the higher end. For Inori, it slowly spirals up to two thousand before giving up and just declaring "OVER." - When the main Zentraedi fleet shows up in Earth's orbit in Super Dimension Fortress Macross/ Robotech, everyone there understandably has an Oh, Crap! moment, and one of the characters mentions that due to the sheer volume of ships (5 million of them), their radar can't even keep up with it all. - Bleach: - The final arc opens with panic in the 12th Division as the Shutara Scale measurements break down. The Scale is supposed to measure the Balance of Souls between all the worlds, but a sudden upsurge in Hollow soul destruction sends the Scale off the charts. The Shinigami comment that the Scale simply isn't designed to handle so much destruction in such a short period of time, announcing the resurgence of the allegedly almost-extinct Quincies. - The Quincy invasion of Soul Society manifests as multiple powerful pillars of light. The 12th Division struggles to analyse them because the amount of raw power makes it hard to calibrate the instruments. They briefly get a clear reading to confirm the enemy is definitely Quincy before the attackers step out of the pillars and nearly half of the Gotei 13 is decimated within just a few short minutes. The measurements break down completely. - NG Knight Lamune & 40, the main robot King Sccrusher runs on a Hot-Blooded meter, and it can use a Limit Break when the gauge goes off a scale. Since this is a traditional shonen anime, the meter goes off the scale every episode. - In Fairy Tail's Grand Magic Games arc, Cana Alberona, \|\|armed with Fairy Glitter\|\|, has a much greater magic level than everybody else, much to everybody's amazement. The magic-measuring device stopped at 9999 because that was as far as it went... and because she completely vaporized the thing in the process. - The final episode of Sentou Yousei Yukikaze has so many JAM clustered around the Passageway that the sensor officers in the FAF fleet simply give up trying to count them. It's very justified, considering that \|\|the planet Faery is breaking up and revealing that it is built out of countless JAM.\|\| - Toriko does this with its Capture Level system. For example, capture level of 5 and above is immune to conventional weapons. The strongest beasts in the human world range between capture level 91-99. However in the Gourmet World it goes off the scale with creatures regularly getting levels of over 100. The first beast Toriko even encounters is the Breath Dragon with a capture level of 219. \|\|The strongest capture level is the Meat Dish of Acacia's Full Course GOD... 10,000.\|\| - Naruto: - This happens with the Ten Tails. When the Ten Tails finally appears, Kurama, the Nine Tails, tells Naruto that trying to measure the Ten Tails' chakra levels is pointless. Naruto goes into Sage mode, allowing him to sense the Ten Tails's Chakra, and is almost blown back by it, and we're given a visual of how much it has: \|\|It's depicted as a Planet\|\|. This is later taken further as the Ten Tails turns into its second form and, back at the Shinobi Alliance headquarters, an entire second sphere of chakra is created as a result of the mutation, symbolized as a planet appearing, and making it, in just its second form, have enough chakra to rival every living thing on the planet. And it just gets stronger from there. - Taken Up To Eleven with the appearance of \|\|Kaguya. While it's already hinted that Kaguya is extremely strong (so strong that the Sage of Six Paths himself, her own son, says that he's nothing compared to her), when she finally ressurrects herself, Naruto again attempts to measure her chakra. She has so much that She dwarfs the aforementioned Ten Tails. So she essentially dwarfs a being so powerful it was at that point stronger then every other being on earth combined\|\|! - YuYu Hakusho: In the Three Kings arc, a bunch of Raizen's old training buddies come out of seclusion to pay respects and join the new tournament. They collectively flex their energy to "see if they've still got it," and Yomi's strategist's energy-reading device goes off the scale before it breaks. Miles away from the energy source. - In [C] Control, there are three levels of attack an Asset can use: Microflation is the weakest, Mezzoflation is medium and Macroflation is the highest. For attacks of Mezzo level and above, a digitized announcer calls out the name and level of those attacks when used. When the ungodly powerful Q uses her Signature Move Cannibalization, the announcer is unable to determine its level and stutters: - In I Went to School to be a Swordswoman, But My Magical Aptitude is 9999 the nine-year old heroine Rola is assessed when she joins a prestigious Academy for adventurers by touching a magic crystal. While she shows strong initial ratings on her physical stats, her ratings for the six different magic types are each 9,999. For comparison, the great sage who founded the school, a heroine from 130 years ago, had ratings in the 3,000 to 6,000 range. It is even said the crystal simply maxes out at 9,999 and her true abilities could be even higher. - Early on in My Hero Academia, the members of Class 1-A are given several tests to assess their physical abilities and Quirks, including one where they have to throw a ball as far as possible. Uraraka uses her anti-gravity Quirk on the ball and it just floats away, never to return, so her score is recorded as "Infinity". - Most Stands in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure are rated from A to E on various parameters, but a couple break the scale entirely, having either "infinite" or "null" written in their entries. Sometimes it's self-explanatory (Notorious B.I.G. has Complete Immortality and isn't connected to its user, so it gets infinite Range and Persistence), and other times it's just because trying to put the Stand on any kind of scale is impossible (how do you grade the destructive power of cursing a person to experience death for eternity?), which is especially common with Reality Warper-type Stands. - The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. in one episode the characters all have a physical examination. When Kusuo is tested on a device that reads a person's grip strength, he squeezes too hard due to his poor control of his Super Strength and it shows an extremely high rating. He hides this by squeezing even harder so the meter loops all the way around past the maximum and zero, so it looks like he got a low result. - Beastars: \|\|Oguma, on his deathbed,\|\| reveals that he really does love \|\|Louis\|\| by explaining that he calculates the monetary value of his relationships with everyone that he knows, but when he tries to calculate the price of his relationship with \|\|Louis\|\|, the only person he loves, his calculator only returns an error message. - Lampshaded in an issue of Fantastic Four: Mr. Fantastic: Power is right off the readouts... Human Torch: So I'm guessing bigger readouts wouldn't help? Like that amp in Spinal Tap that goes Up to Eleven? - In Cable & Deadpool issue #15, Black Box has Deadpool hooked up to some equipment that's monitoring him and showing Black Box his thoughts. After some observation, Black Box notes that Deadpool's ferocity and skills are off the charts. Black Box: Clowns. He is too funny. But his ferocity—his skills—are off the charts. I should know...I've charted them all. - Lampshaded in an issue of First Comics' Humongous Mecha series Dynamo Joe: Pomru: The readings are off the scale! If we get outta this we're gonna need a bigger scale! - In X-23: Innocence Lost, Rice uses this to describe X-23's intellect and physical fitness when she's seven years old. - Ultimate FF: Sam tried to get readings of the mutated workers inside the dome, to no avail. - In Blood of the Phoenix after Harry fights a fifth-year dueling dummy, two sixth-year dummies and a seventh-year dummy during a school dueling competition and beats them all, his name is listed so far up the enchanted scoreboard that Ginny Weasley is technically in first place. - Child of the Storm: the sheer scale of Jean Grey's Psychic Powers \|\|and by extension, those of her twin sister, Maddie\|\| are noted more than once to blow every single pre-existing scale. Harry is the only one hanging in even approximately the same neighbourhood \|\|and with sufficient creativity, can fight Maddie for an extended period... but only while making damn sure to stay out of her reach\|\|, and he once remarks that he's the Moon to Jean's Sun - far closer than literally everyone else, but still far, far behind. - In White, when measuring the Arrancars' power to determine the Espada, Ichigo's reading is simply "error" from how powerful he is. - In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, Cirda of the Terrible Trio finds that power-scanning three of the four jams her scanner needle at the top. However, she can't determine anything else about their power because earlier she had cannibalized that functionality to ensure that her scanner would be able to sense things through the masks that nearly everyone wears. Sadly for her, the four don't have masks yet, so the cannibalism was unnecessary. - John overhears Cirda scream the exact "over Nine Thousand" lines from Dragon Ball Z. From then on, the four ironically refer to themselves as being Nine Thousands whenever they talk about going up against someone, or they need to complete a difficult task. They even gain a Share Phrase: No, wait, John said, a note of weary but evil craft in his mental voice. They should know what hit 'em. Teach 'em not to fuck with Nine Thousands. - Meta Example: Put My Immortal into Microsoft Word, and it will bring up an error message saying that there's so many mistakes that it can't correct them. - Dragon Ball Abridged: - Subverted in this dialogue: Nappa: VEGETA! What does the Scouter say about his Power Level ? Vegeta: IT'S... one thousand and six. Nappa: What ... really? Vegeta: Yeah. Kick his ass, Nappa. Nappa: Yay! [Nappa proceeds to get his ass kicked] Vegeta: Hmmmm... that doesn't seem right. Wait, wait wait wait... Nappa! Nappa: Whaaaaaat? Vegeta: I had the Scouter upside down. It's over 9000. [crushes Scouter] Rawr . - Parodied in a video released before they finished that episode. Nappa: VEGETA! What does the Scouter say about the Subscriber Count? Vegeta: IT'S... nine thousand and ten. Nappa: Wait, so you mean... Vegeta: Yes Nappa, it's... Nappa: It's! Vegeta: It's over! Nappa: It's over!! Vegeta: IT'S OVER EIGHT THOUSAND! Nappa: WHAT EIGHT ... wait, what? Vegeta, you didn't do it right! Vegeta: Yes I did Nappa. Yes. I. Did. - Parodied once more during the battle with Freeza, when the overlord's scouter tries to measure Vegeta's power after the saiyan had gone through several zenkai boosts. After a few seconds of trying, the scouter displays "F*K THIS I'M OUT" and then explodes. - In the Worm/ Hazbin Hotel* crossover WannaBee, Clack gets a surprise when Taylor Hebert, upon getting her sins measured, actually manages to max out the Sin-O-Meter. - In The Worm That Dorks, during the Quirk Assessment Test, Izuku accidentally breaks off the handle of the grip tester. Aizawa marks down his grip strength as "Yes". - In the first chapter of Quantity of Quirks, Izuku's Quirk Assessment results are marked as "Yes" for grip strength, long jump, and distance running. The first because he broke the machine; the last two because he can fly. - In It's An Unliving, the Self-Insert Black Lantern has a timer built into his power ring that states how much time he has remaining before his ring is shut down note : As said ring is the only thing keeping him sorta alive, shutting it down will instantly kill him. The timer maxes out at 640 hours and killing evil people fills the timer. A random serial killer earned him an hour. Lex Luthor earned twenty four hours. And Ra's al Ghul earned 213 hours. When he kills Vandal Savage, he's informed that the timer only gained 282 hours and the remaining 17,843 hours are available to use for alternative usage note : For some quick math, the timer maxes out at twenty five days while Vandal provided over two years of time. - In A Green Dragon's Hoard: Momo technically gets first place on the Quirk Assessment, but only because Izuku's scores were all so high that Nemuri simply wrote down "Yes" for each one. - The Rigel Black Chronicles: Magical power coefficients for alchemy are measured using a color scale, with black as the minimum (and thus strongest) of 1.0. However, Dumbledore's coefficient is 0.97. Apparently it took a lot of trial and error to calculate. Dumbledore: My first six months, all my arrays exploded. Nicolas was quite displeased with the destruction I wreaked on his workshop. - In Das Boot, when everything is going to hell and the submarine is stuck on the ocean floor, the depth gauge is far past its last marking (260 meters). 260 meters is already way past the point where the navy originally expected the hull to be crushed and destroyed. The manufacturer's warranty extended only to 90 meters. - Implied in Ghostbusters. - The PKE meter (handheld device used to measure ghost activity) seems to only have three readings: "Zero," "Pegged," and "Blown Up." When we see it used, it only seems to go "active" when a ghost is within visual range, so it's only slightly better than, say, looking. - The 2009 video game shows the PKE meter in better detail. The "antenna" on the meter rise higher the closer the meter is to a spectral entity, regardless of power. The bars in the middle are kind of a "hot-cold" mechanic for pinpointing a hidden ghost or cursed object. There's more to it than that, as Ray and Egon both comment on the readings, noting things that are non-obvious, but for the rookie Ghostbuster (that's you), it's just a ghost locator. - The Fifth Element: Temperature probes sent to absolute evil jam, one at a million degrees, the other at minus 5000. A bit later, Leeloo's DNA is described as having hundreds of different bases. note : The "minus 5000" part is more than just "off the charts", it's actually impossible. The lowest possible temperature is absolute zero (0 °K), or −273.15 °C, or −459.67 °F. - In The Phantom Menace, Anakin Skywalker's midi-chlorian level is said to be "off the charts" and "over twenty thousand." It's not entirely clear whether this means that they could only measure them up to twenty thousand, or that a little over twenty thousand was the actual count but unprecedentedly high, even Master Yoda doesn't have that much. - Midway through Forbidden Planet, we are shown a power gauge consisting of a (very large) number of lighted displays, each of which shows ten times the amperage of the previous one. (Think of it as a decimal display with a whole lotta digits.) What the protagonists consider a large power output barely registers as a blip on the first gauge. Naturally, by the end of the film, we see the whole panel lit up (and flashing!). - The energy readings of the reactor in Antarctica are off the scale to Nite Owl's Owlship in Watchmen. - Whiteout has a particularly ridiculous example, where someone says that the radar went off the charts. Given that radar isn't actually used to measure anything, how it can go "off the charts" is a mystery. - Star Trek (2009) uses it twice, most bizarrely for James Kirk's attribute tests (there's no way to score very high scorers?). Either that or "Off the charts" is used as Federation slang for "Really friggin' high": a fact which would explain an awful lot. - Inverted in the Soviet sci-fi film Moscow Cassiopeia, where an accident (a guy sitting on a console) results in their relativistic ship accelerating beyond the speed of light in just a few seconds. The Captain notes this on the console readout, which shows the rising speed bar. Forgetting the fact that accelerating beyond the speed of light is impossible without some sort of Applied Phlebotinum, there'd be no way for any device to measure translight speeds (although you could still put the numbers on the scale just for the hell of it). The crew passes out and wakes up to find that they have arrived at their destination, while everyone on Earth has aged several decades, which seems to indicate that they did not, in fact, travel faster than light but merely approached the speed of light, causing Time Dilation. Given that the captain is still a teenager, it can be forgiven if he incorrectly gauged the speed. - According to the ship's name/acronym ZARYa (means "dawn"), the "R" standads for "relativistic", meaning the ship is actually designed to go to a significant percentage of the speed of light. The star in question is a real one; over 200 light years away, but with the Time Dilation, the teens were expected to only age about 20 years (requiring 90%+ lightspeed). Instead, they got into some Negative Space Wedgie, making it 20+ years on Earth, a couple minutes for them, and definitely FTL. - Bomba says this in one scene in Epic (2013). - In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Nancy has her dreams monitored by a brain-scan. The doctor notes that a "really intense" nightmare would read about seven...then watches in disbelief as it goes to 10, 15, 30... - In This Island Earth, Joe tells Cal about a strange bead-like device that blew up their equipment after giving off an amazing amount of power. Cal muses on this, realizing they could use it to generate enough power to power an entire town by itself with it. - In Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, they say this about the level of radiation Godzilla is emitting. - In Ultraviolet (2006), a computer scans Violet and tries to count how many weapons she has in her Hyperspace Arsenal. It eventually gives up and says "Many" in a surprised tone of voice. - Queen of Outer Space. After the rocketship crashlands on Venus, the crew note that the speedometer's needle is at the far end of the scale at 100 miles per second — they can only speculate how fast they might actually have been traveling. - In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), it's stated that King Ghidorah is hiding within the eye of a Category 6 tropical storm. In reality, there's no such thing as a Category 6 storm, since Category 5 encompasses all possible readings above Category 4 (although you could interpret it as the characters simply saying "Category 6" to aptly communicate that the cyclone is impossibly big). - Despite their phenomenally polymorphic instrumentation and interface, sensors on Star Trek are especially prone to this fatal weakness. This is lampshaded in the Star Trek: New Frontier book Being Human: Soleta: Readings are off the scale. McHenry: They're always off the scale. We just have to install bigger scales. - Funny inversion in Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: The temperature at the evil sigil during the Apocalypse is never measured correctly. The machines put it at either -150 or +350 degrees. Both are correct, 'cuz that's the temperature in Hell. - Discworld: - The Last Continent uses a thaumometer, that measures magical energy. Sure enough, it melts when it detects a magical field of over a million thaums (in this case, caused by \|\|the creation of a new continent\|\|). - While not strictly "off the scale," as it continued to measure as intended, the resograph of Moving Pictures (which detects distortions in reality) was at one point spitting out a burst of eleven small lead pellets every few minutes. Unfortunately, the wizards who found it in the back of a storeroom didn't know what it was supposed to be measuring or what the number of pellets and the interval between dispensing them meant until they dug up the operating manual some time later, at which point it turned out that a "really serious" distortion in reality would make it cough up two pellets. Per month. The moment when he figures this out is one of the few times Ponder Stibbons, Unseen University's "token sane person", skips over "This Is Gonna Suck" and goes straight to "Oh, Crap!". - Comes up once in The Corellian Trilogy. Note that said detectors were good up to over 500° Celsius. C-3PO: —and there are probably temperatures much higher than that, except the detectors are not there any more to tell us. - In Ender's Game, this is said about Bean's intelligence. He scored near-perfectly on all their aptitude tests (save physical abilities, given his age), but had also included notes in the margins pointing out mistakes the test-makers had made when writing them and making suggestions for improving the tests. The instructors decide that Bean's intellect is so great that their tests cannot accurately measure it, and therefore they can't be sure of his true limits. - Essentially, he has no upper limit on his intelligence, due to the nature of the genetic engineering he underwent as a fetus (he lacks the normal inhibitors that slow down neural development after infancy, but also the ones which tell his body to stop trying to grow when he reached adult size). - It's pointed out several times that Bean is much smarter than Ender, but Ender is a natural commander, while Bean is more of a strategist (i.e. no one would follow Bean). - This also occurs with the final battle at the Formic homeworld. There are so many Formic warships in orbit that the computer can't track them all, leading to the edges of the radar constantly dropping and picking up readings. - Occurs in the Lensman series - but only a very few times. The Lensman Arms Race applies to sensors and recorders there as well as to other systems. When the readings do go off the scale, it's impressive. "Those beams were hot - plenty hot. These recorders go up to five billion and have a factor of safety of ten. Even that wasn't anywhere near enough - everything in the recorder circuits blew." \|\|The most extreme instance was when a Faster Than Light meteor was pulled from another dimension and sent into a star. No gauge, chart, or screen could properly record what happened at that point. Everything pegged out, whited out, etc. Incidentally, this marked the end of the Lensman Arms Race; the finale of the series occurs shortly after because this was already Apocalypse How levels; if they didn't act fast, the galaxy would go next.\|\| - Hermione from Harry Potter has done exceedingly well on tests, ranging from 113% to 320%. That was muggle studies. One can only assume that being raised as a muggle, she knew infinitely more about it than even the professor. - In Warbreaker, there is a passing mention of the amount of breaths that a Returned had registering as infinite to Vivenna. This may have been a mistake, as it was referring not to the God King, but to a normal Returned, which would only be about four times more than Vivenna herself. This is because \|\|Returned don't have two thousand Breaths, they have one Divine Breath that's two thousand times stronger than a normal Breath. This odd situation throws off Vivenna's senses a little, especially since she's never practiced using the Breath-sense before\|\|. - This is why it took so long to discover that the dinosaurs were breeding in Jurassic Park. The program that kept track of the population was set with the expected number as its upper limit, because everyone believed the dinosaurs were incapable of breeding. They assumed everything was all right as long as the population didn't drop. It was only when Ian Malcolm told them to re-program the counter with a higher number that it was proven that the dinosaurs were breeding. (in the film, this doesn't occur, Alan discovers a dinosaur nest in the field.) - In The Girl from the Miracles District, after Kosma scans Nikita's magic signature, he's horrified to see that practically all of it is the berserk spirit, with almost no space on the scanner to show all the rest. - Iron Widow: The legendary Chrysalis pilot Qin Zheng's spirit pressure was too great to be measured by the technology of his era. On top of that, he could control all five forms of qi interchangeably, while most people are limited to one or two. - In Jean Johnson's Theirs Not to Reason Why, there are devices which measure psychic abilities (telepathy, telekinesis, etc) on a scale of 0 (no ability) to 20 (highest known rating of any ability from any person ever measured). There is a second device which suppresses psychic abilities, which is discovered to be by a factor of 4 (so a rating of 12 would show as a measurement of 3 when the suppressor is interfering with the person being tested). Ia has several of her abilities tested, and they eventually rate her power level as 84: with the suppressor running and reducing her ability by x4, she showed a measurement of 21... - The Black Magician Trilogy: The position of High Lord in Imardin's Wizarding School goes to the strongest mage, which is tested by measuring how long the applicant's Mana reserves can withstand an assault by twenty senior mages. Akkarin defeated all twenty at once instead. \|\|This is an early sign that he uses the Vampiric Draining of Black Magic to boost his power to otherwise impossible heights.\|\| - Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest: The Role-Playing Game 'Verse of Tortus features items called "status plates" that describe the stats and abilities of their owners. Hajime Nagumo starts as a Level 1 Synergist, but by the time he finishes the Great Orcus Labyrinth, becoming a Phlebotinum Muncher in the process, his status plate gives up the ghost, displaying his level as "???". - In the manga oneshot, ∞, the main character, Mieko has a power that determines how much affection someone has for her. A score of 0-20 is for people who aren't interested in her, 21-40 is for acquaintances, 41-60 is for friends, 61-80 is for best friends or those who admire her, and 81-100 is for those who love her romantically. When her best friend has a "∞" score, despite having a 68 before, Mieko is disappointed, mistaking the ∞ for an 8 and hoping to work hard so that her friend will like her again. - Chakona Space: During chapter 7 of Tales of the Folly, a few Chakats have some fun. When they finish, they are subjected to being rated by the rest of the crew and passengers of the Folly. Most give average scores, but one of the scorecards is marked "HOLY #%#^^$$!!". Later, in chapter 9, a pair who didn't realize they were quite so noisy get busy after work and affect all on board. Afterward, they are greeted by everyone holding the "HOLY #%#^^$$!!" card. Neal lampshades this when he comments: "We sometimes find the scale were using isnt quite large enough for what were trying to measure." - Earlier in the same series, a small fleet of Starfleet's finest encounter the Folly. The sensor tech on one of the ships is having trouble believing the readings being sent to his systems. Sensor Tech Carson: "Well, for one thing, your passive scans are showing non-powered objects at five times the range my sensors could, and the couple of times your people went active my display wouldnt scale far enough out to see what they were looking at!" - How Not to Summon a Demon Lord: There is a mirror that measures people's Power Levels. When Diablo tries it, he's too powerful, so it malfunctions and shuts down. - American Restoration: A foot x-ray machine (known to be a big radiation leakage source to begin with) is brought in to be restored. A radiation specialist is brought in to see if/how badly this one leaks. He turns it on and it leaks more radiation than Chernobyl. His detector doesn't read high enough to properly quantify the extent of the leakage. It is worth noting here that the restorers promptly removed the X-Ray tube from the machine and rebuilt it with a simulation which projected a photographic x-ray negative onto a screen instead of using real x-rays. - A quick gag in season 4 of Arrested Development has Dr. Norman tell George Sr. that the latter's testosterone levels are off the scale. Then he clarifies that they are below the scale. - Babylon 5 used off-the-scale readings as shorthand for the equivalent of Wooden Ships and Iron Men spotting a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. The rest of the time they're just fine as-is. - In the short-lived sequel series to Babylon 5, Crusade, Captain Gideon subverted the trope the first time it appeared by ordering that the sensors for the Excalibur be recalibrated so that the readings were back on the scale. Given that they are adventuring out on the frontier, they run into that kind of all the freaking time, and he'd like to know if the ship's Wave-Motion Gun might actually work on that particular target. - The Big Bang Theory's Doctor Sheldon Cooper claims at one point that his IQ "cannot be accurately measured." This is in fact an issue with extremely high IQs. Pretty much all IQ tests produce increasingly unreliable results for results higher than 145-148 due to the fact that there's generally not a large enough sample to normalize them properly. - Chernobyl: Happens three times in a row before the characters can get an accurate scale. Played deadly serious, since they're measuring radiation. - The explosion of Reactor #4 is read by the workers' dosimeters as 3.6, which is the highest they can go (the plant's actual heavy-duty dosimeter was destroyed when the reactor blew up, which is why they're working with such small ones). It's pretty obvious to everyone that this is not actually the correct number and is a bit low for an exposed reactor core, but unfortunately Dyatlov, Bryukhanov, and Fomin are either deeply in denial or desperately trying to cover it up, so they report 3.6 as the accurate number. During the initial meeting in Moscow, Legasov points out that this was likely "the number they had" to justify his suspicions that the disaster is far worse than the Chernobyl higher-ups are letting on. - Later, a dosimeter that went up to 1000 roentgens was outright fried by the radiation. - A 200 roentgen dosimeter survived, but also reported the radiation as the highest it could go. - Finally, the characters receive a heavy-duty dosimeter and Pikalov goes up to the core in a lead-lined truck to get an accurate reading of 15,000 roentgens, the equivalent of two Little Boys per hour, confirming the true scale of the disaster. And in real life, it is suspected that that dosimeter maxed out too. - Doctor Who: - The Goodies. In one episode it becomes so hot the thermometer squirts mercury in someone's face when they go to look at it. - In an episode of How Clean is Your House?, Aggie tells a smoker that the carbon monoxide levels in her living room were right off the scale. - The page quote comes from Kamen Rider Gaim. When he performs certain attacks, the power is added up in multiples of ten, sometimes ending up at 100,000 or 1,000,000. When using Kachidoki/Triumphant Arms (he gets a super-er mode later, but at the time it's the most powerful thing ever, able to contend with swarms of enemies. And that super-er mode is, in fact, at its best when using Kachidoki Arms' weapon!) and activates a finisher he's using for the first time in the big team-up with Ressha Sentai ToQger, it goes up over a trillion before the Computer Voice gives up, declaring its power level immeasurable. - Knight Rider: K.I.T.T. had a top speed that approached 300 mph ... and several times, Michael Knight drove the car that speed (always accomplished through film speed techniques), usually racing to catch a criminal or avert a potentially deadly situation ... such as the time Knight needed to (very quickly) transport a nuclear bomb to a desert location before it exploded. In the example, K.I.T.T. easily outran several state patrol troopers the first one reported that the car was traveling at speeds "off the clock" and crashed (at blinding speed) through a road block. - In the Lost episode "The Incident", Dharma is drilling into the island's electromagnetic pocket. Dr. Chang notes that the Gauss readings are off the scale. (This magnet is known to be strong enough to crash a plane.) - A comedic version from The Munsters - when Lily was asked what Herman's weight was, she replied "three spins". When asked for clarification, she said that when he stepped on the scale, the needle spun around three times. - Occasionally, the MythBusters will get results that go above and beyond any sort of measurement available to them. In one notable instance, they managed to completely max out a G-force accelerometer with a rating above its maximum value of 500 G, or five hundred times the force of gravity; this device had previously recorded numbers in the 160 G range, already considerably more than necessary to kill a human being. 500 G is around five times the lethal baseline of G-forces for humans, and they still managed to produce more force than even that unpleasantly high number. However, the best way to tell that the Mythbusters have gone off their known scales is to wait for Stunned Silence from Adam. - When the White Dino Gem reveals itself in Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, Tommy tells the other Rangers that the energy readings are higher than his equipment can track. - In Star Trek: "The Corbomite Maneuver", the mass of a starship only one mile across was off the scale, according to Spock. One wonders how he measured the mass of, oh, planets or moons. - Either the starship had a ludicrously dense hull, or the Enterprise's sensors just weren't designed to measure the mass of anything substantially larger than itself. - It's more sensible to assume that the mass for a starship a mile across was wildly out of proportion to what it should be for a vessel that size. - In "Operation: Annihilate!" the meter on Spock's biobed measuring pain drifts straight to the top and stays there. Implying that it simply can't measure any higher. - Another episode has a more humorous take on that, where Spock lies on the bed and the readers immediately go haywire, including at least one needle leaping to the highest point and staying there. Spock then points out that these are normal readings for a Vulcan and, since the biobed was calibrated for humans when he laid on it, he triggered almost every life support alarm the system had. - Averted in Star Trek: Enterprise, where a device designed to measure the age of metal happily shows a negative number when used on parts from the future. (Presumably the device can measure the effect the universal background radiation had on the forging process, or somesuch technobabble.) - In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Where No One Has Gone Before", the Enterprise is accelerated to a velocity that causes Data to quote this trope. - Dungeons & Dragons: Various Aura Vision spells will give their users a Poke in the Third Eye if they detect an "Overwhelming" aura that's above the conventional limits for the phenomenon being detected. Trying to read the mind of someone with Super Intelligence, Detect Evil on a Demon Lord, or analyze the magic properties of an Artifact can short out the spell and leave the caster stunned. - Lots of combos in Magic: The Gathering allow you to generate more Mana than you put in, resulting in the ability to use timing rules to generate an arbitrary amount of things. For example, A Magus of the Coffers taps at a cost of (2) mana to give you one Black mana for each swamp you control. You can then equip him with the Sword of the Paruns, which will let him untap for (3). Pay two, tap the Magus for six black mana, pay three to untap him, and then do it again. Written out: -(2) => +(6B) => -(3) => -(2) => ETC. Lather, rinse, repeat, and apply to the variable cost cards, such as Exsanguinate, and you wind up with combos that can do 9999 damage to each opponent at the table and then let you gain that much life. Considering you start the game at 20 life and even the Commander's Arsenal Life Counter only goes to 99, it's certainly off all of the official charts. - The base Chronicles of Darkness game uses a Point Build System where a character's Attributes (e.g.: Strength) and Skills (e.g. Weaponry) are measured on a five-point scale, with 5 representing a conventional human maximum, although some supernatural abilities can temporarily boost them even higher. Characters from the various game lines can also break that limit once their core Power Level gets higher than 5, on the basis that a Vampire: The Requiem elder, Mage: The Awakening archmage, or similarly puissant entity simply isn't bound by mortal norms anymore. - Warhammer 40,000: Done subtly with the T'au Forge World battlesuits. The Ta'unar Supremacy Armour and the Y'Vahra Battlesuit have the designations KX139 and XV109 respectively. Thing is, the T'au count in Base 8, with the XV88 Broadside Battlesuits previously being their top-of-the-line armament before rolling overfor the XV104 Riptide. Their new anti-titan materiel didn't just go to another place value, it broke their numbering system. - Cyberpunk: lists Adam Smasher's Empathy stat as Yeah, right... on a scale from 1 to 10. According to the fluff, Smasher is simply so psychotic, sociopathic and unstable from the start that there is no lower level of sanity for cyberpsychosis to drive him to, or to put it another way, he subverts Cybernetics Eat Your Soul by not having had a soul to begin with. - DanceDanceRevolution: A boss song can have one or more parts of its Groove Radar spill right over the edge. But the crowner would have to be the Groove Radar for the Challenge chart of "MEGALOVANIA", where it just looks like one giant blob◊ plastered on top of the thing. - In Final Fantasy XII, Ghis's control personnel on-board the Leviathan marvel at the power of the Dawn Shard. Female Technician: Sixty-eight hundred, sixty-nine hundred, seven thousand! This must be deifacted Nethicite! The count still climbs! - In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, when the party steps forward to have their personal energy measures by Lexis's kymograph, Guy's results are five times more than the highest reading Lexis had ever seen, then Selan's are shown to be eight times more, then for Maxim, yes, the readings are off the scale. - Homeworld's Nebula missions feature this. However, it is stated that your personnel are working to recalibrate them to compensate. - Done straight when the Bentusi are first encountered. Made hilarious by the calm way it's stated. - Also happens in Chrono Trigger, if Robo is in the party during the battle with Lavos' final form. He tries to assess Lavos' power level: Robo: Power level is... immeasurable. It's completely off the scale! - Enemy Scan abilities in the Final Fantasy series usually depict boss statistics as a series of "???" readings, indicating how powerful they are compared to regular flunkies. Notably, some games allow you to upgrade the Libra/Scan spells to reveal these readings. - Their stats aren't actually off the scale, mind you. They often aren't even beyond what is achievable for the player characters given sufficient Level Grinding. (Except HP and MP, which are often above the player characters' limit, which is usually 9999 and 999 respectively. The Big Bad of Final Fantasy III, for instance, has 65000 HP.) - Final Fantasy X has summons which can deal damage over the damage limit, as well as weapon modifications which allow the player characters themselves to do so (predictably called "Break Damage Limit"). - World of Warcraft: - Monsters and enemy players more than ten levels above yours will have their level displayed as "??" or a skull symbol. They might be +11 to you, or +50. Either way, you probably don't want to mess with them. Most common occurrence of such were the "Welcome Bears" for starting Forsaken players when they could wander over from their starter level 10 zone into level 40+ Western Plaguelands. - Raidbosses are also level skull. They count as being 3 levels higher than the attacker's current level for purposes of determining hit chance and such. Notably this still applies even if you overlevel the dungeon they are in - their health and power may be piddly compared to yours now, but accuracy penalty still applies. - World of Warcraft now has an achievement labelled "It's Over Nine Thousand!!!" What is it for, exactly? Why, for getting over 9000 achievement points, of course! - In Persona 3, Your Mission Control all but freaks out at trying to perceive the Superboss' power. Fuuka: Her power is unbelievable! Who is she? - Lampshaded in the Ghostbusters videogame: Egon: ''These readings are off the charts...now I'll have to make new charts." - Even more hilarious is the fact that Egon is not astounded, but annoyed. Of course, being the super-brain that he is, he probably just doesn't like having something he can't quantify. - In Fallout 3, the player has a radiation measuring device. At the end of the game, \|\|if the player steps into the highly irradiated control room of the Project Purity building, the meter will get maxed at +100,000 (as in, more than one-hundred-thousand rads) and jiggles\|\|. Mercifully, no-one comments on this. - Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door had the Iron Cleft Bros. with a defense so high it was even in Goombella's book marked as ???. The only thing hard enough to hurt an Iron Cleft is another Iron Cleft. Goombella: Defense is... UNKNOWN?!? What the heck is wrong with this book?!? It says no known form of attack can damage an Iron Cleft! - FreeSpace 2 had a Vasudan sensor officer describing the mass readings of the Sathanas as "Exceeding superdestroyer class". They ended up making the "juggernaut" class to describe the Sathanas... and then the fanmade Blue Planet mod introduces two ships which "exceed juggernaut specifications by at least fivefold." - In Half-Life 2: Episode One, the Combine are purposely trying to destabilise their Citadel's Dark Energy Core to cause a massive explosion (sacrificing the whole base of operations, and the surrounding city), then use the release of energy to send a message off-world and open up a super-portal from which off-world reinforcements can pour in. When Alyx Vance looks at the Control Room monitor, she claims that the Core Reactor's readings are off the charts. - In Portal: - The Announcer in the second game claims "nine... nine... nine... nine..." days have passed since the first game. How much time has actually passed is open to speculation. - In the original Portal GLaDOS mentions that "Aperture technologies remain safely operational up to 4000 degrees [sic] Kelvin." (It is implied that Aperture test subjects do not.) Such a temperature is far off the scale of household and most industrial thermometers. To put how hot this is into perspective, consider that the surface of the Sun is just over 5778 K. And the player has to use an Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator to destroy Aperture technology, meaning it must be even hotter. - Shadowrun from Genesis has this with Walking Bear, a female orc shaman. When people want raw power, they usually hire Winston Mars, a Troll Samurai who can reach incredible amounts of strength (the power charts even states his power as [sic] Incredible! when maxed out). But here's a catch: Orcs have the one of the best Max Body/Strength, second only to Trolls. Also, using cyberware as a shaman will weaken your spells. But if you stop fearing the soul-stripping cyberware then cyber up Walking Bear, you will end almost as strong as Winston Marrs (also cybered, in this comparison). With this, Marrs will have a full power bar and Bear will have a nearly-full ("Massive" power). HOWEVER, there are talismans which increase strength and defense ratios, which are only usable by shamans and were meant to be used to make up for their fragility. That said, after maxing up Walking Bear, give her a Power talisman (you can only have one) and Defense talismans (they stack, up to three). The power readings will still read only as "Massive" instead of "Incredible!", but the bar graph charts for attack/defense will be so high, they will go beyond its limit and actually start a new one to carry its excess. Her defense is so massive that even in a game where you never will be invincible, be due to scratch damage, rolling ones or other overwhelming strikes, BULLETS WON'T EVER FAZE HER, and only the strongest mental attacks will scratch her mental gauge. - In the original Disgaea the Superboss Baal shows up. Laharl reads his power as "Level 4000" (his literal level out of the maximum possible 9999). By way of comparison, the previous optional boss was 2500. The Final Boss of the story proper is 90. - In a meta-example, in the third game it is possible to achieve amounts of dealt damage big enough for last digits of the number to go off the screen edge. - In the fourth game, the damage cap seems to be 184 quadrillion (can anything even have so much HP!?) - It is also possible to increase a character's pool of mana so high that the display can't keep up with it. At high enough levels, the game simply lists the character as having "Lots of Mana". - Similarly, when the amount of money won in battle exceeds 7 digits, the games will display "Super [Bonus]" or "A lot" in place of the actual amount. - Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny goes even further off the charts — the new Level Cap for the game is an excessive 99 million! Damage in the game was shown to go somewhere into the quintillions, and potentially higher! - Grolla in RosenkreuzStilette gets a big shock when \|\|Iris\|\| attacks her with immensely powerful magic, leading her to think of her as not just any girl, but some kind of immensely powerful monster. Grolla: What in the...!? How did she obtain such powerful magic? \|\|Iris\|\|, what ARE you!? \|\| Iris: Heheheh. Why, I am myself, of course. I don't expect a commoner to understand my genius.\|\| - In the GITADORA series, charts are given a rating from 10 to 99. Guitar Freaks & Drummania V5, the Superboss song "Rock To Infinity", on all instruments' Extreme difficulty, is given a rating of infinity. Subverted when the song is unlocked for play as a non-extra stage song, in which it's simply rated 99. Subsequent installments continue to simply give the song a finite number rating within the game's rating scale. - In Mass Effect: "Uh, Commander? I'm getting some strange readings. Really strange. Like, off the damn charts." - The Crowd Sourced Science Messages mod for Kerbal Space Program will note such results for some experiments in some environments, such as a barometer imploding on Eve. - The prologue of Xenogears has a team of Bridge Bunnies yelping about the rising "base code" of a vaguely-defined thing that is attacking their spaceship. - During one particular boss fight in Xenoblade Chronicles 1, you are given a vision where one Physical God titan cuts the other in half with its sword; the damage readout for this attack, which normally shows a number (and a skull if the attack is fatal to the target), instead displays a Mobius strip. - In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, on first encountering the final boss, the main character's suit can't even translate its appearance into a perceptible form. It requires outside assistance from a near-divine entity before you can see what it looks like. - Fate Series: - The EX rank in general, as the rank indicates the weapon/ability cannot be properly measured. Ea is this by virtue of being incredibly powerful, but other EX abilities approach the trope from different angles. For example, A rank magic resistance grants incredible resilience to a spell, EX magic resistance makes spells simply miss the person entirely. A rank Mad Enhancement renders its user absurdly powerful, but completely incoherent; EX madness can be anything from "in full control of their faculties, except in this one circumstance, where they go full crazy with stats to match" to "so crazed literally nothing gets into their thick skulls, and so insane their speech goes back to being coherent". - Fate/stay night: Gilgamesh´s sword, Ea, a rank EX Noble Phantasm with the ability to destroy reality and slice the world in 2 (the scale goes from E- to A++ for anything but the most ridiculous Noble Phantasms). Fully charged, it does 5000 units of damage (Excalibur by comparison does 200) though the amount can be multiplied several times by powering it with Gil´s own mana and that of the weapons in the Gate of Babylon. It can somehow be stopped by Avalon. Given Avalon was famous in Arthurian stories as stopping the wearer from being ever being hurt, and granting them pretty-much-immortality, this isn't as out there as it seems. In fact, Rin chides Shirou over forgetting that Excalibur was far, far less important to Arthur than the sheathe. - Fate/Grand Order: - Servants are rated on a scale of 1-5 stars by stats and rarity. Joke Character Angra Mainyu is the only one to clock in at zero stars. Atypically, he fits at both the top and bottom: he's generally weaker than any one-star (though he's actually treated as a two-star in terms of stats and level requirements), but due to his unusual requirements, he is also much rarer than any five-star. - Avenger Edmond Dantès, has a Luck stat completely blanked out - the scale can't accurately measure the fact that the events surrounding his legend means his luck is insanely bad and absurdly good simultaneously. - \|\|Oberon Vortigern's\|\| NP is an EX-Rank Anti-World Noble Phantasm much like Ea, but unlike it and several other similarly ranked NPs in the game, it goes Up to Eleven in that both its Range and Maximum Targets are also listed as Unlimited. That's because \|\|Lie Like Vortigern is basically a sentient black hole that has the capacity to devour everything in existence.\|\| - When \|\|normal human\|\| Bedivere is properly scanned by Chaldea in Fate/Grand Order - Divine Realm of the Round Table: Camelot, his Magic stat can only be measured as F because it's just that low in comparison to Servants. - Fate/EXTRA: CCC-exclusive character BB had her stats represented as "Star" rank, which is somehow above EX-Rank! Then again, as an AI-construct of the Moon Cell, she likely hacked her stats to be so high. When she appears in Grand Order, they're brought down to normal, but her Luck Rank is at EX because her efforts in CCC change it from E- to EX automatically because the scale quantifies what happened to her as a miracle that only someone who had that much luck could ever accomplish. - Civilization V has Gandhi's willingness to use nuclear weapons set to 12/10. For purposes of effect, this is the same as 10/10, but it does come into play: a leader's traits can vary by up to two points in either direction, randomly determined at the game's start (if a leader's base in a trait is, say, 6/10, the actual amount can be anywhere from 4 to 8); with a 12/10, Gandhi will never have less than 10 in Nuke Use. - Asura's Wrath has the Gohma measured in Impurity levels, but one in particular stands out. Gohma Vlitra Impurity Level: IMMEASURABLE. - In the Shining Series, any stat that is over 100 is shown as ??. - In Mega Man X4, when Cyber Peacock tries to analyze X, he comes up with the following gem: " His potential... is limitless?! ...not possible." - In StarCraft, Kerrigan runs up into off-the-scale problems, repeatedly. - In her backstory, she already was the most powerful human psionic. So powerful that she went off the scale, and they designed a new scale with her as the benchmark for the maximum Class 10. - After being infected by the Zerg and turned into their Queen, with mind equal to the usually building-sized Overminds, she is off the scale by an order of magnitude. She gets called a "class 12" as an approximation. - Eventually in Star Craft II: Heart of the Swarm, \|\|she obtains her "Primal" Zerg form, which of course boosts her abilities even further. The scale gives up entirely and she is described simply as "Unclassifiable"\|\|. - Legend of Grey Moon has a stats screen at the end of the game, listing time, deaths, gems (out of 16) and secrets (out of 11). However, these maxima are misleading and there are actually more; at 100% Completion, the stats screen will tell you that you have 17/16 gems and 28/11 secrets. - In Carmageddon 2 all the cars have a five-segment "strength" rating that tells you, generally speaking, how much they can hurt your opponents. The impractically huge and ridiculously heavy dump truck gets a rating of eighty out of five. - In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, while not in the storyline or dialogue, abusing the Alchemy/Enchanting or Alchemy/Restoration Positive Feedback Loop would cause all numbers in affected equipment — both enhanced stats and gold value — to have so many digits that they would go off the side of the screen. Creating a fortification of health enchantment with such huge buffs allows you to tank a hit from a giant - In Kirby Air Ride, one of the game modes (City Trial) allows players to collect stat-boosting items. When a player collects health boosters, the length of your life bar will extend, actually taking up more of the screen. It is possible to extend the bar so long that it actually extends off the top of the screen so that you can no longer see the end. - The Torifune Military Academy in BlazBlue evaluates its students' potential in various categories during the nomination and enrollment periods; even afterwards, the student council can reference them to help with their education or (in the case of troublemakers) containment. In the wake of an incident between a trio of "in-name-only" nobles and Makoto, Jin pulls up hers and points out to Tsubaki just how out of their league the nobles stood to be. "A beastkin, huh? Her ars magus aptitude is average, but her physical tests are off the charts. She would have no trouble dealing with a group of two or three people." - NBA superstar Steph Curry had such an absurdly successful real life season in 2015-16 that the developers of the game NBA 2K 16 admitted that they couldn't properly replicate his shooting accuracy without breaking the game engine. - Fire Emblem can only display HP up to a certain level, depending on the game, in the in-battle HP meters. If a character's health goes past that (such as the final boss of Blazing Sword, \|\|the Fire Dragon\|\|), the HP is displayed only as "??" until they've taken enough damage to bring it below the limit. In addition, the HP gauge glows until that point. - The eponymous Superbosses of the Leviathans DLC for Stellaris, have a fleet strength depicted as just a skull. - The story trailer for Apocalypse says this word-for-word \|\|when the Molluscoid Colossus is preparing to fire its planet cracker at Europa VII\|\|. - Pokémon GO will display a wild Pokémon's Combat Power as "???" if it is higher than that of any that the player has. - In Sonic Forces, Tails tries to scan Infinite to determine his powers... only for the results to come back so messed up, he can't make sense of them. - Star Wars: The Old Republic: On Iokath, Lana Beniko notes that the superweapon power levels are off the chart and rising by the second. How she can tell if they're rising then they're already off the scale is anyone's guess, although the central glowy bit is noticibly getting brighter. - The thermometer on the HUD in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is calibrated for normal atmospheric temperatures. In extremely hot regions, like Death Mountain, it is consistently maxed out, and any wooden weapons and shields Link has equipped will catch fire (and so will Link, if he doesn't have adequate protection from Flamebreaker armor or a Fireproof elixir). Likewise, if Link gets frozen solid, the thermometer gets completely encased in ice. Also, opening the map while on Death Mountain has the temperature indication reading a red "Error". - In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, the final boss has functionally infinite health and cant be beaten with force, prompting this exchange between two of your party members: Shift: So that's it? We're just a distraction?! Screw that, I wanna beat \|\|STORM\|\| fair and square! Eddie: I'm not sure if that's even possible. \|\|STORM\|\| is unlike any enemy we've ever seen before. The "HP" scale simply does not apply to it. - Warframe has a set limit on the amount of damage it can display, a point far beyond the health of any enemy in the game. However, certain warframes (with Banshee being the most egregious) can take a powerful critical-based weapon into damage levels so high that the number displays as a negative. (The damage is still happening as normal, of course, it's just that the number display can't handle it.) - Frog Fractions normally displays a numerical amount of fruit that the player has, though the player can find a huge secret stash of it by \|\|going underwater\|\|. After the stash is found, the player's fruit count will be displayed as "Like a billion", which is basically treated as having infinity. - During Chapter 3 of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC, the party delivers a black orbment to Professor Russell so he can figure out what it is. Professor Russell decides to scan it, and the results are catastrophic. At first, the readings are erratic, then Tita reports that the needle is spinning, meaning the maximum reading is being exceeded several times over. And that's before the scanning equipment ends up setting it off, forcing Professor Russell to shut it down when it becomes apparent that it's deactivated every orbment in Zeiss except the scanner. - Mass Effect: Andromeda: The first time Ryder activates a Vault, Peebee, who is elsewhere at the time, calls in to tell Ryder the readings are off the chart. Then she apprehensively adds "really, really off the chart." Turns out Ryder also activated a security system, and everyone has to run for their lives. - In Mega Man Legends, after grabbing the red refractor from the Lake ruins, Roll suddenly calls you up in alarm saying she just picked up a reaverbot signal. Roll: Mega Man! I just picked up a reaverbot signal! It came out of nowhere! It's a big one! The readings are going off the scale! - When Protectors of the Plot Continuum are on a mission, and Canon Defilement readings are off the scale, it is generally a good idea to throw one's Canon Analysis Device away before it goes kablooie. - According to Rational Wiki, irony meters have a habit of exploding when this trope comes into effect. - Chakona Space features the contributor series, Tales of the Folly. This trope happens several times including at least one hanging lampshade. - A rather terrifying nonfiction example could be found in the now sadly defunct blog, "Random Acts of Reality" by a London Ambulance Service EMT. On one occasion he transported a patient whose blood pressure was so high that the monitor couldn't accurately measure it and glitched out. Not surprisingly, the driver had the lights and siren on for that trip to the ER. - The SCP Foundation grades anomalous objects on one of three levels: Safe (objects that are easily contained and if left to their own devices pose little threat to humanity), Euclid (objects that are not provably hostile, but whose limits and the exact nature of their powers are unknown, thus they might be dangerous) and Keter (objects that are extremely and actively dangerous, even under containment, and are often very difficult or even impossible to contain). A rare few SCP objects are so dangerous and/or bizarre that the community has had to make up a new classification beyond Keter: Apollyon (only one canon SCP object has this designation, and it is capable of causing XK-class End of the World Scenarios \|\|and the Foundation has no known way to stop it or even slow it down\|\|). - SCP-3812 is a Reality Warper that cannot be detected by Foundation equipment specifically designed to measure distortions to reality. Unusually for this trope, this isn't because SCP-3812's level of reality distortion is too low or too high to be measured, but because \|\|it isn't distorting it's own reality: it's distorting it's own fictional narrative\|\|. - The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles: Tebow notes that his performance in the Broncos vs. Chiefs game on November 13th, 2011 was so bizarre that his passer rating afterwards was 102.6—a wildly unintuitive result from a game where he only attempted eight passes and only completed two of them. In a life of goofy left-handed football accomplishments, I consider that game to be stranger than anything I'd ever done to that point. I necessitated the sort of lopsided pass-run imbalance that the NFL hadn't seen in over 30 years. I completed only two passes. I somehow won, and I somehow finished with a great passer rating. I played so strangely that numbers lost their meanings.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverNineThousand
Shot/Reverse Shot - TV Tropes A common method of shooting dialogue: repeated Over the Shoulder shots interrupted by the occasional Medium Two-Shot. This technique is often employed as a method of convenience; if it's impossible to get both of the actors together to film a shot, Over the Shoulder can be used with stand-ins who look, from behind, similar to the absent actor to complete the scene. This is a standard technique from The Golden Age of Hollywood. Pick a major-studio film from the era before Cinemascope, any of them, and you'll find an example of this technique. ## Examples: - Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu had a variation on this, filming conversations in shot-reverse shot sequences where each person in the conversation was centered and looking straight at the camera, rather than the over-the-shoulder style that is seen far more often. - The prevalence of this approach in '30s-'40s film noir movies made it possible for Steve Martin to "act" with Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Laughton, etc. in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. - The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring gets across Galadriel's ability to see into the Fellowship's mind by cutting between an Extreme Close-Up of her eyes and then a member of the Fellowship. This goes on for each of them until we cut back to her from Frodo's face, when we hear her speaking telepathically into her mind. - Done to excellent effect in Mulholland Dr. as seen in the page image — unlike most movies, the camera is not stationary on a tripod, but ever so slowly floats eerily up and down through space, as if the film itself is slowly becoming entirely detached from reality. - Some highly anticipated movies film actors in roles meant to be a surprise for the audience with Shot/Reverse Shot so the actor can be filmed separately from the rest of the cast and crew, dramatically decreasing the chance of a leak. This is probably why a scene from Spider-Man: No Way Home featuring a surprising new character was shot this way. \|\|The character in question, Tobey Maguie's Spider-Man, is never seen in a wide shot of the house he's supposed to have walked into.\|\| - Star Wars: - Used to illustrate the Psychic Link between Rey and Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi. Each is filmed as though talking to the other in the same location, even when separated by vast distances. - Any scene that involved both twins interacting in The Patty Duke Show. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer: - The episode "Lie to Me" from the second season features this ad nauseam in the outside-the-school discussion between Buffy and Ford. - Angel's appearance in the series finale was filmed that way because David Boreanaz was only available for a short time. - There was a Buffy/Giles graveyard scene which used Sarah Michelle Gellar's stunt double accompanied by looped lines for the shots that were over Buffy's shoulder. - Michael and Hurley's conversation in season 6 of Lost were filmed this way, presumably because they only had Harold Perrineau for a short time. - The field interviews in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are usually filmed this way.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverOverTwoShot
Hauled Before a Senate Subcommittee - TV Tropes Jack Ryan: Who authorized this? Ritter: I'm sure they'll ask you that. Jack Ryan: Who authorized it? Ritter: "I have no recollection, Senator." The United States Congress is one of the most powerful legislative bodies in the world. It has an oversight capacity that is quite simply huge and investigates pretty much every aspect of American government policy through a system of permanent and ad-hoc committees. These committees have the power to issue subpoenas and compel relevant officials to testify under oath. While most often rather boring and tedious for most involved, at times they've become high political theater, with some instances (HUAC, Watergate) becoming etched in modern history. Of course the members of the committee have a tendency to act like every last one of these committees is of the utmost importance. Thus if they are at all connected to the government, our heroes can count on having to answer to Congress at some point or another for their actions. While matters such as government corruption, terrorism, or military operations are close to Truth in Television, you more likely will see congressional oversight committees dealing with everything from the undead to alien species. Even when not in play directly, this trope may affect a work, as the bosses try to avert being hauled in for a hearing by sweet-talking some senator or representative. Most often the chair of the committee in question. So this is why you see a senator getting a guided tour of the Elaborate Underground Base. Just make sure the committee's head isn't in bed with a high-ranking executive of the company they are meant to be investigating. Or otherwise working with the villains. Despite the name, this trope also covers investigations carried out by other legislatures, real or fictional. For example, the British Parliament has permanent Select Committees that investigate certain areas, including public accounts, hence this page's use of the committee hearing from Skyfall as the heading image. Some examples might not even be legislatures, as long as they concern the nominal governing body with a committee. For obvious reasons, this is mostly an American and British trope, due to the way The Common Law works, something that it's very difficult to replicate in other legal systems. ## Examples: - One of the later Diet Pepsi commercials featuring Ray Charles saw him and the Raylettes in front of a subcommittee trying to figure out what the "secret ingredient" is that gave Diet Pepsi an unfair advantage. The only answer given is "Uh-huh!" - In Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Yang Wen-li is dragged into an Inquiry committee by the Free Planets Alliance's High Council without any legal basis, ostensibly over his actions during the civil war and his personality. In practice, it's an excuse by the Council to discredit him, fearing his growing influence at the expense of doing their own jobs. Yang, however, sees through the pretensions and grills them in turn, even threatening to resign if not for the Empire's invasion. - In Super Munchkin, one of the curse cards ("traps" in Super Munchkin's terminology) is a congressional hearing, which is rather costly on the victim. - Steve Rogers (Captain America) faces the Committee on Super Human Activities, who demand that he work only for them since the U.S. government legally owns the CA identity. He quits instead. (And his replacement, John Walker, is such a jerk, he nearly ruins the reputation of Captain America; still, Walker later becomes a somewhat decent hero as U.S. Agent.) - Tony Stark (Iron Man) faces a senate committee himself in a 1960s story and the questioning proves so long and arduous that Stark collapses on the stand. When an attending doctor opens Stark's shirt, he finds his chestplate/external pacemaker and it is finally exposed to the world that the tycoon is a very sick man. - Watchmen: Several of the original Minutemen are dragged in front of the (once-real) House Un-American Activities Committee. Hooded Justice refuses to participate and vanishes without a trace. To the story's modern day (1985) nobody knows who he was. The prequel, Before Watchmen, eventually reveals \|\|he was framed for several crimes by The Comedian and killed in battle with the other Minutemen.\|\| - The Justice Society of America (the Justice League's predecessors) were called before a committee and accused of being Communist sympathizers. Depending on the continuity, this may have been the actual Senator McCarthy or a substitute. They chose to disband and retire rather than comply with the new Super Registration Act. Later, we get to see an alternate universe where the JSA did sign up. (It didn't end well.) - In a tie-in with Infinite Crisis, Superman gets to experience this moment during something of a "Freaky Friday" Flip with his Earth-2 counterpart Kal-L. Where the other Society members refuse to reveal their identities, Superman does and states that he's ashamed to be an American because it got this far. - In the miniseries Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles, Hanna-Barbera character Snagglepuss is re-envisioned as a closeted gay playwright during the '50s (essentially Tennessee Williams). In the first pages of the book, he is being grilled by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and clearly not taking it seriously at all. When asked if he was a member of the Communist Party he replies, "Lord of heaven, no! I don't even go to parties anymore!" He's called in again during the climax of the story, with the committee now planning to fully ruin him. \|\|They succeed, but not before he gives them all a "The Reason You Suck" Speech on how they're ruining America in their attempt to protect it.\|\| - In Dastardly & Muttley, General Harrier gets hauled before a Senate committee in order to explain his part in the chaos surrounding the Unstabilium. - This happened to Rat in a Pearls Before Swine arc when he marketed a "weight loss method" that consisted of climbing into a cardboard box and remaining inside until they lost weight. - Also happened to Opus in Bloom County; he ends up literally getting labelled a liberal (multiple times..) - A classic Doonesbury arc, way back in Vietnam War days, had soldier B.D.'s friend (and Viet Cong terrorist — It Makes Sense in Context) Phred organizing Congressional testimony by Vietnamese villagers. - Evangelion 303: The Black Project Evangelion is overseen by a Senate committee. Gendo and Fuyutsuki often appear before the committee to report about the progress and state of the project, answer queries or assuage concerns, since the committee's members are always complaining about funding, the state of the program and some of them would love an excuse for shutting it down (although to be fair, their concerns are not without merit). - At the end of Book 1 of Event Horizon: Storm of Magic, The Company is made to appear before the U.N. Security Council and \|\|justify their actions in helping cause a civil war in Westeros\|\|. - HERZ: Misato often has to appear before committees and general councils to argue about and often against- using HERZs Evangelions in a war. In a chapter, she talked before a committee to dissuade them from using Unit 01 in the Congo crisis. - Once More with Feeling: After Shinji and Asuka engaged the Sixth Angel and that battle resulted in the loss of thousands of lives and the sinking of dozens of warships, one of the members of Seele was dragged before the US Senate on no fewer than four occasions to answer some heated questions. - The second half of Book Four of RealityCheck's Nyxverse series Alicornundrum has Equestria placed on trial by the Council of Celestial Stewards for the actions of Nyx in causing Night Eternal to last for several weeks over Equestria, and subsequently causing trouble in other parts of the world because of the Sun constantly hanging over them at that same time. All of the Princesses are brought before the Council to answer for what happened and to try finding a way to properly solve this issue. - RWBY: Destiny of Remnant: In Chapter 27's flashbacks, Headmaster Ozpin was hauled before the Vale Council to answer for the events that had happened in Volumes 1 - 3. - In Origins, the director of the Republic Intelligence Service is called to testify before a closed session of the Intelligence Committee. He tells them very little, much to the chagrin of the politicians involved. - Shinji And Warhammer 40 K: In chapter 22 the main characters have to come before a Government committee to explain what happened in Tokyo-3 during the attack of Matarael. - This is Harry's main concern at the beginning of Broken Souls, as a dead German national on British soil is sure to stir up trouble. When it spirals into a Government Conspiracy things get even worse. - Bob Lee Swagger: In Targeted, Bob Lee is hauled before a subcommittee investigating the use of force against terrorists. It's portrayed as an utterly cynical re-election ploy by several Smug Snake Straw Liberals. - Most of the plot of Kitty Goes to Washington, the second book of the series. In the first book, the Masquerade was broken, revealing the existence of vampires and werewolves to the general public, in large part by Kitty herself. In the second book, the Senate wants details straight from the source. - In a Brad Thor novel, a conniving Democratic senator tries to get Scot Harvath up before one of these, just so she can humiliate the President and get herself into the Presidency. She nearly succeeds due to her having an affair with a CIA member who gives her all the classified info. \|\|Fortunately, she gets caught and is forced from office while her little source of info gets a hefty jail sentence.\|\| - In the Wild Cards books, the Red Scare of The '50s was supplemented by a fear of super-powered Aces, resulting in the Senate Committee on Ace Resources and Activities (SCARE). The committee's ruthless attacks on Aces parallel McCarthyism. - Gets referenced several times throughout The Laundry Files in relation to the British government, because the protagonists work for a beyond-top-secret intelligence agency tasked with upholding a lovecraftian Masquerade, any breach of which would almost certainly lead to mass civilian casualties and very uncomfortable questions being asked in the aftermath. - City of Light: Ravidel Shand is called to answer (false) charges before the senate of Palidia. So are the main characters at a later date. - Ben Safford Mysteries: Congressman Ben Safford isn't on every committee investigating wrongdoing in the series, but when he is, and he tends to play a more active role in solving the mystery, but he does sit through some interesting proceedings. He sits on a committee uncovering the mechanisms of institutional Medicare fraud in The Attending Physician (at one point, it's being interrupted by a process server telling the testifying doctor that he's being sued), and is chagrined when the scandal reaches his hometown. In Epitaph for a Lobbyist, his committee tries to figure out which congressman a murdered lobbyist bribed to rig a vote. - 24: - Jack Bauer appears before a Senate Committee at the beginning of Day Seven. - In the Expanded Universe, David Palmer used his influence in such a sub-committee to authorise "Operation Nightfall". A House Committee investigated the events of Day One and the report was "leaked" to form a book called 24: The Official Investigation. - The Unit - JAG. The first Secretary of the Navy in the series, Alexander Nelson, gets called before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to answer for his unauthorized intelligence activities carried out by JAG lawyers and not by intelligence professionals. Ironically enough, the Chairman of the Committee, Edward Sheffield, ends up becoming his successor. - Airwolf has Archangel showing the eponymous chopper to a congressional demonstration when Dr. Moffett steals it, killing several people and blinding Archangel in one eye. - Stargate SG-1: Senator Kinsey, who chairs the committee that sets the SGC's budget. A later episode has Hammond figure out why Kinsey is pushing for the Stargate to be handed over to the NID when he learns he's moved to the committee that directly controls that. - Later episodes include other instances, including one involving a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations before which General Landry and Vala Mal Doran appear. \|\|Vala accuses the chairman of the Committee of Compensating for Something; Landry is not amused.\|\| - The West Wing has several arcs where Josh, Leo, and almost every other character were dragged to testify before a committee or another. - From the episode Ways and Means: C.J.: Leo, we need to be investigated by someone who wants to kill us just to watch us die. We need someone perceived by the American people to be irresponsible, untrustworthy, partisan, ambitious, and thirsty for the limelight. Am I crazy or is this not a job for the U.S. House of Representatives? - Wiseguy. Happens twice to Vinnie Terranova, first to report on the CIA's use of Arms Dealer Mel Profitt to take over a communist nation, then when he was used as the scapegoat for a Government Conspiracy to ruin the Japanese economy with counterfeit yen. As the senator who cross-examined him on the first occasion turned out to be involved in the second conspiracy, it was definitely a case of "I'm sure they'll ask you that." - Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister both occasionally called for Hacker or Sir Humphrey to be called before a Select Committee of Parliament, where their stories would frequently do one another no good. On the other hand, the one time they showed up together, it was apparently a victory for the both of them. - The UK also has "public inquiries". In one episode of Yes, Prime Minister Sir Humphrey told Hacker there would be a public inquiry into recent leaks. Hacker replied, "I don't want a public inquiry! I want to find out who's responsible!" - Dollhouse features a US Senator, Daniel Perrin, who is investigating Rossum Corporation and plans to use Mellie (the former "November") as a star witness. Worried that his attractive blonde wife is in fact an Active, Paul Ballard goes over to their house and uses a device that renders Actives highly dazed and gives them nosebleeds. It has no effect on her, but then the horrible truth is revealed... \|\|the senator is the Active.\|\| - In The X-Files two-part episode "Tunguska" and "Terma," Agent Scully is forced to testify before a Senate committee about the death of a diplomat who'd been carrying black oil in a diplomatic pouch. When she refuses to disclose Agent Mulder's whereabouts, she's briefly jailed for contempt. Needless to say perhaps, the committee's chairman is connected to the Syndicate. - One episode of Quantum Leap ("Honeymoon Express") revolves around Al being called before a subcommittee to account for the doings of Project Quantum Leap. The committee is incredulous at his testimony at first and threatens to cut off their funding, so Al tries to get Sam to do something in the past that will show that he's actually back there and they're not just lying to get funding. \|\|Turns out in the leap Sam is in, he helped a young woman gain confidence to become a lawyer and later run for congress. This causes the Hanging Senator chairing the hearing to suddenly be replaced by a future version of the woman Sam helped, who approves more funding for the project.\|\| - In the first episode of Fringe season 2 (A New Day in the Old Town), Broyles is called to Washington to appear before a Senate subcommittee. They tell him that the lack of definitive results produced by the Fringe Division is unacceptable, and are poised to shut the division down until Peter gives them a broken shapeshifting device used by \|\|the shapeshifter who killed Charlie\|\|. Subverted across most of the rest of the series where over-seeing Senators, and pretty much all other authority figures, are almost refreshingly reasonable. \|\|At one point in Season 4 Agent Broyles even volunteers to turn a world-changing decision over to the relevant committee, only for them to hand it right back to the joint Fringe Team/Division experts. At the end of the series Broyles is hauled before the Senator . . . who blandly congratulates him on a job well done and pours resources on him.\|\| - This happened to the FYI crew in an episode of Murphy Brown. - 30 Rock has Jack Donaghy brought before House committees to defend NBC's commitment to diversity and later the takeover by Kabletown. - "The Rundown Job" on Leverage starts with a colonel before a congressional committee about teams he's put together to take care of various threats, but which crossed agency lines without authorization. He's warned not to do it again, and so when a terrorist threat against Washington, D.C. comes up, he turns to the Leverage team to handle it. - Due to the fallout from the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode opens with Maria Hill just exiting a Congressional hearing, talking on the phone with \|\|her new boss, Pepper Potts\|\| before being drawn into a confrontational discussion with Melinda May. - The last season of The Thick of It culminated in an inquiry on the culture of leaking in government, leading to \|\|Malcolm Tucker's downfall\|\| - "Testimony", the penultimate episode of Veep's fourth season, is told in Scrapbook Story style through recorded legal depositions and C-SPAN segments of Selina's crew in front of a congress hearing, shuffling the blame around for a government data breach that's been season's Plot Arc. - Episode "Apollo 1" in From the Earth to the Moon dramatizes the Senate hearings into the launch pad fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The main prosecutor, Senator Walter Mondale, is shown to have a nuanced opposition to the Apollo program, but astronaut Frank Borman's testimony at the end is shown as instrumental in convincing the committee to let it continue, ending with "I think you should stop this witch hunt and let us go to the Moon." - BrainDead: Learning that his sister is being subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques for information on alleged terrorism, Luke Healy attempts to contact the FBI director to get him to release Laurel. When the director denies holding Laurel, Luke uses his power to summon the director to an impromptu meeting of the intelligence committee. - Episode 7 of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey depicts Clair Patterson, the man who uncovered the lead pollution crisis while calculating the age of the Earth, setting off one of these by sending papers on papers to various officials. One senator takes note and convenes hearings, and the scene cuts between the dueling testimony of Patterson and the "industry expert" Robert Kehoe. Patterson's evidence won out. - The Good Detective: Yoo Jeong-ryeol and Oh Jong-tae are both hauled before a government committee where they are grilled over the former, a government minister, granting the latter, a very shady businessman, a lucrative real estate contract. - In one episode of Jake 2.0, Jake and his team are brought to the NSA's emergency inquiry board over the theft of a classified biological weapon. However, Jake is disgusted when the inquiry's real aim is to make Angela Hamilton, the actual thief who only stole the biological weapon to trick and get revenge against the man who used said weapon on her family, as a scapegoat and send her to a foreign prison to cover up the US's involvement of selling biological weapons to their allies. In the end, Jake blackmails the inquiry to free Angela on the threat of sending the board's inquiry transcription to the press using his nanites. - Played with repeatedly in Government Procedural Korean series Chief of Staff. Corrupt Corporate Executive Kim Hyeon-soo of Bugang Electronics is hauled before a committee in Ep. 1.2...but committee chairman Assemblyman Jo is a Corrupt Politician in Bugang's pocket, and he disallows questions. Honest politician Seon-yeong, also on the committee, has to figure out how she can around this. In a later episode, the Minister of Justice has to testify before the audit committee, and when he's caught in a lie, his position opens up for Song Hee-seop, who is even more corrupt. - There's several of these in Alias: in one instance, various characters are called to a committee convened after Irina Derevko, former leader of one of the series' many nebulous evil organizations, seemingly broke her arrangement with the government; in another, series Big Bad Arvin Sloane was called before a committee for the same reason. In both cases, the characters are able to escape punishment thanks to behind-the-scenes extortion by other parties. - Plays a climactic role Nikita, as Nikita herself is called before a Senate committee to give her account of her role in the U.S. president's assassination and subsequent rescue (it's complicated, hence the committee) and essentially her entire life as an assassin. However, this is ultimately more theater than anything: the Senate had privately obtained a more unvarnished version of the truth some days earlier, and what Nikita is there to do is sell a palatable version of it to the public. Ultimately, it works out for Nikita, as she is able to relate what she considers to be the shameful truth of her circumstances to the world at large, only to find that the bulk of the public considers her good and heroic regardless of her history. - Mentioned by Dave Barry in a column about kid's toys. The little boy on your list can have hours of carefree childhood fun with this G.I. Joe set, engaging in realistic armed-forces adventures such as having G.I. Joe explain to little balding congressional committee figures how come he had to use his optional Action Shredder accessory. - In The Complete History Of America Abridged, Lucy Ricardo tells Spade Diamond she's worried because a government committee is out to investigate Ricky: "We think it's because he's Cuban and there's this Cold War on. Waahh!!" Spade tells Lucy that they'll let Ricky go if she gives them a scapegoat. Lucy decides that she'll name her landlords, Fred and Ethel Rosenberg. - This was the focus of an entire episode of Celebrity Deathmatch, which combined the elements of a Clip Show and a Take That! directed at several current members of Congress, including Ted Kennedy (who orchestrated the whole thing), Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Trent Lott, Orrin Hatch, Phil Gramm, Richard Shelby, and Strom Thurmond. Nick and Johnny were arguing about the show's violent content, and after the Senate actually ruled in their favor, Kennedy - who opposed that ruling - went nuts, beat the crap out of most of the rest of the Senate, and then got his ass kicked by Steve Austin. (It's a weird show.) - The Dilbert animated series has Dogbert persuading Congress to consolidate all holidays into a single holiday — Dogbert Day. It happens in the comic strip a few times too, namely when Dogbert becomes a Supreme Court nominee. - A late episode of Animaniacs has Slappy, Skippy, and the Warners present at a congressional event where Reef Blunt of the Federal Television Agency celebrates the infamous E/I laws — Slappy says "we're ruined", and the Warners declare it to be the "end of civilization as we know it". To twist the knife further, Blunt makes Slappy tone down the violence in favor of assembling a non-violent "problem solver" machine. When Skippy comes home with a black eye from the school bully, Slappy wants Skippy to simply use a mallet on him. Skippy points out if they do that, they'll simply "get dragged into another congressional hearing". - Any large-scale administrative or governmental cock-up in a democratic society will almost invariably end up in front of one of these or their functional equivalent. Whether they're actually convened to deal with a problem, or simply an opportunity for the opposition to grandstand, is a crap shoot. - In non two-party democracies (e.g. Germany) the opposition parties will most likely blame it all on the government and the ruling party/ies will pretend nothing happened or at the very least they did nothing wrong. If both sides agree that something seriously has gone wrong, it most likely has. - The modern Trope Codifier in the United States is probably the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose hearings on alleged Communist infiltration of American government and society were widely televised and played a major role in shaping the Red Scare of the '40s and '50s. note : While Joseph McCarthy has become the modern poster-child for the era's Red-baiting, and also made use of televised hearings to boost his profile, he was a Senator and officially unaffiliated with HUAC - though he was friend and mentor to several of its hatchet-men. Notably, their investigations into Communist presence of Hollywood led to a great deal of attention, if only due to the well-known movie stars, directors and writers called to testify. More substantially, their hearings on State Department aide Alger Hiss for espionage proved a major career boost for Richard Nixon, then an obscure Congressman from California. Eventually in the 1960s, this committee called in the Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and instantly regretted it with those two making a mockery of the proceeding and nothing the Committee could do could either stop or intimidate them. - The Senate's Kefauver and McClellan Committee hearings on organized crime in the '50s, which directly inspired the aforementioned scenes in The Godfather, Part II. While the hearings ostensibly focused on corruption in the labor movement and various industries, they just as often showed the inner workings and extent of the American mob, heretofore relatively unknown to the public at large (to the point where FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of the Mafia). As with HUAC's hearings on Communism, these investigations became also a major career springboard for several Senators involved, notably Estes Kefauver (who ran twice for president based largely on his fame as a "gang buster"), John F. Kennedy, his brother Bobby (who served as committee counsel and gained attention sparring with Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa), and Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, a later presidential nominee. It wasn't until local cops raided a Criminal Convention in 1957 that forced Congress and the FBI to investigate The Mafia and its involvement in labor racketeering just as they did with communism. - In 1963, after Joe Valachi became the first mobster to break the Mafia's code of silence and reveal its existence, omertà, Congressional hearings led by Senator John McClellan (D-AR) were held on organized crime activities across the United States. It exposed the Mafia through Valachi's televised testimony, who gave a good glimpse of its inner workings. - The Ervin Committee during the Watergate Scandal, a specially-appointed bipartisan committee of seven Senators. Its hearings unraveled key details of the Watergate cover-up, notably in the testimony of Nixon aides John Dean (who recounted Nixon's involvement in the cover-up in extreme, and damning detail) and Alexander Butterfield (who revealed the existence of the White House taping system). As with HUAC and the Kefauver hearings, they received near-constant coverage on television during the summer of 1973 and played a crucial role in focusing public attention on the scandal. - The Ur-Example is the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, formed during the Civil War. It was a thorn in the side of President Abraham Lincoln, being staffed with Radical Republicans who didn't think Lincoln was fighting the war aggressively enough. - The Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program was created during World War II, to investigate inefficiency and outright war profiteering that sprung from the massive increase in military spending. Unlike Lincoln, Roosevelt was able to make sure an ally (Harry S. Truman) was chair of the committee (thus resulting in it being better known as the Truman Committee), at least until stepping down to become Vice President. The committee continued for a few years even after the war ended, and most famously in 1947 Howard Hughes was called before the committee to explain why so much money had been spent on aircraft he'd designed that failed to materialize before the end of the war. Hughes managed to completely take control of the hearing, embarrassing chairman Ralph Brewster with accusations of corruption. This was likely the inspiration for Tony Stark's performance in the Iron Man 2 Senate hearing, seeing as Stark's character note : A brilliant but eccentric inventor who's a womanizer and the world's richest man. is heavily based on Hughes. - The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and its equivalent, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. - Happened to Colonel Stanislav Petrov after infamous near-miss with nuclear war in 1983. His being relieved of duty and placed on administrative leave is sometimes mistakenly interpreted as his being punished, but in fact the closest he came to that was a semi-formal reprimand for improperly recording the incident in his duty log. (The official reward he was promised by his CO never materialised either, but c'est la vie.) Regardless, the committee ultimately concluded that Petrov had acted properly and he was reinstated. - The UK has public inquiries, the UK equivalent. While it's often used for planning large-scale construction like highways, the more notable handle the same duties as the Senate Sub Committees, such as public transport disasters (most notably the sinking of the Titanic) or outbreaks of E-Coli. Perhaps most spectacular was the Leveson Inquiry, into News International's note : A part of News Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch culture of phone hacking and wider journalistic ethics. Since several celebrities and other public figures were hacked, they were called on to give evidence; everybody from J. K. Rowling to Hugh Grant to the parents of Madeline McCann. Of course, the biggest part of this inquiry was how it was the Creator Killer of News of the World note : Long story short, journalists hired a private investigator to hack the voice mail of a missing teenager who later turned up dead which essentially tampered with the police's investigation. - Many fans of professional sports games that have teams in different states (baseball, football, etc.) wonder why the Senate (or House for that matter) would get involved in sports scandals, such as the steroid/HGH scandal in baseball in the mid-2000s. Since they make the rules (hey, it's supposed to be their job), they have determined that sports fall under their jurisdiction of "commerce across state lines." - After the sinking of the RMS Titanic, the U.S. and British governments both convened inquiries into what lead to the disaster. The Titanic survivors were called to testify before both and in the U.S., the inquiry was conducted by an actual Senate subcommittee. The findings of these inquiries would help codify modern maritime safety procedures to prevent such a disaster from ever happening again.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OversightCommittee
One-Hit Polykill - TV Tropes Liara: Did you really take out three Blue Suns mercenaries with one bullet? Garrus: No, of course not. The third guy had a heart attack. Not fair to count him. Otherwise known as overpenetration in gun-play circles, this happens when a bullet doesn't stop in a body or object once fired. This can happen when one uses armor-piercing rounds on soft targets, but it is more Truth in Television than you might think, even without rifles explicitly using high-powered armor piercing rounds. One of the rules of weapons safety requires a shooter to know what is behind a target and always assume that a bullet will overpenetrate the first target and still retain lethal velocity. Also a common weapon or Power-Up in Shoot 'Em Up games, especially when you've got a Charged Attack. Contrast Bulletproof Human Shield, where the bullets should be able to do this but somehow don't. Also contrast Guns Are Worthless; a game's failure to implement (over)penetration may be a contributing factor to that. ## Examples: - In Asterix and the Cauldron, Obelix achieves a non-fatal, non-gun version of this; while Asterix fights with the crooked chief Whosemoralsarelastix one-on-one in a swordfight, Obelix manages to knock out most of the warriors in Whosemoralsarelastix's village with a single punch as they were all charging towards him in basically a straight line (the only villager still standing afterwards is the one at the very back of the queue). - At the end of the Grendel Tales story "The Devil May Care", Dana, after having been forced to kill her own son in self-defence and seeing her city reduced to ruins by the fall-out of her affair with Hack, kisses him and shoots them both through the head with a single bullet. - In a Bronze-Age Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen tale Supes tossed a rock through seven of Victor Volcanum's pseudo-men robots, taking them all out with one throw. - In ''Bullet Points" the entire story hinges on the idea that the Marvel Universe is changed when Professor Erskine is shot by a Nazi spy 24 hours earlier than he was in the mainstream Marvel universe. This actually causes two direct changes though, as the Nazi spy not only gets Erskine, but a young army private guarding him named Ben Parker. It's arguable which one is more important. - Parodied in Rango, where Rango claims to have killed the Jenkins brothers with one bullet only to find out there were seven of them. He then has to make up an incredibly contrived tale of how such a thing could possibly happened, involving lots a richocheting and the last brother simply dying of infection. \|\|And they believe him.\|\| - In The Thief and the Cobbler, \|\|this overlaps with Disaster Dominoes, as Tack the cobbler uses a well-fired tack to destroy One-Eye's war machine and his army.\|\| - In The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, there's a story-within-a-story about an outlaw called Rattlesnake Jake. At one point he shoots a sheriff with a bullet which goes right through the sheriff and ricochets off several other objects before hitting (and killing) a bear. - The Brave Little Tailor famously killed "seven at one blow!" Unfortunately, he neglects to correct people's mistake when they assume he killed seven giants at one blow. It was actually seven flies. - Destroyermen: In Distant Thunders, Silva MacGyvers a flintlock rifle out of a salvaged anti-aircraft gun from the Japanese cruiser Amagi, which he nicknames the Doom Whomper. This weapon fires a quarter-pound, 1-inch-diameter minie ball, which Silva likes to use to amuse himself by trying to see how many "rhino-pigs" he can kill with a single bullet. - Daffyd manages to pull this off with a longbow in The Dragon on the Border. It's only possible because the Hollow Men are suits of armor with no body in them, and he designed a special arrow intended to pierce armor and keep going, which would be useless against any other opponent. - Barely averted in Flag in Exile. During Honor's exile on the planet Grayson, an attempt is made on her life. An assassin fires at her, hitting her in the chest. Her jerkin is fortunately thick enough to stop the bullet, but only because it went through someone else first and was slowed enough by passing through one body that it lost a lot of its penetrating force. - Used in the climax of the first Left Behind book, where the Antichrist displays his power by shooting two people with one bullet... and then makes everyone forget that this happened. Don't question how something that nobody remembers counts as a display of power. Also don't question how he pulled off this trick with a low-caliber hollow-point bullet, or how everyone accepted it was a murder-suicide. - In John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenata, rounds fired from the rail guns used by the ACS, traveling not much slower than the speed of light, will rip through multiple Posleen before running out of kinetic energy. - "Muck-a-Muck," Bret Harte's parody of The Leatherstocking Tales, exaggerates Natty Bumppo's marksmanship this way: The crack of a rifle rang through the woods. Three frightful yells were heard, and two sullen roars. Five animals bounded into the air and five lifeless bodies lay upon the plain. The well-aimed bullet had done its work. Entering the open throat of the grizzly it had traversed his body only to enter the throat of the California lion, and in like manner the catamount, until it passed through into the respective foreheads of the bull and the buffalo, and finally fell flattened from the rocky hillside. - Invoked in Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard books when fighting the Mongols with shots from the steam-powered machine guns often blasting through 3-4 men at a time. - A minor example is seen in the first Winnetou novel when Old Shatterhand faces off against the Kiowa chieftain Tangua in a formal gun duel over previous grievances (using rifles rather than pistols, mind). Wanting to punish but not actually kill his antagonist, he announces that he's going to shatter the Kiowa's right knee, which the latter scoffs at. Then Tangua makes the mistake of turning sideways to offer a smaller target profile, ignores a warning about that as well, and as predicted by his protagonist opponent consequently takes the bullet through both knees instead... - The Wheel of Time has a supernatural version in the "Arrows of Fire" spell, which produces superheated filaments that punch through their target, carry through to anything behind them, and flicker over to a new set of targets. Rand's ability to maintain a hundred Arrows simultaneously is part of what makes him a Person of Mass Destruction. - Angel: - Non-lethal version in the episode "The Magic Bullet." Fred manages to free Angel from Jasmine's spell by shooting a bullet through Jasmine and into Angel, thus exposing him to her blood. Yes, it's named after the Kennedy bullet theory. - An earlier episode had Angel's cop friend going after a serial-killer vampire shortly after she discovered Angel's past (and thus no longer trusted him). Angel is also trying to stop the other vampire and struggling with him when the cop takes a rather large wooden beam and shoves it through both of their abdomens. She hits the serial-killer in the heart (turning him to dust), but Angel survives the blow and comments that she missed his heart. Turns out she wasn't going for this trope after all and missed on purpose because she had decided to trust him again. - An episode of CSI involves a shoot-out at a store between a cop and several armed robbers. At the end, the cop manages to kill all the robbers, but an innocent woman is also killed. At the end, it's revealed that the cop was tracking a moving robber and fired when he cleared an aisle. The bullet passed through the running robber and hit the woman standing behind him. The cop didn't see her because he was too focused on the robber. The cop got a medal. - In Battlestar Galactica (2003), during the liberation of New Caprica, Galactica is heavily outnumbered by FOUR Cylon baseships. Then Lee pulls a Big Damn Heroes by bringing in the Pegasus. Eventually the Pegasus gets torn up so Lee orders an evacuation and points the Pegasus right at a baseship. the Pegasus destroys the baseship it rams into but its hanger bay, which was blown off during the ramming, flies into another baseship, destroying it as well. - Blake's 7. In "Warlord", a secret resistance video shows bored Federation guards using the drugged population of a conquered planet for target practice, competing to shoot people as they're passing each other on parallel elevators, killing two with one shot. - Burn Notice: - Occurs in a season 6 episode when \|\|a bullet intended for Anson overpenetrates and kills Nate.\|\| - To a (slightly) less lethal degree when in an earlier season, \|\|Jesse shoots Michael through the shoulder to kill a bad guy\|\|. - In Criminal Minds 8x12: "Zugzwang", when \|\|the round fired by the unsub while committing suicide overpenetrates and kills Reid's girlfriend, done on purpose by the unsub.\|\| - Both Hernán Cortés' and Ivan the Terrible's guns were able to kill two dummies with one shot in Deadliest Warrior. - Dead Man's Gun: In "The Fortune Teller" McCrory the assayer shoots two robbers (one of them his own treacherous assistant) with a derringer which he'd purchased after Gisella's crystal ball warned him he was in danger of being robbed and murdered. His first bullet goes through both men, killing them, and McCrory doesn't need to fire a second time. - Parodied on Frasier where the cast is recreating an old radio drama with balloons being used to mimic the sound of gunshots. Niles eventually snaps at Frasier's constant direction and starts offing all of the characters. Niles: I'm just going to take this gun off the table. [fake gunshot] So long, O'Toole; I guess we'll never get to hear your fascinating piece of the puzzle. [two fake gunshots] Or yours, Kraegan and Peppo! Could the McCallister sisters stand back to back? I'm short on bullets. [fake gunshot] Thank you. - The Hexer: A few times throughout the series, Geralt manages to kill two mooks in a single slash when they try to blindly charge him. This however only works on poorly trained and unarmoured opponents. - Luke Cage (2016): In "DWYCK," Diamondback kills two of the crime bosses by shooting one through the side of the neck, the bullet then going across the table and into the head of the guy across the table. - In NCIS, Gibbs does this while shooting a hostage and her captor, with her silent go-ahead. - At one point in The Office, an irritated Michael claims if he had two bullets and was stuck with Hitler, Bin Laden, and Toby, he would shoot Toby twice. The other employees saying he went to far with the joke has him amend it so he shoots Toby and Hitler. After further complaints, Dwight claims that they could use one bullet to kill all three by lining them all up and shooting them though the throat. - Occurs in the season 1 finale of Rizzoli & Isles where \|\|Rizzoli shoots herself through the abdomen while grappling with the corrupt cop in order to shoot him.\|\| - In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, this was Lord John Roxton's greatest failure. While on safari, his brother William started getting mauled by a gorilla. John shot it, but the bullet went through and killed William as well. - In Spooks, \|\|Jo is grappling with a terrorist to stop him detonating a bomb; Ros (after Jo nods at her to take the shot) shoots the terrorist, killing them both.\|\| - In a Stargate crossover episode, the teams try to establish a wormhole between a gate in the Pegasus Galaxy to the Ori supergate in the Milky Way. This requires a massive power surge on the dialing end. Suddenly, a Wraith hive-ship appears and attacks the human battlecruiser. Realizing that the proximity of a black hole is interfering with the Wraith's transporter jamming system, the humans take their ship around the black hole. When the hive-ship is near the floating gate, they beam a nuke aboard, vaporizing the hive-ship. The surge establishes a wormhole to the supergate. Moments before, Teal'c in a Goa'uld scoutship has lured an Ori mothership over the supergate. The resulting "kawoosh" of the opening wormhole destroys the mothership. So, yeah, two ginormous warships in two different galaxies with a single nuke. - In Strike Back: Vengeance, Scott kills two Mossad agents this way. For bonus points, it was a headshot. - The Walking Dead (2010): - This trope is used to set up the big drama featuring Carl in the second season; trying to get close to a deer, Carl gets hit by a fragmented bullet when a hunter who hadn't seen the kid shoots the deer. - Rick has two dead walkers laying on top of him, with a live one on top of that. He is unable to directly shoot the third, so he shoots through the skull of one of the dead walkers. It should be noted that he fired multiple times, initially to get the barrel of his gun out through the other side of the skull, then the final shot killing the walker. - Xena: Warrior Princess has a bow and arrow example. After returning home from 10 years at sea, Odysseus has to fight off an army of mooks with his famous bow capable of cutting through 3 men. Cue a horrific set up where three randoms stand in a straight line behind each other with a precision and timing that would be the envy of any footballing defense, just in time to have a single arrow kill all of them. - The Odyssey: Our intrepid hero demonstrates this tropes with a spear on some unwanted suitors to his wife's hand. - An interesting play on this trope: Geryon has three torsos and one pair of legs, so Heracles goes to his side and shoots an arrow straight through all three torsos. - In Brikwars, if you do enough damage to count as Overkill, you not only annihilate the thing you were aiming at, but the shot also goes on to damage or destroy whatever was behind your target. - The big monsters in Call of Cthulhu don't do damage per se, they just kill a random number of victims per round (not counting the ones who are dying just by being near them). - Diana Warrior Princess) have special rules for mooks that allows damage to overflow if you take one out on to the next. This doesn't always represent shooting through someone, but if you're using a gun and you can't think of anything cooler, it often does. - Dungeons & Dragons: - Edition 3.5 has a feat and a magical weapon enhancement, either of which allows an archer to do this as long as they can keep making the attack rolls. - The game also has a melee version: Cleave. There's even a unique weapon called The Lance of the Unending Charge that lets you keep on charging until you fail to gib someone. - One of the supplement books had a spell called Greater Disrupt Undead. It was a single target spell that only hurt undead but if it killed the target and had damage leftover, the caster was allowed to make a second attack roll against another undead enemy that was on a straight-line path beyond the target, applying the excess damage to that target. This effect could keep going until you had used up all the excess damage, missed an attack, ran out of valid targets, or reached the end of the spell's range. - The spell Chain Lightning (or the Chain Spell feat, depending on what edition you're playing) applies this trope to a magical attack. - The spell Chaos Bolt has a one-in-eight chance to do this every time it hits a creature. - Any sufficiently powerful gun, laser, arrow or such can overpenetrate in GURPS but (if you're shooting it at appropriate targets) it's likely to be weakened considerably by doing so. - Hc Svnt Dracones: Weapons with the "-Annihilate" descriptor continue in a line until they've dealt a total of 1000 damage, salsaing everyone in that path. Fortunately the only weapon with that descriptor is the extremely expensive V-801 Mag Lance. - Cthulhu-like monsters in Pathfinder don't have automatic kills, but their melee hits attack anyone in the vicinity of their nominal target, and do such monumental damage that anyone not godly or epic is squished. (And, again, this is not counting the people who die or go insane simply from perceiving the monster.) - Completely averted in Star Fleet Battles, although this is quite reasonable when one considers that even two starships in the same hex are probably hundreds of kilometers apart—the precise lineup necessary for a polykill would be incredibly unlikely. On the other hand, if a shot does enough damage to completely destroy its target, the resulting explosion could do some hefty damage to nearby ships. - In Traveller the Plasma Gun, Man Portable and Fusion GMP both keep going after they hit something, applying any remaining damage (10d6 to 16d6) to whatever's next in the line. The rules note that practically any firearm can overpenetrate in this way, but it's only worth keeping track of at that level of firepower. - Warhammer: - Cannons in the game act somewhat realistically (as noted below). When the shot is fired, a landing point is determined, then the bounce. It's the bounce that usually does all the damage, especially against infantry. - Bolt throwers and certain magic bows also have a possibility to kill multiple units, but the bolt/arrow stops dead in its tracks if it doesn't kill anything. - Certain weapons in Warhammer 40,000 use special rules that specifically draws a line from the gun in the direction the player wants to fire for the duration of the range (or infinite in the case of heavier weapons or psychic powers). These were specifically made to hit multiple targets, and given that most of them either tear a hole in reality or create a black hole in the shape of a line, it tends to result in the death of its targets. In the game, it's actually harder to land multiple kills with these, as a unit is never in a straight enough line to cause enough hits to justify it; conventional ordinance weapons tend to have a larger chance to kill and hit more targets. - Warhammer Quest had the Deathblow rule: if your melee attack kills the target on the first hit, you can attack another enemy adjacent to the first, and so on until you either fail to kill an enemy or run out of targets. Against low-level mooks, it's quite common (and amusing) to wipe out a whole mob with a single swing. The video game adaptation even has an achievement for getting seven consecutive deathblows. - The Thunderbolt Laser in Agent Intercept, and how. Line up enemies correctly, and one shot of the laser is sure to earn you a Skillshot (one shot, more than one Takedown) bonus for your combo. This is shown in great detail in the side mission "Training Day," where one shot takes out 11-12 cars (judging by how many explosions there were and including the engine) of a train you've been whittling down for the whole mission. - Age of Empires II: Projectiles fired by the scorpion type siege weapons (and several other units) can do this, passing through multiple targets and damaging every one they hit. - The massively powerful maximum-level ability for archers in ADOM is just this, enabling their arrows (or even just rocks) to go on as long as they please without being stopped by creatures in their path. - The Special Weapons class in Alien Swarm gets the Piercing Bullets ability, which gives each shot fired a chance to do this. - In a non-death example, there is more than one way to get two outs at the same time in Arc Style: Baseball!! 3D (and we mean in the same split second, instantaneously, not just in the same continuous play like any ordinary double play). For example, lining out to a baseman standing on a base to which a runner must return (tag up) after the ball is caught, or lining out to an infielder diving towards a runner. - This is actually an achievement in Assassin's Creed III; the achievement goes as "killing three Mooks with a single musket instantly". You line up three mooks, stab through the first, and then shoot the second. The bullet will pass through and hit the third. That only happens if the distance is small enough. - Bloodline Champions has a number of abilities that pierce through enemies - most ultimates are capable of this. Always watch out about the formation your team is making. - Bloody Zombies allows you to kill multiple zombies with a single swing of your ranged weapons, or with explosives. When that happens your character will exclaim, "Sweet, two for the price of one!" - In the Bloons Tower Defense series, many towers fire projectiles which can pierce through several targets. Although the level of penetration is justified, as most enemies are standard balloons, it's still weird when you consider that, say, a blue bloon contains a red bloon, but an upgraded Dart Monkey throwing a dart at a bunch of blue bloons will pop only the blue layer, and it'll require a second shot to take care of the red inside. - Bloons TD makes a distinction between pierce and popping power: popping power is how many layers of one bloon a shot can pop through in one hit, and pierce is how many bloons a shot can pass through (this trope). - Zer0 of Borderlands 2 has a skill called "B0re" which allows for this to happen by allowing bullets to pierce through enemies to hit ones behind them. When this occurs the bullet also gets a massive damage buff for each enemy it pierces, making this trope even easier to pull off. It is also amazingly useful at killing gigantic bosses since it's possible for the damage bonus to apply on them multiple times. - Bulletstorm has multiple weapons that can do this. Pulling off these One Hit Polykills results in an exponential increase in points for each extra mook beyond the first two. - Call of Duty series: - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has this in spades, and players die from the effects of this trope all the time. The body of a fellow player will weaken bullets, but it won't stop them unless they have already lost a lot of momentum. For the more powerful firearms, such as the sniper rifles and the light machine guns, overpenetration is the norm. - In Modern Warfare 2, there are multiplayer challenges requiring the player to get two headshots with one bullet or two kills with one sniper shot. - Call of Duty: Black Ops ups the ante with an achievement for getting three kills with one bullet. - Many players of Call of Duty know of terrible impending deaths in multiplayer in which they saw an enemy player be in a position to shoot at them, but an ally (or allies) of the player was in the way. Due to Friendly Fireproof, you cannot harm your allies or anything behind them with bullets. The enemy can harm your allies and everything behind them (like you), though. - Some weapons in Cave Story can do this, most notably the Spur, which functions as a Frickin' Laser Beam or a Wave-Motion Gun depending on how long you charge it. - In the Munitions powerset of Champions Online, the Sniper Rifle power can take an advantage called "Tungsten Rounds", which enables it to hit up to three targets in a line up to the maximum range of the attack - against Mooks, this is often one hit polykills. - Civilization originally allowed attacking units to destroy entire stacks of units in a square, the exceptions being those within a city or in a fortress. In Civilization II, massed assaults became hard to perform based on better AI understanding of units. Starting with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Civilization III, there were attempts to make a collateral damage mechanic rather than a polykill. - In Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, GDI railguns would penetrate through anything standing between the shooter and the target (read: Friendly Fireproof isn't in effect here), dealing equal damage along anything in that line. Because of the extremely high damage output invested in every shot, a railgun is quite lethal to fragile targets. Canny gamers would then set these weapons to force-fire behind the unit or structure they wanted to kill. - Another weapon that polykills is the GDI sonic emitter, first used by GDI Disruptor tanks from the same game. It's essentially a railgun with more sophisticated rules: the emitted sonic beam takes time to reach its target, hurts less to anything in between that's not an intended target, and hurts friends and foes alike, unless it's another Disruptor. In short, it's safe to cluster Disruptors among themselves, but not with other kinds of things. This reappears as the Shatterer (and upgraded ZOCOM-only version, the Zone Shatterer) in Kane's Wrath. - Dolphins in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 also have this trait due to practically using the exact same code as the above Disruptor, just with a very short firing time to give the illusion of a projectile rather than a focused beam. Much like them and the railguns, force-firing past targets will allow you to deal more damage through multiple ships (and squids), especially against shipyards since the pulses travel through rather than stop in the middle - Command & Conquer: Renegade's multiplayer has Nod's railgun used by Raveshaw that passes through multiple enemy infantry/vehicles that are hit by it (but not through the terrain), this gives it a distinct advantage over GDI's personal ion cannon used by Sydney. - In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, Natasha's sniper shots kill any and all infantry units in their path. Force-Wave Artillery is capable of it as well, albeit every target past the first unit hit will suffer less damage. - The powered-up shot in Cosmic Gate. - The GoldSrc version of Counter-Strike exhibited this with rifles and similar weapons, which could penetrate doors, crates, ventilation ducts, and other 'thin' or 'soft' materials, players included. - In Crimsonland, some weapons naturally fire bullets that go straight through the creatures they hit, and others will do so with the help of certain perks. This is essential, given the ludicrously-sized swarms the game is known for. - In Crysis 2 you get an achievement for killing two enemies with one bullet. - GoldSrc version of Day of Defeat allowed rifles to penetrate thin cover and other players, and so its One-Hit Kill bolt-action rifles were entirely capable of killing two or even three players with one shot under the right circumstances. - The Line Gun in Dead Space fires off a meter wide cutting laser. Unlike its kid brother the Plasma Cutter, this cutting laser is not stopped when it hits a target. A well aimed shot can take off both legs of several necromorphs. - The Sniper Rifle in Dead Trigger 2, can fell two or more zombies in one shot as long as they walk in the line of fire. However, it's exclusive to the Sentinel/ Defend missions. Moreover, the Benelli (misspelled as Beneli) 828U is also capable of doing this in open-field missions despite being a shotgun. - The fusion cannon in Descent. Not only does it go through an enemy robot, the shot actually becomes stronger after doing so. - In Diablo II, the Amazon has a Bow skill called Pierce, which causes arrows to pass through multiple enemies. When combined with Strafe, which splits an arrow to hit multiple targets... carnage ensues. The necromancer's Bone Spear skill also allows overpenetration, due to how it exists partially in the Spirit World. - In older versions, this produced amusing results when used with the "guided arrow" skill - the arrow would hit the target, fly out the other side, and immediately turn around to have another go (and possibly repeat up to 5 times). - Some projectile weapons also have the Piercing Attack trait, rated 1 to 100% chance to pierce a target. The Buriza-Do Kyanon unique crossbow was the preferred weapon of many Amazons, called "Burizons", who specialized in Strafe and (when it worked) Guided Arrow. - As well as this works with bows, it works much better when the Amazon uses a Javelin. Her Lightning Fury skill makes a number of lightning bolts fly out towards the enemies and at high levels you get a very high number of bolts. Combine it with piercing and the javelin will go on to hit another target... and release the entire volley of lightning bolts again. And again. And again. The more enemies you have together the faster all of them will drop dead, making this perhaps the ultimate example. - In Diablo III, the Demon Hunter has several abilities that work like this. The Elemental Arrow, regardless of rune, is basically Area of Effect damage in a line, and some runes make that line narrow enough to resemble this. Some other shots can be modified by runes to hit multiple enemies in a straight line. However, it's unlikely to be a one hit polykill unless your character greatly outlevels the content or your targets are a very weak type of enemy. And if you kill enough enemies in one shot, you get a Mighty Blow and some extra XP, along with a badass send-off line by your character. - In Diepio, there's an entire stat, Bullet Penetration, which is responsible for just this. However, its main use is not in setting up polykills, but in allowing your bullets to pass through those of the enemy, instead of simply seeing cancelling each other out, or being overpowered by those with larger damage or a higher rate of fire. - Dirty Bomb only permits sniper rifle shots to overpenetrate enemies. - Doom: Shotgun can punch through whole columns of weak or damaged enemies in a single shot, since any dying enemy immediately becomes a non-entity to the physics engine, transparent to all of shotgun's multiple pellets. - Dragon Age: - The Scattershot archer talent in the first game also allows this, provided the enemies are weak enough. An archer can clear a whole group of Grunt type enemies with one shot—though a quirk of the mechanics means that that first shot has to targeted at something that will survive it, otherwise the spread effect doesn't happen. - The majority of blood magic seems based around crowd control. One of the most dangerous spells is one that does an ungodly large amount of damage, and spreads to other targets. Casting said spell on a crowd of Mooks usually results in a lot of dead mooks, and severely injured Elite Mooks. - Dragon Age II: Varric describes himself doing this in one of his Unreliable Narrator moments. Any rogue (besides Isabela, who cannot equip bows) can also do this in-game with the upgraded Archer's Lance talent, which travels through enemies and one-shots all "weaker opponents" it comes in contact with. - The laser in Duke Nukem II could do this. - In Eagle Island, equipping Koji with a feather obtained from Zephara grants him the ability to pass through and kill multiple enemies in a straight line when launched. - Though not actually a single shot in most cases, the turn-based nature of Fallout means that it's very rewarding to run right up close to a cluster or row of enemies with your minigun and tear their torsos to shreds in one attack (or, even more hilariously, go hand-to-hand in heavy armor amongst enemies so armed and watch as they obliterate each other.) Sadly, this also means that your "buddies" are often prone to hosing you down from behind if you give them automatics. - One NPC in Fallout: New Vegas claims to have done this if you ask how he killed 4 men with only 3 shots. It turns out that the men are just playing dead and are in on the scam. - The most powerful sniper rifles in Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 are anti-materiel rifles chambered in .50 BMG whose bullets don't stop until they've punched through quite a lot of obstacles. It doesn't even need to be a headshot unless the first target was a Heavy. Hostile outposts with their stationary guards are particularly susceptible to multiple bad guys being killed with one bullet, even if there's a wall in the way. - From the Depths models ballistics in high detail; shells can completely over-penetrate a vessel if they don't ricochet, fragment, squash, or otherwise run out of kinetic energy. Railguns are particularly apt at running straight through the entire length of a ship, especially when loaded with heavy ammo such as solid 14 meter long slugs. Particle Cannons fire subatomic particles at close to the speed of light, which can go straight through conventional defenses and out the other side. - In Gatling Gears, getting a Cannon Booster Powerup turns your cannon into a painful piercing 3-way shooter. - In Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, one of the side-effects of the sync-shot mechanics (that is, a target will die in a single bullet no matter what once you've marked and are locked onto them) allows for, with luck, players to kill an extra enemy or two beyond the maximum of four marked targets in some circumstances. - GHOST Squad offers a "Double Down" bonus for hitting two enemies with a single shot. This is only possible with shotguns and weapons with piercing properties. - GoldenEye: there are several guns that can shoot through bodies, so if the mooks are lined up right you can easily takes down multiple ones with a single shot, occasionally facilitating accuracy scores above 100%. - Same applies in the Online (and local) multiplayer. The Golden Gun has infinite penetration of players (but not walls) and is a One-Hit Kill. Even the weakest Sniper Rifle (Silenced Pavlov ASR) can go for multikills, especially if one of them is a Boom, Headshot!. - Makes some game modes, such as the Protection Mission (for the bad guys, MI6 needs to destroy it) of "Black Box" fairly easy for MI6 on the wider maps. Mainly because the default gameplay is to have one person with said box (who then moves slowly and can only use a pistol), and everybody else clusters around bristling with automatic weapons to ward off surge attacks, cue 3 or 4 deaths with a single silenced round. - All sniper rifles in Grand Theft Auto V can overpenetrate targets. The lighter models require headshots to do so, which is difficult to do in most situations, but the Heavy Sniper can pull it off no matter where the initial target was hit. - The Sawblade Cannon in GunGirl 2 exists purely to do this. One of the upgrades also increases the number of enemies the sawblade can chew through before being destroyed. Useful, since a major source of danger is gigantic hordes of zombies spawned from Clown Car Graves. - Hades: The spear throw and the bow pierce multiple enemies per hit by default. The Adamant Rail can be upgraded with piercing ammunition that lets it do it as well, while the spear and bow can be upgraded with explosive attacks that subvert this trope in return for massive area-of-effect damage focused on the primary target. - One of the world objects players can shoot with Half-Life 2's famous Gravity Gun are circular sawblades, most of which are found in the zombie-infested village of Ravenholm. Since zombies are slow, stupid and numerous, and these blades pack one hell of a punch, gibbing up to half a dozen of the shamblers with one shot is fairly easy to pull off. - Halo: - This can happen in with the sniper weapons, and you can download several people's replays of it. - Even more impressively, a single Spartan Laser shot in Halo 3 can demolish ten Warthogs at once. - On a larger scale, UNSC Super MAC orbital defense stations carry a railgun that fires slugs with sufficient force to overpenetrate a fully shielded Covenant capital ship and retain enough velocity to also kill the one behind it. - The Demonspine spell in Hellgate: London penetrates with perfect accuracy up to 30 meters, potentially killing anything in its path. - Hexen has one of the earliest truly distinctive examples in a 3D FPS: Daedolon's starting weapon, the Sapphire Wand, which combines infinite ammo, low damage, no loss of damage due to passing through an enemy, great accuracy at long range, immunity to attack reflection, and a very high chance of causing flinching. All of which means playing as a Mage involves a great deal of watching entire lines of enemies grunt and try to slowly approach through a steady stream of this trope. - One level in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin allows you to kill two targets with one shot if you line it up just right. - In Hogwarts Legacy, it's possible to learn all three of the Unforgiveable Curses, including the Killing Curse, Avada Kedavra, which can kill anything instantly. Combined with the right talents, you can upgrade it to kill multiple enemies at once. - Most The House of the Dead games give you a pistol, but The House of the Dead III gives you a shotgun that can damage multiple enemies at once. Doing so nets a "Twin Shot" bonus. - Hyperballoid: The Rail Ball bonus makes the ball break every element in one hit and not bounce off while doing so, leading to a lot of potential kills along the way. - Bullets do this sometimes in Jagged Alliance 2. In keeping with the game's complex, pseudo-realistic mechanics, this mostly happens with heavier bullets, armor-piercing rounds, and hits to unarmored enemies. - In Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony, the Beam (continuous fire) and Charge weapons (single shot) can do this. - This is very possible in JFK: Reloaded, since the point of the game is to recreate the magic bullet. - Each weapon in Kid Icarus: Uprising has a hidden statistic that determines how many times it can pass through another target before it stops. Staves are well-known for this, being essentially the sniper weapons of the game, and so are Clubs, which can often pass through walls even without the use of special powers. - In the 3D Web Game Krunker.io, it's possible to kill two players at once with a single shot from a sniper rifle. - In Armor Games' The Last Stand Web Game series, bullets from several weapons can go through (and kill) more than one zombie at a time. - The Last Stand: the sniper rifle and the Barrett rifle. - The Last Stand 2: the sniper rifle. - A large number of Champions in League of Legends have attacks that hit like this, but the most infamous is Ezreal's ultimate which, unlike most other projectiles, crosses the entire map, making it one of the few ultimates that can hit (and rarely kill) an enemy from one fountain to another, or earn a pentakill from a blind shot. - Left 4 Dead: All of the stronger weapons (including the hunting rifle) can overpenetrate, with varying amounts of effectiveness, from the "goes through anything, including walls" hunting rifle to the "as many zombies are within 50 meters" shotguns. Makes fighting those 30+ hordes of zombies easier than you'd think. - The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II has Rean one-shot three of the regular soldats with one swing as he's testing out his sword coated in Zemurian ore. - The Legend of Zelda: - MapleStory provides the page image for the trope. - If a shotgun in Marathon 2: Durandal killed a weakened enemy, it was likely to wound or kill those behind it as well, because only some of its pellets were "consumed" in the kill, and the rest immediately passed through the falling body. In the Game Mod Marathon: EVIL, the Railgun/Mass Driver was able to penetrate multiple targets regardless of their health, but also caused enough splash damage to potentially harm the player. - Mass Effect 3: - It's possible to do this with the Javelin, Widow, and Black Widow sniper rifle models by default. Add the Rifle Piercing mod and suddenly every sniper rifle becomes at least capable of doing this, the probability increasing with the higher damaging rifles like the Valiant or the Mantis. - Liara and Garrus can have a conversation discussing this trope. She asks if a story about him killing three mercinaries with one shot is true; he says he only killed two of them, and the third had a heart attack ("Not fair to count him."). - Mods that add or improve penetration exist for all weapons (in the core game for pistols, assault rifles, and shotguns, and added via DLC for submachine guns. Most guns that aren't sniper rifles lack the per-shot damage potential to score a one hit kill, but most shotguns and a few pistols and assault rifles do. Catching a group of enemies at close range with the Claymore heavy shotgun is always entertaining, with the Shredder or Heavy Barrel mods this will almost certainly result in most of the group being obliterated. With the right weapons and a little luck, it's even possible to outdo Garrus and get three (or more) kills with one bullet. This can even happen through walls. The Javelin, for example, has a native penetration of 100cm. Stacking all the penetration mods, AP ammo, etc., the penetration can max out at 6.25 metres, enough to pass through the thickest walls in the game. Provided they can see the targets, player can put rounds through metre-thick concrete and still score triple headshots. - Every firearm in Mass Effect: Andromeda can accept penetration mods that enable the gun in question to shoot through obstacles up to a certain thickness, which of course includes squishies. Actually scoring polykills is a lot harder than it was in Mass Effect 3 because even tier X mods usually can't penetrate more than about 1.2 meters, but the real problem are the fast-moving, Incredibly Durable Enemies. Your chances of lining up a killshot on multiple sufficiently weakened targets are near zero, with one amusing exception: freshly spawned enemies. Humanoid hostiles often spawn clipped into each other and stay that way until they notice you, so if you have a powerful penetrating sniper rifle handy, one long-range headshot can result in at least half a dozen headless corpses suddenly flying off in all directions. - The fully Charged Attack of Mega Man's Buster weapon is capable of doing this, provided it doesn't hit a durable target. - 1's Thunder Beam is another notable example, as are the Rolling Cutter and Fire Storm. The Ice Slasher is a semi-example; it doesn't kill most targets, but it doesn't stop when it hits them, either. - Same with 2's Metal Blade, as long as it destroys the target. Most other weapons in 2 act this way, but most are too weak to destroy most targets with one hit. The Leaf Shield, most notably, tends to be either a one-hit kill or completely ineffective against normal enemies, with nothing in between. - ROM Hack Rockman 4 Minus Infinity has the Drill Torpedo and the Water Cutter. Drill Torpedo is justified because Mega Man fires drills. Water Cutter is an ultra-focused and ultra-quick water blast. - The Metroid games' Plasma Beam. - In Minecraft, crossbows can hold an enchantment called Piercing, which allows bolts shot from the item to pass through creatures that it hits, letting one arrow potentially do the work of up to five. Two advancements invoke this: "Two Birds, One Arrow", which calls for killing two phantoms with a single shot, and the hidden advancement \|\|"Arbalistic", which calls for killing five mobs with a single Piercing IV shot (it would also count if you used a crossbow with more than Piercing IV, but that's impossible to obtain without commands).\|\| - Monster Hunter (PC) allows players to kill multiple enemies with a single projectile, if timed correctly, with the sound of a bell going off when a double or triple kill is achieved. These tends to happen the most against ghosts, blobs, or gremlins. - Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks has a version of this. When the time comes to Finish Him!, you have a couple of Multalities you can perform, which will kill all enemies within range. - In NetHack, wands of cold, fire, lightning and death fired a beam that went through any creature in its path until it ran out of range. Thus, killing multiple weak creatures chasing after you in a single file through a corridor, and not lucky enough to dodge the beam wasn't too difficult. However, a multi-kill could easily end with the shooter's death: if a beam hit a wall before its allocated range was up, it would simply bounce off it, often going directly backwards. - Ranged weapons themselves typically stopped at their target (though missing it and hitting someone right behind it was entirely possible). However, archers/crossbowmen could fire two arrows/bolts at once at a Skilled rank, and three at Expert (four if they were Rangers), while characters Expert with daggers and/or knives would throw three at once, and those bursts would easily kill several enemies. - In Nintendo Land's Zelda-based attraction, it's possible to do this with a charged arrow. If it kills the enemy it hits, it will continue on its trajectory without losing any momentum or damage. As there are more enemies if you play with a friend/s, co-op play gives plenty of opportunities to do this. Mastering this technique is absolutely necessary note : No seriously, you have no control over your movement (and therefore cannot kite) and no way to block attacks, as well as a limit on how fast you can fire arrows. Without it you will get hit many times. if you want to, well, master each level. - Not Dying Today allows you to pull this off when enemy zombies are clustered together, and if you're using a large caliber-firearm. The achievement ranges from double or triple-kill, and the most impressive being "hexa-kill"! - Railgun and Dart in Nova Drift will pierce through enemies when their projectiles kill the targets they hit. - Crossbows in Nuclear Throne will travel through an enemy if the shot kills them, and can cut through crowds of smaller enemies with ease. If that's not enough, the Heavy Crossbow can take out just about any enemy and keep going, too. - The Sniper Rifles in PAYDAY 2 allows this trope, with achievements for getting a double/triple kill, and another for shooting a Shield Special Enemy through his Riot Shield. These and shotguns using slug-based rounds are the only weapons that can pull this off, regardless of how high powered some of the other weapons might be. - The Valkyrie gun from The Persistence can shoot a needle powerful enough to pierce through an enemy's skin, into another, instantly kill them both, and pin them to a wall. - Plants vs. Zombies: The Fume-Shroom's fumes will damage all zombies in range, which also bypasses the shields of Shield Bearing Mooks such as newspapers, screen doors, and ladders. - In Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: - The Bloomerang's projectiles will damage the three closest zombies/obstacles when fired out and again on the return. The number of zombies hit increases with leveling up. - The Laser Bean's lasers will damage every zombie in the row. The same goes for the Shadow Peashooter's shadow beams when powered up by a Moonflower, but with an added slowing effect. - The Cactus' ability has been changed from Anti-Air in the first game to firing spikes that can go through 2-4 zombies. - Pokra is a Close-Range Combatant whose attacks not only hit all zombies in range and slow them, her fifth attack in sequence also fires out a large spike that penetrates all zombies in her lane. - Any multi-target move in Pokémon allows this. Earthquake, Overheat, Petal Blizzard, Lava Plume, Surf and others can defeat multiple opponents in double or triple battles and are a quick way to ev train with wild horde battles. - Quake's railgun is able to hit multiple people, often through walls. - In the Rainbow Six series, tangoes can wipe out an entire team with a single shot, especially on Elite difficulty. - The Sniper Rifle-type weapons in the Ratchet & Clank series are generally capable of this when upgraded. - Railgun in Red Faction is most notable for its ability to sight and shoot enemies through the walls, (there's even a subway "duel" where you have to shoot a railgun user through a wall of another subway train passing by, before he one-hit kills you.) However, polykills are hardly out of the question. - Resident Evil 4: - The "Punisher" pistol (which can be obtained as a bonus for shooting out several blue targets hidden around the early levels) has the ability to shoot through multiple enemies as its special ability. Especially entertaining when said enemies are perched on an elevated platform and fall to their deaths all at once. - Although this is already achievable with the more mundane (but still awesome) rifle. - Most of the games in the series have at least one gun capable of this. Usually the magnum can plow through multiple zombies, and the shotgun can occasionally manage it. - Unlocking the Terror Scoped Rifle in The Saboteur requires the player to make ten such shots. - One fully charged cannonball from Serious Sam's cannon can penetrate dozens of enemies of size up to 5 meters. - In Silent Scope, it's possible to hit two or even three targets at once if the Mooks are standing in front of each other. - Silent Storm. Oh boy. The realistic damage modelling means it is entirely possible to kill someone standing behind a wall with a high-caliber bullet. And if there's no wall, the bullet can still penetrate multiple mooks and knock them back a few metres (bear in mind these are WW2 weapons we are talking about). Aaaand there's where the sniper's Shoot Through Cover (completely removes the advantage of cover for the target) and Always Inflict Ranged Critical perks come in handy... - Splitgate joins the ranks of games packing a portable Railgun that can and will instantly kill anything in a line once fired. There's even an achievement for the first time you kill at least two with one shot. - Sniper Elite V2 grants an achievement ("Double Dose") for killing two opponents with one shot. Given that the game's main selling point is realistic bullet physics, we shouldn't be surprised the devs included this. The sequels, Sniper Elite III and Sniper Elite 4 encourage you to attempt these as well, with achievements and weapon challenges. There's even a challenge in a specific mission in 4 to destroy the two gunboats patrolling the coast with one shot — by shooting one ship's torpedo warhead or depth charges in a split second window as they pass each other. - Splatoon 2: As of the 2.2.0 update, the Bamboozlers can now do this, though it's easier said than done not only because of how opponents can see your aiming laser, but because the Bamboozlers have rather short range for sniping weapons and cannot perform a one-hit kill. That means to do so with a Bamboozler requires your opponents to be lined up in a specific way and already damaged enough that the next shot will finish them. It does make opponents think twice about using someone else as cover though, and this trait is pretty effective against enemies in Salmon Run mode, who shamble like zombies in huge numbers and don't care if they're in the line of fire. - Star Wars: The Old Republic's first expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel, has a strange version of this. The expansion pack upped the game's level cap from 50 to 55, and each class was given a new ability at level 51. For the Dual Lightsaber Wielding Jedi Sentinels and Sith Marauders, they have "Twin Saber Throw", a long ranged attack that consists of them throwing both lightsabers at a target. The attack penetrates any enemies within 30 meters of the thrower, not just the actual target. - In Star Wars: Battlefront II, the Beam Rifle can pierce enemies, and generally is strong enough to one-shot its target (though at the cost of inconsistent hit detection). - Stellavanity in Type-S mode offers a Multikill bonus for killing multiple enemies with the Blade or Assault weapons. - Sunrider: - In Mask of Arcadius and Liberation Day, the beam of the Sunrider's Vanguard Cannon will keep going until it reaches the hex you targeted, dealing massive damage to every enemy in its path. Odds are good that at least a few enemy ships will go boom each time you fire the Cannon. - In Sunrider 4: The Captain's Return, maxing out Sola's affection level will make her rifle's shots punch through their initial targets and keep flying to the far end of the map. Each subsequent enemy in the bullet's path will get hit for half the initial damage. - Essential in Survivor: The Living Dead, as your have to carefully ration your ammo. It's also one of the determining factors in your score at the end of the game, and since getting a high score, or high number of kills is how you unlock some of the weapons and bonuses you'll need for the harder difficulty settings this makes mastering the One-Hit Polykill the most important skill the player can master. - Super Smash Bros.: - Zelda's and Sheik's Final Smash, the "Light Arrow", will hit any characters in their line of sight, passing through everybody until it hits a wall or the boundaries of the stage, and gives enough knockback to Ring Out even the heaviest of characters at 0% damage, except on the very largest of stages. Not to mention it has the series' trademark satisfying "KREEEENG!" sound effect. - Ganon's final has him go One-Winged Angel, stomp, stunning everyone on the stage, and charge forward for a one-hit kill everyone in front of him. - Similarly, ROB's laser attack hits through anyone in the line of fire, making for a useful kill move, or at least knocking back several foes at the same time. - The Bridge level of Syphon Filter 2 requires you to perform a double kill with the sniper rifle to save a pair of hostages. - Tales of the Abyss: In the opening, Natalia skewers several flying monsters with a single arrow. - Team Fortress 2: - While this feature has since been patched out of the game proper, in the "Meet the Sniper" video, the Sniper fires a bullet through a Heavy's head and into the Demoman's bottle, shattering it and causing him to panic (and then strike a wall while holding the bottle close to his face, getting the neck stuck in his eye, draw his grenade launcher and fire randomly, then fall off a ledge into a bunch of Exploding Barrels under it as his grenades fall there as well, and explode.) - However, they later introduced The Machina, a sniper rifle that can penetrate all targets—except buildings—with fully-charged shots. Unlike the old Sydney Sleeper, it can still get headshots. It even has separate kills icons for bodyshots and headshots that went through someone else first, and a special sound that plays to everyone in the server when you actually manage to get either (whether or not the target it went through died). - The Sydney Sleeper used to be able to do this with a full charge, but the ability was removed shortly after its release (and a while later it was given a shorter charging time to compensate). - One of the Soldier's secondary weapons, the Righteous Bison, fires energy bolts that never stop until they hit a wall, making it great for bottlenecks. Interestingly, the weapon deals damage to each target multiple times (one hit every 45 milliseconds it spends inside their hitbox), which allows it to deal more damage to targets running away. - An unlockable weapon for the Engineer, the Pomson 6000, used to have the same projectiles with an added Mana Burn attribute. Eventually this ability was removed in exchange for a non-penetrating but more powerful projectile. - The Spy's first unlockable revolver, The Ambassador, had piercing bullets and made it possible to headshot multiple snipers. Unfortunately, it was patched out (multiple times) soon afterwards. - In Mann Vs. Machine, this is a purchasable upgrade for any weapon that uses bullets as well as the Huntsman. For most weapons this is a single upgrade giving penetration through any number of enemies, but the Heavy's miniguns instead needs to be upgraded once for each additional enemy an attack is able to go through. - Kiai Scrolls in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles penetrate everything and can 1-shot all but strongest foes. Boomerangs can also do this on weak enemies. - Terraria: Most of the best weapons and ammo are capable of piercing through multiple targets. The earliest bullet, for example, is the Meteorite shot that pierces an enemy or ricochets once while the best of this are Luminite bullets that pierce any number of enemies, it even ignores the split-second Mercy Invincibility against enemies that other piercing weapons/ammo are susceptible to which allows you to fire these with, say, the S.D.M.G. and not have shots wastefully pass through enemies after the first hit. - In Tomb Raider (2013), a late-game upgrade to the competition bow allows Lara to shoot armor-piercing arrows, which deal more damage to armored enemies and can potentially hit multiple targets standing in line. Actually scoring overpenetration kills is exceedingly difficult due to AI enemies spreading out as quickly as possible when they appear, but it sure feels quite satisfying on the rare occasion that Lara does manage to drop two or even three baddies with one arrow. - Total War games: - This is a reason to use Siege Engines outside of city battles, even if they have difficulty hitting a target more lively than a stone wall. Ballistae bolts and cannonballs aren't slowed down by men or horses, and can blow through several soldiers in one shot, making them deadly if they're shooting down the length of a bridge or up a city street. Catapults and trebuchets are even less accurate, but a lucky boulder can blow a chunk out of the middle of a block of infantry. And taking that many casualties in one shot is not good for the enemy's morale. - Ribaults and Monster Ribaults in Medieval II: Total War are basically several light cannon laid next to each other (and in the upgraded version, atop each other) on a handcart. They're slow to maneuver and slower to reload, but on a good day can reduce an enemy formation to paste in a single volley. - The Shimazu Heavy Gunners from Total War: Shogun 2 pull this off with their enlarged muskets, enabling them to kill multiple soldiers per shot. - Napoleon: Total War is, true to history, all about using 19th century field artillery to annihilate riflemen. - Total War: Warhammer III: The third game introduced Crane Gunners and others capable of doing this, along with the extensive old game faction reworks for the Immortal Empires Crisis Crossover giving the ability to old units like Razordon Hunter Packs. - In Touken Ranbu, ōdachi can hit up to 3 adjacent enemies in a row and naginata can hit the entire team. Subverted in that naginata's attack force grows very slowly and usually can't take out enemies at their level in one hit. - Tropico 4 allows for this. If you've appointed a good Minister of the Interior, you may get a notice informing you that he shot all seven members of a famous gang with a single bullet. Word of his prowess spreads and causes a 15% reduction in crime around the island. - In Tyrian, the Mega Cannon did this. It could even damage larger enemies more than once as it passed through them. - Same goes for the Plasma Storm, a giant cloud of fire that did continuous damage to whatever passed through it. - In the original Unreal Tournament, it was not possible to do this with the InstaGib weapon (the modified Shock Rifle). However, UT2004 changed this weapon by allowing the beam to pass through multiple characters. - The Ballistic Weapons mod takes this one step further: the Tactical Infantry Cannon (big-ass scoped railgun), at full charge and using the scope, can shoot through the entire map and still overpenetrate a tank, insta-killing both the tank and whoever was standing behind it. And that's a man-portable weapon we're talking about here. Now imagine what it does against man-sized targets or lighter vehicles... - In Unworthy, the attack animations of your weapons do not stop once they hit a single enemy, and so it's possible to hit two or three enemies with a single swing of the sword, even if they are as large as Sentinels. - Vector Incremental: If the particle is fast enough and deals high enough damage, it'll be able to destroy several rings in one shot. - The first Vectorman game has a power-up called the bolo gun, a slow-moving shot which "crashes through enemy orbots" and continues going through any enemies until offscreen or hitting a wall. It also has the possibility to push the enemy and hit it multiple times. - Warcraft III units with the Missile (Line) attribute can do this. - The same attribute is present in StarCraft II. There is even an achievement for killing 50 mooks with a single penetrating shot in campaign. - Hunters in World of Warcraft can pull this off using the Power Shot talent which hits a target and all enemies between the Hunter and them for significant damage. This is no longer possible in World of Warcraft, as the Power Shot Talent was removed in Patch 7.0.3. Bonus points for knocking everyone it hits back a few yards. - In Warframe, Punch-through mods like "Shred" grant this effect for weapons and are absolutely crucial for Defense and Survival missions, where enemies will spawn in bunched-up fireteams, or when making a fighting retreat in narrow corridors to the extraction point. Some weapons, like the Lanka energy sniper and Miter Deadly Disc launcher, have innate punch-through ability up to several meters. - Special mention must go to the Ignis flamethrower, it's variant the Ignis Wraith, and the Arca Plasmor shotgun, which feature "infinite" punchthrough against enemies, but not terrain (that requires mods). This is balanced by the fact that those weapons fire streams or projectiles with relitevly short range even if they don't hit terrain. The Fulmin in semi-auto mode also has body-only punchthrough, but only for three meters. The Zenith assault rifle's semi-auto mode has full infinite punchthrough and effectively infinite range, meaning that the only things that can stop it are tile boundaries. - The rocket launcher in Wolfenstein 3-D's Mac and IIgs ports. - Crazy Monkey Games' web game Zombie Horde 2. The Decapitator can fire through (and kill) more than one zombie at a time. - In episode 54 of Code Lyoko, "Lyoko minus one", William effortlessly defeated three of his Xanafied classmates◊ with only a wooden stick and one kick. This is even more badass knowing that William was only a secondary character \|\|back then\|\|. - In one of the Futurama movies, The Beast with a Billion Backs, Bender engages in a duel against Calculon, both of them using weapons called planetary annihilators. Bender cheats and shoots his weapon early, completely disintegrating Calculon's left arm, as well as , which presumably had people inside (though only one death was shown on screen). several buildings - In Reboot, during the war between Mainframe and Megabyte, several of Mainframe's soldiers driving vehicles are ordered to travel single file in a straight line. A number of Megabyte's soldiers respond to this by flanking them on both the left and right in similar single-file lines. This allows a pair of fully-charged laser cannons from a distance to shoot right through both lines, eliminating all of the Megabyte soldiers simultaneously while leaving the Mainframe fighters safe. - The Simpsons did a spoof of The Odyssey with Homer as Odysseus, Marge as Penelope, etc. When Homer returns home, he kills all the evil suitors with a single spear throw, because they were standing in a line. - There is no question that even common, normal pistols shooting non-specialized ammunition will exit a human body with enough force to continue and penetrate whatever is behind them. A typical handgun can easily wound a second person after exiting the first victim. Ball or armor-piercing ammo may exacerbate this, but are not necessary for this to occur. Ironically, a very high-powered weapon may have its bullets shatter inside the first victim, causing less injury to the target behind it. - Some musket-balls do this. Historically, given that they were shot at two and three rank lines (or even eight-deep columns) it doesn't seem all that hard to believe. - One rule of Roger's Rangers was to march far enough apart such to prevent a musket ball taking out two soldiers at once, so it's very probable. - It is pretty hard to achieve through-and-through hit with relatively low-powered spherical lead projectiles, especially fired from black powder muzzle-loaders; contrary to myth, contemporary quality plate armor could protect against these, it was just less practical to mass-produce than it was to raise more troops with guns of their own. Glancing multi-hits on the other hand were pretty probable. - Military historian John Keegan once visited a museum with a collection of weapons and armor. He remarked to the curator, an expert in historic firearms, that through most of the Gunpowder Age, the most common debris cleaned out of battlefield wounds was the bones and teeth of the victim's fellow soldiers. "I constantly recall the look of disgust that passed over [his] face .... He had simply never considered what was the effect of the weapons about which he knew so much, as artifacts, on the bodies of the soldiers who used them." - Round-shot ("cannonballs") very often did that, often getting an average of more kills than rounds fired. As they had more heft than musket-balls, it isn't hard to imagine. Perhaps you do not wish to imagine what it looked like. - By "more heft," it means "a twenty-pound sphere of pig iron." One-shot polykills were common. Even six-pound field artillery projectiles were known to drill a straight line through the enemy, not difficult when the enemy is standing in massed ranks before you. - A twenty-pound cannon ball would likely have only been encountered in the heaviest of field artillery or permanent fortifications due to the weight of the guns (which had to be moved by man or animal). That said, even a smaller cannon firing a three-pound ball was going to do a world of hurt to anything in front of it. Before the advent of explosive shells, the use of artillery against ground forces wasn't unlike a very bloody game of bowling, with the shot skipping across the ground and carving a path of destruction. As for those heavier guns, when used in naval combat, much of their damage came from the cannon ball smashing through an enemy ship and sending forth a wave of deadly splinters from the ship's hull and contents (which is one reason why warships would "clear for battle" by rounding up any loose cargo and equipment and stowing it belowdecks). - This trope is the reason why "crossing the T" was a favored tactic in ship-to-ship naval battles as late as World War II. it involved positioning your ship to fire across the length of the enemy ship rather than broadsiding, the idea being that a 20+ pound high-velocity ball of iron bouncing along a ship's deck note : Or, by the 20th century, an 800+ pound armor piercing shell drilling into the hull is going to cause more collateral damage than if it simply went through and fell into the ocean on the other side. Also, in this position, it's harder for the enemy ship to retaliate note : and this was the main reason by the time of the World Wars, as a shell passing lengthwise through an armored warship might well be stopped outright by the ship's bulkhead and barbette armor - something out-and-out impossible for a wooden ship facing even the relatively-anemic naval artillery of the Age of Sail - Age of Sail ships had most of their guns in broadside mounts, with only a handful of "chase" guns, while later warships, mounting their guns in turrets, could still only direct a portion of their firepower forward or aft since trying to shoot aft turrets forward means shooting through one's own ship. note : Unless you're facing something like Richelieu, where all the turrets are forward. - The "single bullet theory" of John F. Kennedy's assassination, which argues that a single bullet passed through the president's body and then struck John Connally, who was seated below and forwards of Kennedy. Recently demonstrated on the History Channel via computer simulation to be plausible. - Also almost entirely replicated by an expert sharpshooter for a Discovery Channel special. The only difference between his shot and the real one was that the bullet didn't have quite enough energy to get into the Connally model's "leg" at the end of the trajectory. Examination of the models showed why: Connally had a single rib broken by the bullet as it went through him, while the replicated shot had hit two ribs as it tumbled, losing just enough energy to prevent the additional penetration. - The tendency to do it was a known flaw of the rifle used: most variants of the Carcano Modello 91 rifle (like the 91/38 used by Oswald) were chambered for the 6.5x52mm Carcano cartridge, which, when produced with decent quality, was extremely accurate but tended to pierce the target without inflicting incapacitating damage unless it hit a vital spot (like the neck and the lung), hence a short-lived attempt at replacing it with a variant chambered for a bigger bullet abandoned due simple lack of time. - There is a game based entirely around recreating the shot. It's not an easy task.. - Then again, Oswald was barely rated as a "sharpshooter"-level marksman (the second rating from the bottom) while in the Marine Corps. Maybe he was just REALLY lucky that day. - Rather chillingly invoked by the Nazis for mass executions, in order to save bullets. Turned out it was still too traumatic for the soldiers tasked to do it, hence the development of the Final Solution. - Simo Häyhä once shot eight Russian soldiers with one bullet. They thought they were being attacked by multiple snipers and ran away. - This is the reason why police (unlike soldiers) use hollowpoint and other such controlled expansion/frangible rounds. In war it's assumed that the man behind an enemy will usually be another enemy, and in any case even a relatively primitive Bulletproof Vest will No-Sell a hollowpoint without doing much more than bruising the target. The police shoot people in an environment where the person behind their target is likely to be an innocent bystander, and body armour is fairly uncommon in the hands of criminals. - Soldiers also aren't allowed to use frangible/hollowpoint/etc. rounds because of the Hague Convention of 1899 (which predates the Geneva Conventions) prohibiting the use of expanding bullets in warfare. It's often held up as a bitterly ironic comment on how War Is Hell yet we insist on using "humane" ammunition when waging it, but that's mostly because it's Common Knowledge (i.e. falsely assumed) that hollow-points are inherently the deadliest and most effective ammunition in any situation, and many people are unaware that they're almost useless against body armor, which a lot of military combatants wear by default nowadays. - For the same reason, American police officers are trained to aim at the centre of a suspect's mass (the torso) rather than attempting to disable them by shooting them in the limbs, as a bullet which hits a limb is far more likely to go straight through the target and potentially hit an innocent bystander (also, the torso is a much bigger target). - This was pretty common in jungle combat during the Pacific Theater of World War II, especially on the American side. The 30-06 cartridge the American guns used was absurdly overpowered for short-range use, and no one had body armor, so firing into a tightly packed mass of Japanese troops could cause two or three casualties with ease. The Japanese guns, having only about half the muzzle energy, were much less likely to do this. - A hunter in Sweden got into trouble with the law, because he killed two moose with one shot. He was only allowed to kill one. - Can sometimes occur when using a shotgun. The spread from the pellets can often hit multiple targets grouped closely together. - Heavy machine guns used on troops in the open can result in this, given the size and weight of .50cal and 14.5mm rounds. - A German sniper in North Africa, with a warped sense of humour, painfully surprised a British officer who had left his trench and walked downwind with a shovel and a roll of toilet paper. Although he could have killed his mark outright at any time, he chose to wait until the British colonel had dug a hole, dropped his shorts, and squatted. The German bullet passed through the fleshy part of both buttocks, leaving, as the target ruefully described later, One bullet. Four holes. We knew the Jerries were short of ammo, but that was taking it to extremes. - There is a serious side to this. Snipers are taught that if their presence makes it impossible for enemy soldiers to leave their protective foxholes to perform latrine functions, it has a massive demoralisation effect and lowers the will to fight - as it would do if you are forced to take a dump in your own foxhole. British snipers in the Falklands War knew this and made a point of targeting Argentinians caught in the open for necessary personal administration of this sort. - In December 2013, a British sniper in Afghanistan killed six Taliban fighters from a range of 930 yards with a single shot. The sniper identified a potential suicide bomber from long range and shot the trigger switch on the bomber's explosive vest. The resulting explosion killed the bomber and five other insurgents. - Ace Pilot Chuck Yeager, originally the Trope Namer for Danger Deadpan, once had a No Hit Polykill. He lined up a shot on a German pilot, who jinked the wrong way and crashed into his own wingman before Yeager could fire (Yeager reported that both pilots bailed out successfully). He scored three other kills that day, making him "Ace in a Day." - Besides man-made weapons of mass destruction, the Universe in spades. Things begin with asteroids that can level a country and simply go up (and very truly up) from there. - On 7 January 1981, during the IranIraq War, an Iranian Air Force F-14 Tomcat destroyed three Iraqi Air Force MiG-23s and damaged a fourth with a single missile. This was possible primarily due to the unique design of the AIM-54 Phoenix: namely its extremely long engagement range and oversized warhead for the time, originally meant for engaging Warsaw Pact bomber formations in a naval air defense role, aided by the MiGs flying in such close formation that the F-14's radar still read them as a single contact.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverPenetration
Overt Operative - TV Tropes Malory: Most secret agents don't tell every harlot from here to Hanoi that they are secret agents! Archer: ...Then why be one? "The name is Bond. James Bond." Is that so, "Mr. Bond"? You don't think that since your job is being a secret agent that perhaps you shouldn't tell everyone your real name!? Maybe that's why every supervillain you encounter already knows who you are, knows your name, your "secret" code number, what you look like, and how you like your martinis. Hollywood secret agents seem to have a habit of being remarkably unsecretive, whether it's by using their real names, lack of disguises, waving their weapons and performing stunts in public while dressed in a tuxedo, or merely looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Compare Highly-Visible Ninja and Paper-Thin Disguise. See also The Men in Black, who are also meant to be some kind of covert operatives, but are just as conspicuous. May overlap with Sigil Spam, if the organisation that plasters its logo on everything is meant to be secret. As a matter of fact, this is often Truth in Television- Real Life spies will deny or cover up the fact that they are spies, but otherwise they will try to keep their cover-story as near to the truth as possible (as permitted by the circumstances). This is for the very simple reason that it's far easier to get caught out in a lie if you are lying all the time, whereas you are more likely to be trusted (and thus do your job better) if a suspicious opponent digs into your backstory and finds that it's everything you said it was. Naturally, this also helps to avert You Just Told Me and related slip-ups that might get you caught out. In addition, spies really do introduce themselves as their real names as James Bond does, because having a fake name is a good way to get caught. An obsolete version of this is the supposedly-inconspicuous trenchcoat, fedora and shades, or the slightly less outdated black suit, tie, and shades, both of which most modern audiences would describe straight away as "a spy outfit". ## Examples: - Golgo 13 is known in civilian life as Duke Togo. When using an alias, he goes by... Duke Togo. Or some variation thereof. The general consensus is that, after decades of killing people for money, Duke's untouchable and he knows it. - Members of the Black Organization in Case Closed are supposed to be so secretive almost no one knows the organization exists, yet they always wear black suits and/or Conspicuous Trenchcoats and one of its members drives a damn Porsche everywhere. Said Porsche is not a 911, which is fairly common and well-recognized. It is an antique and rare Porsche 356, which is something so unique that no one can possibly miss, even if they are completely car-dumb. - Full Metal Panic! lampshades this in the case of Sousuke Sagara, who attends school under his true name and makes little effort to hide his past as a Child Soldier adopted by Former Regime Personnel despite the fact that he's supposed to be Kaname's secret bodyguard. There are a number of explanations for this. First, as he explains to Mao, he barely has any actual records under that name. Second, disclosing much of his actual background makes it much easier to explain away suspicious actions related to his mission as just the behavior of a shell-shocked kid acting out, rather than a secret bodyguard, and also gives the school principal a Freudian Excuse to justify her refusal to expel him that has absolutely nothing to do with those anonymous donations she keeps receiving. Third, he just sucks at lying. And lastly, \|\|he's actually the decoy meant to keep attention off of Wraith, Kaname's primary secret bodyguard\|\|. - Spy X Family: Agent Daybreak, Twilight's Unknown Rival, craves infamy in a field where anonymity is practically required. When he completes his assignment, he sees fit to actually leave a signature behind. It's so idiotic that Twilight actually blows his cover to call him out on it. - Jahan Cross, Agent of the Empire, is a James Bond Expy who is naturally fairly open about his identity. Justified, because his real identity is a credentialed member of the Imperial diplomatic service, giving him the perfect excuse to be almost anywhere he needs to be, and if he's caught anywhere he shouldn't be, he can usually fall back on Diplomatic Immunity... within reason. - Groo the Wanderer: Groo once was given a job as a spy, thus proving that there are, at times, people even dumber than Groo. Needless to say, things do not go as planned. Groo is apt at some things. Being "covert" is not one of those things. - Jet Dream: Jet Dream and her Stunt-Girl Counterspies are Hollywood Stunt-Girls by day, and private counter-intelligence agents... also by day. Their identities and jobs seem to be, at best, open secrets (if not just plain "open.") - Partially lampshaded by John Stone in an issue of Planetary: "Can't be the best secret agent on Earth if everybody knows about you." - The Shingouz in Valérian are by definition Overt Operatives, as they are an entire race of spies and information merchants. Somehow, they still manage to be the best ones in the field, presumably due to their strict work ethics (in spite of claiming to not comprehend the concept of morality), extreme diligence, and insurance that everybody owes them favors all over cosmos. They even use this status to their advantage, sometimes. In one short story they con their way into the heart of an incredibly complex government bureaucracy simply by insinuating that they want to sell information concerning a supposed conspiracy that gets increasingly bigger and more convoluted the deeper they go — just to prove a point. - Nick Fury tends to stand out with his eyepatch, conspicuous Spy Catsuit and slowed aging. And also the fact that he's quite famous. - Wonder Woman Vol 1: Golden Age Steve Trevor was an intelligence agent who often was sent to gather intel in the field, even straight from enemy agents. For some reason he almost always did this in his full USAAF uniform, which helps explain why he was captured so often but not how incredibly effective he was at his job. - Youngblood, Image Comics' premiere super-team, does covert black ops for the US government and regularly reports to the Pentagon and the White House. Members also have their own toy lines, make talk show appearances, and do other "celebrity" things that make no sense for covert government agents. - The Black Widow has been a member of two very public superhero teams (the Champions and the Avengers), wears a very distinct Spy Catsuit (which doesn't come with a mask) and has a tendency to reveal who she is on her missions (assuming the people she's interacting with aren't already aware of who she is). She has been the subject of at least two nationwide manhunts and a limited series by Devin Grayson features a scene that shows a gossip magazine reporting Natasha and Daredevil's break up; even her love life is a matter of public knowledge. However, it is also worth noting that she can disguise herself exceptionally well, when she wants to. - In Compass of Thy Soul there is a bunraku caravan stopping by in Konoha that is very obviously spying on the village. They are still allowed to visit, because the Uchiha already knew them and did business with them for several years, and because they are very good at puppet theatre. - TRON: Endgame Scenario: Mercury is well-known as Administrator Ma3a's champion on Encom's Game Grid, considered a star athlete. What's much less well-known is that she serves as Ma3a's top operative and enforcer. - White Sheep (RWBY): Blake, a former member of the Faunus-supremacy terrorist group the White Fang, tries to sneak into a White Fang meeting and is instantly distrusted due to the sneaky way she is acting. Her teammate Nora, on the other hand, leads the crowd in a song, cheers at everything, and openly asks what the organization's secret plans are. Everyone assumes she's just enthusiastic. Note that Nora isn't even a Faunus, but she bowls through any doubts so well that she makes plenty of contacts and is even offered a leadership position. Blake facepalms at all of this. - James Bond, despite the description, largely averts this. He frequently uses aliases, and officially James Bond is just an employee of Universal Exports (actually a front for British Intelligence). Usually the villain finds out despite all this; often he's up against enemies who are either themselves spies or connected to some foreign government or intelligence agency, and he is identified that way, or the villain turns out to be a supposed ally or client of MI6. Most people do not know who James Bond is. - Double Subversion in On Her Majesty's Secret Service where Bond adopts the persona of 'Sir Hilary Bray', a genealogist, complete with his posh accent, a pair of glasses and a kilt. Bray is actually a real figure who agreed to let Bond use his identity, so they don't even have to worry about flaws in the background check. Blofeld still finds out that "Bray" is actually Bond though, and after exposing him, he points out that the serious Bray would not waltz into the bedroom of the female guests for some Double-0-Rated action , and he also catches him out by tricking him with an esoteric mistake on family records that only a real genealogist would know to correct. - In Goldfinger, 007 poses as a dealer in illicit gold, only to end up strapped to a laser-table with Goldfinger greeting him as "007". 007 naturally denies it, responding with his cover name which is - James Bond! Guess it wasn't as well known at the time. Goldfinger knew who he was because he was working the Reds and one of Bonds "opposite numbers" identified him while he was unconscious. - Casino Royale (2006) hangs a lampshade on this while trying to justify it. After spending a scene going over the details of his cover identity with Vesper (while flirting with her), Bond simply checks in to their hotel under his real name. He explains to Vesper that Le Chiffre is a very connected man, so probably knows who Bond really is anyway, and Bond knows that they know, he justifies it as psychological warfare. And the fact that Le Chiffre will even continue with the game knowing there's an MI6 agent at the table is a sign that he's either desperate or overconfident. Vesper thinks Bond's just being reckless. Le Chiffre: And you must be Mr. Bliss's replacement. Welcome, Mr. Beach. Or is that Bond? I'm a little confused. James Bond: Well, we wouldn't want that, would we? - Actually used in Casino Royale (1967), where MI6 formally gives the codename "James Bond 007" to every single one of their agents — including the women — in order to confuse people. - Bond usually uses aliases, except when he says he is from Universal Exports, which seems to be a cover name for MI6 in general (so he's technically telling the truth). Ironically, there are times he uses real name/fake job description, and he is given away by other means — in Tomorrow Never Dies, Carver's hacker quickly figures out Bond is a government agent from his suspiciously perfect employment record at the bank that his cover identity came with. His name is irrelevant and his cover is otherwise airtight, it's just that absolutely nobody would have a spotless personnel record. - How about the Union Jack parachute in The Spy Who Loved Me? Way to maintain deniability, unless you're going for the double bluff: "Well, obviously a real British agent wouldn't advertise his allegiance like that!" - In A View to a Kill, Bond goes with the aliases of James St. John Smythe, a wealthy man with no real job, and James Stock, London Financial Times reporter. Not only does it take two seconds for Zorin to figure out who he is, but it bites him in the ass when Stacy claims to a police officer he's James Stock, Bond has to tell the cop he's really James Bond, a secret agent, which makes the cop want to arrest him for lying. - In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond needs to be covertly dropped via parachute to investigate a sunken British warship near China. The problem? The ship has been deliberately sent off course by Elliott Carver interfering with its GPS system, and sank in Vietnamese territorial waters. Which shouldn't be a problem if he gets caught, as long as none of Bond's equipment identifies himself as being affiliated with the British or American governments. Which it naturally all does, since all of his equipment for this mission was issued out of US military stockpiles and is all marked as such... and his handler only realizes this after Bond deploys out of the plane to begin his mission. - In Licence to Kill, Bond is able to infiltrate Sanchez's operation as himself, having just been kicked out of MI6. Sanchez already has ex-CIA members working for him, so an ex-MI6 agent wouldn't be unusual and there's nothing there to make Sanchez be suspicious of Bond's background. - Austin Powers: Powers spoofed this in the title of the first film, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. This "secret agent" is at the heart of the Swinging London scene, and everyone knows he's a spy. He seems to operate as more law-enforcement than espionage anyway. - In Goldmember, Steven Spielberg makes a movie about Austins exploits at the end. - Weather Is Good On Deribasovskaya: A KGB agent is secretly sent to America in order to help them fight the Russian Mafia — and then is publicly outed to everyone when visiting a restaurant (seemingly by a know-it-all Mafia or because of someone's stupid mistake), with his cover story blown for good. He later admits to his American partner, that in fact he outed himself, since it's his preferred way of working — being the bait. - True Lies: Harry Tasker. Arguably acceptable in his case, because being played by Arnold Schwarzenegger he does tend to stand out in a crowd. Except his own wife of 15 years had never even suspected him about his double life. - In the original French movie La Totale, the lead actor Thierry Lhermitte looks a lot more like the everyman and nobody would reasonably suspect this so-called computer salesman from being a top agent in a counter-espionage agency. - Not an operative, but in Sister Act, Deloris van Cartier, a Reno lounge singer, is an essential witness in a mob case. In order to protect her life until the trial, she must hide in a convent. Her appearance when she first walks in prompts the Mother Superior to exclaim, "That is not a person you can hide! That is a conspicuous person, designed to stick out." - Agent Sands in Once Upon a Time in Mexico makes no secret of the fact that he works for the CIA. Lampshaded at one point, where he wears a t-shirt on which is printed the words "C.I.A.: Cleavage Inspection Agency". - Inglourious Basterds: For a world-renowned actress and double agent, Bridget von Hammersmark is a pretty lousy spy, able to make decent small talk but falling apart quickly the moment someone starts pulling on a thread in her act. \|\|It eventually gets her killed.\|\| - The Basterds themselves use incredibly overt and unsubtle methods, have a distinctive calling card of carving swastikas into their enemies' foreheads which makes their movements easy to track, cannot speak a word of French or German despite operating in German-occupied France, and have undisguised American accents thick enough to float an aircraft carrier. - While the movie is in many other ways a silly action romp, this is one of the few things xXx gets right. After losing several Genre Blind secret agents to an anarchist cell (the agent that the audience sees is forced to "infiltrate" an underground heavy metal concert in a tuxedo note : His subdued Oh, Crap! reaction implies he wasn't expecting the concert, or was somehow expecting a classical concert, even though Rammstein ain't exactly low-key, and his targets clearly aren't the classical type. Ironically, if he had kept his sneaky black jumpsuit on and just lost the balaclava, he would've blended in a lot better.), the NSA decides to send in a man that's a tattooed, anarchist, extreme-sports fanatic, internet celebrity famous for defying the law. The fact that he could plausibly want to join up with the cell of his own initiative means that he gets much further than the Bond-esque agents ever did. - General Okoye of Black Panther, commander of Wakanda's Dora Milaje, might be a terrifying warrior, but she's a less than ideal infiltrator. During a covert operation in an underground casino, her warrior's posture and stern expression alone make her stick out like a sore thumb, to say nothing of the ill-fitting wig that's part of her disguise. \|\|Sure enough, a guard catches on to her act, and a cover-blowing fight breaks out in seconds.\|\| - Miss Congeniality: As Gracie learns while trying to catch bank robbers at the beginning of the sequel, the fame she acquired from the pageant makes it hard for her to do secret agent work (well, technically undercover work, but it's close enough for our purposes here) without being recognized. - In Cleopatra Jones, the main character (a CIA agent) runs around in a tricked out Corvette with "US Government" plates. In Watts. In the mid 1970's. Not exactly conspicuous. - The whole idea behind Alex Rider is that his status as a teenager means that he should be more covert because bad guys will think he is Just a Kid, however not only does he keep doing things that clearly a kid would not do, such as parachuting into secret enemy bases, but many bad guys in his books seem quite capable of finding all about his connections to MI-6. - Ascendance of a Bookworm: As soon as the two of them meet, Myne's new attendant Delia tells her she's been sent to spy on her by a higher-up in the temple. Since getting attendants is the result of Myne joining the temple in the first place, she keeps Delia around on the basis that firing her may get her replaced by someone who actually knows how to spy properly. - In strong contrast, the CHERUB Series agents are so secret even most members of the British Government can't find out about them, the existence of CHERUB is never revealed, CHERUB agents have very strong covers, and while they have exotic training most of the time they do things that any ordinary teenager would do. - Subverted in the Discworld book Maskerade, with two operatives are extremely overt due to being Corporal Nobbs and Detritus under flimsy cover identities, some of the Watch's best known and least deceptive members - who are there to distract attention from their real agent, who's been there for some time already. - Vetinari uses a similar plan in Going Postal when he deliberately has someone tailed by an incompetent agent: if you see Vetinari's spy, it's a spy he wants you to see. As the book puts it, you can normally tell that you're under surveillance by Vetinari by turning around really fast and seeing no-one at all. - Double Subverted in Jingo. Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs are trying (and failing) to pretend to be Klatchian. However, the Klatchians they are talking to assume that Colon and Nobbs must actually be Klatchians from a different part of Klatch pretending to be Ankh-Morporkians, since Ankh-Morpork would not use such obvious Overt Operative tactics. More specifically, Klatchians assume they're from a part of Klatch infamous for the idiocy of its inhabitants. - Ciaphas Cain: While looking to impress a breathy young chanteuse named Amberly Vail at a fancy party by confirming there's an Inquisitor among them, Cain tells her you can always tell who the Inquisitors are because they always disguise themselves as Rogue Traders. As it turns out, the Rogue Trader really is a Rogue Trader, but he is working for Inquisitor \|\|Amberly Vail\|\|. \|\|She\|\| even notes that although Cain was wrong in this instance, it's regrettably true that \|\|her\|\| imagination-deficient colleagues default to it as a disguise. - Sir Dominic Flandry uses this trope. By letting his targets identify him as an apparently incompetent and venal Imperial agent, he's able to lull them into a false sense of security. - Geronimo Stilton: One of Stilton's old friends, Kornelius Von Kickpaw, is a secret agent who always wears a trenchcoat and dark glasses. His sister, also a secret agent, always wears a distinctive perfume. - Compared to his cinematic alter ego, the James Bond of Ian Fleming's novels is portrayed in a relatively realistic manner. Nevertheless, when he's in London, Bond's real name is known, as is his true employer ("Something at the Ministry of Defense.") The precise nature of his job is still unknown, but the fact that he's doing some sort of secretive work is not. This is pretty much Truth in Television (see Valerie Plame, below, for what's actually a rather typical, if unusually widely-known, example, below.) - A Discussed Trope in From Russia with Love. Darko Kerim is ostensibly a spice trader but it's well known that he runs the British Secret Service station in Istanbul. M says that such operatives can be useful as anyone hoping to sell information (or in this case defect) can readily seek them out. Given that Kerim also uses his extended (and extensive) family as his operatives, it would be impossible to hide his role in any case. - In the book Harry The Fat Bear Spy, Harry loses his fake ID for his cover identity and is forced to present his real ID in order to get into the macaroon factory. He spends the rest of the book wearing a nametag that says "SPY". - A couple of the Matt Helm novels actively used his status as a government assassin who had been around forever and everyone in the trade knew by reputation in order to have him act as a decoy or to intimidate the local baddies. - The Wrecking Crew, the second Matt Helm novel, had him using his real name and background, so everyone would think he was a former assassin who had been out of the business for decades (true) and was pretty much useless now (false). The badguys who assumed this didn't survive to the end of the book. - In Daniel Silva's series of novels about Israeli agent Gabriel Allon, Allon is actually known to other countries' intelligence agencies as being a participant in the targeted assassinations carried out in revenge for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and is in fact arrested for this in one of the books. Also, while he does have a covert identity as an Italian art restorer, his accent is clearly not that of a native, and this gets lampshaded by having his colleagues remark on his oddness, and one of them jokes that he might be Osama bin Laden. - Zigzagged in Star Wars Legends' Thrawn Trilogy. One attendee of a covert meeting immediately picks up on the fact that Wedge Antilles note : Ostensibly a starfighter pilot unused to covert operations, though more recent yet canonically earlier works depict him differently is there as backup muscle for the other party... and completely misses the New Republic commando team member also present. Note that this was deliberate on the part of the heroes: Wedge was specifically picked to serve as a decoy. - All over the shop, over the course of the long run of The Vorkosigan Saga. Lieutenant Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, the extremely visually distinctive son of the former Regent and current Prime Minister of Barrayar, creates the cover identity of "Admiral Miles Naismith" on the fly, purely to try and dig himself out of the jam he's gotten himself into, and it ends up defining his career; as Naismith, he commands a Mercenary fleet that unknowingly serves Barrayaran interests on the Galactic stage, but people pretty rapidly notice that the dashing and tactically brilliant Admiral Naismith is absolutely identical to the son of an important Political figure on Barrayar - particularly after a reporter meets him in both identities on the same planet, in the same city, on very nearly the same day. So Miles frantically invents a fictitious rogue clone of himself, who claims his mother's maiden name due to Betan laws on Cloning making him family, only to actually run into a genuine clone of himself... By the time Miles' military career is over, \|\|heavy hints are being dropped that yes, people have figured out, in spite of all the clones both real and imagined, that Vorkosigan was Naismith all along, and that if Naismith ever pops his head over the parapet again there will be consequences. Miles is able to shrug off the implied threat, having a new job by that point.\|\| - Jack Bauer on 24 almost never uses an alias, even when working deep cover with drug cartels or right-wing militias. In his case, however, the terrorists never seem to wise up, even though Bauer is undoubtedly one of the best-known people on the government's payroll in the 24 universe (having been mentioned on national TV news at least once). However, the one time he is seen to use an alias, after faking his death, it ends up not doing him any good at all. Subverted in Season 8, where Jack actually uses an alias and a different first name ("Ernst Meier"), wears glasses as a disguise, and speaks fluent German! It even works! (For a while, anyway.) - The A-Team, egregiously. Although they were on the run from military justice, they weren't too big on laying low. Sure, they used disguises when approaching possible clients, but many episodes showed that BA lived in a close-knit urban community where his name was well known, and Hannibal was pursuing his own acting career while a fugitive. Of course, the Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist really was that incompetent, so presumably they just don't need to bother. - Better Call Saul: In the second episode of season 3, Mike figures out that Los Pollos Hermanos is a money exchange point for employees of the shadowy drug gang who don't want him to kill Hector Salamanca. His way of finding out what goes on in there is to send Jimmy into the restaurant. Jimmy doesn't have police smarts like Mike does, and he very easily stands out with the way he constantly moves from table to table trying to keep his eye on the bag man. Gus immediately takes notice of Jimmy's behavior, and observes him conversing with Mike after leaving the restaurant under the pretense of sweeping the parking lot. - Get Smart: - Max Smart has been outed any number of times before friends, courts (complete with juries and an audience), police, etc., KAOS knows not only his identity but his address, and whenever he is near KAOS forces, someone says "That's Maxwell Smart, one of CONTROL's top agents!", and he still continues his career as a "secret" agent. And that's just in the first half of the first season! That's the magic of parody for you. - Doubly subverted by Agent 99, who never reveals her real name, even to Max. (On the other hand, she's consequently also routinely addressed in public as "Agent 99".) Until she marries Max and is sometimes introduced as "Mrs Maxwell Smart" giving away her identity. - In the British show Murphy's Law, despite being a career undercover cop, Tommy Murphy almost always uses his real name. This doesn't seem to cause any problems until the third series, when the bad guys get curious about the "Tommy from Belfast" currently testifying in a criminal trial, and even then the matter is quickly dropped. - The entirety of the Torchwood organization, which is theoretically secret. They barge into crime scenes and restricted areas using their status as Torchwood agents to explain it. In the first episode someone trying to find them does so by going to a pizza place and asking if one of their agents was a customer, and learned nothing. Then she asked if they'd had any orders from Torchwood. That brought her right to them. In a later episode someone managed to find their base by going to Cardiff and just asking people in the street where Torchwood was. They have an SUV marked "Torchwood" and get yelled at by name by random old ladies in the street by the second series, so the whole secrecy thing is a half-joke by now. - SHADO, the alien-fighting organisation in UFO (1970), is supposed to be secret, yet all of its vehicles, vessels and aircraft are clearly marked with the name. Many of its operatives also wear uniforms with SHADO insignia. - Scarecrow and Mrs. King: This actually does somewhat better. The Russians know about Scarecrow but know so little about him that they once mistake Amanda for him. - In the NCIS episode "Shalom", Ziva takes one look at a corpse and said "He's not Mossad." Really Ziva? What, did daddy give you the dossiers on every agent in Mossad as a gift for your Bat-mitzvah? - Joe Friday occasionally went undercover as a criminal on Dragnet, which can be unintentionally hilarious, because everything about Jack Webb screams "cop". - Covert Affairs is a justified version: Since the CIA actually gives out real names with an assumed cover identity, nobody is really expecting Annie to not give out her real name. Also subverted in one episode-when she helps her sister with some photography, the agency orders the pictures of her taken down. - In Alphas Gary's autism makes him not very good at going undercover, often refers to himself as a secret agent, often in front of people who aren't supposed to know, and when another member of the team is giving a cover story has identified it as such. - The Wild Wild West: James West fits this trope perfectly, which is hardly a surprise given that he's modeled directly off of James Bond. His partner, Artemus Gordon, is a bit better at the "secret" part of being a secret agent. - El Chapulín Colorado: One story features the world's most famous spy. It is a case of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome as, because of the spy's fame, nobody hires him. Once he gets word of a formula that made things invisible, he decides to steal it so he could use it to gain an edge his fame wouldn't ruin, by being able to enter places without being seen. - Subverted in the Blackadder episode "General Hospital", where the crew has been put on alert for a spy leaking intel to the Germans. One of the patients at the hospital where they're gathered is a man with a very thick German accent, calling himself "Smith". As it happens, he is one of the British army's own spies, and that he'd just picked up a "teensy veensy bit of an accent" after working undercover for so long. The real spy turns out to be \|\|George, who was inadvertently feeding intel in his letters to his uncle in Germany\|\|. - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: - In Alias, K Directorate operatives not only recognize Sydney on sight, they also know her name and appear to be well versed in her latest gossip. This gets her cover blown at least once. - Psych: This is jokingly pointed out in the episode "One Way, Maybe Two Ways Out". Shawn agrees to meet with a spy whom he and Gus have been encountering late at night in the park. When she arrives, she finds Shawn wearing a coat, reading a newspaper to cover up the fact he is staking out the area and insisting address him by a codename he picked. She points out that the codename makes no sense since she already knows his name, the coat is too conspicuous and that him reading a newspaper outside in the dark is too obvious. - The Peripheral (2022): Played with — the team of mercs hired to kill Flynne and Burton in the first episode have state-of-the art vehicles equipped with Cloaking Devices, but underneath the cloaks said vehicles are blacked-out Audi SQ8s, which are about as brash and thuggish as a vehicle can look, and the team members all wear matching black t-shirts and camouflage combat trousers. This means they attract the attention of a cop at a gas station, and murder him to cover their tracks. You'd think professional assassins would try and look normal while on their way to a hit to avoid this. - The unnamed agents in Data East's Secret Service, who go around performing their duties in elegant tuxedos and hundred-dollar dresses, while driving around Washington D.C. in an attention-grabbing bright red Ferrari. - Women of Wrestling employed a UK spy known as Jane Blond as one of its Wrestling Doesn't Pay gimmicks. Still, WOW having only one pay-per-view would have probably been a good thing for her espionage career. - Kyra's Backstory in the Empire Wrestling Federation and Ultimate Pro was that she became a CIA operative at age nineteen, despite having been the star of a traveling act since age 3 who had become a popular competitor in an underground fighting circuit. Her fairly high profile didn't stop her from taking down 198 drug dealers in four years before she had to be let go. - Game of the Generals: - Picture the scene; a suspected Spy has been neutralizing officers left and right, and the opponent knows this since they already lost a 5-Star General to them. Of course, this is downplayed as there are six Privates and a player can only have two, so getting captured by a Private is just as likely. - Another scene would be the 5-Star and 4-Star Generals destroying everyone around them. Over the next few moves, the opposing player begins to make a "path" on the opposite side to the Marshal, then a single piece makes its way through. No prizes for guessing who that can be! Of course, False Flag Operation and I Know You Know I Know can still make for some uncertainty (for a 4-Star General as the opposing piece can be a 5-Star General instead of a Spy). - In Paranoia, many Internal Security agents go undercover as members of another security group; this usually works okay (as long as they're not actually called on to fix a malfunctioning nuclear reactor or whatever), but a few of them are completely incompetent at hiding it; their every word and action practically screams "hi, I'm an Internal Security plant!". They're usually fed false leads and otherwise left alone, lest Internal Security send someone competent in their place. (A few of them act this way on purpose so no-one will notice the other Internal Security plant.) - In Warhammer Fantasy Battles Deathmaster Snitch is known by the name Snitch. Of course being an assassin is a respected profession for a skaven, and as a bipedal rat he can't exactly blend in with other races no matter what he calls himself. It might pose issues with rival clans if skaven weren't in a constant state of paranoia anyway. - An obscure late 80s/early 90s toyline that was basically a bargain-bin knockoff of G.I. Joe had a covert agent character who had "Spy" printed on his shirt. This was lampshaded by the bio on the back of his box, which said that no, he wasn't the brightest bulb, but sometimes he succeeded in gathering important intel because he was so obvious about being a spy that enemies didn't believe he was a real spy. - A perfectly viable approach in Alpha Protocol. The game doesn't penalize you for being a heavily-armored, assault-rifle wielding, grenade-flinging juggernaut who massacres his way through the entire game - beyond your handlers calling you out for being overt and violent. - Mike Thorton is only too eager to tell his name to everyone he encounters. (It's implied a couple of times that it may not be his real name, but it's still the name under which he is \|\|wanted by the American government\|\| for most of the game.) - This is similar to the Metal Gear Solid approach below. You can play the suave secret agent who works from the shadows and charms information out of people, but if you'd rather be the tough-as-nails soldier that does whatever it takes to get the job done... more power to you, as long as you get the job done. - Also, Steven Heck. Almost every operation he's involved with results in a Cruel and Unusual Death, such as suffocating a Vatican official with wafers. He's still one of the most mysterious characters of the game though. He might not even be working for any agency in particular, and some characters suspect he's just a lunatic who thinks he is a spy. His approach to the final mission if you pick him as a handler is closer to an action movie with three craploads and a half of casualties than any spy flick. And he does it by himself, too. - In Binary Domain the main character is part of a covert operation infiltrating an isolationist Japan. By the end of the first mission, the team is engaging in full-blown firefights with the robotic defense force. These only get more ridiculous as time goes on, such as having a running battle with a Humongous Mecha the size of three semis down the middle of a freeway. Despite this, the characters still periodically say they need to avoid detection. - The operation is meant to be covert, so of course their armor leaves their faces fully exposed and they also use each other's names. And since they're invading Japan after it has expelled all foreign nationals, only one of their members is Asian and none of them have even a fake ID. - Dragon Age: Inquisition gives us The Iron Bull who introduces himself as an agent sent to infiltrate the Inquisition. Justified because he thinks a group called "the Inquisition" would have figured it out eventually, so he just wants to get it out there now to prevent any potential conflicts. He offers to give info from his handlers in exchange. During party banter, Varric will point out that a hard-partying mercenary is the last thing he expects as a spy and that he should do more actual spying and manipulating. Bull retorts that doing that is exactly what people expect from spies while fighting, drinking and sending the occasional notes to his superiors is much easier, to which Varric isn't sure whether or not that's good or bad spywork. \|\|It's not quite as simple as that. The Boisterous Bruiser persona is largely an act to get your guard down, although depending on how his personal quest goes he may end up Becoming the Mask. If it goes the other way or is not done at all he'll keep up the infiltration for years before betraying you without a second's hesitation the moment his superiors tell him to (even if he's in a romance with Dorian or the Inquisitor).\|\| - Parodied (and perhaps inverted) in Fallen London, where your character can immediately identify spies based on how inconspicuous they are. "This fellow is of medium height and build. A forgettable face. Nondescript clothes. Even his moustache is uninteresting. He must be a spy." - In Gigolo Assassin, you play a hapless prostitute turned super secret agent. The problem? You're, uh, kind of really stupid and you're only wearing bikini briefs down below. - Mass Effect: For a supposedly super-secret organization, Cerberus sure does like to operate openly. And slap their logo on everything. - Metal Gear: - Solid Snake is normally somewhat overt (although he relies on just not being seen, not false information) and even does a nice subversion in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Disguised as a Navy SEAL, he succeeds in infiltrating the Big Shell with the SEAL team. We in the audience instantly know it's him when he takes his balaclava off, and we expect Raiden to call shenanigans...but it turns out Raiden somehow doesn't actually know what Solid Snake looks like, so it works. - Used as a joke at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater when Ocelot laughs about how no-one has figured out Adam's identity. \|\|It's Ocelot, and his real first name is Adamska... probably.\|\| - By the time of Persona 4: Arena happens, the remaining members of S.E.E.S from Persona 3 form the Shadow Operatives, an unofficial police-sanctioned organization made up of them and other authoritative members. While the group itself does well under the radar, the people in it have no concept of a low profile: Aigis, a Robot Girl, is one of its prominent members (and does a supernatural feat in broad daylight during her story mode), and Mitsuru and Akihiko are wearing a fur coat over a Spy Catsuit and is half naked save for a ridiculous-looking cape, respectively. Naturally, the other characters take pot-shots at their appearances, and Mitsuru in particular gets defensive about her outfit. To top it all off, they travel around in an eight-door limousine with high-tech equipment inside, which is already severely out of place in a big city, let alone a tiny rural town like Inaba. - Zigzagged in Red Alert 3: On the one hand, Spies are dressed with an infinitely-recurring Wetsuit Tuxedo and they can only walk in a half-crouch that screams Acting Unnatural. On the other hand, they can immediately disguise themselves as any infantry unit, and so go about undetected unless there's a detector nearby... which then leads to players spotting the suit of Powered Armor swimming across the sea. According to an in-universe interview with a spy, inconspicuous and blending in aren't necessarily the same thing. Now we sit outside of a small cafe in Phuket, Thailand to continue our interview. He orders coffee and a pastry, his accent French now. When I comment on his white linen suit and European looks, he points out that being inconspicuous does not always mean blending in. GH: It's a matter of expectations. It's important to appear to be what people expect to see. The people here expect to see wealthy Europeans. And the occasional journalist. - In Resident Evil 2 (Remake), Ada Wong no longer pretends to be an ordinary civilian looking for her missing boyfriend. Instead, she pretends to be an FBI agent and makes no secret of having an interest in the outbreak at Raccoon City, which she helps to sell by wearing a Conspicuous Trenchcoat and Sunglasses at Night. - Sonic Adventure 2 features a cutscene in which Shadow puts two and two together and realizes that a famous \|\|government\|\| spy he's apparently familiar with (or has read about somewhere), Rouge the Bat, is the same person as the anthropomorphic female chiropteran (i.e., a bat) who chased them, chose to help their world domination plan and openly refers to herself as Rouge. - Franklin Drake in Star Trek Online is a variant. The issue isn't that he is a open about being a spy, because most of his appearances have him work with you on intelligence-related matters, or even that he is a spy for the Federation, but rather about which organization he works for — Section 31 is supposed to be so super-secret that even the Federation government doesn't really know that it exists, yet Drake openly identifies them as his employers (rather than, say, claim to work for Starfleet Intelligence) and provides the intel and resources to back up that claim. Might be explained for a Starfleet captain (he could be angling to recruit them, like with Bashir), but for Romulan Republic commanders.... - In Star Wars: The Old Republic, despite being a secret agent it seems that almost all Imperial and Sith know who Cipher Nine is. You can even occasionally pull rank and talk about your position as an intelligence officer. Depending on the mission you're sometimes supposed to do this, since Imperial Intelligence doubles as the Secret Police. - The intro to the remake of Syndicate mentions that the corporations employ covert agents like yourself. With the liberal amounts of firepower you can access and must use, covert you most certainly are not. Miles and his fellow agents even have the Eurocorp logo emblazoned on the shoulders and chests of their nifty black trenchcoats/body armor. - Team Fortress 2 subverts this. The Spy is obviously a spy, and dresses the part even when off-duty, as seen in the comics. But when he's on the job, the Spy is just as covert as he should be, thanks to an invisibility watch and sophisticated disguise kit that lets the Spy appear to be anyone, from the other eight classes in the game to Tom Jones himself. - Thimbleweed Park has a group of conspiracy nuts. They draw a lot of attention, but one wouldn't normally know they're part of a secret group. That is, until you get to Chet Lockdown, the younger brother of the group's boss. His job is to wear a full body pizza costume and hand out pizza coupons with \|\|the secret code to their meeting place\|\| on them. However, as Ransome and Delores point out if they talk to him, the town has no pizza parlor. So he's incredibly obvious looking. - Zigzagged in the XCOM games: the titular organization is top secret and never publicly acknowledged by anyone in the Council of Nations that supports it. While its soldiers take to the field in unique equipment that can prominently display the XCOM seal, none of their gear names the organization. But XCOM will eventually become an Open Secret of sorts as civilian witnesses and news agencies notice that someone is dropping into various battlefields with radically-advanced technology on par with the alien invaders', they just tend to attribute XCOM's activity to individual nations' special forces. - Of the two playable characters in Assault Spy, Asaru at least tries to be covert while Ameila doesn't even try with her headstrong fist firsts approach. She even earned herself the moniker of Assault Spy due to this. - In The Elder Scrolls series, introduced in Morrowind, the Morag Tong are a Dunmeri (Dark Elf) faction of Professional Killers which are legal within Morrowind as a deterrent to destructive open warfare between the Great Houses. Historically, during the Second Era, the Morag Tong became far too brazen for their own good. When the Tong assassinated Versidue-Shaie, the Akaviri Potentiate who took over after they assassinated Reman Cyrodiil III (and who had hired the Tong in the first place to kill the Emperor), the Morag Tong wrote their name in his blood on the walls of the Imperial Palace. The rest of the nobility of Tamriel promptly made it their top priority to wipe out the Tong, which they considered a dangerous cult, for fear that they would fall victim to the same fate, and destroyed all but a small presence in Morrowind itself. - In Warframe, the Tenno can be stealthy and sneaky if they want to, and several Warframes specialize in surprise and misdirection, but they are also all just as capable of going on violent, overt rampages. Infiltration and Rescue missions take this extra far, as the Tenno can be blasting everything in sight with high explosives until they get to the door leading to the area that needs to be stealthed through. Even then, the Tenno can just kick in the door and rush straight at their objective if they know what they're doing. One Warframe, Valkyr, can even use her berserker ability Hysteria to scream at the top of her lungs and run right through most security systems to grab the objective and run. - In Half-Life: Opposing Force, the hostile Black Ops troops you encounter are assault rifle-toting soldiers decked out in black combat gear and night vision goggles, even though you fight most of them in broad daylight in the middle of the desert making no efforts to hide themselves - they even roll into Black Mesa driving all-black trucks and flying Black Helicopters. It's played the straightest by the male Black Ops troops, as all the female assassins - carried over from their parent game - are appropriately quick and stealthy, and on the Hard difficulty have an Invisibility Cloak that their male counterparts lack. It's arguably Justified by the fact that the Black Ops' whole mission is to kill everyone and nuke the facility after it's already been overrun by aliens, so covert considerations are largely moot. - It's even worse in the Half-Life fan game Hunt Down the Freeman, in which a US National Guard officer who had no involvement in the Black Mesa incident can recognize one of the Black Ops on sight as a 'Black Ops' solely because he's wearing black combat gear, implying that that they're some sort of recognized military unit, thereby defeating the whole point of black operations. - Psychonauts features the G-Men, sinister trenchcoated secret agents who exist in Boyd's mind as an allegory for his extreme paranoia and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, while operating as spies and investigators, the G-Men are blatantly obvious thanks to the fact that their 'disguises' consist of holding up a related single prop (such as a housewife disguise consisting of nothing but a rolling pin, or a sewer worker disguise being a single plunger) and making stilted, unconvincing statements about their disguise in an unflinching robotic monotone. Their straight-faced obliviousness to their blatant incompetence makes them one of the funniest segments of the game. - Girl Genius: Ardsley Wooster, after a long but ultimately ineffective (that is, the target knew all along) cover op as Gilgamesh Wulfenbach's manservant, has skipped into this territory with his dirigible-hopping announcement of himself to a foreign power as "Ardsley Wooster, British Intelligence." It was tactically viable, though, and it's not like his cover wasn't blown already. - Subverted in this Subnormality strip: Most of the strip features an interaction between a Tuxedo and Martini character and a cocktail waitress, but the last panel reveals that the narration was coming from a random background character the entire time. - Agent Ben and Agent Jerry in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! are extremely obvious The Men in Black anyway, but they also have a big black car and a big black van, each clearly labeled "F.B.I. Undercover" in large, friendly letters. - The Omega Key: Adam really should have kept his big yap shut. But then, he wasn't expecting that anyone would take him seriously, or that the hot chick he was hitting on was the antagonist. - Kara in Covert Front is clearly not concerned with stealth. Her default costume is a greatcoat which is very conspicuous, especially on a woman, and when sneaking around she repeatedly executes complex acrobatics that would draw the attention of anyone present. There is some justification for the outfit, as it conceals her features somewhat and most of her work consists of breaking into places where any person would be deemed suspicious. - Sir Thomas Henry Browne in The Dead Skunk becomes known throughout Paris as a British spy so much so that Sorbonne students prank him with fake secrets. - Played for Laughs in an Onion homage to Get Smart and similar depictions: "Man Suspected Of Being Bumbling Spy". - Parodied in Brutalmoose's SPY Fox review with "Undercover Cop Joe." He even goes around wearing a name tag labeled as such. - Kitboga is a scambaiter popular on Twitch and YouTube. One of the scam scripts as of around 2022 and later is to for the scammers to claim that somebody in the target's bank or something of the sort is compromised and so they need the target to become a "spy" and go undercover for them. Unfortunately for them, Kitboga's M.O. upon hearing this particular script is to be this, reveling in the supposed assignment and shouting about being a secret agent and such when he's pretending to be at the bank. - One interesting factor of the whole Valerie Plame scandal is that she was apparently a covert agent, yet was also an ambassador's wife well-known by a number of important people. Although in her case much of her covert activity had taken place before she'd been married and the CIA was in the process of moving her to "official cover" (that is, she'd be officially working for the US government but not officially the CIA) when she'd been outed. - Rather, unofficial cover means your link to the US government is deniable, whereas official cover puts you in the diplomatic corps (or somewhere else in the government, but usually the diplomatic corps), entitling you to diplomatic immunity if you're caught. In neither case is one allowed to admit they work for the CIA, and in either case it's a crime for anyone in the know to out the officer as a CIA employee, because not only does it place the officer's lives in jeopardy, but also the lives of any agents they've ever been in contact with. In both official and unofficial cover, a CIA officer normally uses their real name and identity with only the fact that they work for the CIA being concealed. A completely fabricated cover identity is usually not necessary because (unlike in spy movies) a CIA officer does not personally infiltrate target organizations, instead recruiting locals (particularly those who are already members of the target organization) to either defect to the United States or become double-agents. Revealing someone as a CIA officer therefore endangers all of the double-agents they've recruited. - This principle was more or less pioneered by British intelligence, to the point where a fairly significant chunk of the diplomatic corps are actually spies - sometimes referred to euphemistically as being "from south of the river" (the FCO building is just north of the Thames, near Trafalgar Square, while MI6 has its very famous HQ on the south bank of the Thames. What the euphemism will be if they finally get their long desired chance to move somewhere more discreet is unknown). - Oddly, Carlos the Jackal led a lifestyle similar to that of Bond and was a fairly inept terrorist, and only escaped capture for so long because his Soviet and Arab employers feared what would happen if they stopped protecting him. - Princess Stephanie Julianne von Hohenlohe. A Jewish member of a German noble family, she acted as a Nazi spy and messenger to sympathizers in the UK and United States despite being very well-known as a close friend of the Nazi hierarchy. - Ian Fleming based James Bond at least partially on a Yugoslav playboy named Dusko Popov who was an agent for the Nazis and then turned to become a double-agent for the British and lived a very high-profile lifestyle, particularly in casino gambling. - This high-profile lifestyle was not a hindrance to his career, since his 'spying' basically consisted of handing himself over to MI5 as soon as he arrived in Britain, then spending the rest of the war sending the Abwehr fake information from fictitious agents as part of the XX system. - Should be noted that the Abwehr at this time was run almost entirely by members of the anti-Nazi resistance, and Popov was just one of many spies encouraged to undermine their own efforts. He was probably recruited precisely for his own anti-Nazi credentials. - Eddie Chapman, codenamed Agent Zigzag, was a very similar case: A criminal before the war, he was recruited by the Nazis and ran straight to MI5 to tell them all about it. As with Popov, he was James Bond before there was a James Bond, indulging his love of casinos, booze and women on a government tab; he also fed the Nazis numerous false reports that their V1 weapons were falling short of London, causing the targeting to be adjusted so they stopped hitting it and started overshooting. - The entertainer Noël Coward pleaded to become an agent for British intelligence. The British government finally relented, signed him on and found he actually was pretty good at it since his status as a celebrity entertainer got him into many shindigs where loose lips were plentiful. - There have been lots of celebrities who did some spying, with real identities and hidden agendas. This makes it plausible if it's like Noel Coward presenting himself as Noel Coward, the entertainer, who is secretly a spy. Cover in modern intelligence has been described as more like lying about one's job than lying about one's identity. - Wolfgang Lotz was a real-life Israeli spy who hung out in Egypt posing as a former Wehrmacht officer running a stud farm for the Cairo elite. His original name was Wolfgang Lotz and he grew up in Germany. Mossad destroyed the documents in Germany that showed that he was Jewish and left the rest in place. - One reason Lotz got caught was that he was introduced to a genuine ex-Wehrmacht officer at an Egyptian event; they were supposed to have served in the same unit in the Afrika Korps at about the same time and Lotz failed to double-talk himself out of that fix. - The Military Liaison Missions were established as a temporary measure to maintain relationships between the occupying powers during the demilitarization of post-World War II Germany, and were kept going throughout the Cold War because both sides found them useful for gathering ground intelligence. The teams (which had quasi-diplomatic status and were authorised to travel anywhere in their clearly-marked, olive drab Opel sedans except in pre-designated special areas) consisted of military intelligence personnel in uniform. - SIS handlers used the position of Passport Control Officer in British embassies, though by the late 1930's it had become a Paper-Thin Disguise. This was compounded by the fact that during the late 1930's, there were large numbers of people wanting to emigrate from Europe and therefore their fake job took so much of their time that there was none left over for espionage. - Richard Murphy was an inadvertent example of this trope. A Russian agent assigned to work under deep cover in the US, his cover was blown practically from the time he entered the country and for the next twenty years he lived his life under FBI surveillance. People who met him immediately noticed that despite having an Irish name and a Canadian passport, he had a thick Russian accent. He also had a surly, stereotypical Russian disposition and apparently no interest in any sort of American culture (he didn't watch sports, he didn't like movies or reading, he had no hobbies). Several times the FBI searched his house, planted listening devices that were never found, at one point he even handed over a laptop he was using to carry stolen information to an FBI agent after having apparently mistaking him for his contact. After he was arrested and deported in a Prisoner Exchange, it was noted that he seemed more like someone who should have been opposing Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in a movie than a real spy. - Russian spy Maria Butina was known for posing in GQ wielding guns and became known to law enforcement in part because, on multiple occasions, she got drunk and bragged to her American University students about knowing spy secrets. - One of many FSB agents who had their details leaked by Ukrainian Intelligence, has a Skype address that included "jamesbond007".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvertAgent
Overprotective Dad - TV Tropes Dads who protect their children very much is not a trope on its own. "Overprotective Dad" may refer to one of the following: - Anti-Smother Love Talk: An overprotective or overbearing parent is persuaded to allow their child greater freedom and risk. - Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: A father who strictly keeps boys from dating his daughter. Previously called "Overprotective Dad". - Control Freak: When the parent (tries to) micromanage their children's lives, ostensibly to "protect" them from disappointment, failure, etc. - Doting Parent: A father who is excessively proud of and affectionate towards their children, especially their daughter. - Fantasy-Forbidding Father: A father who disapproves of his child's dreams, often out of overprotectiveness. - Helicopter Parents: Parents who hover over their children and get excessively involved in their personal lives, ostensibly for their own good. - Knight Templar Parent: A parent who does questionable things to ensure their child's safety. - Let Her Grow Up, Dear: A wife tells her husband to stop being such a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad and/or Helicopter Parents to their daughter. - Love-Obstructing Parents: Parents (usually fathers) who interfere with their children's (usually daughters') love life. - Mama Bear: A mom who responds to threats to her children with active force. - Papa Wolf: An Action Dad who tries to get revenge against people who mess with his kids. - Parents as People: A well-meaning but flawed parent who tries to raise their children in less than ideal methods, such as by coddling them, or restricting their activities to protect them from unhappiness and harm. - Safety Worst: A parent becomes so intent on keeping their child as safe as possible that they try to remove all possibility of risk (and fun) from their life. - Twerp Sweating: A father intimidates his daughter's boyfriend to not mess with her. If a direct wick has led you here, please correct the link so that it points to the corresponding article.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverprotectiveDad
Over-the-Shoulder Murder Shot - TV Tropes The heroes are looking for something suspicious. Possibly a murderer. They find him busy at work on his grisly deed, but he perks up and notices our heroes. Bonus points if the murderer is having lunch in the process. This is pretty much always shot from behind the murderer for dramatic reasons—it partially obscures the victim, lending ambiguity and tension to the scene and helping the audience's imagination to fill in the grisly details. May involve a Face-Revealing Turn. ## Examples: - Commonplace in Zombie Apocalypse films. The heroes see somebody crouched over a body, then the zombie looks up and it's obvious they are eating from the body. - Partial example in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone when Harry, Draco and Fang accidentally interrupt Voldemort's unicorn meal in the Forbidden Forest. He doesn't turn around, but he does look up, and there is blood on his lips. - Appetite: Dohoon learns of Aji's inhuman nature when he finds her chowing down on a man's head. She turns and glances at him, mouth bloodied. - In Bloodborne, Father Gascoigne is introduced hacking a beast to death with his Hunter's Axe. - One of the most iconic moments in the Resident Evil franchise. In the first game, a zombie (the first one you ever encounter in the game) does this as he's eating Kenneth. This example gets bonus points since you can later \|\|find and watch a video of it from Kenneth's perspective filmed on his camera\|\|. - In The King of Fighters, 'Riot of the Blood' Iori does this in one of his desperation moves: tackling his enemy to the ground, clawing at them, then momentarily looking back towards the camera before slamming his fists into them. - Early in F.E.A.R., Paxton Fettel is occupied over a labcoat's body. He looks back at the camera to reveal the blood smeared around his mouth. - Saya no Uta has Saya doing this. Fuminori doesn't catch it because of his warped vision. - SpongeBob SquarePants: Parodied in the episode "Bummer Vacation", in which SpongeBob goes crazy after being forced to take a vacation, with Patrick taking his place at the Krusty Krab. Near the end of the episode Patrick finds SpongeBob maniacally mumbling to himself, when Patrick calls for him, SpongeBob faces him and screams "I've been waiting for you, Patrick!".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverTheShoulderMurderShot
Overrated and Underleveled - TV Tropes "I don't mind that Greybor doesn't shut about being a professional assassin. I do mind that he doesn't shut up about it while being weaker than a bored nobleman, a conscripted street urchin, an amateur serial killer and my f---ing attack elk." Within the plot, a character is introduced who has a preexisting reputation of being a master fighter and quite renowned. This character is then implied to be a potential rival, obstacle, or ally of the party. The problem arises after this character joins your party, and a dedicated player notices aside from perhaps being a few levels higher at first, this character is inevitably weaker than the main character. This can sometimes be explained by a simple matter of not leveling the newcomer properly, but usually a heralded "strongest character" simply never is for long, or is certainly not as useful as their strength would suggest. Maybe programmers are underestimating gamers. Sometimes it can also be explained another way, such as they're weakened by something, like age (You're not as strong at 50 as you were at 20), injury or amnesia. It could also be its own variation of The Worf Effect. A dangerous foe or ally, whose reputation for being powerful is well-known, is overshadowed by the main character as a way of showing the player just how powerful they've become. Inevitably, this is almost always for game balance reasons, preventing a Disc-One Nuke. When it's averted, the character may be a Crutch Character whose power you don't get to enjoy for long. When applied to equipment, it's the Penultimate Weapon. Redemption Demotion can be seen as a variation of this. Also Bag of Spilling, in which a previous playable character doesn't retain their weapons/skills. One of many examples of Gameplay and Story Segregation. Overlaps with Character Shilling, and a frequent culprit behind Memetic Loser reputations. Contrast Underrated and Overleveled or Purposely Overpowered. ## Examples: - Garr in Breath of Fire III. The story presents him as a extremely powerful warrior with skills way above the strongest warriors in the world. He always joins the annual Warrior Tournament as a solo entry, while the standard is to register a team of three. Balio and Sunder, the duo of two Hopeless Boss Fights, tremble by just being stared by him. He eventually joins your party in the third battle against the duo, and after killing them, casually remarks that he was eventually planning of disposing them. After all that insane shilling and hype, he turns out to be, in-game wise, a bog-standard Mighty Glacier that does nothing particularly impressive and is easily outranked by Ryu. He has a plethora of Fire spells but his magic is so low that even his strongest spells can't match the power of his standard attack. - Magus from Chrono Trigger is an infamous case, as he is an incredibly powerful dark wizard with powerful magical barriers when he fights against the party, but upon joining becomes a run-of-the-mill spellcaster who has to learn all of his Dark spells over again. This is justified by having the game's Big Bad drain him of most of his power shortly before he joins the heroes, but we all know it's really thanks to Health/Damage Asymmetry. - Terry from Dragon Quest VI suffers from this; in his first appearance, he is stated to be an extremely skilled swordsman and defeated several soldiers in Arkbolt that your own party beat as a team, and then proceeds to defeat a Hackasaurus that previously defeated said soldiers before your own party can do anything about it. When he joins you for real, he's likely a few levels lower than your party, with his only abilities of note being that he is already in an advanced job (which you likely have access to anyway) and has good equipment; statistically, he is weaker than the Hero or Carver. Furthermore, prior to having him join, \|\|he is fought as a boss battle where he is tougher than when he's in the party purely because Dhuran the Dread Fiend is empowering him, rather than any power of his own.\|\| - Final Fantasy: - As a boss in Final Fantasy III, Odin has his trademark move, Zantetsuken: fearsome, impressive and capable of wiping your entire party to shreds in a single turn. Only after you defeat Odin and get him as a summon do you realize that Zantetsuken is actually pretty useless: it misses every single endgame boss and a lot of random encounters, and the ones that it doesn't can easily be defeated via other means anyway. - Terra in Final Fantasy VI is famed as a One-Man Army who singlehandedly wiped out dozens of Imperial soldiers in a demonstration. As she's the starting character, it's obviously some time before this is actually feasible. In the game proper, she's a Jack of All Stats who starts out with only a few very weak spells, and doesn't truly become a party powerhouse until she obtains Morph/Trance. Aside from two levels and some extra Magitek abilities, she's not much better than the two grunts escorting her. - In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud Strife is introduced as a former SOLDIER First Class — the strongest member of an elite group of super-soldiers. Of course, gamewise he's level 1, clearly much weaker than SOLDIER Third Class, and is only stronger than the regular military police. As it turns out, there's an in-universe justification for this — \|\|Cloud was never in SOLDIER, and is repressing his actual past due to trauma and being experimented on by Shinra\|\|. - Sephiroth massively averts this when he is briefly on your team for a flashback sequence (where "SOLDIER First Class" Cloud is yet weaker still); he is literally invincible, has high-level magic attacks that can destroy entire teams of enemies with ease, and is strong enough to kill a dragon in two hits (although at higher levels, you can kill those dragons in one). He is so powerful that you don't actually control him at all- he attacks on his own, and he's there partly to showcase what a badass he is, and partly just to show you up. He will sometimes kill every on-screen enemy before you have a chance to do anything. - Continuing with Final Fantasy IX, we have the character Beatrix. Being the general of an entire army, she can take quite a few hits from the party before she falls, \|\|and in fact can't be defeated at all\|\|. However, in the short time you fight alongside her, she is just about as strong as just any other party member, and it shouldn't take more than a few hits to K.O. her. This is in part due to a glitch; her HP, stats and abilities are identical to when she's a foe (save for the plot-convenient version of Stock Break she uses to end the battle), and another glitch in her two strongest attacks mean they don't register as special attacks, greatly reducing her usefulness.. - Steiner gets hit by this trope fairly hard as well: he's consistently billed as Beatrix's equal, even accidentally wounding her in a sparring match once, yet at the beginning of the game he's level one. - Half of the main characters in Final Fantasy X. The former guardians Lulu, Wakka, and Auron supposedly had all completed most or all of the pilgrimage, and the Level Grinding that entails, prior to the beginning of the game, but all start at effectively level 1. The monsters at the Calm Lands, which all three Guardians supposedly made it to, could have killed all three guardians with a sneeze at the beginning of the game. - This also occurs very blatantly in a plot-relevant Minigame: While the original members of your Blitzball team are certainly not the best players out there in the long run, the extremely-hyped, won-the-championship-many-years-in-a-row Luca Goers are a highly competent, tough to beat team... at level 1. They also have pretty much the worst stat growth in the game, rendering them ineffective by the time players' levels are in the teens. The first, story-mandated, match against them needn't be won, which is good because winning it usually involves taking advantage of the fairly simple Blitzball AI and Tidus's unique special moves. By the second or third league season they almost never even pose a challenge. The Al Bhed Psyches, on the other hand, start and remain a formidable team, and their starting goalie is a prized recruit for players who seriously pursue Blitzball; however, the story never actually makes much of their abilities, even having them try to win by cheating in a cutscene-only match. They're also the first team the pathetic Aurochs defeat in ten years in the storyline, making it even more confusing once you play them normally. - It is also a good question why all Blitzball players in Spira, many of whom are implied to participate in previous games, start all at level 1. Especially since both Besaid Aurochs and Luca Goers all explicitly won matches just before the one you play. - There are quite a few examples in Final Fantasy XII. They include a sky pirate and his partner, who is described as a "master of weaponry" but is only two levels ahead of your character when you recruit him. What's worse, said two characters are actually the worst characters to use their starting weapon types which they're implied to be most adept at using, mostly because their attack animations with those weapon types are by far the slowest in the party. - Fran is the oldest of the main cast, comes from a race of magical huntresses and can single-handedly take down several imperial soldiers during cutscenes. Which makes it all the more surprising that she is the statistically WORST party member by a small margin. The game also makes a big deal in one boss battle about how she (and presumably other Viera) goes into a feral rage when mist starts filling the area. This is represented by putting her in permanent Berserk status for that battle; later in the game, you go to areas that are permanently filled with mist with no similar effect. - Well-justified with Basch, who was once a renowned knight but has just spent two years imprisoned in horrific conditions. One character explicitly remarks on how much weight (and presumably muscle) he's lost. - God Eater 2: Rage Burst introduces Livie, a remarkably experienced God Eater who is used as a one-woman kill squad whenever a God Eater goes missing in the field. She can sync up with ANY God Arc, something exclusive to her and her alone due to her unique biology. But when she is forced onto your party, she has next to no Personal Abilities and the ones she has are inefficient and not that good at keeping herself alive in combat. - Feena from Grandia fits this as well. She's supposed to be a legendary explorer and adventurer, and everyone is in awe of her, but once she joins you she's not particularly powerful compared to anyone else apart from the fact that she's the first playable character to have magic (which the others can start learning shortly afterwards). - Kingdom Hearts actually zig-zags this trope quite a bit, often starting you at level one with no abilities by putting you in control of a different character, while playing the trope straight and explaining why it's played so. - In The Legend of Dragoon: - \|\|Rose\|\| was one of the original Dragoons, and arguably the strongest considering she was \|\|the only one to survive the final battle\|\|. Since then she has had 11,000 years to train. So why is she no stronger then two (admittedly competent) soldiers when she joins the party after all that training? - Kongol, a former enemy boss, is also something of a disappointment when he joins you. - In Phantasy Star I, your ally Odin has a reputation as a "man of great strength." He's weaker than all your other party members, including the Squishy Wizard, although he can use the Laser Gun. - Since the party characters in each timeline of Radiant Historia don't overlap 100%, the levels of those characters that don't appear in both timelines tend to lag behind those that do (As all experience gained remains even if you go back and forth in time or change timelines, probably because doing otherwise would have been very difficult to program). This is especially true of Rosch, who isn't playable in a significant fraction of the timeline he is a member of the party in, what causes him to lag even further behind. - In Star Ocean: The Second Story: - Dias is the classic version, a legendary swordsman who frequently calls party members weak. Once joining the party, he is quickly outclassed by Claude. In Dias' case, this trope was somewhat turned back; in the PSP remake he was vastly improved, and more on the level of badass the game makes him out to be. - Also happens to Albel Nox in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, who is level 29 (according to the guide) when you fight him, and level 24 when you get him. - And Ashlay in Star Ocean, who is a grizzled and aged veteran, swordsman known the world over, personal friend of most of the world's royalty... and joins at level 15, only to be very quickly overshadowed by Ratix. However, unlike most examples of this trope, there is an easy way to justify this though: Much of the story of his skills were in the past, by now he's obviously past his prime thanks to being almost sixty years old and he only has the use of one arm (in the remake, he is flat out missing the arm.) Ashlay actually plays this trope fairy realistically too ― Sure he knows a lot of technique, but isn't very good long-run because he literally is an old man. His knowledge of techniques DOES have one perk though. He can't use them anymore, but if you recruit him he can teach the main character several powerful sword skills he cannot otherwise get. - Adray, praised as a great magician and swordsman, Fayt absolutely destroys him in swordplay and Sophia outclasses him in magic to the point of seeming like a Goddess by comparison. Justified as she had \|\|genetic engineering for that purpose\|\| and Fayt had been training with videogames his whole life and \|\|had the destructive gene\|\| - Sword and Fairy 7 has a Physical God as a party member, while the rest are just trained magic-using humans. In cutscenes he Flash Steps around before anyone can react and knocks people out with a single chop. In gameplay, he has some high-damage skills and Flash Step instead of dash, but otherwise he's no stronger than the other characters. - Tales Series - Leon in Tales of Destiny is supposed to be an elite military warrior, carefully trained since childhood to be a prodigy general. Yet when he joins the party, he's at the same level as the low-level thieves (+ country bumpkin) he easily wiped the floor with moments before. - Kratos in Tales of Symphonia is supposed to be a powerful, experienced mercenary, adept at both blade and magic, but when he joins he's only a level or so higher than the rest of the party (which at that point consists of only random schoolchildren) and knows only a handful of weak techniques. (Of course, there is a spoilerrific reason for this.) Later in the game he is replaced by another character, Zelos. Despite being a pampered noble, Zelos is effectively Kratos in combat: they have the exact same skills, weapon proficiencies and combat role, with only a few minor differences in stats (Zelos' are lower) and attack style (Zelos is better at using certain attacks). \|\|Oddly enough, when you have to fight them, even if they just left your party in the previous cutscene, they're suddenly tough enough to match the entire party all over again... but, of course, they're using their Angelic powers during those fights.\|\| - Jade from Tales of the Abyss is advertised as one of the most powerful and feared sorcerers in the world, but is hit by a bad guy's special item early in the game which causes him to lose access to all but his most basic spells. He spends the rest of the game gradually breaking the seals on his magic, which by a crazy coincidence happens at more or less the same rate as the other, less-experienced characters are learning new skills. Crazier still, after he remembers all his old abilities and regains his old stats, he keeps gaining new ones at the same rate. He joins your party for a short while before this, and he's a good 40 levels higher than your party by that point (assuming the player isn't grinding). He drops to around the same level as you when his artes are sealed. - In Vagrant Story, the main character's Backstory involves him being among the baddest of badasses, but he gains amnesia before the game starts and forgets most of his past — and most of his fighting skills. He doesn't actually learn new attacks; he "remembers" ones he already knew from before he lost his memory. - Any late-game recruit in Valkyrie Profile gets hit with this, but it's particularly stark with Lyseria and Gandar. The former is half-giant whose magic power was so great that she sealed herself so that her power wouldn't destroy the world. The latter is the most powerful sorcerer on Earth, who Odin specifically orders Lenneth to recruit so that nobody else (particularly Hel, queen of the dead) can get his power. However, due to showing up extremely late (the penultimate chapter for Lyseria, the final chapter for Gandar), and having base stats only marginally better than Mystina (who shows up at roughly the halfway point of the game, just after a Peninsula of Power Leveling opens up), most players prefer using Mystina and taking advantage of Hard Mode Perks to perform more tweaks to Mystina instead. - Kanon of Wild ARMs 2 harasses you all throughout Disc 1, often being called a Wake-Up Call Boss due to how strong she is. When she finally joins you, she's alot weaker. However, it's justified in that the heroes really beat the ever-loving crap out of her so that her bionic implants were destroyed and Marivel had to fix them. This could explain her loss of power. She also happens to notice that she's been weakened. She's still the second most damaging character in the game once you unlock her special moves, however. - Fate/Grand Order: - Siegfried is introduced with a lot of fanfare in the Orleans singularity as being basically the greatest dragonslayer in history, to the point that about half the story is dedicated to successfully restoring him to health so that he can kick ass again. When you actually pick him up, he's a Stone Wall whose anti-dragon skills are pretty much required for him to do any meaningful damage to them, and he doesn't even get a Tactical RockPaperScissors boost against any of the dragons in Orleans. This ended up creating the "SAVIOR OF FRANCE" joke, as the majority of players instead used whatever Assassins they could scrounge up (since Assassins do get that boost against the mostly Rider-class dragons), typically Sasaki Kojirou, and left Siegfried collecting dust. - This applies to a lot of guest servants in the main story, barring a small handful like Jeanne and Caster Cu (who show up very early) as well as Merlin and Super Orion (who are just that good). No matter how Famed in Story they might be, they can be somewhat underleveled, lack Fou statboosts, and are overall probably inferior to your main party, much less the Servants you can borrow from friends. - In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura: - At the end of the game, you can add \|\|Arronax\|\| to your party. While he's at the maximum possible level allowed by the game engine, he equips no weapons nor armour, and most of the time prefers fists to his (quite decent) magic. This may, however, just be a result of a glitch. \|\|The dude single-handedly destroyed advanced technological civilization and was bad enough to be generally regarded as his world's Crystal Dragon Satan. This also happens to the other Banished villains - for example, a half-man-half-dragon creature whom the collective of most powerful mages of the world defeated after days-long battle.\|\| - In general, most of the recruitable NPCs avert this. They're all set at static levels, and the locations you find them are often within their realm of ability. - Franklin Payne (Gentleman Adventurer!) is hyped continent-wide for his famous and daring expeditions. By the time you qualify to invite him, any gunslingers currently in the party could have been better developed and better equipped, and all other character types are more effective in their specialty and still broadly useful. Franklin is a nice chap for such a Glory Hound, and entertaining to listen to, but he's a little late for the True Companions. - The trope occurs in the first Baldur's Gate game. Several NPCs who offer to join you early on (Xzar and Montaron, with Khalid and Jaheira following shortly after) are supposedly experienced adventurers, yet upon joining the party they are all revealed to be no more powerful or better equipped than the player character, a novice going out into the world for the first time. - By the same token there's also Gorion, who's only Level 9 despite being stated to have regularly run with Elminster's crew back in the day. - Dragon Age: Origins: - Sten's name signifies that he's actually a military commander from a culture renowned and feared for martial prowess. He's also a seven-foot-tall Horned Humanoid. He's actually one of the weakest party members. - At Ostagar in Dragon Age: Origins, it takes an ogre and several waves of darkspawn forces to finish Duncan off in a cutscene. In the Fade sequence, it takes you a couple of minutes at most (to kill Duncan). Justified in that \|\|it's not really him, but a demon guarding the main boss of the level\|\|. - Wynne is an accomplished mage and Senior Enchanter who is a veteran of fighting darkspawn. When she joins your party, she is at the same level as your main character (who may be a mage several decades her junior). \|\|Which is justified by her having been killed and brought back to life between when you last saw her at Ostagar and when you recruit her in the Tower.\|\| - Loghain is touted as a veteran of a number of wars, as well as a master swordsman. After dueling him near the climax, \|\|the player may potentially recruit him. Unfortunately, his power in the duel comes from bonus HP from being a boss and two amazing NPC-only rings. Bereft of those in the player's party, he will almost certainly be the weakest member by far due to the atrocious allocation of his stat points. The fact that Alistair, whose build you could optimize for most of the game, leaves permanently if you recruit Loghain, renders him even worse by comparison, and only attractive for narrative reasons.\|\| - The Elder Scrolls: - While certainly not in the majority of cases, a handful of "artifact" class weapons and items throughout the series tend to fall into this. Despite being items of legend, often crafted by and associated with divine beings, they often aren't even as powerful as generic items of the same time which have been custom enchanted by the player. - Oblivion: The final boss of the Mages Guild questline, Mannimarco, "King Of Worms." While in the lore Mannimarco is by far the most powerful Necromancer in the series \|\|and a Physical God after the warp in the west at the end of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall\|\|, here he's more or less a more powerful generic Altmer necromancer set to be 7 levels above the player until level 36 or higher (his level scaling stops at level 42). - Skyrim: - Ulfric Stormcloak, should the player pursue the Imperial questline. The game practically treats Ulfric as a king-slaying, Thu'um throwing, Memetic Badass, if dialogue is to be believed. Yet when an Imperial-Alligned Dragonborn storms his castle, his own Dragon is harder to kill than him. The meta reason takes this trope literally. Up until patch 1.6, all NPCs were leveled based on when the player first encounters them. And Ulfric is the 3rd character you see in the opening sequence. So, you were essentially fighting what would be a challenging enemy, if you were at level 1. Even with the patch to buff his health, his outfit possesses a whopping 7 armor rating (the weakest item in the weakest armor set in the game gives an 8), so any decently-skilled character will wipe the floor with him. Humorously, if one uses the console to spawn Torygg (the king he murdered) and set them to attack each other, Torygg will win most of the time, even if Ulfric shouts him down. - Lord Harkon, Big Bad of the Dawnguard DLC, claims that the Vampire Lord transformation will make you "a lion among lambs". Regular city guards can defeat you easily in this form, and you're often better off as your normal self, as the Vampire Lord cannot use equipment (other than certain rings) and doesn't have access to your regular set of spells. It can be useful in areas where you're deprived of your regular equipment, such as Cidhna Mine. If you manage to get it as early as you can, it can be extremely useful early on for caster characters, who in the early game struggle to hurl more than one or two firebolts before running out of Magicka - the Vampire Lord form gives you a decently powerful projectile with a low mana cost that also heals you. It's only later on in the game, when you properly level up your crafting skills, that its usefulness falls off, but then again, Destruction magic in Skyrim is underwhelming in general due to the lack of an enchantment to increase its damage. Werewolves suffer the same problem in the lategame, where their claws no longer compare to a good blade and their lack of armor cripples them severely, considering that they are melee-oriented. - Several of the Daedric artifacts are talked up as world-shakingly powerful, which they don't live up to. For example, the Rueful Axe is described by its creator as "incredibly powerful" and guards will remark on how it could cut through gods. While it's got good base damage, it's far from the most dangerous of its type, and its enchantment adds stamina damage, which is hardly that exciting. Adding to the problem is the fact that most of these artifacts, for no discernable reason, do not benefit from smithing perks, meaning that you can upgrade them by only half of what you could do with a regular weapon. For that reason, the most useful Daedric artifacts are ironically the ones that are not combat-oriented at all. - Knights of the Old Republic: Carth is "one of the Republic's best pilots," "a hero of the Mandalorian War and a legendary soldier." He's only a couple clicks higher than your starting character, possibly justified in that being a crack pilot doesn't mean much in on-the-ground fighting (the bulk of your game). Bastila? The paragon of Padawans and key to the war effort - at less of a starting level than you will be at that point, which is also handwaved by her being an adept of Battle Meditation, an exceedingly rare ability that, by augmenting her allies' fighting prowess, boosted her reputation. The "near-killed-and-left-with-amnesia" excuse shows up to explain why \|\|you, the ex-Dark Lord and galaxy-feared Badass\|\| are a rather pathetic fighter for a few levels and also further explains why your "exceptional" compatriots seem so mediocre in comparison. And in the second game, damage and age are used to explain the low starting levels for \|\|Canderous, who becomes the Mandalore\|\| and the droids when Exile finds them. - Mass Effect 2: - Your second batch of dossiers includes the assassin Thane Krios. In a bizarre quirk of Gameplay and Story Segregation, Thane is very useful for taking on Collectors in missions, as his specific powers are formidable against them, but when it comes to the game-ending Suicide Mission, he's a complete Master of None story-wise. \|\|He's ill suited for leading any of the available specialty roles (tech expert, fire-team leader, or biotic barricade) and his defense score towards holding the line is nothing special.\|\| - There's also Samara, a thousand-year-old Asari justicar and accomplished biotic. Apart from Cutscene Power to the Max, she is not particularly more powerful in gameplay than other biotics \|\|although she is one of two people who can sustain the biotic barrier in the final mission\|\|. - Jack, supposedly the most powerful human biotic ever born, is actually inferior to virtually all the other biotics in your team due to her bad power set. Not helped by her Cutscene Power to the Max intro which shows her blowing up the heads of mid boss level enemies with ease, something you can't remotely come close to doing even against the exact same enemies. - In Neverwinter Nights, the novice players are tasked by Lady Aribeth to defend the city. Aribeth is a legendary fighter and defender of the realm. In a major plot point she later \|\|turns heel and the players must fight her\|\|. Fortunately, by this time the players have been adventuring for a few months and any one of them could mop the floor with Aribeth without much difficulty. - In Neverwinter Nights 2, we have \|\|Ammon Jerro\|\|, who is stated by several characters to be "a wizard of some power," others to be "a powerful sorcerer," and still others "an extremely powerful Warlock." In-game, he only has Warlock levels, and is fairly powerful, but all the descriptions of him suggest that he is, in fact, every single frelling spellcaster class available short of Bard, and should technically have more levels than the game suggests is possible. When you actually fight him, his summoned help is ever-so-slightly harder to beat than he is. - Although this is justified by his powers being based on various pacts and agreements with certain fiends: When you destroy his Haven you strip him of his power, which he mentions. And all those NPCs calling him sorcerer or wizard are in no way knowledgeable about differences in spellcaster classes - all they know is that he uses spells. - By the time you get him, he is level 15+. By Dungeons & Dragons standards, this is actually an extremely high level, especially for anything that is remotely a caster. - Pathfinder: Kingmaker has a few examples: - Jubilost Narthropple is supposedly a legendary explorer, journalist, cook and author who has travelled the length and width of Golarion, writing up stories on its lands, people, customs and food for years if not decades. When he joins your party in-game he's level 5 (which is fair enough if he's avoided combat for most of those adventures), an alchemist (a class with a skill-set that isn't very conductive for exploring and writing), and hasn't got a single rank in Knowledge: World, the actual skill used for knowing customs and for cooking. Mechanically, Linzi is likely to be better at the things Jubilost are supposedly famous for, despite being a Naïve Newcomer and a bard college drop-out in-story. - Amiri's call to fame is that she slew a Frost Giant and took his weapon as her own. She joins the party at level 1, a point at which it is extremely unlikely she'd be able to so much as scratch a Frost Giant, nevermind slay one. \|\|This disrecepancy actually gets adressed in-story: Turns out Amiri simply found an already dead Frost Giant and looted his sword, and then made up the story that she killed him.\|\| - Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous: Most of the party are implied to be veterans of some kind, or at least skilled in their craft, but they start with low levels and horrible equipment. The only ones to avert this are Arueshelae and Greybor who come later and thus have higher levels and equipment; as well as the few companions like Ember and Woljif whose backstories don't involve much actual combat experience. Seelah perhaps suffers from this the most, as she's an Iconic character who's already been through at least one adventure and yet she starts off at level 1 with gear to match. - Played extremely straight in Planescape: Torment - The Nameless One doesn't so much learn new skills as he remembers what his previous incarnations knew... and some of those were absurdly powerful. - Adell in Disgaea 2. Although he starts the game at Level 1, as appropriate for an RPG hero, he's already traveled all over the world of Veldime looking for Overlord Zenon, whom he's sworn to defeat — and Veldime has some pretty dangerous regions to search through. When he couldn't find the Overlord, he instead traveled all over Veldime again to collect the ingredients his mother needed to summon Zenon — which included killing a few mighty beasts. So, he's supposed to be much stronger in the story than his level in the game indicates. This is how he can block one of Etna's attacks in a story segment, even if gameplay wise she has over 100 times his Level. - You could explain this through the game's Fourth Wall-lessness, where Adell should be level 1 as it's the start of the game. - Disgaea also contains a mechanic that allows a character's level to be reset to 1 in exchange for higher base stats. It's possible he Reincarnated just before the beginning of the storyline. - Adell's passive ability is to do more damage to enemies that are a higher level than him. While this wouldn't allow him to match enemies that are of a significantly higher level in actual gameplay battles, it could be used to justify his power in the storyline. - The Updated Re-release of Disgaea 2 parodies this with one of the DLC unlockable characters, in which Hanako sacrifices a copy of Phantom Brave in which all the characters are leveled up to 9999 (Don't think too hard about the fact that Phantom Brave is disk based...) for a summoning ritual. All that comes out of it is a level 100 Marona. - Near the beginning of Disgaea 2, your party runs into Demon Lor...erm...Beauty Queen Etna from the first game, who is Level 1,000 (compared to your party being maybe Level 10 or so.) Later on, Etna becomes the strongest Demon on the planet and is inadvertentely summoned by Adell's group when they try to summon Zenon again (only this time, by not summoning Zenon specifically, but by summoning "The Strongest Demon In The World" instead.) \|\|However, since Etna gave them bad summoning materials out of spite, she messed up the ritual and suffered severe level drain in the process. Only now does she join your party (or rather, stalk your party until she gets her levels back.)\|\| - Near the end of the first game you are stopped by some "powerful" demon lords (they're roughly level 80) and your group starts to lose hope when they're inspired by the sudden appearance of... \|\|Kurtis\|\|! Who joins your group so you can fight the enemies properly. ...Except he's level 50 and has no notable equipment, and you can't take the time to change equipment or level him up until after you've defeated the demon lords. He's also reincarnated as a prinny to atone for his sins, and his old friends have trouble taking him serious at first. - Note that at the same time he is Underrated and Overleveled as he joins as a Level 50 Prinny. - Final Fantasy Tactics games: - Cloud in Final Fantasy Tactics is extremely useless unless you put a ton of effort into raising him properly. Despite being pretty strong in his own game, he joins your party at level 1 and he can only use his special abilities from the Soldier class if he has a certain sword equipped, which is pretty weak compared to other weapons. Most of the time, you are better off raising Cloud with whatever job classes you have available rather than stick to his default class. - Thunder God Cid, however, is just given to you without any effort at all and very much does live up to his name and legend. He very easily becomes the most powerful PC in the game, to the extreme that the rest of the game can be solo'd by him and him alone. - Ezel from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is touted as a character who can make any law cards that can easily nullify whatever laws are set in battle and is someone that is quite elusive. However, Ezel is just a reskin of the Alchemist class. He only has two abilities (one which makes you immune to status ailments once and another that puts all enemies to sleep) and can't change classes at all. Despite Ezel having extremely high magic power, he posses no abilities that are based on it. Along with being extremely slow, physically weak, having low HP, and can't even walk into water due to a glitch, Ezel may look like a powerful character but is absolute crap in battle. Even if Ezel joins your clan, he won't give you law cards for free, thus you still have to barter with him to get the cards you want. - Al-Cid in Final Fantasy Tactics A2. He's a powerful opponent when you fight him, but he loses several levels once he joins your clan. He is the only human in the game that can use a gun in battle, which would have made him extremely awesome, but like with Ezel in the above example, Al-Cid can't change classes and most of his abilities revolve around the gimmick of females present in battle. If you don't have many female units in the clan, Al-Cid will become useless quickly. - The Fire Emblem series of tactical RPGs has more instances of this than can be conveniently listed. The reason is primarily a result of the games' mechanics — since death is permanent in this series, late recruits exist primarily to give the careless and the inexperienced a fighting chance in the later levels. As a result, the experienced knights, powerful generals and legendary warriors of the world (who come later in the game) are almost invariably weaker than the rank novices, random mercenaries, and inexperienced students (who join early) raised to the same level. Almost without exception, a character who starts out at level 5 and is raised to level 15 will be far stronger than a character who starts at level 15, even if the character who starts at level 15 is renowned for his peerless strength and skill. (The only exceptions are Game-Breaker units who join on the final chapter of most games.) This doesn't make these characters useless by any standard, though—in many cases, their stat deficiencies still leave them as very competent fighters, and they consistently boast high weapon ranks, letting them use powerful swords and staves. Complete aversion in the franchise are relatively rare, though there are a handful of outliers who provide some level of story justification. - Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light and Mystery of the Emblem: - Hardin is the leader of a band of exiled soldiers who have been escorting their princess and fighting a guerilla war against the Macedonian Army for some time. You'd expect him to be a prepromote or at least very high-level, but he's only a level 6 cavalier, albeit an unusually strong one. His four subordinates are pretty unimpressive at base level, and in the original game, two of them are some of the weakest characters in the game. - Minerva in the original NES game, Warrior Princess of Macedon and famed as The Crimson Dragoon, is a level 1 Dracoknight, and due to the way the game calculates stats, she has the same stats as a generic enemy in her class (she's still very strong, but it can be rather disconcerting to compare her to another Dracoknight). Every game afterward gave her some buffs to be more fitting of her reputation. Her elite subordinates, the Whitewings, also aren't particularly high-level in their original appearance, with two of them being more Magikarp Power than anything. - Jeorge is notable for being renowned as the "greatest sniper on the continent" but is a prepromote who's average and not really noteworthy statwise aside from his very high bow rank. This is explained in-game, however: due to the high-class nature of his bloodline, people have been spreading ridiculously exaggerated rumors about him, leading to this false reputation. - Zig-zagged with Gotoh. He was the original 11th-Hour Ranger in the series, and in the original NES game his stats definitely befitted his legendary status, having 20's in most areas, which was the maximum at the time. In the remake, Shadow Dragon, however, stat caps are higher than 20 but Gotoh's base stats were left unaltered, leaving him to fall victim to this trope. He's never playable in either version of Mystery of the Emblem, probably to avoid this trope. - Despite taking place after the first book, the second book of Mystery doesn't take your stats from a playthrough of the first book into account, instead simply giving characters preset levels and stats. Consequently, while just about everyone has gone up a few levels and gained about the right stats for those levels, the amount of levels they've gained is considerably less than what you'd expect—most notably, Marth has gone from level 1 to level 3. While some of this could be explained with them having lost their skills in the three years in between, it doesn't work as well for characters who stayed frontline troops or have been actively involved in other events, particularly the Whitewings. - Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem is notable for this, due to growth rates and enemy strength being hugely inflated across the board; consequently, just about every character to join after the Sable Knights will be struggling to survive past their join chapter. Astram is one of the most notorious cases, due to the fact that he's recruited from the enemy side. This means that you can compare this guy, who is supposed to be the World's Strongest Man, to the soldiers he commands... and holy crap does he not stack up well. On the highest difficulties, he can be one-rounded by every single one of them. Even the thieves. - Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 mostly averts this, with Famed in Story characters like Galzus, Ced, Saias, Xavier, and Eyvel all being about as strong as you'd expect for characters of their status (though Saias does suffer some Redemption Demotion). Amalda, Conomor, and Diarmuid are on the weak side next to similarly-leveled units of their classes, but are still entirely competent fighters. Olwen is the most significant counterexample, being quite weak at base apart from her signature tome, but even she has a level of justification: she's been fairly sheltered and lacks experience. - Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade has Cecilia, who, despite being the Mage General of Etruria, has very mediocre stats (most significantly, her 10 Speed, which isn't enough for her to double anything that isn't an armor knight, is one of her higher stats). Compare that to Perceval, the Knight General, who has 18 Speed without Hard Mode Perks, and even Douglas, the Great General and a Mighty Glacier, has 8. The base parameters of her class (high movement, good rescuing capability, an Armor-Piercing Attack with the option to hit hard on fliers, and staff use to cure status and heal allies) make her an alright Support Party Member, though. - The Blazing Blade: - Karel is Famed in Story as "the Sword Demon", and many characters talk about his incredible feats like wiping out whole armies and slaying giant monsters. In reality, he has fairly mediocre stats for his level and is in a rather bad class (footlocked Fragile Speedster swordsman in a game that heavily favors mounts, raw power and durability, and axes), meaning that him wiping out whole armies is a tough sell. He's actually outclassed in every stat but Speed by Harken, who replaces him if certain conditions are met and is mostly just treated as a fairly experienced knight. His appearance in Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade depicts a much more experienced Karel who is a far stronger warrior—albeit one who suffers badly from Late Character Syndrome. - The penultimate chapter, "Victory Or Death", introduces Renault, a mysterious, high-level Bishop with rare equipment and the ability to heal numerous units at once—initially, he may be seen as a godsend thanks to the continuous stream of high-level, dangerous enemies present in the level. However, his magical abilities are absolutely atrocious, implied through support conversations to be because Renault was a former mercenary who renounced his violent ways and embraced religion as penance. The process of discovering this, unfortunately, requires bringing a seriously underpowered character into the most dangerous part of the game. - Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn: - Lucia and Bastian, Elincia's retainers. While both have excellent growth rates, they also have atrocious base stats for their high levels. The third, Geoffrey, is ironically the lowest leveled despite being the head knight, and his base stats are much better suited to his level. - The trope is notably averted with Stefan, who, while a much higher level than the rest of your team at that point, has a stat spread that's more than adequate for his level (except for his paltry Luck score). This trend continues in the sequel, where he's among the last units you recruit in the game, but is no less effective than his fellow swordmasters (still has low Luck, though). It might have to do with his recruiting requirements and the implication that he's descended from a legendary member of the tribe that produced one of the Purposely Overpowered Laguz kings that joins in the final chapter. - Then this gets completely defied by the Greil Mercenaries when they make their grand return in Radiant Dawn. Famed in Story and the heroes of the previous game, they'd be a disappointment if they were anything less that absolute badasses more powerful than any other unit you have... so they're absolute badasses more powerful than any other unit you have. Despite the enemies scaling appropriately, the Greil Mercenaries have a much easier time with combat than any of the previous groups you control, and their chapters are made difficult mostly by virtue of escortees or time limits. Even once perspective shifts back to the other teams and they get enough experience to reach the same level, the Dawn Brigade and Royal Knights will struggle to outclass the Greil Mercenaries. - Averted by the royal families in Fire Emblem Fates. Between amazing bases, growths, and being perfectly specced for their jobs, they all come across as the Badass Family of Royals Who Actually Do Something the story says they are. Although this does have elements of Tropes Are Not Bad, since this makes it very hard for other units to compete for a place on your team when a royal fills that niche - to the point where they're collectively considered a High-Tier Scrappy in some circles, and not using any of the royals is commonly considered a Self-Imposed Challenge. - Played with in regards to the Knights of Seiros you can recruit in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Despite being experienced knights, the best of the best, they join you at a level considered appropriate for the story. That said, they arrive already in an Advanced class regardless of level, and their statline reflects this. They also tend to arrive well-suited for that job and often carrying powerful equipment (Catherine is a Disc-One Nuke for exactly this reason) so all up they're hardly a disappointment. Likewise, the protagonist's father, Jeralt, is a famous mercenary known as the Blade Breaker, and former captain of the Knights of Seiros, but in the prologue, he's only a Level 3 Paladin; he's definitely the strongest unit on the map on non-Maddening difficulties, but isn't as powerful as he should be. Also applies to Byleth, since you start at level 1 despite having over ten years of experience as a mercenary. - Many characters from Growlanser I return in Growlanser II. They seem to have lost all their levels between the two games, which is given no explanation whatsoever. - Langrisser 2 employed this to hair-pulling extent, where Leon, a Level 6 Knight Master, joins you as a computer-controlled unit for one battle and then offers to join you. If you accept, he loses nearly 30 levels on the spot. (To add insult to injury, several party members leave you and appear at least 10 levels higher as enemies the very next stage.) - Quattro Bajina in Super Robot Wars Z is a variation on this, he's one of the best pilots in the game(He usually is. In fact, here he's probably second in Z only to Kei ) but rather than getting his own top of the line mobile suit, he's got the OK Hyaku Shiki, which is not very good compared to the units you get late game. UNLESS you do what many do and put him in the ∀ Gundam..... - Quattro in general really. It's most prominent in Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden, where his stats are some of the worst in comparison to other Gundam main characters including normal pilots like Kou Uraki and even Loran Cehack. And like in Z, he only get the Hyaku Shiki, and Sazabi is an Easy Mode only unit that is decent at best. - Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis: - Erin is an interesting version of this. She is not a bad character by any means. She is a healer with a healing ability which can, with proper equipment, be made capable of activating every two rounds and heal the party completely, rendering many battles easy so long as you can avoid a TPK for two turns. For players that don't like using a lot of healing items she is arguably the strongest character. However, her strength comes entirely from her ability to quickly heal the party, she is otherwise underwhelming in health and especially damage. The Fridge Logic kicks in here, because in the early game, the time when everyone insists she is powerful, she always fights alone. A solo Erin, before drives made it possible to speed up her healing, would easily get overwhelmed and killed before she could build up resources for a heal or do much damage. Effectively she is only powerful when put in a team and the only times the plot calls her out as powerful is the times she isn't with a team. Plus no one ever mentions her ability to heal when mentioning her danger, despite this being the only thing that makes her a viable character at all. - The bonus characters are all NPCs that were either bosses or allies who were powerful in cutscenes, but they all start at level 1. The only saving grace is that they have lower EXP requirements and good stat growths, meaning they can easily surpass the main party members. - In Assassin's Creed Origins, Aya is touted as Bayek's equal as a warrior. During the moments you play as her however, since none but the most basic of Bayek's abilities carry over and she's restricted to a set of leveled gear she ultimately comes off as mechanically weaker. - In Bleach: the 3rd Phantom, character levels are determined by when in the storyline they first appear. Since the four senior captains are encountered first (but don't join you until later), these legendary warriors have starting levels lower than captains hundreds of years their junior (though their high statistics make them more powerful, even at low level, than many other characters). - The game's dialog will also assume that the main character is weaker than pretty much everybody else, when in fact the opposite is true. The lieutenants in particular are bad about this; pretty much all of them talk down to the main character, when in fact they can't hold a candle compared to him/her, even when they first appear. - In Chaos Rings III. Al is introduced as a high ranking explorer. When he's brought into the party he's not much stronger than the rest of the team. One of the other members in the party actually calls him out on this, and he responds that he's high ranking because of his experience, not raw power. - City of Heroes uses different stats and AI for allies compared to enemies. This can be clearly seen in Gaussian's story arc, where the previously incompetent Longbow allies that you've fought with for a few missions now are suddenly much, much tougher when you have to fight them instead. - Vanguard also demonstrate this. The player will usually fare better against the Rikti than Vanguard does, but when the player has to fight Vanguard during a civil war they are suddenly so much more deadlier that you wonder why they couldn't do anything without your help before. - In Defense of the Ancients, many of the heroes, according to their backstory, ought to be powerful beyond belief already, but for balance everyone starts at level 1. - Rather disappointingly enforced by paladin Artix of DragonFable In his own movie (Artix VS The Undead), Artix was shown to slay hundreds of Undead with a swipe of his sword. In game however \|\|he is a level 3 Paladin who seems weaker than your main character, bar his four-hit Light combo\|\|. Justified when you find out while talking to Artix \|\|that after fighting a deadly creature summoned by a Master Necromancer, he sealed the monster inside his battleaxe and as a result of the battle lost 30 levels. Implying that before the battle, he was still very much a badass at level 33\|\|. Even at level 3, his four-hit combo is extremely powerful, and turns most fights at lower levels into cakewalks. Add the fact that the increase in damage from level 3 to 33 is generally at least 1000% and you realize that he was originally probably capable of taking out the player's full-grown dragon. - Merik in Dungeon Siege is talked up as a magical badass, but when you finally meet and recruit him he turns out to be a plain nature mage... who is lower level then you. Especially bad if your main character is a nature mage himself. - The prequel novel to Guild Wars 2 is about the Five-Man Band \|\|(well, it's five by the end of the book)\|\| who took down several Champions of the Elder Dragons, and nearly succeeded in taking out one Elder Dragon himself. In the game proper, the tutorial mission and lvl 1-20 story missions of each race feature the player fighting alongside one of the group's members, where they are marginally stronger or equally strong as the low level player. - In Izuna 2, all characters who join your party begin at level 1, even when your mains could be at level 45 or higher. This includes \|\|the first six bosses of the previous game, including the Big Bad.\|\| - KanColle: Despite Johnston's historical showing where her historical counterpart unambiguously pulled off a feat rivaling or even surpassing Yuudachi, her surface combat stat in-game is pitifully low, only barely higher than Sammy B. (which only puts her pretty much dead average in night battle power compared to other DD) even though a Fletcher-class has way more firepower than destroyer escorts. This is probably because the developers chose to give her other roles instead, including the ability to perform OASW without any gear in her base form note : All other ships that can do that like Sammy B., Jervis, Isuzu, and Tatsuta all need remodels to pull this off and, with right gear, having AACI that's among the strongest in the game, at least rivaling the Akizuki-class. - The playable characters in League of Legends have four usable abilities, but when you start a game with them, they can only use one, and are actually rather weak with less than a thousand health. Especially when you look at some of their backstory. However; this is presumably invoked by having spells around the fields of justice so that the champions powers are kept equal or in check. Even though players will forever argue about champions being overpowered and underpowered. Explained away in-game as having to summon the champions every time a new battle starts, creating a fusion of the summoner and champion who has to learn how to use their powers and abilities again. Killing minions and champions presumably assists this process. - Legend of Legaia 2 Averts this with Kazan, an old, highly trained martial artist who joins the team literally 15 levels higher than the rest of your party (a young man with a few years of combat training and a young woman with none) and stays that way until they catch up with him. He quickly makes work of every enemy they encounter for the next few dungeons. - Zero, the "Legendary Hero" from Mega Man Zero, was violently awoken from his 100 year rest and has forgotten most of his fighting techniques. True to his series heritage, he recalls most of his techniques after beating a boss and mimicking its attacks. - A rare Tabletop Games example is Van Richten, the famous monster hunter of Ravenloft; Van Richten literally wrote the book on hunting monsters, with a career of adventuring and monster killing spanning decades and dozens of monsters, from vampires to mummies to werebeasts to ghosts to golems to ancient dead and worse besides. And what level is he when you meet him in the 2e adventure of "Bleak House"? A whopping level three. Even considering that in the days of AD&D, levels were harder to gain, and that Van Richten lived his career by the creedo of "kill smarter, not fight harder" note : he would research his targets before fighting them, allowing him to negate many of their strengths and amplify their weaknesses, so as to minimize their ability to fight him back, something he encourages in his guidebooks - and something that many Dungeon Masters would award full experience points for anyway, that's still distinctly underwhelming. One of the fan sourcebooks includes an array of differently leveled Van Richten's, aiming to portray him what he would have been "more realistically". - \|\|Tezkhra\|\|, the last playable character in The Reconstruction, is a god. Yet he moves at approximately the same speed as dirt and most of his abilities are Useless Useful Spells, making him more trouble than he's worth most of the time. - Shadowrun Returns is repeatedly guilty of this: - The final mission of "The Dead Man's Switch" has a famous character from the Shadowrun setting, \|\|Harlequin, a 2000+ year old immortal elf Magic Knight who is single-handedly a match for an entire high-level team in the tabletop\|\|, join your party. He's a rather underwhelming physical adept with some buffing spells, and while he'll pull his weight against your foes he is rather fragile and has nothing on a good mage or street samurai damage-wise. - Similarly, you meet Jake Armitage from the SNES game. You see, the problem is that by the end of the SNES game, Jake was a badass decker-shaman that fought a Great Dragon and won. Here, he's only a bit more powerful than your fresh-out-the-new-game-screen character, and he's just a mage. When you meet him again much later he's still not much better than you'll be then. - The supposedly famous and super-skilled deckers Dodger and Johnny Clean don't have very good stats or gear either. - Luna, from Soulcalibur 3's Chronicles of the Sword Mode, is a recurring boss from the first half of the mode who wields the titular SoulCalibur. She joins 2 chapters before the end, is average level, has a class with unexceptional growth rates AND she has the ONLY moveset in the entire game without a known anti-AI move, near required against Chronicles of the Sword's cheating AI. - Total War: - In Rome: Total War, Carthage. Historically, Carthage at their height dominated the western Mediterranean and was an equal of the Roman Republic militarily and economically. The three Punic Wars fought between the two nations were the largest wars that had ever taken place at the time and lasted over a century. Carthaginian forces under Hannibal threatened the heart of Rome in a way no other outside force would for hundreds of years after. In-game, however, Carthage is significantly inferior to the Roman forces in just about every way. Only Carthage's highest-tier units like the Sacred Band heavy infantry beat out their Roman equivalents, and it's rather rare for Carthage to last long enough in the campaign to recruit them in significant numbers. Carthage is also lacking archer units of any sort (though this appears to be due to a bug, as they exist in the game files which can be easily modded to add them into the game). Essentially, if you're hoping to rewrite history by leading Carthage to victory over Rome, be prepared for a much tougher task than you might expect. - In Third Age: Total War, several factions qualify, but perhaps most egregiously, Gondor. Minas Tirith doesn't even have a grain exchange, and there is no place in Gondor that begins the game with the ability to train it's primary troops, or even a standing army of any kind! The closest is a bunch of scattered militias, which are capable but not exactly what you'd expect from one of the greatest kingdoms of Middle Earth, a shadow of it's former glory or not. - In War Thunder many vehicles that in real-life were effective if not dominating can struggle because of game modes not favoring their intended role or the matchmaking putting them against comparable adversaries that they did not face historically. Due to how vehicles are balanced, though, sometimes they might even become very weak. One example are high speed supersonic interceptors such as the English Electric Lightning or the Lockheed F—104 Starfighters, which in reality were tasked of quickly scrambling and climbing to intercept high altitude Soviet bombers, but in-game are put in compressed dogfights against more agile and technologically advanced fighters. - The update that introduced rank VI and supersonic jets showed the American F-100 Super Sabre, the Soviet Mig-19... and the British Gloster Javelin, which was a subsonic night interceptor, quite underleveled compared to the other two. - The "Apex Predators" update of December 2022 introduced rank VIII with the F-16 Falcon, the Mi G-29... and the Tornado IDS. Presented as a comparable counter to the other two right from the cinematic trailer, the Tornado was by no means an "apex predator" during his service. It was in reality a strike aircraft. In-game, countries that operated it, such as the UK, Germany and Italy, don't have a counter to the F-16 spam until other aircraft are introduced. Even if the developes instead added first its interceptor variant, the Tornado ADV, it would have been in the same situation of the aforementioned Lightning as its role was different from what happens in game (and the Tornado ADV was even underwhelming as a platform). - XCOM is infamous for this. Your troops, supposedly drawn from the best of Earth's special forces, are pathetic chumps who stormtroopers could give a run for their money. Of course, one could argue that the aliens are just that good at their job... if your soldiers didn't constantly panic and drop their weapons. - XCOM: Enemy Unknown and its sequel avert this. Your soldiers have a standard 70% chance to hit, and generally good chances to avoid panicking. The former is amazing by real life standards and the latter is good as well, considering that the game takes place in an alien invasion.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverratedAndUnderleveled
Overshadowed by Awesome - TV Tropes "I loved the Flash like a brother, but dont forget where we were. That was Central City back in the day. His day. It was like trying to compete with Sinatra." Where in a show or game that features ludicrously powerful people, a certain character or group of characters are overshadowed by their superior fellows and end up looking like plain crap, even though they are still very competent in comparison to your average Innocent Bystander. Similar to Badass Normal, except they rarely get a chance to actually be badass and they are not always considered "normal" in the first place. If the creator is cognizant of this, expect a few rounds of Training from Hell to remedy this Can't Catch Up. Occasionally, they'll get their own storyline among 'real' normals, just to show how objectively badass they actually are. Unfortunately, Hard Work Hardly Works, so you can expect them to remain overshadowed throughout the show... Of course, this makes sense for human characters playing second fiddle to someone superhuman, or even a god. Unless... See also Muggle Power, Tough Act to Follow, and In the End, You Are on Your Own. Can cause Always Second Best, Always Someone Better, Stuck in Their Shadow, Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist. Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond may result if they end up somewhere where their ability is actually potent. Videogame gameplay version of this would be Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness and Power Creep. ## Example subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - This can easily happen if a Munchkin (who knows the rules of the edition they're playing) min-maxes their character to hell and back. Especially if combined with a dungeonmaster who doesn't place enough upgrades for melee fighters in a campaign of Dungeons & Dragons. - It can also happen easily if the players roll for their character stats, in fact this is one of the main arguments for the point buy system: every character has 8 in every stat at the start, distribute 27 points around up to a cap of 15 (though racial bonuses and the like can go through the cap) and there's your character. Every character will have different arrangements but will be on level pegging if you tally them up. - Or, in 3rd edition and 3.5 if someone plays a caster class above level 6 or so, thanks to Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards. The higher the level, the greater the disparity. Even if the non-caster seems awesome on paper, he's still massively outclassed by the magic users. - Exalted: - The Lunar Exalted: Blessed by the goddess of the moon with the power to shapeshift, which includes the ability to assume the forms of anything or anyone they've killed and eaten, including demons and gods. They are the only Exalt type to have successfully and permanently altered their own Exaltations. This is on top of their own innate magic to become masterful charmers and hypnotists, brilliant sorcerors and scientists, and/or nearly unparalleled warriors; they are the protectors of all Creation. They are also completely overshadowed by the Solar Exalted, who were empowered by the sun god with sheer overwhelming skill and might. On top of that, each Lunar is magically bound toward a single Solar. - Dragon-Blood have it even worse. Even the Dragon-Blood book goes out of its way to point out that one Terrestrial in a mixed game is a bad idea; the Terrestrial Exalted are intended to work as a team, and outnumber the whole host of all Celestial Exalted nearly 30:1 for a reason. - All over the place in Warhammer 40,000. The Imperial Guard are the most obvious example; they're the largest military force in human history, made up of trillions of intensely trained soldiers equipped with technology far more advanced than their modern equivalents, and yet the prevalence of Super Soldiers, Eldritch Abominations, and alien species superior in technology, physical prowess, psychic abilities, and/or numbers makes the Guard quite pathetic by comparison. They do have frequent wins, and their tanks are the nastiest things on the tabletop, but ultimately they aren't that impressive despite their power. They do still get a decent amount of respect for the standard-issue giant brass balls that they keep fighting regardless. - Generally, Toughness 3 and an Armour Save of 5+ was supposed to be considered good, with 4+ being elite body armor and 3+ being the equivalent of a walking tank. However, with the popularity of Space Marines and variants, many of the other species that would have been considered "normal" have been demoted to "swarm" status. Doesn't help when GW seems to actively embrace this new image, releasing even more space marines while actively playing up the "swarms" part in other armies. - A high-powered laser that can take off an unarmored man's limbs in a single shot, can be recharged just by throwing its magazine in a fire or keep it in sunlight and can be mass-produced with such ease that a man who barely knows how to build a hut out of mud and wood would not only be able to operate one, but also make one? The US army would be clamoring for such a piece of technology. To 40k however, it is the humble lasgun, otherwise known as "flashlights". This is because every other gun in the setting is either a rapid-firing, one-handed grenade launcher, fires mono-molecular edged ninja stars, flesh-eating worms, or just flat out rips you apart at an atomic level. - In the current Meta many units are often seen as "uncompetitive". This does not mean they're bad or underpowered, in fact most of them do very well at what they do and are quite appropriate for their cost. However, there are many units that are more powerful than them, many of which share the same Force Organisation Slot, meaning you either choose between the balanced unit, or the overpowered one. It's not a hard choice. - In the actual lore, Luther would have been the single greatest hero of all time on Caliban, if one of the primarchs, Lion El'Johnson, didn't happen to land on that particular planet. At this point, it is almost bordering on a tragic subversion, since, while Lion El'Johnson is physically powerful, tactically brilliant, and very quick to analyze any situation, he is an absolute moron with dealing with people. Luther isn't quite at Lion's level, but his charisma ends up making him more effective than Lion in most situations. Several major issues caused accidentally by Lion El'Johnson probably would not have occurred under Luther. - What about the PDF? The Planetary Defence Forces? It's joked that their role is to be punching bags long enough for the Imperial Guard and Space Marines to arrive, but think that not all of them are backwater hired guns and mercs. The wealthier and more important worlds have huge and well-equipped PDFs with competent officers, competent men, and have the money and industrial base to equip their men with the finest weapons and armour the Imperium can provide. Forge worlds are even more impressive, with lasguns, tanks and artillery that are produced by the Adeptus Mechanicus and actually superior to what the Imperial Guard get, not to mention they may be upgraded with the order's own cybernetics technology and turned into the Skitarii. Basically, a Forge World PDF will be the size and technology equivalent of the US military, a Badass Army in their own right. Yet in come the Orks, Eldar or Tyranids, and the PDF get utterly crushed. The PDF lack the one thing that make the Imperial Guard competitive: quantity. Even the most badass PDF is not enough. Not even close to being enough. - PDF tends to outnumber Guard by a large margin. It is hard to transport millions of soldiers between stars to defend nameless backwater planet. Guard is more effective because they are recruited from the best fighters of PDF, they have much better morale, actual combat experience, and complex electronic equipment. note : It allows them to perform large-scale operations with coordination that would be impressive for modern special ops unit However, the main problem of PDF is the plot. Xenos attacked and PDF kicked their asses just don't make up a good story. (Except in some of the Ciaphas Cain books, where they get A Day in the Limelight and provide the muscle for Cain's wins.) - One of the outcomes of Power Creep whenever it is applied to any game. What was once dominant can be knocked down into obscurity because the newest additions invoke this trope. Case-in-point, the famed Blue-Eyes White Dragon from Yu-Gi-Oh!. Once known as a nigh-unbeatable powerhouse, the shift in power and pacing of the game has changed such that it is not unusual to see a Deck field out 2 or more monsters of its strength in a single turn with beneficial effects to boot. It took some explicit support (involving cards that would also be on par with the game's own Power Creep, mind you) to bring Blue-Eyes back up to speed. - The Lion in Winter: Prince John has the misfortune of being born into an entire family of Magnificent Bastards, and ends up looking rather thick by comparison (and resenting it a lot). - Hamilton: - Aaron Burr is a highly intelligent scholar and a skilled lawyer, but even he can't keep up with a genius like Hamilton. His complicated feelings about watching Hamilton's rise are one of the main driving forces of the story. - While he doesn't appear, John Adams is periodically referenced as this in comparison to the other Founding Fathers. King George III in particular comments on how he seems almost comically unworthy to succeed George Washington. - Discussed in Daughter for Dessert between the protagonist and Lainie in the flashbacks. The protagonist tells Lainie about his dream of opening a diner, and Lainie asks him if hed like to open a restaurant instead. He replies that he doesnt see himself as a good enough cook to run his own restaurant. And it is well established that he can cook. - Double Homework: - Tamara is a strong skier in her own right, but her abilities are eclipsed by those of her brother, the protagonist of the story. - Double subverted with Rachel. The protagonist saw her talent while the two were dating before, and suggested that she try for the Olympics like he was doing. He was initially better, but after the first avalanche, he falls off the wagon with his training while Rachel sticks to her regimen, \|\|and she edges him out at the Olympic qualifier by a split second. In Rachels epilogue, however, Rachel wins the bronze medal, not gold. Not only that, the protagonist notes that if he were in the same competition in tip-top shape, he would have won gold in all likelihood.\|\| - In Majikoi! Love Me Seriously! this happens to pretty much all the male leads. Gakuto in particular is shown to be able to hold off 70 people attacking him at once with a broken leg but is hopelessly outclassed against almost all the characters. It also happens to some of the female characters, like Fushikawa or, tragically, \|\|Kazuko Kawakami\|\|. - Majikoi is incredibly bad about this, to the point where nearly every character save for a select few is completely overshadowed by the main female lead Momoyo by a wide margin. To put this into perspective, all of the women on the main team are stronger than the men, but all of them save for one are significantly weaker than Momoyo. - Yamato manages to avoid this, however, by being The Chessmaster and a Magnificent Bastard. - The whole of Melody can be seen as a deconstruction for the music industry. The protagonist, Tim, Liam, Dash, and Jade are all good musicians, but none of them have achieved superstardom due to the fiercely competitive nature of the business. \|\|Short of the Perfect Ending, this becomes Melodys fate as well. She achieves a measure of success, but not enough to become a household name.\|\| - Poor Hoshikawa Maki from Tokimeki Memorial 4. She is the dedicated lead heroine, taking up the torch from previous main lead heroines from the game series and overall fulfills all the necessary criteria to be one. But she is easily overlooked or deemed not as memorable as Satsuki Yuu, the deuteragonist who is an Expy of old-time fan-favorite Fujisaki Shiori as well as Okura Miyako, the game's Ensemble Dark Horse due to her \|\|not just being a secret character to date, but also her route consisting of her personality doing a 180 and being the first Yandere in the game series\|\|. - DEATH BATTLE! has matches like these frequently. Nearly every single combatant is a badass in their own right, and some can even fight on equal footing with their opponent. Other matches on the other hand, end up with the losers getting destroyed by their opponents who are simply better than them in every single way that matters. - One of the most notable is Hercule Satan VS Dan Hibiki where as it turns out, Hercule won because of this trope; Both Hercule and Dan are pathetic excuses of fighters in their own worlds, Hercule is only that way due to being a normal man in a multiverse of planet busters at minimum, otherwise being, by normal standards, an excellent fighter with at least one legitimate win to his name thanks to his skills. Dan on the other hand is pathetic even when in a world full of fighters much closer to him in power, frequently gets his pink clad ass kicked (usually because of his own overconfidence) and his only confirmed victory was handed to him out of pity by Sagat. - RWBY: - Jaune Arc is fairly physically strong, but he's still the weakest fighter of the heroes and has no formal training, so he Fights Like a Normal in a World of Badass where everyone fights according to Rule of Cool anime physics. Jaune makes up for it by being The Strategist. - Team CRDL, memes aside, are not pushovers, but they do have the bad luck to have both their fights be against exceptionally strong opponents (Pyrrha and Penny), meaning that they get stomped fairly easily. - Meta-version. Cracked made an article about works which become Genre Killers, not because they are bad, but because they are that good that they become the "definitive" movie. - At the Super Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, there are mutants who just don't have the best powers. - Aquerna possesses the spirit of the squirrel. She can do a 25-foot standing broad jump. She's far stronger and quicker than any normal human her size. She has super-senses. She can talk to and command squirrels. And she's regarded as one of the biggest losers on campus. - For that matter, Phase is a good example. Phase has pounded Matterhorn, fought an interdimensional demon to a standstill, one-punched Fantastico, and still thinks of himself as being in the bottom half of his team. He's probably right, given who's on his team. - Gadgeteers often find themselves falling into this. They don't tend to have flashy powers - though their mechanical advantage, so to speak, can be utterly devastating. They don't usually have the Exemplar package, or magic, or super strength, or the like... so it's easy to underestimate them. One does so at one's own peril. - False Swipe Gaming: Some Pokémon didn't see play in higher tiers because others fulfilled the same role, but better. - Dragonite wasn't used in Gen 3 OU because Salamence had the exact same typing, was faster, and had higher offensive stats, making Salamence the better option. - Thundurus completely outclassed Zapdos offensively in Gen 5 because the former had higher Special Attack, Speed, and Nasty Plot to boost its Special Attack even further, resulting in Zapdos dropping to the UU tier for the first and only time. - The Deoxys video mentions that its Normal form was always overshadowed by its Attack form, so the Normal form saw extremely little usage. - Honest Trailers all but says this in regard to the 2015 summer blockbusters that were not Mad Max: Fury Road: - Epic Rap Battles of History: - Discussed in Idols of Anime, with regards to Fancy Lala: Viga theorizes that part of the reason for Fancy Lala's poor ratings and early cancellation was that Cardcaptor Sakura was airing at the same time (and in fact premiered just two days after Fancy Lala), and was a much better Magical Girl show. - In Noob: - Heimdäl is leader of Justice, the top guild of the game \|\|up to Season 3/The third novel/Comic 7\|\|, can be assumed to be the best mage, is a good strategist and may possibly be in the top five. However, Fantöm, Amaras, and Spectre, the three that outrank him, are the poster boys for UltimateGamer386 and get to do most of the impressive stuff in the story, thus greatly limiting Heimdäl's opportunities to shine in comparison. - Mist, who was top player before Spectre and actually the first to even earn the title, is stated to have gotten overshadowed by him in terms of reputation in one of the novels.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvershadowedByAwesome
Overdramatic Dating Commotion - TV Tropes Hazuki: I'm going out with [Akihisa] because we're gonna get married! The FFF: Time for an inquisition. He perpetrated a felony by going out with a girl. Defendant, any last words? Akihisa: [who's tied to a cross] Shouldn't my defense come before my last words?! The FFF: Verdict is guilty. Death penalty. In real life, two people dating can be met with a couple of "congrats" and some teasing, and that's it. Because over-reacting to the news of two people dating, even if you're close to them, would come off as weird and overstepping boundaries, right? Wrong! In fiction, it's a Matter of Life and Death. Characters' reactions to their friends dating one another wildly vary, and this might even be treated as a source of gossip, especially if everyone around you is a Large Ham prone to Chewing the Scenery. The moment a couple is suspected, the friends of the couple would show approval and push the two lovebirds together. If the average-looking Generic Guy gets the cute/smoking hot girl, his male (or female if Even the Girls Want Her applies) peers would comically flip out in jealousy and throw a few "What Does She See in Him?" remarks while glaring at him. The same can go for the male character's jealous female peers. And if the "couple" aren't actually dating, but everyone around them just misunderstood and jumped to conclusions, expect one of the characters caught up in the mini dating "scandal" to be very annoyed at the unwanted attention, gossip, and misunderstandings this brings them. The way the character clears up the misunderstanding/stops the chaos would be as overdramatic and comical as the chaos itself. Cue a public announcement that they're ''not'' an item and it's Not What It Looks Like, or scaring the crowd into shutting up and minding their own business. The commotion would die out eventually, but the crowd would either be disappointed or relieved and overjoyed that nothing's going on, depending on whether they're rooting for the two or not. The male character would also be afraid of the seething hatred the other guys have for him and avoid angering them further. Basically, the "dating" revelation often, but not necessarily always, evokes a Universal Group Reaction (if everyone's reaction is similar). If the girl is the focus of the story, many of the male, and possibly female, characters will hope to be the ones who claim her Sacred First Kiss and will react with violence and dismay that someone else claimed it, deeming that person "unworthy" of the kiss. This is almost always Played for Laughs and Ship Tease material if the "couple" causing all this commotion isn't together yet. However, it can be Played for Drama if one of the two characters gets bullied by a jealous posse. It's also extremely common in Asian media, specifically in the Harem and Romantic Comedy genres. Note: For an example to qualify, the reaction to two characters possibly being an item should be over-the-top. Throwing jokes, celebrating the couple normally, and one single character reacting or simply getting jealous/mildly surprised don't count (whereas fainting, for example, counts). It has to be an overdramatic response from multiple characters. A subtrope of Serious Business and Comical Overreacting. ## Examples: - Up to eleven in Cupid's Chocolates. In the first episode, a girl named Zitong suddenly comes up to Haoyi at his university and tells him she's pregnant with his baby, causing an explosion in the background. All his peers start taking pictures of the two nonstop while calling him a "vile bastard." When she informs him that she's three months in, he replies, "who the hell are you? I don't even know you!" His peers get even angrier at him, so he escapes with the girl. - Played With in Clean Freak! Aoyama-kun. Aoyama is a School Idol so it's justified that his fanclub and the entire student body would be invested in his love life. Interestingly, he has a strong aversion to physical contact. So, when the popular Odagiri is the only person he allows to touch him and willingly touches her, everyone jumps to the obvious conclusion that they're dating and the whole thing blows up, with Odagiri's male seniors threatening him if he ever makes her cry and Aoyama's fanclub being shocked and saddened by this, saying, "hang in there!" and "this might be the end for us." Aoyama's fanclub in unison: Aoyama and Odagiri would be the ultimate couple?! - Despite being a non-romantic Shounen work, Jujutsu Kaisen features a scene where Yuji mistakenly thinks Megumi is being hit on by a random girl (who was actually just asking him for directions), Satoru and Nobara, along with Yuji, instantly start running to where Megumi is, with Satoru ordering them to get in "Formation B!" like they're on a mission. Nobara and Yuji latch to him dramatically and disapprovingly inquire about the woman and ask him, "was it all a lie when you said your time with me was the most enjoyable of all?!" - Downplayed in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War. There are several chapters where the entire school is shown to get very invested in Kaguya and Shirogane's perceived love life and a rumor that Shirogane was going to confess led to what was probably half the student body showing up to watch. The only one who actually obsesses over it on a daily basis, however, is Karen. - Happens twice in Maken-ki!. - When Celia first meets Takeru and takes an immediate liking to him, stating he should be her "steady boyfriend," his male classmates look and move like zombies out of envy and start fighting him physically. - After Kodama gives Takeru a kiss of gratitude, everyone is seen in a crying or annoyed fit. The boys are jealous of him for stealing "Kodama-san's purity", promising that they'll kill him, whereas Haruko and Inaho are angry at Kodama and bothered by this display of affection. - My Bride is a Mermaid has a scene where Nagasumi reveals that he's living with Sun, and it cuts to the world having exploded and all of his male classmates being pissed that someone like him is living with Sun that they get into a big comical fight with him... twice. - When Junichi is forced to beg Yukana in My First Girlfriend is a Gal to go out with him, she agrees after a long conversation and some teasing. The next day, she sends him a bed selfie with her boobs slightly exposed on his way to school. His three friends immediately tell him they aren't friends anymore right after promising to be his friends forever. Played With since they're the ones who made him ask Yukana out in the first place. Shinpei [crying]: A man as fortunate as you is no friend of mine! I hate you! I'm losing my mind from the absurdity of the situation! - Princess Resurrection: When the other students at Hiro's school believe that Hiro is dating Reiri Kamura (which Reiri herself gleefully encourages), the other boys shoot him serious death glares. And at one point, after Reiri had zipped up Hiro's pants, the other boys all greeted her the next day with their fly's open in the hopes of receiving equal treatment. - Ranma ½: A good many of the stories of the martial arts rom-com are set at Fūrinkan High School. As such, the students are regularly witnesses to and sometimes participants in the hijinks of the Love Dodecahedron. - In one episode, after Kunō learns of Akane's engagement to Ranma, he loudly and very publicly challenges Ranma, revealing the engagement to the whole school, all of whom are eager to question the affianced couple about their relationship. - When Ryōga hears that Ranma has gained yet another fiance (Ukyō), he appears at the school to punish Ranma for "toying with Akane's heart." Ryōga is quickly interrupted in his bid by Ukyō herself showing up to defend her beau. The whole thing got started because Ryōga heard a couple of Ranma and Akane's classmates talking about the whole thing. - The movie Sing a Bit of Harmony includes a scene where some female students see Shion kissing Gocchan (their lips didn't actually meet), and begin squeeing. They run to spread the news, making the issue blow up with everyone talking about it until Aya, who likes Gocchan, learns about it and gets upset, pushing her to confess to Gocchan at some point. Some female student: Did you see Gocchan kissing the new girl? A male student: The hot new transfer student? Another female student: Isn't he going out with Aya? Another male student: Nicely done, Gocchan. A different male student and Aya: What the hell? - Taboo-Tattoo: When Fruesy transfers to Seigi's school, she greets him from afar, eliciting fury against him. Then after being asked what Fruesy's relationship with Seigi is, she vaguely answers with, "it's not your normal relationship," while holding him from behind, causing a furious mob to throw him from the window into the water. Seigi: Y-you've got it all wrong! This is not funny, seriously! Seigi's male classmates: Protagonist-type guys like you are supposed to swim in the sea, right? So off you go! - The moment Kiriha from Tsugumomo reveals that she and Kazuya live and even bathe together, the scene cuts to one classmate yelling "judgment time!", and they form a court-like atmosphere, then attempt to execute Kazuya for "cohabitating with a beautiful girl and engaging in lascivious activities" and sentence him to the "maximum punishment," that is tying him up to the ceiling and gagging his mouth. - Urusei Yatsura: The students at Tomobiki High really hate that Lum is interested in Ataru, to the point that they try having him flogged by the school's "S&M Club". They then perform a chant on the school roof to try and summon Lum, but get a space taxi instead and land Ataru deeply in debt because of it. - Witch Craft Works has Ayaka who has a crazed, obsessive female fanclub who get mad at the mere sight of seeing their sacred princess with another boy, specifically Honoka, whom she only cares about, derogatorily calling him lame and shooting daggers at him. When he tells Ayaka that he doesn't understand a subject, she leans in to teach him, making all the girls glare at him and wish death upon him. Played for Drama when the leader of Ayaka's fanclub along with her posse harasses and roughs up Honoka at school away from others' eyes just for "ogling [their] sublime princess." - As Fate Would Have It: Given that the main characters are famous celebrities, with Nate being a superhero movie actor and Yancy being an Idol Singer slash TV host, their fans finding out at a Fan Convention about both of them going out together has them cheer at and congratulate the young couple. However, later in the story, a number of Yancy's more hardcore fans, who are Poke Maniacs, take offense to this development and attempt to battle and defeat Nate for stealing her from them. - True Beauty (2020) has Seojun and Jugyeong do a photo shoot in some compromising positions. The photos are later printed all across their classroom and on the shirts of Seojun's dimwitted friends. The whole class is in a frenzy celebrating the new couple (with balloons and banners and everything). Then Seojun enters the classroom, and they're asked if they are secretly dating and are pestered by their classmates for answers. In reality, Jugyeong is \|\|actually dating Suho.\|\| Jugyeong: [claps to calm down the commotion] Okay, guys! We're just friends . Nothing more, nothing less. So please stop spreading rumors based on speculation. [everyone makes noises of disagreement and disappointment] Seojun: [to Jugyeong] Is this a press conference? [...] Seojun: [slams table] Guys! If I hear you talk nonsense, you're dead. [turns to Jugyeong] Happy? - Bye Bye Birdie: In the song "The Telephone Hour", Hugo giving Kim his school pin is such a huge deal that all the teens in town jam up the phone lines spreading the news. - SHUFFLE!: Every girl in Rin's Unwanted Harem has a fan club at the school, and every last one of them wants his head on a platter for going out with the girl they idolize, which often results in groups either aligning with or betraying one another so that Rin can end up with a girl other than the one they themselves want.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverdramaticDatingCommotion
Over-the-Shoulder Carry - TV Tropes Over-the-shoulder carrying (abbreviated OTS) is a method to transport another person. The person is laid face down over one's shoulder with their upper body to the rear. The person's legs are held at the hollow of the knees to secure them. This position allows for relatively easy transportation, even if they are the same weight as oneself. It can be a humiliating pose for the person being carried, since they're turned into a passive object, with their face down and buttocks pointing up and to the front (which, depending on the camera angle, also makes it a potential source of Fanservice). When this happens in fiction, usually (but not always), it involves an antagonist carrying a Damsel in Distress or other captive that they have caught or subdued. Expect such a victim, if conscious, to scream, curse, and make lame attempts to punch the abductor. On the other hand, this method is sometimes used by a hero character as a way of rescuing/evacuating an injured or unconscious victim from a dangerous area, since it allows them to be slightly more mobile than they would be using other carry forms like Bridal Carry, and it leaves one hand free for doing things like opening doors or wielding a weapon. It also does not wear out the carrier as much as a bridal carry would, since most of the weight is placed on the legs instead of the weaker arm muscles. Sometimes in media where males Wouldn't Hit a Girl the interfering female is "neutralized" from the situation by being carried away in this fashion by a support male character when a female available to oppose her isn't available. This can also happen in non-combat situations where a female is trying to make her presence known or is otherwise impeding progress. Compare Neck Lift and Hoist Hero over Head, which are other ways a villain shows of their strength by lifting up a victim. Sometimes called the Fireman's Carry, although this is actually the name for another position where weight is supported on both shoulders and the carried person is held by both legs and whichever arm is draped over the carrier's shoulder. Depending on the context and because of position of the person being carried, they may be subject to Pain to the Ass or a Flirtatious Smack on the Ass. Note that this position (as well as the Fireman's Carry) is often recommended against - it tends to worsen any spinal injuries sustained, and can asphyxiate people in a burning building. This trope is often performed effortlessly to highlight super strength, or above average physical capabilities. This is always the case when females do this to males, since it occurs less frequently and often highlights physical prowess to match enhanced attractiveness of said female. Compare Piggyback Cute. ## Examples: - This happens frequently in Agent Aika, due to the revealing angle when a female character is slung over someone's shoulder. - In the OVA and the revised edition of the Ai no Kusabi novel, Iason carries Guy like this. In the original novel it was Riki that carries Guy by himself while still in pain. - In Alice in the Country of Hearts, Peter White carries Alice like this before they go down the rabbit hole because she refuses to get up and follow him. - Space Adventure Cobra has a scene in chapter 8 and episode 16 of the manga and anime respectively where our hero, while infiltrating a Rugball team, sees one of the players carry a cheerleader in this fashion◊ (he thankfully gets him to drop her). As with the series's fanservicey nature, the woman is of course scantily clad while getting carried. - Happens frequently in Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts when a student's avatar goes down to 0 HP. A teacher named Ironman would sometimes carry the student away to remedial classes in this manner. - Berserk despite technically being The Hero carries off Farnese as a hostage in this fashion, he even holds a torch to her rear and threatens to "burn her ass" when Farnese's knights come at him. To be fair to Guts, they're the ones who hunted him down, whipped him and threw him in a cage. - In the movies Guts carries an unconscious naked Casca in this fashion after climbing out of the river. - Black Butler: Sebastian (wearing a deer head disguise) carries Prince Soma like this when he's saving him from Agni's attacks. - Bleach: - Ichigo carries Orihime like this after battling Grimmjow. Orihime is embarrassed by this, but only because she thinks she is heavy. - During Don Kanonji's visit to the hospital, Ichigo and Rukia try to stop him from exorcising a spirit and are held back by the police. Kisuke helps Ichigo turn into a soul reaper and distracts the police. Tessai carries Ichigo's body over his shoulder while they escape. - When Ichigo, Orihime, Chad and Uryú enter the Soul Society through the restrictive current, Uryú's cape gets stuck. Chad frees Uryú, then carries him over his shoulder the rest of the way. - During one of Ichigo's battles with Byakuya, Yoruichi stops the battle by knocking Ichigo out, lifting him onto her shoulder and running off with him. - When Hiyori first appears, she makes fun of Chad and Orihime and tries to kill them. Shinji stops her and runs off with her over his shoulder◊. - In Brave10, Saizou carries Isanami this way after saving her from assassins. - D.Gray-Man: In Book 2, Allen carries an injured Toma like this when he and Kanda are looking for Lala and Guzol. - Happens in the Dragon Ball series when injured characters are carried away from the battlefield. One of the few times it happened to a female character was when Bulma tried to stop Trunks from training to fight Majin Buu and Krillin carries her away like this◊. - In the Punishment Game OVA of Fairy Tail: Gajeel carries Levy this way before telling a bunch of men who are following her to scram off and leave her alone. Since she's wearing a Playboy Bunny outfit at the time, he doesn't miss the chance to look at her butt from up close, much to her annoyance. - In Fruits Basket Volume 18, Haru carries Rin like this◊ after finding her passed out on the sidewalk. Rin insists she can walk, but Haru assures her he's strong enough to carry her. - In Fullmetal Alchemist, Ling Yao carries a badly injured Lan Fan in this manner after she's severely injured by Wrath, and in a stunning display of combat prowess, he actually manages to fight off Wrath for a short time while he's still holding her. Quite an accomplishment considering Wrath is basically a One-Man Army. \|\|Eventually though, Wrath does became too much to handle, and after they manage to disengage, Lan-Fan ends up amputating her own shattered arm in order to throw Wrath off their trail.\|\| - Fushigi Yuugi: - When Tasuki first appears, he throws Miaka over his shoulder, uses his spell cards to make wolves attack Hotohori, Nuriko and the bandit leader, then carries Miaka off. - A slaver briefly carries Yui when she and Miaka first enter the book. - In Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, Ledo carries Amy away in this method after being revived on Gargantia, hoping that having a hostage will prevent the unknown people from attacking him. This also provides him with the added benefit of allowing Chamber to learn Earth's language due to Amy's constant string of profanity as she's being carried off. - Handsome Girl and Crossdressing Boy: Hazuki grabs Iori like this and runs away from Koyuki and Sayuri in Chapter 70. - In Inuyasha, Miroku carries an unconscious Sango to safety using this method during his Determinator moment in Mount Hakurei. Kagome is also carried this way when kidnapped by Kouga, though he uses a somewhat inverted method where she is facing the same side he is and her buns are where her face would be in the traditional method. - Jotaro carries a possessed Kakyoin back to his house like this in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure after knocking him out. - In the end of season 1 of K, Misaki and Saruhiko are still fighting, but the rest of the Red and Blue Clans have evacuated the island. Rikio has to carry them off like this. Misaki is kicking and screaming. Saruhiko is just embarrassed. - Happens twice to Miu Furinji from Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple: - Enjouji carries a struggling Ranmaru this way to bring him inside Rena's hotel in the third OVA of Kizuna. - In the 12th episode (titled "Who will have the last laugh") of the Lupin III anime's 1st part, Lupin ties up Fujiko, throws her over his shoulder, smacks her ass◊ and carries her outside of the cave they were both in alongside Jigen (who carries statues Fujiko stole). - Happens a few times in One Piece: - This is Luffy's method or carrying people, so he can have one hand free to stretch and swing away. The most notable example is when he does it to Nami during the Aqua Laguna which she couldn't possibly escape from on her own. - Blueno deserves a mention for carrying Usopp and Franky on each shoulder◊. - In the Punk Hazard arc, where Zoro carries Tashigi this way to run away from the deadly gas Shinokuni, since she's injured, and thoroughly humiliated as she is coming backside first towards her Marines. - Sanji carries Nami in this fashion when they running through the Seducing Woods, justified as Yonko Big Mom is chasing them and it's either Run or Die. Nami doesn't mind and uses her clima tact from Sanji's shoulder. - In Ore-sama Teacher, Takaomi is about to pick up Mafuyu and taker her to the nurse, and everyone around watches in anticipation for him to hold her in 'the legendary princess carry'...and then are appalled when he holds her like a sack of grain over his shoulder and demand he hold her the other way. - In the first episode of Ranma ½, Genma (in panda form) knocks out Ranma (in female form) with a street sign and carries her over his shoulder to the Tendo's house, which she isn't too happy about when she wakes up. - When Makoto (aka Sailor Jupiter) first appears in Sailor Moon, she saves Usagi from being hit by a car by picking her up and carrying her over her shoulder to safety. - In Skip Beat!, Kyoko is carried out kicking and screaming over a security guard's shoulder after she threatens revenge on Sho. - In Snow White with the Red Hair, Shirayuki gets carried away by this method when she's kidnapped by bandits in season 2. - In episode 7 of Sword Art Online, Kirito briefly carries Lisbeth this way while the two of them are trying to escape from an ice dragon. - In Tanaka-kun is Always Listless, Tanaka is carried by Ohta nearly Once an Episode, as the former is often too lazy or sleepy to walk. - In Ten Count, Kurose carries Shirotani this way when he doesn't budge from the door. - In the Touhou manga, Wild and Horned Hermit, Marisa tests out the Super Strength she temporarily gained \|\|from drinking out of the Ibaraki Medicine Box\|\| by easily carrying Reimu around in this manner. Reimu responds by kicking her in the face. - When Kiba is too injured to run in Wolf's Rain, Tsume slings him over his shoulder, much to Kiba's protest. How exactly this would work in their wolf forms is a mystery. - In Master's Way, Ranma slings Akane over his shoulder and carries her up to her room at one point, as a flirtatious way of letting her know he wants to sleep with her that night. - Displaced (The Legend of Zelda): Zelda jokingly asks Link to carry her because she's tired. At first it looks like he's going for a Princess Carry, but instead he does this. Link: What? You wanted me to sweep you off your feet like a princess and romantically carry you off into the sunset? Zelda: Technically, yes, that is exactly what I asked you to do. Link: And technically, that's exactly what I'm doing. Zelda: I'd hardly call this romantic. Link: You wouldn't? You're tired, and I'm carrying you even though I'm tired too. I'm a catch. Zelda: This is like you're going to drag me off to your cave and grunt at me. - The Iron Bull subjects Varric to this treatment, in order to remove him from a potentially dangerous situation, in Beyond Heroes: Of Sunshine and Red Lyrium. When asked about it later, Cullen - genuinely startled - assures Varric that Bull was not given explicit directions and decided entirely on his own how he was going to interpret Cullen's request to get Varric out of there. - Kingdom Hearts: The Antipode: When Gaston punches Jim Hawkins during a bar fight, Baloo, the tavern's bouncer intervenes, slinging Gaston over his shoulder and carrying him away. No one manhandles Gaston! - The artist Gérald Parel reinterpreted the scene in Space Adventure Cobra (see anime/manga section) where the football player Gelt carries the cheerleader Miranda like this. - The Ultimate Evil: In the reimagined version of the Jackie Chan Adventures episode "The Tiger And The Pussycat", Tohru lifts Valerie Payne over his shoulder when she tries to escape from him while holding in her arms Jade and the box containing the Talismans. He then carries them all to his car and throws them in the backseat. - The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Quasimodo rescues Esmeralda from \|\|being burned at the stake\|\| and carries her like this up the side of Notre Dame. - The Incredibles: Mr. Incredible and Frozone rescue people from a burning building by carrying them like this. Since Mr. Incredible has Super Strength, he's got them piled about six deep. - Fire and Ice (1983) features Teegra (who alternates between Damsel in Distress and Damsel out of Distress) being kidnapped in this way. In slow motion. While she's wearing a micro-kini. And the kidnapper turns around a couple of times to make sure we get every angle. - Prince Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke does this to two women at once, having just knocked both of them out with a hard hit to the abdomen. In this case, used for drama, though considering that one woman is a supernatural wolf princess and the other is a gun-toting aristocrat it's still undignified. - In the animated short film Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher (based on the comics of the same name), the film ends with Rex having beaten up the nazis, tied up their commander Greta and carrying his assistant Penny over his shoulder◊ while she sticks her tongue out to Greta. - Shrek: - In the first film, Shrek carries Princess Fiona when she starts Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like. Fiona: You tell Lord "Far-Quad" that if he wants to rescue me PROPERLY, I'll be waiting for him right here! Shrek: Hey! I'm nobody's messenger boy, all right? I'm a delivery boy. Fiona: You wouldn't dare...! ( Shrek carries her off) - The Ugly Stepsister briefly carries Sleeping Beauty over her shoulder in Shrek the Third when the princesses are escaping the castle. - Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas: After Marina makes a deal with Sinbad to go after The Book of Piece (located in Tartarus), Sinbad carries her out onto the deck of the ship for all the crew to see, before locking her away. Needless to say, she is none too thrilled about this◊. - In Toy Story 2, the "New Buzz" throws Woody over his shoulder when he and the other toys are rescuing him from Al's apartment. - Adrian Mole: After Adrian's first proper hangover, Pandora puts him to bed, and gives him a fireman's lift up the stairs. - In A Brother's Price, Jerin carries a wounded soldier this way. It is depicted as Bridal Carry on the cover, naturally. No complaining ensues, as the soldier is unconscious, having been hit over the head with a blunt weapon. When she regains consciousness for a moment, she's already on a horse, in a much more dignified position. - In John C. Wright's Orphans of Chaos, Glum carries off Amelia like this. Giving her a few clues, because in spite of his having hit her in the solar plexus just before it, she is not nauseated by the jolts of his shoulder. - In Fire Engine By Mistake, the young fireman Jim Price has to learn the proper way of carrying people when rescuing them from a burning building. When he does this for a competition, he rescues an old fireman who says he doesn't mind being "rescued" just that one afternoon. - The protagonist of The Goblin Reservation carries a girl from the gassed room in such a fashion. She comes to her senses and starts complaining about this being an absurd way to carry a woman. He puts her on the floor and sarcastically suggests he should just leave her there. - Keeper of the Lost Cities: In Flashback, Ro is dragging Keefe back to his session when he makes a needling comment about her and Bo. She responds by tossing him over her shoulder and stomping out. - In Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Wide Window, Count Olaf's Associate That Looks Like Neither a Man or a Woman grabs Violet by the hair and slings her over his/her shoulder, then picks up Klaus and Sunny to carry all of them away. Luckily, the children escape when the Associate slips and drops them. - On the cover◊ of Barbara Park's Dump The Chump, Oscar's little brother Robert is carried like this. - In Where's Waldo Now, one of the scenes Waldo visits takes place in the Viking Age. Three Vikings are shown running away from houses they've robbed, each with a screaming woman slung over their shoulders. In a comic reversal, two large ugly women are shown carrying Vikings they've captured over their shoulders. - Happens frequently in the Artemis Fowl series. - Butler has carried Holly like this three times, and he's also carried Juliet and Artemis. - Holly was also carried like this by Julius Root. - In "The Arctic Incident", Artemis Sr. is carried like this by one of the members of the Russian Mafiya. - In Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, Greg is carried over a security guard's shoulder after \|\|getting trapped in the ladies' restroom in Leisure Towers\|\|. - Taran does this to the unconscious Eilonwy when they have to escape from The Castle of Llyr in The Chronicles of Prydain series. - In The Place Inside the Storm, a helpful stranger carries Loki this way when he's unconscious from a particularly bad seizure. - In Dogs Don't Talk, Ben carries The Bully this way during their fight. - The Easy Part of Impossible: When Sean gets drunk at a football game, Ria asks Cotton to help her help him to the car. She expects Cotton to grab Sean's arm, but instead he lifts him over his shoulder and carries him. Later he carries Sean from the car to the porch the same way. - The Brotherhood of the Conch: In The Conch Bearer, Anand and Nisha are captured by a group of ape-like creatures who carry them over their shoulders while they climb up a cliff to the cave where they live. - Fractured Stars: During the Great Escape, Dash knocks out some prison guards, carries them over his shoulder one at a time to the control room, and locks them in a closet. - Dolphin Trilogy: In Daughters of the Dolphin, men kidnap Syn from Crab Island so they can hold her for ransom. One of them carries her over his shoulder back to his boat. - In Cyndi Lauper's video for "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", Cyndi watches TV during the "Some boys take a beautiful girl..." line. A black and white movie clip of an apeman kidnapping a woman in this fashion is shown. - In Tom Cochrane's video for "Life is a Highway", a couple take a break from driving their car. After the first chorus, the boyfriend playfully tosses his girlfriend over his shoulder and spins her around. - During the dance between the ex-boyfriend and his victims in Christina Perri's "Jar of Hearts" video, one of the girls takes a running leap at him. He catches her, drapes her over his shoulder and spins her around. - When Lindsey Stirling and Tyler Ward are romping around in "Thrift Shop", he briefly carries her in this fashion. - While most spine busters simply involve grabbing the legs and slamming someone to the mat, the bionic spine buster is a no hands over the shoulder carry, for wrestlers who want to show off. - Randy Savage did this with Miss Elizabeth a few times, most notably on an edition of Saturday Nights Main Event where George Steele took a liking to Elizabeth. - The Schwein/Kryptonite Krunch piledriver starts this way but ends with the attacker only holding one of the legs before planting the opponent's head into the canvas. A popular variation, Mariko Yoshida's air raid crash, is instead done from a fireman's carry, which makes the head planting easier, if less painful looking. - One of Black Rose's signatures, since she shows off how strong she is by dumping wrestlers significantly larger than herself into turnbuckles this way. - When unauthorized "ROH a Night of Hoopla" special guest referee "Elizabeth" agreed to Machismo King's wedding proposal, Mike Bennett carried her off over his shoulder, to King's chagrin. - Jacqueline and K-Kwik defeated Ivory and Haku on the June 16 (taped June 11), 2001 WWF Jakked when Jackie powerbombed and pinned Ivory. After the match, Haku threw Ivory over his shoulder and carried her away, with her screaming and protesting the whole time. - Happened constantly to A.J. Lee during her in-ring career. Anytime she was defeated, knocked out, or otherwise unable to walk on her own after a match, her partner or manager would inevitably carry her this way backstage. - During a Brawl between ODB and Velvet Sky the bigger stronger ODB grabbed and put the smaller Velvet in this position and rammed Velvet rear end first into a wall. Velvet notably didn't enjoy it. - When Samoa Joe was starting his "Nation Of Violence" gimmick and was terrorizing the heels of the company before joining them himself he kidnapped Sharmell (Booker T's Wife) by carrying her away in this fashion. - In TNA's feud of Christie Hemme vs the VKM (Voodoo Kim Mafia) where Christie was finding new opponents for them every week Lance Hoyt prevented her from interfering by carrying her away in this fashion before the match started. - In this illustration from the original Fiend Folio, one of the hapless adventurers is being carted off this way by a crabman. - In Batman: Arkham Knight, the Arkham Knight captures Oracle and carries her out of the clock tower like this, upon Batman observing some security footage of the incident. It happens again later after Oracle manages to crash the Knight's transport vehicle they were both occupying, and he carries her away on his shoulder.◊ - Rogue is carted away by Mr. Sinister's Dumb Muscle henchman in the Deadpool game - the protagonist has to chase them to save her, but is distracted several times by obstacles and hallucinations. - At one point during Death Stranding, Higgs carries Amelie over his shoulder with one hand resting on her butt while the other is shooting at Sam. He even gives her rear a couple of light taps as he teleports away. - In Dishonored and the sequel, the player character carries a unconscious or an intact dead body this way. You have to be careful when putting unconscious bodies down, as they could easily become dead bodies if they slide off an edge or land the wrong way on a bookshelf. - Pauline gets carried away in such a matter in most Donkey Kong games. - The opening sequence of Double Dragon has Marian being carried over by a mook after being knocked unconscious, complete with a panty shot (at least in the original arcade version). - Duke Nukem Forever has a "Capture the Babe" mode, in which the player captures said babes and takes them to their base in this manner while fending off opponents. During this time, the player is severely limited in combat, as the only weapon they can use is a tiny Derringer pistol in their free hand. The babe will periodically try to sabotage the player by waving her hand in the player's face; she has to be slapped on the butt to make her stop. - In Far Cry 4, the player uses this method to move dead bodies so enemies can't find them. There is also a campaign mission where you have to capture Paul Harmon by knocking him out and carrying him to a getaway vehicle. There is a long distance to cover to get there any numerous enemies along the way, so this often requires putting him down to go into combat and then picking him up again. There's also a skill you can unlock that allows you to fire any sort of weapon the game classifies as a sidearm while in situations that only actually require one hand/arm, which carrying corpses (or Paul in that one mission) counts as. - Final Fantasy VII Remake: In chapter 7, \|\|when they are separated from Cloud in an exploding factory and he's hanging one-handed off a ledge, Barrat grabs and carries Tifa to safety this way over her protests and her Futile Hand Reach.\|\| - In Professor Layton and the Last Specter, \|\|"Third Eye" Jakes does this to Arianna when he "arrests" her for supposedly masterminding the Specter's rampages throughout the town. Carrying her off in this manner makes it even more obvious that this is essentially a kidnapping, not a sincere effort at upholding the law.\|\| - Red Dead Redemption: - If John Marston kills Javier Escuella instead of capturing him, he will carry Javier's body sorrowfully in this manner: once in bringing him into El Presidio's prison cell for a moment to weep silently over him there before going after the arriving army reinforcements; and once again when he returns to the cell and carries the body outside before handing it over to Edgar Ross and the authorities as proof (although John does get a "What the Hell, Hero?" from Archer Fordham, who had expected him to bring Javier in alive). John also does the same thing if Javier is captured alive, in order to bring him into the same prison cell. - John can also do this to the wanted criminals he hogties in order to bring them in alive for the rewards. - In Resident Evil 4 poor Damsel in Distress Ashley Graham gets carried in this fashion a lot. This is how mooks take her away from Leon. Also in her own chapter, she gets put in this position after an exclusive neck snap death. She is also shown like this for a small part in one chapter. - In Nefarious, once you kidnap a princess, the rest of the level consists of carrying her this way. Depending on which one it is, Crow gains an additional ability. (For instance, if it's Apoidea, Crow can jump higher.) - Sakuna Of Rice And Ruin: How Sakuna is forced to board the ship away from the capital, when her guardian, Tama, allows Tauemon to carry her this way, being a fully grown adult carry a child-like goddess. - In Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights, Daphne is kidnapped by the villain in this fashion. - In the app Subway Surfers, if your character is caught by the guard, he will sometimes carry them away over his shoulder. - Super Mario Sunshine has Shadow Mario, who snatches Peach at the beginning of the game and tries to make a get away by running amok through the entire city while carrying the princess◊ the entire time. Either Shadow Mario has strength or she has no weight. - In Sword of the Samurai, on missions to kidnap family members of rival Samurai lords, the player uses this carry method to take the hostage out of the rival's castle. It's best to make sure all the guards have been cleared out first, as you realistically cannot fight while carrying the hostage. Oddly enough, you also use this method to evacuate your own hostage family members when you perform rescue missions, even though there is no reason they should not be capable of walking out of the castle with you. The most likely explanation for this is that programming a friendly AI character that could safely follow you on their own after you find them would have been too difficult for a game made in 1989. - In Tekken 5, Craig does this to Anna after defeating her, carrying her off to an unknown place. - Valkyria Chronicles III has a non-villainous version in Felix's chapter when he rescues Giulio from enemy reinforcements. Naturally, the screen gives the player a nice view of the latter's butt. - How your soldier recovers dead troopers (they won't complain) and their gear, or injured troopers (noted in Worst Aid as being a last ditch way to carry someone, but considering that 1) your soldiers (probably) aren't doctors, and 2) if you have to carry an injured soldier, it's because they are either about to die or you need to evacuate the premises before enemy aircraft arrive to engage your Drop Ship, it's very justified) in XCOM 2. - In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Donkey Kong's Cargo Throw has been changed so that he hoists and carries his opponents on his shoulder as opposed to above his head like the previous installments, as seen here. - Sam Fisher carries bodies around in this fashion in the Splinter Cell games, the original two having him hoist them across both shoulders and Chaos Theory/ Double Agent having him carry them over one shoulder. Interestingly, the Worst Aid aspect is hinted at in the original game, where Sam carries an injured programmer to a medical office in this manner during the Kalinatek mission, and after giving some exposition, said programmer immediately dies. - In Mass Effect, Commander Shepard does this twice to evacuate either Ashley or Kaidan. Once \|\|on Virmire in Mass Effect after sustaining injuries in combat against the geth\|\| and again \|\|on Mars in Mass Effect 3 after they're critically wounded by a Cerberus robot.\|\| Bonus awesome points if it's female Shepard hoisting Kaidan. note : Shepard's official scale statue puts her height at 5'3", while most fan estimates put Kaidan anywhere in the 5'10" to 6'2" range - Manhunt has James Earl Cash carry his victims like this. Same happens in Manhunt 2, with extra Jitter Cam. - In the first Kingdom Hearts game, Hercules carries Cloud Strife this way after he collapses during a fight. - Done to Momiji in the DS version of Ninja Gaiden while she was still treated as a Faux Action Girl. Fortunately for her due to the game being more family friendly her ninja rear end wasn't displayed instead close ups of her battle weary passed out face and shoulders were mostly used. - In the 2nd installment of The Witcher, Roche carries a tired Triss. During gameplay, Geralt has to protect them from enemy assault while Triss keeps up her spell shielding them from arrows. All the while, she complains that Roche's hands are on her butt. - E. Honda does this to his opponents in Street Fighter V and rams◊ them into the nearest corner. - Honoka in Dead Or Alive puts her opponents in the position before droping them on their heads in Dead Or Alive. - The one Fred pulls off in Namesake is impressive for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that he does it at a dead sprint. Also, given that Elaine was running in the same direction several paces ahead of him, he apparently had to speed up, spin her around and then hoist her over his shoulder without breaking stride - all of which is so fast we don't even see it happening between panels. Coming from anyone else, this would be unbelievable, but... - In Girl Genius when Gil swings by and grabs Agatha away from OTHAR TRYGGVASSEN, before knocking the boisterous "hero" out a window she ends up carried mostly over his shoulder. Gentleman Adventurer! - I'm the Grim Reaper: After rescuing Chase from the Red Spades and running into Brook again, Scarlet swings him over her shoulder so she can wield her scythe. - Betty Boop was carried like this by the villains in some of her cartoons. In "Chess-Nuts," the black king throws her over his shoulder and heads for the bedroom; fortunately, Bimbo comes to her rescue. In "No! No! A Thousand Times No!," the villain ties up her other boyfriend Freddie and carries her like this into a hot air balloon to escape with her. Again, she is rescued. - In the Bugs Bunny cartoon Hot Cross Bunny, Bugs tries to run away from a scientist set on switching his brain with a chicken's. The scientist gives Bugs laughing gas to make him cooperate and carries him to the operating room over his shoulder, as seen here (at 6:22). - In the Courage the Cowardly Dog episode "Cowboy Courage," Courage dreams that he, Muriel and Eustace are in the Wild West. The outlaw Eustace throws Muriel over his shoulder and tries to carry her off, but Courage stops him. - Daisy-Head Mayzie: Like in the book, Miss Sneetcher picks up Mayzie and carries her to the principal's office over her shoulder as Mayzie's classmates tease her with a song. - Danny Phantom: While fighting Vlad in one episode, Danny's 'cousin' Dani knocks him unconscious with a ghost ray. Vlad slings Danny over his shoulder◊ and he and Dani fly off with him. - In the french animated series Il était une fois... L'Homme, an episode centered on the Roman empire showcases romans pillaging a Gaulish village, with one legionnaire carrying a female Gaul over his shoulder while she screams for him to let her go. - Ninjago: - In "Rise Of The Snakes," Cole, Jay, Kai and Zane carry Lloyd like this after they caughter him trying to steal candy in a village. - In "Never Trust A Snake," Jay slings Lloyd over his shoulder and carried him to the ship after the latter is cornered and Wu orders him to come with them. - In "The Temple on Haunted Hill," Ronin carries Nya like this when she refuses to run away and let Morro steal her suit. - The Fairly OddParents!: - In "Abra-Catastrophe," one of the apes carries Timmy over his shoulder to their lab to do experiments on him. - In the episode "Take and Fake," Timmy's parents accidentally insult Trixie's costume during her party and are carried out over the shoulders of her guards. - In the episode "Hero Hound," Sparky carries Timmy in this fashion when he's rescuing him from a well. - Hey Arnold!: - In the episode "Spelling Bee", a kid is caught cheating using a hearing aid as his mom spells the words in his ear. The kid is carried out over a security guard's shoulder protesting his innocence. - In the episode "Parent's Day", Big Bob carries Helga over his shoulder during the tournament's relay race. - In The Legend of Prince Valiant, Guinevere is kidnapped in this fashion in one episode. - Gambit had to carry Jubilee (Marvel Comics) this way for both to flee from a mob of Sentinels in X-Men: The Animated Series. And he couldn't resist making a crack about her weight in the process. - Happens at least once in My Life as a Teenage Robot. - Phineas and Ferb: Happens a few times. One such example appears in the caveman episode, when the caveman does this to Candace while she attempts to bust her brothers. - The Ren & Stimpy Show: - In the pilot episode, Ren is carried like this by a little girl who wants to adopt him from the pound, thinking he's a poodle. - In "Powdered Toast Man," Powdered Toast Man carries the Pope like this when he's rescuing him from Muddy Mudskipper. - Happens quite frequently on Scooby-Doo, usually to Daphne. - Happens occasionally on The Simpsons. - In this clip of the episode "Homer the Heretic," Ned carries Homer over his shoulder when he rescues him from his burning house. - In this clip of the Treehouse of Horror V segment "The Shinning," a crazed Homer falls down a flight of stairs and passes out. Marge manages to carry him like this into the pantry and locks him in there. Not that he minds. - Barney rescues two and carries them over his both shoulders from Moe's burning tavern. It's two barrels of beer. He also returns for Moe... and another barrel. - In the second episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends titled "crime of the century", Kraven the hunter throws a heat sensing boomerang (with a freezing spray) at Firestar, making her fall to the ground unconscious from way above the sky. Kraven then catches his prey and carries her over his shoulder◊. - SpongeBob SquarePants: - In the episode "Arrgh!", SpongeBob carries Patrick home over his shoulder after he falls asleep playing the Flying Dutchman game with him and Mr. Krabs. - SpongeBob carries Squidward like this a few times in the episode "Squid Baby". - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: - Frequently happens to April O'Neil in the original cartoon during her many kidnappings or when the turtles rescue her. - Happen also to young version of April in an episode of the 2012 series, as illustrated in the trope image. - Total Drama: - In both versions of "The Very Last Episode, Really!", Trent picks up Gwen and holds her over his shoulder after the winner has been decided. If Gwen loses, he does it to cheer her up and playfully get the promise of a date out of her. If Gwen wins, he does it to congratulate her on her victory. - Trent is shocked to be voted off in "3:10 to Crazytown" and refuses to leave without saying goodbye to Gwen, who is not present at the elimination ceremony because she's on the other team and because the two of them recently and awkwardly broke up. Not one to tolerate campers that make their elimination a chore, Chef picks him up, throws him over his shoulder, and carries him off to throw him into the Lame-o-sine. - Tyler gets the apple bobbing in the pond for Team CIRRRRH in "Broadway, Baby!". However, this leaves him exhausted, so Owen grabs him and throws him over his shoulder to carry him along to the finish line. - After rescuing Cody from a giant mosquito in the Amazon Rainforest in "The Am-AH-Zon Race", she declares that she's the only one he can truly rely on and throws him over her shoulder to rejoin their team. - The final challenge in "Niagara Brawls" requires male contestants to carry female contestants over a tightrope across the Niagara Falls as groom and bride. Although a Bridal Carry would be conventional, two teams opt for the over-the-shoulder carry. Firstly, Sierra goes against the assigned gender roles by carrying Cody. She carries him over her shoulder for mobility and switches to a bridal carry when they reach Chef's customs booth. Duncan and Courtney stick with the gender roles, but because outside of the challenge they're bitter exes, Duncan refuses Courtney any dignity and carries her over his shoulder. - Jo has just forced Cameron into an alliance in "Up, Up, and Away in My Pitiful Balloon" when she catches him giving advice to Lightning. She tells Cameron to stop talking, grabs him by the hoodie, throws him over her shoulder, tells Lightning to get his own nerd, and runs off with her ally. - Leonard tries to cast a time reversal spell in "I Love You, Grease Pig!" when he learns that he's been eliminated. Neither Chris nor Chef are fans of his wizard shtick and don't like campers that try to fight their elimination, so Chef throws Leonard over his shoulder and carries him over to the Cannon of Shame. - Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race: MacArthur frequently carries Sanders using this method. Sanders returns the favor in "Bahamarama" after MacArthur gets knocked over by Josee. - Totally Spies!: The girls, especially Clover◊, were carried like this a few times. - T.U.F.F. Puppy: In "The Doom-mates," Dudley carries Kitty like this a few times because she has no sense of balance after losing her whiskers. - The Twins of Destiny: In one episode, an Arab slave trader kidnaps Julie to sell her to a sultan by tossing her over his shoulder and running away. - The Venture Bros.: In "Operation P.R.O.M.", Sergeant Hatred carries a thoroughly tied up and ball-gagged Princess Tinyfeet over his shoulder. She's into bondage, so everything in this scenario is at her behest. - In a season two episode of Star Wars Rebels ("Always Two There Are"), Sabine and Zeb try to lay a trap for the Fifth Brother, who is hunting them, using thermal detonators. The plan backfires when the Fifth Brother uses the Force to throw the detonators at Zeb and Sabine. They both survive the explosion, but the blast leaves them unconscious and Sabine is thus taken captive by the Fifth Brother, as shown here.◊ - Done in Jackie Chan Adventures with Jade and the mook of the day. Being only 12 years old and 3 foot tall and the mook being much bigger than her she had to out wit him to get out of his grasp. - Often called the fireman's carry because it allows firemen to carry out fire victims while maintaining a free hand. That said, as noted above, it's fallen out of favor except in the most absolutely dire situations where the risk of death or worse injury is worse than that of further spinal injury, or those where it's obvious that the only injury is from things like burns or smoke inhalation, exhaustion, wounds to the lower legs and feet — if there's a risk that someone's neck or back is injured (as in a vehicle accident or building collapse) or has bullets/impaling objects/shrapnel in/near it (as in the aftermath of an attack/explosion or a building collapse), most firefighters and paramedics are strictly warned not to do this. - Unfortunately, along with the Bridal Carry, common among people with little to no medical experience trying to "help" fainted/injured people. Combining this trope with pulling people from a wrecked vehicle or a collapsed building, for example, has led to severe injuries. - How many kidnappers successfully capture their victims. - There's a popular sport in Finland, Asia, and some parts of the U.S. called wife carrying, where men compete in an obstacle race carrying their wives. The wives can be carried piggyback, over the shoulder or Estonian style. - It is arguable that Yoshiki Hayashi's neck injuries were exacerbated by the tendency of roadies/staff to carry him off the stage either like this or in a modified Bridal Carry. Road crews and venue staff tend to make the mistake, in general, of carrying injured performers offstage when it is generally a far better idea (especially if the injury has been sufficiently bad to stop the show anyway) to simply remove anything that could further injure someone so badly hurt they can't walk offstage under their own power (e.g. their instruments or gear or accessories, nearby pyro, etc.) and leave him or her in place until properly equipped paramedics arrive. - The logo of the Wounded Warrior Project depicts one soldier carrying another in this fashion.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverTheShoulderCarry
Overshadowed by Controversy - TV Tropes " Hounddog: Don't remember it by title? Don't worry, neither did we, and now the Cracked IT guys are asking why we have 'Dakota Fanning rape' in our Google cache." There are some well-known works that gathered controversy over the years, and there are also famously controversial works in which the controversy, justified or not, would overshadow most other aspects. Which isn't to say that works in the latter category have no other redeeming factor, just that most people would know little else aside from the controversial aspects. This is not just something controversial, but when the controversy is about a small part of the work or something out of work, thus overshadowing its actual merits. It does not count if every aspect is controversial as that leaves nothing to overshadow, or if the moment was intended to be controversial or be a major part of the work, as that would make it a legit merit as opposed to overshadowing. For example, the ending is such a big and key part of the work that such overshadowing controversy over it goes under its sub-trope Audience-Alienating Ending. Bad reviews alone do not make a controversial moment, and in fact some works can be well-regarded by critics and those who watched, read, or played the work, and not all of the works listed here are either laughably bad or straight-up abominable. Plot-related twists are generally not what makes up the category either, even if such cases are subjective — if a plot twist qualifies, it is usually an extremely major twist that dramatically changes the story and greatly polarizes or alienates the fanbase. The major qualifier is that the works would be known beyond the fans of a particular genre that there's little knowledge of some other parts of a work to the general public. - From the work itself: - The work contains shocking, offensive, or obscene material such as graphic violence or sexual content, that serves no purpose to the story other than to be shocking, offensive, or provocative for the sake of it, drawing the ire of the Moral Guardians and Media Watchdogs in the process, be they politicians or groups note : Works that use such material for reasons beyond superficial shock value or Sex Sells e.g. a work with graphic violence that tells a story about the horrors of war, are usually able to co-exist with controversy on their own merits, unless the content is used in a manner that is so disrespectfully lurid, titillating, or gratuitous that an average audience member would call bullshit on that defence. - Unfortunate Implications and/or Values Dissonance that are serious enough to keep audiences from enjoying the work overall. - Deceptive, offensive, or patronizing marketing, especially AstroTurfing or particularly bad examples of Totally Radical. - Adaptation Deviation. For example, the differences between the book and The Film of the Book. - Porting Disasters, especially when it is clearly due to someone not giving a shit or farming it out to the cheapest developer willing to do it. - Intrusive microtransactions, especially freemium setups or pay-to-win, especially when they slowly creep into games that originally did a good job at keeping them non-intrusive, when they're sneaked in post-launch via an update in a way that indicates they were deliberately withheld at launch only to bypass attention from the press until the reviews move on to the next game, or when they involve lootbox/gacha setups. - Intrusive Digital Rights Management systems, especially always-online requirements or setups that (ironically) create massive security holes. - A game ships out in a clearly unfinished or barebones state, usually with numerous Game-Breaking Bugs and day-one patches to fix them, as well as DLC that is quite clearly content that was meant for the launch product that didn't make the cut ( especially if it is paid DLC). - Pervasive balance issues, especially when they clearly overbuff popular characters, throw unnecessary buffs at characters who have expensive new skins coming out, or habitually release new characters in a blatantly overpowered state. - Removal of previously existing features or content from a game, app, or online service. - Badly-handled updates, particularly if they create Game-Breaking Bugs, massively unbalance a game or arbitrarily shift power with no regard for the established meta, force gameplay to revolve around gimmicks, or either ignore player input completely or overwhelmingly cater to a specific section of the playerbase. - A particularly Harsher in Hindsight moment. - Bowdlerization of a work. - Someone makes a joke or remark that's meant to be funny or edgy, but it comes across as offensive instead. - Changes to the work that don't sit well with the audience. - Actual or perceived cultural appropriation. - A character is given a Race Lift which the audience does not approve of, especially if done in an overly performative, patronizing, or tokenizing manner, or if it involves heavy whitewashing. - A work with a hardcore cult or Geek following becomes mainstream, and as such tries to cater to that more mainstream audience instead of the original fandom. - The work tries to comment on social issues or current events, but does so in a clunky, Narmish, performative, or tone-deaf way. - The work pokes fun at religion, or something else that many people consider to be Serious Business or a Sacred Cow. - A work that is satirical in nature is taken at face value — whether it didn't occur to the writers that a few people might miss the irony, or the work's presentation makes it difficult to figure out if it is meant to be taken seriously or not — especially if the work satirizes a controversial social movement e.g. white supremacists, and ends up being praised as "advocating" their beliefs by the very people it was intended to make fun of. - A work that is satirical in nature is done in an extremely clumsy and ill-conceived manner rife with Unfortunate Implications, so that even those who realize it is not meant to be taken seriously still don't enjoy it because it simply isn't funny. - A Cultural Translation that comes off as more of a Macekre. - A work that may have been well-received at the time it was released hasn't aged well, and instead becomes dated and/or offensive. - A work becomes widely derided for having an incredibly off-putting premise. - The work is based on a Real Life historical figure or event, but treats that figure/event in a way that is viewed as disrespectful and/or offensive, particularly if it involves whitewashing or outright justifying atrocities, greatly misrepresents an extremely controversial event ( especially if it attempts a "both sides" treatment of events where one side is commonly agreed to have been much worse, or pulls a Historical Villain Upgrade or Downgrade under the same circumstances), turns a grave historical tragedy or injustice into a Glurge-y morality tale, or has a (real or perceived) heavily nationalistic or fringe slant. - The work plagiarises content from another creator's work without their permission. - An independent service is acquired by a much larger entity, especially when that entity begins making sweeping changes to the service that are widely agreed to be for the worse, or outright guts the service. - From the work's creators: - Public catfights between the creator and the media, critics, public, or all three (such as Dear Negative Reader rants). - Frequent displays of offensive, embarrassing, or questionable behavior. This includes public intoxication, impulsive offensive comments, vulgarity, and rudeness, political extremism, sexual harassment, etc., especially if said behavior contradicts themes in their own work. - Habitual poor showings on social media. - Habitual blame games and Never My Fault whenever an aspect of a work receives a negative reception, especially when a creator attacks fans for not accepting it (especially when Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things is invoked for situations where the backlash is completely understandable) or blame some sort of conspiracy to undermine them when all the evidence points to the fault being theirs and theirs alone. - Someone involved with the work is the perpetrator of a violent crime (such as rape or murder). - Someone involved with the work holds a view that is taboo in mainstream society (e.g. support for racial supremacy, sympathizing with perpetrators over victims in domestic/sexual violence cases, or anti-LGBTQ beliefs), or unintentionally makes a comment that implies holding such views. - A creator has financially predatory or exploitative practices towards other creators in the work. - Someone overseeing a large group of creators fails to act on or enables serious misconduct from one or more of them. - A group of creators becomes notorious for constant infighting and drama. - A creator defends or continues to work or associate with someone credibly accused of serious misconduct. - Troubled Production stories that become more interesting than the finished product, especially if the finished product disappoints. - Abusive or exploitative work environments. - Overly-intrusive Executive Meddling. - Someone involved with the work has attracted controversy for violating Contractual Purity. - The creator makes promise after promise that they fail to keep or botch the delivery of, especially if they fail to take responsibility for dropping the ball and/or blame someone else ( especially if they blame fans for taking issue). - A work has a creator who has some highly questionable views that people were originally able to separate from the work, but eventually spur people to examine the work more closely, which reveals a lot of previously undetected Unfortunate Implications or outright dogwhistles. - Cynical, insincere, patronizing, or self-serving attempts to co-opt political or social causes, particularly as a cheap attention grab or a ploy to throw off bad press. - Mass recasts, especially abrupt ones. - Production missing previously-stated deadlines for release, especially if said release has been heavily hyped or anticipated, or a delay is announced shortly before release. Sometimes delays add up so it seems it will never get released. This is particularly egregious if the final product winds up being of poor quality, especially if it is overly slapdash or was clearly stitched together from various iterations. - Badly-managed crowdfunding efforts, especially when creators make lots of empty promises, fail to deliver perks, botch the release ( especially if the retail launch goes fine, but the backer launch doesn't), or engage in serious financial mismanagement or outright fraud. - Filing Frivolous Lawsuits intended to financially harass people who criticize the work rather than to protect intellectual property. - Unethical behavior by the production company or the company owning the rights to a work, whether or not it's related to the work itself. - Purchase or investment in the company owning rights to a work by a company or person known for unethical behavior. - Licensing deals or marketing partnerships with an unsavory person, company, or product. - From critical reception of the work: - A work that attracts a following, most likely misaimed, amongst people who are part of a hate group. - A work is cited as an inspiration for a violent incident note : It should be noted that research has proved that people who decide it's a good idea to engage in violent activity after being inspired by a work are already mentally unstable. For example, Doom (among other works, like The Basketball Diaries) was blamed by Moral Guardians for the Columbine High School massacre, but the FBI concluded that co-conspirators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were motivated by sadism and revenge, respectively. - A work is cited as an inspiration for a dangerous stunt that results in serious injuries and/or death note : usually performed by young people who didn't realise that doing the same thing in real life might not be a good idea. - A work's fanbase becomes infamous for a significant Vocal Minority of overzealous fans who engage in hostile confrontations and death threats towards haters, other fans, and even the work's creators who disagree with them, overshadowing the more sensible fans (of which there tends to be more of) and putting outsiders off of the work who don't want to associate themselves with the toxicity. This goes quadruple if the creator encourages these tendencies and uses them as a personal army or goon squad. - Contentious and polarizing reviews of highly-anticipated works. - It got panned by an influential critic who didn't like it, found it distasteful, or just had a bad day. - A work, episode, scene, etc. receives a severe and widespread negative reception on the Internet. - A work wins an award, beating another work that was perceived as more deserving by the audience, seemingly due to biases on the judges' part. - Review bribery and payola scandals, especially when they lead to dismissals due to a reviewer's refusal to participate in them. See also Colbert Bump, Dancing Bear, Just Here for Godzilla, Even Nerds Have Standards, Mainstream Obscurity, Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch, Watch It for the Meme, Ruined FOREVER, Contractual Purity, Music Is Politics, Yoko Oh No, Cowboy BeBop at His Computer, Audience-Alienating Premise, Audience-Alienating Ending, Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things, Misaimed Fandom, Serious Business, Poe's Law, Jumping the Shark, Tainted by the Preview, Role-Ending Misdemeanor, and Best Known for the Fanservice. Compare and contrast No Such Thing as Bad Publicity (when a certain work remains popular despite the protests from Moral Guardians and other controversies or even becomes popular because of said controversies), Controversy-Proof Image (when a person is popular and still has a positive reputation despite their controversy), Vindicated by History (when a work which wasn't popular in the past/since the release becomes more liked over time), Condemned by History (when a work which was very popular in the past/since the release becomes more disliked over time), The New Rock & Roll (when a whole genre gets held under controversy), Bile Fascination (when an audience is drawn towards a work specifically because of their curiosity about the uproar surrounding it, which may overlap with this trope), and Walking Spoiler (an In-Universe form of this trope, when a specific character or object is deeply associated with an important plot point within a work that makes it very difficult to talk about them without mentioning their contribution to the plot). Keep in mind that, despite how it is usually used, "controversial" is not the same thing as "offensive." You can have a completely family-friendly and non-political work that still provokes dissent, especially if the work is aiming for realism. Additionally, since most scandals and controversies tend to not * overshadow a work in the long run, only add examples if the controversy in question is still the main point of discussion about a work after at least six months to be absolutely safe. Finally, don't use this page to complain about shows or creators you don't like.* ## Examples with their own pages <!—index—> <!—/index—> WARNING: Some pages contain unmarked spoilers: ## Other examples: - In 2013, Cheerios released an ad that featured an interracial family. Unfortunately, the ad became less known for its content and more known for the racist comments it received. - One ad from Coca-Cola simply featured the famous "America the Beautiful" being sung by several people of various ethnicities and walks of life, some of whom sang it in different languages. Many people were outraged at the song being sung in anything but English, as well as offending those on the hard right who condemned it as "liberal propaganda" for showcasing the cultural and ethnic diversity of America note : (including some who believed that Coke showing a Mexican-American in the commercial was them promoting illegal immigration) and issued a boycott online. This only allowed the ad to become more memorable; since the initial 2014 airing, Coke has re-aired the commercial during major American events and holidays as a sign of unity. - Discussions of the marketing for The Emoji Movie will almost inevitably gravitate towards an infamous promotional tweet that parodied The Handmaid's Tale, a TV show about sexual slavery. Needless to say, referencing something like that while trying to advertise a movie for children provoked significant ire. - The Hitman: Absolution trailer "Attack of the Saints" quickly became known for the eponymous Saints, an all-female enemy faction dressed as Naughty Nuns, being killed by Agent 47. The trailer swiftly earned IO Interactive accusations of sexism, not helped by the fact the trailer was released in the wake of the Depression Quest controversy, which prompted heavy debate about sexualized depictions of female characters in video games. - Just For Feet was a growing shoe retailer who distinguished themselves with basketball courts inside stores, an in-store snack bar, in-store appearances by professional athletes, and a large clearance section among others. Nowadays, however, they are known for being taken down by a Super Bowl commercial accused of being racist and insensitive. note : It features a barefoot runner in the Kenyan desert being hunted by a Humvee of white men, who is drugged and wakes up to discover he has shoes on his feet, which visibly horrifies him. The ad, alongside accusations of accounting fraud, helped bankrupt the company, which collapsed not too long afterward, and it's all that they're known for now. See it here. - McDonald's: - This upbeat advertisement from when they used the "We love to see you smile" slogan is pretty unremarkable and would be almost completely forgotten today... except that it was the last commercial shown before Today announced the first plane hit the World Trade Center. - McDonalds's former mascot "Mac Tonight" has become better known today for the unofficial parody of the character known as "Moon Man", which depicts him as an advocate for white supremacy and bigotry to the point that the meme was declared a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in 2019, a far cry from the original Bobby Darin-impersonating moon in TV spots from The '80s. - Texas mattress chain Miracle Mattress is nowadays better known for the 9/11 sale commercial that killed their business than anything else they've done. The commercial, depicting the chain owner's daughter accidentally knocking over two men who crash into two tall stacks of mattresses, went viral and got major backlash over its poor taste. A few days after pleas from the company stating it wasn't their intention to offend, note : The owner of the company had no idea the commercial was made. the company announced its stores were closing down. A few days later, it was announced they would reopen their stores under new employees and management. - In March 2020, Marvel released a trailer for a reboot of the New Warriors series as part of Outlawed. The trailer quickly became infamous for two of the superheroes depicted, the non-binary Snowflake and their twin brother Safespace, whose namesakes and powers were based on terms often used to insult the LGBT community. The criticism was enough for Marvel to silently cancel the series, as the series wasn't out by its October release date. - This French Orangina ad. It barely raised an issue in France, but when a few activists showed it to the U.S., people were so shocked by all the YIFF they saw that one of the later Orangina ads poked fun at it. - In 2017, Pepsi released an ad starring Kendall Jenner where during a photo shoot, she decides to hand a Pepsi to a cop during the middle of a protest. The ad was heavily panned for being tone deaf and promoting the message that Pepsi would ease tensions between protesting factions. Pepsi would eventually pull it due to the backlash. - While Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) was well-received upon release, it's hard to talk about the movie's advertising without bringing up Sonic's original model◊. Needless to say, people didn't particularly like it when it was first shown off in the trailers. The backlash was so big that the movie got delayed by three months just to redesign Sonic's model to be more on-brand◊. - For most of the Turn of the Millennium, Jared Fogle was known by virtually everyone as "the Subway guy", as he appeared in many of Subway's commercials as their spokesperson (and was famous enough from that to cameo in movies like Jack and Jill and two of the Sharknado flicks). Nowadays, however, he is more known for his arrest in 2015 where he ultimately pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography and traveling to pay for sex with minors. - Formerly one of the most popular and biggest dubbing companies in America, 4Kids Entertainment is now primarily remembered for two things: their heavily Bowdlerised English dubs that frequently bordered on straight-up Macekre, combined with the dubs themselves making questionable writing changes and removing any traces of Japanese culture from their source materials, and the lawsuit filed out by TV Tokyo for using unlicensed footage of Yu-Gi-Oh!, which helped descend the company into bankruptcy. note : The company actually remerged in 2012, but filed for another bankruptcy in 2016 before shutting down entirely a year afterwards. - If you weren't a reader of act-age during its serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump, you most likely only know it as that one manga that was swiftly Cut Short, scrubbed off from Shonen Jump corporate history and withdrawn from circulation worldwide in August 2020 after its writer, Tatsuya Matsuki, was arrested for groping middle school girls. - The manga The Beautiful Skies of Houou High barely made a blip in the U.S. and is generally despised both by fans and its own English publishers. Why? Because it's a manga that takes the Cure Your Gays route far too seriously, bringing along with it a whole mountain of Values Dissonance regarding lesbianism and gender roles. The English publishers treat it as an Old Shame and don't ever bring it up anymore. - Bunny Drop started out as an innocent story about a young man taking in what he thought was his illegitimate half-aunt after his grandfather died and learning how to be a responsible parent to an abandoned child. Then the Time Skip happened where \|\|a now grown up Rin realizes she has feelings for Daikichi, the father figure who raised her, which he reciprocates\|\|. Chapter 54 would handwave this issue \|\|by having Rin's deadbeat mother reveal to Rin that she was adopted by Daikichi's grandfather and they really aren't blood relatives\|\|. As a result, many fans insist that the post-timeskip never happened, while the anime and Live Action Adaptations would omit it entirely. It's to a point that the term "Usagi Dropped" was born to refer and warn people in case another series ended the same way as Bunny Drop did. - Cheat Slayer is infamous not just because of its immensely violent, sexual, and problematic content, but in how it got cancelled after a single published chapter due to accusations of Shallow Parody that are closer to straight-up plagiarism of other isekai protagonists, who are portrayed exclusively as horrible, monstrous people that are nothing like their original counterparts, than any of the manga's actual story merits. - Dragon Ball: - Dragon Ball Z Kai was just reaching the end of its initial run when accusations of plagiarism concerning Kenji Yamamoto's soundtrack struck, and all of said music had to be taken out in every re-run and re-release and replaced with pieces from Shunsuke Kikuchi's score for the original series. While Yamamoto's soundtrack for the series was already divisive, its legally obligated censorship only made things worse, with a new base emerging to try and defend Yamamoto's plagiarism. - In Latin America, Kai tends to be best remembered for the very negative reception its original run had due to massive censorship note : Toei used the censored version commissioned by Funimation for Nicktoons, instead of the original Japanese version like the one used for the Latin American Spanish dub of Dragon Ball Z. and, more importantly, the fact that almost all of the original cast, whose work reached cult status in the region, were replaced. The fallout from this led Toei to restructure their Latin American division and make it so that, in The Final Chapters, where possible, all characters were voiced by their original voice actors. note : The few exceptions were either due to retirement or death. - Dragon Ball Super was hit with this early on, thanks to the decision of making the first two sagas adaptations of the two canon Dragon Ball Z movies, which was seen as very repetitive and invoking It Was His Sled, especially since they had been released very recently at the time of Super's debut, and the notoriously awful animation early on, especially with Episode 5, ended up overshadowing any of the content. The series later improved, but the whole "rehashing the movies" and quality early on remains a stain. - Dragon Ball Z gets a lot of scrutiny from American videophiles because of the Digital Destruction that has plagued all home video releases since the mid-2000s, including, among other things, cropping the whole series to 16:9. Even the first 4:3 release in a long while, made from film elements Funimation happened to still have, got flack for excessive DVNR. It's gotten to the point where videophiles have gone on record as wanting to seek out the seven Dragon Balls to wish that Funimation would simply import and upscale the far superior-looking Dragon Box DVD releases issued by Toei. - The ecchi manga and OVA Eiken was near-universally despised by viewers and critics, and has made virtually no impact otherwise... well, except for the fact that the girl with the largest breasts in an already exaggerated World of Buxom is only 11 years old. - Idolmaster: Xenoglossia happens to be subject to this from The Idolmaster fandom because, rather than it be about idols like its source material, it was instead a mecha anime. Most of the cast being subject to Adaptational Personality Change as well as the major Adaptational Villainy given to Chihaya (\|\|and to a lesser extent, Yukiho\|\|) left a bad taste in the mouths of fans of the franchise. While the anime itself has been Vindicated by History, fans would rather not treat it as part of the Idolmaster franchise. - I Think I Turned My Childhood Friend Into a Girl is a fairly straightforward BL Otokonoko manga, but what is it most known for? A particularly disastrous Translation with an Agenda on the part of Seven Seas Entertainment that changed the gender identity of Hiura, one of the main characters, from a cis boy to a trans girl, leading to accusations of perpetuating the stereotype that feminine men are automatically trans and sparking serious debate amongst readers about whether the original Japanese text supported interpretations of Hiura as transgender to begin with. Even after a more accurate translation was quickly released in response to the backlash, the stigma of the initial translation still remains to this day. - Kemono Friends is mainly known nowadays by the Troubled Production its second season endured, including the director being pushed out and the blame for everything being shunted over to the voice cast, who had next to nothing to do with the trouble, among other things. The backlash to this, including the harassment of Tomason's staff by disgruntled fans (including an incident where the animation director's name was used to fraudulently sign the studio on for multiple paid online services, resulting in getting swamped with emails and phone calls asking for info) and the massive dislike bombing every episode got on Niconico in protest, is likely not to be forgotten as well. - If anybody in the West who isn't a big anime fan brings up Kimba the White Lion, chances are it's to talk about the many accusations that The Lion King plagiarized the story. - Kinnikuman is best known for the controversy surrounding the character Brocken Jr., who is a good guy with a Nazi-themed outfit, complete with swastikas. Due to this character, the series was pulled from broadcast in France shortly after he debuted. - Kodomo no Jikan ( A Child's Time), proposed English title Nymphet, was licensed by publisher Seven Seas Entertainment but never released in America due to its lolicon overtones. They had only seen the first book, which isn't too bad in terms of content. Then the controversy erupted. Initially, Seven Seas defended the title, but a combination of major book chains refusing to stock it and their reading the later volumes, which come very close to violating the PROTECT Act, caused them to change their mind and drop it. - Koi Kaze is well known for being about an Age-Gap Romance between a 27-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl, who are also siblings who were separated at a young age. Even though the series covers the topic more maturely and realistically than one might expect, it's still controversial due to the premise. - Ask anyone who has heard of the anime adaptation of Kokoro Connect, and you'll hear it be associated with Mitsuhiro Ichiki's controversial treatment during the promotional phase. He was tricked into giving a fake audition for a character that didn't exist, embarrassed himself on TV, and the producer said he didn't regret any of it. This angered many people, including some voice actors. - Kosuke Fujishima is well known for creating Ah! My Goddess and being the character designer for Sakura Wars and Tales Series. However in 2017, his divorce with his first wife and later engagement to a much younger woman ended up overshadowing his work. It wouldn't be until 2020 with Tales of Crestoria until he was back to doing character designs. - Kuni Ga Moeru, a series dealing with a family caught up in the Second Sino-Japanese War and later the War in Asia and the Pacific. The series is best known, however, for its lost chapter, dealing with one of the main characters having to witness the Nanking Massacre after being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. The mangaka, Hiroshi Motomiya, pulled exactly zero punches in depicting the event. This caused massive backlash when the chapter was published in Weekly Young Jump. Much of the controversy centered on the illustration of a photo, based on a genuine (though its veracity is disputed) photograph, allegedly depicting a Japanese soldier posing by a Chinese woman he had just raped. Due to liberties taken by the artist, as well as criticism concerning the provenance and veracity of the photograph, Motomiya was accused by elements from the nationalist right of trying to libel the Imperial Japanese Army. Shueisha, the publisher, responded by apologizing and having Motomiya putting the series on hiatus and removing that specific chapter from being republished in tankouban form. This caused more outrage from the other side who then began accusing Shueisha of wihtewashing history and caving to the right wing of the LDP and then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who had resumed Prime Ministerial visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in 2001. It didn't help that said visits had ignited protests and riots in China and South Korea, due to infamous World War II figures being commemorated at the shrine. note : In another evocation of this exact same trope, the shrine was established after the Meiji Restoration to house the kami, or spirits, of Japanese who had fallen in war. In that case, it was merely intended as a spiritual Arlington Cemetary. However, in 1978, in a secret midnight ceremony that even Emperor Hirohito did not know about, the kami of the executed "Class-A" war criminals including wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo were enshrined. Once Hirohito found out, he declared his disapproval and that he would refuse to visit the shrine evermore, a policy his successors have followed to this day. - Kuroko's Basketball is infamous as the manga that was targeted by domestic terrorists and is at least as well-known for the Fanwork Ban, which has since been lifted, and removal of merchandise that resulted from the poison threats as it is for its artistic merits and accomplishments. It doesn't help that the terror threats dominated the news in anime circles for over a year. To this day, it's still not known why the suspect who was caught targeted the manga and everyone associating with it even tangentially, or even if he had acted alone in his threats, but it's speculated a personal grudge against author Fujimaki Tadatoshi may have had something to do with it. - Lotte no Omocha! ( Lotte's Toy!) features a female protagonist who is a succubus princess of a fantasy kingdom. Well, OK, nothing bad about it so far until you learn that the female protagonist is also 10 years old, she's expected to start creating her own male harem as part of her royal duties, and she will die if she doesn't drink Life Essence from male beings. It went about as well as you'd expect, and the sheer concentrated lolicon on display is all it's known for. - The anime adaptation of Love Lab is most well-known for a scene in episode 8 where the main characters attempt to pay tribute to black celebrities by dressing in brown makeup and acting out affectionate parodies of them. While it didn't cause much of a fuss in Japan, the scene caused an uproar in the West thanks to its resemblance to blackface (complete with large, bright lips) and Minstrel Shows. While the intention of the scene is about as well known as its execution, the heavy Values Dissonance of the latter ensured that it would be far better-known than anything else in the series, to the point where "love lab blackface" and "love lab anime racist" are still popularly-suggested search results on Google in a neutral setting. - The Love Live! franchise is becoming increasingly known for bad press generated by badly-behaving fans. The worst incident was a vandalism incident involving manhole covers bearing the images of the main characters in June 2018, which resulted in the manhole covers being pulled indefinitely. - The Macross franchise is better known for the sheer amount of legal trouble that it was involved with in the United States. To explain, Big West Advertising, the primary sponsor of the franchise, partnered with Tatsunoko Production to help secure financial funding for the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which gave the latter the rights to the international distribution of the series. Tatsunoko would then license Macross, along with two of its own productions, Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, to Harmony Gold USA, who reworked all three of them into a single narrative for syndication purposes: Robotech. Through this, Harmony Gold would claim all the rights to the Macross franchise in the United States. This has lead to Macross producer Studio Nue and the aforementioned Big West to pursue legal action, and has resulted in most of the installments in the franchise never leaving Japan until 2021, when a deal was finally made with the two parties. - Perhaps the one thing most people remember about Midori (Shōjo Tsubaki), the 1992 film adaptation of Mr Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, is the fact that it was banned by the Japanese government for 14 years because of its graphic depictions of child molestation and animal abuse, rather than being known for its actual plot or the fact that it overtly depicts child molestation and animal abuse in a scathingly negative light. - Neon Genesis Evangelion became embroiled in controversy when Netflix picked it up for streaming in 2019, as it was completely redubbed and retranslated from the ground up at the insistence of Studio Khara. The announcement of a redub itself was hotly contested by fans of the original ADV Films dub, especially since none of the original English cast returned, but the new translation as a whole became an even greater subject of scrutiny when it was discovered that it was far more literal to the extent of Bowdlerising a number of fan favorite lines from the more Woolseyism-rich ADV dub — including toning down the script's hints at a possible romantic connection between Shinji and Kaworu (e.g. changing most instances of "love" to "like" and replacing Kaworu's description of Shinji as "worthy of love" with "worthy of my grace"), which many LGBT+ and allied fans quickly decried as homophobic. Because of this, it's become difficult to discuss Evangelion in the west without bringing up Khara's stricter handling of it, and despite Netflix having nothing to do with the changes, the controversy surrounding the retranslation is still touted as a microcosm of longstanding issues with their poor treatment of media from outside the Anglosphere. - Pokémon: The Series: - The episode "Computer Warrior Porygon" note : more commonly known and referred to as "Electric Soldier Porygon" is known far more for causing nearly 700 seizures in Japan upon its initial airing, and the resulting worldwide ban of the episode, than the actual content itself. This extends to the Pokémon Porygon itself. Despite not being the actual cause of the flashing, note : it was a missile blowing up it's swept under the rug for no other reason than it being the Pokémon featured in the episode. Even its evolutions have been hit with it, as they've made no major appearances in the series. note : Though they did have a cameo in the fifteenth movie's intro. After this incident, OLM, the animation studio behind Pokémon, dropped all strobe lights caused by Pikachu's attacks in future episodes of the anime and re-edited the first 37 episodes to eliminate said effects. This even extended to anime as a whole—ever since this snafu, any fast-paced scenes that could conceivably cause seizures have to be darkened for the broadcast version. - Pokémon: The Mastermind of Mirage Pokémon is known less for any of its own merits and more for being associated with the controversy that followed after Pokémon USA, now known as The Pokémon Company International, fired the English voice actors that had been working on the anime since day one in favor of newer, cheaper ones. - Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl's Sinnoh League arc suffered from this due to the character of Tobias, infamous for possessing Legendary Pokémon in Darkrai and Latios, which is otherwise usually unheard of in the anime, and curb-stomping every opponent of his with just his Darkrai. When Ash ended up facing him in the semifinals, this lead to Ash losing majorly to just two of Tobias' Pokémon, made the arc notorious for giving Ash an invincible opponent to make sure he lost, and made Tobias (unlike Alain below) a character that's hated by the fandom as a whole. - Pokémon: Genesect and the Legend Awakened is mostly remembered for the fan backlash surrounding the inclusion of a second, female Mewtwo and the implied (but eventually debunked) retcon of Mewtwo's backstory that it created, to the point where it has its own folder on the film's YMMV page. note : Years later, it was revealed that the reason for the film's Mewtwo being different was because the estate of Takeshi Shudō held the rights to the Mewtwo from the first movie, so they opted to instead create a lawyer-friendly version of that Mewtwo. This backlash extended to Mega Mewtwo Y, which debuted in the film as the second Mewtwo's Super Mode and was subsequently "tainted." Only when it was used in the Final Smash of the Super Smash Bros. Mewtwo (who is mostly based on the original Mewtwo in Pokémon: The First Movie) was its association with the movie weakened. - Pokémon the Series: XY became this over Ash losing the Kalos League. Ash losing the regions league is nothing new nor is fan backlash, but the unprecedented appeal to older fans of XY, Ash's unprecedented skill and maturity as a trainer, his highly built and hyped up Ash-Greninja, the episode's title, promotional materials and other factors Explanation : it was the franchise's 20th anniversary, and the next games were seemingly doing away with traditional Leagues all pointed to him finally winning. Ash's losing the Finals to Alain thus caused unprecedented backlash across both sides of the Pacific as invalidating everything praised about XY by having the seeming payoff of his win never happen and turned the previously well-liked Alain into a fandom pariah. Despite the immediately following Team Flare arc and rest of XY being seen as the best in The Series they're still mostly remembered by fans in terms of the debate if the Kalos League negated all their good or not. \|\|Ash won the next series League in what's seen as damage control and creator apology, but rather than forgive XY, fans changed the issue to debating if his winning Kalos would have been better due to its stronger setup (especially because the Alolan league as a whole was a hot button topic both in the anime and in the games).\|\| - In 2017, Rurouni Kenshin returned with a new volume after a nearly twenty-year hiatus... just in time for creator Nobuhiro Watsuki to be arrested for possession of child pornography, scuttling the new series almost as soon as it began and retroactively tainting the old one. Not helping was that it hugely undermined the manga's central message about moral improvement: this coming out in the way it did, instead of the author himself admitting it, makes it hard for fans to rewatch the series without feeling hypocritical. And despite Watsuki expressing regret for his actions, paying a fine, and returning to work in April 2018, the damage is already done and fans are mixed whether to support his work or not. There's also the publisher Shueisha letting him continue to work after six months since the charges, which many people felt was too soon, given that the controversy was (and continues to be) still fresh in the people's minds. - Sailor Moon: - The only thing most know about the DiC/Cloverway dub is that it made several changes to the original, most infamously changing Haruka and Michiru, a lesbian couple, into cousins. However, because a good deal of the romantic subtext wasn't removed, this led many fans to assume that they were not just lesbians, but incestuous to boot. - When the anime was airing in Italy, there was a huge controversy in 1997 due to an infamous statement of psychologist Vera Slepoj, who claimed that being a strong fighter is an exclusively manly trait, while a girly/female superheroine is a bad role model for little boys who want to imitate her, making them "sexually confused". note : This happened seven years before Winx Club, an Italian show largely inspired by Sailor Moon. The headline of her article was "Kids, don't watch Sailor Moon, it will turn you into sissies", which was considered outrageous even in the '90s and caused so many discussions that the Italian dub of Sailor Stars (the season that was airing at the time) was ridiculously censored: the Sailor Starlights, women who disguise themselves as men and revert to their female form when transformed, were changed into real men with twin sisters who occasionally take their place. note : The Starlights were voiced by men in their civilian forms, meaning that they couldn't just be made female at all times like in other dubs. This change only applies to episode 188 and you can tell some scenes were redubbed later (in every "twin sisters" scene, Usagi is voiced by Donatella Fanfani instead of her usual voice actress Elisabetta Spinelli). This is dropped like a sack of bricks afterward, but it's such a clumsy workaround that it's easily the most infamous edit from that dub. Not helping matters is that the controversy played a considerable role in Naoko Takeuchi's infamous international embargo that lasted through the better part of the following decade. - The 1993-1994 and 2000-2002 OVAs of Stardust Crusaders drew considerable attention in 2008 when Egyptian Islamic fundamentalists discovered shots of DIO, the non-Muslim Big Bad, reading The Qur'an. note : In the original manga, DIO was reading a nondescript book with gray boxes for text. Since he was residing in Egypt, APPP decided to replace the nondescript gray boxes with the first Arabic text they could find. Unfortunately for them, the most commonly circulated Arabic text happens to be the Qur'an, the Muslim holy book. This may not seem like it would be such a big deal in the Western world or East Asia, but it started a firestorm of controversy in much of the Islamic world. Since some fundamentalist Muslims, such as the ones in question, believe that only Muslims are entitled to read the Quran, the sight of a supernatural non-Muslim glancing at a few pages of it was bound to infuriate them. Repercussions of this controversy spread elsewhere: Shueisha cut off ties with A.P.P.P., circulation of the OVAs was temporarily halted to remove the Quran text, and Hirohiko Araki himself was forced to redraw the original manga to replace mosques and other Muslim buildings that get harmed or destroyed with more secular constructions, which carried over to David Productions' later adaptation. The whole incident and the resulting censorship was heavily scorned by critics as "embarrassing," and Shueisha's distancing from A.P.P.P. is heavily believed to be one of the leading contributors to the Keep Circulating the Tapes fate of both the OVAs and A.P.P.P.'s 2007 film adaptation of Phantom Blood. More than a decade later, the Quran controversy remains one of the biggest points of discussion surrounding the OVAs for anyone who aren't already fans of JoJo or OVA staff member Satoshi Kon. - Yuki Suegutsu is chiefly known for two things: her Career Resurrection with Chihayafuru and her earlier career low point with Eden no Hana in which she plagiarized Takehiko Inoue's art, putting all manga serialized in the Bessatsu Friend magazine on an international blacklist for over a decade. - The life and career of Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata was overshadowed in August 2018 by revelations that he was a Prima Donna Director, being so tough to work under that his exacting standards may have led to the untimely passing of up-and-coming Ghibli talent Yoshifumi Kondō, note : Kondō died in 1998 from aortic dissection, which was said by his doctors to have been brought on from being overworked. a theory that fellow Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki and Takahata himself were willing to believe. Worse, he died without ever having to account for the damage he might have done, leaving his legacy (if not the enjoyability of his works) up in the air. The controversy never made Takahata's movies' reputations radioactive, but it's still an elephant in the room when it comes to discussing Takahata and his works. - Previously a major hit series in Japan and a cult favorite in the West, since the late 2010s, it's been difficult to discuss Toriko without bringing up author Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro's 2002 arrest for soliciting sex from a 16-17-year-old, which resulted in a one-year prison sentence and the cancellation of Seikimatsu Leader Den Takeshi!. While Toriko previously served as a Career Resurrection, the arrest of Nobuhiro Watsuki in 2017 brought Shimabukuro's past to public prominence outside of Japan for the first time, generating so much backlash that Shimabukuro's following series Build King was highly criticized solely for his involvement (it did end up Cut Short, but most likely for other reasons). - Transformers, being an American toy line created by importing and re-purposing Japanese toys, has had several Japanese media, many of which fall into this: - Transformers Kiss Players is undoubtedly best known for its blatantly suggestive imagery involving teenage girls that look prepubescent. Western fans were disgusted by this, while Japanese fans were embarrassed and feared it would irrevocably color perceptions of Japanese Transformers media in foreign countries. - Transformers: Armada is mainly remembered for debuting in the U.S. six months before it debuted in Japan, the animation and translation errors that resulted from it, and the first half focusing almost entirely on finding Mini-Cons. - In the West at least, Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! is known less for its actual content and more for the frequent debates among audiences regarding the title character's massive chest, which are considered unusually huge for a mainstream Slice of Life series and jar with her otherwise looking significantly younger than she actually is. While the controversy ultimately boosted the anime adaptation's popularity to the forefront of the wider anime fandom, it nonetheless dominated the discussion of both the series and the Summer 2020 anime season as a whole. - In early February 2018, internet users found the Twitter account of Kazuyoshi Yaginuma, long-renowned for his work on a number of high-profile anime, most notably his direction of the anime adaptation of Recovery of an MMO Junkie, only to find that he's a virulent Neo-Nazi who had been posting and endorsing anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler content since joining Twitter in 2011. The discovery led to Signal.MD terminating their association with Yaginuma, who proceeded to blame his firing on a nonexistent Jewish conspiracy instead of considering that it had anything to do with him being a Neo-Nazi, and his Twitter account was suspended in the fallout of that. Needless to say, discussions surrounding him revolve less on the merits of his artistic output and more on his beliefs and the ethics of supporting the works he contributed to despite them, with MMO Junkie being hit the hardest thanks to both his directorship and the adaptation's recency when the controversy broke out. - Snow White and the Madness of Truth was an item of Swedish installation art erected in 2004 that quickly garnered international attention when Zvi Mazel, then the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, vandalized it by deliberately causing a short circuit. With this act, Zvi ignited a firestorm of discussion around the piece, most prominently a debate about whether it was anti-Semitic. Ironically, Dror Feiler, one of the artists behind it, is an Israeli-born Jew. - In the English-speaking world, it is impossible to find coverage of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf without finding news on that one time two kids in China tried to imitate something they saw on the show by having a third one tie them to a tree and start a fire at the base, seriously injuring themselves as a result. Even worse, it even seriously affected the popularity of the series, and led to increased censorship in the Chinese industry, which resulted in the series needing to be bowdlerised on digital streaming services. However, it eventually won back the crowd since Mighty Little Defenders aired in 2019. - The first-generation Chevrolet Corvair was one of GM's most popular models during the 1960s, but it is better known today for its handling issues, a problem that was further compounded when it was revealed by consumer advocate Ralph Nader in his book Unsafe at Any Speed that GM executives had declined to include suspension upgrades that would have made the car safer after calculating that paying off lawsuits was cheaper than re-engineering the car. - The General Motors EV1 was one of the first mass-produced electric cars and had a moderate amount of success when it first came out. Today, it is best known for the fact that General Motors would end up forcefully repossessing several units of the car and destroying them (with a few intact units being disabled and donated to museums) note : Only one completely intact and running EV-1 is known to still exist (though there's rumors of others), at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., believing that the car was unprofitable. The EV1's discontinuation remains controversial to this day, with many accusing General Motors of deliberate self-sabotage, and accusing the oil industry of trying to keep electric cars off the road. - The Ford Pinto was actually a good car with better reliability than its American competitors but is remembered for the gas tank flaw from its first couple of years model that made it explode in rear-end collisions. Even the trope referring to exploding cars is called Every Car Is a Pinto. - Google's self-driving car/Automated Automobiles project is seen like this, with some people seeing it as Reed Richards Is Useless technology (and by extension, a Job-Stealing Robot). It's also hard to talk about self-driving cars without bringing up concerns over the possibility of such a car causing a crash due to a glitch, and arguments over who should be held responsible for the accident in such a situation. - Uber counts, not only due to the Automated Automobiles, but also being a way to steal taxi driver's jobs, as the many Uber protests show. The controversies surrounding its former CEO Travis Kalanick haven't helped matters. - The Pontiac G6 suffered an extremely ill-considered marketing ploy in which the entire audience for an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show was given a car for free, with the quickly memetic "You get a car, you get a car, everybody gets a car!" Just one problem: ownership of the car also meant a sizable spike in the recipients' income, meaning they wound up with a $6,000 tax hike, and with much of the audience for the episode specifically chosen because they badly needed a car, they were naturally in no position to pay it, meaning many of the cars ended up being sold just to cover their own cost. The disaster almost certainly played at least some part in the death of Pontiac, something its Aztek was already in the process of doing. Oprah learned her lesson, and the numerous similar promotions she's done since have also included a check to cover the taxes. - Tesla Motors has courted controversy not just for its working conditions and vehicles catching fire, but also for the erratic behaviour of its CEO Elon Musk, particularly after his buyout of Twitter. - Pepe the Frog, a character from the comic Boy's Club, became a widespread meme after his debut in 2005. However, the usage of Pepe as a meme turned awry in mid-2016 when many members of the alt-right used him as a symbol to express racist and anti-Semitic sentiments around the time of the 2016 U.S. election. note : It's possible that some of the offensive Pepe memes, especially those from before 2016, were originally meant more as Vulgar Humor than serious political statements, since other "Rare Pepes" often featured gratuitous Body Horror, coprophilia, Gorn, and various sex acts instead of racist imagery, all played for extremely dark laughs, until genuine bigots started blurring the lines between satire and serious. The damage had been done by the time the Anti-Defamation League classified Pepe as a hate symbol. note : Though they did include the caveat that Pepe is not inherently a hate symbol and context should be taken into account when judging whether using him is hateful. Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe, was so angry over this that he attempted a "Save Pepe" campaign in order to rescue the character. However, in May 2017, Furie decided to kill off Pepe in his comic after the character became more ingrained as a symbol of the far-right. Furie did succeed in enforcing his copyright in certain cases, such as forcing InfoWars's Alex Jones to pay $15,000 in a lawsuit for selling merchandise with Pepe on it, but the reputation as an alt-right meme is very hard to erase. - These days, Dilbert creator Scott Adams is considerably better-known for his outspoken support of former US President Donald Trump than for his cartooning. And while the average comic strip reader might ordinarily be willing to overlook a cartoonist's politics, Adams drew quite a bit of attention to it when he published a rather controversial pro-Trump book whose cover art featured an image of Dogbert with Trump's hair. Because of this, Dilbert unsurprisingly lost a lot of fans who dislike Trump. Even before that, Adams was no stranger to controversy; he had previously provoked outrage in a blog post where he claimed that rape was a "natural instinct" for men and that men who committed rape were just victims of a society that criminalized their natural desires. - For many years, For Better or for Worse was among the most respected of comic strips, notable for its characters aging in real time and its willingness to do risky things (such as introduce an openly gay character well before such things were mainstream). Then, as it neared its end, it introduced a storyline where main character Elizabeth left behind her life teaching in a First Nations village to move back to her hometown and enter a relationship with the extremely unpopular character of Anthony (after he had broken up his marriage because his wife wanted to go back to work after having a child and expected him to live up to a promise he made). Not helping was the "going-after" sequence, where Anthony saves Elizabeth from Attempted Rape only to immediately beg her to get together with him (leading to the memetic "I HAVE NO HOME!" moment). This decision destroyed the comic's reputation, to the point that almost all discussion of it nowadays centers on that storyline. - In its heyday, Li'l Abner was one of the most famous and influential comics strips in America. Moreover, strip creator Al Capp was a well-known and recognizable public figure in his own right. But in the 1960s, Capp drifted into a right-wing crank who sneered at folk singers and political activists (memorably berating a bemused John Lennon and Yoko Ono on camera during their 1969 "bed-in" in Montreal), and this started bleeding into the comic itself. Before long, his politics became a cloud that hung over his work. Then he was arrested on sex-related charges in 1971 and papers began to drop his strip in droves, contributing to the comic strip ending in 1977 (Capp was also in ill health by the end of The '70s, and died in 1979). Now, it's hard to talk about the strip without discussing its creator's prickly personality, ideological hang-ups, and the allegations that he committed sexual misconduct. - Abominable is remembered for a scene which had a map with the nine-dash-line on it which resulted in the movie being banned in countries in Southeast Asia; the protests in Hong Kong that were happening at the same time when the movie came out didn't help matters as well. Despite this, the film was still a success at least, but not enough for a sequel to be developed. - The one thing most people remember about Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, aside from the music by Mastodon, is the Viral Marketing campaign involving LED signs displaying the Mooninites Flipping the Bird. One of the signs was mistaken for an IED, which resulted in the Boston Bomb Scare. This incident (unrelated to an actual bombing during the Boston Marathon a few years later) led to Jim Samples stepping down as the head of Cartoon Network and being replaced with Stuart Snyder. - Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker is remembered for two controversial scenes: the Bonk vs. the Joker scene \|\|in which the latter kills the former with the "Bang!" Flag Gun\|\|, and the entire flashback scene, with the very noteworthy part near the end \|\|in which Robin does the same thing to the Joker\|\|. Even before the film was released to video and DVD in 2000, movie companies were coming under heavy criticism for violence in films during the fallout of the Columbine shootings that had happened over a year ago, and WB felt pressured and afraid that Moral Guardians and Media Watchdogs would object that the movie would be a repeat of Columbine. As a result, the original release date (Halloween 2000) was postponed, and the film heavily edited and toned down for release on December 12. But even then, the Bowdlerised version (especially with \|\|the Joker's death scene changed to death by electrocution\|\|) didn't help matters, but only caused unrest among many Batman fans that lasted for over a year. That unrest was thankfully quelled when the film developers retained the original version and eventually released it on DVD as "the original, uncut version" under the PG-13 rating on April 23, 2002 (just three days after the third anniversary of the Columbine tragedy) following an online petition to have it released. The same uncut version would be digitally remastered and released on Blu-Ray nine years later. - Batman: The Killing Joke: The original Killing Joke comic has the Joker paralyzing Barbara Gordon as its inciting incident, with little statement of who she actually is in the story itself. The Animated Adaptation attempts to correct this by expanding Barbara's role in the story, but it's done in a way that comes off as more problematic than the comic: namely, it does so by introducing sexual tension between Batgirl and Batman note : as well as implying that Barbara became Batgirl largely because she had a crush on Batman. This culminates in the two having sex, which creeped out a good portion of the audience, especially those who see Batman as more of a paternal mentor to Batgirl in other media. And that's not even getting into the debates on whether the first half of the movie, which set Barbara up as a character, should've even been made in a movie called " The Killing Joke". - In Coco, this happens In-Universe to the Big Bad: \|\|a year after Ernesto de la Cruz is exposed as both a plagiarist and a murderer, his mausoleum is in ruins, his "Remember Me" statue has been vandalized with a sign saying "FORGET YOU", and Word of God confesses that he won't be able to experience being forgotten because he is Hated by All\|\|. - Coonskin, Ralph Bakshi's satirical Blaxploitation re-imagining of the Uncle Remus tales. Al Sharpton famously criticized the film without even seeing it, saying, "I don't got to see shit; I can smell shit!" This gave the film some very bad publicity. Since then, professional critics and black audiences have praised it for being the complete opposite of being racist. Even Spike Lee is a fan. - The 2019 Spanish animated feature Elcano & Magellan: The First Voyage Around the World, based on the voyage of the Iberian explorers of the same name (of which one of the most famous episodes was the Battle of Mactan), prompted major backlash in the Philippines, largely due to the poster showing Lapulapu (a native chief who participated in the battle and is widely revered as an anticolonialist hero in the Philippines) in a decidedly villainous light. The backlash was to the point that many Filipinos petitioned to ban the movie in the country. The studio in charge seemed to have gotten the hint, as they released a redesigned version of the poster where Lapulapu is replaced with a fictional Portuguese spy named Yago. As it turns out, the original poster was rather inaccurate, as the main antagonist of the movie is Álvaro da Costa, a Portuguese official, and Lapulapu is little more than a glorified background character. - Thanks to multiple online reviewers covering the topic, the film Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return is best known for the fact that the film's producers scammed hundreds of people into investing their life savings into the film while downplaying the risks, which ultimately led to said investors filing a lawsuit against the producers in 2019. It really doesn't help that one of the film's antagonists is also a scam artist. - Olaf's Frozen Adventure became known soon after its release less because of anything related to the film itself and more because of the circumstances behind said release: It was originally meant for a television special before being put as the opener for the Pixar film Coco, and the fact that its length was meant for television and not as an opener for a Pixar film upset many of the moviegoers who went just to see Coco. It went to the point that most Mexican movie theaters outright removed the short from their showings of Coco (as Coco prominently features Mexican culture as its backdrop) before Disney officially pulled it from all future screenings of Coco beginning on December 8, 2017. While Disney has not given an official reason why Toy Story 4 was the first Pixar film since Toy Story to not have a short subject attached to its theatrical release, the scuttlebutt is that Olaf's Frozen Adventure had a lot to do with it. - The South Korean Fractured Fairy Tale film Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs probably would have flown completely under the radar had it not been for controversy over the marketing, which showed the two forms its main character would apparently take in the film (one a chubby young woman, one a more "traditional" princess look) and implied that the chubby form was ugly, drawing accusations of body shaming. The few who have seen the movie were quick to point out that this was a case of heavily Misaimed Marketing note : as well as Values Dissonance, as South Korea has some rather skewered beauty expectations. - Sita Sings the Blues and Seder-Masochism are today mostly overshadowed by the controversies of creator Nina Paley who became infamous for her hostility towards the transgender community and followers of the Jewish and Christian religions. - Skydance Animation serves as one of the newly added divisions of film studio Skydance Media. Formed in 2017 through a multi-year partnership with Ilion Animation Studios, the new division gained recognition as a potential contender for producing future high quality animated films. However, they came under immediate fire in January 2019, when it was announced that Pixar founder and former Disney executive John Lasseter was made head of the division. As Lasseter was struck with multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and sexist behavior less than two years prior, Skydance was met with heavy criticism for being willing to work with him, let alone having him be head of one of their divisions. As a result, both the division and Skydance Media as a whole lost a lot of support from most of the public. This also cost them Emma Thompson, who'd been set to star in one of the films placed under Lasseter's supervision and then quit over his hiring even before she'd been announced to be in the film, leading to even more attention being placed on the issue. And then she published an open letter condemning them for forcing all their employees into a choice between working with a person they may find morally reprehensible or losing their jobs. - The Thief and the Cobbler is mostly well known for its decades-long stint in Development Hell, director Richard Williams being removed from his own pet project by the completion bond company brought on to complete it, being finished in a vastly different form in Australia and South Africa under the title The Princess and the Cobbler, and receiving an edited and partially re-dubbed North American release by Miramax Films under the title Arabian Knight. - This is made light of in-universe in a classic joke about a drunken old Scotsman who vents to a younger patron at the same bar about how he'd accumulated a laundry list of accomplishments over his long life, but nobody remembers them because he once had sex with a goat. - Ex-Bally/Williams pinball designer John Popadiuk is overshadowed by the Development Hell of games produced by his company, Zidware note : ( Magic Girl, Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland, and Alice in Wonderland). With millions of dollars in pre-order money collected and little results since 2011, he has been accused of defrauding customers. - A shadow hangs over pinball designer John Trudeau's games, including Ghostbusters, after he was charged with alleged possession of child pornography in 2017 and then the sexual abuse of a minor the next year. Stern Pinball announced his firing, removed all mention of his name, and has refused to identify what projects he was working on as lead designer. Comments from the artist Zombie Yeti subsequently revealed that he was the original designer of Deadpool prior to his arrest, and his work was thrown out entirely (with the final game being designed by George Gomez). - Kevin Kulek, the founder of boutique manufacturer Skit-B Pinball, is more known for allegations of defrauding customers with a Predator game that was never licensed by 20th Century Fox (who shut down the project). - Shock Jock Don Imus had fifty years of experience in the radio business. However, most people know him for a 2007 incident where he referred to the Rutgers University women's basketball team (which included nine black players) as "nappy-headed hos". His apology and CBS Radio's decision to suspend him (and subsequently cancel his show, Imus in the Morning, which moved to Citadel Media a few months later) ignited further controversy, with some saying he earned forgiveness with his apology, and others saying a strong stand needed to be taken. - Shock Jock Bubba the Love Sponge Clem has held an active career in radio since 1986. However, his professional life has since taken a back seat to the revelation that he was the one who filmed the Hulk Hogan sex tape that led to Hogan's 2015 suspension from the WWE for racist language in the tape and Hogan suing Gawker Media, who publicized the tape, into bankruptcy for invasion of privacy the following year. Clem later apologized to Hogan after the suit, but remains best known among the general public for his involvement in the scandal. - Big Finish Doctor Who cast actor James Dreyfus as an early incarnation of The Master, making his debut in The Destination Wars. However, between this and his second story, The Home Guard, it came to light that Dreyfus had made some transphobic comments, and Big Finish would put out a statement of equality and diversity. Big Finish played down Dreyfus's involvement in subsequent stories, and after releasing the final audio record that featured Dreyfus's Master, The Psychic Circus, the company has not cast him in any future Master stories. - KEGL in Dallas, Texas is mostly known for a prank by their evening drive shock jocks Kramer and Twitch wherein they claimed that Britney Spears was killed in a car accident. The hoax led to hundreds of calls to local law enforcement agencies and a massive internet firestorm, which ended in Kramer and Twitch being shown the door by KEGL owners Clear Channel. - Prolific Shock Jock Steve Dahl tends to be known less for his long, widespread career and more for his status as a major figure in the Disco Sucks movement, organizing the infamous Disco Demolition Night that galvanized an American backlash against disco music that, in the late 2010s, was found to have been punctuated by undercurrents of bigotry against the genre's popularity with black and gay communities. Dahl, for his part, simply held a grudge against his old radio station WDAI after it fired him to shift focus exclusively on disco, but he never expressed regret over his involvement with the movement, even after the more bigoted aspects of it came to light, allowing it to eventually go from his claim to fame to one of the most debated aspects of his career, ultimately eclipsing everything else he had done outside of his core following. - Bayern 3 is a public radio station owned and operated by the Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), the public broadcaster in the German state of Bavaria. Outside of Germany (Bavaria in particular), it is infamous for Matthias Matuschik, a host, making hateful "jokes" about how BTS is similar to a virus, suggesting that BTS should go on a 20-year "vacation" to North Korea, and calling them "fuckwits" for covering "Fix You" by Coldplay. All this while being on-air and during a time when racism against Asians had become a hot topic due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. - The hosts of the Australian radio programme Hot30 Countdown, Mel Greig and Mike Christian, will definitely be remembered more for causing the 2012 suicide of Jacintha Saldanha, a nurse they prank-called by impersonating Elizabeth II and Charles III to find out that Princess Kate was pregnant, than anything else. Saldanha even blamed them in a suicide note she left behind. While the hosts never faced criminal charges for her death, they were nevertheless soon fired and the programme was cancelled. - Chess: - Former World Champion Bobby Fischer became known in later years for disavowing his Jewish heritage and becoming an anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theorist (notably blaming 9/11 on the Jewish people), which put a damper on his legacy. - A lot of people mostly remember Armenian grandmaster Tigran L. Petrosian note : Not to be confused with former World Champion Tigran Petrosian for his reaction to being accused of cheating in the 2020 PRO Chess League: he posted an angry, poorly-spelled rant including memorable phrases like "You are a biggest looser I ever seen in my life! You was doing PIPI in your pampers when I was beating players much more stronger then you!". It didn't help that Chess.com eventually found him guilty. - While Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura is a popular streamer, it's hard to talk about him without getting into the allegations of poor sportsmanship and how the community reacted to it. - Sergey Karjakin's support of Putin had always been a turn-off to potential fans, but it really started overshadowing his chess achievements after Russia invaded Ukraine. While many Russian top players condemned the move or at least remained silent, Karjakin eagerly supported it (going as far as calling Ukraine "stupid"), and repeatedly doubled down after being criticized for it. This earned him several bans, most notably a six-month ban from FIDE events. Now he tends to be more remembered for supporting Putin than for his chess. While some people feel that his ban set a problematic precedent, few people will defend his actual views. - Vampire: The Masquerade was scheduled for a much-hyped relaunch into the world of Tabletop Role-Playing Games during their Renaissance during the late New Tens. Things were looking up for the owners at White Wolf, with a launch that could rival Dungeons and Dragons in popularity. Then people discovered some unfortunate ties to alt-right ideology in the test material and Quickstart guide. White Wolf was slow to address the storm of anger brewing on the internet, and the article's writer claimed to have been contacted by White Wolf's attorneys with a threat of lawsuits if the article wasn't taken down. This went as well as could be expected. Soon the TTRPG community associated Fifth Edition with alt-right ideology, and White Wolf rushed out an apology, claimed the whole thing was a coincidence, and included a denunciation of the alt-right in the main rulebook. If White Wolf mortally wounded their brand with the Vampire Quickstart guide, they would kill it when they dropped the Camarilla Sourcebook. The book treated the still-ongoing terror campaign against homosexuals in Chechnya as a plot point for vampire shenanigans. The Chechen Government threatened to sue White Wolf, claiming the concentration camps where journalists have documented the torture and murders are still taking place are actually completely normal prisons and there couldn't be a gay pogrom because "there are no gay people in Chechnya!" This was the final straw for White Wolf and ultimately resulted in it being folded into their parent company, Paradox Interactive. - In Warhammer 40,000 the Squats (Dwarves IN SPACE) were dropped early on in the game due to a variety of factors. note : A combination of the models not selling as well as they had hoped along with the general shift in tone made the Squats a creative dead end. It didn't help that a lot of their rules overlapped with other armies at the time, so they were seen as dead weight when third edition rolled around. However, the way GW handled their discontinuation has been infamous in the fandom; after much heckling from people who still liked them and hated the "squatting" of the squats, GW started banning anyone who made mention of the Squats on their personal forums and absolute refusal to even discuss the matter at public events. While the rest of the line was spared from this, "squat" ended up evolving into a term meaning "to be discontinued and erased from canon" within the fandom. It's only during the Kevin Rountree era that GW finally started acknowledging the Squats, likely wanting to turn this around and finally put an end to all the memes surrounding it. - Empire of the Petal Throne was retroactively tainted by the discovery in 2022 that creator M. A. R. Barker was the author of Serpent's Walk, a neo-Nazi novel written under a pseudonym and published in 1991. Barker was also found to have been on the editorial advisory committee of a Holocaust denial publication by the name of the Journal for Historical Review, which was put out by the Institute for Historical Review, a group that claims to seek "truth and accuracy in history", but whose real aim is to promote Holocaust denial and defend Nazism. - Among William Shakespeare's works, the most polarizing in modern times are The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, which are well known for their notoriously unflattering depictions of women and Jews, respectively. Modern productions of both typically add some sort of twist to reduce the uncomfortableness, up to and including staging the plays, originally intended to be comedies, as tragedies with the female and Jewish characters as Doomed Moral Victors. Even within Shakespeare's own lifetime, there was a Take That! play called The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed where Katherine's abuser Petruchio gets a taste of his own medicine from his next wife Maria. Titus Andronicus is also well-known for being an extremely dark and violent Evil Versus Evil revenge tragedy very much unlike any of the Bard's other works, including cannibalism and the only rape scene he ever wrote. - The mid-Victorian play Our American Cousin would forever be remembered for the Lincoln assassination instead of the witty characters like Lord Dundreary. The fatal shot was actually timed to what was famously the play's funniest moment, in the hope that the roar of laughter would cover the noise of the gunshot. In addition, John Wilkes Booth was a well known and critically acclaimed stage actor at the time. Nowadays, he's only remembered, obviously not without reason, as one of the most notorious criminals in American history. On top of all that Ford Theater is now known only as the place where Lincoln was shot, to the point that one may get the impression it was built solely so Honest Abe could be shot in it. - While The Rite of Spring is cherished for its avant-garde music and choreography, its premiere night in 1913 sparked a near-riot inside the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris when the audience turned against each other on whether it was groundbreaking or sheer crap, with the latter throwing stuff at the orchestra and the dancers. It didn't help that inside the curtain, the composer and lead choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky had cooperation issues during the production. You might say that the premiere night had been a near-literal Broken Base. - Nord-Ost, a Russian musical, is better remembered as the target of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis than as a work in itself. - Theater director Julie Taymor won the Best Musical Tony for her adaptation of The Lion King, has adapted Shakespeare and Greek tragedies, made a foray into film with the Cult Classic Beatles tribute Across the Universe (2007), and throughout all her work has received acclaim for her use of elaborate costumes and puppets. What's she best known for these days? Her major mishandling of her Spider-Man adaptation Turn Off the Dark, which was plagued by, in addition to bad writing and prima donna antics by Taymor herself, numerous accidents involving the aforementioned elaborate props and costumes, some of which even resulted in serious injuries. In the end, she was unceremoniously given the boot from her own show and has done little of note since. - Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies, the twenty-years-later follow-up to his smash hit The Phantom of the Opera, was never able to rise above the stigma of being a sequel that nobody but Lloyd Webber himself really wanted. It was based on a poorly regarded Fan Sequel novel called The Phantom of Manhattan and contained cliches that have appeared in fan works of dubious quality for decades, including Christine giving birth to the Phantom's illegitimate child after a one-night stand and deciding he was her true love after all, and her kindly love interest Raoul having become a neglectful drunkard who's blown his fortune at the gambling table. All of this resulted in considerable fan opposition before it even came out (including a Twitter campaign called #LoveShouldDie) and a general sense that the show was Lloyd Webber's terrible Draco in Leather Pants fanfic that he forced onto the stage with his piles of money, and despite having the Phantom name and Lloyd Webber's own behind it, the initial run received mediocre reviews and closed at a loss — though the show later picked up a cult following in Australia, where a more polished production was staged and filmed. - Aaron Sorkin's stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird is best known for leading to a lawsuit months before its debut from Harper Lee's estate, who accused it of straying too far from the source material against Lee's instructions from her will. This includes some already controversial elements from Go Set a Watchman, like Atticus having some racist leanings. - While Carousel has several individual songs that have become classics, such as "If I Loved You" and "You'll Never Walk Alone", if you haven't seen it yourself, most likely the only thing you know about the actual plot is its extreme level of Values Dissonance: the main character is a sympathetically-portrayed wife-beater, and the play includes a scene where his wife defends his actions. - Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues is still a very popular play, but the vignette "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could" is best known for its highly controversial depiction of an underaged girl's sexual encounter with an adult woman. The segment has become rather infamous for driving many theatre groups to rework it to avoid alienating the audience; some productions change the narrator's age from 13 to 16, others have omitted the controversial line "If it was rape, it was a good rape", and still others have elected to cut the entire segment. - The only real impact left by the play All in a Row is the outrage it caused for having an autistic character portrayed by a creepy puppet contrasting a cast full of humans. - Annie Get Your Gun is another one now known almost entirely for its Values Dissonance. It was created at the end of World War II specifically to encourage women who'd joined the workforce while their husbands were fighting the Axis to go back and Stay in the Kitchen, and thus reworks the true story of sharpshooter Annie Oakley to have her future husband Frank Butler refuse to be with a woman who's a better shot than him, so she ends up throwing a contest between them and retiring, when in real life it was actually Butler who gave up his sharpshooting career to support hers. It also features some horrific portrayals of Native Americans, with the reveal that they're not just mindless savages intended to be played for surprise laughs, and the song "I'm an Indian, Too" which brutally mocks their naming style. A 1999 revival heavily revised it to fit contemporary attitudes, cutting the insulting Native material and having Butler catch on to what Annie's doing and throw his own shots to end the contest with a tie. - The Death of Klinghoffer, an opera about the murder of Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists who hijacked the Italian passenger liner MS Achille Lauro, is better known for accusations of being anti-Semitic and/or too sympathetic to the hijackers than for its actual content. - Much of the talk about Ivo Van Hove's 2019 revival of West Side Story revolved around the casting of a sex offender, Amar Ramasar as Bernardo, not even a year after being (temporarily) fired from City Ballet for his offenses. The changes to the story and staging were also controversial, but most reviews also mention Bernardo's casting (especially regarding a graphic Rape as Drama scene) since it attracted numerous protests during the show's short run. The revival did not reopen after the COVID-19 pandemic, likely due in part to all the bad press. Ramasar himself announced retirement in 2021 due to how the controversy overshadowed his career. - It's impossible to talk about the infamous New Jersey theme park Action Park without mentioning its numerous safety hazards, which resulted in hundreds of injuries and six deaths. Problems included poorly designed and maintained rides, untrained teenage employees, terrible communication with its (often non-English speaking) visitors, lax safety rules, and high levels of drunkenness among both staff and riders. Its abysmal safety record led to the park gaining the nicknames "Traction Park", "Accident Park", and "Class Action Park". Case in point: Action Park's most notorious ride was Cannonball Loop◊, a water slide with a complete vertical loop built into it. Crash test dummies sent down the slide supposedly came out the other end decapitated and dismembered. Nevertheless, the slide remained operational for a whole month. - It's become very difficult to discuss anything pertaining to SeaWorld due to the massive controversy surrounding the orcas and the Blackfish documentary that only worsened said controversy. Things have gotten slightly better following SeaWorld announcing the termination of the orca breeding programs, but some grievances still remain. - Marineland Canada is a marine mammal park similar to SeaWorld owned by the Holer family in Niagara Falls, Ontario, known for its "Everyone Loves Marineland" advertising jingles played throughout Southern Ontario and Western New York, even having a commercial with that jingle dating from 1998 still airing to this day. However, thanks to a Toronto Star exposé published in 2012, it's now infamous for allegations of severe animal cruelty against several of their captive species. Even before the exposé, animal rights activists had protested against the park's treatment of its animals, but this controversy caused attendance to the park to drop and the Holer family to file a lawsuit against the Toronto Star for defamation. Since the death of founder John Holer in 2018, the park has shifted their focus from the animal exhibits to the rides. The Walrus and the Whistleblower, a CBC documentary released in 2020, elaborates upon this controversy, telling the story of how former Marineland trainer Phil Demers chronicled all the animal abuse that happened in the park. - The Schlitterbahn water park chain experienced controversy in August 2016 after the death by decapitation of a ten-year-old boy (the son of a local politician) on the tallest waterslide in the world (called "Verrückt") at its Kansas City location, thus leading to the permanent shutdown of the slide. But it got worse after an indictment of park higher-ups was released in 2018. It implied that the slide's designer had no official engineering degree, the ride was known to be dangerous well before the fatality happened, and it was intentionally kept that way so the park could chase money from TV networks regarding their record-breaking attraction. Schlitterbahn Kansas City closed in 2018. - Alton Towers: - The Smiler holds the world record for the most inversions in a rollercoaster, a staggering 14, but is more remembered for a devastating crash that happened in 2015 which led to multiple injuries and two leg amputations as a result. Even when the ride reopened the following year, with far more safety checks in place to make sure another crash wouldn't occur, many kept on referencing the crash when discussing the rollercoaster. - Th13teen opened with the world's first vertical freefall drop, on which the track and train freefall approximately five metres in darkness. What is it best known for? A case of false advertising on Alton Towers' part, with the coaster's pre-opening hype claiming it would be the scariest rollercoaster of all time, along with a range of promotional stunts that included suggesting that guests would need to sign a waiver to ride it or that it was a new type of ride known as a "psychoaster", only for it to turn out to be a family coaster with a single neat surprise element. Even after the ride's reception warmed with time, many kept on bringing up the false advertising within its marketing campaign whenever the coaster is discussed. - Nemesis: Sub-Terra is a dark ride that tied in with the lore of Nemesis, Alton Towers' most famous rollercoaster. The original version closed just three years after opening due to budget cuts resulting from the Smiler crash. Nemesis: Sub-Terra is mostly remembered for fans' disappointment that it wasn't another rollercoaster in the Nemesis line (Thorpe Park also has one, Nemesis Inferno), and controversy over whether a TV advert for the ride was racist. The advert in question showed an alien egg hatching and then cut to an extreme close-up of a Black man's face; seen by some as implying he was the monster within the egg. Alton Towers had to clarify that the man was scared of the alien. Since its eventual re-opening in May 2023 — to notably more positive reception upon its second debut — though, only time will tell if it can shake off the reputation. - The now-defunct rollercoaster Corkscrew is still beloved among fans of the park, but will always be associated with its infamously uncomfortable ride experience. Riders would often hit their heads on the safety bar at a certain point, and would have their heads jerked around all through the ride. It wasn't unusual for people to complain of headaches and/or neck pain for an hour or so afterwards. Concerns over safety were part of the reason why Corkscrew was removed in 2010. - Disney Theme Parks: - For a very long time, Disneyland Paris (or "Euro Disney" as it was originally known) was, unfortunately, most known in and outside of the Disney fandom for having an absolutely disastrous opening year to the point of directly affecting almost all of Disney's other theme park plans for the next two decades, as well as being absolutely despised by the French people at first for a number of reasons, mainly strongly opposing its poor (by French standards) working conditions and viewing it as an example of American cultural imperialism. The resort has been steadily recovering ever since the addition of Space Mountain: De La Terre À La Lune in 1995, but had only just recently been able to turn a consistent profit after the Walt Disney Company made some adjustments to its management after buying back all of their shares in it. Regardless of how well the resort does in the future, it's doubtful that mainstream pop culture will be willing to let Disney forget about those troubled first years any time soon, especially after being the subject of many jokes at Disney's expense throughout The '90s. - A big part of why Stitch's Great Escape! got so much backlash was because it controversially replaced the much-beloved Cult Classic ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter. Even now, after the ride's permanent closure and dismantling, discussions of the ride are often focused on that fact. - It is impossible to discuss the Disneyland attraction America Sings without bringing up the death of 18-year-old hostess Deborah Gail Stone. Nine days after it opened in 1974, Stone was caught between a rotating wall and stationary wall and was crushed. The attraction was temporarily closed and modified to prevent further accidents. America Sings would continue to operate without further major incidents until it was permanently closed in 1988, but a shroud of morbidity still hangs over it to this day. - Habit Heroes at Epcot has been mainly overshadowed by its Unfortunate Implications and the negative reception it endured, which led to the attraction's closure and Disney to not develop any further Epcot attractions not tied to existing IPs in the process. - The short-lived "Journey Into Your Imagination" Retool of "Journey Into Imagination" is far more well-known for the negative reception it received from fans of the original incarnation and its myriad of widely-disliked changes. The ride was later reworked further into the better-received "Journey Into Imagination With Figment," but some controversial changes (such as the shorter ride length and overall lower-quality theming) still remain. - Now-defunct Christian theme park Heritage USA, which was built and owned by televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, is now known largely for two things: that time Jerry Falwell went down one of its water slides while wearing a suit, and the fact that some of the money used to build it was collected from members of the Bakkers' audience under the pretense of funding overseas missions. - The Mindbender, a rollercoaster at the West Edmonton Mall's Galaxyland Amusement Park, holds the record for the tallest, fastest, and longest indoor rollercoaster in the world. Despite that, most people know about it because of an accident in June 1986 where a derailed car crashed into a concrete pillar, killing three of its four passengers and seriously injuring the fourth. - RollOver, an attraction at Norwegian amusement park Tusenfryd, is mostly remembered for being involved in the park's worst accident after a wheelchair user fell out of it and was injured. While a subsequent investigation revealed that there was nothing wrong with the attraction, guests still fled from it, contributing to its closure two years later. - My Friend Cayla, and by extension all Internet of Things toys, had their reputation destroyed when security experts noticed a glaring flaw with the toys — that is, they had nothing to prevent the toys from being hacked. With no safeguards in place, a malicious party could commandeer a Cayla (itself a Bluetooth speaker in the form of a doll) and make her say nasty things or listen in on children's conversations. The manufacturers were quick to state that all hacking incidents took place in proof-of-concept demonstrations, and it requires people with the know-how to do so (not that a determined creep couldn't do it), but the reputation of the toys was completely tarnished. Additionally, the audio advertising and data collection by the dolls caused another controversy by parent groups who were uncomfortable with their children being monitored 24/7. Now, whenever the doll is brought up, it's always in relation to one or both of these controversies. - Sky Dancers were popular dolls at the time, but now they're more well-known for causing injuries when used improperly, which resulted in the toys being recalled 5 years after their release. When Play Along re-released the toys four years later, safety instructions were printed on the box to prevent any similar incidents from occurring. - The Entertech line of water guns boasted "The look! The feel! The sound, so real!" on their commercials, in reference to its close resemblance to actual firearms, on top of them being far more powerful than the cheap hand-powered squirt guns played by children. While not the first toy guns to closely replicate their real-life counterparts, this selling point led to its downfall, thanks to highly publicized incidents of children getting shot and killed by police officers who mistook the Entertech toys for actual guns, as well as real criminals utilizing Entertech guns in bank robberies. This led legislators to impose stricter rules on the manufacture and sale of toy weapons, specifically the Federal Toy Gun Law requiring them to be visually distinct from real guns by giving them a blaze orange color. This controversy spilled over to the NES Zapper, which while made to more closely resemble a Star Wars-esque futuristic blaster gun than an actual pistol to begin with when it was first released to coincide with the NES's North American debut in 1985, was re-released in 1989 with an orange color scheme to comply with federal gun safety laws. - If anyone brings up lawn darts, chances are it's to bring up the many people who were injured or even killed by them, which resulted them being banned in the United States and Canada. - Teen Talk Barbie was a doll that had a whopping 270 phrases recorded, with each doll including four selected at random. Of all these phrases, the only one most people know is "Math class is tough!", due to accusations of discouraging girls from pursuing education in mathematics. In response to the controversy, Mattel removed the line from the pool, and offered to exchange any doll that had it. - Regarding the flash series Madness Combat created by Matt 'Krinkels' Jolly: - It's hard to discuss Cethic, creator and collaborator of both multiple fan projects and her involvement as an artist in the main series, without talking about her being accused of, and later confessing to, being a chronic emotional and sexual abuser and zoophile. The majority of discussion about her revolves around her actions, and it's hard to find any resource talking about her without also mentioning her allegations, although this may have something to do with her being kicked from the main series (along with Fleetwire) and all fan projects, most notably Green Pepper Studios, and seemingly retiring from Madness-related works indefinitely. - Fleetwire (real name Corey McKenna), is best known both for the song 'Eidolon Step' from DedmosRebuilt.fla, and for being exposed as a groomer and a zoophile by the aforementioned Cethic, and subsequently being kicked from his musician role on the series and deleting all social media. - If you don't know Danish fan animator Kelzad from either his REALM series or contributing the head sprites of Scrapeface for the 'An Experiment' episode of the main series, you either know him from being accused by fellow fan animator Kryy of concept theft from the non-canon Incidents side-series, or his immature Discord outburst over Green Pepper Studios, and by extension, himself, being denied an administrative role on the MADNESS: Project Nexus 2 Discord server over the moderators of the game's Steam community page, with the community being quick to label him as an outright manchild and his creator page on the MC Tributes Wiki having more information on his controversies than his past as an animator. - It's also hard to have a discussion on the wider Madness Combat fandom without bringing up its reputation as being one of the more extreme examples of The Law of Fan Jackassery on the internet, with a plethora of animators in the community engaging in egotistical behavior, petty rivalries between other creators, stealing of concepts, and prevalent gatekeeper mentality and hostility to 'outsiders' and a large Vocal Minority of purists who frown upon newer, more unconventional animators who do things differently from the established style. Not helping matters is that Krinkels himself admits he avoids addressing the drama out of concern it'll only cause more problems, and prefers to instead focus on putting out content. - Super Mario 64 machinimist Starman3 was formerly revered for his influence on the early SM64 machinima community, most famously for founding The YouTube Rangers. However, his reputation started derailing in 2012 when accusations of pedophilia, control freak tendencies and victim blaming started coming forth from both random online users and his fellow SM64 machinimists which led to, among other things, his character being removed from fellow machinimist SMG4's Mario series. While he did eventually fess up and express a desire to change, he ultimately continued this behavior through the decade, with accusations flaring back up every year starting in 2017, carrying evidence from over 100 of his victims. This culminated in July 2020 when, at the height of the Smash community allegations, veteran SM64 machinimist MATTHEWGU4 posted a video further exposing his behavior. Most talk about him now centers on his bad behavior and absolute refusal to genuinely take responsibility and change, overshadowing any former influence and merit he and his channel had on the early SM64 machinima community. - Lenstar Productions (real name Jacob Lenard) was an indie animator notable as the creator of various webtoons such as Mugman, Pike's Lagoon, and Loose Ends, all of which were famous for their Deranged Animation and surrealism. While he had already gained bit of a negative reputation for his prioritizing of style over substance (which some people found hypocritical given his deliberately amateur-ish art direction), Lenard's reputation took a nosedive in late 2020/early 2021 when many of his former peers came fourth detailing years of abusive treatment while working under him. Most notably repeated instances of homophobia and transphobia that led to the suicide attempt of one of Mugman's former voice actors. With the exception of his YouTube (where he disabled the comments for all his videos), Instagram and Discord accounts, Lenard deleted all his social media profiles shortly after the controversy struck. - Animator Emily Youcis was always a polarizing figure, but was well known in some parts of the Internet (particularly the indie animation and horror scenes) for her Black Comedy and for creating Alfred's Playhouse. Nowadays she is best known for becoming an open neo-Nazi, which resulted in her losing her job and support from Troma. - My Pingu TV, an Indian YouTube Kids' Channel featuring animated fairy tales, is mostly known for their video "Dina and the Prince", about an angel named Dina who is forbidden from speaking with the human prince she's fallen in love with, does so anyway, and is punished by being turned ugly. While this sounds fine on the surface, the channel decided to depict her "ugly" form with dark skin and curly hair, while her "beautiful" form had pale skin and straight hair. This led to claims that the video was teaching children to view black people as inherently unattractive, and a massive backlash ensued. While My Pingu TV took down the video and issued an apology, the channel remains better known for this video than any other they've uploaded. - While CartoonMania was fairly divisive due to its stiff animation and hit-and-miss writing, the series still garnered a cult following due to its interesting premise of a cartoonist living with his own creations, in addition to the show's usage of slapstick humor and homages to popular cartoons such as Animaniacs and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. The series' fanbase dissipated in the summer of 2020 when screencaps and other evidence of creator Matthew Littlemore drawing suggestive artwork of some of the series' underage characters (as well as acting perverted in general on Discord, even after others made it clear that they were uncomfortable) were revealed, on top of people coming forward with stories of emotional abuse at his hands. This led to many involved in the then-upcoming reboot to publicly cut ties with him, and Matthew himself deleted several of his social media accounts and labeled his YouTube channel as "inactive" (though Matthew would eventually return in February 2022), seemingly putting the show on permanent hiatus. - The web animation series The Red Ape Family is best known for being a promotional tool for the "Bored Ape Yacht Club" line of NFTs, making it nearly impossible to discuss the show without getting into the highly controversial politics of the NFT market. It doesn't help that the show openly advertises its connection to NFTs, with its story containing blatant pro-NFT messages—making the connection nearly impossible to ignore, even if you watch the show without knowing its background. - Whenever people discuss the Webtoon comic Boyfriends., chances are it'll almost always focus on the accusations of the comic playing into stereotypes of homosexual men (despite author Refrainbow being a gay man himself) and the allegations of racism and anti-semitism against Refrainbow when certain comments he made in the past were brought to light. - Ctrl+Alt+Del: - The webcomic is more well known for the "Loss" (or "CADbortion") arc which is legendary for its Memetic Mutation and Mood Whiplash and writer Tim Buckley's online behavior than anything else. What really makes this moment awful is that Buckley used a similar traumatic experience that an ex-girlfriend suffered as the basis for "Loss", all while showing her no compassion and calling her "toxic". Accusations of being a Penny Arcade knockoff haven't helped and likely played a part in the comic's Retool. - It is also known for an incident in which Buckley had a fan animation taken down, made a response that outright insulted the creator, and threatened to sue them, despite previously saying he was okay with fan works. This move was widely criticized, especially after the ill-regarded Animated Adaptation. Not helping matters was Buckley's frequent use of copyrighted characters in the comic. - The Sonic webcomic Other M, once extremely popular, now is mostly remembered for being written by future Archie Sonic writer Ian Flynn, and for having one of the villains be Knuckles, who is portrayed as an Absolute Xenophobe. This move received much scorn and has overshadowed every other plot element, including the fact that it takes place in an Alternate Universe, and that Knuckles being this kind of villain was intended as a sign of things being very wrong with said universe. The basic premise was revisited in Archie Sonic's Dark Mobius arc, where it was better received. For what it's worth, even Ian Flynn himself considers the webcomic an Old Shame. - Sinfest was initially popular for its raunchy, dark comedy and its lighthearted parodies of religious tropes. When the Sisterhood/Patriarchy arc began in 2011, the comic suddenly became an Author Tract reflecting the author's trans-exclusionary radical feminist values, before slowly descending into support for alt-right movements. The comic is now more known for its author's radicalization than for the characters and storylines it had before. - Dave Cheung is a manga artist who was originally famous as the author of Chugworth Academy, a fanservice comic centered around four teenagers attending the eponymous school. However, whenever his name gets brought up nowadays, it tends to be in the context of one or more of the following topics: a very clumsy attempt to tell people to stop demanding explicit material in Chugworth, posting an incredibly demeaning comic about video game developer Jade Raymond on his DeviantART page (which got taken down by the site mods due to its explicit content, prompting heavy backlash from Cheung himself), or the entirety of US Angel Corps, a murder-porn comic infamous for its deeply misogynistic overtones, dangerously literal gorn, and fetishization of rape, necrophilia, and abuse; while it was done primarily on commission, it was still Cheung's idea to begin with. - Leasebound is a webcomic focusing on two lesbian women who, due to a lease mix-up, accidentally become roommates and eventually lovers. Initially praised for its open LGBT representation and relatability, the comic has since been overshadowed by allegations of transphobia against author RustyHearts following the release of its fourth chapter in February of 2019. Said chapter featured three characters being denied entry into a lesbian bar because they weren't considered "real women". RustyHearts's rather clumsy attempts at addressing these concerns have only added fuel to the fire. - DAR! A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary and the NSFW sex toy / sex education site Oh Joy Sex Toy aren't respected by a lot of people due to controversial statements from artist Erika Moen. The most cited examples from the former are the "L.U.G." comic, where Erika describes herself as a "lesbian with an exception" note : she would later describe herself as simply "queer" and depicts her boyfriend casually using the word "dyke" and him and Erika expressing sexual desires towards a visibly displeased woman, and a comic where Erika openly admits to fetishizing trans men. While Erika has presumably changed her mind since DAR as Oh Joy tries very hard to be inclusive, the latter's features on certain controversial fetishes have made it a subject of disgust or mockery to many, especially the infamous comic on the cuckolding fetish. - Once a hallmark of late 2000s/early 2010s Black Comedy webcomics, pictures for sad children is now better-known for (what appeared on the surface to be) the massive Creator Breakdown of its author, Simone Veil, who in 2014 forfeited on a Kickstarter intended to publish a print run of the series, uploaded a video of her burning copies of the print volumes (with threats to burn more if she continued to receive emails asking about the Kickstarter's rewards—though in reality, these were unsalable copies with printing errors and the like), shutting down the comic's website, and filing DMCA notices against anyone who tries to re-upload strips from the series. This literal Torch the Franchise and Run approach became such a defining element of the webcomic's reputation that its article on Know Your Meme note : which, fair warning, was written before Veil came out as trans and consequently uses her former name features a still from the book burning video as its icon. This InputMag interview with Veil sheds some more light on the situation. - Ask anyone who knows about Draconia Chronicles, and one of the first things they'll likely bring up is how the first chapter of the story revolved around an Earth Dragon named Gaia suffering a brutal Trauma Conga Line before being unceremoniously killed off in a fight between Scyde and Elektra's groups. While Anyone Can Die is in full effect in this series, the sheer senselessness and cynicism of Gaia's death tainted the comic for many, especially after a rumor began circulating that she had been based off the author's ex-girlfriend he had a messy breakup with (though this was never actually proven). - If you've heard of El Goonish Shive outside of TV Tropes, it's probably in connection with the continued allegations of biphobia made towards its creator Dan Shive. - Mallorie Jessica Udischas was originally famous as the author of Manic Pixie Nightmare Girls, which centered around the daily life of a trans woman as she struggled living in Seattle. However, beginning in 2020, she became better remembered for creating comics allegedly supporting shoplifting (which she attempted to defend by stating all of her art supplies she had as a teenager were acquired through stealing) and stealing the possessions of people you dislike - which was a semi-subtle jab at PewDiePie's then-recent home burglary - and the memes both comics inspired. - Post-2019 discussions of Erfworld are more likely to involve the comic's sudden termination and the lingering controversies over the cause of the Creator Breakdown that ensued, rather than the interesting implications of what is effectively an RPG Mechanics 'Verse Isekai. The official reason is 'family tragedies.' - Discussion about Homestuck^2, and by extension its predecessor Homestuck (especially after 2019), will almost always shift towards the controversial decisions made regarding the epilogue, the fact that much of Homestuck^2's content is/was locked behind a Patreon paywall, barely-existent communication between the authors and fans (including the news that Andrew Hussie ceased work on the comic breaking a whole year after he had actually left), and the authors' poor responses to criticism, most infamously sending a legal threat towards Sarah Z after she made a video documenting the history of Homestuck that, by their own admission, they hadn't even watched. - If Raine Dog is remembered for anything, it's the infamous page where the titular character kisses her young owner, and the follow up page where she is effectively mutilated under the guise of "spaying" note : though she isn't anthropomorphic yet, she's portrayed as sentient from the start. When it went viral in 2016 the creator Dana Simpson had to address that the comic wasn't advocating for bestiality, and she considers it and the whole comic an Old Shame of hers. - Grim Tales from Down Below, one of Bleedman's crossover comics, had a flashback early in its run revealing that, as a means of courting Grim, Mandy carried out 9/11. In real life, this was only a few years after the attacks, and so the wounds were still fresh for many of the people who called Bleedman out on using them so insensitively. Bleedman, in turn, responded to the criticism with enough hostility (including flat-out calling one person a "bitch") that he was suspended from deviantART for a time. There's a number of other ill-advised creative decisions, such as the romanticized incest between Grim Jr. and Minimandy, but the "Mandy caused 9/11" incident remains at the forefront even to this day. - I Will Survive, a Zootopia comic, is mostly known for the infamy surrounding it. The comic featured Judy Hopps finding out that she's pregnant with Nick's child but decides she doesn't want the baby. Nick, on the other hand, objects and tries to convince Judy to keep the baby, which leads to a violent argument between the two and eventually their breakup. It quickly became a laughingstock among people for how blatantly out-of-character it portrays the two and being over-the-top with the melodrama. Borba intended to show how even a One True Pairing like WildeHopps can fall apart. However, because he chose an unwanted pregnancy and Judy wanting to terminate it as the reason for their breakup, the comic drew hordes of pro-life and pro-choice commentators who cared little for the characters and focused obsessively on the potential abortion, even though the comic tried to avoid taking a side. As such he is prominently remembered as the guy who wrote the "Zootopia abortion comic" even though he has done a lot of other things besides it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvershadowedByControversy
Overnight Age-Up - TV Tropes The reverse of Fountain of Youth, this is a scenario where Applied Phlebotinum (frequently in the form of a wish and/or a Physical Attribute Swap with someone older) turns one or more children into adults. Hilarity Ensues, and the kids either fumble around awkwardly in their post-pubescent bodies, or learn An Aesop about adult responsibilities and/or not being in too big a hurry to grow up. Can also include a young adult character or one in early middle age becoming elderly. This process may result in an Age-Down Romance when the aged character gets infatuated with someone of their new age or vice-versa. Supertrope to Plot-Relevant Age-Up. Not to be confused with Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome. Sometimes combined with Older Alter Ego or She Is All Grown Up. See also Rapid Aging and Older Alter Ego. ## Examples - A commercial for GoodNites shows a young boy waking up several years older, his pyjamas having been ripped up due to his increase in size. - In Ah! My Goddess, Skuld gets to be an adult for a day due to Phlebotinum Breakdown. Her older sister, Urd, goes the other way. Despite being desperate to return to their original forms, they find ways to make the best of it. - In Case Closed OVA: "The Stranger in 10 Years," Haibara finishes an antidote drug to make Conan/Shinichi 17 again, but he was sick at the time. Once he took the drug, he didn't turn back into a 17-year-old Shinichi, \|\|he's a 17-year-old Conan Edogawa warped 10 years in the future. Thankfully, it ends up being a dream.\|\| - In Castle Town Dandelion, Hikari's Royalty Superpower can temporarily manipulate any living organism's biological age. One of the effects of this power is this. (Of course, the other effect will be Fountain of Youth.) - Guu from the anime Haré+Guu can appear as an adult when she needs to. Since she normally appears to be the same age as ten-year-old Haré, this counts. Sorta. It's quite possible neither age is her true form. - The anime series Himechan No Ribon ( Hime-chan's Ribbon) is largely based on this, as Himeko frequently uses the magic ribbon to appear as an adult. - Instant Teen: Just Add Nuts; after all, there's a reason Tokyopop released the English translation under that name, and that reason is this trope being a major plot element. - A wish of this kind that comes true forms the premise of Living for the Day After Tomorrow — and turns a nearby adult into a kid as a side effect. - Lyrical Nanoha: - As partially mentioned above, the entire premise of Marvelous Melmo is based around age-changing pills: the titular character, a nine-year-old girl, can use some of those to age herself into a 19-year-old girl or an old lady, as well as turn into a baby. - Inverted in Nanaka 6/17, where, thanks to Trauma-Induced Amnesia, 17-year-old Nanaka believes that she's actually six years old and was magically transformed into an adult. - Negima! Magister Negi Magi: In a large Shout-Out to Marvelous Melmo, Negi's Non-Human Sidekick Chamo produces a jar of candies that alter one's age (specifically, the red ones for older, blue ones for younger). Of course, when he uses them, several of his students notice that He is All Grown Up without actually recognizing him. Apparently, the pills are based on a spell Evangeline invented to make up for her body being stuck at ten years old. Once the gang gets more friendly with her, she provides them apparently for free (the knock-offs are expensive). - In One Piece, this is one of the abilities granted by Jewelry Bonney's Devil Fruit. She prefers to make her opponents younger, though. - There is a pill found on Fishman Island that ages whoever takes it by 10 years. Vander Decken, one of the villains, attempted to use it on a child to make her physically old enough to marry, though he ultimately failed to obtain such a pill until ten years later, when the target of his desires naturally reached that age. Related are the Energy Steroids, also found on Fishman Island, that the New Fishman Pirates liberally take to gain Power at a Price, the price being that they age to appear elderly by the time they're defeated and put in jail. - While not a true instance of this trope, it's played out exactly the same. An episode of Psychic Squad has Minamoto becoming hypnotized into seeing the three young girls he watches over as five years older — and much more irresistible — teens. This was to test if he really might be falling for them. - Lambo from Reborn! (2004) does this in spades with his Ten-Year Bazooka, turning him from a five-year-old Bratty Half-Pint into a suave 15-year-old Bishōnen. \|\|In one instance, he does it twice during a battle and turns 25 — and is a veritable powerhouse, to boot.\|\| However, the transformations only last for about five minutes. I-Pin has been hit by the bazooka more than once as well, and in one notable misfire, Gokudera actually became younger after accidentally being hit. \|\|One can only imagine the utter hilarity that occurred during the five minutes the adult Gokudera was where his younger self used to be.\|\| - In Rosario + Vampire the Token Mini-Moe Yukari wishes she had the Most Common Superpower the others in the Unwanted Harem has, so she comes up with this magical spell and is aged into a teenager and becomes a Hot Witch whom all of the boys drool over, complete with a large bust (though her boobs are still not as big as Kurumu's). - In one episode of Sailor Moon SuperS, PallaPalla switches Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi Moon's ages around as a joke. A similar plot is present in the original manga. - Episode 18 of Sgt. Frog revolves around Natsumi being subject to a Transformation Ray that turns her into an adult. She's even more annoyed when she finds it's part of a scheme on Keroro's part to enter her in a beauty pageant/manzai contest and win a rare model kit. - In the manga, it's just a straight-up beauty contest, in which Natsumi experiences a Wardrobe Malfunction as she reverts back to her original age — all in front of horny geeks. - A later episode has the Bipolar Momoka experience this same growth, at the same beach, but there is no contest for her to partake in. Instead, it's some sort of Iron Man competition. - Another manga-only story has Natsumi being hit with the same ray at a ski resort, being hit on by the same creeps from the beach, and another wardrobe malfunction, courtesy of explosives. - In To Love Ru Yami, once, use her Shapeshifter abilities to change her bodies size and measurements to look more mature and adult-like. Although her choice to remain in her child-like form is most likely due to the fact that it is comfortable when in combat. - Nemesis in the sequel Darkness, most of the time, to tease Rito and give him a taste of Marshmallow Hell. - Happy Heroes: In Season 10 episode 28, one of Planet Gray's monsters uses an aging gun to turn Careful S. and Kalo into senior citizens. - The DCU Fifth Week Event Sins of Youth combined Fountain of Youth with this, with a combination of Chaos Magic and an "aging ray" turning all the teenage heroes into adults and all the adult heroes into kids. - Subversion: Darkdevil from Spider-Girl, according to his origin and mind-trip sequence. Subverted in that he's had to live as a twenty-something for a while and seems to prefer it that way. - In Green Lantern, teenage Green Lantern Arisia's power ring responded to her desire to be older and aged her into a twenty-something literally overnight. - In the original Guardians of the Galaxy, Starhawk and Aleta have three children. The children are captured by Starhawk's and Aleta's father, and turned into psychic vampires brainwashed to kill them. In the process of draining their parents, the children age to adulthood. Fortunately, they are stopped and realize what they were doing, but \|\|the shock starts the aging process again, aging them to old age and then dust.\|\| - Shazam!: Captain Marvel, a boy who transforms into an adult superhero. This actually causes a problem when he gets involved with a superheroine his own age, and they have to break up because their teammates, who don't know Marvel's civilian identity, would take it the wrong way. That may have been the origin of Major Might's very brief affair with Amazonia in Love and Capes. - The Battle of Aki: In parts 2 and 6, Kyogoku Maria feeds an aging potion to \|\|Maeda Keiji and Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura's son Masa's ex-Split Personality Sei's (who has a body of his own from her sorcery) one month old surrogate son Nobushige, turning him into a teenager as as means of aiding his surrogate family. He gets better at both times when Kyogoku reverts him back into a baby\|\|. - In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Empath And The Golden Magic Bird", Sassette instantly ages to an adult Smurf when Smurfette accidentally makes a wish that Sassette would be her age to have an appropriate romantic relationship with Empath when the Wishing Bird was in the Smurf Village. - Gaz Dreams of Genie: Gaz ends up magically aged into adulthood when \|\|her third wish results in her becoming a genie\|\|. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: - Grow Up, Apple Bloom has the titular filly acquire an aging potion from Zecora, which turns her into a mare almost as old as her sister Applejack. - Inner Demons: \|\|Queen!Twilight Sparkle magically ages up the Crusaders, and also offers to give them their cutie marks, in exchange for their loyalty. Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo take her up on it, while Apple Bloom refuses\|\|. This gets reversed at the end of the story, with help from the Princesses. - Rainbooms and Royalty: At the climax of Hot Heads, Cold Hearts, and Nerves of Steel, Sombra's attempt to steal the lifeforce of the kidnapped foals to empower himself causes them to physically age up at least ten years each, though their mental state stays the same. This gets reversed after Sombra is defeated. - A Shadow of the Titans: In one chapter, Jade uses a staff based on Mad Mod's technology to drain Cyborg's age, making herself an adult while turning Cyborg back into a child. Uniquely, she's the one who reverses the process, as she's sick of the Power Incontinence that came with the change. - From Kirikou and the Sorceress \|\|Karaba, the Sorceress, kisses Kirikou and he goes from a cute boy to a handsome man in a matter of seconds\|\|. - Jake in the Animorphs book The Familiar. He wakes up as a young adult in a world where the Yeerks control the Earth. By the end of the book, he's back to being a young teen, though. - In Five Children and It by E. Nesbit the older four get annoyed with how they have to chase their baby brother around all the time, so they wish him into a grownup. Unfortunately, he didn't learn all of the lessons associated with growing up, such as not being a total prat, and turns out to be even more annoying this way. - In Flossie Teacakes Fur Coat, the eponymous 10-year-old longs for the fun and independence of her older brother and sister. When she puts on her sister's fur coat and does up the magical third button, she becomes the 18-year-old Floz. - There's a boys' version by the same author, Hunter Davies, entitled Come On Ossie, featuring a boy called Oswald who turns into an 18-year-old when he borrows his grandfather's medal. There are several sequels to both books. - In Freaky Friday, a mother and daughter change places for a day, giving us a Fountain of Youth and an Overnight Age Up in the same story. - In the sequel, set several years later, the father and brother also trade places (sequel to the book, not the film). - In Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, Sophie is cursed by a witch and turned into an old woman. - In the children's book Magic by the Lake by Edward Eager, the protagonists are four siblings (three girls, one boy). Two of the girls wish themselves into teenagers and go on a double date, and their brother and sister have to chase them down and undo the wish before the date goes too far. - In Replica #16, Happy Birthday, Dear Amy, Amy, Number Seven mysteriously ages into her twenties overnight on her thirteenth birthday. \|\|The rapid aging was caused not by Amy's unusual genetics, but by some sort of implant, and she reverts to being a teen when it is destroyed.\|\| - In A Tale of Lost Time by Evgeny Schwarz, four lazy kids wake up as old people one day as four evil wizards have stolen all of their wasted time for themselves. - In The Thief Lord, there is a magical merry-go-round that can act as either a Fountain of Youth for those who ride it, or provide this effect, depending on what animals you ride. At the end of the book, one character chooses to age himself from a young teenager to a young adult — and is stuck that way. - The TV Show Big John Little John was half this trope and half Fountain of Youth as the titular character switched back and forth between childhood and adulthood at least once an episode. - Doctor Who: Jo Grant is aged into old age when caught in the effect of the battling time flow analogues created by the Master and the Doctor. She gets better. - Isabelle from The 4400 goes from being an infant to being twenty-something over the course of an end-of-season montage. She turns out to be super-intelligent but naive. She begins a relationship with Shawn, which her father finds out about. Father is outraged, taking the view that she is not legitimately an adult. - In the Gilligan's Island episode "Meet the Meteor" (Ep.2.32), a meteor lands on the island and emits cosmic rays, causing all of the characters to age rapidly. - This is the main power of the Old Dopant in Kamen Rider Double. \|\|When the Old Memory is destroyed, the effects are reversed.\|\| - A variation on Manifest as a plane takes off in 2013 for a simple three hour flight. When it lands, the passengers are rocked to discover it's now 2018. Thus, from their perspective, all the people they meet are now instantly five years older while they stay the same. The biggest example is 10-year old Cal coming face to face with his twin sister Olive, who's now a grown teenager.On the other hand the passengers all look the same as they did before the flight leaving which would understandably seem just as strange to those who know them. - Merlin used a spell to turn himself into a white-bearded elderly version of himself a few times—and it wasn't just a glamour, as he became noticeably more crotchety and complained about old-person maladies while under the spell. \|\|The last scene of the series finale reveals that he eventually got there the hard way.\|\| - On Midnight, Texas, a woman dies while giving birth in the supernatural town's church. The main characters are thrown when the child goes from an infant to a toddler in minutes. She's a were-tiger and by the next day, has become a fully grown teenager. - Power Rangers: - Smallville has an episode where two kryptonite-infected teenagers hook up at a party and have a baby...one week later. Clark and Lana end up taking care of the child as he rapidly ages from infant to child before exploding from the effects of rapid aging. - "Brief Candle," from season one of Stargate SG-1, finds Jack O'Neill infected by Goa'uld nanites which send him flying into old age. - Star Trek: - First used in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Deadly Years", in which the Enterprise crew discover a planet where the colonists are afflicted with a rapid aging syndrome and are affected by it themselves. - Star Trek: The Next Generation does the "adults becoming elderly" version a few times: - In the "Unnatural Selection", the Enterprise receives a distress call from the USS Lantree, where they find everyone dead from rapid aging, and must find the cause before scientists on a research colony suffer the same fate. - "Man of the People" has Deanna aging as a side-effect of a psychic ambassador using her energies to influence the outcome of his mission. - Supernatural: - After gaining human form upon her essence's escape from her primordial prison, Amara ages from a newborn to adult woman over the course of a few episodes, consuming souls to fuel the process. - The fifth season episode "The Curious Case of Dean Winchester" involves a poker game played using years as stakes; Dean doesn't fare very well in the game and ages rapidly. He gets better. - At the end of Eternal Ring, \|\|the God-child understanding what death is due to his sorrow over Lyta's death causes him to instantly physically mature into an adult.\|\| - The Old status effect in Final Fantasy V continuously lowers the affected character's level, weakening them and turning their hair white. Strangely enough, it also affects Cool Old Guy Galuf. - Getting hit by a Magician's spell without armor in Ghosts 'n Goblins turns Arthur into an old man. - The Legend of Zelda: - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to an extent. Link goes to sleep for seven years, aging gradually, but it's instantaneous to him and the player. - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask lets Link turn Cucco chicks into grown roosters in an instant using the Bremen Mask. This is significant because their owner, Grog, felt that not seeing the Cuccos grow up was the only true regret he had in the face of Termina's imminent destruction. The Fierce Deity Mask, when worn, makes Link taller and look more like an adult, and his battle cries are taken from his adult form from Ocarina of Time. - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Purah, one of the Sheikah's leading magitek researchers, is Impa's older sister, but due to an accident while experimenting with age-reversing tech, she physically resembles a six-year-old girl when Link meets her. By the time Tears of the Kingdom begins, however, Purah is considerably older, more closely resembling her teenage counterpart in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. While there was a Time Skip between games, it was only four or five years at the minimum. Exploring Purah's lab near Hateno Village, Link can find one of her diaries, which reveals she worked out the kinks in this tech and aged herself up to her physical prime. - Played straight in the video game series The Sims. The characters "poof" from one age group to another once the requisite time has passed. In the first game this only applies to babies becoming children - children never become adults and adults never grow old - but from the second onwards it affects everyone. - The Age-O-Matic spray in Tomodachi Life turns kid Miis into grown-ups. There's also the opposite effect in the Kid-O-Matic spray. Kid Miis who want to get married will ask the player to turn them into adults before they can. - Done more literally with baby Miis — they age up one year a day. Once they are fully grown, you can choose to have them stay on the island, and thus age like a normal Mii. Before you do so, you have the option to change how old they are. The game sets them as children by default, but you can make them grown-ups. You can even make them older than their parents. - In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, \|\|the rebuilt Colony Omega rapidly ages the reborn Miyabi, Cammuravi, Mwamba, and Hakt to be near Homecoming\|\|. The process is seen on-screen when \|\|the reborn Ethel uses it to become physically old enough to fight again\|\|. - A few downplayed examples in Brother Complex. The first is with Rose, who certainly grew up far more than she should for the one year Jack was abroad. Not just in body, but in intellect as well when the teacher calls her over to write on the blackboard during one session. The second is with \|\|Eclaire over the course of three weeks after she takes up Mimi's offer to receive the same benefits she and Rose did\|\|. - In a storyline in Kevin & Kell, Coney and Nigel use the time machine to age themselves from babies to adults so they can spend one day as adults before Nigel moves away. A funny moment is when Coney spits a whole bunch of teeth and says "Baby teeth". - These downloadables (with pay) from DreamTales Comics. - Marcy and Francis in PvP both undergo instant age-ups in response to certain events (having sex for the first time, Francis deciding to leave home when the office relocates to Seattle, etc.) They instantly "level up" into their new ages, complete with a display of their changed stats. It gets lampshaded by other cast members. - Known on DeviantArt as "Age Progression", and is fairly common on that website. - This entire collection is full of sequences with this trope in effect. - Inverted even more commonly with "Age Regression". - In the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode, "Musta Been A Beautiful Baby", Dr. Robotnik invents the Decrepitizer to age Sonic into a senior so Sonic will be too old and feeble to escape him. Unfortunately, Scratch and Grounder accidentally put the machine in reverse, turning Sonic, Tails, and eventually Robotnik into babies. At the end of the episode, Sonic and Tails are aged back to their normal selves, while Robotnik is aged into a senior. - Sunni Gummi is turn into an elderly em... Gummi bear after Lady Bane steals her youth in one episode of Adventures of the Gummi Bears. This is how Bane remains young after more than 100 years. - The Amazing World of Gumball: After Richard mixed-up the Daisy the Donkey cereal with a muscle vitamin, the Watterson kids experience an accelerate puberty, which ends up with Gumball and Darwin turned into adults. - American Dad!: Stan pulls one of these on Steve (who had already been regressed to a young child by Francine) with an aging serum, but adds an extra dose to age him to 21 years old in an effort to dodge dealing with another child going through puberty. He put in too much, resulting in Steve transforming into an old man. - Used also by Numbuh Two in Codename: Kids Next Door, who has a crush with Numbuh Five's big (evil) sister and repeatedly ages himself so he can get close to her. - Numbuh One was turned into an adult once by the Delightful Children in a particularly sad example: all operatives must be decommissioned when they turn 13, and not being a child anymore means that One must leave the KND. \|\|At least until his Big Damn Heroes moment at the end of the episode.\|\| - Three episodes of Dexter's Laboratory deal with the mental mechanics. In one, he wishes to stay up late to watch scary movies, so makes himself older. But thanks to Dee Dee's antics, he overshoots, becomes elderly, and is unable to stay awake to watch. In the second, he is too small in size to ride amusement park attractions, and ends up giving himself a case of size change instead. And in the third, he becomes a teenager... but instead of becoming a handsome lad, he becomes an absolute nerd with pimples and crooked teeth. - Duck Dodgers: In "Duck Codgers", Dodgers and the Cadet are infected with spores from a Martian plant that causes rapid aging in Earthlings, and must find an underground spring on Mars whose waters are the only known cure. Oddly enough, the spores have an opposite effect on Martians, causing Marvin to grow younger when he gets infected as well. - In The Fairly OddParents! episode "The Big Problem!", Timmy wishes he were grown up, then almost loses his godparents, who can only grant wishes to children. - In another episode, Timmy wishes to be a teenager so he can ride on a rollercoaster. It turns out that his 16-year-old self is so ungodly handsome that everybody, guys and girls chase him constantly. Even his evil babysitter Vicky, who doesn't recognize him, falls madly in love with him! - In the Made-for-TV Movie Channel Chasers, Timmy does it to himself on an year by year basis using a magical remote in order to find the hard limit to having Fairy God Parents to remove the magic from another magical remote Vicki took from him. Wanda does it again to restore Timmy to his normal age after Cosmo ends up turning him into a baby. - Final Space: In Season 3, Ash gets aged up from a teenager to a young adult courtesy of Invictus in addition to \|\|gaining a second eye\|\| — the show's animation style makes it a bit tricky to tell, so dialogue from the characters explicitly confirms Ash has aged up. - Grossology: In the episode "Oldie But a Goodie", Abby is tricked by Lance Boil into activating a device that causes her to age at 6000 times the normal rate. Initially getting taller and more mature-looking, she eventually develops white hairs and starts becoming elderly. Ty to stop Lance and reverse Abby's change before he uses his new weapon on the rest of the city. - Jorel's Brother: After swapping ages with his school bully, he and his friends loses their youth. - Jumanji: Happens to Judy and Peter Shepherd in the episode "An Old Story". - Lilo & Stitch: The Series, "Skip": Tired of being treated like a kid, Lilo uses an experiment that lets her skip ahead 10 years at a time to become a teenager, then a grown woman. Unfortunately, she finds that she's been gone all those years, and after the second time-skip, bad guy Dr. Hamsterviel has managed to take over the Earth. - In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode Growing Up is Hard to Do, the Cutie Mark Crusaders get magically transformed into adult mares when they wish on a magical flower. If Apple Bloom's wish is anything to go by, it made them as old as their sisters. - Peter Pan & the Pirates: In the two-parter "Ages of Pan", some cutting remarks from Captain Hook inspire Peter to try giving growing up a try. Unfortunately, as Peter grows older in a manner of days and stops believing in Neverland, the land starts to fade away. - Rocko's Modern Life. Rocko, Heffer, and Heffer's Grandfather are on a cruise filled with senior citizens when they cross The Bermuda Triangle, which alters their ages. Giving us a mix of Fountain of Youth and this trope, all the elderly revert back to young(er) adulthood, the ship's crew become babies, and Rocko and Heffer become elderly. - This was the premise of the Rugrats special 'All Growed Up' that spawned the spinoff series All Grown Up! - Scruple became and adult after one of Gargamel's spells goes wrong in "Gargamel's Second Childhood", an episode of The Smurfs. - In Spongebob Squarepants, Plankton once developed an instantaneous aging ray. - In the ThunderCats (1985) episode "Trouble With Time," Tygra wanders into the Cave of Time where he ages into an elderly man. This is reversed by having him drink from the Geyser of Life.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvernightAgeUp
Over the Shoulder - TV Tropes An Over the Shoulder shot is one of the most common shots in film and television. It frames a dialog speaker with the shoulder and back of the head of the character being spoken to. Along with the Medium Two-Shot, it is one component of the Shot/Reverse Shot. A classic tactic for Double Vision. Sometimes used as a variant of The Faceless. The video game trope Always Over the Shoulder is named for this. See Over-the-Shoulder Murder Shot for a horror-specific Sub-Trope.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverTheShoulder
Overused Copycat Character - TV Tropes So many, there's a version out to kill her other versions. "I am the result of Hideaki Anno failing to make my character unsettling, and instead my very archetype was copied repeatedly." Basically, when a character has been copied enough times, that works start making jokes about how often the character is copied. Let's say Bob the Slayer is the Breakout Character in a hit film. Then just about every similar movie uses characters like Bob The Slayer, and then all the comics, and all video games, and even original characters made by gamers playing games with Character Customization. This trope comes into play when a work mocks about how Bob the Slayer always shows up. It could be that a work has a joke about how every hero in the realm is now a copy of Bob the Slayer. Or it could be that everyone is going as Bob the Slayer for Halloween. Or Alice is writing a show, and when strapped for characters, she gets lazy and writes a copy of Bob The Slayer. Now of course this isn't saying the original character is bad. In fact, often the reason for this happening in the first place is that the original character is good. A Sub-Trope of Fountain of Expies. Compare Captain Ersatz, Expy, Copy Cat Sue, Follow the Leader, Serial Numbers Filed Off. Contrast Public Domain Character, Historical Domain Character. - Wolverine - He got enough imitators in Image Comics, when it first started, for magazines such as Wizard Magazine to joke about it. - Wolverine has been copied so many times in Marvel Comics themselves (though since they own the character, they can make them different versions of Wolverine instead of expies) that they've parodied it at least twice: - In an issue of Excalibur, the team travels to a dimension that's basically the Marvel Universe with the craziness turned up to 11, and at one point see a line of different versions of Wolverine practicing his catchphrase while waiting to audition to be the "real" Wolverine. - Later, in an issue of Exiles, a book about a rotating cast of characters from different dimensions being assembled to Set Right What Once Went Wrong throughout The Multiverse, the only information available about a particular "what went wrong" is that only Wolverine could solve it, so an entire team is assembled consisting of different versions of Wolverine. During the mission, they discover that they are not even the first such team, and encounter the remains of dozens of other versions of Wolverine from teams that failed. - Phil Foglio mocks the Trenchcoat Brigade in Stanley and His Monster, by having the latest John Constantine expy claim it's like an assembly line. - Parodied in one chapter of the Kingdom Hearts fanfic Those Lacking Spines, where the "heroes" fight a guy named "Jeffiroth", with the implication that he is to be the first of many similar Copycat Sues. - This Superman fancomic mocks how often "Superman but evil" has been done, including by DC Comics themselves. (From the timing, the movie they're discussing seems to be Brightburn.) - In the Super Smash Bros. fanfic Remake, one of Cloud's personality problems is that (due to the Follow the Leader VII ripoffs of the 90s) he assumes other video game protagonists are ripoffs of him, even when they're pretty different. He makes a withering comment about Ike, followed by an argument with him, about this; and then accuses Bayonetta of it, which causes her to point out that it's not like he's completely original himself. - In the blog post Adventuring Party Politics: The Campaign is Getting Ugly, apparently McCain rips off Aragorn: Obama: Well, maybe some people got tired of the grim and squinty "Matterhorn, son of Marathon" shtick you keep doing. Dude, could you be any less original? - In one of the Thursday Next books it's revealed that a large group of "generics" (fictional characters that haven't developed any character yet) were being stored in The Once and Future King, and they all imprinted on T.H. White's version of Merlin. Eventually, they were relocated to every fantasy novel ever. - Another group of generics were stored in Rebecca, and imprinted on Mrs. Danvers. They're even referred to as "Danverclones" at least once. - Critical Role: Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting: The adventure hook "A Lesson in Tropes" pokes fun at the D&D cliche of making a character based off the fantasy hero Drizzt. The hook consists of a dark elf ranger with a panther pet revealing himself heartless spy planning to assassinate an elven official with little more than a dashing smile and his beautiful eyes. - The Dark Elf Trilogy has Drizzt Do'Urden, the Chaotic Good dual-scimitar-wielding Drow elf ranger of the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons & Dragons. This trope used to be called Drizzt Syndrome because it's a long joke for fans that some players like to play thinly veiled copies of him. - This is explicitly lampshaded on page 12 of the 3.5 Edition supplemental rulebook Dungeon Master's Guide II: - Icing on the cake? Even Salvatore himself reacted on this trend by saying he "fears for the integrity of the evil drow race as antagonist". Talk about Fan Dumb... Wizards does a brilliant lampshading of this in an advertisement of his book series — the ad is set out like a 4th Edition power card, and the "additional effects" bar says, "You'll probably want to make a character named Drizzt." - Paizo, creators of Pathfinder, actually has stated that one of the goals of the Second Darkness adventure path and their portrayal of the drow in general was to redeem the drow in the eyes of players. And by redeem, they meant recast them as a menacing, terrifying, demon-worshipping race willing to exterminate the surface dwellers for their own benefit. - An additional source of Fan Dumb comes from players who react to Driz'zt's overwhelming popularity by hating the character and by extension the drow or Salvatore. - A Running Gag among players of D&D is that the Drow are an Always Chaotic Evil race populated by nothing but Chaotic Good individuals, due to the absurd number of players who make Drizzt Clones. - Rather humorously lampshaded in Baldur's Gate II, where your party will eventually run into Drizzt himself. Generally, you can use the opportunity to either ask for his aid on your assault on a vampire compound or just murder him and his party for their awesome gear. If you're playing an elf named Drizzt and have a low enough reputation, however, you never get the chance — he'll simply challenge you to a duel for the honor of his name. If you use a cheat code to give yourself Drizzt's equipment at the start of the game (or if you obtained it in the original game and imported the character), when you finally meet he eventually says, "Wait... I recognize that sword..." and attacks you. - Dynasty Warriors: Gundam had a field day with all the Char Clones running around, both in making them fight and in making fun of them. At one point, Duo Maxwell sarcastically asks "How many people with goofy masks could there possibly be?" (answer: at least six) and even Char himself observing one of his more direct copies (in this case, Full Frontal) and dryly commenting that there are "some things you never notice until you look in from the outside." - The Fate Series has a bit of a problem with this. - Many characters in the franchise share a physical resemblance to Saber/Artoria Pendragon, who besides having variants of the original (and one literal clone in Mordred) also has several unrelated characters who share the same face. Referenced in Fate/Grand Order with characters having a hidden attribute called "Saberface", that causes some enemies to react differently to them. Then there's Mysterious Heroine X, who is definitely not Artoria hunting down her clones. - This was even followed up years later when Mysterious Heroine X got new variants, one of whom is another literal clone (whose sole purpose is just to take down Mysterious Heroine X) and the other an Older and Wiser version who had to stop hunting them and get a job because the Saberfaces all got eclipsed in popularity in-universe. All of them get on pretty amicably. - Before FGO, there was the Sakura Saber incident, where the cast of the Koha-Ace gag magazine proudly announced that they were introducing a new character, designed by Takashi Takeuchi (the main artist of Fate/stay night) himself... only to freak out when said design turned out to be a slightly off-color Saber wearing a kimono. She was eventually fleshed out into a full-blown character (as Souji Okita of The Shinsengumi) but the jabs at her looks never ceased. - Lord El-Melloi II Case Files plays this for tragedy. Gray, a far-off descendant of the Pendragon lineage, \|\|was transformed into a copy of Artoria by outside circumstances, and as a result was treated as a possible vessel for the return of the Once and Future King.\|\| She is deeply unhappy about being an Artoria lookalike. She bonds with her teacher, Waver Velvet from Fate/Zero, over their mutual hatred of Artoria's face. - Lampshaded as a diss during Fate/Grand Carnival when Artoria and Nero (who has the distinction of being the first Saberface created) clash and the former insults Nero as a "franchisee" and Gawain piles on with calling Nero a Palette Swap. Nero is left chomping at the bit, especially as her teammate Elisabeth agrees with them. - In Fate/Extella Link, Artoria Pendragon is once again mistaken for Jeanne d'Arc — a Saberface introduced in Fate/Apocrypha — by Gilles de Rais, to her exasperated fury. After she chases him off, Nero — who witnessed the battle — hits on Artoria, saying that the King of Knights' beauty is a close match for her own and they should spend some alone time in her private Roman baths. Artoria promptly flies into a rage and starts channelling Mysterious Heroine X. - Final Fantasy: - Dissidia Final Fantasy has Kefka complain that Sephiroth, one of many later FF villains heavily inspired by him, is "just another sadist with a god complex... Like that's something special!" - Mobius Final Fantasy has several jokes pointing out Wol's clear inspiration from Kazushige Nojima's previous Final Fantasy protagonists: - Gilgamesh rattles off details of the "Warriors of Light" from several other worlds ("not to mention side-stories"), before pointing out that Wol reminds him of several of them already. Wol, a moody, Deadpan Snarker amnesiac swordsman who secretly has a kind heart and has to slowly learn to show it, suggests Gilgamesh should go and talk to a wall or something because he's not interested. - Wol eventually gets to meet Cloud and they end up getting on pretty well. Later, Echo suggests that Cloud and Wol are so spookily alike, it's like they're brothers or something. By their next encounter, they're so in sync that they're able to finish off each other's sentences. - Gems of War has dark elves, and several of them have descriptions which lampshade their resemblance to Drizzt. - Intentionally averted in Halo games; player tags of "I17", "117", "S117", and the like are not allowed to be used. - In Street Fighter IV, Zangief complains about the overabundance of Fireballs. - The Order of the Stick: - A Drizzt Expy, aptly named Zz'dtri, shows up as a member of the Linear Guild. Vaarsuvius points this out during a battle, and lawyers drag the copycat off-screen. Nale earlier claims that now all Drow became Chaotic Good rebels, "yearning to throw off the reputation of their evil kin". ("Wait, evil kin? Didn't you just say they were all Chaotic Good?" "Details.") Zz'dtri also claims that dual-wielded scimitars are "standard issue", presumably meaning for all drow. It's also subverted since he actually does turn out to be a normal drow. \|\|Of course, Zz'dtri later got off scot-free by declaring himself a parody of Drizzt and went back to secretly work for Nale.\|\| - In Invaders From the Fourth Dimension, a bonus story appearing in Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales, Belkar makes the rather bold claim that the 4th Edition ranger is based on Overused Copycat Characters of himself. - Goblins also skewers the idea of every drow character being a Drizzt clone, gleefully, with three joining the PC party at the very beginning, including Drasst Don'tsue, Drizzt's half-brother. - 8-Bit Theater also has an evil dual-wielding drow ranger called Drizz'l, though he moved away from this after his first appearance. - In Knights of Buena Vista, Dick is told to tweak his Player Character when Walter catches on that he's trying to play Han Solo. - An accidental case of this occurs in Looking for Group. Cale, full name Cale'anon Vatay, is an Elf, has a black panther named Sooba who seems to magically appear out of nowhere when called, is obviously a dual-wielding Ranger, and is Good (albeit Stupid Good) while the rest of his race is (ostensibly) Always Chaotic Evil. Sohmer, the comic's writer, had never read even one Forgotten Realms book in his life (instead basing Cale on the Hunter class and Blood Elf race from World of Warcraft), and wondered who the hell this "Drizz't Do'urden" guy was that everyone kept saying Cale was a brilliant parody of. Since learning about Drizz't, he's happily accepted the similarities and doesn't mind at all if people see Cale as a deconstruction or parody of Drizz't in the slightest, even actually playing it up from time to time. - "Clichequest", the MMORPG in The Noob, has several dozen players named various variations of the different members of the fellowship. At one point, we see Elfboro, where almost everyone is named Legolas one way or the other ("Oh, you're looking for Leg0las"). Even the Idiot Hero tried to name his character "Aragorn" in the first strip. - GOG.com pokes fun at the phenomenon. In one screenshot for Eye of the Beholder 2 (7th from the left) an elven magician is named "NOT DRIZZT". - In Critical Role campaign 2, the first firbolg character to appear is Pumat Sol, an NPC who GM Matthew Mercer plays with a laid-back personality and Canadian accent. The players were crazy about the character, to the point that when Taliesin Jaffe lost his character and had to come back with a new one, he came back as Caduceus Clay, a firbolg very similar to Pumat, and leaving Pumat the baseline for what firbolgs are like in the whole setting. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic makes fun of how, twice now, they've introduced a new powerful unicorn lacking in social skills whose name is a synonym for "Twilight" and "Sparkle", and sent her on adventures to learn about friendship in "Triple Threat" when Ember casually mistakes Starlight Glimmer for Twilight Sparkle and then bluntly declares they both look the same and she can't tell them apart. Naturally, Twilight and Starlight are not amused by this.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverusedCopycatCharacter
Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death - TV Tropes Sometimes, it's not enough for a horror movie to have a frightening premise. It has to scare its prospective audience right there in the title! This mentality leads to a title with so many "scary" words or phrases that it becomes ridiculously redundant, a la Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000. Often, the title doesn't even make sense when held up to scrutiny. (Try to visualize some of the examples below...though it might be best if you didn't.) In brief, instead of frightening potential viewers, these titles provoke the reaction "Eww!" or "What the hell is this movie about?" This trope was a hallmark of B Movies and Splatter Horror, which used over-the-top gore and mayhem as a selling point, even when there was little to be seen. A subtrope of Intentionally Awkward Title, where the over-the-top title is used but not necessarily with violence. Compare the Mad Lib Thriller Title. In practice, the trope usually inspires Squick or Narm rather than fear. It also tends to involve the Department of Redundancy Department. Related to Long Title and Overly-Long Gag. ## Straight examples - This Marvel Cinematic Universe fic, Avenge Us. According to the author, its actual title is "Leyenar and avengers Bizarre Adventure:The Titan Empire Strikes Back 2 the Future of the last Crusade Revenge of the Fallen Ballad of the dusted heroes". - Africa: Blood and Guts - Alice in Murderland - And Now the Screaming Starts!! - Antfarm Dickhole - Apocalypse of the Dead - Attack of the Cockface Killer - At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, its sequel This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse and the loosely related The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (the third film, Embodiment of Evil, is too light for this trope). - Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires - The Beast in Heat - Big Fucking Monster - Big Tits Zombie - Black Devil Doll from Hell - Bloodsucking Freaks - The Blood Beast Terror (a.k.a. The Vampire Beast Craves Blood) - Blood Cult - Blood Feast - Blood Freak - Blood Junkie - Blood of Ghastly Horror - Blood of the Man-Devil (a.k.a. House of the Black Death) - The Blood on Satan's Claw - Blood Orgy of the She-Devils - Blood Reaper - Blood Slaughter Massacre - Blood Was Everywhere - Bloodwine - Bloody Bloody Bible Camp - Bloody Pit of Horror - The Bloody Video Horror That Made Me Puke on My Aunt Gertrude - Bloodrape - Brain of Blood - Brides of Blood - And its sequel, Mad Doctor of Blood Island - A Bucket of Blood - Bullet in the Head - Bullet to the Head - Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker - Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh - Cannibal Apocalypse - Cannibal Holocaust - Cannibal Hookers - Chainsaw Scumfuck - Colonel Kill Motherfuckers - Carnage for the Destroyer - Carnage Road - Chopping Mall - Color Me Blood Red - The Corpse Grinders - Corpse Mania - Creature of the Walking Dead - Curse of Pirate Death - Dead Hooker in a Trunk - Death Screams - Death Stop Holocaust - Demented Death Farm Massacre - Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile - Die You Zombie Bastards! - Doctor Bloodbath - Doctor Blood's Coffin - Don't Torture a Duckling - The Driller Killer - Drive-In Massacre - Dr. Terror's House of Horrors - Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! - The Eerie Midnight Horror Show - Entrails of a Virgin - Evil Dead Trap - Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! - Filthy McNasty - The Flesh and Blood Show - The Flesh Eaters - Flesh Eating Mothers - Flesh Feast - Flesh for the Beast - Frankenstein's Bloody Terror - Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks - Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island - The Gestapo's Last Orgy (a.k.a. Last Orgy of the Third Reich) - Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell - Goregasm - Goretech: Welcome to the Planet Motherfucker - The Gore Gore Girls - Gore, Quebec - Gory Gory Hallelujah - Grave of the Vampire - Gut-Pile - Hack-O-Lantern - Halloween Camp 2: Scream If You Wanna Die Faster (known as Adam & Evil in the US) - Hands of the Ripper - Hardcore Poisoned Eyes - Haunted Horrifying Sounds From Beyond The Grave - Hell of the Living Dead (also known as Zombie Creeping Flesh in the UK and Night of the Zombies in the US) - Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers - The Hooker Cult Murders - Horror of the Blood Monsters (a.k.a. Vampire Men of the Lost Planet) - Horror Rises from the Tomb - House of 1000 Corpses - House of Blood - House of Pain - The House That Dripped Blood - I Dismember Mama (also known as Poor Albert & Little Annie) - I Drink Your Blood - I Eat Your Skin note : Ran with I Drink Your Blood as a double feature. - I'll Kill You... I'll Bury You... I'll Spit on Your Grave Too! - I Spit on Your Corpse, I Piss on Your Grave - I Spit on Your Grave - The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies - It's My Party and I'll Die If I Want To - Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman - Johnny Sunshine Maximum Violence - KillerKiller - Killer Klowns from Outer Space - The Killer Must Kill Again - The Last House on Dead End Street - Lesbian Vampire Killers - Lolita Vibrator Torture - The Mad Mutilator - Massacre of the Cannibal Acid Fiends (Cinema de Bizarre even sells this with a recipe. NSFW) - The Midnight Meat Train - The Mutilation Man - Mutilation Mile - My Bloody Valentine - The Night God Screamed - Nightmare in a Damaged Brain - Night of the Blood Beast - Night of the Blood Monster (the US release title of Hammer Horror's The Bloody Judge) - Night of the Bloody Apes - A Night to Dismember - Orgasm Torture in Satan's Rape Clinic - Porno Holocaust - The Red Queen Kills Seven Times - Sadisticum - Scary or Die - Scream and Scream Again - Scream Bloody Murder - Schizophreniac: The Whore Mangler - Schizophreniac 2: Necromaniac - Subverted by David Cronenberg's Shivers (released in the U.S. as They Came From Within), which was filmed under the flowery title Orgy of the Blood Parasites. - Shriek of the Mutilated - S.I.C.K.: Serial Insane Clown Killer - The Slumber Party Massacre - Stabbed in the Face - Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator - Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood - Taste the Blood of Dracula - Terror Creatures from the Grave - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives - Tokyo Gore Police - Tombs of the Blind Dead - The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism - Tumbling Doll of Flesh - Twitch of the Death Nerve - Vampire Hookers from Outer Space - Violent Shit - The Vomit Gore series, by Lucifer Valentine, consisting of Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, ReGOREgitated Sacrifice, Slow Torture Puke Chamber and Black Mass of the Nazi Sex Wizard. - Weasels Rip My Flesh - Women's Flesh: My Red Guts - Zombie Cult Massacre - Zombie Holocaust - Zombie Island Massacre - Zombie Strippers! - Doctor Who went through a phase of this during its "Hammer Horror" period when what had until then been fairly tame titles suddenly had 'of Evil', 'of Doom', 'of Death', 'of Blood', 'of Terror', etcetera appended to everything, with the most laughably redundant title being "The Deadly Assassin". - Bullet in the Face. - Record company example: Crypt of Blood. - Band example: Cannibal Corpse. - Album example: What, "Cannibal Corpse" wasn't obvious enough? - Another album example (from a band sophisticatedly named Death): Scream Bloody Gore. - Death Metal bands in general love these. In addition to Cannibal Corpse, we have Dying Fetus, Carcass, Decapitated, Gorelord, Fleshgore, Rotting Christ, and many, many others. So much that Something Awful found a death metal magazine "some of the funniest stuff youll ever see" for bands with names such as Necrotic Disgorgement, 7000 Dying Rats, and The Christpunchers. - The Japanese hardcore wrestling promotion FMW regularly featured insane, violent Gimmick Matches with descriptions that fit this trope. - At the 7th Anniversary Show, May 5, 1996, Terry Funk and Mr. Pogo d. Masato Tanaka and Hayabusa in a "No Rope Explosive Barbed Wire Time Bomb Land Mine Double Hell note : This usually means two sides have barbed-wire in place of the ropes with no ropes on the other sides and something dangerous on the floor Death Match." - At the 8th Anniversary Show (held on April 29, 1997, instead of the usual date of May 5), Megumi Kudo defeated Shark Tsuchiya in a "No Rope 200 Volt double hell Double Barbed Wire Barricade Double Landmine Crushed Glass Electrical Barbed Wire Death Match" to win the FMW World Women's Title. - At the 10th Anniversary Show, which was held on November 23, 1999 as their November PPV, FMW WEW Singles Champion Masato Tanaka d. Kodo Fuyuki in a "Loser Leaves FMW Electrical Thunderbolt Cage Death Match." - Corpse Killer - Corpse Party - Deadly Rooms of Death, also an example of a Non-Indicative Name - Fatal Fury - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Revenge with a Vengeance. Revengeance. - Mortal Kombat - Puppet Combo is very fond of this trope, given that a lot of their games are inspired by Splatter Horror and B Movies: - Blood Maniac - Buzz Saw Blood House - Meat Cleaver Mutilator - Night Ripper - Project Overkill - Slaughter Sport, a gratuitous rebranding of a game previously known as Mondu's Fight Palace and Tongue of the Fatman. - Sands of Destruction is a little over-the-top, but its original Japanese title was simply World Destruction. The localization team thought that was just a little too much. However, it's fairly standard RPG fare with Bloodless Carnage, perhaps making it a subversion. The manga adaptation shares the title, but is Bloodier and Gorier, making it a straighter example. - Total Carnage - Violence Killer, Japanese title of Turok 2: Seeds of Evil - ULTRAKILL: The three acts are Infinite Hyperdeath, Imperfect Hatred, and Godfist Suicide. - Violence Fight - Gore Screaming Show (Although, bizarrely enough, it's the name of a character that the main villainess had given the title character after a movie she knew of that was an example of this trope.) ## Parodies - One episode of the Sgt. Frog anime (or at least the Funimation dub) had one episode titled "Blood Violence Death Kill! Rated R." - Adal Ramones, in one of his monologues, mentions that every man's favorite option when choosing a movie to watch would be "Pesadilla en la Calle del Infierno 17: Freddy se Viene del más Allá" ("Nightmare in Hell's Street 17: Freddy comes back from the Afterlife") - Calvin and Hobbes: Pick a movie Calvin wants to see. Any movie. Samples include Attack of the Co-Ed Cannibals, The Cuisinart Murder of Central High and Vampire Sorority Babes. - 100 Bloody Acres - Blood & Donuts - Bloodbath at the House of Death (A Kenny Everett film, and worth watching if only for Pamela Stephenson's subtle charms.) - Bloodsuckers from Outer Space - Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh - The slasher-based porno Camp Cuddly Pines Power Tool Massacre. - Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death - Deathgasm parodies death metal bands' propensity for this trope with the titular band. - The Gingerdead Man - Grindhouse gives us some examples, such as Planet Terror and Werewolf Women of the SS. - Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D and its sequel, Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Hellbound, Flesh-Eating Subhumanoid Zombified Living Dead, Part 3. - The Rocky Horror Picture Show - Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th - Terror at Blood Fart Lake - Virgin Cheerleaders In Chains - Parodied in The A-to-Z of Absolutely Everything with The Sex Devil from the Planet Blood. - Neil Gaiman's short story Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nameless House of the Night of Dread Desire. Whoo. - Sergey Lukyanenko once told a joke about an editor who tells a young author that a successful book nowadays needs to be about space, sex, gore, or demons. A month later the author brings Bloody Orgy in Martian Hell. Later Sergey actually wrote and published exactly that. It was a Stylistic Suck short story called an excerpt of the aforementioned novel, but still. - Toxic Teen Lesbian Zombie Vampire Chainsaw Bitches from Outer Space 3, a film script made up for Zephyr Goza's The Tomato Soup Chronicles. - Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds) - Craig Shaw Gardner's Cineverse Cycle: Slaves of the Volcano God, Bride of the Slime Monster and Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies. - Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death - Parodied with the title of the recurring SCTV sketch "Monster Chiller Horror Theatre". Also parodied with the Show Within a Show's often-promised but never actually screened feature, Bloodsucking Monkeys from West Mifflin, Pennsylvannia. And Doctor Tongue's 3-D House of Meat! - The Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode "Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders brings us the wonderful children's book Doctor Blood's Orgy of Gore. \|\|It's about seven plump mice who got sweaters and lived happily ever after, mocking the fact that the movie they were MiSTing was a horror anthology awkwardly shoehorned into the role of a family film.\|\| - Red Dwarf gave us Revenge of the Mutant Splat-Gore Monster and Die Screaming with Sharp Things in Your Head. And those excellent cinematic treats, Revenge of the Surfboarding Killer Bikini Vampire Girls and Attack of the Giant Savage Completely Invisible Aliens. - In one episode of Leave It to Beaver, the Beaver tells his parents he wants to go see a double-feature with his friends. When they ask what movies they'll be seeing, he replies Massacre at Blood River and Voodoo Curse. - Kill It Before It Dies from Charmed. - The Kids in the Hall has a novelist whose second book is: There's a Spider on Your Back! \|\|That wasn't just the title — it was the whole book.\|\| - Monty Python's Flying Circus has "Blood, Devastation, Death, War and Horror," \|\|which turns out to be an interview with a man who speaks in anagrams.\|\| - Mr. Show had "Return of the Curse of the Creature's Ghost". The characters weren't sure if they should be afraid of the curse, the ghost, or the creature. - In an episode of The Goodies, the Goodies are watching films made by Pinewood Studios after buying the studio. One of these films is called Kung Fu With A Bucket Of Blood And A Bath Full Of Giblets. Tim refuses to watch it. - In an early episode of Boy Meets World, Cory and Shawn try to watch I'm Blowing Up Your Head Part 6: Stumpy's Revenge while they're left home with a babysitter. - The Young Ones episode "Nasty" features the boys attempting to watch the Video Nasty Sex with the Headless Corpse of the Virgin Astronaut. - "Bambi" also mentioned Bambi Goes Crazy-Ape Bonkers With His Power-Drill And Sex. - Death Metal band Blood Vomit and their album Up From The Grave, not to mention the song titles ("The Shredder", "Human Butcher", "Madman of the Woods", etc.). In fact, pretty much any death metal band. - Thrash Metal band Lich King recorded a song titled "Attack of the Wrath of the War of the Death of the Strike of the Sword of the Blood of the Beast". - Rose and the Arrangement's "The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati." - Norman Greenbaum's "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago." - Weird Al's "Attack of the Radioactive Mutant Hamsters from a Planet Near Mars." - The Dead Milkmen's "(Theme from) Blood Orgy of the Atomic Fern." - One of the best examples of this trope in music would be Impaled Northern Moonforest, a side project by Anal Cunt's Seth Putnam: they have released a full album of Stylistic Suck acoustic black metal songs with names like "Awaiting the Blasphemous Abomination of the Necroyeti While Sailing on the Northernmost Fjord of Xzfgiiizmtsath". - BLOODCRUSHER II, complete with random subtitles (THE SPINEBREAKER FILES) to enhance the effect. Appropriate, as the game is a send-up of '90s shooters. - The House of the Dead: OVERKILL is already an example in its own name alone, the game being a deliberate send-up of its parent franchise by means of turning it into a seventies exploitation film, with level subtitles such as Papa's Palace of Pain and Jailhouse Judgment. - The bonus material in Mishap: An Accidental Haunting, due to the fact that the first boss is the ghost of a Hollywood ex-"scream queen," includes several posters for flicks such as Invasion of the Alien-Brained Fly Men and Attack of the Zombie Taxman. - The Curse of the Revenge of the Ghost of the Evil Chicken of Doom...Returns! - Maniac Mansion features arcade games called "Die, Enemy, Die" and "Kill Thrill." - Turbo Overkill, whose title refers to it's hero, Johnny Overkill - a Cyborg One-Man Army who absolutely lives up to his name. - Death: Dead Again, One More Time is the title of a fictitious Dean Koontz novel in Squidbillies. - After The Angry Beavers eat themselves sick on junk food at the end of "Food of the Clods", they sit back to watch some TV, only to find the next movie on is The Oozing Flesh of the Rotting Hand. Cue Vomit Discretion Shot.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverkillTitle
Over-the-Top Christmas Decorations - TV Tropes Just imagine having to untangle all those cords. How to show that people feel really festive and are in the mood for some serious Christmas celebrating? Why, decorate their houses, of course, and apparently, more is better when it comes to decorating a household for Christmas in fictionland. Characters light up their house from the bottom to the roof, the yard/garden included; decorate and/or illuminate their door and windows; have the biggest, finest tree; fill all their rooms with Christmas wreaths, candles, garlands, tinsel, wrapped-up gifts, stockings, cards, bells, Nativity scenes, Santa Clauses, reindeer figures, angels, snowmen, snowflakes, holly, mistletoe, poinsettias, candy canes, peppermints, cookies, gingerbread, gingerbread houses, gingerbread men, and more. Everything is very bright and very big. One popular colour combination is red and green, often with silver or gold, and there are lots of lights everywhere. Absurdly Bright Light and Christmas Light Chaos might be employed for extra comedy. Often, there is a contest for the best decorated house, and it's a matter of honour to try one's best to win. In some cases, this might be related to Conspicuous Consumption and showing off. It might be pointed out that more is not always better and that this kind of decorating can be tacky. This is a staple of most Christmas episodes, Christmas specials and Christmas movies. It's very often Played for Laughs on sitcoms and in Western Animation. In workplace comedies, it's not uncommon for characters to take a similar approach to adorning their office or cubicle come the holidays. These extravagant and overblown decorations have been seen in Real Life, too, but usually people don't exaggerate that much and try to keep the budget down. (Usually.) See also Christmas in America. ## Examples: - A 2006 Miller Lite commercial used a direct snippet of the viral video of the Mason, Ohio home of Carson Williams playing a computer-animated light show synched to the song "Wizards in Winter" by Trans-Siberian Orchestra. - A GEICO ad from 2017 shows a man telling his neighbor across the street that he just switched to GEICO and saved money on his homeowners insurance. The shot alternates back and forth between his house and his neighbors as they both decorate for Christmas. Every time the first man's house is shown his Christmas lights are progressively fancier and the commercial ends on a shot of an astronaut looking down at the Earth and seeing a multi colored twinkle coming from the man's house and remarking "Houston, are you seeing this?" - In IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Issue #65, Donatello sets up a spectacular lights display for the Church that the Turtles live under. When he activates it, the display ends up taking out half of New York City's power grid. Raphael : Nice going, Griswold . Donatello: Oops. - Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas : Minnie warns Mickey not to go overboard with the Christmas decorations in his home, which he does. At least until Pluto accidentally destroys them, forcing Mickey to go the simple route. - In National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Clark covers the entire house in lights. The entire house. They're evenly spread across the exterior walls. When he turns them on, the power plant has to activate an emergency power supply to keep things going. - The live-action movie of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! gives the Whos a device like a belt-fed machine gun to shoot decorations at their houses. - In the 2006 film Deck the Halls, Buddy Hall's goal is to have his Christmas light display seen from space. - Part of the plot of Christmas with the Kranks is the Kranks' refusal to take part in this over-the-top decorating, causing their neighbourhood to lose the annual "Best Decorated Street" award. - In Elf, Buddy was raised by elves at the North Pole, so over-the-top is the only way he knows to decorate for Christmas. He decorates the toy department at Gimbels department store so well that his supervisor thinks it's the work of a ringer from corporate headquarters, trying to undermine his job. Buddy also decorates Walter's apartment, destroying some of Walter's property in the process to use the pieces as decorations. He gets a Christmas tree (so big it barely fits into the apartment) by cutting one down from a public park which, as the movie reminds the audience, is a felony. - In the parent-centric subplot of Unaccompanied Minors, we see Aunt Judy Davenport's house is decked out in a downright ludicrous amount of decorations, inside and outside, and she implies that her christmas decorating somehow goes beyond that. There is even an inflating Santa in a chimney with motion sensors on the lawn that scares the bejeezus out of anybody walking by. - In a rare example from a film that, while it takes place during the Christmas season, is not a Christmas film, Michèle's neighbors Rebecca and Patrick in Elle put life-size illuminated figures of the Three Wise Men on their lawn. While this may not seem like a lot by American standards, the film takes place in France with all the characters being French, from whom we would usually expect more tasteful, restrained displays. (Justified by Rebecca being such a devout Catholic that she and her family take time off to go to Spain and join the pope on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela). - In the children's picture book The Amazing Christmas Extravaganza, Mr. Merriweather originally intended to celebrate Christmas by decorating his house with a simple string of Christmas lights around the front window. However, when his neighbor, Mr. Clack, shows off his own decorated house with more than one string of lights, Mr. Merriweather decides to add more decorations to his own house. At this point, he gets carried away with the decorations, adding bigger and more elaborate displays until \|\|it ends up taking up the electrical power of the city, leading to a mob led by Mr. Clack to tear the decorations down during Christmas Eve. While Mr. Merriweather is shocked when he discovers the destruction on Christmas morning, it is then that he realizes that fancy displays are not what Christmas is about, and once again his house is decorated with a simple string of lights\|\|. - The Cat in the Stacks Mysteries: Book 10 has new resident Gerry Albritton filling her yard with an absurd amount of inflatable decorations a short time before Christmas. At least one person doesn't approve, since they sneak in and deflate all of them. \|\|It's later revealed it was Gerry's brother Billy Albritton, who was trying to frighten her, though it didn't work.\|\| - Clue: Variant in book #5, chapter 6 ("The Guest Who Stole Christmas") — the lights and decorations on Mr. Boddy's house don't look too extravagant, but then it turns out he spent a million dollars on the Christmas tree ornaments. - Attributed to Jeff Foxworthy: "If your Christmas decorations are bigger than your house, you might be a redneck!" - In the Greater Tuna sequel A Tuna Christmas, there's a three-way battle for Tuna's best Christmas yard display between Vera, whose display includes a nativity scene with live sheep, Santa Claus, Bing Crosby, the Grinch, and Natalie Wood, Didi Snaveley's pie pan Christmas tree lit by surplus military floodlights that causes retina damage if looked at for too long, and Helen and Ineda's 'All I Want for Christmas': two life-sized cowboy mannequins stuffed inside gift sacks. \|\|Helen and Ineda win.\|\| - While not shown, one strip of Helpdesk had one of the technicians tell a teammate that every year his parents make the nativity scene they set up in the yard more elaborate. The descriptions ultimately end with "when they added Herod slaying the male children of Israel, the neighbors called the cops". - A Charlie Brown Christmas: Snoopy gives his doghouse the decorative overkill treatment and wins first prize in the local newspaper's Christmas decoration contest. - In early seasons of The Simpsons, Flanders put up really elaborate Christmas decorations, including mechanized Santas, lots of lights, etc. - There's a Mickey Mouse short where Mickey and Mortimer competed against each other about Christmas decorations — it got to the point that it put out all of the city lights and destroyed their houses. They compromised only when a signboard behind them displayed "Peace on Earth", and mediated by sharing gifts... which turned out to be boxing gloves designed to hit the recipient. - Goof Troop shows that Goofy clearly went to the Clark Griswold school of decking the house. - The Kim Possible Christmas Episode begins with the lighting of the decorations at Kim's house, played up with dramatic donning of protective goggles and flipping a Big Electric Switch as if they're activating some mad-science experiment. The lights are so overwhelming that Ron is temporarily blinded as he arrives, and the Tweebs mention that they rerouted the Middleton power grid so they wouldn't overload it like they did last time. - In The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy's parents decorate the whole house, inner and outer, for the holiday, even changing paint on the walls. - The Whos at the beginning of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! even had a song about it: "Trim every blesséd needle on the blesséd Christmas tree." "Christmas come tomorrow. Trim you, trim me!"	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverTheTopChristmasDecorations
Overreacting Airport Security - TV Tropes " Many airports have signs telling us to avoid humorous remarks... For instance, never tell a ticket agent, 'As a matter of fact, I DID accept items from persons unknown to me! A nice man in a chadar gave me this awesome luggage freshener with a clock attached!' Federal regulations require them to have no idea you're joking as they riddle your body with bullets. " So you're off to see the Honorary Uncle in New Jersey, and your flight leaves in 15 minutes. As you get to the terminal, you bend down to tie your shoe which has come undone. To your left, you hear someone scream something about a shoe bomb, and instants later, 20 security guards have dogpiled on you NFL style. Minutes later, you've been strip-searched and have to justify the fact that you have a pair of scissors in your carry-on bag. You have encountered the Overreacting Airport Security. Depending on the media, you can pretty much guarantee that any instance of this will have someone show up with a handheld scanner, complete with the iconic chirping noise playing when in use. In the wake of 9/11, airport security in the United States has been ramped up significantly, and while random luggage checks, X-ray machines, and Metal Detector Checkpoints have been routine for a while, some feel that it reached ridiculous levels when water bottles and nail clippers were banned from flights. Many feel security is too paranoid in the modern day, and as a result, tend to drive or take Amtrak instead. note : Amtrak even started joking about this trope, putting up advertising in airports saying that it's okay for train passengers to wear mismatched socks, because they're not required to take their shoes off. This trope combined with the arrival of High Speed Rail and the growing awareness of the environmental impact of air travel has also spelled the end of "commute" flights on many corridors in Europe and Asia. This phenomenon has become infamous, and in fiction, it's almost always Played for Laughs and Exaggerated. May involve He's Got a Weapon! or Police Are Useless (see also Suicide by Cop), as well as the security having Skewed Priorities in particularly extreme cases. Not to be confused with Overacting Airport Security. ## Examples: - An advertisement has a guy explaining to airport security that his phone is so powerful, it's basically a computer. Comically Missing the Point, they respond with a curt "Which is it? You seem to be changing your story...", ending with an implication that he's about to be strip-searched. - In Zatch Bell!, a minor villain sets off a metal detector and is hauled away. Meanwhile, two other people are hauled away because they "look funny." - Excel♡Saga has a Funny Background Event where a tank drives through a metal detector without a second glance, but a man wearing nothing but underwear is dragged offscreen by security guards. - In Steins;Gate, the special 25th episode OVA has the members of the Future Gadget lab coming to Los Angeles to visit Kurisu and attend a RaiNet battle tournament. While passing through customs, Okabe's poor English means that when the airport attendant asks the purpose of his visit, he responds by whipping out a "manifesto" and yelling a bunch of stuff about being a Mad Scientist and causing chaos to invade. One Gilligan Cut later, he's being escorted away in handcuffs. - In Happy Heroes and the Magical Lab episode 5, Careless S. is helping out at the airport's security scanner when the security machines aren't working forces people to check baggage for dangerous items manually. Doctor H. comes along with a box of milk cartons, and Careless S. has him drink all those cartons to prove they're just milk. - Fantastic Four: The Thing is told he can't bring nail clippers on an airplane because they might be dangerous. He gives the guy a magnificent "are you kidding me" look and they let him through. - Spider-Man and Aunt May were traveling through an airport to visit Mary Jane in California when they discovered his webshooters in one of the bags. At this point, Aunt May still knew that Peter was Spider-Man, so she bluffed the agents by claiming that the webshooters were something her gynecologist had her using (and looked like she was about to give them a detailed description of their use). The agents hurriedly packed the webshooters back up, but then one of them rebuked Peter for having, you guessed it, nail clippers. - In Samowar in Atlantis, Björn encounters them on his return from Judea, where he "overslept" quite interesting times. Things didn't escalate, as Björn didn't hesitate to open his suitcase with a big samovar, a tea cooker, and he knew too well what happened, but he still found their faint of heart puzzling and quite unprofessional. - Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa: King Julien tries to keep Mort off the flight by shouting "Watch out! He's got scissors and hand cream!" The guards, who had just been lounging until that moment, dogpile on him. Of course, when Mort crawls out of the dogpile, he's carrying scissors! - The Ronnie Johns Half Hour has a sketch where Chopper has to go through airport security. After making numerous terrorism jokes involving his nail clippers, he throws a tea towel over a dark-skinned man and accuses him of being a terrorist. The airport security officers cart the innocent man away and Chopper gets on his flight. His plan was successful because "they're always gonna pin it on some poor bloke who looks like an Arab." - In The Muppets Christmas special Letters to Santa, Fozzie is told by a security guard that telling bad jokes on an airport terminal is against security regulations. After Fozzie tells him that he has better jokes and takes them out to show him, the guard shouts "He's got index cards!" and poor Fozzie is tackled and taken away. - In the first episode of Bones, Brennan gets accosted by security (who didn't initially identify themselves, so she beat them up), but it turns out it was just Booth messing with her. - It gets better: One of the guards searches her carry-on bag... and finds a human skull. - A subplot was scripted for Friends in which Chandler, en route to his honeymoon with Monica, makes a joke about bombs at airport security, but is hauled in and interrogated. The subplot had to be quickly scrapped and replaced, because it was due to air mere weeks after 9/11. - In the Drake & Josh made for TV movie, Drake And Josh Go Hollywood, Drake and Josh put their sister Megan on the wrong plane. After they discover this, the two attempt to run onto the plane and get her before it takes off. They are stopped by security. Afterwards, the boys are released and one of the officers tells them that they take airport security "very seriously", to which Josh voices his concern on whether or not the strip search was really necessary. - One episode of The Big Bang Theory has Raj bemoan that, as a foreigner, he cant remember the last time he got through airport security without a cavity search. - On an episode of Modern Family, Manny, who is age 11, is questioned by the Homeland Security Department because his name appears on the "do not fly list". From his and his mother's reactions, this isn't the first time this has happened. - On Would I Lie to You?, Lee Mack once claimed that he received a strip search at Miami Airport after making a joke about Ronald Reagan. \|\|It wasn't true. He went on to complain about the show forcing him to come up with a plausible joke on the fly.\|\| - Double Subverted in Monty Python's Flying Circus with the watch smuggler sketch. The guard refuses to recognise the smuggler's obvious (and confessed) guilt. Then at the end, he arrests an obviously innocent clergyman. - An episode of 7th Heaven has two characters held up and frustrated by airport security. It doesn't help when, in their frustration, one of them sarcastically mentions having a bomb on their person, which results instantly in outright detaining. They're let go but warned that they have to take every threat seriously regardless of how obvious the sarcasm is. - Inverted in Community, where the security agents look through Abed's stuff before he's done anything, but eventually let him get away with making a joke about a bomb on a show that was aired across campus. - A mild example in the Lie to Me pilot, where Lightman is at the airport with Foster and carrying a briefcase. He is waiting in line at a security checkpoint and steps out to look past the line (possibly to see how long he'd have to wait). He is immediately approached by a female security officer who asks him to step aside and open his briefcase. He does and reveals that it's full of cash. He then proceeds to question her about what clued her in that something was up and reveals that the whole thing is an impromptu audition for her to join the Lightman Group. The cash is a starting bonus. She becomes a regular cast member. - A rail version on Gavin & Stacey, when Gavin decides at the last minute to bite the bullet and propose to Stacey before she gets the train home, and jumps the barrier to do so. He ends up getting held at gunpoint by multiple transport police when he reaches into his jacket for something and just manages to get the proposal out before he's tackled. - Saturday Night Live: - Allegations about the physicalness of security procedures put into place by the Transportation Security Administration in November 2010 were parodied with this sketch. - John Mulaney's "Airport Sushi" musical sketch features a weird guy in pajamas (Jake Gyllenhall) singing (to the tune of "Defying Gravity") about how he wants the TSA to search him and his... "cavity." - In the Australian Border Security, an entire section of Sydney International Airport is cleared and shut down because an x-ray scanner revealed a grenade in a suitcase. It turns out to be a belt buckle, which is then confiscated. The thing is, this is fairly justified - it's now heavily advised against bringing anything which looks like a weapon, especially anything which looks like an explosive, because the X-Ray machine could set off the real thing in certain situations. This can also cause massive delays to prevent anyone from being killed but could cause hundreds of people to miss their flights if it happens. - Played for laughs in one episode of NCIS, where the team grabs a terrorist trying to leave the country by staking out an airport and catching him in the airport security line. As the perp is taken away, DiNozzo holds up the man's water bottle and calls out "When say no fluids beyond this point, we mean it!" - One Foot in the Grave: In the first episode of Season 2, this happens to Victor offscreen; when an airport customs official asked him how he was today, he replied that he was "fine apart from the crack in [his] bottom". (He suffers from an anal fissure.) Apparently the drugs officers then spent two and a half hours searching for it. (It's described in more detail in the novelisation, which observes that saying it wasn't a pleasant affair would be "like saying a rhinoceros was not a set of fitted wardrobes".) - For Better or for Worse: - The family gets in trouble when the kids play with toy ray guns, which no one in their right mind would confuse for real weapons. Luckily, a more reasonable security officer defuses the situation. - In another strip, April has all her belongings searched when they find a pair of nail scissors in her bag. - A FoxTrot strip also has the Fox family get busted because Jason packed several toy guns. When asked why he did so, Jason answers his dad just told him to not pack nail clippers. - Generally averted if not inverted in the comic strip Drabble. Ralph Drabble is an airport security man, and while he and his coworkers often annoy passengers, they're largely out to amuse themselves. - Cabin Pressure: At the end of the second episode, Captain Martin Crieff, feeling flush with success after getting through a situation with airport paramedics, starts getting overconfident and picks an argument with airport security after they try confiscating his nose-hair trimmer, including bringing up the fire ax on the jet, and the fact he could crash the jet if the mood takes him, even as his co-pilot and boss are telling him to shut up. He gets arrested. - In one episode of Mitch Benn's Crimes Against Music, Mitch is planning to tour America but is stopped at airport security because he's on a list of un-American satirists. When he tries to demonstrate that he's going to sing nice songs, they panic. "He's reaching for the guitar!" - Robin Williams riffed on this in his HBO special Robin Williams: Live on Broadway (which aired less than a year after 9/11): "Airport security used to be like, (imitates someone going through a metal detector) BEEP! 'Okay, get on the plane. What's that? Oh, that's a gun. Okay, get on the plane.' You could carry a four-inch blade on a plane. That's about that long. (demonstrates) Now, you can't even take a nail-clipper on a plane. What, are they afraid you're gonna go 'ALL RIGHT! Hand over the plane or the bitch loses a cuticle! I have a nail file! I can be irritating!'" - Dara Ó Briain tells a story about a guy who is planning to ask his girlfriend to marry him on their vacation and thus hesitates to open that one little black box when he's asked to, leading to a showdown and eventually a proposal in the security line. - Magic, but close enough. Penn & Teller sell metal cards inscribed with the Bill of Rights after their Las Vegas shows to help make a point; they think this is one of those anvils that needs dropping, at least. - Hannibal Buress has a bit saying that nowadays it's probably easier to get cocaine on a plane than a bottle of water. - Jeff Foxworthy mentions how the list of items that are forbidden on airplanes includes leaf blowers and Coleman lanterns. "So if you are an international yardman who likes to work nights, you are S.O.L., buddy." - Jeff Dunham - One sketch with Walter has them explain how they once pranked a TSA agent who asked him to open the case Walter was in. So Jeff opened the case and Walter promptly went, "Hey, shut the damn door!" (audience laughs, Walter continues in a vaguely Indian accent) "'I do not want to go to Los Angeles!' We were detained. Those airline guys have no sense of humor." - Another opener has Jeff commenting about an overreacting airport security system. He went through security where they had to hand-check things rather than an automated process, so they have to pick-and-choose who to search, and "apparently [Jeff] looked like a terrorist with a trunk." Point A: the guard pulls out Peanut where other passers-through can see. Point B: he swabs Peanut's butt, instead of somewhere more reasonable. Point C: when the swab goes in the machine, the alarm goes off and Jeff finds himself against the wall, receiving a background check, getting his ID inspected. Jeff: What the hell was on Peanut's butt that labelled me as a potential terrorist? Guard: Plastic explosive. [...] The machine sometimes mistakes lotion for that... - One of the black cards in Cards Against Humanity is "TSA guidelines now prohibit _____ on airplanes." Depending on which white cards are played that round, you might find straight examples ("A really cool hat" is dangerous how, exactly?) or inversions (What took us so long to ban "Kamikaze pilots"?). - xkcd did one on this. A guy and his wife are stopped by the TSA with the guy explaining to the officer that his laptop battery contained as much stored power as a hand grenade and if it went off, then there would be a pretty bad explosion. As the man is being arrested, he exclaims, "You can't arrest me if I prove your rules inconsistent!", which just goes to show he doesn't really understand how people work. - Least I Could Do used this as the cap to an Escalating Prank War between main character Rayne and his Jerkass brother Eric. After weeks worth of material of the two trying to outdo each other, when Eric is leaving Rayne tricks him into saying bomb in an airport. Eric immediately recognizes his mistake and congratulates Rayne on the cleverness of it as he's led away by security. Link. - Ozy from Ozy and Millie doesn't get dogpiled, but he does have all his fur shaved off because his name happened to pop up on a list. - When the cast of Concession go on a trip, the TSA's reactions might have been justified, what with Rick hitting on a female agent, Matt having a baggie of something green (catnip, and not his), and Joel packing a whip, handcuffs, and a bunch of dildos. - Carry On: Corporal Taffy is having a hard time at the metal detector. - Sluggy Freelance: Torg gets tackled by the TSA and sent to Guantanamo after they overhear him trying to talk Riff out of blowing up his ex-employer's offices. Fortunately he gets released pretty quickly thanks to his Viking heritage. - Code MENT has this exchange: Lelouch: I got stuck at the airport. Diethard: You haven't left yet? Lelouch: No, I told a TSA agent my underwear was the bomb. Diethard: Why would you tell him your underwear is a bomb? Lelouch: I didn't say it was a bomb, I said it was the bomb. Now I can't go . - In All Hail King Julien "Empty is the Head" Clover puts up a security checkpoint in front of King Julian's air plane and searches everyone. Anyone even remotely suspicious gets an intense security examination by Mort who puts up a rubber glove up his head. Even lemurs that are just passing by are getting searched. - On King of the Hill, Hank was bringing a turkey to Montana for Thanksgiving with Peggy's family, but it got the attention of the bomb-sniffing dogs, so the bomb squad blew it up. - South Park: - The airport security in the episode "The Entity". They Killed Kenny Again for carrying a nail clipper and motivated Mr. Garrison to invent an alternative form of cross-country transportation (which got banned by the government to protect the airlines). - Parodied in "Reverse Cowgirl" with the Toilet Safety Administration. - Bojack Horseman: Todd gets trapped inside Bojack's suitcase. The TSA agent watching the x-ray machine ignores the bag containing Todd and a bag full of guns... but sets off a full lockdown when she finds a small bottle of shampoo. - The Simpsons: One episode has Bart and Lisa distract airport security in order to get onto a plane by having Lisa loudly declare she's going into a lounge she doesn't have the proper pass for. Two guards draw assault rifles to deal with one eight-year-old girl. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Three's a Crowd", one line in Discord's song goes "Take tweezers out of my valise" while being checked by airport security. And in the background you can see a pony with bracelets unable to go past the metal detector. - Inside Job: Even the Shadow Government has to go through the TSA, which is depicted as a bunch of bitter control freaks who claim to be a branch of the military and detain Glenn for saying they're not. But when they try torturing his friends to make him say they're a branch of the military, Glenn demonstrates why they're not.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverreactingAirportSecurity
Overused Copycat Character - TV Tropes So many, there's a version out to kill her other versions. "I am the result of Hideaki Anno failing to make my character unsettling, and instead my very archetype was copied repeatedly." Basically, when a character has been copied enough times, that works start making jokes about how often the character is copied. Let's say Bob the Slayer is the Breakout Character in a hit film. Then just about every similar movie uses characters like Bob The Slayer, and then all the comics, and all video games, and even original characters made by gamers playing games with Character Customization. This trope comes into play when a work mocks about how Bob the Slayer always shows up. It could be that a work has a joke about how every hero in the realm is now a copy of Bob the Slayer. Or it could be that everyone is going as Bob the Slayer for Halloween. Or Alice is writing a show, and when strapped for characters, she gets lazy and writes a copy of Bob The Slayer. Now of course this isn't saying the original character is bad. In fact, often the reason for this happening in the first place is that the original character is good. A Sub-Trope of Fountain of Expies. Compare Captain Ersatz, Expy, Copy Cat Sue, Follow the Leader, Serial Numbers Filed Off. Contrast Public Domain Character, Historical Domain Character. - Wolverine - He got enough imitators in Image Comics, when it first started, for magazines such as Wizard Magazine to joke about it. - Wolverine has been copied so many times in Marvel Comics themselves (though since they own the character, they can make them different versions of Wolverine instead of expies) that they've parodied it at least twice: - In an issue of Excalibur, the team travels to a dimension that's basically the Marvel Universe with the craziness turned up to 11, and at one point see a line of different versions of Wolverine practicing his catchphrase while waiting to audition to be the "real" Wolverine. - Later, in an issue of Exiles, a book about a rotating cast of characters from different dimensions being assembled to Set Right What Once Went Wrong throughout The Multiverse, the only information available about a particular "what went wrong" is that only Wolverine could solve it, so an entire team is assembled consisting of different versions of Wolverine. During the mission, they discover that they are not even the first such team, and encounter the remains of dozens of other versions of Wolverine from teams that failed. - Phil Foglio mocks the Trenchcoat Brigade in Stanley and His Monster, by having the latest John Constantine expy claim it's like an assembly line. - Parodied in one chapter of the Kingdom Hearts fanfic Those Lacking Spines, where the "heroes" fight a guy named "Jeffiroth", with the implication that he is to be the first of many similar Copycat Sues. - This Superman fancomic mocks how often "Superman but evil" has been done, including by DC Comics themselves. (From the timing, the movie they're discussing seems to be Brightburn.) - In the Super Smash Bros. fanfic Remake, one of Cloud's personality problems is that (due to the Follow the Leader VII ripoffs of the 90s) he assumes other video game protagonists are ripoffs of him, even when they're pretty different. He makes a withering comment about Ike, followed by an argument with him, about this; and then accuses Bayonetta of it, which causes her to point out that it's not like he's completely original himself. - In the blog post Adventuring Party Politics: The Campaign is Getting Ugly, apparently McCain rips off Aragorn: Obama: Well, maybe some people got tired of the grim and squinty "Matterhorn, son of Marathon" shtick you keep doing. Dude, could you be any less original? - In one of the Thursday Next books it's revealed that a large group of "generics" (fictional characters that haven't developed any character yet) were being stored in The Once and Future King, and they all imprinted on T.H. White's version of Merlin. Eventually, they were relocated to every fantasy novel ever. - Another group of generics were stored in Rebecca, and imprinted on Mrs. Danvers. They're even referred to as "Danverclones" at least once. - Critical Role: Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting: The adventure hook "A Lesson in Tropes" pokes fun at the D&D cliche of making a character based off the fantasy hero Drizzt. The hook consists of a dark elf ranger with a panther pet revealing himself heartless spy planning to assassinate an elven official with little more than a dashing smile and his beautiful eyes. - The Dark Elf Trilogy has Drizzt Do'Urden, the Chaotic Good dual-scimitar-wielding Drow elf ranger of the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons & Dragons. This trope used to be called Drizzt Syndrome because it's a long joke for fans that some players like to play thinly veiled copies of him. - This is explicitly lampshaded on page 12 of the 3.5 Edition supplemental rulebook Dungeon Master's Guide II: - Icing on the cake? Even Salvatore himself reacted on this trend by saying he "fears for the integrity of the evil drow race as antagonist". Talk about Fan Dumb... Wizards does a brilliant lampshading of this in an advertisement of his book series — the ad is set out like a 4th Edition power card, and the "additional effects" bar says, "You'll probably want to make a character named Drizzt." - Paizo, creators of Pathfinder, actually has stated that one of the goals of the Second Darkness adventure path and their portrayal of the drow in general was to redeem the drow in the eyes of players. And by redeem, they meant recast them as a menacing, terrifying, demon-worshipping race willing to exterminate the surface dwellers for their own benefit. - An additional source of Fan Dumb comes from players who react to Driz'zt's overwhelming popularity by hating the character and by extension the drow or Salvatore. - A Running Gag among players of D&D is that the Drow are an Always Chaotic Evil race populated by nothing but Chaotic Good individuals, due to the absurd number of players who make Drizzt Clones. - Rather humorously lampshaded in Baldur's Gate II, where your party will eventually run into Drizzt himself. Generally, you can use the opportunity to either ask for his aid on your assault on a vampire compound or just murder him and his party for their awesome gear. If you're playing an elf named Drizzt and have a low enough reputation, however, you never get the chance — he'll simply challenge you to a duel for the honor of his name. If you use a cheat code to give yourself Drizzt's equipment at the start of the game (or if you obtained it in the original game and imported the character), when you finally meet he eventually says, "Wait... I recognize that sword..." and attacks you. - Dynasty Warriors: Gundam had a field day with all the Char Clones running around, both in making them fight and in making fun of them. At one point, Duo Maxwell sarcastically asks "How many people with goofy masks could there possibly be?" (answer: at least six) and even Char himself observing one of his more direct copies (in this case, Full Frontal) and dryly commenting that there are "some things you never notice until you look in from the outside." - The Fate Series has a bit of a problem with this. - Many characters in the franchise share a physical resemblance to Saber/Artoria Pendragon, who besides having variants of the original (and one literal clone in Mordred) also has several unrelated characters who share the same face. Referenced in Fate/Grand Order with characters having a hidden attribute called "Saberface", that causes some enemies to react differently to them. Then there's Mysterious Heroine X, who is definitely not Artoria hunting down her clones. - This was even followed up years later when Mysterious Heroine X got new variants, one of whom is another literal clone (whose sole purpose is just to take down Mysterious Heroine X) and the other an Older and Wiser version who had to stop hunting them and get a job because the Saberfaces all got eclipsed in popularity in-universe. All of them get on pretty amicably. - Before FGO, there was the Sakura Saber incident, where the cast of the Koha-Ace gag magazine proudly announced that they were introducing a new character, designed by Takashi Takeuchi (the main artist of Fate/stay night) himself... only to freak out when said design turned out to be a slightly off-color Saber wearing a kimono. She was eventually fleshed out into a full-blown character (as Souji Okita of The Shinsengumi) but the jabs at her looks never ceased. - Lord El-Melloi II Case Files plays this for tragedy. Gray, a far-off descendant of the Pendragon lineage, \|\|was transformed into a copy of Artoria by outside circumstances, and as a result was treated as a possible vessel for the return of the Once and Future King.\|\| She is deeply unhappy about being an Artoria lookalike. She bonds with her teacher, Waver Velvet from Fate/Zero, over their mutual hatred of Artoria's face. - Lampshaded as a diss during Fate/Grand Carnival when Artoria and Nero (who has the distinction of being the first Saberface created) clash and the former insults Nero as a "franchisee" and Gawain piles on with calling Nero a Palette Swap. Nero is left chomping at the bit, especially as her teammate Elisabeth agrees with them. - In Fate/Extella Link, Artoria Pendragon is once again mistaken for Jeanne d'Arc — a Saberface introduced in Fate/Apocrypha — by Gilles de Rais, to her exasperated fury. After she chases him off, Nero — who witnessed the battle — hits on Artoria, saying that the King of Knights' beauty is a close match for her own and they should spend some alone time in her private Roman baths. Artoria promptly flies into a rage and starts channelling Mysterious Heroine X. - Final Fantasy: - Dissidia Final Fantasy has Kefka complain that Sephiroth, one of many later FF villains heavily inspired by him, is "just another sadist with a god complex... Like that's something special!" - Mobius Final Fantasy has several jokes pointing out Wol's clear inspiration from Kazushige Nojima's previous Final Fantasy protagonists: - Gilgamesh rattles off details of the "Warriors of Light" from several other worlds ("not to mention side-stories"), before pointing out that Wol reminds him of several of them already. Wol, a moody, Deadpan Snarker amnesiac swordsman who secretly has a kind heart and has to slowly learn to show it, suggests Gilgamesh should go and talk to a wall or something because he's not interested. - Wol eventually gets to meet Cloud and they end up getting on pretty well. Later, Echo suggests that Cloud and Wol are so spookily alike, it's like they're brothers or something. By their next encounter, they're so in sync that they're able to finish off each other's sentences. - Gems of War has dark elves, and several of them have descriptions which lampshade their resemblance to Drizzt. - Intentionally averted in Halo games; player tags of "I17", "117", "S117", and the like are not allowed to be used. - In Street Fighter IV, Zangief complains about the overabundance of Fireballs. - The Order of the Stick: - A Drizzt Expy, aptly named Zz'dtri, shows up as a member of the Linear Guild. Vaarsuvius points this out during a battle, and lawyers drag the copycat off-screen. Nale earlier claims that now all Drow became Chaotic Good rebels, "yearning to throw off the reputation of their evil kin". ("Wait, evil kin? Didn't you just say they were all Chaotic Good?" "Details.") Zz'dtri also claims that dual-wielded scimitars are "standard issue", presumably meaning for all drow. It's also subverted since he actually does turn out to be a normal drow. \|\|Of course, Zz'dtri later got off scot-free by declaring himself a parody of Drizzt and went back to secretly work for Nale.\|\| - In Invaders From the Fourth Dimension, a bonus story appearing in Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales, Belkar makes the rather bold claim that the 4th Edition ranger is based on Overused Copycat Characters of himself. - Goblins also skewers the idea of every drow character being a Drizzt clone, gleefully, with three joining the PC party at the very beginning, including Drasst Don'tsue, Drizzt's half-brother. - 8-Bit Theater also has an evil dual-wielding drow ranger called Drizz'l, though he moved away from this after his first appearance. - In Knights of Buena Vista, Dick is told to tweak his Player Character when Walter catches on that he's trying to play Han Solo. - An accidental case of this occurs in Looking for Group. Cale, full name Cale'anon Vatay, is an Elf, has a black panther named Sooba who seems to magically appear out of nowhere when called, is obviously a dual-wielding Ranger, and is Good (albeit Stupid Good) while the rest of his race is (ostensibly) Always Chaotic Evil. Sohmer, the comic's writer, had never read even one Forgotten Realms book in his life (instead basing Cale on the Hunter class and Blood Elf race from World of Warcraft), and wondered who the hell this "Drizz't Do'urden" guy was that everyone kept saying Cale was a brilliant parody of. Since learning about Drizz't, he's happily accepted the similarities and doesn't mind at all if people see Cale as a deconstruction or parody of Drizz't in the slightest, even actually playing it up from time to time. - "Clichequest", the MMORPG in The Noob, has several dozen players named various variations of the different members of the fellowship. At one point, we see Elfboro, where almost everyone is named Legolas one way or the other ("Oh, you're looking for Leg0las"). Even the Idiot Hero tried to name his character "Aragorn" in the first strip. - GOG.com pokes fun at the phenomenon. In one screenshot for Eye of the Beholder 2 (7th from the left) an elven magician is named "NOT DRIZZT". - In Critical Role campaign 2, the first firbolg character to appear is Pumat Sol, an NPC who GM Matthew Mercer plays with a laid-back personality and Canadian accent. The players were crazy about the character, to the point that when Taliesin Jaffe lost his character and had to come back with a new one, he came back as Caduceus Clay, a firbolg very similar to Pumat, and leaving Pumat the baseline for what firbolgs are like in the whole setting. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic makes fun of how, twice now, they've introduced a new powerful unicorn lacking in social skills whose name is a synonym for "Twilight" and "Sparkle", and sent her on adventures to learn about friendship in "Triple Threat" when Ember casually mistakes Starlight Glimmer for Twilight Sparkle and then bluntly declares they both look the same and she can't tell them apart. Naturally, Twilight and Starlight are not amused by this.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverusedCharacterClone
Contractual Gag - TV Tropes A Running Gag which may risk wearing out its welcome but is always associated with a particular situation; the audience expects it whenever that situation comes up, but may not always find it as funny after a while. Removing the gag for a period of time will still make the audience ask where it went. Usually not put in every episode, but frequently enough it becomes associated with the show as a whole. Writers may even start to make increasingly complicated setups for them just to keep the novelty. If it's regularly being Lampshaded, then it's also an Overused Running Gag. See also Character Exaggeration. ## Examples: - In Home Improvement, Wilson's un-shown lower face became this. Originally, he just stood behind a fence on stage. As the show progressed, Wilson was shown out of the house more and set designers went to town finding ways to keep the portion of his face hidden with props. In all these cases, he was never shown, being obscured by at least three props in the scene as he moved around the set. Even at the final curtain call, actor Earl Hindman came out holding a miniature fence in front of his face (he did move it, though). Hindman was even known to do out of character appearances, for instance interviews about his experience working on the show, with his face obscured. - In The IT Crowd the apathetic Roy will always answer the phone with "Hello, IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?" In later seasons they progress to "is it plugged in?", and later still "I'm sick of saying that... what do you WANT?!" - This was actually cited by Brent Gore as the reason he left the show California Dreams in its third season as his character had been reduced from the focus character of the show to a one-trick pony who mostly showed up to whine 'Aww man' when things didn't go his way. - Charles Schultz of Peanuts said he was in a bit of a bind regarding the strip's annual, seasonal gags like Lucy and the football, and Linus and the Great Pumpkin. Some people complained the gags were stale, but even more people complained if he tried to skip them. - In the Tsukiuta stage play series, the second act of every production is a dance live performed by the idol main cast, and in the beginning of the act, the members all introduce themselves briefly. Hirai Yuuki, who took over as Fuduki Kai from episode 9, has done the following gag at every performance he's been in at least through episode 13: he starts by giving a standard sort of introduction, then stops as if thinking of something... then he puns some word he'd just been saying into the name of the venue. He then runs back and forth across the stage, puts his arm around someone else's shoulders, and/or shouts "Sooo-re!" ("Thaaaat's it!"). It's incredibly cheesy, and he even seems to cringe at himself. When he tries to skip it, the other Procellarum members don't let him, especially since Washio Shuuto returned as Haduki You. - Metal Gear: The cardboard box started out as a really overpowered gag item in Metal Gear and has made an appearance in every game since, as it is now a signature item of the series, though changes in gameplay mean it has become progressively less and less useful. It even makes an appearance in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which isn't even a stealth game. - In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! Bob's roof has to get destroyed at least once per story arc. Bonus points if it gets destroyed, fixed, and re-destroyed in a single storyline. - On Usenet, the word "pred" (for "predictable", naturally enough) denotes a response to a topic that is a) completely unoriginal and b) nonetheless required. - In Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Space Ghost would often abuse his Destructo Ray to blast the guest or Zorak when he tires of them. - Much Family Guy humor is based on Non Sequitur asides that play off the characters' metaphors. Occasionally, an aside doesn't happen, causing the character to flinch, "Oh? We're not doing one? Right?" - In Pinky and the Brain, Brain would often ask, "Pinky! Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" before a zany scheme, prompting Pinky to agree, before spouting a goofy non-sequitur. - They occasionally turned it on its head, with Pinky thinking the same thing once, then discarding it as too absurd, and another time they had an entire conversation about it. - In one episode told from Pinky's point of view, the viewer sees his train of thought leading up to his non-sequitur, and it makes perfect sense. - Kenny's frequent deaths in South Park, one of the original hooks for audience attention. The creators quickly grew tired of the joke, however, and went to extreme lengths to lampshade or subvert the joke. They eventually left Kenny dead for a whole season, then brought him back and only killed him off occasionally. In a later episode, it's revealed that Kenny actually remembers being killed, but his friends don't. His mother gives birth to him again each time, and he matures to his current age overnight. - Phineas and Ferb is a show where the great deal of the humour comes from the formulaic plot and its Once an Episode running-gags and catch-phrases. To keep them fresh, the show will constantly tweak, rotate or make them pointedly absent in funny ways.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverusedGag
Over-the-Top Roller Coaster - TV Tropes "Corkscrewin' round the interstate, with peanut butter and rubber snakes..." Roller coasters are very popular rides, mainly because they give you the thrill of high speed and danger, while actually being relatively safe (depending on where you go). And to capture this thrill, designers try to make them as tall and/or crazy as they can. Now imagine what you can do without having to follow any laws, not even physics. In fiction, roller coasters tend to be a lot more extreme and dangerous, often times they go so high that the riders take forever to get to the top, and once there, they're high above the clouds! (Or all the way in low Earth orbit!) The turns tend to be really continuous loops, sharp turns, and impossible corners that would derail any real life cars. This is purely a Rule of Funny (or Rule of Cool) trope, since this sort of thing could never happen in Real Life (or can it?). Compare Absurd Altitude. ## Examples: - In My Ridonculous Race, while in Japan, the Ice Dancers ride the famous Fujiyama coaster at Fujikyu Highland Theme Park. The ride to the top is described as going so high that they pass demoiselle cranes, bar-headed geese, and two people in a hot air balloon. - "Devil's Flight" from Final Destination 3 is insane. A 400-foot high coaster with loops, corkscrews, hills and dives that would make anybody sick. It's also poorly maintained and ends up derailing, setting up the events of the film. - One of the Phule's Company books takes place on a world whose hat is really liking roller coasters, with an unfriendly competition between theme parks to build the one with the highest drop. Corrupt Politicians pass a law that no coaster can go higher than x off the ground (allegedly for safety reasons but really to preserve one park's claim on being the highest). Phule & co. build one bigger anyway - Ain't No Rule that the bottom of the roller coaster's drop has to be above ground, so they build one where the drop ends in an underground tunnel. - In Series 15 of the UK version of The Apprentice the teams are given the task of designing and marketing a roller coaster. Unison design an over-the-top roller coaster that breaks the world record for the fastest launch speed and the most loops, and use this as a selling point. However, when they present their idea to roller coaster experts they think that it wouldn't be enjoyable to ride, with one person commenting that the simulation they put together made them feel sick. In contrast, Empower design a more plausible roller coaster with an unusual gimmick in that it goes backwards, which is much more well-received by the experts. - At The Carnival: The aptly named "Colossal Coronary" is the biggest coaster at Hazard Park, big enough to pass clouds and an airplane. It's so big, in fact, \|\|they ran out of money to finish building it, which doesn't stop them from letting passengers on!\|\| - The Disney's Ultimate Ride series of games is a PC roller coaster simulator that lets you build your own coasters. Technically, it's supposed to teach you how real life roller coasters work and how to follow the same constraints that actual designers use, but nothing is stopping you from making a death trap with fifteen loops in a row and enough G-force to kill a person as well. - In the game Epic Coaster, the roller coaster must jump over large gaps in the track. Fail to do so, and the roller coaster will plunge to the ground. - Mad Panic Coaster for the original Playstation is made of this trope. You spend the entire game in a roller coaster, navigating it left and right as it speeds along, and trying not to fall over the side (thanks to an extreme case of No OSHA Compliance where the coaster literally doesn't have security railings), occasionally jumping to avoid obstacles and collecting coins. The twists and curves becomes increasingly hectic as the level progresses expectedly. - Can be done to an extent in RollerCoaster Tycoon. There are limits such as the track consisting of certain, realistic pieces, and the grid-based building system, but anything goes as long as the Roller Coaster reaches back to the station safely. Of course, if you do decide to make a ride over the top, it may suffer from high intensity and nausea ratings, which can lower its excitement rating, so nobody would want to ride it. - In Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland, Babs Bunny's stage takes place on one. This stage costs four tickets, and requires a great amount of memorization of when to jump, duck, and flip the car around to avoid having Babs get hit. - Danger Mouse: In "The Duel", Baron Greenback tricks DM and Penfold onto an insane roller coaster that launches their car into outer space at its apex. - In The Fairly OddParents!, most of the games in Adrenaland are like this, but the main attraction is 'The Heart Stopper', a roller coaster that extends to outer space and literally has ambulances waiting for the passengers at the end. - Subverted in * Johnny Test. Johnny wants to get into a roller coaster, and waits literally 12 hours to ride it. When his turn finally arrives, the roller coaster is so tall that it goes into the atmosphere, but when he falls the ride abruptly stops at the bottom of the peak and nothing else happens. Johnny: 'That's it?' - Phineas and Ferb: The titular characters build one of these in their backyard and into the city in the very first episode with a lot of impossible turns. And then it goes even further since, due to outside forces, the ride gets moved from its original position and they end derailing and bouncing around, ending in France, and even outer space. - The Rick and Morty* episode "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy" centers on a roller coaster that exists in a theme park protected by an immortality field, meaning no one in the park can die as long as the field is operational. Aside from the fact this means the coaster can be incredibly outlandishly dangerous, it has an added threat: the apex of the highest peak actually barely extends past the immortality field, a fact utilized for an assassination attempt. - In the first episode of Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko and Heffer ride a roller coaster at the carnival that goes through the clouds all the way into space (is there a trend here?), and when they come back down, the coaster is still under construction. - The Roger Rabbit Short "Roller Coaster Rabbit" has Roger and Baby Herman riding a roller coaster whose first drop is so high the entire globe is visible below. It then has a lot of insane turns and loops, and seems to last twice as long as the average roller coaster ride. - In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Roller Cowards", SpongeBob and Patrick ride on the Fiery Fist O'Pain at Glove World, which goes just above the surface (next to the island) and when it gets to the ground, it explodes. It also has a list of side effects: Crying, screaming, projectile vomiting, amnesia, spine loss, embarrassing accidents, uncontrollable gas and explosive diarrhea. - Only hypothetical, but Lithuanian artist Julijonas Urbonas designed the Euthanasia Coaster, a coaster with a 500 meter drop followed by 7 loops that would kill its passengers by limiting the oxygen supply to the brain.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverTheTopRollerCoaster
Boobs-and-Butt Pose - TV Tropes She got it good in the front and in the back! " [T]he only 'strong' in many 'strong female comic book characters' are the oblique muscles required to point their ass and boobs in the same direction." Often in fiction, a Ms. Fanservice character or model will be depicted in a pose with her back to the audience, but turning at the waist and often looking over her shoulder in the process. It's a common pose for a few reasons: - It lets you see the character's face. Having her look at the audience is more engaging. - It can be used to give a coy impression ("I see you back there...") or to make the character look mysterious. - Alternatively, it may be intended to invoke a submissive or vulnerable image. - Shows that the character is supple and limber. - As the name suggests, it lets you see the character's butt and chest at the same time, so both Butts and Boobs fans get what they want. If it's trying to be anatomically realistic, the "Boobs" part will usually be restricted to Sideboob. While this pose is possible to achieve in multiple variations in Real Life, in fiction it can get exaggerated to the point that the character's torso is almost pointing backward. If the fanservice is more blatant, she will probably be sticking her butt out and curving her spine vertically rather than merely twisting sideways. This is a longstanding trope that's a staple of fan service. In recent years, however, many see framing a woman with her butt and breasts facing the viewer as objectifying and as prioritizing sex appeal over badassery, especially since this is practically a women's only trope. Many of the less exaggerated poses are plausibly doable, but there are still also many examples of this trope that defy both physics and anatomy. This is primarily the reason why, in its more exaggerated forms, it's a popular pose with non-live action media. Compare Contrapposto Pose, Head-and-Hip Pose, Coy, Girlish Flirt Pose and Leg Cling. Also may be combined with Dynamic Akimbo, which is typically associated with manliness, which is why women may get framed with this trope so that they still look sexy. ## Examples: - Batman: Hush. Batman is chasing Catwoman across rooftops, and at one point she turns to look back at him while still keeping her behind (which of course is in a tight catsuit) pointed in his direction. Behind her is the Gotham skyline. - Much of the Disney Princess merchandise has some of the girls doing this, especially Aurora and Cinderella. - The Incredibles. Elastigirl is infiltrating the Supervillain Lair and encounters a mirror. She poses briefly in this manner, then sighs in exasperation, having put on some weight since her retirement as a superheroine. - The cover of Sabina Kane: Red-Headed Stepchild has the heroine in a standing form of this pose, with a gun stuck through her belt. - The cover for Warhammer 40,000 novel " Rise of the Ynnari: Wild Rider" shows the faction's leader Yvraine striking this pose with both her chest and rear in view, even though the latter is covered with a skirt. - In this clip, the English version of Carameldansen, one of the dancers must have a spine made of rubber to do some of the moves on the video. - Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda"◊, the cover of which shows her squatting with her back turned to the viewer, wearing only a thong. Minaj is also notable for popularizing an all-fours variation on this pose◊ in the same video, lifting up her butt while directly facing the viewer. - The redhead in white shorts takes this pose on the playfield for Breakshot, while the brunette adopts it on the sides of the backbox. - In Eight Ball, "Pinky" adopts this pose on one of the triangle bumpers. - The Machine does this on the side of JackBot's backbox, though she's standing up. - Seen on one of the girls on the "Babewatch" table of Pinball Illusions. - The backglass for Rollergames* features one of the "T-Bird Twins" (Jennifer and Kristine Van Galder) taking this pose. - Technically, Chun Li in Street Fighter II is adopting this pose in the backglass. Too bad the artwork is so atrocious it's a turn-off for most players. - The fourth edition of TRON: Legacy replaces the original backbox display with one featuring Quorra and Gem standing back-to-back in such a pose. - Spring from Sequinox does one when she notices Caiden taking pictures of the girls at the end of episode 2, mainly to try and conceal her real identity (since Hannah would never pose like that). - The original poster art for Sweet Charity was Gwen Verdon doing this pose wearing a Little Black Dress with sheer black tights, with her right arm on her hip and her left arm showing a character-important tattoo. - Darkstalkers: Felicia's victory portrait has her posing like this, turned enough that her butt and the front of her breasts are visible at the same time. - In KanColle, Teruzuki's standard pose is turned away while reaching back towards the player with her left arm, which with the help of her high rudder heels mostly accentuate her legs. - Rio has her back turned in Operator's Side's cover art, with her head turned towards the viewer and her breasts and butt in display. - The art of several blades in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 have this to varying degrees. Praxis, T-elos and Theory are the only ones putting any effort to pull this off while Agate shows a more realistic amount of boob in her from behind shot. Dahlia's breasts are just so large that any shot of her butt is automatically a boob & butt pose. - Commissioned Comic — "Tits, ass and lens flare!" - Parodied in Curvy with Starbreath, a female superhero who got a painful spine injury while doing this pose. - Girl Genius: - Grrl Power has this infrequently, with one strip in particular lampshading it, labeled as "Dabbler-Approved T&A Pose". - Gyno Star gets this treatment after being zapped by Alpha-Male/Male Gaze Man/The Objectifier. Mocked, of course. - Hark! A Vagrant: - A rare justified example in The Noordegraaf Files. The character in question is a Dryad, and therefore is completely naked. She can't be viewed from a front-on view (as her genitals and nipples would be visible) and a back view wouldn't show her face, so this is the pose the artist opted for. - Kevyn Andreyasn struck this pose while talking to Ch'vorthq during the "Old Habits Die Hard" arc of Schlock Mercenary's sixth book. - Mocked in Super Stupor with the Snow Owl, who has Green's Disease ("It's where all your joints are ball joints and you spasm into poses.") In one pose she manages to rotate her torso a complete 180. - In SwordCat Princess, this pose is used for varying effect; in this example, it is meant to underscore sexual "heat" between Kathryn and MacKnight, even as she uses a broken window to chop off his hand to recover her ring. In this example, to underscore Kathryn's ability to split her focus and fighting skill into different extremities simultaneously. - Tasteful Comics has a superhero "Boobs And Butt Always Visible Lass". Three guesses at her superpower. - "This needs to stop... and let me tell you why!" — an article by a martial artist and a contortionist from childhood, posted examples of these he says he cannot repeat, along with of photographed poses he can do. - Escher Girls is a Tumblr dedicated to warped female anatomy in comic books, and this pose is a common one there. Even the blog's favicon depicts a girl (Amy Rose) twisted like this. In fact, it's so common that they had to narrow down the definition — they only count it as a full Boobs And Butt Pose if you can see both boobs and both buttocks at once. Luckily, there are other tags for masterpieces like the page image, such as "serious swayback," "rubber spines," and "runaway breasts." - The Hawkeye Intiative: see "fan works" above. - Cashoo, a Tumblr user, posted a rebuttal to the aforementioned Tumblr blogs by physically demonstrating several plausible examples of "Boobs and Butt" poses which they say they felt no discomfort holding. They also provided anatomical references both male and female, for any artists interested in using similar poses. - Parodied in The Amazing World of Gumball's episode "The Comic". In the Laserheart comicbook, the titular character often turn his lower body at 180° so the reader can see his pecs and his butt. Gumball even comments that making such a pose is not possible. - Total Drama: Katie and Sadie dance together in hopes they'll get to represent their team at the talent show that evening in "Not Quite Famous". Towards the end, Katie has her butt turned to the camera while her upper torso is twisted far enough sideways that not just her boob is visible, but also her belly button.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverTheShoulderPose
Overranked Soldier - TV Tropes Creators often like to emphasize the importance of a military character by giving him a high rank. This is understandable, since one's first thought when seeing a character of high rank is that he must have gotten that far because of his merits, and there's a certain amount of Truth in Television to it. Since, for example, battlefield commissions and promotions have been given to soldiers who've distinguished themselves for great deeds and exemplary service, giving a character a high rank means they must have done something to earn it, right? However, writers can take this too far. WAY too far. Over-ranked Soldier refers to a character whose rank is, quite simply, impossible for him to possess. The character's rank (or postion on The Chain of Command) is so high, it breaks the audience's suspension of disbelief. While the creator might just mean to use the character's rank to show his importance to the work, it shows the creator did not research the plausibility of the character possessing said rank. This trope manifests in certain ways: - The character is too young: Improbable Age as it applies to the military. Quite simply, it'd be impossible for the character to possess the rank at such a young age. Even the most prodigious soldier still needs a certain time in service to possess certain ranks, and some ranks are only attainable after a lifetime of service and excellence. Oh, and the character being an Ensign Newbie does NOT justify this. After all, it's ENSIGN Newbie, not ADMIRAL Newbie. Note, however, that this reasoning mainly works in times of peace. During high-intensity wars, many of the high-ranked officers who aren't Soldiers at the Rear tend to die on the battlefield, even Generals, creating huge opportunities for promotion. Due to the very existence of the chain of command, even an inexperienced commander is better than no commander at all. See the below example of Napoleon Bonaparte who became a Major General at 25, because Revolutionary France needed commanders at all costs. - The character is too disruptive: The Military Maverick will always be an attractive character archetype to audiences, since we tend to root for guys with guts and attitude. However, this works best with characters who are, at best, in the low officer ranks, where he spends more time in the battlefield than in the war room. The armed forces frown on disrespect to the chain of command, and would not give a high rank to such a disruptive soldier, no matter how much of a badass he is. In fact, the soldier's antics would more realistically result in a demotion instead of a promotion. (Note that Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher, aka Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, is a Real Life exception to this rule, being an incredibly controversial sailor who bruised egos everywhere he went, in a Navy and a society almost notorious for their deference to the chain of authority, and still rose to the very top of the tree.) - The character is too incompetent: Another character type that is common in military media is a soldier who is high-ranked, yet is actually quite sucky at being a soldier or leader. Think of it as the military version of a Pointy-Haired Boss. In humorous media, this is all well and good, since it's just part of the absurdity of the setting, but in more serious fare, it makes the viewer wonder how the hell he got that far (but note that even military organizations are not immune to The Peter Principle). This is aggravated by the fact that rank is partly merit-based, so a soldier that sucks at a low rank will STAY at a low rank (or in most modern militaries, dismissed from service for not making the promotion list). This might be justifiable in historic settings though, when noblemen were given actual leadership positions (unlike the honorary ones they still get today) by virtue of being nobles or actually funding the troops, regardless of their expertise. - The character is actively dangerous/insane: This is a tricky one to deal with, because a character's lack of stability could be a sign of post-traumatic stress, which is completely plausible and sadly all too common, but this refers to a character who's obviously unstable and the chain of command doesn't do anything about it. If the character develops instability throughout the course of the story, it's completely plausible as long as it is addressed. If the character's instability is a regular part of the character and it is not specifically addressed in the work, it's this trope. - The character is not respected by his subordinates: Any soldier who attains a high rank gets there both by his merits and the merits of the soldiers under him. A soldier whose subordinates subvert his authority at every chance they get will not reach a high rank, because not being able to lead limits his advancement. Common in humorous media, and animosity between high-ranked soldiers and subordinates does happen, but when it is to an extent that the higher-ranked soldier is disrespected and made to look a fool, it breaks plausibility. - The position the soldier holds is way below their pay grade: Often, some officers are seen doing tasks more menial than their rank befits, or they are out in combat in situations that high ranking officers would normally not be in. In some cases, this stems from older wars up to World War II where generals would be very close to the battle lines (if not in the thick of them). In some modern cases, it's more about the impression held by some writers that any "important" job in the military must be held by a three or four star flag officer. See Outranking Your Job for examples of this. One thing to note: this trope does not refer to rank outside of the traditional structure followed by most of the world's armed forces. Honorary ranks, ranks based on privilege, or self-granted ranks do not count. A nobleman given a high military rank because of his high status, as unfortunate as it might be, is completely plausible, as are the extremely young appointments made during revolutions, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, promoted from major to général de brigade (major-general) at age 25, or to the inflationary handing-out of ranks such as by the Confederate government during The American Civil War (before 1860, the highest rank carried by an American soldier was lieutenant-general (three stars). Jefferson Davis started appointing full generals (four stars) shortly after the first major battle of the war). This trope is specifically about characters in fiction, within traditional military structure, that have a rank way beyond the realm of logic and possibility. Generally speaking, senior members of the British Royal Family hold military rank and Regimental commands, but these are strictly honorary - the real business of command is done by trained professionals and the royals are figureheads. Junior royals are expected to serve as junior officers in the Armed forces, and here their responsibilities and duties are consistent with rank. Prince Charles, for instance, commanded a Royal Navy inshore ship, HMS Hunstanton. (His father commanded a destroyer, with some distinction, in World War II, but that was before he married into the Royal Family. He died a Lord High Admiral, but that was an honorary rank.) Prince Andrew was a helicopter pilot in the Falklands War and was a full-time military officer for over 20 years; their brother Prince Edward wimped out of Royal Marines officer training (indicating that some standards apply to Royals as to ordinary joes); the current Duke of Kent served for 20 years on active duty. But older royals are ceremonial figureheads, not active soldiers and sailors. For instance, King George VI had generals' rank, but no generals' duties, in World War II (though he had served as a junior naval officer in World War I). Contrast Almighty Janitor, who is Underranked. Typically leads to The Main Characters Do Everything. ## Examples: - Irresponsible Captain Tylor: Justy Ueki Tylor is lazy, having joined the military so that he can retire with a fat pension check. He is also uncontrollable, issuing controversial and outright ridiculous orders to his crew, like "Do whatever you want." He had probably never even seen the cover of the USPF military's rulebook, considering how often Commander Star and Lieutenant Yamamoto have to bring them up. He's also all of twenty years old, and a Lieutenant Commander. The only reason he has that rank is because he rescued an old war hero from a hostage situation. This trope is subverted in that Tylor's irresponsibility does get him sent to an obscure section of the galaxy. Sheer luck is the only thing that ensures he regains his rank half the time. - Fullmetal Alchemist. All registered State Alchemists receive an automatic military rank of Major, regardless of their age, and afterward they can be promoted like a normal soldier. This is at least part of the reason that Roy Mustang is resented by several members of the High Command; at the time of the series, he's only 29 years old and already a full Colonel because he became a State Alchemist at the age of twenty. Interestingly enough, though, Ed is never addressed as "Major" and rarely treated as a superior officer. This is mostly because Ed doesn't hold a high opinion of the military and therefore tries not to play up his status; among other things, he forgoes the military uniform most State Alchemists use for his own trademark red coat. He also has stated that he doesn't really like the idea of people having to "kiss up" to him and would rather interact with others as equals. His low age and, er, stature, also make it easier for those aware of his rank to ignore it even if they are lower ranked soldiers. - Legend of the Galactic Heroes: - Reinhard von Lohengramm was made Fleet Admiral and placed in command of half the Imperial fleet at age 20. Though he had genuine battlefield accomplishments, high command constantly tossing him into dangerous missions and his sister being the Emperor's favorite concubine explained his extremely rapid promotion, it is still ridiculously young. Then he creates his own admiralty from officers loyal to him, leading to a group of Vice Admirals ranging from early 20s to mid 30s being commanded by the twenty-year-old brother of the Emperor's favorite concubine. Given the setting, though, it actually makes sense. - His archrival, Yang Wen-Li, is a more subdued example. He did made a flag rank at 28 (a Rear Admiral, to be precise), which is ridiculously young, but everyone around very much treated it as something exceptional. It was also kind of justified by Yang being a bona-fide military genius who saved the Alliance's collective ass more than once, him having friends note : Alexander Bucock and Stanley Sitolet in high places, who decided just for once to promote a genuinely competent officer instead of a political appointee, and his promotion being in part a piece in the powergames of the Alliance's top brass (covering up the fiascos caused by incompetent political appointees by lionizing and promoting a junior officer who salvaged something from the resultant disaster after said appointees got themselves killed). - Later, as the power structure in both the Empire and the Alliance started to crumble, the chain of command crumbled as well, degenerating into petty warlordships and civil wars, so both men became military dictators simply as a consequence of their fighting prowess and desire to keep at least some semblance of order in their respective nations. Well, Yang became. Lohengramm actively strived for power. - Lyrical Nanoha: - Hayate Yagami, Lieutenant-Colonel at 19. Even if you assume she started her career at nine — there are better places to discuss the Values Dissonance — ten years does not a Lieutenant-Colonel make in a Real Life military barring severely extenuating circumstances. Contrast Nanoha, who's more reasonably a non-Navy Captain. The justifications are, first, that powerful mages are quickly promoted through the ranks anyway(Hayate is the highest ranked mage in the series, at SS, albeit with Awesome, but Impractical magic), with ranks often being considered "decorations", and second, that Hayate has connections in the highest ranks and was bucking for promotion since the day she joined. It's also revealed that Hayate, being a former criminal, was put in command of Mobile Division 6 because she was considered expendable in case anything went wrong and she had to take the fall for it, and Hayate herself notes that the officers at headquarters tend to see her as a young girl first and a Lieutenant Colonel second, indicators of factors apart from a belief in Hayate's merit. - Just as bad: Chrono Harlaown reaches the rank of Admiral with fourteen years in service. His mother is also an admiral in the Navy (albeit for an unspecified length of time; she is 31 upon her first introduction), and he's one of those connections that helped propel Hayate to battalion command. In Chrono's case, the justification is that after his dad died in the line of duty when he was just 3 years old, Chrono went all Bruce Wayne, becoming a fully fledged Enforcer by the age of 14. Enforcers, for the record, are the elite of the elite within the Bureau, with the personal authority of a Field Officer, so his advancement to an Admiral ten years later wasn't much of a career ladder jump. - One Piece: - Averted with Commodore Smoker. He is said to be stronger than his Captain rank implies. However, he is stuck at the rank of Captain for a very long time due to his insubordination with his superiors in the Marines. The only reason he is promoted to Commodore at all is part of a conspiracy by the World Government — he just happens to be in the area. - One Piece does have a number of examples played straight, most notably Vice Admiral Garp, who actively and openly helps pirates, laughs at top-ranked Marines for their mistakes, and recruits from questionable places. He has been offered several promotions to Admiral. However, Fleet Admiral Sengoku does sometimes wonder to himself how Garp managed to climb up the ranks with the attitude he has. Then again, the Marines are (for the most part) based on Asskicking Leads to Leadership, and Garp is probably the strongest marine in the entire force next to Sengoku himself. Sengoku mentions that Garp would have become an Admiral, but he refused due to not wanting to take orders from the Celestial Dragons, an act of insubordination that would have cost him his job if not for his accomplishments. - While not exactly a soldier, \|\|Buggy should obviously not be one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea. He's one of the weakest pirate captains in the series, and the only reason he gets the position is pure dumb luck, having been a former member of Pirate King Gol D. Roger's crew who'd recruited several dangerous prisoners while breaking out of Impel Down.\|\| - Rebuild of Evangelion: Asuka is a Captain in this version, at 14. Not that she acts even remotely like a military officer, particularly around Misato, who is, after all, her CO. For that matter, Misato is a Lt. Colonel at age 29, whereas in the original series she was a much more realistic Captain who got promoted to Major partway through the series (possible, assuming she joined the military young). - Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross/Robotech: The Masters Saga: Jeanne Francoix/Dana Sterling begins the series aged 17 and ranked a Sergeant Major, later being promoted to Lieutenant. While the promotion to Lieutenant based on merit is plausible, her initial rank of Sergeant Major is most definitely not, and is even more outrageous than Ocelot's rank. Both because of her age AND her attitude to authority, it'd be totally impossible for her to hold this rank. - Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny: Kira Yamato is an interesting example. He was promoted from Second Lieutenant note : a rank which he inherited back from EFSF to Admiral at once, being eighteen, but this was a) a wartime express promotion, as Orb's forces were decimated at that point, b) he was their best pilot anyway, and was given that rank so that his status would reflect this, and c) because he was the brother of a ruling monarch of one nation, and the boyfriend of a democratically elected leader of the other. It may not mean much, given how Mildly Military the forces in that universe seem to be, and he didn't exercise his authority much as well, though when he did it, these were usually quite competent decisions. - Mobile Suit Gundam: - When the White Base crew, formerly an irregular unit headed by a Space Cadet, is brought into the Earth Federation Forces, most of the crew get reasonable ranks. The exception is Ace Pilot Amuro Ray, who is appointed a Chief Petty Officer, a senior noncommissioned rank that usually takes years to work up to. No explanation is given for this. In Tomino's Gundam novels, written largely to tell a more consistent story after all the screenplay shenanigans in the heavily troubled anime, he wasn't even a civilian to begin with, but a fully trained cadet on his middie cruise shortly before commissioning. After the White Base finally made contact with the main forces he just received the commission he was due. - This is partly justified - within military rank structures, officers are leaders with more generalized abilities, and senior enlisted forces are technical experts in their career fields. Amuro was the best mobile suit pilot on the White Base, so being made one of the highest ranked NCOs on the ship was appropriate as it reflected his technical superiority and experience with the Gundam. - Bright Noa and Mirai Yashima, meanwhile, invert this trope and create another example into the bargain. Once the White Base is regularized, Bright receives the rank of Lieutenant JG, and Mirai is commissioned as an Ensign; this is for the commander and executive officer of a carrier command that previously merited a full captain. In this case, the brass weren't going to break up a well-functioning unit in the middle of wartime, but they also weren't interested in ranking Bright up too far beyond his seniority (LTJG was already an accelerated wartime promotion). This situation gets downright weird when Lieutenant JG Sleggar Law is assigned to a flight position to replace lost crew; while fitting his rank, the position puts him below Ensign Yashima in the chain of command. - On the Zeon side, Dozle, Kycilia and Garma Zabi are a Vice Admiral, a Rear Admiral, and a Colonel, at 28, 27, and 20, respectively. The fact that they were the children of Zeon head of state Degwin Zabi played a major part in that, though Dozle and Kycilia clearly show that they were capable of handling the responsibilities of their ranks. Garma's need to likewise prove that he earned his rank instead of being handed it for being his father's favorite child played a key part in Char's scheme to lure him into the battle in which he died. Char himself made the somewhat more reasonable but still improbably high rank of Lt Commander at 20 as a result of sheer badassery, most notably five solo capital ship kills during the Battle of Loum. - In Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, Lt JG Monsha not only drinks on duty, he drinks while piloting. He also hits on every female to cross his path and is continuously rude to every pilot who isn't a member of his original squad. Presumably this is why he's only a junior lieutenant despite being a famous ace from the One Year War, but given that the war had ostensibly been over for three years at the time of this anime, one has to wonder why he's still allowed to wear the uniform at all given his conduct. - In Mobile Suit Gundam AGE, Lt Commander Natola Einus, Captain of the Diva in Generation 3, is a mixture of I, III and V. She's a Lieutenant given an accelerated promotion she did not earn and was not ready for so she could be given command of a mothballed battleship as an act of petty spite against both her (over perceived Nepotism) and the retired hero who requested that the ship be launched so he could access some of its special systems despite her youth, lack of time in grade, or the fact that she had yet to serve on a ship in any capacity, much less a command one. Her being totally unqualified for her command is blatantly obvious to everyone on the ship (including herself), to the point that when she first manages to make an intelligent command decision for herself instead of deferring to someone she outranks, everyone on the bridge is shocked. - Ghost in the Shell: Arise gives Batou the rank of a Commander during his service in the Republic of Kuran. His command there is basically a platoon-sized unit that's normally commanded by a Second Lieutenant. Motoko, a Major, is somewhat more justified, in that she's explicitly from a secret Special Forces unit that uses its officers in solo missions. - Full Metal Panic!: - Sōsuke Sagara is 16 at the beginning of the anime, but a fearsomely-skilled sergeant in a paramilitary organization, although this is explained by a history as a child soldier in Afghanistan; its also a way to logically hang around the schoolgirl-aged Chidori. - His commander, Teletha "Tessa" Testarossa, is about the same age and has her position almost solely by virtue of the bizarre racial memory gift possessed by those called The Whispered, which means that she designed the submarine she commands. - Sōsuke's colleague Kurz Weber also qualifies, though not to quite the same extreme as Sōsuke and Tessa; he's only nineteen at the start of the series and the Light Novels eventually reveal that he began training as a sniper at the age of about fifteen. - Also, note that while they have military-styled chain of command, Mithril technically doesn't belong to any established military it's just a Private Military Contractor writ large, legally making all them just civilian security guards. Very heavily armed security guards. - In a nonmilitary example, in GATE, the Japanese Foreign Ministry sends Kouji Sugawara, a 30-something man, as an official envoy to the Special Region. He is backed up by an actual ambassador on site, but she stays at the embassy while he is on point for negotiations. In the Japanese diplomatic service, where the seniority is a very Serious Business, this is ridiculously young for a plenipotentiary, and was probably done just because Sugawara, one of the ministry's numerous aides and undersecretaries, was considered more or less expendable, and should anything untoward happen to him, this wouldn't have hurt or embarrassed the real bigwigs. The JSDF, though, is pretty conventional in this regard, largely avoiding Artistic License Military, as the author is a former military man himself. - Code Geass: - Suzaku Kururugi is promoted from Private to Warrant Officer (a full ten ranks) literally overnight and only a couple months later is a Major, despite being only seventeen at the time and his formal education ending when he was nine. The first promotion is justified as being a bribe by Cornelia, the current Viceroy of Area 11 and Chief General of the Army. - Suzaku's coworker, Cecile, is also a Major despite being only twenty-four even though the rank usually requires a full decade of service. - Les Tuniques Bleues: This was the focus of the album Des Bleus et du blues, with General Grant holding an important meeting of his highest-ranking officers, including a few that he intended to fire from the army. As far as regular characters go, Captain Stilman is infamous for his cynicism, laziness and general incompetence (although with a few flashes of true brilliance). - During the controversial Civil War storyline in Marvel Comics, Tony Stark is examining a file on Frank Castle (AKA the Punisher). The file details Frank's time as a U.S. Marine during the Vietnam War, specifically referring to him as having been a 21 year old Captain. Even more impressive/odd is that Frank originally enlisted in the Marines, earning an officer's commission later on in his deployment. This may be somewhat justified, however, as Frank was an amazing soldier with a background in black ops; his promotions may have been based on skill as opposed to time served (in the MAX continuity, Nick Fury arranges for his promotion after he and Frank go on an assassination mission). - Even by the standards of Comic-Book Time and Continuity Snarl for Marvel Comics characters with long histories, the military status of Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel) is still improbable. She retired from the U.S. Air Force at the rank of full Colonel (O-6)... apparently before her first chronological comic book appearance as director of security at "The Cape". Absent some highly unusual situation, one would expect Carol to be at least pushing 40, and this is before her entire career as a superhero. While she's depicted as an experienced hero in current stories, she isn't drawn or treated as if she's anywhere near as old as her backstory would suggest. - This is actually a subversion. Carol retired from the Air Force to become head of security at the Cape with a rank of Major (O-4) at the age of 28, which is impressive, but absolutely doable. Her promotion to Colonel came in the early '00s, after her Air Force commission was reactivated, and was a special promotion courtesy so that she could run a division of the Department of Homeland Security. Before that, her role in Air Force Intelligence gave her "the ability to temporarily upgrade to Colonel on missions" because "the extra clout came in handy", but it wasn't a permanent rank. - In G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel), while Hawk is a capable leader, he's somewhat young to have already reached the rank of general, and still spends too much time in the battlefield to be one. The age issue also applies to his predecessor, General Flagg. Modern versions of the franchise tend to have Hawk as an older man, or as a Colonel (and the Joes a smaller organization as a result) to avoid the issue. - Tintin is accidentally recruited into the San Theodoros army when (while drunk off his ass) he's yelling "Long live Alcazar!" in front of a firing squad just as the prison is taken by pro-Alcazar rebels. This gets him promoted to colonel and the general's Number Two, while the general's former Number Two gets demoted back to corporal after unwisely noting that Alcazar's army has 3487 colonels and 27 corporals. This makes a bit more sense than as this is a revolutionary army where promotions are often handed out more by loyalty to the cause rather than by competence. - Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Earth-Two/Golden Age version of Steve Trevor managed to make it to colonel in his early twenties without seeming to have anyone reporting to him (besides his secretary Lila) and still mostly acted as a solo field agent on undercover missions. - Carried to absurd levels in Stephen Ratliff's Marissa Picard series of Star Trek: The Next Generation fanfic, in which the title character becomes a fully-commissioned starship captain (of a starship bigger than the Enterprise, in fact!) while still a pre-teen, and Admiral of the Fleet at age 21. - Similarly, but not quite to the same extent, the original "Mary Sue" from A Trekkie's Tale was a 15-year-old lieutenant. - Lampshaded and justified in Bait and Switch. Captain Kanril Eleya and her command staff are by and large very young for the ranks they hold (Eleya is 29), but it's due in large part to a heavy dose of You Are in Command Now since the Federation is A) in a full-scale war with the Klingons and B) under attack by the Borg. She is explicitly stated to have been fast-tracked to captain. - In Boys Do Tankary, the teenage boys vary in ranks, from a Warrant Officer to a Major, none of which they seem old enough for, even considering that Vincent, who has the rank of Major, was forcibly enlisted into the army at the age of six. - In Chapter 75 of BlazBlue Alternative: Remnant, Tsubaki Yayoi becomes a member of the Ace Ops, an elite military unit comprised of the best among Atlas' graduates, despite the fact that she's still in her late teens and hasn't even finished her first year at any Huntsman Academy yet. According to Ironwood, the reasons for him giving her the position stem from her combat prowess displayed during the Fall of Vale, him wanting to have her weapon (the Izayoi) under his direct command, and his need for people who will be unquestioningly loyal to him. - In The Weaver Option, Taylor is 16 years old (too young to enlist at all outside of Death Worlds and Fortress Worlds) when she becomes Major of the Imperial Guard unit she just joined. A few months later she becomes Acting Colonel in the course of the \|\|Battle of the Death Star\|\| after the Colonel is killed, and the decorations she earns after the fight promote her to Major General first and later to General. After seven years as Governor of Nyx, she retakes her General position and leads a fleet and army in the \|\|Battles of Pavia and Commorragh\|\|, which grant her another decoration that promotes her to Lady General, which is just two or three steps down from the highest echelon of the Guard. Definitely a case of too young, but not of too incompetent. - Parodied in With Friends Like These where a Parody Sue claims to be a Lieutenant Colonel (of a military branch that doesn't exist) at eighteen, on top of having three PhDs. Once Suu destroys his Plot Armor, Motoko swiftly decapitates him and they bury his body out in the woods. - Heartbreak Ridge: Tom Highway (Clint Eastwood) is a Gunnery Sergeant (E-7) in the US Marine Corps, which is more than plausible given his age and how long he's been in, both of which are lampshaded throughout the film. However, given his conduct, it's hard to believe that was allowed to stay in to close to mandatory retirement and not forced into retirement, if not court martialed and discharged from the Corps. In the film, in addition to showing little respect for the rank and authority of his superiors, he's shown being arrested twice for drunk and disorderly conduct, and both the judge and his CO in the beginning of the film mention that it's happened multiple times before. Justification? Being a living recipient of the Medal of Honor actually can plausibly excuse a hell of a lot in the military. - Top Gun: Tom Cruise's character, Lieutenant Pete "Maverick" Mitchell. The stunts he pulls during training make it a miracle he even gets to fly in combat, let alone not be demoted. It's supposed to show that he's just that good. - In Top Gun: Maverick after 34 years Maverick is a captain who is only kept on due to Iceman's protection who by then is the commander of the Pacific Fleet, and his insane qualifications including the only active pilot who has dogfight experience. Even without the reckless stunts he still pulls, the fact that he hadn't made it past Captain after 34 years would have removed him from the Navy by this point due to the US Military's "Up or Out" (soldiers who are passed over for promotion too many times are discharged to free up their slot for a younger soldier to fill, to prevent people who have been promoted beyond their competence from blocking the careers of up-and-comers by their mere existence) policy. - Star Trek (2009) ran into this in its dual role as an Everyone Meets Everyone story and an origin story for James T. Kirk. We see Kirk join Star Fleet, and in almost no time he's captain of the Enterprise. At the start of the film he's outranked by all of the characters we know as his crew (all of whom had actual jobs and positions); he's still a cadet in training. The plot is basically built to justify this: Starfleet loses droves of experienced personnel, and Kirk receives two field promotions in the resulting crisis. By the second film, however, we discover that Starfleet simply let the up-jumped cadet continue captaining their flagship... \|\|until he breaks the rules one-too-many times, and gets (temporarily) removed. Only Pike's intervention kept him in the general chain of command.\|\| It is worth noting that most of Kirk's character arc in the second film involves learning that while being lucky is all well and good, but being level-headed and respectful of the lives under his command is more reliable and appropriate for the captain of the flagship. - Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen: Chief Master Sergeant Epps jumps from Technical Sergeant (E6) to Chief Master Sergeant (E9) in two years, a rank which often bumps a soldier out of field duty, and with a promotion time frame between those two positions closer to 10 years. - Private Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger is promoted directly to captain in the U.S. Army after the Super Soldier testing project is shut down. This is entirely a political appointment; he needs to be a captain because "Captain America" is a propaganda symbol and an ad for war bonds. Also, "Private America" sounds less like a superhero and more like something else. In fact, he gets slapped down the time or two he actually tries to use his rank in the first half of the movie. He uses it as a Badass Boast during his first rescue, stating that he was Captain America and had punched out Hitler several times (he only did so on the staged shows). After his rescue of the men from the Hydra weapons factory, he earned the respect of the men and seems to have formally recognized as a Captain, even being given his own commando unit (given that he is a one-man army and had single-handedly saved 2-3 companies worth of soldiers on his first "mission", exceptions were to be made). - Hopper in Battleship is a naval lieutenant and yet he is insanely brash, often insubordinate and does not have even a drop of his men's respect. For most people who have actually served in the military, it's a surprise that he even finished his basic training let alone got commissioned as an officer. At least the admiral has finally had enough of this and tells him that this training exercise will be his last. It is also lampshaded in the movie. When people hear Hopper's now in charge, their reaction runs from This Is Gonna Suck to "Oh, Crap! we are all gonna die!" - Part of the satire in Starship Troopers is the fact that Rico rockets up the ranks because his superior officers keep dying. He's a Private at the start of the mission on Planet P, then gets promoted to Corporal, then acting Sergeant, and finally Lieutenant all within the span of a day. "Fresh meat for the grinder" indeed. Carmen and Zander are watch officers within a year of their joining the fleet. Carl is the only one who seems suited to his rank (Colonel) after going through Military Intelligence training, though his young age still stands out among the older Psi-Corps officers. (Perhaps Psi-Corps rank is mostly ability-based.) - The Star Wars series really suffers from this. - Almost immediately after joining the Rebel Alliance, Luke is made a fighter pilot despite almost zero combat experience (this was explicitly his reward for saving Leia and the plans plus one of Red Squadron's pilots was out sick), by the time of The Empire Strikes Back he's a commander, and a general a year after Return of the Jedi in Legends(in the current canon he never made that rank); not bad for someone who's canonically 25 by the time of Return of the Jedi (though it does help that he's a Jedi and has his father's Ace Pilot skills). Plus he achived one the Rebellion's greatest victories by destroying the Death Star. - Meanwhile Han is first a captain and then a general in the same amount of time, despite not officially joining the Rebellion until Return of the Jedi, and spending the period between Empire and Jedi in carbonite. His initial rank is likely because he's the captain of the Millennium Falcon; it makes sense that the chronically under-equipped Rebellion would want to reward anybody who brings a battle-worthy starship with them when joining. But why he was both immediately promoted and switched from a naval to army rank is unclear. Lando also gets made a general shortly after joining the Rebellion himself (though mention is made of him having previous command experience and we met him while he was profitably running a city of tens of thousands, which might explain why he was given the rank). It gets really silly during the Endor mission, where General Solo commands a squad of around ten people, including Luke (a commander) and Leia, whose rank is never really defined, but appears to be somewhere between a political leader and a flag officer. At the very least Lando's mission (leading the assault on the Death Star II) was appropriate to his rank. - The Rebel Alliance does have the excuse of being massively outnumbered and outgunned by Empire so it's more than likely that people who prove they can get the job done are swiftly promoted because they are needed. They don't really have the luxury to play with regulations in a battle for the galaxy they could very well lose. - The prequel trilogy is much the same: the Jedi are all generals of the Clone Army, but inevitably end up fighting on the field. They clearly believe in leading from the front in a galaxy far, far away. What makes it worse is that the apprentices are given the rank of Commander, but are often shown to outrank pretty much everyone but a higher ranking Jedi (up to and including admirals). In The Clone Wars series Anakin's 14 year old apprentice Ahsoka was shown to lead several battles personally, and the results varied from strategic genius to getting her own men killed in over-enthusiatic attacks (occasionally in the same episode). Fridge Brilliance when you remember that it was set up by Palpatine, for whom chaos and bad leadership were actually plusses, given his endgame. No matter how bad a general a Jedi might be, there's no risk of them losing the war because Palpatine is Running Both Sides and arranges to make sure neither side can "win" prematurely, while in the meantime any Jedi who get themselves killed via tactical blunders will be a bonus for him. - The Dark Knight. Jim Gordon is promoted from Lieutenant to Police Commissioner literally overnight but still rushes out and takes personal command of emergencies when he should be delegating those responsibilities. The promotion is justified in that the top job in departments similar in size to the GCPD is actually a political appointment, and one doesn't necessarily have to have come up through the ranks. It's also heavily implied that Gordon is one of the few in the GCPD who isn't a Dirty Cop, and thus he can't trust anyone else. - One of the criticisms leveled at A Bridge Too Far at the time of its release was that Ryan O'Neal was far too young for the rank he was meant to be. In fact, O'Neal was actually older in reality than Brigadier General James Gavin was at the time of the events portrayed. - Commander Krill in Under Siege is a mix of type IV-V, harassing and provoking crew members he doesn't like for no real reason, often in ways that blatantly violate Navy regulations. To be fair, Captain Adams had noticed his XO's instability, and after the terrorists take the Missouri, they find he had prepared a performance review for Krill that would have torpedoed Krill's career over that had Adams lived to reach San Francisco and file it. - The entire Philippine military in the historical movies Heneral Luna and Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral is filled with these, largely because it was hurriedly created as an ad-hoc rebel army fighting first the Spanish and then the American colonisers. General Jose Alejandrino in the second movie discusses how he doesn't think there is a single proper soldier in the ranks, bar the first film's General Antonio Luna who actually has a military education and knows what he's doing note : though in Real Life it was apparently still considered short of serious military training, being more of a hurried crash-coursenot to mention when he first joined the Revolution in 1898, Luna, who started out a civilian scientist, had almost none of the combat experience many officers under him had already amassed since 1896even longer if they had defected from the colonial military, as they're either political appointees or capable but generally out of their league. For example, General Gregorio Del Pilar in the sequel has his rank at the age of 24 and is given command over an entire province with his detractors saying that this appointment is because he's the president's loyal attack dog. (In Real Life the Revolutionary Army had even younger generalsManuel Tinio was promoted to that at 20, and still he survived the entire Revolution and Philippine-American War and lived far longer than del Pilar.) - In Project Moonbase, Colonel Briteis is a mix of III and V, showing no real leadership skills and totally unrespected by officers both above and below her. She was a Captain who got promoted three grades in one jump for political reasons after completing a high profile mission, and the fact that she wasn't ready for the extra authority shows. - The Police Academy films have this happen in law enforcement with pretty much the entire cast. The protagonist cops are generally type II, with Tackleberry arguably being type IV (and Lassard a more harmless type IV with his age-induced senility), while the antagonist cops (Proctor, Mauser and Harris) are a mixture of III and V. - In Justice League, when Barry Allen presents his (fake) ID to the guards at the Kryptonian ship, the disparagy between his looks and the rank on the ID (Air Force Master Seargant) cause them to check the ID more closely. Luckily, Cyborg is able to hack the system and validate it before it's flagged. - The Doc Savage novels. Four of Doc's aides had high military rank during World War I: Major, Lt-Colonel, Colonel and Brigadier General. Given how late the US entered the war, it seems unlikely that they could have achieved these ranks if they enlisted when the US entered the war. Fanon, as used by Philip Jose Farmer in his "biography" of Doc Savage, has them enlisting in other nations armies at the start of the war and transferring to the US Army when the US joined. Even then, Ham's Brigadier Generalship is stretching credibility. - Footfall, a Larry Niven-Jerry Pournelle novel, features a female Army officer who goes from being a Captain (a rank attainable at a relatively young age; the character is introduced when she is only 28 years old) to being a Lieutenant Colonel within the space of three years time. The subversion comes from the fact that she's directly promoted, twice, by the President of the United States, who as Commander in Chief of all American military forces has the right to promote whoever he wants any time he wants for any reason he cares to use. - Honor Harrington: - State Sec Citizen Brigadier General Dennis Tresca was a mere Corporal before the revolution. Somewhat justified by the Klingon Promotion-type side-effects of the post-coup purge of the secret police. In fact, it's repeatedly mentioned that the Havenite military is lacking in personnel with the experience normally required for the higher ranks, but they're forced to promote anyway as they need someone to fill those slots. Despite smaller losses, Manticorans also had to resort to rapid promotions during the war, especially given that they have a much smaller population and thus manpower reserves. - It's also mentioned that Havenites don't have experience in the lower ranks, leading to officers carrying out tasks that the Manticorans have Petty Officers normally carrying out (this was the case in the Cold War era Soviet Navy, not because of lack of experience but because of specificity of authority levels; USN sailors had broad authority at every level while Soviet sailors got their jobs and did them. This resulted in a system that looked strange to American observers but worked very efficiently in the Soviet Navy). Thus leading to competent officers having to do their own jobs, someone else's job, and likely get promoted to a position they aren't qualified for. And then shot by State Sec. Note that because this is a "prolong" society, where the average life expectancy for most humans is about 250-300 years, normal peacetime promotions tend to be slow. Honor herself attained List Captain rank at 42 note : and became a Fleet Admiral at 55, but that was in wartime, and it was explicitly said to be because of the rapid expansion of the Royal Manticoran Navy in preparation to the First Havenite War, as well as including promotion for valor under fire. In the neutral nations, such as Solarian League, an officer might expect to stay in a grade for decades on end. - The short story A Ship Named Francis is about a ship whose entire crew is this. Massive manpower expansions due to a war resulted in rapid promotion to many of the people who were already in the Navy, some of them to people who didn't deserve them. The Grayson Navy then dealt with this by transferring these people, who are a mix of types I-IV, to the Francis S Mueller, a cruiser which is deliberately never given any important assignments. The crew refer to the ship among themselves as Siberia. The whole thing is extremely silly and ridiculous, but is justified by the story being an explicit parody of Irresponsible Captain Tylor, and being written by John Ringo. - Catch-22 had Major Major Major Major (Rank, first name, middle name, last name). When he enlisted, he was instantly promoted to Major by "an IBM machine with a sense of humor almost as keen as his father's." Major can never go up or down in rank because the Almighty Janitor Ex-PFC Wintergreen thinks it's funny. In more general terms, pretty much every officer in the book is too incompetent and/or crazy to be suited for their given rank, and most of the enlisted aren't much better. - A huge example occurs in the Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars novelization, where Private Vega is promoted to Sergeant on his first day out of boot camp, over other, longer-serving, more experienced troops, due to a combination of nepotism and idiot luck. His absurdly fast-tracked promotions continue throughout the book until he reaches the rank of Captain at the end of several months. Vega thus combines being too young (he's still in his early teens) and incompetence (the most decisive order he ever manages to give is to charge), with an added bonus of being completely undertrained for his rank. Vega was afraid it'd be the opposite of nepotism, due to his relative being the drug-addicted Nod General Vega. His first promotion was due to luck (he randomly happened to see a heat signature of a weapon aimed at his squad from a vent) and skills he gained prior to enlisting (shooting bottles on a farm). His immediate superior even tells him he argued against giving him a promotion because he didn't earn it on merit but was overruled, as this promotion is mostly for publicity. The cancelled tactical shooter Tiberium was supposed to put the player in Vega's shoes. - Discussed in Orphanage. Jason Wander leads a strike team to one of Jupiter's moons. He is quickly field promoted to general-on-the-ground due to the insane casualty rate. Everyone there including him expect him to be demoted when the battle ends, however he remains a general (at only 19!) because as the "savior of the human race" the brass decided he's more useful as a symbol than a soldier- although he still has plenty of infantry life ahead of himself. - In Simon Scarow's Eagle series of novels about the Roman Army, the two heroes are a hard-bitten centurion called Macro, who has risen to officer rank purely through merit and experience. And Quintus Licinius Cato, a youth who has grown up as an emancipated slave in the Emperor's palace. Macro is told by the imperial legate Vespasian that like it or not, Cato is on an unprecedented accelerated promotion through ther legion's ranks. He must, therefore, act as mentor to a young man who goes from recruit to Legionary to the junior officer rank of Optio in an incredibly short time, assisted by Vespasian's patronage. At first a man with no discernible military skills, Cato grows through the books into a very capable officer and soon outranks his friend Macro. And the manipulative future emperor Vespasian guards them and steers their missions for reasons all of his own... - Ciaphas Cain notes that Colonel Kasteen and her officer corps are generally very young and inexperienced to be holding their rank and position. Justified because everyone more qualified or senior than them had been eaten by Tyranids, and the Imperium almost always promotes unit commanders from within the ranks rather than transferring new officers in from other units. - Late in Ender's Game, the title Ender is promoted from the ostensible rank of Cadet straight to Admiral at the age of twelve. The justification for this is the whole point of the book: by this point he \|\|has already been the de facto commander of Earth's entire space fleet for some time; once the war is over, the promotion is largely political, and he very rarely pulls rank\|\|. - Vorkosigan Saga: - In the backstory, Piotr Vorkosigan made full General in his early twenties. There was a war going on at the time, and the Emperor wasn't able to give him more substantial rewards for his services like supplies or reinforcements. Despite this, Piotr proved himself a Four-Star Badass, and kept that reputation well into his seventies, despite the nature of war on Barrayar evolving from horse cavalry tactics all the way into the space age over the course of his life. - Inverted with the head of Imperial Security through most of the series. It's not technically a military post — the Emperor points out once that while it has traditionally been held by a serving officer, there is no law that prevents him appointing a civilian — but it wields enormous power. When Simon Illyan takes the reigns, he is reluctant to promote himself above his predecessor, the legendary Captain Negri (who never bothered acquiring higher rank because he didn't need it to make people understand how important he was), and thus serves as a Captain for his entire career, while routinely tackling duties that are vital to the continued survival of Barrayar and commanding a force of thousands. He is drawing a Vice-Admiral's pay by the time of his retirement, though. - Had Lieutenant Miles Vorkosigan not killed his ImpSec career himself with that fake report, he would've become its head, as Illyan was already contemplating retirement and has been consciously grooming Miles as a successor all that time. So instead the job ends up going to someone who had already achieved flag rank as one of Ilyan's department heads, breaking the tradition of ostensibly underranked intelligence chiefs. - In the Oz books, it's clear that nobody in Oz really understands the point of the military command structure. The third book depicts an army with something like 50 officers and one enlisted man, where the only duty of the officers at any given level is to listen to the orders given to them by the officers in the level above them and repeat them to the officers at the level below, until they finally reach the one man who does any actual fighting. - Starship Troopers: When Captain Blackstone, due to heavy attrition among officers, is forced to give 3rd Lieutenant Juan Rico (whose official job is to stay out of the way and try to learn something) a platoon command, he places his fleet sergeant as Rico's platoon sergeant (a position well below his pay grade), hoping that he can compensate for the inexperience of the platoon CO with an experienced XO. - Over the course of The Shadow Campaigns (less than two years in-story), Winter Ihernglass has gone from Ranker (common trooper) to Division General (equivalent to an RL Brigadier) through a combination of luck, skill, and having the above be noticed by the greatest general of the age, despite only being in her early twenties. Despite the extremely rapid promotions, she's only lost one battle, which was against the greatest general of the previous generation. - In the third Codex Alera book, Tavi, in his persona as Scipio Rufus, ends up commanding the First Aleran Legion in his early twenties despite having no legion experience beyond a few months as a junior quartermaster after an assassination attempt kills or cripples every other officer in the legion. He then proceeds to hold onto that command for several years by virtue of sheer baddassery. - Kris Longknife: - Kris made full Admiral at thirty-four. After jumping from Lt. Commander clear to Vice Admiral at twenty-nine. The truly absurd number of awards for valor she'd received by then played a major part in this (and most of those were acting ranks that she developed the clout to have made permanent). Also there's a strong political motivation since she's a "princess" and her great-grandfather is the king (it's an Elective Monarchy but he's suggested to be grooming her as his successor). She really is that good, but she sometimes comes in for grief from officers who followed a more conventional career path. - In the Spin-Off series, Kris's rival-turned-friend Vicky Peterwald is field-promoted from lieutenant junior grade all the way up to vice admiral, since she's in charge of one of the sides in a Civil War against her in-laws. To her credit, even she thinks this is utterly bonkers, and she defers detailed battlefield command of her forces to lower-ranked admirals because she mostly lacks the experience to go with the rank (a realization aided by the fact that her older brother was given command of a task force for political reasons, failed to understand that he didn't have the experience to actually command it, and promptly got himself killed as a result). In Dominator she actually refuses yet another promotion to five-star (she's a de facto head of state at that point, and heads of state have traditionally taken on the highest rank in their militaries). - Aeon 14: Discussed in the fan-written Short Story "Know Thy Enemy". Admiral Sini Laaksonen of the AST Space Force describes her opposite number from the Bollam's World Space Force, the scenery-chomping Admiral Senya, "arrogant, capricious, and well-connected in the system," and believes Senya wouldn't have gotten above lieutenant commander were she serving in the AST instead. - The entire command staff of the 15th Legion in A Practical Guide to Evil consists of fresh graduates from the War College. This is because their CO, Catherine, is the Squire, and the hand-picked protege of Black Knight, the most accomplished military leader in the Empire. Cat then picked her XO and staff officers from people whose abilities she knew and trusted from her time at the College. Within a year they've won three major battles, and proven that they deserve their rank. - In The Lost Fleet, John Geary is promoted directly from captain to fleet admiral for his success in bringing the titular fleet home from deep within enemy space. His age is uncertain, but he's probably somewhere in his mid-thirties, since he was a commander before winding up in cryosleep for a century and being "posthumously" promoted to captain. Notably, Geary doesn't want the rank for both professional reasons (he doesn't feel that he's accumulated the necessary knowledge and experience) and personal reasons (he's fallen in love with his flag captain and being made a fleet admiral seriously interferes with their already complicated relationship). He ultimately gets the government to agree to make it a temporary promotion, though they immediately kick him back up to admiral in the next book. - F Troop: In one episode, the Hekawi Indian chief is disguised as a trooper so that he can be taken to the fort and treated by the Army dentist. A visiting general takes a liking to "Private Howe" and quickly promotes him through the ranks all the way to Captain! - One could argue that everyone at Fort Courage is too incompetent for their given rank. Including the privates. - Frank Burns of MASH* is type III and V, a Major (later promoted to Lt Colonel) despite being terrible at his job and hated by virtually everyone. The only reason why Hawkeye, Trapper and Hunnicut don't qualify as a type II is because Army regs have Captain be the starting rank of all fully trained doctors (so they have the authority to make the enlisted and junior officers who make up the lion's share of their patients listen to them on health-related matters), and thus they are actually at the lowest possible rank they can legally hold. Were they anything other than surgeons in a hospital unit, they'd have never made O-3. - The Phil Silvers Show: Sergeant Ernie Bilko is a Master Sergeant, which is plausible according to his age and responsibilities, but the fact he keeps this rank without being demoted because of his antics borders on divine intervention. - Private Benjamin (1981) had an episode where Judy was mistakenly promoted to Major, then to Brigadier General, just in time for a war games exercise. - Star Trek: - Star Trek: Enterprise: Tucker is chief engineer of the Enterprise, not just the flagship but the most advanced human starship of the period. Canonically, he cannot do basic algebra as revealed in the episode "Shuttlepod One". - In Star Trek, Picard beats Kirk and becomes captain at 28 after Captain Ruhalter of the Stargazer is killed in battle. Although, in the Star Trek: Stargazer novels, it's clear his promotion is opposed by Admiral McAteer, who clearly sees Picard as too young to be in command but can't override another admiral's promotion without cause. That said, the unusual circumstances of his promotion, as well as the eventual fate of the Stargazer, may well have put his career into something of a holding pattern, as he's canonically 60 when he takes command of the Enterprise, still a Captain (though on the flip side, the Enterprise is still the flagship and he's basically a half-step below Admiral at that point). The funny thing is that McAteer's most defining character trait is his ambition. He is even disgusted with the message of Macbeth that ambition is evil for that same purpose. Yet he somehow feels that this doesn't matter in Picard's case. - Wesley Crusher is made an acting officer and frequently manned stations both on the bridge and in main engineering at the age of 15. By the third season, Picard actually gives him a field commission. One can only imagine how much this pissed off the career Starfleet officers and enlisted personnel serving aboard Enterprise who didn't happen to be main characters. - Inverted on Star Trek: Voyager, which has an example of an underranked soldier, specifically Ensign Harry Kim. If nothing else, he should have gotten an automatic promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade at about the midpoint of season two. He hangs a lampshade on this in one of the later seasons, telling Janeway that if not for Voyager's special circumstances he'd be at least a Lieutenant, and possibly a Lieutenant Commander. In fact, two other characters did get promotions during the series. The meta reason is that showrunners Berman and Braga were determined to maintain Kim as an Ensign Newbie character regardless of whether it made sense or not. - In Stargate Universe, Marine Master Sergeant Ronald Greer is 20 — if he signed up on his eighteenth birthday, he's still fourteen years too young, as the Marines require a Master Sergeant to have at least 16 years' service. - Stargate SG-1: - Late in the show, Cameron Mitchell is technically old enough for his, but at his age, he would need to have joined at 18 and then been promoted as soon as he was eligible every time, and even then, some of them would have to be field promotions, making it really unlikely. He is selected to command the pre-eminent SG team, so the implication is he's just that good. Got lampshaded once with a throwaway joke about Mitchell being O'Neill's son via Time Travel, with explicit nepotism being responsible for his advancement. The people telling him this were (probably) just messing with him. - On the DVD there is mention of an episode featuring the actual Air Force chief of staff at the time of the show's filming. Richard Dean Anderson asked him if he had colonels as disruptive and irreverent as his character, Jack O'Neill. The man's reply? "Nah, I have worse". So much for disruptiveness being an obstacle to promotion. - Enforced aversion with General Hammond. He was initially going to be a bit of a tyrant, but the show's Pentagon advisers pointed out to the writers that he would never have made general if he hadn't earned his underlings' respect. Hence, he briefly comes off as a "my way or the highway" Jerkass prepared to nuke an inhabited planet... before cooling down enough to have second thoughts and coming to Jack to ask for another option. - General Melchett from Blackadder Goes Forth is grossly incompetent, being a deliberate example of the "lions led by donkeys" opinion of the British forces in World War I. The others are probably at their correct ranks: Captain Darling is a competent soldier, Baldrick is a private and therefore cannot be any lower ranked, and Upper-Class Twit George probably joined as a lieutenant and was never promoted. Blackadder, having been an officer for over 15 years by 1917, should have been a major and not captain by seniority alone, though he could still have commanded a company in the trenches. In the last episode, we learn that Sergeant Blackadder, the Hero of Mboto Gorge (where we killed all the peace-loving pygmies and stole all their fruit), wasn't promoted to officer until the war. There is some Truth in Television with this, as many of the high-ranking officers of World War I were educated in 19th century tactics, and still believed that bayonet charges would win battles, often sending soldiers charging to their deaths from machine gun fire by the thousands. - Battlestar Galactica (1978): Lieutenant Zac is gee-whiz young and inexperienced, and golly, he's going on his first Viper patrol, ever, with Big Brother Captain Apollo! He comes off as about 19, although Rick Springfield was actually about 29 at the time. If he's that young and inexperienced, even in war, at his first patrol he should have been one or two ranks lower in grade... At least if the Colonial space forces actually have a lower rank for commissioned officers with flight status; in some real-life militaries the rank of Lieutenant j/g or Ensign is only given to non-pilot aircrew or ground support personnel, at least in peacetime. - The "if they have a lower rank" caveat is important, as Galactica has never had a rank system which aligns with any Real Life western military (for instance, at least in the US military, a Colonel would almost never work for a Commander, as Colonel is an O-6 rank, and Commander is an O-5 rank in a totally different service branch). That said, in all US armed services except the Navy and Coast Guard, Lieutenant (more specifically: Second Lieutenant) is literally the lowest rank a commissioned officer can hold, being equivalent to an Ensign. - The A-Team: Real Vietnam-era 12-man A-teams were commanded by captains, not full Colonels like Hannibal Smith. - Defiance has the genocidal General Ripper, Rahm Tak, who despite his rank only commands a platoon (at best) of Votanis Collective Doom Troops with a couple armored cars for support. However, his pogroms and obvious degrading sanity have led the VC to declare him rogue. - Red Dwarf inverted this with Rimmer, who, after 15 years of service, has managed to move from the absolutely lowest rank on the ship to the second-lowest. However, from his mother's perspective, the trope would appear to be played straight, since she addresses him in a letter as "Rear Admiral Lieutenant General Rimmer". Apparently every time he took an exam, he told her he passed. He admits to Lister that it's getting embarrassing, since he should be "Commander in Chief of the whole universe" by now. - Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Captain Stently spent nine years in police academy (which is supposed to be a six month program) and essentially bumbled his way through the ranks all the way to captain, which he earned by going to a drug bust instead of a dermatology appointment and surprising the kingpin so bad that he shot himself. He's aware of his own incompetence and inexperience, and is content to let the Nine Nine do whatever they feel is most important. - The Orville: Xelayans are a Heavyworlder species who possess Super Strength, but because they are also a Proud Scholar Race they seldom join the Union Fleet. As such, on those rare occasions when a Xelayan does enlist they tend to end up being quickly overpromoted, as their physical capabilities make them so effective as soldiers regardless of competence in other areas. The Orville's first security chief Lt. Alara is in her early twenties and has been in the Fleet for only a few years, but has a rank and job more appropriate for someone with at least ten more years experience, something she is keenly aware of and insecure about. Her replacement Lt. Talla is noticeably older, more experienced and more sure of herself. - The Navy Lark: Sub-Lieutenant Phillips, is both improbably old for a Sub-Lieutenant (which is the lowest active service officer rank) and improbably incompetent to hold a rank at all having done more damage to Naval property than both world wars. Rule of Funny is in effect. Also applies to much of the senior brass. More than one character In-Universe wondered how Cloud Cuckoo Lander Vice-Admiral 'Burbly' Burwasher ever obtained his rank. - The Goon Show: How self-proclaimed 'dirty coward' Major Dennis Bloodnok ever obtained his rank is a mystery. More than one episode implies that blackmail had something to do with it. - Air Force Delta Strike features Lilia, the 14 year old Major. It is handwaved by a few throw-away lines early in the game. - BlazBlue has several ranking soldiers within the NOL among its cast, but four of the named officers have no business being in their given posts were it not for the villainous conspiracy that put them there. - Noel Vermillion is somewhat neurotic for her rank in the NOL, although it's stated to be a result of a combination of Asskicking Leads to Leadership and that as a member of the Absurdly Powerful Student Council she was practically guaranteed a reasonable rank. There's also the fact that \|\|Noel is Mu-12, and due to her importance got a higher rank than she really deserved (since Hazama would need a reason to get her where he needs her).\|\| - Also as it turns out, even Jin Kisaragi is also one. He \|\|didn't do much during the Ikaruga War(it really only took him two days to "end" the war), as he even notes that there were probably several people who could have ended the war as well due to how easy it was. The ending of the war itself was more of a setup that the NOL used as a way to get rid of the old regime and established their new one. Since Jin was the person they used for the purpose to end the war, he was then hailed as a hero and got tons of rank ups. This gave the NOL a figurehead hero to parade with their new order and allowed for Hazama to manipulate him easier. Personally, Jin felt completely empty and disliked the notion very much.\|\| - Chronophantasma suggests that Major Tsubaki Yayoi is going to be following in Jin's footsteps. \|\|A mere First Lieutenant back in Continuum Shift, not only is Tsubaki younger and less accustomed to high rank than Jin, she also has a small number of neuroses regarding ex-Major Jin that Terumi helped instill and/or exploited for his own machinations. There's also the fact that she's a Brainwashed and Crazy loyalist, and yet she was "promoted" due to her "exploits" with Ragna the Bloodedge (read: Terumi needs a new figurehead hero, Makoto's gone rogue, and Noel and Jin defected with her).\|\| - Lastly, we have Hazama himself, hard as that is to believe. \|\|His utter disrespect for his supposed "superiors" is because he (or rather, Yuuki Terumi) is the one who founded the NOL in the first place, and yet this does not excuse either the batshit insanity or the many Intelligence faux pas he commits throughout the story, whether it's leaking vital details, gross mismanagement of his subordinates, not conducting parallel investigations during an important mission, or tunnel-visioning towards a target completely unrelated to said mission. It shows how badly he fails to adapt to reality when he has to be reminded how dangerous his own subordinate can be to his plans by that same subordinate.\|\| - Bloons TD 6 has Captain Churchill, who despite his title lacks any kind of command over other soldiers and fights by himself with a tank. This is in jarring contrast to Admiral Brickell from the same game, who in fact does have command over other ships. - Final Fantasy VI: Celes Chere is a General in the Imperial Army, despite being only eighteen years old. Then again, the Empire also made Kefka a General... - Halo:. - Miranda Keyes is a borderline case with her rank of Lieutenant-Commander, then later Commander. She is competent, she does her job to the letter, the soldiers under her trust her explicitly, and she always keeps a level head on her shoulders. At the time of her death, she was twenty-seven years old. It should be noted that she is a Commander during a war where the UNSC has been repeatedly getting slaughtered in fleet engagements; she has her rank because not only is she competent, but most of the officers with more experience than her are dead. - Halo: Reach: Several of NOBLE Team's members, like Carter and Kat, hold high ranks and are even younger (Kat being an Lt. Commander at 22, Carter being a Commander at 32), but it's justified because they've been soldiers since they were children. It's also mentioned via Word of God that this is primarily to give them command over any necessary conventional forces in the event of a crisis (and to prevent any " Oscar Sierra light-switch" from interfering with their missions). This policy is not dissimilar to some Real Life special forces units. - Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Ocelot is a Major. At 19 years old. If one charitably assumes that he rose in rank in the least amount of time required to hold said rank, he would have enlisted at around 4 years old. Several characters do express surprise at this rank, so it's not a simple mistake. Plus, \|\|he has been a soldier/spy since he was a child. And being the son of The Boss probably helped.\|\| - \|\|Also, as far as the Soviet government knows he's a defected American agent. His unlikely rank might be part of his cover-up from the Russian side.\|\| - The Sims: It is possible for Sims on the "military" track to become a General after one day's work if one effectively manages motives and develops the requisite statistics. Then again, all the other career paths work this way. It's also possible to go from "Boot Camp" to "Elite trooper" as literally the second step in the career path. - League of Legends: - Swain became a ranked officer at a very early age (even though by all logic he should not have been accepted in the military at all due to being crippled). How he did it is a mystery, and contributes to his overall enigmatic status. - His archnemesis, Jarvan IV, is the single highest-ranked military officer in Demacia, despite being fairly young. One would think it's because he's the crown prince, but no, J4 earned his rank. - In Sol Survivor, you go from Lieutenant Second Grade all the way to Fleet Admiral over the course of the game which is only a few months in game. It's justified in that the War isn't going that well, there are always vacancies caused by death of the previous guy, and despite it all you have never lost a battle. - Star Trek Online: Exaggerated. Your rise from ensign to fleet admiral (or their factional equivalents, see below) canonically takes a total of eighteen months. - In the Starfleet tutorial you go from a junior ensign (a fresh Academy graduate in the revamped version) to captain of your own ship in one battle. Justified in that the entire senior crew is dead so you have seniority. You retain your command seeing as you managed to pull off a victory that more experienced officers couldn't have. You do not, however, get promoted to captain, just lieutenant (you get your own command, but it is a small, really old ship, so there's a certain logic in it). Captain is a mid-game rank, so there is a bit of work ahead before you actually become one. Downplayed with the other two factions: the Klingon Defense Force PC is introduced as second officer of a bird-of-prey (with a significantly more open-ended backstory) and takes command via Klingon Promotion (the Klingons have a much more Asskicking Leads to Leadership-based promotion system), and the Romulan PC is part of a rebel faction with a less formal command structure (and supplies their own ship). - Player Character rank is tied to Character Level and caps out at an OF-10 grade (fleet admiral) for Starfleet and the Romulan Republic at level 60 and an OF-9 grade (general) at level 55 with an honorary and very prestigious title (Dahar Master) at level 60 for the KDF. But apart from getting the ability to call in one other ship to help you out if your hull drops below 50%, there's no real difference from when you hit captain at level 30. You're still flying just one ship instead of commanding an organization, you regularly get ordered around by NPCs you outrank, and there isn't a single mission available that makes more sense for a flag officer to handle than a captain (for that matter a lot of the grinding side missions make more sense for enlisted personnel). Eventually an Admiralty system was added where you send out ships represented by tokens on missions almost purely so that there would be something recurring that does make more sense for admirals/generals than captains/commanders. - Inverted by Subcommander Kaol in the end-game: he is placed in charge of a joint alliance of the Federation, the Romulan Republic and the Klingon Empire on a critical mission to investigate the technologies of an ancient artefact (that also links to the Delta Quadrant) and neutralize a major and highly classified threat (Omega particles) * : In the show, at least for Starfleet, captain is the minimum rank at which Omega particles are even declassified at all created by the artefact, and co-ordinates the alliance forces in a major conflict with the Voth. But subcommander is an OF-5 grade (equivalent to a Starfleet commander), meaning a mere captain outranks him (and thus so does every single player character he interacts with, since the Dyson Sphere is restricted to level 50 and thus OF-8 characters and above). - Inverted again by Kagran, who leads the entire Alliance war-effort against the Iconians (in other words, he commands the combined military forces of the Federation, the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Republic as well as support from several other Alpha and Delta governments, in a life-and-death struggle for the survival of their peoples). He is a captain. \|\|Also played straight, as he turns out to be such a General Failure he's probably overpromoted for the rank he does hold.\|\| - Sidestepped by Jem'Hadar (whose captains start at level 60, Honored First), where the actual promotions stop at First (roughly equivalent to captain, and placed as such so your subordinates top out at Second) as per the Dominion giving higher command authority to Vorta who are outside the Jem'Hadar rank system. Every subsequent "rank" is simply an adjective appended to First to indicate respect for competence and experience. On the flip side they get hit with an unavoidable inversion — in normal circumstances Jem'Hadar Firsts do not actually get to command starships, instead passing on orders from a Vorta commander to the rest of the crew, but the Jem'Hadar PC gets to command a starship autonomously. - Inverted in Sword of the Stars. One trailer specifically shows a SolForce destroyer commanded by a Lieutenant. This is justified in the background material due to humanity still recovering from various wars and nuclear devastation, so the SolForce ranks are a bit thin to afford a Commander for each ship, especially since destroyers are fairly tiny by starship standards (30 meters in length — smaller than a Space Shuttle) and command a crew of a few dozen at most. Destroyers also drop like flies. The battlegroup in that trailer got wiped out in a matter of minutes. On the other hand, a destroyer still has enough firepower for Orbital Bombardment, killing millions if it's not stopped. So they put a WMD in the hands of a Lieutenant. - By the time the third game in the Mass Effect trilogy rolls around, pretty much everyone who's worked directly with Shepard has gained rank if they're in any chain of command, some quite significantly. Even \|\|Jack\|\| is a military instructor, despite being a confirmed terrorist. Completely justified though, because only the human military had even a handful of people believing Shepard and his/her crew \|\|right up until the Reapers starting wrecking everyone's shit, at which point the galaxy realized who they needed to be listening to.\|\| Plus, they all definitely have the merits to qualify for their various promotions. - By Mass Effect 3, depending on who survived Virmire, Staff Lieutenant Kaiden Alenko becomes a Major (equivalent to a Navy Captain in this universe) and Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams gains an officer's commission and is promoted to Lieutenant Commander. In the Alliance's military structure, this means Ashley is now the same rank as Shepard (who is never promoted in the series) and Kaidan now outranks Shepard, by two ranks, yet still takes Shepard's orders. - Garrus Vakarian holds an unspecified rank in the Turian Hierarchy but is saluted by Generals and advises the Primarch due to being one of a handful of people in the galaxy with actual experience vs Reapers. The meritocracy of the Turian Heirarchy was previously noted to allow for very rapid promotion and its implied that Garrus is very close to being the next Primarch. - By the third game, Tali'Zorah becomes one of five Admirals of the Quarian Migrant Fleet. She had been groomed toward the position previously held by her father well in advance. - If they survive the Fifth Blight, the protagonist of Dragon Age: Origins is promoted to the rank of Warden-Commander of Ferelden, the second highest rank in the Grey Wardens Order despite having joined the Order a mere year prior and being hinted as rather young in most origins. Justified by the act that the protagonist is one of the only two surviving Fereldan Grey Wardens, and the other one either doesn't want or cannot accept the job. - In the first Wing Commander game, the player character starts as a newly-commissioned 2nd Lieutenant, and can potentially get promoted all the way to Lt Colonel over the course of the game and the two expansion packs (Maybe a year in-universe), along with getting an enormous number of medals, including the equivalent of two Medals of Honor. Despite this, the player never once gets authority over anyone other than his wingman (regardless of which pilot is higher ranked). The sequel has the character demoted to Captain for allowing his carrier to get destroyed, get stuck at that rank for ten years because of the stigma associated with the failure, and then jump three grades to full Colonel in one go after finally being exonerated, catching the traitor who stole the exonerating evidence, and then single-handedly winning a major victory over the course of three levels. This does not result in any change in the character's actual authority over the course of two more expansion packs and two sequels. - In Mercs of Boom, your mercenaries advance in rank with each level. The problem is, by the time they reach rank 12 (somewhere in the middle), they're generals. So you have a squad of 4-5 generals personally attacking enemy soldiers, mercs, mutants, and aliens, even though a general typically commands thousands of soldiers in Real Life. On the other hand, you're running a PMC company, so the ranks could be a mere formality and don't correspond to any military, especially since there are only two political entities left in the Crapsack World. - In XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, XCOM operatives will start as rookie, advanced to squaddie, corporal, etc, and steadily progress until they're colonels, leading to having a squad of 6 colonels (who were rookies two months ago) engaged in close-range combat against the alien threat. They also show no leadership skills, as they follow the Commander's orders to a tee. In the expansion packs for both games, you can send out colonels for covert actions. In the first game at least, the "rookies" you get are (supposedly) the cream-of-the-crop from the most elite of the world's armies, explaining some of the rank absurdity. - In MechWarrior 2, your character goes from being a mechwarrior (the lowest warrior rank in Clan society) to potentially reach the rank of Galaxy Commander (the second highest, after Khan) over the course of the Refusal War, which happened in the span of about one year. Even though Asskicking Leads to Leadership in Clan society, your character's rank should have been capped at Star Captain due to lacking a Bloodname and never having the chance to compete for one during the game. And it usually takes several years of leading a Binary or Trinary as a Star Captain before one is judged worthy of competing for promotion to Star Colonel, and an even longer time before being promoted to Galaxy Commander. This is, however, justified due to the sheer devastation suffered by both Clans that participated in the Refusal War to their touman: several canon characters received similarly quick promotions in rank during the war. - Futurama: Captain Zapp Brannigan is as incompetent and cowardly as they come, yet the general consensus among the populace is that he's a great hero. Like everything in Futurama this is of course Played for Laughs. He was suspended once and only once, and was only reinstated because the only witness able to testify against him wanted him out of her hair. - The Simpsons has had various examples over the years: - It's not explicitly stated, but in "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadassss Song", Skinner's commanding officer appears to be much too young to be a full colonel. Also, his proudest military action was securing a Kuwaiti department store. - While Homer is around the appropriate age to command an attack submarine, he has only been out of basic training for a week at most when he's asked to take the conn of the USS Jebediah in "Simpson Tide". Also, Moe, Apu, and Barny, despite having been in the Navy for the same length of time as Homer, are all wearing rate badges indicating that they are petty officers. note : So is Homer, but his being a nuclear technician makes this more plausible. - Lampshaded with "Admiral Baby". note : "It's hard to believe someone that young could have risen to the rank of admiral." - General Iroh of The Legend of Korra is 36 years old and is the youngest general in United Forces history. Possibly justified due to 1) being Zuko's grandson 2) the United Forces have only existed for less than 70 years and 3) is extremely badass. - In DuckTales (1987), Admiral Grimitz is in direct command of Seaman Donald Duck, a difference of well over a dozen ranks. He also commands an aircraft carrier, conducts personal inspections of equipment, and supervises routine training maneuvers, all jobs for lower ranks. About the only thing he does in the series that is appropriate is meet with a civilian military contractor to negotiate the purchase of top secret materiel — and he does that while in port in a hostile country instead of in a secure facility ashore. - G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: In one episode, Lifeline, Dial-tone and Shipwreck suddenly find themselves promoted to the rank of Colonel, outranking everyone except General Hawk. Predictably, the Joes are thrown into chaos with Lifeline turning them into more of a CASEVAC force than a fighting force, Shipwreck turning into The Neidermeyer and Dial-tone plagued by indecision. General Hawk returns, demotes all three back to their original rank and reveals that the whole thing was Cobra hacking into personnel records and sewing chaos. - There are certain jobs in the military that someone initially joining will get advanced rank, some all the way up to E-4. Such a person will usually be in a highly technical field (such as advanced medical or nuclear power). Typically, the person will attend basic training ("boot camp") with the rank of E-1 (recruit) along with all the others within the training platoon. This is so everyone going through boot camp is the same rank. However, upon graduation from basic, the person will be allowed to place the advanced rank on their uniform for graduation, and will receive a "catch-up" payment, which is equal to the amount the person would have received from day one, thereby the person does not lose any money. - The United States Marine Band and Air Force Band immediately promote new members to E-6 upon joining. This is in recognition that they are already experienced professionals who almost always hold a college degree in music (often from elite conservatories) before even being granted an audition. This is a rank that typically takes at least a decade to reach if you begin at E-1. note : The professional musicians who serve in these bands are non-combatants who spend their entire enlistments with the bands, meaning they'll never be in a position to give orders to, or take them from, regular servicemembers. These bands are also different from military field bands, which traditionally also acted as generals' bodyguards and are still expected to act as such if necessary, so members have to be combat ready on top of their music duties.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverrankedSoldier
Overtook the Manga - TV Tropes "How'd you get here so fast, Anime-san?" Mokuba: We appear to be locked on course with a giant ocean fortress directly beneath us! Yugi: That's weird. I don't remember any of this happening in the manga. Many anime are based on manga, or Japanese comics. While simply making the anime into a completely Alternate Continuity is common (especially if the manga has No Ending), more often the anime at least tries to follow the major plot points of the original manga. However, if a series is especially popular (and/or marketable), its anime version will begin before the manga even ends. Because of medium conventions, it takes longer for events to unfold in manga than it does in anime — the average conversion being roughly 2 (weekly) manga chapters to make 1 anime episode — and this often means that before long an anime will simply run out of source material. While some manga series are published weekly (e.g., Shonen Magazine/ Sunday/ Jump, etc), others are published on a monthly schedule (e.g., Magazine/Nakayoshi, Shonen Ace). However, most anime are aired weekly, which only makes it worse, especially for manga that have just started recently. The producers of the anime are then in a fix: they can't just wait for the creator to produce more material because they have a broadcast schedule to meet. Japanese shows are almost always broadcast solely as original episodes without re-runs, so no new episodes is akin to being cancelled. This is something that is frequently lost in translation outside of Japan, with the result being that, unlike Western shows, television shows aren't really made in the form of "seasons", with breaks written into the production schedule. They just keep going and going and going until they finish/get cancelled, or stop at a predesignated point. This is also why lots of anime are only 12/13 or 24/26 episodes long, because that's all they were scheduled for, regardless of popularity. However, there are shows that are starting to break this tradition by adopting the "seasons" model, such as My Hero Academia. Unless they work in close tandem with the writer of the original manga which is very rare since those writers are usually busy with the manga as is the people in charge of the anime will have to come up with their own solution for this problem. The most common being that they just start making things up on their own, and create a unique plotline continuing from the point they caught up with the manga to base things on. Unfortunately, unpopular or unwelcome filler arcs and episodes may often be Misblamed as being the fault of the original creators, when in reality the creators almost always have nothing to do with the filler plot. Some fillers that were better received by fans are often cited as being opportunities to develop lesser characters (this helps a lot with anime that have a cast size near the size of the production staff). Another popular option is to just pad the episodes out and slow the story down. This was common in the Dragon Ball series, which unfortunately meant that many people thought the manga was exactly the same or that Akira Toriyama's writing was at fault, when in reality the pace of the anime was out of his hands (his manga is a much brezzier experience, but unfortunately nowhere near as famous). Finally, the writers can choose to just diverge from the manga entirely and do a Gecko Ending instead. An example of this is the 2003 adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist, which was actually produced with this in mind due to the mangaka knowing that this trope was inevitable and feeling the other two options would ruin the story. See also Wacky Wayside Tribe, Adaptation Expansion. - Ai Yori Aoshi. While Ai Yori Aoshi and Ai Yori Aoshi Enishi follow the manga for the most part pretty faithfully, its ending accomplishes nothing story wise. - Where the Asteroid in Love anime ends is just a month after its corresponding chapter (Chapter 36) published, and there are substantial content in the Animated Adaptation of the Ishigaki arc that are anime original. For example, the debriefing session at the end of Episode 12 is never in the manga, although it is implied Sayuri does interview Mira and co. regarding the Shining Star Challenge. On the major storyline, though, the adaptation covers the events properly, albeit in a more sentimental tone. - The anime Akame ga Kill! really started deviating from the manga once it reached around Episode 20, with many source readers outraged at the direction it went in. The manga ended 3 years later in 2017; ironically enough, its Gecko Ending was actually rather similar to the anime's, with only a slightly lower body count. - The anime for Attack on Titan only had 25 episodes, because the manga wasn't finished at that time. It also caught up way too fast with the source material, leaving out less than 15 chapters of content. Because of this, there was a 4-year long delay in the production of the 2nd anime to allow for story developments to catch up and to avoid this happening again. It seems to have worked: after the second season aired in 2017, the anime has managed to continue releasing annually after that, with Season 3 divided into two parts in 2018 and 2019, and the same goes with the first part of the final season in late 2020 to 2021. The manga ended in 2021 which gives enough time for the second and third part of the final season to be produced and released in early 2022 and 2023. - Berserk is a monthly (mostly) series that had already run for several years by the time its animated TV adaptation came out in 1997. That anime was a single season that covered only one arc of the manga (10 volumes worth of material nowadays that's less than a third of the total story). Rather than a Gecko Ending, it stops at a large Cliffhanger (technically it's a whole series flashback that doesn't tell the viewer how we got to where we started). It's been described as "the world's most elaborate ad for the manga" for the way it drives viewers desperate for resolution back to the original. The New '10s' film trilogy adaptation re-adapts that same plot arc, ending only very slightly further on in the plot roughly one chapter's worth, which fortunately is enough to finally resolve that cliffhanger. The creators of the trilogy have expressed the desire to continue adapting the manga story up through the unwritten ending, with a new TV series. Due to passing of Kentaro Miura, the only way to end the series is this very trope. - Nine episodes of Black Butler are adapted from the manga, the rest of the first and second seasons are entirely original and feature their own Gecko Ending. However, a third season called Book of Circus and its accompanying OVA Book of Murder are direct adaptations of two connecting arcs in the manga, presented as mid-sequels that take place before the anime goes off the rails. It was followed by Book of Atlantic, which directly follows a saga from the manga taking place after Murder. - Defying this is the reason why the Black Clover anime went on a hiatus on Episode 170 after adapting Asta and Liebe's fight and mutual contract afterwards, as the anime was so close to the manga at the time this would have been inevitable if it continued. - Bleach created the Bount, Shusuke Amagai, Zanpakuto Tales, Beast Swords, and Division 13 Incursion arcs due to Tite Kubo's legendarily slow pacing. Sometimes the filler arcs slid neatly in between canon arcs but at other times, they occurred in the middle of canon arcs, resulting in comedy segments where the canon characters behaved like actors taking set breaks. Eventually, Pierrot decided to cut their losses and end the anime altogether while the final arc ran in the manga. It was only until after the final arc ended did the anime resume. - This happened to Blue Exorcist. It followed the manga pretty well up until the very first filler episode, after which they both went in two entirely different directions. Some fans were not pleased. - Season two, however, went back to following the manga, and made the anime-exclusive parts of season one (certain scenes from episodes 16-17, and everything after) Canon Discontinuity. - The Bokurano anime was completed before the manga was, resulting in the last half of the anime having absolutely no connection or resemblance to the equivalent in the manga, with the exception of one plot twist that the manga author might have decided to use after the anime came up with it. - A Certain Scientific Railgun has many filler arcs because of its manga's slow pace. Fortunately, the author Kazuma Kamachi had some say in these arcs, and they were mostly used to tie up the previous arcs' loose ends that the manga missed. It is notable that the anime's third season has no filler arcs, as there were two completed and unadapted arcs at the time of production due to a seven year gap between seasons. - In Chrono Crusade, the anime took a radically different direction from the manga in the last third of the series (they ended around the same time). Whether or not this is necessarily a bad thing is up to you. - To simplify it, the anime plays up the religious symbolism way more than the manga does, and the natures of certain characters are different. Even the Foregone Conclusion plays out differently. - The anime version of Code:Breaker is a different case. With the manga released back in 2003, the anime version, which was released on 2012, only has 12 episodes and only focused on the Hitomi Arc. What's even worse is that anime brought in three characters (Yuuki, Rui, and Yukihina) who aren't supposed to appear after the Hitomi Arc. - Daily Lives of High School Boys, despite being a Slice of Life comedy, got this treatment due to two factors: (1) the manga's Sketch Comedy format means a whole volume of manga can only produce about 3 episodes of anime without padding, and (2) Sunrise did not pad. The anime practically ran out of original material at the last episode, in which they asked the mangaka to draw two skits for the anime ( High School Boys and Assertiveness and High School Boys and Getting Hit On) and made two original skits ( High School Boys and ... and the faux High School Girls are Funky—The Movie trailer). Of course, being an ongoing Slice of Life manga without much of a plot, the anime simply ended the season by using Book Ends. - Dragon Ball is notorious for introducing loads of Padding and filler to give the manga time to work its way ahead and give the anime material to adapt and progress the story forward. There are also notable points that allowed the anime to capitalize on large stretches of time the manga doesn't cover and write its own original stories: - The very first occurrence of a filler arc in Dragon Ball is after Goku departs to search for the Four Star Ball after the 21st World Martial Arts Tournament, where Goku encounters Colonel Silver early, fights the Pilaf Gang again and spends an episode or two with Chi Chi and the Ox King (all at the same time!). - Easily the most common excuse for filler sequences are manga time skips where characters train and prepare for an upcoming battle. It would be used in Dragon Ball where characters train for the 22nd and 23rd Tournaments (and flesh out Goku and Chi Chi's wedding), and in Dragon Ball Z it appears during the build-up to the arrival of Vegeta and Nappa, the arrival of the Androids, and the wait until the Cell Games. These episodes typically show characters gaining new fighting insights that will definitely be important and utilized later, introduce some characters slightly early, or have them take driving lessons. - The Namek Arc is possibly the most infamous arc by way of desperately trying to avert this trope, having a huge amount of padding and filler. This was unfortunate because Namek was an uninteresting archipelago world whose sparse population was almost completely wiped out by the Big Bad before the heroes even get there, meaning they couldn't conjure up new locations or characters like in earlier stories set on Earth (so it introduced its own Earth-set B-stories). Despite its efforts, the anime still came dangerously close to fulfilling this trope: the conflict with Frieza was right up against the manga by only a couple of chapters, with the episode of Goku transforming into a Super Saiyan being the closest the anime ever got to overtaking the source material. - As a result of the above, the Garlic Jr. saga occured in the timeskip immediately after Namek to give some breathing room for the manga to forge ahead into the Android Arc. While the arc itself does delve into story elements the manga would not, it too has a fair amount of padding and nonsensical storytelling. - The last significant filler arc is the Other World Tournament, which occurs after Cell is defeated but before the skip forward to Boo, as well as some extra Great Saiyaman shenanigans. After that, the anime was just as likely to take a week or four off the air to stall for time than it was to use filler and pad out the existing fights. - Dragon Ball Super sidesteps the problem. Both the anime and the manga are given a general plot outline and character designs by Akira Toriyama, but are left to interpret them differently, leading to the anime and manga varying wildly in different aspects. - Dragon Ball GT is a case of Adaptation Expansion, because it was made after the original manga ended and Toei ordered an anime-only sequel to Dragon Ball Z to continue airing immediately afterwards. - Elfen Lied fell victim to this, ending roughly at Chapter 63 of the manga (which would go on to run for 107 chapters total). It was resolved with some separate continuity, culminating in an ending that was half Gecko and half Ambiguous. - Excel♡Saga got an adaptation less than two years into its run, which was a problem due to it being a monthly series. However, the anime producers made a deliberate attempt to avoid this by going for a completely different storyline officially it covers the first five volumes, but only a handful of episodes (mostly in the first and third quarters) have any connection to the original manga at all. For the record, Excel♡Saga gets considerably darker and is much more of a satire than a parody not long after the adapted-to-anime material ends. - The Eyeshield 21 anime has a lot more wacky hijinks between games because of this. - Defied by the Fairy Tail anime, which has gone on hiatus twice in its run note : first from 2013 to 2014, and again from 2016 to 2018, with Filler arcs, some slight Padding, and an adaptation of the prequel manga helping to stretch things out until a good drop-off point in the story was reached. The final season eventually finished the series over a year after the manga ended, and indeed ended during the running of the sequel manga. - The first season of the Fist of the North Star TV series, which adapts the first 25 chapters of the manga into 22 episodes, changes the order of events as a way of preventing it from getting ahead of the original manga (which was in the middle of the Cassandra arc when the anime began airing). Kenshiro's battle with Shin (who dies in Chapter 10) was pushed back to the end of the season and as a result the two follow-up villains from the manga, the Golan Colonel and Jackal, were rewritten to be agents of Shin instead of acting on their own accord and numerous anime-only villains were introduced afterward to pad out rest of the season. The subsequent parts also featured filler, but generally kept the main storyline going in the same order. - The 2001 anime adaptation of Fruits Basket narrowly averted this. It originally aired five years before the manga ended; as a result, it only covers about a third of the manga's story (barely seven books' worth of material). The final episodes are about an arc from the beginning of volume 6 that was shifted back for narrative purposes Kyo's inner struggle with his true form, and Tohru learning to accept him for who he is. Another reason Fruits Basket only had 26 episodes is because Natsuki Takaya broke her drawing hand while working on the eighth book, leading to her taking a break from it. If the anime had gone past 26 episodes, then it's likely that it would've overtaken the manga, though Takaya being deeply disappointed with how it turned out and having major Creative Differences with the director prevented it from ever continuing. In 2019, the manga would get a new anime adaptation that aims to be more faithful than the 2001 anime, and it covers most of the manga's story at 63 episodes. - The first anime adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), went into an Alternate Continuity from its very early episodes, although the changes were fairly subtle in the beginning. This is because the creators knew in advance that it would overtake the manga, as did the manga's creator, who explicitly asked them to take this route. Averted with the second series, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, whose release was carefully timed to end almost simultaneously with the manga — the final episode was aired about two weeks after the final manga chapter was released. - Gantz is an odd example. The manga and anime were created at about the same time. The animators, knowing they would eventually get ahead of the manga, decided from the beginning that it would only follow the manga through a few arcs. The anime ended with an arc that was nowhere in the manga, but had been planned since the first episode of the anime. - The anime version of Great Teacher Onizuka followed the manga for the most part right up the trip to Okinawa. - Averted in Guyver, which has had three animated adaptations and none of them have gone past the first appearance of Guyver Gigantic. This happened in the early 90s... and the manga is still ongoing. Even the most recent anime, produced in 2005, just barely got Guyver Gigantic in. Many Guyver fans would love an anime that runs long enough to overtake the massive manga lead. - .hack//Legend of the Twilight also diverged from its manga once it reached the "Haunted House." This included, oh, removing half to all of the plot. To this day, the Twilight anime is the only instalment, besides the gag OAV .hack//GIFT, which does not count officially in the series canon. - The Haunted Junction anime had to replace the more linear and consistent plot from the manga with a comedic Once per Episode deal and cut several characters out (like the Bleeding Beethoven and \|\|Shingo\|\| to cover up for how the manga was nowhere near finished... and it wouldn't be over until years after the anime series was done for. - Hellsing's first anime went a completely different direction with characterization in its second half, the "Incognito Arc", due to catching up with Kohta Hirano's manga early on (as in, extremely before the Big Bad was even introduced). This was made worse by the fact that (1) Hellsing was a monthly series, and (2) Hirano is famously lazy, regularly turning in chapters only 10 pages long in a magazine where the average is 25-30. Hirano was extremely unhappy with the anime, and further adaptation of the comic was postponed for years. Hellsing Ultimate, an OVA series much more in line with the original, was then made. - The 2015 anime of The Heroic Legend of Arslan was based on the Arakawa manga version of the novel. However, the anime ran out of manga material, so the staff decided to follow the novel story route instead. For now, the anime is ahead of the manga that it was originally based on, but it's fine because they are both based from the novel. It also helps that said novel had been ongoing since 1986 and later finished in 2017. - Despite this happening, Hunter × Hunter has at most four episodes that could be considered filler in it, and they were all fairly early on. Instead of making filler episodes, the anime simply stopped making episodes until the manga made significant progress, which is why it has three OVA seasons and stops at the end of the Greed Island arc. The series was rebooted in 2011, and despite a twelve-year gap, it narrowly averts this, ending in 148 episodes. - Inazuma Eleven is a rare example of the anime staff avoiding filler by working closely in tandem with the creators of the source material (in this case a video game series instead of a manga series). Whenever this happens, the anime simply starts on the plot of the next game before the game itself is released. The game series itself simply has its major plot points planned out well in advance; the 4th game, Inazuma Eleven GO, is currently scheduled for a winter 2011 release, but trailers had already surfaced a whole year in advance in December 2010. As a result, the major plot points are generally consistent between the game and anime, although plenty of details and smaller points differ. - When the Inuyasha anime series Overtook the Manga, Sunrise opted to simply end it, resulting in a finale that only gets about 7/10 of the way through the story. It was finally continued in Inuyasha: The Final Act, which covered the remaining volumes of the manga, which ended in 2008. - No other manga series has the distinction of averting this trope the way JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has. This is due to two things. For one, the gap between the original work's first publication and the eventual television adaptation. Published in 1987, it was one of the longest-running manga series without a TV anime adaptation, not receiving one until 2012, in stark contrast with the vast majority of manga series that typically gain their adaptations in 1-5 years or so, meaning that Filler Arcs won't be an issue for David Production for quite some time, if at all. The second is that there's been a two year gap between the first airing of each season note : Parts 3, 4, and 5 in the manga are each considered their own seasons in the anime. However, Parts 1 and 2 of the manga were adapted into just one season, so even though Hirohiko Araki is publishing JoJo monthly, the team at David won't outpace him any time soon. - Kaitou Saint Tail's anime is the result of a mid-nineties anime adaptation running simultaneously with the manga but not opting for a Gecko Ending: the anime started production right before a certain Mid-Season Twist occurred in the manga, which abruptly shifted the tone of the story from an episodic caper story to an allegory for human connection and built off of Foreshadowing that had seemingly been irrelevant beforehand. Because the anime didn't account for this, it removed most of the Foreshadowing, moved important episodes around in order, and added Filler that backpedals on major developments and practically comes from an alternate universe, yet continued to adapt the story all the way to the manga's original final arc and ending despite everything leading up to it not making sense anymore. Contemporary Japanese fans of the manga understood the situation well enough to be satisfied with the anime being a relatively faithful adaptation by the era's standards (in the sense that most of the manga's important scenes have an animated counterpart), but joked about it and its Filler being "an animated children's picture book" that swerves sharply into the manga's original final arc; meanwhile, the manga's shaky localization history resulted in international fans getting a completely different impression of what the anime's story was about due to it no longer having a coherent plotline. - This happened to Karin, resulting in a very anti-climactic yet funny ending for the anime and an elaborate Tear Jerker ending for the manga. - Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl ignores a new plotline added in the manga and goes for a Gecko Ending probably for the better, although opinions differ. - The anime of Kekkaishi made its own story for a short while, then abruptly cut it short with no resolution whatsoever. - Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch also had filler while waiting for the manga that eventually crowded out key plot points from the manga. Meaning? Anything involving Coco. - My Hero Academia has so far been getting around this problem by simply using the "seasonal" model for releases rather than a traditional run typical of anime adaptations, completely breaking tradition. It helps that so far there is a substantial amount of chapters ahead of the anime, providing a decent buffer so the wait isn't too long. All indications suggest that this has so far been working out quite well for Studio BONES, who have previously had to deal with this issue with titles like Soul Eater and Fullmetal Alchemist. - The Naruto franchise: - The "Filler Hell" of Naruto after the Sasuke Retrieval Arc is perhaps the most infamous example since Dragon Ball. As in, the show ended up with two entire seasons composed solely of episodic filler and nothing else. Although some of the filler arcs were moderately popular for providing screen time to fan favorite secondary characters as well as general Fanservice, this eventually led to a severe drop in ratings, resulting in the first arc after the Time Skip being essentially a relaunch with the new title of Naruto Shippuden. - Shippuden attempted to pace itself so the manga could maintain a lead, even at one point going so far as to adapt only one manga chapter per episode. Despite this, the lead slowly closed. Multiple filler stories have been introduced, but do not have the same advantage as taking place during a Time Skip, instead being shoehorned into the plot as either flashbacks or Wacky Wayside Ninja. Unlike Bleach, however, the series happily and successfully followed the manga to the very end and even managed to adapt the various tie-in novels released after Chapter 700. They ended the series with \|\|Naruto's and Hinata's wedding\|\|, however, since the greenlighting of Boruto meant that Chapter 700 (a Babies Ever After) has little purpose. - The Sequel Series, Boruto, has been taking a different approach to avoid this: Since the manga is released monthly and its first 10 chapters adapt the events of Boruto: Naruto the Movie, the anime started by covering the events before that, focusing on Boruto's early days as a student of the ninja academy, all to allow for more time for the manga to advance. The show doesn't reach the events of the manga's first chapter until around the 50th episode. - Toei Animation is trying desperately to avert this with One Piece, not expecting the series to have gone on for this long. Saving filler stories strictly for promotion of other things (such as movies) and keeping them short, the anime instead is taking the one-chapter-one-episode approach, sometimes resorting to stretching a chapter into two episodes if they get too close, keeping roughly 10 to 12 months behind. Eiichiro Oda, the creator of the manga, seems to have caught wind of this and has greatly increased the pace of the manga, creating many gaps in every chapter for the anime people to fill in. - There is at least one instance of a minor addition in the anime contradicting later information from the manga. After the Time Skip, Tony Tony Chopper was shown to be able to use three of his special Points without his Rumble Ball drug. The anime assumes this was an oversight on Oda's part and had Chopper use a Rumble Ball before transforming. The Fishman Island Story Arc later clarifies the misconception, revealing that Chopper still needs a Rumble Ball to assume his Monster Point. - Beginning in 2014, Oda started having health problems and would take occasional breaks from the series. Unfortunately for everyone, it happened in the middle of a major story arc that had already run for over a year. This caused the anime to have to slow its pace to an absolute crawl to avoid this trope. It still hasn't quite hit DBZ-level because Oda packs a lot more dialogue and movement into each chapter than Toriyama. - Ouran High School Host Club pretty much averted this. The anime came out in 2006 and ran for only one season, while the manga ran from 2002 to 2010. Despite this, the anime followed the manga nicely with the exception of a few minor alterations that more or less didn't really affect anything. Only the very last two episodes or so drift from the manga. The anime ending was enough to give some closure, but still relatively open, leaving all pairings technically possible for fangirls to squee over. - Most shoujo stories published by Hakusensha seem to only receive roughly 26 episodes of anime adaptation (either a single series or two half-size seasons) which ends way before its manga source is anywhere near a proper conclusion. The production studios therefore don't have to wait for the manga at all provided it already has enough material for a one-season anime, and those who like the series can start reading the manga for continuation and/or more details. Whether this tactic actually works tends to vary between the series, though. - The anime Peacemaker Kurogane is the prequel for the actual manga "Peacemaker Kurogane", as it only follows the events of the manga "Shinsengumi Imon Peacemaker". Sound confusing? It is. - While most seasons of Pokémon: The Series are based directly off of one of the handheld video games, having Ash and co. visit the region of the currently-released installment and compete in the regional League, it had to go off the paved path twice, simply because they got to the end of "pavement": - The second season, named "Adventures in the Orange Islands", took place on a completely original set of islands. This was due to Pokémon Gold and Silver not yet being released at the time; while they could've had the characters putter about the Kanto region for another 35 episodes, moving the story to a more original setting allowed the producers to start introducing more of the new Johto Pokémon ahead of Gold and Silver's release. This actually allowed the Finnish MTV channel to forgo the Orange Island saga entirely. - The last portion of Pokémon the Series: Black & White (the second half of Season 16 in the dub) contains various filler episodes that did not fit within any of the saga's plotlines, plus a few Early Bird Cameos for Pokémon X and Y as per usual, and a brief arc regarding Team Plasma as the two-parter which was supposed to introduce them earlier had been canceled. - Ranma ½ overtook its manga source several times, and made a large number of episodes from scratch each time it happened. Several episodes also were condensed arcs from the manga as well, but that may often be expected. - An interesting phenomenon was when an event in the anime and the manga happened at different seasons. When Ranma fights Cologne, it's a summer Beach Episode in the manga, whereas it's a winter ski trip episode in the anime. As a result, the two are quite different. - Rozen Maiden is an unusual example, in that the anime adaptation overtook the manga because the manga was abruptly Cut Short due to a dispute between the publishers and the producers. As a result, the anime added a new and original arc that fans would dub "The Barasuishou Arc", named after the arc's Big Bad. This created a weird side-effect by the time Rozen Maiden: Tale came out, which ironically, the manga was trying to catch up to itself by first starting in an Alternate Universe before eventually picking up where the original left off. - This ironically did not happen to Rosario + Vampire; the first season of the anime stopped about halfway through the first serialization of the manga, which itself was just getting into its second, but not only did they rush to release the second season anime within a few months of the first, but rather than picking up where they left off, they skipped the rest of the first serialization and went directly into the second, which had barely been around for a year by then, though they did touch on some of the plot points from the first serialization. The result is not well-liked. - The Rurouni Kenshin anime's last three arcs the Christian/Shimabara Arc, the Black Knights Arc, and the Feng Shui Arc were anime-only, created while waiting for Nobuhiro Watsuki to finish the manga. Although the Christian Arc, as well as the episodic filler and the four episodes adapted from the light novel (which altogether make up over half the season), were reasonably well-received, the poor quality of the last two arcs led to the anime's cancellation and the final manga arc (the Enishi/Jinchuu Arc) was never fully animated, though a series of live-action movies adapting nearly every major arc, including the Jinchuu Arc was filmed long after the manga ended, with the final films released in 2021, ultimately covering every major story except the Raijuta Arc (which, while relatively long, was not of narrative importance to the rest of the overall story). - Nearly half of the first-season episodes (almost everything after the end of the Oniwaban story) were also filler, largely consisting of stand-alone episodes or two- to three-episode storylines that were basically watered-down versions of other plots from the manga (the series and the movie have three or four low-rent versions of the series' ultimate Big Bad Shishio masterminds with a vision of the "good old days" who gather together a bunch of unemployed swordsmen to embark on national conquest). - The Sailor Moon manga (monthly) and original anime (weekly) were essentially produced simultaneously. Toei Animation wanted to create an anime based on Codename: Sailor V, which lead to the Sailor Moon manga starting the month before the anime premiered. Thanks to Production Lead Time, the anime wasn't directly based on the manga; Toei were just given characters and broad outlines of what the source material would be like. Not only was the majority of the anime original Monster of the Week stories, plotlines nominally based on the manga are barely recognizable, and even main characters were drastically different. - Saint Seiya created the whole Asgard arc after the Sanctuary Chapter which surprisingly enough became one of the fans favorite arcs. On the other hand, they created several episodes in the Sanctuary Chapter which led to some confusions notably with the introduction of the Crystal Saint as Hyoga's mentor when it was later revealed in the manga that Hyoga's mentor was in fact the Aquarius Saint. It was handwaved by making The Aquarius Saint the mentor of the Crystal Saint who was still the mentor of Hyoga the Cygnus Saint, thus establishing some kind of "coherent" hierarchy. - Saiyuki had a few cases, which led to a lot of filler and a large mismatch between the sequel series of the manga and the anime: - The entire second half of the first TV series, Gensoumaden Saiyuki, was an anime-original arc, although its Big Bad Homura was designed by the mangaka Kazuya Minekura, and the story took existing elements from the then-ongoing manga prequel series, Saiyuki Gaiden. (Notably, the Homura arc became rather popular for non-manga material, with its characters even getting a cameo in Gaiden.) - The second anime series, Saiyuki Reload, started out adapting the then-ongoing manga sequel of the same name, but in its second half covered the final arc of the first manga series, which didn't make it into the Gensoumaden anime. - The last anime sequel, Saiyuki Reload Gunlock, continued adapting the Saiyuki Reload manga, but still lacked enough material because the latter was on hiatus due to the author's health. As a result, the final arc of Gunlock used the same basic plot and characters as the final arc of the Reload manga, but ended up going in a very different direction: whereas the manga was starting to tie its plot threads together in preparation for the final stretch, the anime, on the contrary, went for a normal standalone arc barely connected to the overarching story, omitting a lot of important elements and concluding with a Gecko Ending of the usual And the Adventure Continues variety. BLAST was eventually adapted as a 12-episode series with little filler in 2017, though even it had to end in a cliffhanger to account for the chapters ahead of it. - In Saki, the manga ended the regional tournament just a few days before it ended in the anime. - The Seven Deadly Sins' anime adaptation experienced some delays through its run due to needing the manga to progress further before they could adapt the next arc fully. - Because the anime version of Sgt. Frog frequently ran ahead of the manga (particularly in more recent years) a number of episodes and plots are present in the former that are not in the latter, such Karara's repeated appearances to marry one of the members of the platoon and the timer counting down to the invasion in season 3. - Shaman King is a bit more balanced between the manga and anime, but the 2001 anime seemed to overtake the manga by a nose. By the halfway point, the anime diverged from the manga almost entirely, making its own take on the shaman tournament and a Gecko Ending since they still hadnt reached that point in the manga. - Shugo Chara! used the whole Lulu arc to catch the manga's pace, but at the end they ignored the manga's conclusion and added a whole filler season ( Dokki Dokki!), ignored by most of the fandom. - The Simoun manga debuted in the January, 2006 issue of Yuri Hime magazine, at which time the anime version had already started production. The two tell different stories, albeit with the same background. - The Sonic X comic has done the same thing, with the Sonic characters being shown still living on earth in the comic long after the anime had sent them home. - Soul Eater is almost exactly the same as the manga with only a few minor alterations (and more Excalibur for some reason) up until episode 37 \|\|at which point the new ending switches around which characters live and die, changes the significance of several characters, and involves a giant robot fight in a series which had never had anything remotely like that happen before. In the final episode, Maka is able to fight off Asura, one of the most powerful beings in existence, by somehow becoming a weapon for a few minutes (which, oddly enough, doesn't have any real effect on the fight), and finally by punching him really hard in the face, which causes him to crack apart as if he were made of glass and explode because she "filled her fist with courage". It's worth noting that she doesn't even use Soul, her partner, to achieve this, which is strange since teamwork seemed to be a pretty major theme in the show up until the final episode.\|\| Some of these changes, though, can actually be considered to be quite awesome, so it's really up to the viewer to decide. It was inevitable as the series runs in a monthly magazine, and anime are made for weekly showings, so it was going to catch up pretty quickly regardless. - The Trigun anime overtook its manga by a fair margin, though how it did so is a rather unique situation. In 1997, Yasuhiro Nightow had to deal with the abrupt end of his manga because the Shōnen magazine he was being published in folded. By the time he restarted it as Trigun Maximum in the Seinen magazine Young King Ours, Madhouse had already begun production on the anime. As a result, the anime quickly caught up and finished long before the manga did. In fact, Maximum continued for nearly 9 years after the anime ended, finally finishing in April 2007. From Volumes 2-3 of TriMax, including the equivalents of episodes 20-21, the manga takes new directions with plot and characters, while retaining parallels in the plot sometimes revealed in the manga years later that Nightow had probably intended from the beginning. - For the curious: only anime episodes 1, 4, 5, 7-10, and 12-21 have any connection to the manga at all. note : The only part of Ep.1 that happened in the manga was the bar scene with the Insurance Girls. Only the first half of Ep.9 (introducing Wolfwood) and the first few minutes of Ep.10 (Vash's morning training) appeared in the manga. - With Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-, apparently CLAMP was very upset that production company Bee Train had to resort to making stuff up. When the manga reached the Acid Tokyo arc, the damage was already done and CLAMP gave the rights to Production I.G to continue the anime in OVA form. The fillers did break several rules that CLAMP stories strictly abide by. Most egregiously, one episode had the heroes using a wish to restore the dead to life. An immutable, unbreakable law of nature in the Tsubasa-verse is that the dead never come back to life, no matter what happens. Hell, it ends up being one of the central themes of the entire story. - Twin Star Exorcists followed the manga quite well (though heavily padded) up until the 20th episode, after which it derived completely with an original story involving Rokuro staying on the mainland rather than moving to Tsuchimikado Island. Though unlike most examples of this trope Yoshiaki Sukeno himself approved of this change making the derivation more like an Alternate Continuity than anything. He would later even introduce characters from it into the Manga itself. - Venus Versus Virus's anime went in a completely different direction from the manga from the first episode. It also had a Gecko Ending. - Violinist of Hameln found themselves so far ahead of the manga that they needed to come up with their own explanations for many of the Chekhov's Gun found in the series, as well as creating a Gecko Ending for it all. - The Wedding Peach manga ran for 6 volumes and one spinoff. The anime ran for 52 episodes and 3 OVA spinoffs, and almost all of the tropes on Wedding Peach's page are about the anime. - The Animated Adaptation of CLAMP's X/1999 have obviously counted into this because the manga was actually cancelled (Or rather, it has been listed as "on Hiatus" for a long while) due to Monthly Asuka growing concerned about the manga's rather violent storyline and imagery present in the storyline, and the authors actually didn't want to be censored so they opted for hiatus. (Of course, the manga was actually pulled a couple times already for similar reasons.) - Yu-Gi-Oh! loves to do this; the Virtual World (which occurred right in the middle of another in-manga arc), Doma / Waking the Dragons and the KC Grand Prix were a result of this. If nothing else, the Virtual World arc gave us more backstory on the Kaiba brothers. Later series avert this by virtue of the anime and manga being completely different plot-wise. - Yumeiro Pâtissière's anime had a sequel arc in Yumeiro Patissiere SP Professional, which takes place several years later with Ichigo now in high school. As the manga serialization didn't go into Ichigo's high school years until two years after SP Professional aired, the season was entirely original. - The anime version of Zatch Bell! ran at the same time as the manga version it was based on. Unfortunately, Makoto Raiku, the author of the manga, broke his hand, forcing the manga version to go on hiatus while the author's hand healed enough to allow him to draw again. The anime overtook the manga as a result, so the anime diverged from the manga for its final episodes. Some aspects of the anime made it into the manga once Raiku resumed drawing, the most notable being \|\|Zeon's ultimate spell and the location of the final battle between Sherry and Gash\|\|. ## Other Examples: - The Panini comic book adaption of Digimon; ended up skipping almost all of Adventure when Dark Horse Comics (whose comics the company had until then reprinted) lost their license in favor of jumping straight onto 02, which had already started by then. - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures started out as a Comic-Book Adaptation for the 1987 cartoon's pilot and a few other episodes before quickly introducing its own new characters and episodic adventures. As the more serious ongoing storylines got established, practically all of the '87 elements were gradually phased out (sometimes violently so, like with poor \|\|Mondo Gecko\|\|). - The Transformers (Marvel): Being published by booth Marvel US and Marvel UK simultaneously. The fact that the UK version was not only longer, but on a (mostly) weekly schedule meant that a lot of original material had to be made. Most of which the writers tried to fit in between the US stories, with varying degrees of success. - The Godfather Part II picks up where the novel ended, with Michael Corleone moving his family to Nevada, and The Godfather Part III takes place decades later and concludes with \|\|the death of Michael Corleone\|\|. The novel series continued with The Godfather Returns in 2004 and The Godfather's Revenge in 2006, written by Mark Winegardner as original author Mario Puzo died in 1999. - The film and comic book versions of Kick-Ass were written at the same time, with both influencing the other and things being changed to keep them consistent. - Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was filmed before the comic's final volume had been written, so while most of the film is fairly faithful the endings are quite different. - Nearly avoided in Harry Potter when the first movie was released in 2001 after the fourth book was published in 2000. J. K. Rowling told Alan Rickman about the true nature of his character, Severus Snape, which made him one of the few people who knew about Snape's motives prior to the publication of the seventh book. Hence, Movie Snape appeared to be nicer than his book counterpart. Though Rowling did supervise the scripts, she made the final word about the characters such as Kreacher's importance in the last book and Dumbledore's sexual orientation. Though the movies never caught up with the books, with the seventh book released in the same month as the fifth movie, the movies did have a problem with the official pairings. It seemed that the production staff expected Harry and Hermione to be the Official Couple, due to the chemistry between Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, but they're confirmed as Like Brother and Sister in the final book, with Ginny Weasley as Harry's love interest instead. When Harry is finally paired with Ginny in the movies, it comes off as an extreme case of Strangled by the Red String due to them having had significantly less screen time and chemistry together than in the books. - The film The Last Airbender was written while the final season of the show on which it is based was in production. Because of this, the showrunners didnt have time to consult on the movie, which caused some issues. Avatar Roku is Adapted Out as Aangs mentor in favor of a dragon. Aang ran away in the show because he was a kid who was understandably terrified of having to take the responsibility of saving the world, while in the film, he runs away because hes told the Avatar cant have kids, something all twelve-year-olds care deeply care about. In the third season of the show, Deuteragonist Zuko finds out hes the great-grandson of both Roku and Fire Lord Sozin. This is the climax of his Character Development and the push he needed to pull a HeelFace Turn for good to join Team Avatar to teach Aang firebending so Aang can take down his dad. Zuko wouldnt exist if the Avatar couldnt have kids. Roku is also the person who tells Aang that he and Sozin used to be friends. Aang doesnt find out that Zuko is related to Roku until the tie-in comics, but a layer to their relationship would have been completely lost. This ended up being a moot point as the film barely broke even and therefore became a Stillborn Franchise. - At the time The Kissing Booth 3 was released, Beth Reekles had only published two books and a short story, The Beach House, with The Kissing Booth 2: Going the Distance being released the same year as the second movie. Due to the sequels being filmed concurrently so they could be released back-to-back, the third movie is the first installment not directly based on the books (although it takes some inspiration from The Beach House). - Played with regarding the After film series. The book series has five books, but the 5th one is a prequel (titled Before). After the 4th film ( After Ever Happy) was released in 2022, it was announced that the next movie wouldn't be based on the prequel book, it would be a new installment entirely (titled After Everything), and it's currently in production. - Some of the early Star Wars Legends material that was published between the movies of the original trilogy, like Splinter of the Mind's Eye. It was written as a low-budget sequel to the first movie, but published when it was unknown if The Empire Strikes Back was ever going to be made. The Star Wars (Marvel 1977) comic book series fits this trope despite ironically being a comic book adaptation of a screen franchise. First it adapts the original movie, then it has a bunch of original stories, then it adapts the second movie, followed by more original stories, then the third movie, before running out of source material. - The Star Trek comic books - specifically, the first series from DC Comics - suffered from overtaking the movies. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock follows immediately after Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; however, DC's series started just months before Search premiered, and thus added events between those movies. Then, following the adaptation of Search, they had Spock make a full recovery and get his own science vessel, while Kirk and the rest of his crew took command of the Excelsior, with Starfleet sending them all on a bunch of far-away missions while they decided what to do with the captain who stole the Enterprise and got it blown up. Then, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home comes along and sets up that it's only been a couple of months since Search, so in the comics, Spock started having a mental breakdown while his entire crew died, so Kirk swapped the Excelsior for the Klingon ship they'd apparently kept in the Excelsior's hangar for all those months, took him back to Vulcan for treatment, and managed to set things up exactly the way they had been at the end of Search, just in time for a huge cylinder to start asking Earth about whales. - S.D. Perry wrote a follow-up to her Resident Evil 2 novelization titled Resident Evil: Underworld, in which Sherry Birkin is left under the care of her aunt (a character made up for the books), while Leon and Claire go on a new adventure with Rebecca Chambers and the surviving members of the Exeter branch of S.T.A.R.S. However, this book proved to be hard to reconcile when Resident Evil 3: Nemesis came out, as it revealed the fates of various characters after RE2, which differed to what Perry came up with in Underworld. Perry had to explain away all the continuity snarls in her Nemesis and Code: Veronica novelizations. - The Nikki Heat novels are a strange example, being a defictionalization of an in-universe novel series from the Castle TV show. In the show, the fictional Nikki Heat novels gradually stop being mentioned by about season 5; the series itself was Screwed by the Network at the end of season 8 in 2016. The real-world Nikki Heat novels ran for ten volumes through 2019, the second-to-last of which crossed over with Castle's earlier Derrick Storm novel series, which itself had been given a defictionalized comic book adaptation by this point. - Game of Thrones caught up with the published A Song of Ice and Fire novels in the fifth season. Book author George R. R. Martin gave the show's writers a detailed explanation of the events he'd planned for the final two novels, and the remaining TV seasons progressed past the latest point in the book series. As no more novels have come out since the end of the TV series, it's unclear how much of those seasons is based on the books' plot and how much is a Gecko Ending. - British Brevity meant that Being Human (US) stops being an adaptation of Being Human (UK) reeeeal quick. At first it was mostly the same story with the extra episodes largely given to Aidan because vampires are popular lately for some reason. However, it ends up being quite a different show with each passing season, especially once the original decided to wipe out the old cast and go with a new cast entirely. - Inspector Morse began by adapting the original novels by Colin Dexter, but then moved to original stories after running out of novels. - Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie was adapted into an NES game by Sunsoft, who took great liberties with the plot but still managed to churn out a pretty good sidescroller. However, Sunsoft couldn't wait for the next movie to come out before making a sequel to the NES game, and created Batman: Return of the Joker as a standalone sequel based on the comic. - A similar example occurs with the SNES adaptation of Jurassic Park. Ocean couldn't wait for the sequel (or even the novel it would be loosely based on) and created their own, Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues. It had a vaguely similar plot to the eventual sequel—a rival genetics company tries to take control of the island by force, and Alan Grant is sent to stop them. Nobody stopped to question why Grant was suddenly a gun-toting Contra-esque mercenary or why he'd care about any of this. Good music, though. - Ocean did the same thing on the Genesis/Megadrive with Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition, which is an Actionized Sequel that takes place after the first game (although, unlike the SNES sequel, it retains the gameplay style of its predecessor). - Street Fighter was another interesting example in that Tiertex, the company responsible for porting the original game to home computers, decided they couldn't wait for Street Fighter II to revolutionize the fighting game genre, so they took their port of Street Fighter and made their own original sequel to it, titled Human Killing Machine. - Years before Capcom released Strider 2, the official arcade sequel to the original Strider (Arcade), they handed the Strider license to U.S. Gold and Tiertex (the companies that produced the European computer ports of the first arcade game) to produce their own sequel titled Strider II (spelled with a Roman numeral). This sequel was originally made for the same set of European computer formats and then remade for the Sega Genesis and Game Gear, getting a stateside release in the form of Journey from Darkness: Strider Returns. - When Konami wanted to make a sequel to Metal Gear following the success of the NES port in North America, they commissioned one of their teams to make a sequel specifically for the American market, resulting in the creation of Snake's Revenge. This inspired Hideo Kojima to make his own sequel for the MSX2, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Snake's Revenge is not considered part of the official Metal Gear continuity, as the events of the game are incompatible with what occurs in the official sequel. \|\|Namely, the way Big Boss' return is handle in both games. Both games takes place three/four years after the original Metal Gear and have Big Boss forming a new terrorist organization with a new Metal Gear prototype in his hands. However, in Snake's Revenge he also turns in a huge cyborg during the final battle.\|\| - A sequel to the original Gradius (a.k.a. Nemesis) was made for the MSX titled Gradius 2 (a.k.a. Nemesis 2) before the actual arcade sequel, Gradius II (a.k.a. Vulcan Venture), was even made. While the arcade Gradius games had Excuse Plots that were basically written as afterthoughts, the MSX version of Gradius 2 is known for its elaborate lore. Gofer no Yabou Episode II (a.k.a. Nemesis 3: Eve of Destruction) was later released as a reworked port of the arcade Gradius II, but continues the story from the MSX Gradius 2. - Golden Axe II for the Sega Genesis was made a year before the proper arcade sequel ( Golden Axe: Revenge of the Death Adder) was released. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle was released shortly after JoJolion, JoJo's eighth part, began serialization, resulting in only one character from it (Josuke) being included, with his moveset based on what little the developers had to go off of at the time, Its story mode also consists of Josuke fighting against all the previous parts' protagonists rather than a condensed retelling of the manga. Its remaster, All Star Battle R, didn't change this even though it came out over a year after JoJolion ended. - Darths & Droids finished Episode VI in mid-2017, but the writers decided to hold off on adapting the still-in-progress sequel trilogy until The Rise of Skywalker was released in late 2019. To compensate, they adapted Rogue One as a Whole Episode Flashback, which worked out nicely as the original Episode IV adaptation (released in the early 2010's, years before Rogue One was even announced) started In Medias Res and never showed the earlier important events, which neatly lined up with the time-frame of Rogue One. When they still needed more time, the comic then adapted the Star Wars/ The Muppets crossover special as a post-Episode VI story, while also slowing down uploads from thrice-weekly to once-weekly. The Episode VII adaptation, The Forced-Away Kin, finally began in early 2020. - The Secret of NIMH actually overtook the source material. While the Bluth film was rather jumping in and out of In Name Only, the ending (and primary events) of Bluth's 1982 Animated Adaptation pretty much ruined any potential chance of covering the two later books written by Jane Leslie Conly with Jenner and Nicodemus kicking the bucket (whereas they both survived in the books; however, it was implied that Jenner possibly died off-screen sometime in the first book with the mention of his party being electrocuted by a car battery). In fairness to Bluth, it may have been the success of his adaptation that led to Conly writing the sequel, which was published four years after the film's release. So many involved in the film probably had no way of even knowing this would happen. - He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983): The series was put into production before the Masters of the Universe comic it was based on (and, by extent, the mini-comics that came with the action figures) could establish a concrete plot. This resulted in the story being retconned to fit in with the show. - Regular Show inverts this in that the comic was months behind the show. The biggest example of this was retaining the character Margaret at a time when she was Put on a Bus, and then removing her as soon as she returned. It does, however, have enough alternate continuity to get away with it. - When The Maxx was adapted by MTV, they did a very faithful job, despite having to replace some of the character cameos. However, given the book's typical Image Comics production schedule, the cartoon had to invent its own ending, well before the comic got there. - Blake and Mortimer: Only one of the continuation albums ( The Francis Blake Affair) was adapted when the series was done adapting the Edgar Pierre Jacobs canon, due to the others not existing at the time it was made (the next one, The Voronov Plot, was published in 2000, over one year after the end of the animated series). As a result, the four remaining stories ( The Viking's Bequest, The Secret of Easter Island, The Alchemist's Will, The Druid) are completely original.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvertookTheManga
Owls Ask Good question, my feathered friend. Animals, for the most part, don't typically talk. Despite this, one of the animals that comes closest to participating in a coherent conversation (not counting parrots) is the owl, its call of "hoo" being often mistaken for the owl asking "Who?" in English. The confusion can also happen in French-language works and translations, except the "hoo" sounds like " Où ?" ("Where?") instead. Dutch-language works and translations understand the "hoo" as " Hoe?" ("How?"). A subtrope of Who's on First?. Compare Animal Species Accent and Pokémon Speak. ## Examples: - The "America's Best" owl commercials were originally based on an inversion of this, with the humans constantly asking "who?" and the owl responding eloquently to their questions, as seen here. Later commercials dropped this element. - Fifteen minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance. Everyone knows that. Well, did you know some owls are not that wise? - Quite a few My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan works do this, inspired by the Running Gag of the episode "Owl's Well That Ends Well." - Chaotic Harmony: Sonic: Whew... it's just an owl. You aren't going to start talking, right? Owlowiscious: Who? Sonic: You, duh. Owlowiscious: Who? Sonic: You! I'm talking to you right now! Owlowiscious: Who? Sonic: You! You, okay!? Geez, and I thought that pink pony was annoying! Owlowiscious: Who? Sonic: Alright, that's it! Say "who" one more time. I dare ya, birdie! I. Dare. You. - Getting Back on Your Hooves: Trixie: Um... hello there... Owlowiscious: Hoo? Trixie: Trixie. Owlowiscious: Hoo? Trixie: Umm... Trixie. Owlowiscious: Hoo? Trixie: Trixie! Owlowiscious: Hoo? Trixie: You stubborn bird! I said my name is Trixie! Owlowiscious: Hoo? Twilight: Trixie, he's an owl, that's all he can say! Trixie: Oh! Um yes! Trixie knew that! Oh look at the time! Goodnight! - And again in A Voice Among the Strangers. This time it happens off-screen between Spike and Owlowicious, with Spike only realizing later that he fell into the same trap as always. This one is noteworthy because it happens in a story where the Equestrian language explicitly sounds nothing like English. Twilight: We would have been here sooner but Owlowiscious and Spike got into an argument over who was cleaning up later today. Spike: Hey, it's not my fault he kept asking who was meant to... be... doing —... argh . - An American Tail: Fievel Goes West: While lost in the desert, Tiger sees what he thinks is his girlfriend Kitty, and as he calls for her, she only asks "Who?" It's only when he comes to give her a kiss does he realize that it was actually an owl sitting on a cactus. - Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: When Rudolph and Herbie are singing "We're a Couple of Misfits" the line "Who decides the test, of what is really best?" is followed up by an owl asking "Who? Who?" - Sleeping Beauty: When Briar Rose talks to her animal friends, the owl naturally goes "hoo?" which she takes as a question. - In The Sword in the Stone, it's how we're first introduced to Merlin's owl, Archimedes. When Merlin checks his watch and concludes that someone [Wart] will be arriving in half an hour, Archimedes pops out of his bird house and says, "Who? Who? I'd like to know who?" - Also played with in that he has a tendency to mutter interrogatives, especially when riled up or surprised. - The Civil War. An antedote is related about a nervous sentry who mistook an owls hoot for a "Who?" (as in "Who goes there?") and introduced himself to what he assumed was a superior officer. - A canine version occurs in The Goodies episode "Frankenfido", in which a dog called Cuddly Scamp is a contestant on Mastermind. Magnus Magnesium: In the art of weaving, the strands of wool in one direction are known as the warp; what is the name given to the strands going in the other direction? Cuddly Scamp: Woof! Magnus Magnesium: And woof is the correct answer! Now when something is divided into two equal parts, each of these parts is known as...? Cuddly Scamp: Arf! Magnus Magnesium: Correct—half! And can you tell me the family of birds divided into screech, tawny and barn? Cuddly Scamp: (howling) Owwwwwllll! Magnus Magnesium: Owl is correct! And now the final question which could win you the title of Mastermind of the Year... What was the name of the collar worn by the nobility in Elizabethan times? Cuddly Scamp: Ruff! Magnus Magnesium: Ruff is right! - A Whose Line Is It Anyway? game of Greatest Hits had Ryan try to make an owl/who joke to introduce the next song, but Colin derailed it... Ryan: What kind of bird always says the name of our next band? Colin: Oh... I guess... a... tern? An arctic tern? Ryan: And what sound does an arctic tern make? Colin: BACKSTREETBOYS ! Ryan: [corpsing] No! No, Col! That's wrong. Colin: Well, why don't you tell us what's right? Ryan: I was thinking an owl. Colin: Oh! Ryan: Who. The Who is our next band on this CD set. - A non-owl non-"Who?" variant of this trope is seen in Classical Mythology, Philomela, Procne and Procne's husband Tereus are turned into birds: Procne into the nightingale, Philomela her sister into the sparrow as her tongue was ripped out by Tereus who raped her so she wouldn't tell the tale... and Tereus, whose son was killed by the women as revenge for the rape into the hoopoe, because to Ancient Greeks, the hoopoe's call sounds like the Greek word "where?" (ὅπου / hopou), as if he was still looking for his killed son. - Done in the rhymes based on Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals" by Ogden Nash: But do not laugh at the jackass wild, for there is method in his he-haw: For with maidenly blush, and accent mild, the jenny-ass answers "She-haw." - Helluva Boss: The demon prince Stolas (who is, naturally, an owl) says "anyhoo" during his conversation with Blitzo in the first episode. He will also, on very rare occasions, make the noise itself. - Turnabout Storm: Same as with other MLP:FIM examples. Later on, Spike manages to get stuck in the cycle once again. Phoenix: Hey, an owl. Owlowiscious: Hoo. Phoenix: You, you're an owl. Owlowiscious: Hoo. Phoenix: You mean "Who am I?" Phoenix Wright, with a "Ph" and a "W." Owlowiscious: Hoo. Phoenix: You know? You make Big Macintosh look like a blabbermouth. Owlowiscious: Hoo. Phoenix: [sigh] - In this Petfoolery comic, a girl comes across an owl, and asks if it has seen her brother. Naturally, it says "Who," except it wasn't making owl noises - it was legitimately asking her who her brother was, telling her that she needs to provide more information. - In Realm of Owls, the city of Buffet used to just be called "Hoo" and later "Hoohoo," but both were deemed too confusing because each of those words had at least 400 different meanings to the owls who live there. - In Kid Time Storytime, Hooty the owl speaks in "hoo"s, so sometimes people think he's asking, "Who?" - Scootertrix the Abridged: Episode 24 starts with Twilight having purchased Owlowiscious and making plenty of owl puns, including "Who?" This comes back to bite her in the flank in "Scootertrix The Epilogue: Twilight's Punishment," when she is kidnapped by a parliament of owls who are mad at her for purchasing an owl and making owl puns, especially "Who?" because "it's our word!" Her punishment is \|\|being subjected to horse puns for 24 hours\|\|. - In the Animaniacs segment "Woodstock Slappy," Slappy wants to know which band is playing. Skippy tells her Who is playing, leading to a confused back and forth between the two where Slappy keeps asking about the band and Skippy keeps answering "Who." About a third in, Slappy notes that Skippy is beginning to sound like an owl. - Bojack Horseman: Slightly subverted when Bojack meets Cute Owl, Wanda Pierce. - One of the quiz gags with Fish on The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! involves an owl that keeps hooting when Fish is trying to ask us his question about what sound an owl makes. Fish: You got it this time, but next time I'll stump you for sure. Owl: [hooting] Whooooo. Fish: Me, that's who! - The Casagrandes: In "Squawk in the Name of Love," after the family parrot Sergio got dumped by his ostrich girlfriend Priscilla, Carl tells him to just find another bird to date. Sergio has tried, but it never went well. In one case, it's because she "just didn't listen." Sergio: And for the fifth time, this is Ronnie-Anne! Owl: Who? Sergio: [Facepalm] Auuugh! - The Critic: When Eleanor Sherman is feeling depressed, her husband Franklin turns to "Wilson" for advice. When Eleanor feels better, Franklin told "Wilson" the good news. Franklin: Oh, Wilson, my wife is happy again! ["Wilson" is actually a scarecrow with an owl perched on its shoulder] "Wilson": Hoo. Franklin: My wife, Eleanor. "Wilson": Hoo. Franklin: My wife, Eleanor. "Wilson": Hoo. Franklin: My wife, Eleanor. [continues into the night...] - Elinor Wonders Why: "Owl Girl" has Elinor waking up to someone keep saying "who" from outside. She and her mom would later find out that it was an owl who has been making that sound, the same owl Elinor has seen sleeping at day, and so she learns of its nocturnal nature. - In the Family Guy episode "Absolutely Babulous," Peter greets his family one morning with an owl on the shoulder, which he denies he stole from the Pewterschmidt mansion's enclosed owlery. After Lois asks Peter "What were you two talking about last night?" the owl hoots, prompting Peter to reply "Yeah, who?" This gag is repeated before Peter gets bored with the owl and decides he's returning it to the owlery. - Garfield and Friends: One of the gag bloopers in "Mistakes Will Happen" is an owl that not only goes "who," but also "where" and "when." - The Little Rascals: In "Rascals' Revenge," as the kids approach the abandoned house: Darla: Look! The door is open! Alfalfa: Maybe someone is expecting us! [owl hoots] Alfalfa: The ghost of Captain Mildew, that's who! - In the Merrie Melodies short "A Day at the Zoo," the narrator introduces "the wise owl," who immediately asks "who?" The narrator explains that he is the wise owl and the owl, put on the spot, retreats to his nest while responding with "oooooh!" Owl: Who? Narrator: You. Owl: Me?! Narrator: Yes you. Owl: Oooooh! - My Gym Partner's a Monkey: In "Don't Noc It 'Til You Try It", Jake and Windsor go into a room, where an owl class is taking place. Windsor explains the scenario to the owl teacher, and he replies, saying "Who?" to everything. This starts up an Abbot and Costello, "Who's on First Base?" bit, which goes on long enough for Jake to get restless. Jake lashes out at the teacher, to which the teacher replies "What?" Annoyed with the situation, Jake leaves. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: This is a fairly consistent running gag with Owlowiscious: - Used as a Running Gag in "Owl's Well That Ends Well," Owlowiscious' "hoo" is understood as the question "Who?" most of the time. Spike: Uh... hi there! I'm Spike. I'm sure Twilight has told you all about me. Owlowiscious: Hoo. Spike: Uh, Spike? You know, assistant number one? Owlowiscious: Hoo? Spike: I'm Spike! And who are you? What are you? Owlowiscious: Hoo! Spike: Who? Owlowiscious: Hoo! Spike: I thought your name was Owlowiscious! Owlowiscious: Hoo? Spike: Okay, "Who," "Owlowiscious," whatever. I'm Spike, okay? Look! All you need to know is that I'm number one and you're number two. Got it? Owlowiscious: Hoo? Spike: So, a man of mystery, huh? - In "Inspiration Manifestation," at first, Spike's conversations with Owlowiscious seem like a reprise of their first meeting, but eventually he starts responding to what the owl is saying. - Played with in the Phineas and Ferb episode "Wizard of Odd." Stacy Hirano's counterpart in Oz is an owl with a human head. While nobody answers her call of "Hoo," this is a Casting Gag as Stacy's voice actress is Kelly Hu. - Scooby-Doo, The New Scooby-Doo Movies: Scooby believes to see Don Knotts but as an owl hoots, he responds about the said celebrity guest. Velma learns about the owl. - At the end of the Walter Lantz Productions short "Scrambled Eggs," Peterkin tries to shift blame for mixing up the birds' eggs. First, he blames the squirrels, prompting the skeptical owl to intimidatingly ask "who?" Nervous, Peterkin changes his story to blame the chipmunks, earning himself another "who?" from the owl. He can't come up with someone else to blame before the birds attack him, knowing quite well Peterkin's the perpetrator. - The Simpsons: In "Milhouse Doesn't Live Here Anymore," Bart is sad over Milhouse having moved away. Marge encourages him to go play with Lisa, telling him, "You'll be like an owl, saying, 'Milhouse who? Milhouse who?" Bart isn't amused. - SpongeBob SquarePants: In the episode "Mimic Madness," SpongeBob has done so many impressions of everyone he talks do he becomes a shapeshifter from the chest-up, but he undergoes a Shapeshifter Identity Crisis and flees into a cave not sure who he is. He sings a song about this, starting with him doing an owl impression. Owl SpongeBob: Who? (Hoo) Who? (Hoo) Who? (Hoo) Who? (Hoo) Whooooo am I? - In T.U.F.F. Puppy, one of Professor Bird Brain's henchmen is an owl who only ever says "Who?" This naturally results in some Who's on First? jokes, infuriating Bird Brain repeatedly.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OwlsAskWho
Override Command - TV Tropes "The problems with the security system were high on Jurassic Park's bug list. Nedry wondered if anybody ever imagined that it wasn't a bug — that Nedry had programmed it that way. He had built in a classic trap door. " So what if you don't know the combination to the keypad lock, or the password to the ultrasecure government computer? Every electronic device has an Override function, which will conveniently give full access to any schmuck who knows the command. Most often seen as the explicit command "OVERRIDE" entered via a Viewer-Friendly Interface when access is denied to someone who really ought not to have it. Sometimes this is spoofed with "manual override" being a euphemism for pounding on the machine with fists or tools until it finally does what you want. Klaatu Barada Nikto is a specific variant. A real situation similar to this one would be a backdoor, which is a hidden, purposefully created way of entering a computer system created by the programmer(s). ## Examples: - Nagato and Asakura from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya know the override codes to reality. In the light novels the code they use is rendered as SQL queries. The anime has them "speaking" SQL as well, but so quickly it can barely be recognized as speech. - As expected of a Ken Akamatsu Manga, Hakase in Negima! Magister Negi Magi built Chachamaru with her override function applied by adding moderate pressure to her right breast plate. Take from that what you will. Presuming the override only works when she's in diagnostic mode (the one time we've seen it used), this isn't either a security risk or too bad a choice. Easy target if you need that, and nothing there you'd normally be testing. - In Space Pirate Mito, the mailsuits used by the main character and the Big Bad have a glitch that's activated by hitting a sensor on the back. Once activated, the glitch short-circuits the suit, paralyzing the user. - In Outlaw Star, Melfina the bioandroid/ship navigator has an override command that suspends her personality. - In Yu-Gi-Oh!, during the Legendary Heroes arc, Seto Kaiba had a voice-activated command to immediately terminate and exit the virtual reality simulation. Unfortunately, when he tried to use it, it turned out the Big Five had already disabled it, leaving him trapped until Yugi and the others rescued him. - In the Civil War storyline, when Spider-Man turns against the pro-registration camp, Iron Man uses an Override Command to shut down Spidey's armour (which he designed), calling Spidey out on not realizing that he would have one. Subverted when Spider-Man reveals that he did realize that, and installed an override override. - In The Invisibles, the antagonists know the override command to \|\|the human brain\|\|. - Justified in Superman, when Clark never realized the "cells" (actually high-tech Kryptonian shipping crates) in his Fortress even had voice-activated override codes. Which means they were never changed from the factory default, which General Zod knows... - Justified in Paperinik New Adventures: Everett Ducklair programmed One and Two, thus he was simply smart enough to include commands to shut them down or outright delete their program if he needed to. - In Blackest Night, Sinestro reveals he designed an override command into the yellow power rings, so he defeats Mongul by turning his own ring against him. - In a 1980s Little Orphan Annie storyline, the friendly sentient robot F1do can be shut down with the oral command, "F1do! Down!", and his benevolent personality overriden with the command "F1do! Attack!" However, villain Skip Smith's attempt to use the "F1do! Kill!" override against Annie fails when F1do self-destructs rather than obey the command to kill his friend. - In the Firefly fanfic Forward, the Alliance has hardwired override commands installed on all their ships in case of subversion. Only Operatives and very high-ranking military commanders and officials know these codes. Unfortunately for them, many of these people were in the same room with a mind-reading psychic at one point... - During the Disc-One Final Boss battle of Marionettes, Gear Shift attempts to use one of these to \|\|regain control of Lightning Dust (who is one of the title robots). It fails because Twilight already fried her fail safes to free her in the first place.\|\| - In Ponies and Dragons, they find out that the enchanted comics like the one from "Power Ponies" actually have override commands that allow you to exit at any time. - Demolition Man: - Simon Phoenix is in a phone-booth-slash-computer-terminal when the police catch up with him. He sees that one of the cops is standing close to a wall and tries to activate the anti-graffiti system (metal rods that come out of the wall and use high voltage to clear the wall of ink). The computer senses the presence of the cop and refuses to run the system, but he promptly overrides the safety feature with the password "7777777" (seriously), electrocuting the cop. The password does have some other characters in it so it's more like '777.77-7777-7_7777'. (Assuming that those characters aren't part of a shown pattern to aid in typing in the code.) - Earlier in the movie, the same baddie escapes confinement by voicing the passcode to the cuffs that were restraining him (which was probably part of \|\|the programming he received while in cryostasis\|\|). It should be noted that the person who programmed him with this information is also pretty much the designer of their society and technology, so he purposely made things easy for Phoenix. - Lenina Huxley also uses an passwordless override command to access \|\|Simon Phonenix's cryostasis programming contents\|\|. However, the Viewer-Friendly Interface does hint that she has to state a life-threatening reason before accepting the override command. - In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Admiral Kirk uses a prefix code (which is unique for each ship) to force the Reliant to lower its shields after it seriously damages the Enterprise in a surprise attack. It works, but only because Khan a) didn't know that feature existed and b) couldn't find the manual override button on his ship's control console in time. They state it wouldn't have worked if Khan had changed the passcode after stealing the ship. - In WarGames, the creator of the military supercomputer W.O.P.R. implements a back door password: Joshua, the name of his son. - Justified in Jurassic Park (1993); the giant gates have a manual override lever so that they can be opened in the event of a power failure. There is also of course Nedry's software backdoor. This is justified too, since he wrote the software in the first place. - In Iron Man 2, close examination of both Tony Stark's and Anton Vanko's computer antics (Stark at the Senate committee hearing, Vanko when taking control of the Hammer mainframe) imply their seemingly ridiculous hacking skill boils down to having a backdoor account installed in the respective systems. In Stark's case, given his status as a major government contractor, he probably sold it to them in the first place, while Vanko had plenty of unsupervised access while he was helping program the Hammer drones on the same computers. - In Batman & Robin, Batman uses a voice activated override to shut down Robin's motorcycle and stop him from doing a dangerous stunt. - In Forbidden Planet Robby the Robot can be overridden using the phrase "emergency cancellation Archimedes". - In Mortal Engines, the crash drive was built to shut down MEDUSA if it was activated accidentally or maliciously. - Dr. Strangelove: Group Captain Mandrake discovers the override code to recall Burpleson AFB's B-52 squadrons from their misguided mission to attack Russian targets. They were variations on the letters O-P-E, which were anagrams of phrases General Ripper was scribbling down during his Sanity Slippage ("Peace On Earth," "Essence Of Purity", etc.). Now Mandrake has to contact the President to relay that code through a coin phone, only he hasn't got enough change and he's dealing with a Cloud Cuckoolander Colonel from another base. - The Four Horsemen's second big trick in Now You See Me is to hack their sponsor's bank account for an Involuntary Charity Donation. They know he's too careful with his password, so instead they fake a Cold Reading routine to get his account recovery information (his mother's maiden name, and that of his childhood pet). - Imperial Radch: Justice of Toren and every other Radchaai ship or station AI has these, \|\|and by the time of the series have each been given multiple conflicting commands from Anaander Mianaai\|\|. In the third book, \|\|the ships and station in Athoek system have their overrides removed using the overrides posessed by Lieutenant Tisarwat\|\|. - Played with in a spinoff miniseries of Perry Rhodan. After being stuck millennia in the past of the Empire of Arkon (a time when his original self was still stranded on Earth), the protagonist Atlan is faced with a hostile local ruler who commands a fleet superior to that of the allies he's made. Thankfully, he remembers that the common practice during this historical period was for units of the Imperial fleet to have secret override codes so that suitably highly-ranked officers could simply render troublesome ships useless to their handlers with a single transmission, happens to have discovered the relevant codes for the enemy fleet, and uses them to devastating effect to force his enemies to evacuate their doomed planet with only the small craft he allows them while leaving their fleet behind. The 'played with' part comes in when he later muses that that very incident must have been one of the reasons the practice was discontinued not too long afterwards... - The Lost Fleet: Similar to the Perry Rhodan example above, the Syndicate Worlds have a remote command override system that can disable or totally take control of their warships, in order to prevent mutinies or force ships to undertake a Suicide Mission without going to the trouble of offloading the crew first. They're savvy enough to keep this extremely quiet and only use it in times of direst need, partly for fear of the Alliance getting wind of it and turning it against them in battle but also because once it becomes generally known that it's possible, every captain whose loyalty was even slightly uncertain would start working on an override for the override. Spin-off series The Lost Stars also addresses the other problem with an override function, when a high-ranking Syndicate official who's cleared for the codes in question is the one who leads a revolt. - Star Trek: - Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the novel "The Romulan Prize" the Romulan Commander Valak uses a chip to override the lockout on the Enterprise-D computers after he and his people capture the ship. However Picard is able to shout out a command to the computer that causes it to erase all classified materials stored in the ship's computers. When Riker asks Picard how Valak was able to override the lockout, Picard informs him that chips with override codes were kept in secured locations so technicians with sufficiently high clearance could clear up any access problems, and that a Romulan spy must have stolen one of those chips. - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: After discovering a chamber filled with apparently dead Cardassians in the novel "Station Rage", Garak warns the DS9 crew that the Cardassian government would use it as an excuse to send an "inspection" team to the station to fully investigate the situation. Odo notes that after the Cardassians initially left it took the station crew about a year to close off all the overrides and backdoors and worries that if such inspectors were able to plant more override commands the DS9 crew would never be able to have a secured conversation again. - Star Wars Legends: - The Thrawn Trilogy: Mara Jade, being a former personal agent to Emperor Palpatine himself, knows the secret access codes Palpatine had hardwired into the mainframe computers of every ship in the fleet so that he or his agents couldn't be locked out of his own ships by vessel commanders. She uses them to access the Chimaera's records to find Talon Karrde's detention cell as well as the ship's itinerary so that she and Luke can rescue him. She knows that Thrawn can't have removed her back door codes, but she worries that he might know about them and have set flags to show if they are used. Fortunately, no flags were set and Mara was not caught accessing the computer. During the rescue itself, she again uses the computer to alter duty rosters and reroute turbo lifts. When Thrawn figures that Karrde has been broken out of his cell, and that the rescuers must have used the computer to help them do it, he simply shuts the computer down entirely. While this considerably impairs the ship's operations, having the computer actively work against you is an even greater impairment. - X-Wing Series: After the New Republic takes Coruscant back from the Empire their computer experts go through and close off most of the obvious exploits, backdoors, and other override commands in in "The Krytos Trap." However, given the enormity of the task Imperial agents still have ways of using computers on that world to contact their Imperial handlers. The agent in Rogue Squadron (later revealed to be Erisi Dlarit) sends a message to Imperial Intelligence head Ysanne Isard via public networks. She then executes a command normally used to erase messages in bulk, selecting the time her message was sent as the start and stop time for the command. This ensures no public records remained of the message being sent. - In Andromeda, at least one of the verbal authorization codes for overriding the Eureka Maru's ship safety protocols is "Shut up and do what I tell you" - In the Battlestar Galactica remake, this is the key to the Cylons' Curbstomp Battle of the entire Colonial Fleet in the opening stages of the war. One of the Sixes seduced Gaius Baltar, posing as a defense contractor, and convinced him to allow her access to the latest hardware being installed in the Fleet, ostensibly to give her an edge in bidding for the next contract. In reality, she inserted a backdoor that would allow the Cylons to remotely shut down any Colonial ships with the hardware installed. Since almost the entire fleet had been refitted with said hardware, the Cylons went through the Colonial Fleet like a chainsaw through tapioca. - Doctor Who: The Doctor once hacked UNIT's computer systems so that they would accept "BUFFALO" as the correct response for all their passwords. - Farscape has fun with this in one episode. The protagonists have overridden the security on an elevator, only to have their override overridden. What do they do? Try to override it! Unfortunately, "We couldn't override their override of our override!" - The 7th season Hawaii Five-O episode "Computer Killer" has a surprisingly realistic example where an individual associated with an IBM expy obtains a secret book of phone numbers that allow direct administrator (root) access to most mainframe computer systems in the Honolulu area. This allows him to bypass all safeguards and event logging when changing database records. At the time mainframe computers were usually leased with the manufacturer maintaining direct back doors into the systems for maintenance or as an override mechanism when end users ran into trouble. - In one episode of Stargate Atlantis, Doctor Keller and Ronon are attempting to reclaim the Daedalus from the Wraith. Keller lists all the different systems they need to override and asks Ronon if he knows how to do all that. He proceeds to start shooting at the control crystals randomly. - Star Trek, of course, has several examples, from voice commands to manual overrides. Not only do they have override commands (in most cases, as simple as saying the word "Override"), but they have Auxiliary Control, which appears to be able to take over control from the Bridge without it being given voluntarily! - The example from Wrath of Khan shows up again in the Star Trek: The Next Generation "The Wounded", being used to shut down the shields of a captain who was waging a one-man war on the Cardassians note : it was specifically the modulation of that particular ship's shields, which is less of an override and more of an armor-piercer, but the principle is the same. It was given to the Cardassians to stop him, but even without shields (however briefly), he still won. - In Star Trek: Voyager, Seven of Nine could control the entire ship on a whim. For example, one episode has her trying to access the Captain's personal logs. When denied, she walks over to a wall panel, flips a couple chips inside, and instantly gains access. In the same episode, she teaches a child to override commands from the bridge. - Star Trek: Picard: - Averted in "Broken Pieces" when Raffi decides I Need a Freaking Drink. Raffi: Burgundy. (replicator beeps, nothing happens) Red wine. (replicator beeps, nothing happens) Emergency Hospitality Hologram: (materializing) What is the nature of your hospitality emergency? Raffi: I need a glass of red wine. EHH: You disabled alcohol services from your quarters two days ago. Raffi: Reinstate it. Override. EHH: You locked yourself out of override and... (consulting padd) meta-override. - Later in the same episode, when Soji tries to hijack La Sirena to fly it to her homeworld, Cristóbal Rios recites "Arroz con leche", a Spanish lullaby, that completely locks out the helm and returns control of the remaining systems to him. - In the Supernatural episode "Devil May Care" (S09, Ep02), Kevin says Dean opening the door from the outside reset the systems and ended the bunker's lockdown. - Kamen Rider Gaim: Ryoma Sengoku programmed his Genesis Drivers to self-destruct when he says Kill precious to prevent them from being used against him. While this stops Micchy from tearing him a new one, the much angrier and more emotionally stable Kaito simply switches to the Sengoku Driver, which lacks this feature. - In the Game Boy version of a game based on Star Trek: The Next Generation, typing in OVERRIDE on the password screen will allow you to "override" the random mission selected, until you get the one you want. - Final Fantasy VIII has Selphie override several computers — one a "manual override" (in a Button Mashing minigame) and one a legit override in order to prevent a missile launch. (The password is EDEA, the name of the Sorceress dictator who's running the base.) - Fallout 3 has some sentient terminals and robots that can be affected by your Science skill (or failing that, Robotics Expert perk). One particular instance is the M.A.R.Go.T terminal, which can be overridden thusly. - Fallout: New Vegas also has this a few times. Also, hacking computers in general is this trope turned into a minigame in both this game and Fallout 3. - Portal 2's Wheatley performs a manual override on a wall to get Chell on to the old testing track to reclaim the portal device. \|\|AKA he smashes the wall down.\|\| - Played with in the \|\|core transfer procedure and the Stalemate Resolution Button. It overrides the current core and replaces it with another, as long as both cores agree. If not, a trained Stalemate Resolution Associate must push the aforementioned button. Chell is able to press it to start a transfer in her favor the first time, but when she does it again, Wheatley, in a rare moment of intelligence, reveals he rigged the button to some bombs to ensure she couldnt press it.\|\| - System Shock uses the overrides at least twice. Considering that the software is dominated by SHODAN, It's the Only Way. - In Sonic Battle, Professor Gerald has installed one of these in Emerl the robot, but it must be activated before it goes definitively berserk. \|\|They aren't able to issue the command the second time.\|\| - MechWarrior series of games, being based on BattleTech, grants pilots the Override Shutdown command. The pilot shuts off the automatic shutdown designed to be engaged if the mech red lines over the Heat threshold, leaving only the Heatsinks and Life support systems active, while trying to limit damage to the fusion reactor and mech, as well as reduce the risk of an ammo explosion. Pilots shut it off when absolutely need to keep firing in a desperate attempt to survive by destroying the enemy mech quickly. Or by those who realize they're facing the end of the line, and are about to make one last final defiant stand. - In Discworld Noir, Lewton must get into the Archeologists' Guild vault, which is guarded by a magical lock which will transform anyone who enters the wrong code. The trick is to talk to a wizard, who will tell you there's a "back passage" code. - Used and justified in Mega Man Legends, when Mega Man's pet monkey, Data overrides Mega Man Juno's commands to sterilize Kattelox island and even orders that Juno's personality be deleted. The reason this justified is that Mega Man actually did know the override codes a long time ago and copied them into Data for safe keeping. - Red vs. Blue: - Subverted: when Sarge is called upon to disarm a bomb he created, he says he specifically built it so that he could not — just in case he was brainwashed and fell in the hands of "those dirty Blues". - But used later on by Agents York and Washington, at different times, on the AI Delta, who can apparently be ordered to do just about anything by someone with the proper authority. Which makes sense: other storyline arcs clearly show what can happen when one of these A.I.s isn't kept under control. - Youtuber Tom Scott created a video of a fictional scenario where a disgruntled Google insider modified GMail to let anyone in the world log into anyone else's G Mail account without requiring the password. Chaos ensues. - Sluggy Freelance: - In the "GOFOTRON" arc, it becomes a sort of running gag that Riff overrides automated systems by tearing wires out with the phrase, " Everything has a manual override." This tends to have some unexpected consequences, from disabling the ship to indirectly causing the destruction of the entire universe. - Oasis apparently has "Override B-1" whenever she encounters Hereti-Corp personnel. From all appearances, activating it makes her more focused and less compassionate — this being someone already Ax-Crazy. When someone blurts out in the middle of a firefight that \|\|Riff works for Hereti-Corp, he says "I quit" and Oasis goes back to fawning over Torg. Cue every Hereti-Corp agent in the room announcing their resignation and leaving.\|\| - Freefall: - Being an artificial life form, Florence was equipped with several. - The robots have a verbal override command as well, which Florence used to prevent Blunt from attacking her in his effort to try to stop her from interfering with \|\|the release of Gardner in the Dark, which would effectively lobotomize all robots on Jean\|\|. - In Commander Kitty, simply being an intelligent lifeform (or Fluffy) counts as this for the Triple-I's automated drone pilots. - Batman Beyond: In the last years of Bruce Wayne's crime-fighting career, he'd created an electronic batsuit which included a "kill switch", a Big Red Button in the Batcave, to use in the event the suit ever ended up in the wrong hands, which completely shuts down the suit's system. It was used twice in the series: in the pilot episode "Rebirth", when Terry McGinnis first took the mantle, and "Lost Soul", when the Robert Vance program hacked its way into the suit. However, in the latter episode, when the suit was recovered, the Vance program reactivated itself and destroyed the kill switch before escaping the Batcave. - Batman: The Brave and the Bold: When Red Tornado builds his "son", Tornado Champion, he builds him with an override in case anything should go wrong. About a week later, things go wrong, and Tornado Champion is forcibly shut down. Once Red and Batman are out of the room, he reboots, and declares he knew about the shutdown code and removed it ages ago. - \|\|Dinobot's\|\| Heroic Sacrifice in Beast Wars was made possible by overriding his Stasis Lock protocol (basically a self-induced robotic coma if one is too low on energy or too banged up to function without injury). Although it violated the rules in order for drama since that was the only instance it announced it was going to work giving time to override it. All other times including with the character in question at earlier episodes they just immediately went into stasis lock, whether they wanted to continue to fight to the death or not. - The finale of Ben 10: Alien Force has Ben override the Omnitrixs (and later, the Ultimatrixs) command functions simply by saying Code 10. He can then issue commands that are a shout out to Star Treks Make Ship Asplode code. - In Code Lyoko, Aelita can shut down any Tower by use of her handprint and inputting Code: LYOKO. Other codes exist, such as Code: EARTH, which materializes Aelita, and Code: XANA, which is essentially an override that deletes the entire Sector. - An episode of Futurama with the cast of Star Trek: The Original Series: George Takei: Does your ship have a self-destruct code? Like: 1A, 2B, 3C,— (Bender's head blows up) Bender: Thanks a lot, Takei, now everyone knows. - Star Wars Rebels: In "Through Imperial Eyes", Grand Admiral Thrawn's assassin droids, which he spars with, have the override "Rukh" to deactivate them. The Mole \|\|Kallus\|\| either deactivates or changes the override code when he sics the droids on Thrawn in an Assassination Attempt. - Wander over Yonder: In "The Prisoner", Commander Peepers is tasked with capturing Wander. He believes the task will be extremely easy given Wander's simple, trusting nature and that Lord Hater's description of him as a cunning genius was completely erroneous. Hilarity Ensues and in the end, the Skullship is about to self-destruct thanks to Wander's meddling. After forcing a panicking Peepers to admit he was wrong to underestimate Wander, Hater gives the self-destruct system's override command: "Lord Hater, Number One Superstar." - Unix and similar operating systems have "sudo" (which temporarily elevates your privileges for one command) and "su" (which elevates them until you undo it). note : su stands for Super User, which is the Unix equivalent to what Windows more prosaically calls an administrator account. This is useful because you can accidentally run malicious or otherwise damaging programs, but as long as your privileges aren't elevated at the time, then the potential damage is limited. - To prevent The Cracker from having an easy time of it, you must be in the sudoers file and re-enter your password (for "sudo"), or enter the root password (for "su"). - sudo make sandwich. Not to mention such possible combinations as sudo kill president and sudo destroy earth. - Windows has "runas", which basically work the same as "sudo" (or "su", if the one command you run is "cmd") if you provide it an account with administrator privileges. - Also, many mainboards had — and partly still have — model or even brand wide override passwords or key combinations to circumvent the password protection of the BIOS or the whole system. - In the business, it's called, "Removing the CMOS battery, waiting for it to forget the BIOS password, and then having our way with it." - Or put a jumper on the pins marked "CLR_CMOS", wait a second, done. - Forget your Windows user account password? Safe Mode gives you a password-free admin account that you can use to revert your account password (among other things). Well, only if you've been so stupid as not to set your Admin password (usually during Installation). - if you did set your admin password, you can reset it using tools like a Bart PE disk that boots your computer into a lite environment that will allow you to run diagnostics on your harddrive without worrying about it being in use, along with being able to do background administrative tasks. - Websites that go to great length to explain the importance of long, complex, unguessable passwords, then suggest a password recovery question such as "Where do you live?" or "What is your mother's maiden name?" - Wiser ones, though, will reset the password by sending out an email to the associated email on file and require resetting the password that way. Wiser users still will make the answer to these questions completely unrelated to the question itself (functionally, a secondary password). - Smartphone banking apps typically require either biometric identification or a strong password each time they're used. If either of these methods fails, however, a new password can be rapidly generated using "two-factor" authentication - which frequently means sending an email or SMS message to the same 'phone that's running the app. - Some email apps can be configured to require a separate password before displaying the contents of a message, but the default tends to be to show all messages without additional security. The situation is even worse for SMS apps. - Initially registering with such apps requires additional information such as the user's name, address and date of birth. Such information is unlikely to be secret, so some might class this as another override command. - Several UK banks' apps will reveal the PIN(s) for the user's card, as well as granting significant access to the account. An unlocked 'phone in the same bag as a bank card therefore becomes an override for the card as well. - There is the magic SysRq key in Linux. - If you forget the root password on a Linux system, you can boot into single-user mode and reset it without being prompted for a password, if the BIOS password hasn't been set at least. - Unrestricted physical access to a PC of any kind is usually Game Over from a security standpoint. Even in the case of full disk encryption, the hardware can be modified to record the decryption passphrase in a way that would be hard to detect unless the user were specifically looking for it. - Ken Thompson, creator of the Unix operating system, produced one version whereby the login program had a back door. So just recompile from source, right? Except the C compiler was in on the joke too, and was programmed to add the back door to any case where it was building login, and to add the back-door-adding code to any case where it was building itself (so you could have a system where the programs were evil but the source looked 100% clean). And to add insult to injury, it was also programmed to recognize when it was building the disassembler, and alter it so the hacks wouldn't show up. No one knows if the back door made it out of Bell Labs. - In 2009 a virus for Microsoft Windows that made use of this technique was found in a Delphi compiler. After being undetected in the wild for at least a year. - The override code to a Playstation 2's parental lock is 7774. This activates the password reset. Since the Playstation 2 is notorious for not remembering its own passwords and/or parental lock settings, most players memorized that number. - Those electronic signs you see at the side of the road sometimes? The default password is commonly DOTS. If it's not, then you can hold Control and Shift and type DIPY to reset it to DOTS. Have fun warning drivers about zombies! - Most low end Internet routers have a "reset to defaults" button that needs to be paperclip-poked. This happens to be particularly useful when you're buying a used router and the previous owner forgot to give you the password. - Higher end routers can also be defeated with physical access by connecting with a console cable. - While it doesn't give you any access to the phone's other functions, many cell phones have an emergency dialer that can be used by anyone whether they know the code to unlock your phone or not. Very handy if it is the only phone available, yet its owner is missing or incapacitated by an emergency situation. - This is actually a legal requirement of almost all telephone systems throughout the world. The emergency number(s) must always be available, even if no other service is either available or allowed. If you can get a connection and use an emergency number, you will be routed to an emergency dispatcher. - Most military equipment has a "battle short" feature of some sort, which deactivates some or all of the safety mechanisms. Drive system on a warship turret has been damaged and keeps blowing the fuse? Enemy is shooting at you and this is NOT THE TIME for repairs? Grab the chunks of solid copper shaped to fit in the fuse holder. You will probably damage the electric motors which move the turret, but if it saves the ship... Many generators, etc. will have a switch which does the same thing. - Unmanned spacecraft have a safe mode, which stops everything but the essential functions such as communications or attitude control so engineers at Mission Control can fix whatever caused the craft to enter into said situation. For critical moments of the mission such as orbit insertion or landing, this mode is overridden, so for example a cosmic ray hit on the wrong place at the worst moment will not cause the failure of a multi-billion dollar mission. - Android by default does not allow installing .APK files of unknown origin (i.e. not downloaded from trusty sources such as the Google Play Store). However there's a switch on the "Security" menu (at least until Android 7.0) that, once activated, allows you to do so. - Many multi-factor authentication systems allow you to print a set of codes you can use in case you don't have access to the authentication method. If you use one of those codes, it becomes invalid afterward, however.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverrideCommand
Overt Rendezvous - TV Tropes They were in St James's Park, watching ducks on the lake. Defectors, spies, tramps and shady-dealers congregated in twos on the benches. Wardens who picked up litter with spiked sticks here had a higher security clearance than the Secretary of State for Defence. Old government secrets, obsolete weapons plans and two-way mirror compromising filmstrips were always found in the grass. Paradoxically, the best way to hide a secret meeting is often to hold it somewhere extremely public. Locations like this can be selected to be unpredictable to anyone who you might want to avoid, are almost certainly bug-free, and can provide a layer of plausible deniability when the people in question aren't supposed to be meeting each other at all. The classic situation where this occurs is meetings between members of two different secret government agencies; in that case they're not only dodging eavesdroppers, they're also making it more difficult for either agency's goons to do anything untoward. Stock locations for this kind of meeting include: - A bench in a busy park. - On the banks of a river, downstream from a bridge. - In a noisy Italian restaurant or diner. - A train or subway station at a busy time. For an extra layer of security, sometimes the two people meeting will sit back-to-back so it doesn't look like they're talking to each other — on park benches facing in opposite directions, or at adjacent tables in a restaurant. This is also close enough to exchange a briefcase with the MacGuffin or secret plans. Of course, while this kind of meeting decreases the odds of being noticed by the specific people you're trying to avoid, it substantially increases the odds that your conversation will be overheard by random passers-by. This is generally glossed over, though sometimes it's nodded at by selecting an exceptionally loud meeting place, making sure all the apparent bystanders are agents as well, or by having the characters speak in some way that appears innocuous: Trouble Entendre, Talking through Technique, Spy Speak, or the like. Or it's assumed that those random passers-by simply won't give a damn. This is somewhat justified actually. If you are discussing something highly technical using lots of jargon, then most people will have no idea what you are talking about. Not only will they be unlikely to think that your conversation is significant, they also won't be able to remember it very well even if the authorities start asking about it later. This also works better in places where both you and most of the other people are moving around: because then nobody will be able to catch more than a small slice of your conversation. If the messenger doesn't show up for the meeting, the situation has changed into a Doomed Appointment. Compare Public Secret Message, Elevator Conference. Contrast Publicly Discussing the Secret. ## Examples: - In The Big O, Roger always met with his street informant Big Ear in a bar. - Death Note: - In one interesting example, Misa is trying to find Light, so she sends a diary page to the task force saying that they should "show off their notebooks in Aoyama" on a certain day. On that day, Light goes to Aoyama with Matsuda and meets friends whom he hangs out with expecting to perform this trope. Misa, however, finds him first and leaves before he can see her. - L first reveals himself to his prime Kira suspect at the entrance ceremony of the university, then proceeds to investigate him under the guise of talking with him about the case on campus, in a café close-by or during walks. Was this an investigation or a date? - The first episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex features two park bench meetings between Chief Aramaki and an associate in another government branch who needs his help. - In episode 7 of Lupin III: Part 5, Lupin meets up with the \|\|head of the DGSE\|\| in the middle of a café. \|\|However, the head is aware of this trope and makes sure to fill said café with DGSE agents, in an effort to double cross Lupin\|\|. - Near the very start of 1961 novel Call for the Dead, the first of John le Carré's many spy novels, British spy George Smiley recounts a security interview with a Foreign Office official accused of Communist Party membership. The interviewee's London workplace was busy and they might be overheard, so they stepped outside, went to the park and talked while watching the ducks. Notably, Le Carré actually worked for the British secret service MI-5 until his cover was blown - and although the Foreign Office location isn't mentioned in the conversation, it's actually on King Charles Street, next to St James's Park... - There's a duck pond in Good Omens which is specifically the place in London where spies from different agencies (and Crowley and Aziraphale) go to meet. Some of the more amusing anecdotes include two members of MI9 trying to recruit each other, and the ducks having learned to differentiate and appreciate the kinds of crumbs left by assorted diplomats and spies. There's also the café at the British Museum, (described as a second home for the battle-weary foot-soldiers of The Cold War) where two agents argue over who keeps the receipt. - In The Bartimaeus Trilogy Nathaniel is asked to meet the British agent in Prague at a cemetery at midnight. Complaining about the melodrama, he insists that their next meeting being somewhere more ordinary and they agree to meet in the main square around six — "Harlequin" had wanted to pick the old plague pits. He does cope with the change well, and \|\|Nathaniel receives his information in a hot dog bun he bought from the disguised agent.\|\| - Discussed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Harry, Hermione and Ron have a secret meeting in a public location, but choose the less-frequented Hog's Head over the Three Broomsticks. Both the Order and Umbridge learn what they're doing, making things that much harder. Sirius tells them they should have chosen the Three Broomsticks, because while they could never know if someone was watching them, in a noisy crowded place any spies would have trouble hearing them. This gets foreshadowed when Harry looks around during the meeting and realizes that the entire bar is hanging onto his every word. - Also discussed in An H-Bomb for Alice by Ian Stewart when the British protagonist meets his ASIO counterpart in a noisy Australian pub. When he worries that someone might overhear them, the ASIO agent points out a young couple (each from rival political parties), and a businessman meeting with a trade unionist, and suggests that they may be making an illicit deal, or just sharing a friendly drink, but it's impossible to tell. - However in The Specialist by Gayle Rivers, the mercenary protagonist complains when he has to meet a British agent in a pub as it means masking your conversation in ambiguous terms, which is difficult if you're not on the same wavelength as the person you're talking to. - Serpico's corrupt police colleagues discover he's not been taking bribes (his partner has been pocketing the money 'for when he wants it'). They order him to turn up to a meeting, and Serpico is dumbfounded to find it's in a park across from the courthouse, with an entire squad of detectives discussing the matter while a stream of prosecutors, cops, and judges walk by. - The page quote refers to the same duck pond as in Good Omens, which may or may not be Truth in Television, but is certainly believed to be. The St James's Park Bridge is popularly known as the Bridge of Spies. - At one point in Without Remorse, Bob Ritter meets with a KGB agent attached to the Russian embassy at the Washington Zoo to discuss Russia leveraging Vietnam into releasing some POWs in exchange for America not revealing that Vietnam had falsely reported that said prisoners were dead after capturing them to the world press. - Arrow. After Oliver Queen discovers that Malcolm Merlyn is alive and back in Starling City, Malcolm agrees to meet him in a crowded plaza, as the presence of innocent bystanders will deter Oliver from starting a fight. - In The Sandbaggers, most of Burnside's meetings with his American counterpart Jeff Ross happen while strolling in the park. - Stargate SG-1 has a few examples. - General Hammond has a park meeting with one of his contacts who's so paranoid that he refuses to talk even while they're sitting on a park bench; they have to be actually walking before he'll say anything. - Sam and her NID contact Malcolm Barrett first meet in his office, where he vocally denies having any interest in what she has to say while passing him a note that says to meet in the park instead. Once she gets there, he explains there are listening devices in his office, and he couldn't have a conversation there. - In Stargate Atlantis, Sheppard meets his ex-wife — who works for the Department of Homeland Security — on a park bench, in order to ask her to illegally dig up some classified information for him. - In "Spies Five", an unaired sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Tony and Control meet on a park bench because there's a mole in their department. - Subverted in 30 Rock. Jack meets Lenny, a private investigator played by Steve Buscemi, along the banks of the river, in view of the Queensborough Bridge. Lenny thanks Jack for driving out there, Jack says he doesn't mind because discretion is important. Lenny replies "Also, my gym is right over there." - Spooks: In seasons one and two, the characters frequently have meetings on the benches across from the Houses of Parliament. - Breaking Bad: - Drug deals in this show tend to take place in public places, but for another reason in addition to secrecy: if negotiations go badly, people are less likely to shoot each other in public in broad daylight. Walt, in the first drug deal he participates in, sets it in an abandoned junkyard because that's where drug deals take place in the movies. Jesse: This, this is like a non-criminal's idea of a drug meet. This is like, "Oh, I saw this in a movie, look at me!" Tuco: What are we doing way the hell out here? What, they close the mall or something? Jesse: (meaningful look) - In season 5, Lydia insists on meeting Walt in a coffee shop. She tries to sit back-to-back with him, but he points out that this only makes them look more conspicuous, and joins her at her table. - Burn Notice: - In "Fight or Flight" Michael meets Egyptian spy Akhom Thabet in the cemetery where Michael's father Frank was buried. Thabet is discomfited by this, but Michael justifies it to him: It's quiet, there's plenty of cover, and two guys in business suits don't attract much attention. - In "Do No Harm" Michael and Fiona meet with a Mark of the Week in a hot tub at a public pool, which has the added benefit of making it more difficult for someone to wear a wire. - In another episode, Ambiguously Gay baddie Gilroy meets with Michael in a hot tub at a public pool pretty much for the Rule of Funny of making Mike uncomfortable. - In the 1990's Australian cop show Phoenix the head of Major Crime Division meets a colleague in the park to discuss an undercover operation. At the end of the meeting one of them grumbles: "Jesus, what do we look like? Two bloody old poofs holding hands, sucking their ice creams. Is there a pub nearby?" - Good Omens: Aziraphale and Crowley meet several times on a very public park bench to discuss very confidential matters of Heaven and Hell. Notably, this is the setting of their conversation where Crowley asks Aziraphale to \|\|provide him with holy water for "insurance"\|\|. - Played for Laughs in an episode of Hunter where a small-time crook steals a package of drugs from a crime boss, and says he'll sell it back to him. To avoid his inevitable death, the exchange takes place in the foyer of a police station. - In Season 3 of House of Cards (US), Doug Stamper and Gavin Orsay periodically meet in a diner to discuss the status of Gavin's search for Rachel (for which he's misappropriating FBI resources). - In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Creel meets with his HYDRA handler to hand over the Obelisk on a pair of back-to-back public benches. This ends up making it remarkably easy for Raina to walk away with it when the meeting goes bad. - In Agent Carter, Peggy meets with Edwin Jarvis back-to-back at neighbouring tables in a diner. Jarvis also meets with Howard Stark by sitting next to him at a shoe shine stand. - Person of Interest. - In the pilot episode, Harold Finch does a Walk and Talk through Central Park while revealing the existence of the Machine to John Reese. We then see them from the Machine's POV, showing the all-seeing A.I. can still hear their conversation. - This backfires on Finch in "No Good Deed" when he reveals himself as the creator of the Machine, while sitting in an outdoor table in a coffee shop. At the end of the episode we revisit the scene to see former NSA employee Alicia Corwin at a nearby table sitting with her back to them, but with a small rifle microphone sitting on the table pointed in Finch's direction. - Control becomes suspicious of Samaritan and to escape its ubiquitous surveillance goes to the park, sits on a bench and uses a satellite phone to contact one of her men directly. However Samaritan adapts by sending a bike rider into the park with a microphone attached to his arm in the guise of a smartphone, to hear her conversation. - Inverted when Control is interrogating a woman she suspects of being The Handler for The Mole inside her organization. Control produces photographs showing her sitting next to The Mole in a park and a coffee shop. The woman protests that it's a coincidence, as they're both public places. So Control produces a third photograph, showing this innocuous housewife walking down a restricted corridor in the White House. - Scandal loves to do this, and nearly every such meeting is presumed to be orchestrated by Olivia. Olivia and Cyrus tend to meet on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. Olivia and her father meet in parks or in restaurants. The most treacherous of conversations tend to occur between Olivia and some other person in the middle night, when no bystanders are present. - Daredevil (2015). A plot point in the Back Story of The Punisher. A meeting was set up by the Blacksmith with three criminal gangs to be held in Central Park. The authorities got wind of it, but didn't clear the park of civilians because it might tip the criminals off. Unfortunately when the Blacksmith never showed, the rival gangs got nervous and a shootout occurred, with Frank Castle's family caught in the crossfire. - Luke Cage (2016): During the first part of season 1, Mariah Dillard is very uncomfortable about being seen in public with her cousin Cottonmouth, given Cottonmouth is running the Stokes family's organized crime operations, and she is trying to minimize any potential association with the dirty money. - Porridge: Grouty will sometimes hold a secret meeting in a communal area of the prison, such as the doctor's waiting room, or the toilets, using his henchmen to bully the other prisoners out of the area first. - The Boys (2019). At the start of Season 2, Hughie Campbell is a federal fugitive, so has to meet with an incognito Starlight by pretending to be passengers sitting next to each other on a crowded subway train. Given that Starlight is a celebrity superhero, she's actually at more risk of being recognised than he is. - Shadowrun. - In The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to Real Life it was recommended that runners meet with their Mr. Johnson (employer) at a public place such as a McHugh's restaurant. - Many of the adventures published for the game had runners meeting with their Mr. Johnson in public places such as restaurants, bars and nightclubs. - In Covert Action Player Character can meet local informants simply in the lounge of his hotel. Not that it was necessary or alert-safe. - In the intro to Civilization IV's expansion, an image of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg address Match Cuts to his memorial, where two spies are passing along photos of Soviet missile sites. - In KGB, the player character must bug one of these meetings. Doing anything else will result in one of the speakers getting spooked and escaping. - In Persona 5, the Phantom Thieves' second meeting place is a public accessway bridge over a busy road that gets lots of foot traffic. They also occasionally meet in local diners to discuss Phantom Thieves business. - In Autumn Bay, Felicia Kingsley, the Intrepid Reporter, has an early morning meeting in Wellington Park with Frank Logan, an old spy, to discuss exactly what's going on. - In Pay Me, Bug!, getting \|\|Meaghan Sythe\|\| out of \|\|Ur Voys\|\| requires a meeting in a bar. Unfortunately, she is seen there by other bar patrons, which allows Mavis' agents to connect her with the Fool's Errand. Since they already suspect her of being part of the theft of the artefact, they naturally go after her, which sets up the climactic battle.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvertRendezvous
Oxygen Meter - TV Tropes "There's some pretty cool stuff down there. Grab a blue balloon and double your dive time, dude!" Somewhere in between Super Drowning Skills and Super Not-Drowning Skills lies the Oxygen Meter, which indicates the Player Character's capacity to hold their breath. If the Oxygen Meter depletes, one of two things will happen: instant death by asphyxiation or the player character's actual health will begin to drain. In water levels, there will often be designated stops that allow for the oxygen meter to be refilled, such as ceiling vents that allow you to resurface and breathe or bubbles that pop up in certain places to automatically refill the meter. Frustratingly, your oxygen meter is sometimes invisible yet still just as real and waiting to bite you; this is most likely to happen in a First-Person Shooter. This is probably just because the interface is already full and they don't want to waste space on something not even used in most levels... and surprisingly, not all games decided to only make it visible when in use. It's worth noting that dying from lack of oxygen is often played unnervingly straight even in games where deaths are otherwise cartoonish or even Played for Laughs. The Oxygen Meter may be removed entirely if your character can somehow breathe underwater (through some sort of ability or equipment, or even just being native to water) or doesn't even need to breathe at all (if you're playing as a robot, for example). An occasional alternative to the Oxygen Meter is to allow only for a finite amount of time underwater before the player character automatically floats back to the surface unharmed—however, this also places a restriction on level design, to avoid the player getting stuck should their "swim timer" run out in the middle of, say, an underwater tunnel or cavern with no air on the surface. A third way, of course, is to just prohibit underwater travel entirely—either by limiting swimming mechanics to the water's surface (such as in Bully), using Super Drowning Skills, or by simply not allowing the player to interact with deep water in the first place using Invisible Walls. Sure, you can still splash around in puddles and knee-high streams, but to go jump in a lake? Are you crazy? Games that include a Sprint Meter will often replace it with the Oxygen Meter underwater (or use the same meter for both purposes), since actions that use the Sprint Meter are typically unavailable while swimming. Characters with Super Not-Drowning Skills, by definition, rarely have need of an Oxygen Meter. ## Examples: - Grand Theft Auto: - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This was a departure from the rest of the series, as previous games gave the player Super Drowning Skills. - The game after this, Grand Theft Auto IV, kept the ability to swim but restricts it to the surface, so there's no meter. - Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories also restricted it to the surface, but added a stamina meter which works exactly as an Oxygen Meter; when it runs out, you're screwed. - And then along came Grand Theft Auto V which vastly expanded the underwater world, reintroduced the oxygen meter, and added scuba-diving and controllable submarines which allows the player to explore for longer. - American McGee's Alice has this meter for underwater levels where you don't have a shell. Annoying in that the meter is not visible, so you must gauge by bubbles when you're almost out of air. Doubly annoying in that once your health begins to decline, you are given absolutely no time to find an air source to stop yourself from dying. - In Another World, a meter isn't explicitly shown, but as Lester spends time in the water, he releases more and more air bubbles. When the bubbles start getting out more frequently, he'd better be close to the surface. - In Shadow of the Colossus, your stamina meter doubled as an oxygen meter. If it ran out, you would simply let go of whatever you were holding and return to the surface. Because the two are the same, it makes it rather odd when the main character is panting and gasping while completely submerged in the water. - The 3D The Legend of Zelda games use both varieties: - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Diving while swimming normally only lasts for a few seconds before Link resurfaces (in the former game, the Silver Scale raises the timer to 6, and the Golden Scale does for 8). Equipping the Iron Boots in the former game lets Link stay underwater longer, in which case a timer based on how much health you have appears (unless you also equip the Zora Tunic, which lets you breathe underwater). These two items are important in the Water Temple. - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: Link's timer while diving is only two seconds. Fortunately, Link wearing the Zora Mask will eliminate the swimming restrictions. - The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker does not have any underwater breathing, but does have a stamina bar to prevent you from swimming from island to island (which can only be done by sailing your boat). This also applies to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, in which Link can only swim on the surface and while the standard Sprint Meter lasts. - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has a blue bar that appears whenever Link is sunken underwater with the Iron Boots. Once again, wearing the Zora Armor will allow him to swim for as long as he wants. - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has an oxygen meter as well, which is barely of note until you get the Water Dragon's Scale (Link automatically floats upward when he's not focused on swimming). It resembles the Sprint Meter in blue instead of green. Staying underwater depletes it, using your spinning attack depletes it faster, and whatever you do, don't inhale the purple-colored bubbles (they're toxic). Running out of oxygen will quickly drain hearts until Link surfaces or drowns. There is a potion that slows the rate Link consumes oxygen, as well as a potion medal that prolongs the effects of potions (including the air potion); using the two at the same time makes the difficult Tadtone quest (which takes place underwater) much more manageable. - Monkey Island: - While oxygen seems to be unlimited in the games, if Guybrush Threepwood stands around underwater for a really long time, he will die. This is really more of a gag death, as it's literally the only way to die in the games. This is, of course, in reference to Guybrush's special talent to hold his breath for ten minutes (a fact he'll repeat to anybody willing to listen). You literally have 10 minutes to solve this puzzle/get out of the water, which is intentionally much longer than most people will need. - In Tales of Monkey Island, Guybrush can intentionally go underwater, and if you spend a little less than ten minutes of gameplay underwater, Guybrush will remember his limit and go back to dry land. Thankfully, there's only really one or two areas where you need to be underwater, they're incredibly straightforward to navigate, and like it's been said before, ten minutes is a generous amount of time. - The remake of Ninja Gaiden has one of this, but it ceases to be an issue once Ryu acquires an oxygen tank and draws on it from his Hyperspace Arsenal. - Ecco the Dolphin. Of course, since the whole game was set underwater and dolphins can hold their breath for quite a while. When the oxygen meter runs out, health begins to drain. - In addition to being a certified death incarnate, Rico Rodriguez in Just Cause 2 can swim underwater for a ridiculously long (for a video game, at least) amount of time. His oxygen is counted by a small circle that counts down from 99 by two every 2 seconds. This means that Rico can stay underwater for approximately one minute and 50 seconds, which is around what a fit human can accomplish in real life. Not quite Super Not-Drowning Skills, but quite impressive compared to other games. - Tomb Raider uses a couple of variations on this: - While most of the games use a standard oxygen meter, Tomb Raider Chronicles used a special diving suit on one level that had confusing (since they never told you) additional mechanics: the suit had near infinite air, but as you bumped into walls and rocks, Lara audibly becomes stressed and begins breathing heavily, at which point you begin to lose oxygen quickly, meaning you had to avoid hitting things. - Tomb Raider III also has an underwater propulsion vehicle that makes you move faster, but it's less useful than just swimming as it decreases your general mobility and must be got off of to use switches and other items. Water in arctic levels also had a hypothermia bar that went down faster than the oxygen bar, but functioned much the same way. - In Tomb Raider: Legend and Tomb Raider: Anniversary, oddly, Lara is much slower underwater and has a much shorter air meter. - Tomb Raider: Underworld changes things up again, with Lara going back to being almost as fast as in the original games, and having such a long oxygen bar it borders on Super Not-Drowning Skills (that is in the rare instances where she swims without scuba gear, where it is that trope). - Decrease in health also functions differently depending on the game. Prior to Tomb Raider: Legend, health usually decreases at a fixed steady rate. During and after Legend, the decrease in health rate is usually a slash of a quarter of the health bar every two seconds, or an eighth, depending on the difficulty level setting. - In An Untitled Story, in addition to a life meter indicated by a red heart you also have an air meter, indicated by a blue heart, that drops when you're in water and is restored by getting out of water, touching Oxygenated Underwater Bubbles or standing on jets of oxygen. Once it drops to 0 you start getting damage restrained only by Mercy Invincibility. - Endless Ocean has an oxygen meter for your air tanks, but it's a rather long one and most tasks get completed without running out of air ever being a factor. When it does run out, you get warped back to the boat. The sequel does tweak things a bit; dangerous fish attacking you knock your air out faster. Certain equipment upgrades up your air supply in both games. - Deep Fear counts down the amount of air left in any given room. Firing your weapon makes it go down slightly faster. When it reaches 0, you pull out a backup air supply that carries over from room to room (and is mandatory in some rooms which are flooded with water or filled with poisonous gas). When that runs out, you asphyxiate. This is intended to add a layer of tension to the game; however, various panels in the levels can refill the air supply in both the rooms and your backup air, seemingly infinitely, and special air grenades exist to fill any given room up with air as well, which are plentiful in supply. - Dishonored has one of these for you. The NPCs, however, aren't so lucky, as they die the second a single polygon touches water. This is particularly frustrating in a Pacifist Run, as the game gives no indication of this, other than when Sokolov instantly dies if he is dropped in water (with the player having to drag his unconscious body back to Samuel, so this is basically Game Over). - Shadow Man has a rather short one for Mike when he's in Liveside, and running out means instant death. As Shadowman, he becomes an immortal Zombi and has no need for air. Fittingly, underwater sections in Deadside tend to be much longer than they are in Liveside. - A Hat in Time has an unorthodox Oxygen Meter that masquerades as a swim stamina meter. While Hat Kid can swim, she can't dive underwater unless she drops in from a long fall or if she uses the Ground Pound of her Ice Hat's statue form, with the only option from there being the jump button to swim upward. Whether she's underwater or treading the surface, 4 bubbles appear and drain after a few seconds, to which Hat Kid starts flailing around in a panic. This is a rare instance in a game where drowning can occur even after surfacing from a dive, as you have to touch land in order to restore the meter. - Horizon Zero Dawn has an oxygen meter for when Aloy dives underwater whilst stealth-swimming; this makes it easier for her to sneak up on enemies in or near the water and harder for her to be detected. However, if she stays under for more than approximately 30 seconds, Aloy begins to drown and she flails whilst making pained groaning and choking noises — her health decreasing rapidly until she either re-surfaces or suffocates. Of course, she can use any health-granting items on her person to survive longer, but it does raise the question of how she's able to eat whilst holding her breath. - The LEGO Movie Videogame has a swimming section in the mission "The Depths" that slowly drains the characters' health over time, which can be replenished by collecting blue hearts. - In the Half-Life series, your hazardous environment suit provides you oxygen for a limited time. Oddly, the same meter that powers your sprint ability and flashlight is used for this in the second game. Once the suit runs out, Gordon has to start holding his breath. Once that runs out, your health starts dropping, but regenerates just as gradually when you come up for air. - Far Cry: - In Far Cry, your Sprint Meter doubles as a Oxygen meter. It makes sense, because if you sprint for an extended period of time, what are you going to have to catch? - Far Cry 2 had your standard oxygen meter that, once empty, would begin to drain your life instead. However Far Cry 2 also allows you to heal for free with the press of a button. This wonderful Good Bad Bug led to what the fans call DEADLY AFRICANIZED WATER: you can swim for an eternity in it, provided to stop every so often to pull the barbed wire out of your flesh that the water inexplicably leaves there. Later games corrected this by merely having you drown when your breath ran out. - In Hands of Necromancy, the moment you enter an underwater area, a 30-second timer appears onscreen and you need to either clear the stage or resurface before the timer hits zero. However you can collect a morphing spell turning you into a water serpent, which removes the timer and allows you to stay underwater for as long as you need. - Bungie's Marathon series feature an especially heinous, literal Oxygen Meter: Your armored suit's HUD doesn't indicate how much oxygen remains in your lungs and blood, but in ITS compressed oxygen tanks! Since your suit lacks any way of refilling it with ambient oxygen, you must locate compressed oxygen dispenser panels or tanks of compressed oxygen to refill it. Worse yet, the player character apparently refuses to hold his breath, as if his suit's tank is empty he will instantly faint from even momentary immersion. It's rare to have trouble with Oxygen underwater (or sewage, or lava), but the back-to-back vacuum levels (three in a row, if you visit a secret level) in Marathon Infinity have a nasty reputation. The one vacuum level in Marathon was also infamous. - Turok has a fairly unremarkable one, although you'd kind of expect a muscled-up warrior like him to be able to hold his breath a bit longer. - Alpha Prime uses an Oxygen Meter on the asteroid's surface, refillable through the use of oxygen dispensers, or simply by walking back into an airlock. - Will Rock has the traditional meter for the underwater sequences. If it runs out, you can always replenish your health with healing packs and bandages if they're at hand. - A variation from Metro 2033: your wristwatch tells you how much time you have left on your gas mask before you need to switch filter canisters. Spend too long in areas with toxic atmosphere and you die. Since there's no HUD, you have to check your wristwatch constantly to see how much time you have before you have to change filters. And just because you're required to wear the gas mask doesn't mean it can't be damaged either, making any surface expedition a tense journey to avoid any serious conflict. You also need to remember to take off the mask as soon as it's safe to breathe, or it might get damaged the next time you get attacked. - While you don't get a visible oxygen meter in Team Fortress 2, stay underwater too long and your character will begin to take damage and make choking noises as the screen tints blue round the edges with each "hit" taken, eventually dying in the same manner as an environmental hazard when their health runs out. Health lost from drowning is restored by coming up for air, but pauses if you go back underwater. Oddly enough, Medics and Dispensers can heal players faster than drowning can kill them, so they're sort of like oxygen masks or tubes. - Doom³ has the oxygen meter only visible outdoors, and begins depleting when you're outside the inner areas of Mars City. You can even refill it by getting scattered air canisters. - In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, the player can go out onto the open-space surface of the moon where the game takes place. The player's oxygen tanks will slowly deplete, but can be instantly replenished by entering pressurized areas or by collecting oxygen canisters. The only character whose oxygen doesn't slowly deplete is Claptrap due to being a robot. - Dark Forces features a gas mask that lets you get through toxic air safely, but drains battery to do so. - Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II does not have a visible oxygen meter, but it doesn't mean you won't take damage from staying underwater for too long. - Unreal lets you spend a few seconds swimming underwater before your character starts losing health due to lack of oxygen. You can extend that time with expendable SCUBA gear you can occasionally find. In Return to Na Pali, your "benefactors" give you a SCUBA gear that recharges every time you resurface. - South Park: You can take a character underwater but there isn't any indication that there is a time limit, which may make you think the game gives Super Not-Drowning Skills, only for the character to start rapidly losing health after a while. - In the Wii Play: Motion minigame "Treasure Twirl", your diving suit-clad Mii has to dive into the sea to salvage the treasures that hide in it, but they have to get back up before they run out of oxygen. Thankfully, there are some conveniently-placed oxygen tanks underwater so you can slightly refill the oxygen meter during the dive. - World of Warcraft has two of these. A traditional oxygen bar for underwater, and a fatigue bar to prevent you from swimming out too far. The first one can be bypassed by potions or spells. The second one on depleting completely begins draining your health, and can be circumvented by healing yourself to easily swim to the end of the map. The undead Forsaken can also stay underwater for much longer. This used to be significantly more useful until they extended the oxygen bar for all players, so that now everyone usually has plenty of time to fulfill their task. They can't seem to decide on how long the oxygen meter should be, before the Burning Crusade expansion, and shortly into Wrath of the Lich King, it was one minute long, halfway through wrath, they increased it to roughly five minutes, and as of Cataclysm, it's back down to roughly two minutes. As of Mists of Pandaria, the Forsaken no longer have a longer oxygen meter than the other races, while as of Warlords of Draenor they no longer have an oxygen meter in the first place. - Dungeons & Dragons Online has a breath meter whenever a PC goes underwater. When the bar empties, the character starts taking damage. Unfortunately, surfacing does not heal any damage taken due to drowning. - In Sonic Shuffle, the first board, Emerald Coast has underwater sections. Sonic and his friends can only spend five turns underwater. If they don't land on an oxygen space or resurface within those five turns, they will drown, losing a turn as a result. - In Banjo-Kazooie, the Oxygen Meter is represented by blue-colored honeycombs (in analogy to the yellow honeycombs that represent the standard health meter); it normally lasts about 60 seconds from a full meter, and if it runs out, you immediately drown. Rusty Bucket Bay has oily water that not only drains the meter twice as fast when submerged, but drains it at the regular speed when on the surface (this also happens with the water in Click Clock Wood in winter, due to its low temperature). This is rectified slightly in Banjo-Tooie, where once the Oxygen Meter goes, your health starts to go down really quickly instead (this is also the case for areas where oxygen is depleted due to toxic airs or very naughty smells); there's a sidequest in Spiral Mountain whose reward is an upgrade to the oxygen meter's length. In both games, certain transformations allow you to stay underwater indefinitely. - Conker's Bad Fur Day and its remake Conker: Live & Reloaded has one of these once you're able to swim underwater (namely after consuming some pills in the Poo Cabin). When you're underwater, Conker's face and a stream of bubbles represents your air. As your air runs down, the stream of bubbles grows shorter, and Conker's expression becomes increasingly desperate and his face starts turning blue. When his head droops, your chocolate bar (i.e., your health) starts falling apart rapidly. All six pieces go in about five seconds, so unless you're near the surface, you run out of air, you're probably gonna die. The meter lasts about 25 seconds in the original, and about 70 seconds in Live and Reloaded. The other main difference between the two is that you begin losing health immediately when the last bubble goes in the original, while in the remake, your last bubble goes at about 15 seconds remaining, and that's when Conker's expression really starts getting desperate, shaking and ultimately having his eyeballs begin to roll back as his head droops and his eyes close. - Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze has a meter that applies to all Kongs, both when played as together or separately. Touching air bubbles or items surrounded by air will replenish the meter. - Doujin Soft developer Fox Eye has this mechanic in every last one of their games. This is mainly out of its lead designer's huge fascination with underwater fantasies and drowning perils, making this trope the developer's modus operandi. Even in games where the Oxygen Meter isn't present (and several games where it is), the developer puts great care and graphic detail in showing that it still plays a significant role through the character's distressful body language as they're running out of air. - Holdover gives Marie a meter that can be upgraded by collecting blue hearts around the facility. You'll need it, too. She spends a lot of time underwater, and the anklets that are repairing her organs also prevent her from swimming. - Aqua Cube makes you handle two. One for the sibling you're playing as, and one for the trapped sibling you're rescuing. The controlled sibling has a bubble that shrinks while they're underwater, while the trapped sibling has an animated portrait that gets more and more dire the closer they are to drowning. An Underwater Kiss is all you can do to keep the trapped sibling's oxygen full besides dropping the water level, but it comes at the cost of your own and this becomes impossible to do if the trapped sibling is locked in a cage. - BLUE GUARDIAN: Margaret has one that gets affected by the titular character's "Excitement Meter". The higher it is, the faster her oxygen drops underwater. The player can manually lower the Excitement Meter before or after taking a dive to prevent Margaret from drowning too early. - Hades Vanquish has one that is capped by Mana's Life Meter. So how long she can hold her breath underwater depends on how much damage she took beforehand. If Mana has no items to recover her health or revive her after death, Failure Is the Only Option if you're forced to take a dive to get further through a floor with little health left, which means seeing her drown in only a few seconds. - Distorted Travesty 3 has a blue bar on the left side of the screen that appears whenever your head is below the water. Additionally when it's within five seconds of running out, big green numbers straight from Sonic the Hedgehog appear right above the player's head and start counting down. - Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko: Gex is given a red bar slowly emptying whenever he dives into water. Earlier games gave him Super Not-Drowning Skills where Gex swims Mario-style, pressing the jump button to float upwards and not needing any oxygen. - Super Mario Bros.: - Most 3D games have one (With the exceptions being 3D Land and 3D World which allow the player to swim indefinitely since they play closer to the 2D games). The original Super Mario 64 makes the odd decision of using the Life Meter in lieu of a separate oxygen meter, while still allowing you to catch your breath when surfacing, which basically means that you can refill your health for free by swimming around at the surface of any deep body of water, or continue holding your breath as long as you gather coins (which heal your life meter). - Super Mario Sunshine and both Galaxy games use a separate oxygen meter (though coins still refill it when underwater, and in Sunshine, it basically replaces your health meter while you're underwater). Super Mario Odyssey also uses a separate meter, however, the need for oxygen can be bypassed altogether if Mario uses Cappy to capture an aquatic creature that breathes water, such as a Cheep Cheep. The oxygen meter is also turned off altogether in Assist Mode, allowing Mario to stay underwater indefinitely. - Mario Party 6: The minigame Sink Or Swim has three characters swim in the waters of a flowery lake while the fourth player is standing on the surface to drop mines onto them to try to eliminate them. Each of the swimming players has a heart-shaped gauge that will deplete the longer they spend underwater; rather than drowning, they'll automatically rise to the surface to breathe anew once their oxygen depletes completely, making them easier targets for the solo player. The solo player wins if they manage to hit all the other three with the mines; however, if at least one swimming player survives during 30 seconds, then the trio wins. - The Ty the Tasmanian Tiger games use the Mario 64 variant, sharing the properties of being an oxygen meter and an energy meter, with exactly the same consequences. - Ratchet & Clank (2002): Ratchet then gains an oxygen mask about halfway through the first game — and unlike most of his weapons and items, the mask makes it to every subsequent game, making it a non-issue for the rest of the series. - Sonic the Hedgehog: - Two-dimensional games give the Player Character an invisible oxygen meter lasting 30 seconds. Three warning chimes are played at five-second intervals; after a total of 18 seconds, a countdown begins, running from 5 to 0 (each of these lasts about two seconds) followed by automatic death when it runs out. The indication of how much time remains is based on a infamously-chilling background music that gradually speeds up as the timer reaches zero. - This is the same case for the first Sonic Adventure game, but in its sequel, two-thirds of the cast dies upon falling into water (save the small patch in the Chao Gardens, though Tails is short enough that he can drown in one area, the same as in the first game). This eventually became the case for everyone over the course of the 3D series while the 2D games retained the classic countdown. Such is the case of the underwater Knuckles level "Aquatic Mine", which can be quite dangerous until you find the infinite oxygen item. - Averted in some levels, where Sonic displays Super Drowning Skills, dying if he so much as touches the rippling water at the very bottom of the game world (if you're lucky, he may only lose rings, and bounce back onto land). On others, water is a relatively benign substance, merely reducing your running speed and jump height (swimming is out of the question), and in some cases (where it takes up a significant portion or even all of the level) requiring you to find air to breathe. Worse, there are even some places where the two are mixed; go too deep on, say, the Jungle zone in the 8-bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog 1 or the Aquatic boss fight, and you'll instantly pop your clogs. - Cave Story has a meter which appears when the protagonist is underwater. Since the protagonist is an armed scout robot, when submerged in water his internal compartments get slowly flooded with water until he can't operate anymore. Curly Brace, also a robot, carries an air tank which lets her survive underwater indefinitely, which she gives to the protagonist at one point. - The NewZealand Story did this, with the added implication that it may have actually been water in Tiki's lungs — swimming up to the surface would naturally allow your oxygen level to (slowly) replenish itself, but the process could be accelerated by spitting water. Pretty deadly water it was, too, as it could kill most enemies. - Radical Rex plays this entirely straight. Not only do you get a bar, but you have to either surface to refill it, or (ugh) lock lips with a big fat fish that is somehow able to maintain neutral buoyancy despite apparently being full of air. Oh, and if you touch the un-inflated fish (which this type will become upon giving up its payload), you'll lose a big chunk of air. There are also "bubble" powerups good for about half a deep breath. And if you get caught in the anemone's tentacles, the meter drains almost immediately to zero (though whether it's this or some kind of poison in them that kills you is debatable). - Jungle King / Jungle Hunt uses this during the swimming levels. - All three Disney's Magical Quest games have them, but the meter is only visible in the third. - In Jables's Adventure, your oxygen counts down from 100. It happens so quickly that you really can't accomplish anything underwater prior to receiving the SCUBA gear (which allows you to stay underwater indefinitely). - Kirby Mass Attack is the only game in the Kirby series which has this meter. note : And one of the only games to not feature Kirby in scuba gear when underwater. This meter is shared by all the Kirbys and the more Kirbys the player has, the bigger the meter is. - The first Rayman game has Super Drowning Skills, the second has an Oxygen Meter which can be refilled by collecting blue lums (or by entering bubble vents in Rayman 2, and inhaling the large air bubbles Carmen the Whale provides for you in Whale Bay), and the third game onward lets you breathe underwater indefinitely. - Space Panic may have been the first game to have an oxygen meter, though it was really no more than a level timer labeled "oxygen." - Magical Doropie gave Doropie an oxygen meter in the underwater base levels. When it got low, it would beep until refilled by jumping into a convenient air pocket. - Endeavor has an oxygen bar, which replaces the endurance meter when you're underwater. Getting the Flippers item in game slows down how fast your oxygen depletes. - Ori and the Blind Forest has an oxygen bar that lasts for roughly 15 seconds before Ori's health begins to drain rapidly. Strangely, drowning in this game is the only way to die that doesn't employ Critical Existence Failure (Ori clutches at their throat and visibly inhales a lungful of water upon death, rather than exploding into a shower of magic sparks as usual), and can be averted entirely via an upgrade that ditches the meter for Super Not-Drowning Skills. The meter returns in Ori and the Will of the Wisps, but with one frustating change: instead of their health rapidly draining upon their air running out, Ori now drowns immediately. - If a Sackperson in LittleBigPlanet stays underwater for 30 seconds without resurfacing or reaching a Bubble Machine, they pop from lack of air. - Non-underwater example: the Mr. Driller series has an Oxygen meter that slowly depletes as you play, with the oxygen loss accelerating once you make it deeper underground. To stay alive, you need to pick up air capsules scattered throughout the mine. - One type of puzzle in The Time Warp of Dr. Brain had you controlling a lungfish in an underwater maze. The lungfish would gradually change colors from bright green to purple as your oxygen ran out. Eating bubbles or finding an air pocket replenished it. - The Hidden Object Game Hidden Expedition: Titanic was structured as a series of dives to the wreck of (you guessed it) the Titanic. The timer for each level was a SCUBA tank, that vented a little extra air with each mis-click. Some of the levels also had a second tank hidden in one scene, and finding it gave you some extra oxygen/time. - Played with in the indie browser game "Asphyx" where you explore a partially-drowned mine. YOU are the oxygen meter. Yes, YOU are supposed to hold your breath when you are underwater. - One level in Karoshi 2.0 takes place underwater and is finished by letting your oxygen meter drop to 0, a task made harder by Oxygenated Underwater Bubbles rising in droves. - An example without water: LEGO Rock Raiders had a meter measuring the remaining oxygen in the various caverns. Some levels had infinite oxygen, but in others, it would be gradually consumed by your Rock Raiders. In those levels, building at least one Support Station is critical note : also the victory condition in one level, as it provides enough oxygen for up to nine miners to work worry-free. - The Elder Scrolls: - Morrowind and Oblivion both have "Breath" meters which appear when the Player Character is completely underwater. The breath meter decreases over time, and once it empties, the player's health begins to drain rapidly. Skyrim keeps the meter, but makes it invisible — so the only indication that you've been underwater too long is when your health starts draining. All three games offer Water Breathing as a spell effect, and it also comes in the form of enchantments and potions. While under the Water Breathing effect, your breath meter will not decrease. Argonians, who canonically possess gills, have Water Breathing as a racial ability. In series' lore, they will use this as an Exploited Immunity. Renowned for their prowess in guerilla warfare, Argonians are known to ambush enemies from underwater and will often drag them into the water in order to drown them. - Morrowind has a Tribunal Temple quest which requires you to drown yourself as part of a pilgrimage. Once your health dips below 10, the quest will complete and your health will be restored. As your character only takes a fixed amount of (minor) damage for each second that they are underwater without air, it can take a high-level character at full health a ridiculous amount of time to finally "drown". - Fallout: Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4, which use the same (or similar) engines to their aforementioned Bethesda Elder Scrolls sister series above, inherit this mechanic as well. It drains worryingly quickly, followed by massive health loss. Although a character in New Vegas can gain Super Not-Drowning Skills with \|\|the unique rebreather\|\|, again based on the very same effect as Water Breathing in The Elder Scrolls. An interesting variation on this is that the meter is more and more forgiving as you increase your Endurance attribute. Amusingly, some creatures in New Vegas will follow you underwater, despite having their own oxygen meter. - In Deus Ex, your health would start decreasing when you run out of oxygen and start gulping water. While there are skills, items, and Upgrade Artifacts to increase the amount of time you can hold your breath, the powerful health regeneration Upgrade Artifacts and instant-use medkits allow one to use Hit Points as an extra Oxygen Meter. - Swimming underwater in Gothic adds an oxygen meter in addition to the player's health and mana meters. When the Nameless Hero runs out of oxygen, the health starts draining instead, until he runs out of health and drowns. Notable because surfacing will make the meter invisible again, but will not instantly refill it — the player must stay on the surface for at least a few seconds, or will find on diving again that the meter isn't completely full. - Mega Man Battle Network: - Mega Man Battle Network 4 Blue Moon uses one during AquaMan's chapter, when the net is flooded by his crying over (what he thought was) Shuko and her brothers talking about getting rid of him. This may be refilled by slipping into a homepage from the net. - In Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Team ProtoMan, there is a water dungeon which you have to guide your current Navi through. While they are underwater, they are perfectly fine until they run out of "cyber-air" (really?), at which point their HP starts dropping rapidly until you either hit a cyber-air pocket or exit the water. Oh, and there's random encounters the whole way, including while you're attempting to fight the currents that push you back and drain your air, and while you're trying to avoid the whirlpools that drain your air. There's also three areas of this, each one progressively more frustrating. This is one instance Capcom cut something out of the English release for a good reason — in the Japanese version, there were four areas. By the DS version, it was back up to four. - When traveling on the ocean floor to Tane-Tane Island in Mother 3, the way you refuel your characters' collective oxygen bar is unusual. The amount of time you're able to survive without the aide of these machines is fairly realistic compared to most examples, though — around 30 seconds to a minute (with battles excluded). You get them kissed by big-lipped mermen. And if you run out of oxygen, you don't die — instead you get washed up on the beach at the beginning and have to start the underwater "dungeon" all over again. - Final Fantasy: - There's an optional underwater dungeon in Final Fantasy V that gives you a timer. The boss is a Puzzle Boss, just to make things more "fun". It's Gogo the Mimic. How do you win? \|\|Do nothing. He's testing to see if you can be a good mimic — so mimic him mimicking you doing nothing.\|\| The faster you catch on, the more time you have to get out. - In Final Fantasy VII, the party has twenty minutes to defeat Emerald WEAPON, unless a party member is carrying the "Underwater" Materia, which replaces the timer with Super Not-Drowning Skills. - Super Paper Mario uses a meter like this, but not for oxygen — the one place where Mario needs oxygen, he can somehow get all he ever needs from a goldfish bowl. No, the meter comes into play when shifting into 3D, where it depletes steadily and does damage if it runs out. - Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) and 3 Ultimate use an oxygen meter during underwater combat, though the amount of time the player character can hold their breath for is a bit unrealistic, just not enough so that you're not forced to return to the surface, find oxygen bubbles underwater, or use a miniature oxygen supply bauble. One of the major fights in the game takes place exclusively underwater, so this becomes very important. Eating certain food combinations or using an Air Philter or Mega Air Philter will extend your already-generous oxygen meter, and raising the Oxygen skill to 10 points grants you the Endless Oxygen skill. - Soma Union: In the Ripple Railway, there are some sections of the subway that are submerged in water. When traveling through these maps, the party has a limited amount of time they can hold their breath. Running into bubbles from pipes will refill the oxygen gauge and allow them to make it to the other side of these maps. - Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana: While none of the party members can swim and they sink like rocks, they can still go underwater, albeit with an Oxygen Meter that rapidly depletes and forces a respawn above water with some HP damage when empty. - Minecraft gives you small air bubbles underwater. Once used up, you lose health over time. Helmets enchanted with the Respiration ability decreases oxygen consumption, including drowning damage. - Terraria: - Clearly visible in the game and health begins to drain after you run out of air. It is possible to keep yourself alive with health items and having a large health meter for lengthy periods of time. - Diving gear and breathing reeds greatly retards the rate of oxygen depletion, while the charms that grant you transformation into merfolk eliminate the bar entirely. - The Gills Potion allows you to breathe underwater. The Obsidian Skin potion also allows you to breath under lava (along with its lava immunity effect) as of 1.2. - Wearing the Lava Charm or the Lava Waders gives you a different type of "oxygen" that allows you to be submerged in lava for up to 7 seconds before you start to take damage from it. Both of those accessories can be worn together to extend that time to 14 seconds. - Starbound gives you an air meter that appears and depletes when you're submerged in liquid (water/tar/poison/lava) or if you're in space, damaging the player rapidly once it fully empties. Equipping the Survival System removes this oxygen meter. Strangely enough, even the Hylotl still have this oxygen meter when underwater. - Subnautica: The whole game takes place in a planet surrounded by water, so naturally it's present and you'll be keeping an eye on it a lot. At first you can only hold your breath for about 30 seconds, but you can craft oxygen tanks to increase that amount. Your PDA will give you warnings when you'll run out of oxygen, and once it runs out your vision will start fading until it goes black and you die. There are a few oxygen-producing plants underwater, which can restore some oxygen levels. The oxygen mechanic has some additional caveats like submerged depth affecting oxygen usage (unless you have Rebreathers equipped) and unpowered interiors not providing oxygen. - Planet Explorers allows players to swim underwater for a limited time before they start drowning. Equippable scuba gear allows players to stay submerged for longer. - Breathedge, being heavily inspired by Subnautica but set in space, also features an oxygen meter as a core mechanic. Your spacesuit starts with a pathetically small capacity, which is upgraded over the course of the game. Unlike Subnautica, you can't just swim to the surface when your tank gets low, so you have to keep a close eye on your distance from the nearest air supply especially in the early game. - Steel Battalion: Line of Contact adds one in the form of your view whitening up when the cockpit hatch is closed and your VT is shut down (either manually by toggle switches, the Rapier's Stun Rod, or the Earthshaker's Gauss emitter). Go without oxygen for too long and the pilot asphyxiates, taking you out of the match even if you have enough sortie points for another VT and deleting your pilot data. - The X-Universe gives you a two-hour air supply on your spacesuit, though checking it requires you to open up the spacesuit's info screen. Two hours is usually plenty of time for you to do whatever you need to, although it's possible to run out if you're trying to patch up a capital ship's hull with the suit's repair laser. Somewhat bizarrely, when your oxygen runs out, you explode. - Fisher-Diver has an oxygen meter that not only goes down when you dive underwater, but also whenever you use weaponry on the fish that swim in the ocean's depths. - Elite Dangerous's starships have nigh-100% efficient closed circuit life support systems, but all that goes out the window if your cockpit canopy is shattered in combat. The oxygen vents out as your space suit automatically seals, and a ominous timer appears in the HUD indicating reserve oxygen levels. If you fail you enter a pressurized space station before the timer runs out, kaboom. The backup life support can be upgraded from the base 5 minutes up to 20 minutes. - In FTL: Faster Than Light, rooms on spaceship can have pressure from 0 to 1 atmosphere (shown as white at 100% pressure and getting redder as it drops) which can be replenished by a working life support system and depleted by opened airlocks, fires, hull breaches, hacked life support or the Lanius. If pressure falls below 5% (indicated by red diagonal stripes), organic non-Lanius beings staying there start rapidly losing health and any fire there will get extinguished. Humorously, an upgraded medbay can restore health faster than underpressure depletes it. - In the undersea levels of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Edward will slowly run out of air, shown on a meter. He can replenish his air by sticking his head in various pockets of air contained in overturned barrels or underwater caverns, or by simply returning to the diving bell used to reach the sea floor. - All the Metal Gear Solid games feature an oxygen meter, which determines how long you can MANAGE TO AVOID DROWNING underwater, survive poisonous gas, or resist being strangled. - The first game, even though there is no reason to backtrack all the way to the heliport after acquiring the gas mask, took the time to distinguish between water and gas just in case the player decided to take the gas mask all the way back to that briefly flooded air vent to see what happens if you wear it. - Both Vamp and Liquid Ocelot, as bosses, also feature oxygen meters. The former has to resurface from the waste water when his meter empties (which you can speed up by shooting him or literally knocking the wind out of him by tossing in a grenade), while Ocelot's is purely cosmetic and only pops up when you're strangling him. - The Thief games have an oxygen meter that looks like a line of bubbles across the bottom of the screen. If you knock someone unconscious and dump him in water, he will die in about the same span of time you would (so don't dump unconscious guards in swimming pools if you're running a no-kill mission). Averted however in Thief: Deadly Shadows, where Garrett has learnt Super Drowning Skills. - Duke Nukem Time To Kill deviated from the first-person variant by actually providing the player with a LCD heads-up oxygen meter. There was the added caveat, however, of no scuba gear to be found. - In Dead Space, this becomes visible once you enter a vacuum. As it depletes, Isaac begins to choke and gasp, which is just wonderful for your concentration. Thankfully, your time limit can be extended with upgrades to your RIG and restored with air canisters. - Mass Effect features a variant; many levels have environmental hazards in the form of extreme heat, cold or gravitational pressure. The player is safe inside their vehicle, the Mako, but if they leave the vehicle, a meter will appear and slowly deplete. If it empties, the player receives constant damage, but the meter instantly fills back up if the player enters the Mako or a pressurized environment such as a building. Equipping certain types of armor that were noted as having been designed for use in hostile environments would slow or possibly even stop the meter from draining. - In level 3 of MDK2, Dr. Hawkins is trapped in a large room with an open airlock that's sucking him towards it. The player has 10 seconds, shown on the screen, to find a way to stop getting sucked into space and then find a spacesuit (or in this case a fishbowl) so he can breath. - Resident Evil 6: Leon is given one when he traversing through a flooded cavern with zombies while having to find safe spots to get some air. - The aim of Survival missions in Warframe is not just to Hold the Line against fiercer and fiercer enemies, but also to look after your draining life support meter, which can be replenished by tiny capsules dropped by enemies and larger capsules dropped by your Mission Control. When life support drops to 0, your life will start draining and you will have no choice but to extract; unless extraction is not available yet, in which case you fail the mission. - In the pinball table Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (2023), the first stretch of Captain Cutler's mode requires the player to fill up an oxygen tank before going underwater to search for clues. The oxygen meter then serves as a time limit that can be refilled by hitting a specific set of targets.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OxygenMeter
Overzealous Underling - TV Tropes Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, horrified by the terrible slight that Blomberg had committed against the dignity of the military by defending his wife, sent Blomberg's old assistant to follow him around on his honeymoon and demand that he get a divorce. The ludicrously overzealous adjunct instead repeatedly demanded that Blomberg commit suicide , at one point even trying to force a pistol into his hands while telling him to "do the honorable thing." So the onetime commander-in-chief of the Nazi war machine was reduced to having some doofus assistant to the regional Nazi telling him to kill himself while he was trying to enjoy his honeymoon. Alice gives her underling Bob an order, which is then carried out far beyond what Alice asked for or intended. If punished, the underling may feel it's a Bewildering Punishment. May be pulled off by the Psycho for Hire, Blood Knight, Obstructive Bureaucrat, or Psycho Supporter. Shoot the Dangerous Minion is a possible outcome. The Beleaguered Boss may find himself in charge of one or more of these. Compare Psycho Supporter, Sane Boss, Psycho Henchmen, Tragically Misguided Favor, Just Following Orders (what the underling thinks they're doing), Your Approval Fills Me with Shame (if the underling thought this was the best way to carry out the boss' wishes), Rhetorical Request Blunder (when the order was stated but was never intended to be carried out in the first place), Underling with an F in PR (where the underling doesn't care about the repercussions of their actions), Better to Kill Than Frighten (a subtrope where orders to intimidate someone are turned into orders to kill them) and Gone Horribly Right. ## Examples: - Gate: After Pina has negotiated an incredibly generous (compared to her society's usual reparation demands) settlement with the JSDF (they mostly want hostages back instead of punitive damages from the attack on Tokyo), her knights (unaware of the treaty, since messages can't go faster than horses) run into Itami, who they think is still an enemy and violently torment all the way back to the castle. Pina lashes out at Bozes and orders her to sleep with Itami to salvage the situation (which, as a daughter of aristocrats, she's more or less expected to do in diplomatic situations). Unfortunately, Bozes finds Itami in the middle of a tea party with his squad and some maids and slaps him. Pina then decides to go along with the JSDF to Japan in order to prevent any more screwups from her troops. - GTO: The Early Years: Katsuyuki starts fights in Onizuka's name, always talking about "conquering the nation", and even started leading his "elite guard" in the last few chapters, none of which Onizuka wanted. - Sixshot is portrayed as such in Transformers: Energon: due to his own vendetta against Optimus Prime, he frequently goes against Galvatron's orders to target the Autobots. Repeated disobeying of orders, almost killing his own side in the process or just butting into Galvatron's own obsessive rivalry with Prime made him the constant target of violent lambastings and tantrums from his Control Freak Bad Boss. Sure enough, this pattern slowly embittered Sixshot into The Starscream, sabotaging and blackmailing Galvatron with Cybertron's artillery to force him to deal with things his way, and eventually attacking and almost killing him, deeming the commander an interference to his own troops. Galvatron escaped and underwent an Emergency Transformation, making sure to crush Sixshot first thing before dealing with the Autobots. - Dio Brando from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders has tons of fanatical followers, but among the most outstanding ones is his right-hand man Vanilla Ice, who chops his own head off when all Dio asked for was a bit of his blood. Fortunately for him, Dio brings him back by turning him into a vampire. - Overlord: - The driving force behind most of the series is the fact that Nazarick's guardians (originally player-created NPCs with customized abilities and appearances with pages of backstory with no in-game effect, now sentient beings acting in accordance to those backstories who consider their creators as gods) have thrown all the devotion they held for their disappeared creators onto Ainz, and thus act on everything he says based on their perception of him as a unfathomably powerful force of evil. Thus when Ainz unthinkingly says conquering the world sounds interesting to Demiurge, the latter relays it to the other guardians as Ainz commanding they assist him in taking over the world (since most of the guardians are evil-inclined, it wasn't much of a stretch). - Albedo has to be restrained from getting violent when anyone does anything to insult the name of Nazarick, such as covering the walls with earth to disguise it (despite Ainz asking for suggestions and approving that one) or two little girls refusing a potion from Ainz (who appeared to them as a giant walking skeleton, murdered the knight threatening them, and turned him into an undead minion). Of course, her case is special because she was accidentally reprogrammed to be in Mad Love with Ainz. \|\|She's also hinted to start making plans to murder Ainz' guildmates if they're ever found for the crime of "abandoning" him, despite Ainz' dearest wish being to reunite with his friends\|\|). - After \|\|Shalltear\|\| is \|\|incompletely mind-controlled\|\| into rebelling against Ainz, the guardians consider each other's motives with heightened suspicion. Even \|\|Shalltear\|\| demands to be punished for it, despite Ainz's repeated insistence that he doesn't hold \|\|her\|\| responsible, and eventually settles for \|\|turning her into human furniture... which, it turns out, is a fetish for her\|\|. - Sebas rescues Tsuare from a horrible brothel, but is reported by a fellow guardian as he'd been ordered not to attract attention (since the brothel owners come looking for compensation and are dealt with in a gloriously cathartic manner). This leads to Ainz ordering Sebas to kill Tsuare to Leave No Witnesses and prove he is in fact still loyal to Ainz. Tsuare is so grateful to her rescuer she puts his well-being ahead of her own life, smiling and making no attempt to defend hersef. \|\|As ordered, Cocytus blocks the attack and determines that Sebas had every intention of obeying Ainz's order.\|\| With the guardians reassured as to Sebas's loyalty, \|\|Tsuare is allowed to live at Nazarick.\|\| - Pokémon: The Series: - In the Indigo League series, Ash makes the mistake of showing antipathy towards the gym leader Erika's perfume. Her assistants lambast him furiously and kick him out the store. Later he finds the same aggression at her gym, with the guards banning him from entry for hating perfume. He manages to reach Erika through disguise and, despite her earlier annoyance with Ash, she still gladly battles. - During the Battle Frontier series, when trying to meet up Frontier Brain Lucy, Ash is interrogated by her assistant. Lucy however appears in time, scolding her sister for being rude to yet another competitor. - During the Baltic Sea War arc in Vinland Saga, Floki orders his Ax-Crazy minion Garm to kill Thorfinn. While in the area to do this, Garm decides to take it on his own initiative to assassinate Vagn, Floki's main political enemy. Except... the assassination royally infuriates Thorkell, who Floki had previously recruited, and Thorkell (a much deadlier opponent than Vagn) promptly turns against Floki, consolidating both his own forces and Vagn's Decapitated Army to go after Floki. Oh, and Garm let Thorfinn escape in all the commotion, so he's also coming after Floki. Oops. - Blake and Mortimer: In "The Oath of the Five Lords", an MI-5 agent is certain T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) is betraying his country, having seen him in the company of foreign operatives. The agent (who's also jealous and resentful of Lawrence) inducts a young Henry Blake (who idolizes Lawrence) to unwittingly help him murder Lawrence for his betrayal... who it turns out was infiltrating on his superiors' orders. Oops. - Les Innommables: Colonel Lychee and the Dog-Man take a few of the latter's crewmen to dig up buried treasure. Lychee shoots them dead once they're done, telling the angry Dog-Man that they won't have to worry about them blabbing. The Dog-Man then says that's not the reason he's angry: they could just as easily have killed them onboard the ship, now Lychee will have to row the two of them back. - The Punisher: "When Frank Sleeps" has Frank go back in time to Prohibition, where he beats the crap out of Al Capone's goons before offering his services as a hitman. Capone uses Frank to exterminate rival gangs, then holds a victory banquet where the guests (members of Capone's gang who'd failed or betrayed him in some way) are all tied up so Capone can beat them to death with a baseball bat, citing his fear of Frank becoming this trope during the Motive Rant. Frank breaks free and kills Capone, destroying organized crime in America before it could become too powerful, saving his family from the mob shootout in Central Park in the future... and then he wakes up. - In G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel) #109, the Crimson Twins botch an order from Cobra Commander and order several captive Joes executed. An overzealous SAW Viper steps forward and immediately shoots; actually killing several of the prisoners. As this was not what Cobra Commander intended, this cause problems for everyone involved. - The Mountain and the Wolf: The Wolf briefly functions as one for Daenerys, first by insulting Cersei during parley, resulting in the death of several prisoners (which he justifies as being better for said prisoners than being starved during a siege, and now they can't be used against her), then by torturing Lannister soldiers to death in her absence. He's so morally repulsive (and so evidently convinced she's the kind of tyrant who would order public executions for her own entertainment) that she ends up declaring a blanket pardon for the Lannisters out of sheer spite (Shoot the Dangerous Minion not being an option at either time). The final straw is when he's caught \|\|trying to pry the Iron Throne free\|\|, seeming genuinely surprised she'd disapprove. She sics Drogon on him \|\|but it costs her her life when she gets between him and Drogon\|\|. - Advance to the Rear: The trouble is started by Heath ignoring Brackenbury's truce with the enemy and instead following proper military protocol to capture a group of enemy soldiers. - In The Quick and the Dead, when the Quick Draw tournament is down to Herod and Cort, the night before the final match Herod has his follower Ratsy work Cort over, since Cort attempted to attack Herod earlier in the day. During the course of this, Ratsy breaks Cort's right hand in revenge for Cort breaking his nose. Herod, who claims that he's wanted to have a proper gunfight with Cort even back when the two were bandits together so they can find out who really is the Fastest Gun in the West, is pissed when he sees what Ratsy did. - One of these kicks off the entire plot of Navy SEA Ls. Terrorists attack and sink a freighter with a gunboat. Captain of the freighter sends a message pleading for help. A nearby USN carrier sends a helicopter to rescue the freighter's crewmen. Had the terrorist gunboat just slunk away, letting the helicopter rescue the doomed crewmen, no one would have been the wiser about the terrorist group's plans. Instead, the commander of the gunboat shoots the helicopter down and captures the aircrew. His superior, the Big Bad is understandably pissed and orders the aircrew to be immediately executed, before their activities are compromised. Fortunately, a SEAL platoon gets there just in time to rescue the aircrew. That platoon also discovers that not only is this group in possession of Stinger missiles, but also that their leader is Lebanon's most infamous terrorist. The SEAL platoon relentlessly pursue the terrorists and the Stingers for the whole rest of the movie. - A knight returns from a campaign and reports to his king: Knight: Sire, I have defeated your enemies to the north, to the west, to the east and to the south! King: South? We don't have any enemies to the south! Knight: Oh. Well, you do now. - Sherlock Holmes: - The Sign Of Four: Small's accomplice is an Andaman native who thought he was carrying out Small's orders by killing Sholto (all Small wanted was to find the treasure Sholto's father had stolen from him), and is entirely surprised when Small lashes out at him. - "The Priory School": What was supposed to be a simple kidnapping turns into a murder by the mastermind's accomplice, which so horrifies said mastermind (\|\|James Wilder, the Duke's secretary and bastard son\|\|) that he immediately makes a full confession to the Duke and arranges to flee the country. Holmes agrees not to pursue \|\|Wilder\|\| due to not being legally guilty of his henchman's crime. - 20 Years After: Grimaud takes his job as Beaufort's prison guard comically seriously, removing the duke's comb and a glass shard in accordance with the rule that the prisoner may not have any pointy or sharp objects on him. \|\|It's an act so no one will suspect he's actually there to help with Beaufort's escape\|\|. - Ciaphas Cain: - In "The Traitor's Hand", the Imperial Guard finds evidence of a daemon summoning ritual, though too late to find anything useful. Another site is discovered, but the overly puritanical Tallarn soldiers and their commissar Beije completely destroy the site before the psykers can examine it. Because Beije believes Cain to be acting traitorously (along with a big helping of decades-old resentment), he attempts to arrest Cain with a Tallarn squad as he investigates the final site, inadvertently providing Cain with reinforcements to defeat the daemon princess as she's summoned and character witnesses for his heroic behavior (to the point where years later there's a Tallarn sect that believes Cain was the Emperor's will embodied). - In "Duty Calls", a squad of Sororitas gets so caught up in burning Tyranids that they leave their position, leaving a gap in the line they're supposed to be defending and leaving the temple/refugee camp wide open. Cain gets them back in by pointing out that their noble sacrifices mean certain death for the civilians depending on them for protection. - Harry Potter: After Fudge orders the Daily Prophet to libel Harry as a delusional attention-seeker for claiming that Voldemort returned, Umbridge takes it on herself to ensure his silence by siccing Dementors on him. As she puts it, what he (Fudge) doesn't know won't hurt him, which means that he cares about the result and doesn't have to deal with any kind of qualm that he may have had. While Fudge is forced to admit that Voldemort is back, having seen him with his own eyes, she isn't punished for this as it is never officially proven, staying with the Ministry until she is finally sent off to Azkaban after Voldemort's defeat. - This is a recurring problem for many sides in both A Song of Ice and Fire and its TV adaptation Game of Thrones. - Tywin Lannister loves the terror inspired by his brute Gregor Clegane. Mostly, Tywin sends Gregor out to add onto that reputation by doing all the thug work for the Lannisters, meaning a whole lot of Rape, Pillage, and Burn. Gregor is so enthusiastic in these tasks that it sometimes backfires: multiple characters note that Gregor is too bloodthirsty and sadistic to take highborn captives, often killing them just because when he could get rich ransoms for them or use them strategically as hostages. And Gregor's needless rape and murder of Princess Elia years before the start of the story drove one of Elia's brothers to carefully plot to overthrow and destroy the Lannisters and everything they care about, while the other brother would eventually give Gregor a poisoned spear in the gut that caused him to die slowly and in horrific agony. - In the book, Robb Stark's uncle Edmure disobeys orders to stay put (orders which are admittedly vague) and decides to move his army to block Tywin Lannister's army from crossing a river, repelling the large force with minimal losses in a series of minor skirmishes. Edmure believes he's doing the right thing by his nephew and that it was the only reasonable course based on what he knew, but this prevents Tywin from crossing the river and being caught in an ambush where Robb might have been able to crush the entire army. In the TV adaptation he acts on his own initiative and wins a Pyrrhic Victory against Gregor Clegane instead, but Clegane and most of his force escape and it ruins a trap Robb had planned for Clegane. - In The Wheel of Time, personal tragedy spurs Aram to abandon his Actual Pacifist people, take up a sword, and join Perrin's forces. Things go downhill from there: he has to be ordered not to kill prisoners of war, gets jealous of anyone spending time with Perrin, meets the Obliviously Evil zealot Prophet \|\|Masema\|\|, and assists the Prophet's forces with Cold-Blooded Torture. Ultimately, he \|\|switches sides to the Prophet, who is his equal for insane zeal, and dies trying to murder Perrin\|\|. - The villain of the third book of the Sword of Truth series, Tobias Brogan, preached throughout his life how every magic user is a servant of evil and must be destroyed. However, he did keep his sorceress sister around to fight other magic users. \|\|Then, a block is removed which had been keeping his own magical gift locked, and the revelation drives him into an A God Am I delusion within a couple of minutes. As soon as the sister sees that, she blasts Tobias right in the heart as per his lessons\|\|. - Robert Thomas Jones from The Newest Plutarch was the creator of a Death Seeker sect who insisted one must die as soon as possible. When he started approaching sixty, however, his best student had noticed others are accusing Jones of hypocrisy, so he came over with a few implements for committing suicide. The teacher attempted to flee the overly zealous follower, and was hit by a car. - A pet example in the third Henry Huggins book, Henry and Ribsy. Henry tries to train his dog to fetch the morning newspaper, and almost gets into trouble when Ribsy goes on to fetch not just his newspaper, but every other paper in the neighbourhood—effectively stealing them. Henry then has to "untrain" Ribsy so that he'd stop stealing his neighbours' newspaper. - In Saturnalia, the fifth volume of John Maddox Roberts's SPQR series, \|\|Lucius Calpurnius Bestia\|\| admits to poisoning Decius' uncle, Metellus Celer, because of Celer's political opposition to Pompey the Great. When Decius asks whether Pompey actually ordered Celer killed, \|\|Bestia\|\| responds, "you known how one serves great men, Decius: Try to do what they want, especially the less savory tasks, without waiting for them to tell you to. That way their hands stay clean, but they are aware of how much they owe you." - I, Claudius: Tiberius sent letters to Piso, the governor of Syria, giving him general instructions to uphold Imperial authority, to stamp out disloyalty, and that Tiberius had full confidence in him. Piso and his wife Plancina interpreted these as orders to kill Germanicus, which was not what Tiberius had in mind. When the couple find themselves on trial for the murder, Piso thinks that the letters will prove he was acting with imperial approval—Placina, more accurately, thinks that showing them will make Tiberius cut them off. - Kaamelott: Grüdü (Arthur's Viking bodyguard) has a surefire method of ensuring no assassins can reach the king: murder anyone who passes near the king's bedroom (be it a servant who's just coming to light the candles or a knight of the Round Table) or gets near the king (such as, say, the king's current bedmate). Arthur tries to pull a Logic Bomb on him by holding a dagger to his own throat, but quickly stops as he sees Grüdü about to go berserk. - Luke Cage: Tone is the right-hand man of Cottonmouth (who demands to referred to as "Mr. Stokes"). He is so aggressively loyal to his boss that when Shades shows up (speaking on behalf of a much more powerful criminal) and doesn't show Cottonmouth the proper respect, Tone makes things difficult by threatening Shades. Later, when the traitor Chico is found, Cottonmouth learns that he's hiding in the barber shop where Luke Cage and his friend/mentor, Pop, work. Cottonmouth is an old friend of Pop and respects his rules that the barber shop is neutral ground; Tone thinks that this makes his boss look weak, so he goes against orders and shoots up the entire shop, accidentally killing Pop while still failing to kill the target they were after. This move is so poorly thought-out that not only does Cottonmouth become enraged by his friend's death, but this act is the Inciting Incident that leads to Luke Cage rising up against crime in Harlem. For this and an accidental show of disrespect by calling Stokes "Cottonmouth" to his face, Tone gets thrown off the roof of Harlem's Paradise. - Mahabharata: In the 1988 television adaptation of the old epic, Duryodhan is shown to be prone to this as a youngster. In one instance, Duryodhan's evil uncle Shakuni orders him to feed Bhim poisoned porridge. Duryodhan does feed Bhim the poisoned food, but he then proceeds to dump Bhim into a snake-infested river, just to make sure, but without explicit instructions to do so. When Bhim survives the poison due to snake venom being the antidote, Shakuni berates Duryodhan for exceeding his instructions. A few years later, when Duryodhan has just graduated from his required military training by the guru Dronacharya, the guru demands that a rival king Drupad be defeated, captured and brought before him as "payment" for knowledge imparted. Duryodhan declares that he will kill Drupad and bring his head to Dronacharya as payment, but Dronacharya scolds Duryodhan that exceeding orders is as bad as disobeying them. - Not the Nine O'Clock News: Constable Savage, a British cop who's performed 117 arrests in a single month, against the same (black) man. - In the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Charisma", cult leader and pedophile Abraham Ophion meets his end when, in a fit of madness, he declares that he is greater than God. One of his young followers shoots him dead, as he'd previously told her that he was only God's messenger, and thus clearly he was committing blasphemy by claiming to be God's superior. - In Monster of the Week, this is the point of the "Helper"-type bystanders: they are NPCs whose motivation is to assist the player-controlled monster hunters, but are mechanically treated as threats by the game, since in their zeal, they routinely cause more trouble than benefit. - Warhammer 40,000: - You can be given the chance to do this in Neverwinter Nights 2, depending on whether you side with the City Watch or the Shadow Thieves in the first chapter. If you side with the Watch, Marshal Cormick will order you to root out members of the Watch who are taking bribes; if you do so by killing them, Captain Brelaina will chew you out for your "foul" and "unrelenting" approach to justice. If you side with the Thieves, your handler Moire will command you to burn down the Watch post... after which her boss, Axle, will complain that your recklessness has started a war between the Watch and the Thieves which he didn't need. - In Far Cry 4, The Generalissimo Pagan Min's Establishing Character Moment has him nonchalantly kill a soldier who gets overenthusiastic and opens fire on a busful of people he was supposed to detain. - Liam Kosta, your Crisis Specialist in Mass Effect: Andromeda becomes one of these just prior to his loyalty mission. Liam freaks out that diplomatic relations with the Angaara, an alien race native to the Heleus cluster, aren't proceeding fast enough for his liking, takes "initiative" and does things that cause you a lot of trouble. First he tries to get you to surreptitiously scan agricultural products from a "gouging hardliner" who is actually just really protective of Angaara farming techniques as they are vital to the survival of a race fighting a brutal occupation by the Kett. Your attempt to scan almost creates a diplomatic incident. Liam then tries to trade something for those farming techniques - except he trades vital codes used by the Andromeda colonization Initiative, that in the wrong hands pose a serious security risk to the Initiative's Nexus space station. And when pirates kidnap Liam's Angaara contact and have the codes, Liam co-opts a group of settlers (instead of trained Strike Teams from the Nexus militia) to launch a rescue mission that literally goes sideways. - Pretty much starts the whole plot in The Wolf Among Us. \|\|Georgie found out that some of the hookers in his employ were planning to steal from his gang to get out from under his thumb. He informed the Crooked Man and was simply told to "take care of it", which Georgie misinterpreted as a Deadly Euphemism ordering him to kill one of the hookers as an example to the others. Thus he killed Faith, with her vengeful friend Nerissa deliberately sabotaging his subsequent attempts to disappear her body, all leading to Bigby's investigation of Faith's death and exposure of the Crooked Man's whole operation.\|\| - In The Order of the Stick, Lord Shojo orders Miko to arrest the title band of adventurers supposedly for a great offense they inadvertently committed, but really because Shojo wants to recruit them for a secret, vitally important mission he can't assign to his own forces. Miko, not knowing this and being a Knight Templar with a big dose of Black-and-White Insanity, decides midway through tracking them that, considering their offense, she will act as Judge, Jury, and Executioner should they not surrender immediately, even without her giving them an explanation. By the time Durkon gets her to see reason, she could have easily killed several members of the group. - In Thunderbirds Are Go episode "Clean Sweep", a jobsworth employee creates the danger of the week by refusing to let a cleaning crew into an anti-pollution weather device a few minutes early because they are ahead of schedule, citing the employee rule book. When the International Rescue team arrive, he creates further rule bothering because he hasn't received official clearances and that is against the rules too. He genuinely thinks he is doing what his employer wants by doing all that. At the end of the episode he's reminded of Rule Zero saying that all rules can be waived if there is an actual reason to do so, and then fired.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverzealousUnderling
Overt Operative - TV Tropes Malory: Most secret agents don't tell every harlot from here to Hanoi that they are secret agents! Archer: ...Then why be one? "The name is Bond. James Bond." Is that so, "Mr. Bond"? You don't think that since your job is being a secret agent that perhaps you shouldn't tell everyone your real name!? Maybe that's why every supervillain you encounter already knows who you are, knows your name, your "secret" code number, what you look like, and how you like your martinis. Hollywood secret agents seem to have a habit of being remarkably unsecretive, whether it's by using their real names, lack of disguises, waving their weapons and performing stunts in public while dressed in a tuxedo, or merely looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Compare Highly-Visible Ninja and Paper-Thin Disguise. See also The Men in Black, who are also meant to be some kind of covert operatives, but are just as conspicuous. May overlap with Sigil Spam, if the organisation that plasters its logo on everything is meant to be secret. As a matter of fact, this is often Truth in Television- Real Life spies will deny or cover up the fact that they are spies, but otherwise they will try to keep their cover-story as near to the truth as possible (as permitted by the circumstances). This is for the very simple reason that it's far easier to get caught out in a lie if you are lying all the time, whereas you are more likely to be trusted (and thus do your job better) if a suspicious opponent digs into your backstory and finds that it's everything you said it was. Naturally, this also helps to avert You Just Told Me and related slip-ups that might get you caught out. In addition, spies really do introduce themselves as their real names as James Bond does, because having a fake name is a good way to get caught. An obsolete version of this is the supposedly-inconspicuous trenchcoat, fedora and shades, or the slightly less outdated black suit, tie, and shades, both of which most modern audiences would describe straight away as "a spy outfit". ## Examples: - Golgo 13 is known in civilian life as Duke Togo. When using an alias, he goes by... Duke Togo. Or some variation thereof. The general consensus is that, after decades of killing people for money, Duke's untouchable and he knows it. - Members of the Black Organization in Case Closed are supposed to be so secretive almost no one knows the organization exists, yet they always wear black suits and/or Conspicuous Trenchcoats and one of its members drives a damn Porsche everywhere. Said Porsche is not a 911, which is fairly common and well-recognized. It is an antique and rare Porsche 356, which is something so unique that no one can possibly miss, even if they are completely car-dumb. - Full Metal Panic! lampshades this in the case of Sousuke Sagara, who attends school under his true name and makes little effort to hide his past as a Child Soldier adopted by Former Regime Personnel despite the fact that he's supposed to be Kaname's secret bodyguard. There are a number of explanations for this. First, as he explains to Mao, he barely has any actual records under that name. Second, disclosing much of his actual background makes it much easier to explain away suspicious actions related to his mission as just the behavior of a shell-shocked kid acting out, rather than a secret bodyguard, and also gives the school principal a Freudian Excuse to justify her refusal to expel him that has absolutely nothing to do with those anonymous donations she keeps receiving. Third, he just sucks at lying. And lastly, \|\|he's actually the decoy meant to keep attention off of Wraith, Kaname's primary secret bodyguard\|\|. - Spy X Family: Agent Daybreak, Twilight's Unknown Rival, craves infamy in a field where anonymity is practically required. When he completes his assignment, he sees fit to actually leave a signature behind. It's so idiotic that Twilight actually blows his cover to call him out on it. - Jahan Cross, Agent of the Empire, is a James Bond Expy who is naturally fairly open about his identity. Justified, because his real identity is a credentialed member of the Imperial diplomatic service, giving him the perfect excuse to be almost anywhere he needs to be, and if he's caught anywhere he shouldn't be, he can usually fall back on Diplomatic Immunity... within reason. - Groo the Wanderer: Groo once was given a job as a spy, thus proving that there are, at times, people even dumber than Groo. Needless to say, things do not go as planned. Groo is apt at some things. Being "covert" is not one of those things. - Jet Dream: Jet Dream and her Stunt-Girl Counterspies are Hollywood Stunt-Girls by day, and private counter-intelligence agents... also by day. Their identities and jobs seem to be, at best, open secrets (if not just plain "open.") - Partially lampshaded by John Stone in an issue of Planetary: "Can't be the best secret agent on Earth if everybody knows about you." - The Shingouz in Valérian are by definition Overt Operatives, as they are an entire race of spies and information merchants. Somehow, they still manage to be the best ones in the field, presumably due to their strict work ethics (in spite of claiming to not comprehend the concept of morality), extreme diligence, and insurance that everybody owes them favors all over cosmos. They even use this status to their advantage, sometimes. In one short story they con their way into the heart of an incredibly complex government bureaucracy simply by insinuating that they want to sell information concerning a supposed conspiracy that gets increasingly bigger and more convoluted the deeper they go — just to prove a point. - Nick Fury tends to stand out with his eyepatch, conspicuous Spy Catsuit and slowed aging. And also the fact that he's quite famous. - Wonder Woman Vol 1: Golden Age Steve Trevor was an intelligence agent who often was sent to gather intel in the field, even straight from enemy agents. For some reason he almost always did this in his full USAAF uniform, which helps explain why he was captured so often but not how incredibly effective he was at his job. - Youngblood, Image Comics' premiere super-team, does covert black ops for the US government and regularly reports to the Pentagon and the White House. Members also have their own toy lines, make talk show appearances, and do other "celebrity" things that make no sense for covert government agents. - The Black Widow has been a member of two very public superhero teams (the Champions and the Avengers), wears a very distinct Spy Catsuit (which doesn't come with a mask) and has a tendency to reveal who she is on her missions (assuming the people she's interacting with aren't already aware of who she is). She has been the subject of at least two nationwide manhunts and a limited series by Devin Grayson features a scene that shows a gossip magazine reporting Natasha and Daredevil's break up; even her love life is a matter of public knowledge. However, it is also worth noting that she can disguise herself exceptionally well, when she wants to. - In Compass of Thy Soul there is a bunraku caravan stopping by in Konoha that is very obviously spying on the village. They are still allowed to visit, because the Uchiha already knew them and did business with them for several years, and because they are very good at puppet theatre. - TRON: Endgame Scenario: Mercury is well-known as Administrator Ma3a's champion on Encom's Game Grid, considered a star athlete. What's much less well-known is that she serves as Ma3a's top operative and enforcer. - White Sheep (RWBY): Blake, a former member of the Faunus-supremacy terrorist group the White Fang, tries to sneak into a White Fang meeting and is instantly distrusted due to the sneaky way she is acting. Her teammate Nora, on the other hand, leads the crowd in a song, cheers at everything, and openly asks what the organization's secret plans are. Everyone assumes she's just enthusiastic. Note that Nora isn't even a Faunus, but she bowls through any doubts so well that she makes plenty of contacts and is even offered a leadership position. Blake facepalms at all of this. - James Bond, despite the description, largely averts this. He frequently uses aliases, and officially James Bond is just an employee of Universal Exports (actually a front for British Intelligence). Usually the villain finds out despite all this; often he's up against enemies who are either themselves spies or connected to some foreign government or intelligence agency, and he is identified that way, or the villain turns out to be a supposed ally or client of MI6. Most people do not know who James Bond is. - Double Subversion in On Her Majesty's Secret Service where Bond adopts the persona of 'Sir Hilary Bray', a genealogist, complete with his posh accent, a pair of glasses and a kilt. Bray is actually a real figure who agreed to let Bond use his identity, so they don't even have to worry about flaws in the background check. Blofeld still finds out that "Bray" is actually Bond though, and after exposing him, he points out that the serious Bray would not waltz into the bedroom of the female guests for some Double-0-Rated action , and he also catches him out by tricking him with an esoteric mistake on family records that only a real genealogist would know to correct. - In Goldfinger, 007 poses as a dealer in illicit gold, only to end up strapped to a laser-table with Goldfinger greeting him as "007". 007 naturally denies it, responding with his cover name which is - James Bond! Guess it wasn't as well known at the time. Goldfinger knew who he was because he was working the Reds and one of Bonds "opposite numbers" identified him while he was unconscious. - Casino Royale (2006) hangs a lampshade on this while trying to justify it. After spending a scene going over the details of his cover identity with Vesper (while flirting with her), Bond simply checks in to their hotel under his real name. He explains to Vesper that Le Chiffre is a very connected man, so probably knows who Bond really is anyway, and Bond knows that they know, he justifies it as psychological warfare. And the fact that Le Chiffre will even continue with the game knowing there's an MI6 agent at the table is a sign that he's either desperate or overconfident. Vesper thinks Bond's just being reckless. Le Chiffre: And you must be Mr. Bliss's replacement. Welcome, Mr. Beach. Or is that Bond? I'm a little confused. James Bond: Well, we wouldn't want that, would we? - Actually used in Casino Royale (1967), where MI6 formally gives the codename "James Bond 007" to every single one of their agents — including the women — in order to confuse people. - Bond usually uses aliases, except when he says he is from Universal Exports, which seems to be a cover name for MI6 in general (so he's technically telling the truth). Ironically, there are times he uses real name/fake job description, and he is given away by other means — in Tomorrow Never Dies, Carver's hacker quickly figures out Bond is a government agent from his suspiciously perfect employment record at the bank that his cover identity came with. His name is irrelevant and his cover is otherwise airtight, it's just that absolutely nobody would have a spotless personnel record. - How about the Union Jack parachute in The Spy Who Loved Me? Way to maintain deniability, unless you're going for the double bluff: "Well, obviously a real British agent wouldn't advertise his allegiance like that!" - In A View to a Kill, Bond goes with the aliases of James St. John Smythe, a wealthy man with no real job, and James Stock, London Financial Times reporter. Not only does it take two seconds for Zorin to figure out who he is, but it bites him in the ass when Stacy claims to a police officer he's James Stock, Bond has to tell the cop he's really James Bond, a secret agent, which makes the cop want to arrest him for lying. - In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond needs to be covertly dropped via parachute to investigate a sunken British warship near China. The problem? The ship has been deliberately sent off course by Elliott Carver interfering with its GPS system, and sank in Vietnamese territorial waters. Which shouldn't be a problem if he gets caught, as long as none of Bond's equipment identifies himself as being affiliated with the British or American governments. Which it naturally all does, since all of his equipment for this mission was issued out of US military stockpiles and is all marked as such... and his handler only realizes this after Bond deploys out of the plane to begin his mission. - In Licence to Kill, Bond is able to infiltrate Sanchez's operation as himself, having just been kicked out of MI6. Sanchez already has ex-CIA members working for him, so an ex-MI6 agent wouldn't be unusual and there's nothing there to make Sanchez be suspicious of Bond's background. - Austin Powers: Powers spoofed this in the title of the first film, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. This "secret agent" is at the heart of the Swinging London scene, and everyone knows he's a spy. He seems to operate as more law-enforcement than espionage anyway. - In Goldmember, Steven Spielberg makes a movie about Austins exploits at the end. - Weather Is Good On Deribasovskaya: A KGB agent is secretly sent to America in order to help them fight the Russian Mafia — and then is publicly outed to everyone when visiting a restaurant (seemingly by a know-it-all Mafia or because of someone's stupid mistake), with his cover story blown for good. He later admits to his American partner, that in fact he outed himself, since it's his preferred way of working — being the bait. - True Lies: Harry Tasker. Arguably acceptable in his case, because being played by Arnold Schwarzenegger he does tend to stand out in a crowd. Except his own wife of 15 years had never even suspected him about his double life. - In the original French movie La Totale, the lead actor Thierry Lhermitte looks a lot more like the everyman and nobody would reasonably suspect this so-called computer salesman from being a top agent in a counter-espionage agency. - Not an operative, but in Sister Act, Deloris van Cartier, a Reno lounge singer, is an essential witness in a mob case. In order to protect her life until the trial, she must hide in a convent. Her appearance when she first walks in prompts the Mother Superior to exclaim, "That is not a person you can hide! That is a conspicuous person, designed to stick out." - Agent Sands in Once Upon a Time in Mexico makes no secret of the fact that he works for the CIA. Lampshaded at one point, where he wears a t-shirt on which is printed the words "C.I.A.: Cleavage Inspection Agency". - Inglourious Basterds: For a world-renowned actress and double agent, Bridget von Hammersmark is a pretty lousy spy, able to make decent small talk but falling apart quickly the moment someone starts pulling on a thread in her act. \|\|It eventually gets her killed.\|\| - The Basterds themselves use incredibly overt and unsubtle methods, have a distinctive calling card of carving swastikas into their enemies' foreheads which makes their movements easy to track, cannot speak a word of French or German despite operating in German-occupied France, and have undisguised American accents thick enough to float an aircraft carrier. - While the movie is in many other ways a silly action romp, this is one of the few things xXx gets right. After losing several Genre Blind secret agents to an anarchist cell (the agent that the audience sees is forced to "infiltrate" an underground heavy metal concert in a tuxedo note : His subdued Oh, Crap! reaction implies he wasn't expecting the concert, or was somehow expecting a classical concert, even though Rammstein ain't exactly low-key, and his targets clearly aren't the classical type. Ironically, if he had kept his sneaky black jumpsuit on and just lost the balaclava, he would've blended in a lot better.), the NSA decides to send in a man that's a tattooed, anarchist, extreme-sports fanatic, internet celebrity famous for defying the law. The fact that he could plausibly want to join up with the cell of his own initiative means that he gets much further than the Bond-esque agents ever did. - General Okoye of Black Panther, commander of Wakanda's Dora Milaje, might be a terrifying warrior, but she's a less than ideal infiltrator. During a covert operation in an underground casino, her warrior's posture and stern expression alone make her stick out like a sore thumb, to say nothing of the ill-fitting wig that's part of her disguise. \|\|Sure enough, a guard catches on to her act, and a cover-blowing fight breaks out in seconds.\|\| - Miss Congeniality: As Gracie learns while trying to catch bank robbers at the beginning of the sequel, the fame she acquired from the pageant makes it hard for her to do secret agent work (well, technically undercover work, but it's close enough for our purposes here) without being recognized. - In Cleopatra Jones, the main character (a CIA agent) runs around in a tricked out Corvette with "US Government" plates. In Watts. In the mid 1970's. Not exactly conspicuous. - The whole idea behind Alex Rider is that his status as a teenager means that he should be more covert because bad guys will think he is Just a Kid, however not only does he keep doing things that clearly a kid would not do, such as parachuting into secret enemy bases, but many bad guys in his books seem quite capable of finding all about his connections to MI-6. - Ascendance of a Bookworm: As soon as the two of them meet, Myne's new attendant Delia tells her she's been sent to spy on her by a higher-up in the temple. Since getting attendants is the result of Myne joining the temple in the first place, she keeps Delia around on the basis that firing her may get her replaced by someone who actually knows how to spy properly. - In strong contrast, the CHERUB Series agents are so secret even most members of the British Government can't find out about them, the existence of CHERUB is never revealed, CHERUB agents have very strong covers, and while they have exotic training most of the time they do things that any ordinary teenager would do. - Subverted in the Discworld book Maskerade, with two operatives are extremely overt due to being Corporal Nobbs and Detritus under flimsy cover identities, some of the Watch's best known and least deceptive members - who are there to distract attention from their real agent, who's been there for some time already. - Vetinari uses a similar plan in Going Postal when he deliberately has someone tailed by an incompetent agent: if you see Vetinari's spy, it's a spy he wants you to see. As the book puts it, you can normally tell that you're under surveillance by Vetinari by turning around really fast and seeing no-one at all. - Double Subverted in Jingo. Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs are trying (and failing) to pretend to be Klatchian. However, the Klatchians they are talking to assume that Colon and Nobbs must actually be Klatchians from a different part of Klatch pretending to be Ankh-Morporkians, since Ankh-Morpork would not use such obvious Overt Operative tactics. More specifically, Klatchians assume they're from a part of Klatch infamous for the idiocy of its inhabitants. - Ciaphas Cain: While looking to impress a breathy young chanteuse named Amberly Vail at a fancy party by confirming there's an Inquisitor among them, Cain tells her you can always tell who the Inquisitors are because they always disguise themselves as Rogue Traders. As it turns out, the Rogue Trader really is a Rogue Trader, but he is working for Inquisitor \|\|Amberly Vail\|\|. \|\|She\|\| even notes that although Cain was wrong in this instance, it's regrettably true that \|\|her\|\| imagination-deficient colleagues default to it as a disguise. - Sir Dominic Flandry uses this trope. By letting his targets identify him as an apparently incompetent and venal Imperial agent, he's able to lull them into a false sense of security. - Geronimo Stilton: One of Stilton's old friends, Kornelius Von Kickpaw, is a secret agent who always wears a trenchcoat and dark glasses. His sister, also a secret agent, always wears a distinctive perfume. - Compared to his cinematic alter ego, the James Bond of Ian Fleming's novels is portrayed in a relatively realistic manner. Nevertheless, when he's in London, Bond's real name is known, as is his true employer ("Something at the Ministry of Defense.") The precise nature of his job is still unknown, but the fact that he's doing some sort of secretive work is not. This is pretty much Truth in Television (see Valerie Plame, below, for what's actually a rather typical, if unusually widely-known, example, below.) - A Discussed Trope in From Russia with Love. Darko Kerim is ostensibly a spice trader but it's well known that he runs the British Secret Service station in Istanbul. M says that such operatives can be useful as anyone hoping to sell information (or in this case defect) can readily seek them out. Given that Kerim also uses his extended (and extensive) family as his operatives, it would be impossible to hide his role in any case. - In the book Harry The Fat Bear Spy, Harry loses his fake ID for his cover identity and is forced to present his real ID in order to get into the macaroon factory. He spends the rest of the book wearing a nametag that says "SPY". - A couple of the Matt Helm novels actively used his status as a government assassin who had been around forever and everyone in the trade knew by reputation in order to have him act as a decoy or to intimidate the local baddies. - The Wrecking Crew, the second Matt Helm novel, had him using his real name and background, so everyone would think he was a former assassin who had been out of the business for decades (true) and was pretty much useless now (false). The badguys who assumed this didn't survive to the end of the book. - In Daniel Silva's series of novels about Israeli agent Gabriel Allon, Allon is actually known to other countries' intelligence agencies as being a participant in the targeted assassinations carried out in revenge for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and is in fact arrested for this in one of the books. Also, while he does have a covert identity as an Italian art restorer, his accent is clearly not that of a native, and this gets lampshaded by having his colleagues remark on his oddness, and one of them jokes that he might be Osama bin Laden. - Zigzagged in Star Wars Legends' Thrawn Trilogy. One attendee of a covert meeting immediately picks up on the fact that Wedge Antilles note : Ostensibly a starfighter pilot unused to covert operations, though more recent yet canonically earlier works depict him differently is there as backup muscle for the other party... and completely misses the New Republic commando team member also present. Note that this was deliberate on the part of the heroes: Wedge was specifically picked to serve as a decoy. - All over the shop, over the course of the long run of The Vorkosigan Saga. Lieutenant Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, the extremely visually distinctive son of the former Regent and current Prime Minister of Barrayar, creates the cover identity of "Admiral Miles Naismith" on the fly, purely to try and dig himself out of the jam he's gotten himself into, and it ends up defining his career; as Naismith, he commands a Mercenary fleet that unknowingly serves Barrayaran interests on the Galactic stage, but people pretty rapidly notice that the dashing and tactically brilliant Admiral Naismith is absolutely identical to the son of an important Political figure on Barrayar - particularly after a reporter meets him in both identities on the same planet, in the same city, on very nearly the same day. So Miles frantically invents a fictitious rogue clone of himself, who claims his mother's maiden name due to Betan laws on Cloning making him family, only to actually run into a genuine clone of himself... By the time Miles' military career is over, \|\|heavy hints are being dropped that yes, people have figured out, in spite of all the clones both real and imagined, that Vorkosigan was Naismith all along, and that if Naismith ever pops his head over the parapet again there will be consequences. Miles is able to shrug off the implied threat, having a new job by that point.\|\| - Jack Bauer on 24 almost never uses an alias, even when working deep cover with drug cartels or right-wing militias. In his case, however, the terrorists never seem to wise up, even though Bauer is undoubtedly one of the best-known people on the government's payroll in the 24 universe (having been mentioned on national TV news at least once). However, the one time he is seen to use an alias, after faking his death, it ends up not doing him any good at all. Subverted in Season 8, where Jack actually uses an alias and a different first name ("Ernst Meier"), wears glasses as a disguise, and speaks fluent German! It even works! (For a while, anyway.) - The A-Team, egregiously. Although they were on the run from military justice, they weren't too big on laying low. Sure, they used disguises when approaching possible clients, but many episodes showed that BA lived in a close-knit urban community where his name was well known, and Hannibal was pursuing his own acting career while a fugitive. Of course, the Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist really was that incompetent, so presumably they just don't need to bother. - Better Call Saul: In the second episode of season 3, Mike figures out that Los Pollos Hermanos is a money exchange point for employees of the shadowy drug gang who don't want him to kill Hector Salamanca. His way of finding out what goes on in there is to send Jimmy into the restaurant. Jimmy doesn't have police smarts like Mike does, and he very easily stands out with the way he constantly moves from table to table trying to keep his eye on the bag man. Gus immediately takes notice of Jimmy's behavior, and observes him conversing with Mike after leaving the restaurant under the pretense of sweeping the parking lot. - Get Smart: - Max Smart has been outed any number of times before friends, courts (complete with juries and an audience), police, etc., KAOS knows not only his identity but his address, and whenever he is near KAOS forces, someone says "That's Maxwell Smart, one of CONTROL's top agents!", and he still continues his career as a "secret" agent. And that's just in the first half of the first season! That's the magic of parody for you. - Doubly subverted by Agent 99, who never reveals her real name, even to Max. (On the other hand, she's consequently also routinely addressed in public as "Agent 99".) Until she marries Max and is sometimes introduced as "Mrs Maxwell Smart" giving away her identity. - In the British show Murphy's Law, despite being a career undercover cop, Tommy Murphy almost always uses his real name. This doesn't seem to cause any problems until the third series, when the bad guys get curious about the "Tommy from Belfast" currently testifying in a criminal trial, and even then the matter is quickly dropped. - The entirety of the Torchwood organization, which is theoretically secret. They barge into crime scenes and restricted areas using their status as Torchwood agents to explain it. In the first episode someone trying to find them does so by going to a pizza place and asking if one of their agents was a customer, and learned nothing. Then she asked if they'd had any orders from Torchwood. That brought her right to them. In a later episode someone managed to find their base by going to Cardiff and just asking people in the street where Torchwood was. They have an SUV marked "Torchwood" and get yelled at by name by random old ladies in the street by the second series, so the whole secrecy thing is a half-joke by now. - SHADO, the alien-fighting organisation in UFO (1970), is supposed to be secret, yet all of its vehicles, vessels and aircraft are clearly marked with the name. Many of its operatives also wear uniforms with SHADO insignia. - Scarecrow and Mrs. King: This actually does somewhat better. The Russians know about Scarecrow but know so little about him that they once mistake Amanda for him. - In the NCIS episode "Shalom", Ziva takes one look at a corpse and said "He's not Mossad." Really Ziva? What, did daddy give you the dossiers on every agent in Mossad as a gift for your Bat-mitzvah? - Joe Friday occasionally went undercover as a criminal on Dragnet, which can be unintentionally hilarious, because everything about Jack Webb screams "cop". - Covert Affairs is a justified version: Since the CIA actually gives out real names with an assumed cover identity, nobody is really expecting Annie to not give out her real name. Also subverted in one episode-when she helps her sister with some photography, the agency orders the pictures of her taken down. - In Alphas Gary's autism makes him not very good at going undercover, often refers to himself as a secret agent, often in front of people who aren't supposed to know, and when another member of the team is giving a cover story has identified it as such. - The Wild Wild West: James West fits this trope perfectly, which is hardly a surprise given that he's modeled directly off of James Bond. His partner, Artemus Gordon, is a bit better at the "secret" part of being a secret agent. - El Chapulín Colorado: One story features the world's most famous spy. It is a case of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome as, because of the spy's fame, nobody hires him. Once he gets word of a formula that made things invisible, he decides to steal it so he could use it to gain an edge his fame wouldn't ruin, by being able to enter places without being seen. - Subverted in the Blackadder episode "General Hospital", where the crew has been put on alert for a spy leaking intel to the Germans. One of the patients at the hospital where they're gathered is a man with a very thick German accent, calling himself "Smith". As it happens, he is one of the British army's own spies, and that he'd just picked up a "teensy veensy bit of an accent" after working undercover for so long. The real spy turns out to be \|\|George, who was inadvertently feeding intel in his letters to his uncle in Germany\|\|. - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: - In Alias, K Directorate operatives not only recognize Sydney on sight, they also know her name and appear to be well versed in her latest gossip. This gets her cover blown at least once. - Psych: This is jokingly pointed out in the episode "One Way, Maybe Two Ways Out". Shawn agrees to meet with a spy whom he and Gus have been encountering late at night in the park. When she arrives, she finds Shawn wearing a coat, reading a newspaper to cover up the fact he is staking out the area and insisting address him by a codename he picked. She points out that the codename makes no sense since she already knows his name, the coat is too conspicuous and that him reading a newspaper outside in the dark is too obvious. - The Peripheral (2022): Played with — the team of mercs hired to kill Flynne and Burton in the first episode have state-of-the art vehicles equipped with Cloaking Devices, but underneath the cloaks said vehicles are blacked-out Audi SQ8s, which are about as brash and thuggish as a vehicle can look, and the team members all wear matching black t-shirts and camouflage combat trousers. This means they attract the attention of a cop at a gas station, and murder him to cover their tracks. You'd think professional assassins would try and look normal while on their way to a hit to avoid this. - The unnamed agents in Data East's Secret Service, who go around performing their duties in elegant tuxedos and hundred-dollar dresses, while driving around Washington D.C. in an attention-grabbing bright red Ferrari. - Women of Wrestling employed a UK spy known as Jane Blond as one of its Wrestling Doesn't Pay gimmicks. Still, WOW having only one pay-per-view would have probably been a good thing for her espionage career. - Kyra's Backstory in the Empire Wrestling Federation and Ultimate Pro was that she became a CIA operative at age nineteen, despite having been the star of a traveling act since age 3 who had become a popular competitor in an underground fighting circuit. Her fairly high profile didn't stop her from taking down 198 drug dealers in four years before she had to be let go. - Game of the Generals: - Picture the scene; a suspected Spy has been neutralizing officers left and right, and the opponent knows this since they already lost a 5-Star General to them. Of course, this is downplayed as there are six Privates and a player can only have two, so getting captured by a Private is just as likely. - Another scene would be the 5-Star and 4-Star Generals destroying everyone around them. Over the next few moves, the opposing player begins to make a "path" on the opposite side to the Marshal, then a single piece makes its way through. No prizes for guessing who that can be! Of course, False Flag Operation and I Know You Know I Know can still make for some uncertainty (for a 4-Star General as the opposing piece can be a 5-Star General instead of a Spy). - In Paranoia, many Internal Security agents go undercover as members of another security group; this usually works okay (as long as they're not actually called on to fix a malfunctioning nuclear reactor or whatever), but a few of them are completely incompetent at hiding it; their every word and action practically screams "hi, I'm an Internal Security plant!". They're usually fed false leads and otherwise left alone, lest Internal Security send someone competent in their place. (A few of them act this way on purpose so no-one will notice the other Internal Security plant.) - In Warhammer Fantasy Battles Deathmaster Snitch is known by the name Snitch. Of course being an assassin is a respected profession for a skaven, and as a bipedal rat he can't exactly blend in with other races no matter what he calls himself. It might pose issues with rival clans if skaven weren't in a constant state of paranoia anyway. - An obscure late 80s/early 90s toyline that was basically a bargain-bin knockoff of G.I. Joe had a covert agent character who had "Spy" printed on his shirt. This was lampshaded by the bio on the back of his box, which said that no, he wasn't the brightest bulb, but sometimes he succeeded in gathering important intel because he was so obvious about being a spy that enemies didn't believe he was a real spy. - A perfectly viable approach in Alpha Protocol. The game doesn't penalize you for being a heavily-armored, assault-rifle wielding, grenade-flinging juggernaut who massacres his way through the entire game - beyond your handlers calling you out for being overt and violent. - Mike Thorton is only too eager to tell his name to everyone he encounters. (It's implied a couple of times that it may not be his real name, but it's still the name under which he is \|\|wanted by the American government\|\| for most of the game.) - This is similar to the Metal Gear Solid approach below. You can play the suave secret agent who works from the shadows and charms information out of people, but if you'd rather be the tough-as-nails soldier that does whatever it takes to get the job done... more power to you, as long as you get the job done. - Also, Steven Heck. Almost every operation he's involved with results in a Cruel and Unusual Death, such as suffocating a Vatican official with wafers. He's still one of the most mysterious characters of the game though. He might not even be working for any agency in particular, and some characters suspect he's just a lunatic who thinks he is a spy. His approach to the final mission if you pick him as a handler is closer to an action movie with three craploads and a half of casualties than any spy flick. And he does it by himself, too. - In Binary Domain the main character is part of a covert operation infiltrating an isolationist Japan. By the end of the first mission, the team is engaging in full-blown firefights with the robotic defense force. These only get more ridiculous as time goes on, such as having a running battle with a Humongous Mecha the size of three semis down the middle of a freeway. Despite this, the characters still periodically say they need to avoid detection. - The operation is meant to be covert, so of course their armor leaves their faces fully exposed and they also use each other's names. And since they're invading Japan after it has expelled all foreign nationals, only one of their members is Asian and none of them have even a fake ID. - Dragon Age: Inquisition gives us The Iron Bull who introduces himself as an agent sent to infiltrate the Inquisition. Justified because he thinks a group called "the Inquisition" would have figured it out eventually, so he just wants to get it out there now to prevent any potential conflicts. He offers to give info from his handlers in exchange. During party banter, Varric will point out that a hard-partying mercenary is the last thing he expects as a spy and that he should do more actual spying and manipulating. Bull retorts that doing that is exactly what people expect from spies while fighting, drinking and sending the occasional notes to his superiors is much easier, to which Varric isn't sure whether or not that's good or bad spywork. \|\|It's not quite as simple as that. The Boisterous Bruiser persona is largely an act to get your guard down, although depending on how his personal quest goes he may end up Becoming the Mask. If it goes the other way or is not done at all he'll keep up the infiltration for years before betraying you without a second's hesitation the moment his superiors tell him to (even if he's in a romance with Dorian or the Inquisitor).\|\| - Parodied (and perhaps inverted) in Fallen London, where your character can immediately identify spies based on how inconspicuous they are. "This fellow is of medium height and build. A forgettable face. Nondescript clothes. Even his moustache is uninteresting. He must be a spy." - In Gigolo Assassin, you play a hapless prostitute turned super secret agent. The problem? You're, uh, kind of really stupid and you're only wearing bikini briefs down below. - Mass Effect: For a supposedly super-secret organization, Cerberus sure does like to operate openly. And slap their logo on everything. - Metal Gear: - Solid Snake is normally somewhat overt (although he relies on just not being seen, not false information) and even does a nice subversion in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Disguised as a Navy SEAL, he succeeds in infiltrating the Big Shell with the SEAL team. We in the audience instantly know it's him when he takes his balaclava off, and we expect Raiden to call shenanigans...but it turns out Raiden somehow doesn't actually know what Solid Snake looks like, so it works. - Used as a joke at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater when Ocelot laughs about how no-one has figured out Adam's identity. \|\|It's Ocelot, and his real first name is Adamska... probably.\|\| - By the time of Persona 4: Arena happens, the remaining members of S.E.E.S from Persona 3 form the Shadow Operatives, an unofficial police-sanctioned organization made up of them and other authoritative members. While the group itself does well under the radar, the people in it have no concept of a low profile: Aigis, a Robot Girl, is one of its prominent members (and does a supernatural feat in broad daylight during her story mode), and Mitsuru and Akihiko are wearing a fur coat over a Spy Catsuit and is half naked save for a ridiculous-looking cape, respectively. Naturally, the other characters take pot-shots at their appearances, and Mitsuru in particular gets defensive about her outfit. To top it all off, they travel around in an eight-door limousine with high-tech equipment inside, which is already severely out of place in a big city, let alone a tiny rural town like Inaba. - Zigzagged in Red Alert 3: On the one hand, Spies are dressed with an infinitely-recurring Wetsuit Tuxedo and they can only walk in a half-crouch that screams Acting Unnatural. On the other hand, they can immediately disguise themselves as any infantry unit, and so go about undetected unless there's a detector nearby... which then leads to players spotting the suit of Powered Armor swimming across the sea. According to an in-universe interview with a spy, inconspicuous and blending in aren't necessarily the same thing. Now we sit outside of a small cafe in Phuket, Thailand to continue our interview. He orders coffee and a pastry, his accent French now. When I comment on his white linen suit and European looks, he points out that being inconspicuous does not always mean blending in. GH: It's a matter of expectations. It's important to appear to be what people expect to see. The people here expect to see wealthy Europeans. And the occasional journalist. - In Resident Evil 2 (Remake), Ada Wong no longer pretends to be an ordinary civilian looking for her missing boyfriend. Instead, she pretends to be an FBI agent and makes no secret of having an interest in the outbreak at Raccoon City, which she helps to sell by wearing a Conspicuous Trenchcoat and Sunglasses at Night. - Sonic Adventure 2 features a cutscene in which Shadow puts two and two together and realizes that a famous \|\|government\|\| spy he's apparently familiar with (or has read about somewhere), Rouge the Bat, is the same person as the anthropomorphic female chiropteran (i.e., a bat) who chased them, chose to help their world domination plan and openly refers to herself as Rouge. - Franklin Drake in Star Trek Online is a variant. The issue isn't that he is a open about being a spy, because most of his appearances have him work with you on intelligence-related matters, or even that he is a spy for the Federation, but rather about which organization he works for — Section 31 is supposed to be so super-secret that even the Federation government doesn't really know that it exists, yet Drake openly identifies them as his employers (rather than, say, claim to work for Starfleet Intelligence) and provides the intel and resources to back up that claim. Might be explained for a Starfleet captain (he could be angling to recruit them, like with Bashir), but for Romulan Republic commanders.... - In Star Wars: The Old Republic, despite being a secret agent it seems that almost all Imperial and Sith know who Cipher Nine is. You can even occasionally pull rank and talk about your position as an intelligence officer. Depending on the mission you're sometimes supposed to do this, since Imperial Intelligence doubles as the Secret Police. - The intro to the remake of Syndicate mentions that the corporations employ covert agents like yourself. With the liberal amounts of firepower you can access and must use, covert you most certainly are not. Miles and his fellow agents even have the Eurocorp logo emblazoned on the shoulders and chests of their nifty black trenchcoats/body armor. - Team Fortress 2 subverts this. The Spy is obviously a spy, and dresses the part even when off-duty, as seen in the comics. But when he's on the job, the Spy is just as covert as he should be, thanks to an invisibility watch and sophisticated disguise kit that lets the Spy appear to be anyone, from the other eight classes in the game to Tom Jones himself. - Thimbleweed Park has a group of conspiracy nuts. They draw a lot of attention, but one wouldn't normally know they're part of a secret group. That is, until you get to Chet Lockdown, the younger brother of the group's boss. His job is to wear a full body pizza costume and hand out pizza coupons with \|\|the secret code to their meeting place\|\| on them. However, as Ransome and Delores point out if they talk to him, the town has no pizza parlor. So he's incredibly obvious looking. - Zigzagged in the XCOM games: the titular organization is top secret and never publicly acknowledged by anyone in the Council of Nations that supports it. While its soldiers take to the field in unique equipment that can prominently display the XCOM seal, none of their gear names the organization. But XCOM will eventually become an Open Secret of sorts as civilian witnesses and news agencies notice that someone is dropping into various battlefields with radically-advanced technology on par with the alien invaders', they just tend to attribute XCOM's activity to individual nations' special forces. - Of the two playable characters in Assault Spy, Asaru at least tries to be covert while Ameila doesn't even try with her headstrong fist firsts approach. She even earned herself the moniker of Assault Spy due to this. - In The Elder Scrolls series, introduced in Morrowind, the Morag Tong are a Dunmeri (Dark Elf) faction of Professional Killers which are legal within Morrowind as a deterrent to destructive open warfare between the Great Houses. Historically, during the Second Era, the Morag Tong became far too brazen for their own good. When the Tong assassinated Versidue-Shaie, the Akaviri Potentiate who took over after they assassinated Reman Cyrodiil III (and who had hired the Tong in the first place to kill the Emperor), the Morag Tong wrote their name in his blood on the walls of the Imperial Palace. The rest of the nobility of Tamriel promptly made it their top priority to wipe out the Tong, which they considered a dangerous cult, for fear that they would fall victim to the same fate, and destroyed all but a small presence in Morrowind itself. - In Warframe, the Tenno can be stealthy and sneaky if they want to, and several Warframes specialize in surprise and misdirection, but they are also all just as capable of going on violent, overt rampages. Infiltration and Rescue missions take this extra far, as the Tenno can be blasting everything in sight with high explosives until they get to the door leading to the area that needs to be stealthed through. Even then, the Tenno can just kick in the door and rush straight at their objective if they know what they're doing. One Warframe, Valkyr, can even use her berserker ability Hysteria to scream at the top of her lungs and run right through most security systems to grab the objective and run. - In Half-Life: Opposing Force, the hostile Black Ops troops you encounter are assault rifle-toting soldiers decked out in black combat gear and night vision goggles, even though you fight most of them in broad daylight in the middle of the desert making no efforts to hide themselves - they even roll into Black Mesa driving all-black trucks and flying Black Helicopters. It's played the straightest by the male Black Ops troops, as all the female assassins - carried over from their parent game - are appropriately quick and stealthy, and on the Hard difficulty have an Invisibility Cloak that their male counterparts lack. It's arguably Justified by the fact that the Black Ops' whole mission is to kill everyone and nuke the facility after it's already been overrun by aliens, so covert considerations are largely moot. - It's even worse in the Half-Life fan game Hunt Down the Freeman, in which a US National Guard officer who had no involvement in the Black Mesa incident can recognize one of the Black Ops on sight as a 'Black Ops' solely because he's wearing black combat gear, implying that that they're some sort of recognized military unit, thereby defeating the whole point of black operations. - Psychonauts features the G-Men, sinister trenchcoated secret agents who exist in Boyd's mind as an allegory for his extreme paranoia and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, while operating as spies and investigators, the G-Men are blatantly obvious thanks to the fact that their 'disguises' consist of holding up a related single prop (such as a housewife disguise consisting of nothing but a rolling pin, or a sewer worker disguise being a single plunger) and making stilted, unconvincing statements about their disguise in an unflinching robotic monotone. Their straight-faced obliviousness to their blatant incompetence makes them one of the funniest segments of the game. - Girl Genius: Ardsley Wooster, after a long but ultimately ineffective (that is, the target knew all along) cover op as Gilgamesh Wulfenbach's manservant, has skipped into this territory with his dirigible-hopping announcement of himself to a foreign power as "Ardsley Wooster, British Intelligence." It was tactically viable, though, and it's not like his cover wasn't blown already. - Subverted in this Subnormality strip: Most of the strip features an interaction between a Tuxedo and Martini character and a cocktail waitress, but the last panel reveals that the narration was coming from a random background character the entire time. - Agent Ben and Agent Jerry in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! are extremely obvious The Men in Black anyway, but they also have a big black car and a big black van, each clearly labeled "F.B.I. Undercover" in large, friendly letters. - The Omega Key: Adam really should have kept his big yap shut. But then, he wasn't expecting that anyone would take him seriously, or that the hot chick he was hitting on was the antagonist. - Kara in Covert Front is clearly not concerned with stealth. Her default costume is a greatcoat which is very conspicuous, especially on a woman, and when sneaking around she repeatedly executes complex acrobatics that would draw the attention of anyone present. There is some justification for the outfit, as it conceals her features somewhat and most of her work consists of breaking into places where any person would be deemed suspicious. - Sir Thomas Henry Browne in The Dead Skunk becomes known throughout Paris as a British spy so much so that Sorbonne students prank him with fake secrets. - Played for Laughs in an Onion homage to Get Smart and similar depictions: "Man Suspected Of Being Bumbling Spy". - Parodied in Brutalmoose's SPY Fox review with "Undercover Cop Joe." He even goes around wearing a name tag labeled as such. - Kitboga is a scambaiter popular on Twitch and YouTube. One of the scam scripts as of around 2022 and later is to for the scammers to claim that somebody in the target's bank or something of the sort is compromised and so they need the target to become a "spy" and go undercover for them. Unfortunately for them, Kitboga's M.O. upon hearing this particular script is to be this, reveling in the supposed assignment and shouting about being a secret agent and such when he's pretending to be at the bank. - One interesting factor of the whole Valerie Plame scandal is that she was apparently a covert agent, yet was also an ambassador's wife well-known by a number of important people. Although in her case much of her covert activity had taken place before she'd been married and the CIA was in the process of moving her to "official cover" (that is, she'd be officially working for the US government but not officially the CIA) when she'd been outed. - Rather, unofficial cover means your link to the US government is deniable, whereas official cover puts you in the diplomatic corps (or somewhere else in the government, but usually the diplomatic corps), entitling you to diplomatic immunity if you're caught. In neither case is one allowed to admit they work for the CIA, and in either case it's a crime for anyone in the know to out the officer as a CIA employee, because not only does it place the officer's lives in jeopardy, but also the lives of any agents they've ever been in contact with. In both official and unofficial cover, a CIA officer normally uses their real name and identity with only the fact that they work for the CIA being concealed. A completely fabricated cover identity is usually not necessary because (unlike in spy movies) a CIA officer does not personally infiltrate target organizations, instead recruiting locals (particularly those who are already members of the target organization) to either defect to the United States or become double-agents. Revealing someone as a CIA officer therefore endangers all of the double-agents they've recruited. - This principle was more or less pioneered by British intelligence, to the point where a fairly significant chunk of the diplomatic corps are actually spies - sometimes referred to euphemistically as being "from south of the river" (the FCO building is just north of the Thames, near Trafalgar Square, while MI6 has its very famous HQ on the south bank of the Thames. What the euphemism will be if they finally get their long desired chance to move somewhere more discreet is unknown). - Oddly, Carlos the Jackal led a lifestyle similar to that of Bond and was a fairly inept terrorist, and only escaped capture for so long because his Soviet and Arab employers feared what would happen if they stopped protecting him. - Princess Stephanie Julianne von Hohenlohe. A Jewish member of a German noble family, she acted as a Nazi spy and messenger to sympathizers in the UK and United States despite being very well-known as a close friend of the Nazi hierarchy. - Ian Fleming based James Bond at least partially on a Yugoslav playboy named Dusko Popov who was an agent for the Nazis and then turned to become a double-agent for the British and lived a very high-profile lifestyle, particularly in casino gambling. - This high-profile lifestyle was not a hindrance to his career, since his 'spying' basically consisted of handing himself over to MI5 as soon as he arrived in Britain, then spending the rest of the war sending the Abwehr fake information from fictitious agents as part of the XX system. - Should be noted that the Abwehr at this time was run almost entirely by members of the anti-Nazi resistance, and Popov was just one of many spies encouraged to undermine their own efforts. He was probably recruited precisely for his own anti-Nazi credentials. - Eddie Chapman, codenamed Agent Zigzag, was a very similar case: A criminal before the war, he was recruited by the Nazis and ran straight to MI5 to tell them all about it. As with Popov, he was James Bond before there was a James Bond, indulging his love of casinos, booze and women on a government tab; he also fed the Nazis numerous false reports that their V1 weapons were falling short of London, causing the targeting to be adjusted so they stopped hitting it and started overshooting. - The entertainer Noël Coward pleaded to become an agent for British intelligence. The British government finally relented, signed him on and found he actually was pretty good at it since his status as a celebrity entertainer got him into many shindigs where loose lips were plentiful. - There have been lots of celebrities who did some spying, with real identities and hidden agendas. This makes it plausible if it's like Noel Coward presenting himself as Noel Coward, the entertainer, who is secretly a spy. Cover in modern intelligence has been described as more like lying about one's job than lying about one's identity. - Wolfgang Lotz was a real-life Israeli spy who hung out in Egypt posing as a former Wehrmacht officer running a stud farm for the Cairo elite. His original name was Wolfgang Lotz and he grew up in Germany. Mossad destroyed the documents in Germany that showed that he was Jewish and left the rest in place. - One reason Lotz got caught was that he was introduced to a genuine ex-Wehrmacht officer at an Egyptian event; they were supposed to have served in the same unit in the Afrika Korps at about the same time and Lotz failed to double-talk himself out of that fix. - The Military Liaison Missions were established as a temporary measure to maintain relationships between the occupying powers during the demilitarization of post-World War II Germany, and were kept going throughout the Cold War because both sides found them useful for gathering ground intelligence. The teams (which had quasi-diplomatic status and were authorised to travel anywhere in their clearly-marked, olive drab Opel sedans except in pre-designated special areas) consisted of military intelligence personnel in uniform. - SIS handlers used the position of Passport Control Officer in British embassies, though by the late 1930's it had become a Paper-Thin Disguise. This was compounded by the fact that during the late 1930's, there were large numbers of people wanting to emigrate from Europe and therefore their fake job took so much of their time that there was none left over for espionage. - Richard Murphy was an inadvertent example of this trope. A Russian agent assigned to work under deep cover in the US, his cover was blown practically from the time he entered the country and for the next twenty years he lived his life under FBI surveillance. People who met him immediately noticed that despite having an Irish name and a Canadian passport, he had a thick Russian accent. He also had a surly, stereotypical Russian disposition and apparently no interest in any sort of American culture (he didn't watch sports, he didn't like movies or reading, he had no hobbies). Several times the FBI searched his house, planted listening devices that were never found, at one point he even handed over a laptop he was using to carry stolen information to an FBI agent after having apparently mistaking him for his contact. After he was arrested and deported in a Prisoner Exchange, it was noted that he seemed more like someone who should have been opposing Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in a movie than a real spy. - Russian spy Maria Butina was known for posing in GQ wielding guns and became known to law enforcement in part because, on multiple occasions, she got drunk and bragged to her American University students about knowing spy secrets. - One of many FSB agents who had their details leaked by Ukrainian Intelligence, has a Skype address that included "jamesbond007".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvertOperative
My Beloved Smother - TV Tropes [Bart Simpson sees Principal Skinner in the waiting room of a psychiatrist's office] Bart: I don't believe it! Principal Skinner. Well, well, well, I never thought I'd win this easy. Skinner: Hmph. This has nothing to do with you, Simpson. I have many, many issues with my beloved smother — mother! You probably know her. You might even live with her. A mother who tries too hard to control their children's lives. Often (but certainly not always), they are the mothers of sons, and for whatever reasons can have a bit of trouble cutting the apron strings; as a result, no matter how old the boy (or, for added humor value, man) is, he'll be mothered relentlessly, his mother absolutely smothering him with parental affection... and authority. Using either carrot or stick (sometimes both), his mother will go to any lengths to make sure that, whether he wants to or not, he's not going to be leaving his mother's embrace any time soon. Any attempts on his part will usually result in a passive-aggressive guilt trip for trying to break away and do his own thing. Her poor son, as a result of such domination and badgering, usually ends up a Momma's Boy. A lot of these mothers are Jewish for some reason, though they are also oftentimes Catholic, serving double duty as a conduit for Catholic guilt. The family where the Beloved Smother lives usually feature a Disappeared Dad. The Smother may be a single mother, or the father is a Henpecked Husband; either way, he takes no independent part in raising the child, passing all control to her. The child usually has no siblings and more often than not is born late in their mother's life. Bonus points if the Beloved Smother has had trouble getting pregnant or if the child themself has or had some illness to protect from and take care of. The greatest threat, however, as perceived by the Smother, lies in the opposite sex. To a son, she will constantly preach that all women are Gold Diggers who are plotting towards a Divorce Assets Conflict; to a daughter, that All Men Are Perverts who will leave her barefoot and pregnant, literally. Any Love Interest that her son may attract will be immediately regarded as a rival for the son's love by the Beloved Smother, and the woman will be belittled, harassed and spied on to varying degrees of obsession. (Hell, the Smother might actually have been through it herself.) If her son happens to break free and marry the woman he loves, then that unfortunate woman will find herself coping with the Mother-In-Law From Hell, who will be hyper-critical, dismissive and condemning of everything she does to the point where it may even break the marriage apart if her son doesn't do something to curtail his mother's interference. Alternatively, if she spots a potential mate for her son of whom she does approve, she will relentlessly try to pair them up, ignoring any signs that the "happy couple" are losing interest in each other (or never were romantically attracted in the first place). In the most favorable depiction, the Beloved Smother genuinely does love her son and wants him to be happy; she just has a little bit of trouble letting him go, and her plot arc usually revolves around the gradual realization that he's his own man and that she needs to cut the apron strings for his own good (and, usually, hers as well), and that his moving away from her doesn't equal that he doesn't love her in return. At worst, she's a Control Freak Evil Matriarch who will stop at nothing not even murder to make sure that Mommy's Little Angel remains with her at all costs. For added Squick value, Mommy and Son may be a bit too close in the wrong kinds of ways... It is rarer for daughters in fiction to have trouble with the Smother, but not unheard of; if the girl is unlucky enough to have a Smother, then things will be much the same (although rather than actively preventing their children from having a life outside of her, a Smother who has a daughter will usually instead start badgering her about why they aren't married and providing her with grandchildren on a constant basis). With daughters, however, the dominance may sometimes have an edge of competition as well, as they tend to view their own daughters as rivals. Smothers of daughters are often ex-Alpha Bitches or cheerleaders who tend to bully and harass their daughters into following their footsteps as a way of living their past glories through their children. Like most tropes, it's a Truth in Television; psychiatrist Carl Jung identified this archetype as the Terrible Mother, an over-nurturer who, in smothering her child, ends up stifling them to the point of hampering individuation and personal growth. Sigmund Freud, who worked with Jung, believed that mothers were a common source of psychological complexes. In contemporary psychology, the behavior of the Smother is consistent with parent-child codependency, a trait of Borderline Personality Disorder. note : Interestingly, while Nigel Smith wrote of his mother being a smother in 2011 (the linked article above), he had an apparent change of heart seven years later when he wrote this article on why every family should live with their granny. When a queen is acting as regent, she often will smother the young king as well, and expect to control the king after he comes of age. If she actually succeeds in taking control of her children, those characters will end up with parental issues. A subtrope to Helicopter Parents. Compare Boyfriend-Blocking Dad and/or Fantasy-Forbidding Father. Contrast Hands-Off Parenting. If it's a more action-based series where the offspring being "smothered" is in trouble and the Smother is an Action Mom, see Mama Bear. If the mom was a child star and pushes her kid into stardom, she's a Stage Mom. Often overlaps with Obnoxious Entitled Housewife if the mom constantly makes demands in the name of her child. May lead to Calling the Old Man Out or an Anti-Smother Love Talk. If the mom is not just controlling but a straight-up villain using their son as a pawn, see Villainous Mother-Son Duo. ## Example subpages <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - A commercial for Taco Bell features a guy whose life is run at least in part by his mother. She is shown to be intrusive in a couple of places and makes a lot of suggestions. She also seems to only be able to communicate in run-on sentences. In the end, you discover that the commercial is an advertisement for Taco Bell's "Smother Burrito". - In Assassination Classroom, there's \|\|Nagisa Shiota\|\|'s mother \|\|Hiromi\|\|. She asserts her control over her son at every opportunity, trying to make every major decision for him in an attempt to guide him through the life path she wanted for herself. She's also the one who styled his hair the way it is because she wanted a girl, one she could mold in her own image. She refuses to allow him to have any say and even goes so far as to assert that, as the one who birthed and raised him, she owns him. At any moment in which \|\|Nagisa\|\| so much as tries to stand up for himself, Hiromi flies into a psychotic rage, shrieking at a high volume, pitch, and speed. At one point, she nearly burns down the school building her son goes to. For added torture, there is a scene of her grabbing \|\|Nagisa\|\|'s hair and violently yanking his head back and forth from the other side of a dinner table, no doubt unleashing hell on his scalp. \|\|Unlike other smothers, she eventually realises that she's wrong and stops doing this.\|\| - Attack No. 1: Kyoko and her brother loved tennis, but their mom hates and forbade sports because, in her opinion, such activities are dangerous and would be bad for her children's academic grades, so she's at first very disappointed when her daughter joins Fujimi Highschool's volleyball team. - Attack on Titan gives us two distinct flavors of this trope. - Jean turns out to have a mother that doted on him as a child, and now horribly embarrasses him. She was first introduced in an omake involving her walking in on him while he was (maybe) masturbating. When his comrades hear her Affectionate Nickname for him, they tease him relentlessly. - A darker example is \|\|Reiner Braun's mother, Karina\|\|. An intensely bitter woman left to raise the product of her Secret Relationship alone, she raised them with her own fanatical beliefs and hopes to turn them into a Tyke Bomb for the military will grant her access to a better life. She is very much a carrot-and-stick parent, alternating between praising her "war hero" child and viciously glaring daggers at them when they fail to convincingly parrot things that match her twisted ideology. - In a Case Closed case, Akio's mother was this. So much that \|\|she wants to save her beloved Akio from being imprisoned after killing his apparently abusive dad... by locking him in the basement of their home. Akio ends up crossing the Despair Event Horizon since he does want to turn himself in, and it's up to Conan to help him convince his mother to let him atone.\|\| - Mamako from Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? is an extreme case. Not only does she follow her son Masato into a fantasy game world, where she ends up being the strongest character in the game, but she insists on killing every monster her son's team encounters, which prevents Masato and his friends from leveling up. - Fruits Basket: - Meshou, Ritsu Sohma's mother is one of the few Sohma parents who doesn't abuse or neglect their cursed kids, but despite her good intentions she's a Shrinking Violet who apologizes for everything, thus Ritsu ends up just as insecure and prone to ditziness and apologies as his mom. - Kyo Sohma's mother counts, too, in an even less healthy way. She basically kept him indoors for most of his childhood, claiming it was "because he was so cute she didn't want anybody else to see him," constantly checked to make sure \|\|the beads that keep him from transforming were still in place\|\|, and in general kept up a very forced display of motherly love towards him. This only compounded his issues later on since he could tell, even as a child, that she was overcompensating to hide how she was terrified of him. Later, it's implied that \|\|Kyo's mother did genuinely love him, but she only managed to express it through being overprotective of him. For worse, she also was mentally/emotionally unstable (and it's all but spelled out that Kyo's Jerkass dad was to blame for it), and thus she ended up Driven to Suicide.\|\| - Yuki Sohma's mother is among the worst of the lot, seeing him and his status as the Rat as nothing but a means to boost her own wealth and social status. On one occasion, she flat-out tells Yuki to his face that he's nothing but her tool, so he doesn't get to have wishes or opinions of his own. At the parent/teacher conference, she casually says she already planned out Yuki's future without consulting him while not letting Yuki even voice out his opinion about it because "she knows what's best"; she's only stopped when Ayame pops in and tells her off until she Rage Quits. - Machi Kuragi's mother was much the same. She heaped all manner of pressure on Machi to be perfect, seeing her as nothing but a Trophy Child she could use to inherit her husband's fortune. When she had a son, she immediately cast Machi out and focused on her younger brother solely because as a boy, the baby has a better chance of being chosen as an heir than Machi. - Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable!: Tsubasa's mother tries to control every aspect of his life and behavior from birth. He starts getting away from this after he moves to Hokkaido, but he is ever fearful that he will be dragged back to Tokyo and be under her thumb again. - It is very apparent that Killua in Hunter × Hunter took the Hunter Exams because his mother is this, he is resentful of her to the point that he has tried or threatened to kill her. - Is Kichijoji the Only Place to Live? has a mother in Chapter 21 who basically takes over her daughter's search for a new home and tries to strongarm her out of choosing any that appeal to her. In the end, the daughter manages to stand up for herself and their relationship improves. - Fate Testarossa-Harlaown is normally a Good Parent, but she shows shades of this in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS. This is best seen in episode ten when Erio and Caro have the day off and she tells them to be careful while they're in the city and offers to give them some money, forgetting that they're both skilled soldiers who are on payroll. It's mainly caused by her overcompensating out of fear that she'll end up like her biological mother. - By contrast to Patrick Zala, Ezaria Joule from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED is this to her son Yzak. Ironically, despite the fact she has similar beliefs to Patrick, this actually humanizes her, mostly because she does care about her flesh and blood beyond a means to her projected ends. - The plot of Mom, Please Don't Come Adventuring with Me! centers around 15-year-old Ryuuji, who wishes to become independent from his overly protective and overly doting adoptive mother. Unfortunately for him, his mother is Karma Abyss, a nigh-omnipotent and omniscient dragon who will stop at absolutely nothing to keep her son at her side. - Pokémon: The Series: - Pretty Cure All Stars New Stage 3 centers on Maamu, a Tapir who just wants to protect her son Yumeta's happiness by trapping kids in a dream world so they can play with Yumeta forever. It takes every Cure from the series up to that point note : Except for Cure Flower, Cure Fortune, and the international teams to convince her that her methods are having the opposite result. - RahXephon: Maya Kamina is well-intentioned but extremely smothering of her son Ayato. \|\|Or better said, her nephew since Ayato's biological mom is her twin sister Quon.\|\| - In Sakura Quest, there's Chitose Oribe, a confectioner in the small town of Manoyama and her granddaughter Ririko's legal guardian. Chitose can be a bit strict with Ririko and is initially unhappy with her working with the tourism board. That said, some of Ririko's friends notice that Chitose is somewhat more lenient with Ririko than people would expect, partly because she doesn't actually prevent Ririko from working with them. Chitose even once tells Ririko to pursue her dreams while she's still young before she gets old and gives up on them. - One Slayers OVA is based around Lina and Naga being hired by a rich, horrifically controlling noblewoman to help her son Jeffrey become a knight. Jeffrey has delusions of being a Knight in Shining Armor, but is immensely sickly and kind of a dip. Insult him, however, and his (masked) mother will crush you with a giant hammer. While yelling about how you dared insult her boy. \|\|Ultimately, Jeffrey confronts a local Evil Overlord... his long-lost father, who just couldn't put up with that woman anymore.\|\| - Furoku Tsukumo, mother of Teen Genius Susumu on Wandaba Style falls into this. She's the Designated Villain of the series because she wants Susumu, who left home to conduct his eco-friendly space experiments, to acknowledge that the 1969 moon landing wasn't faked and to recognize her maternal authority. He is only thirteen, after all. - Jo Koy has a bit where he discusses his Filipino mother warning him, a grown man, about the dangers of "rupees" (roofies). - One of Elaine May and Mike Nichols' most famous routines together was "Mother and Son", where Nichols played a scientist and she played his mother. Naturally, her first words are, "This is your mother - do you remember me?" May : ( after nagging him for several minutes for not calling her for a long time ) I hope I didn't make you feel bad . Nichols : Are you kidding? I feel awful! May : Oh, honey, if only I could believe that, I'd be the happiest mother. - When it comes to Batman villains... - Hush's mother was like this, in addition to having a drunken and abusive father. When, as a child, he tried to kill them by cutting their brakes, his mother not only survived, but the incident made her even more clinging and controlling, demanding her son's constant presence. When he heard Bruce Wayne's parents were killed and he wouldn't have to deal with that, his main thought was: "That lucky bastard". - Most variations of the Penguin's backstory at this point showcase this. It was added that his habit of always having an umbrella started after his mother forced him to carry one no matter what when his father died of pneumonia when caught out in the rain. One of the things that contributed to him facing ridicule from his peers. - De Kiekeboes: Marcel Kiekeboe's mother, Moemoe, is a Manipulative Bastard who will frequently try to make him feel guilty about not doing everything she demands from him. Often results in an All for Nothing resolution or Dude Where Is My Respect. - Flash Forward's mother in Doom Patrol. It's telling that he, an irreverent braggart and smart alec, is immediately cowed when he realizes his mom has his phone number. She also corrects his grammar over the phone. - Chas' very domineering (and supernaturally charged) bed-ridden mother in Hellblazer. \|\|It's implied that she killed her husband, and Chas is only free of her domination after John kills her familiar.\|\| Naturally, his own wife is just as controlling, albeit ambulatory, neater in dress and habit, and a Muggle. - "Mummy's Boy" was a strip that ran in the British comic Monster Fun (and later Buster). The title character was forced to wear a bonnet and baby clothes and was pushed around in a pram by his overbearing mother, even though he was almost a teenager. Everything Boy wanted to do was "too dangerous", or "for bigger boys". The latest gadgets and games he yearned for were "too sharp" or "too difficult" for him he was hopelessly swaddled. - Ms. Marvel (2014): Kamala has this problem to contend with in addition to getting her powers out of the blue: having grown up in a Muslim household, Kamala has problems trying to juggle her family life and coming to grips with her new skill set. Since the girl is too frightened to outright tell her family what happened, her mother immediately assumes she's becoming a degenerate and is constantly reaming on her shirking her responsibilities. Her father is more understanding (as he thinks she just feels stifled at her age), but no less strict, and her brother, while being fervently religious to the point of openly denouncing the father's profession as a banker, just prefers to remain neutral. Eventually, however, Kamala's parents figure out her secret and accept it, since they know she is out doing good for the people around her. - The Flash: - Mary West, mother of Wally West, was this during the early years of his superhero career until she was Put on a Bus. She would try to control her now-adult son, emotionally blackmail him into caring for her every need, abused his Justice League credentials to go shopping in Paris while needling any girl he brought home (not helped that Wally Likes Older Women so one of his first girlfriends is a decade his senior). Nowadays, Wally acknowledges that his mom was outright abusive in how she treated him, though she's seen as A Lighter Shade of Grey compared to his father, but it's still telling that he considers Iris West, his aunt, to be his true mother. - Libby Lawrence, formerly Liberty Belle of the All-Star Squadron, became this towards her daughter, Jesse Chambers/Jesse Quick, after she retired from heroics herself. She needled her about giving up being a hero, repeatedly nudged her academic pursuits, constantly criticised her lack of dating, and micromanaged her work at Quickstart, despite Jesse being CEO, and would phone her up to needle her about her mistakes when she was out heroing. After a while, she mellowed out slightly and Jesse learnt to embrace her mom, though it took effort from Jesse's then-future husband Rick to make them fully patch things up. - Spider-Man: - One origin story for Doctor Octopus has his abusive father killed in an industrial accident, leaving his mother to depend on him. When he grew up, one of his lab assistants was attracted to him, but after his mother found out, tongue-lashed him so severely that he broke off with her without explaining why. Then one Otto comes home to find Mother making out with a man, and... - Electro also had a controlling mother who demeaned his intelligence, preventing him from following his dreams to become something like a scientist or an engineer, in order to keep him home with her and convinced him to get a rather lowly job at the local power company. - Almost every mother that appears at length in Bloom County fits this trope: Bobbi's mother, Steve's mother, Lola's mother, Opus' mother... (In fact, Opus' mother issues are so severe that one series of strips depicted his imaginary feminine ideal as the embodiment of this trope.) - The later years of For Better or for Worse set up Deanna's mother, Mira, as this so she could be a foil to alleged "good mother" Elly. For her part, Elly wavered between this (For example, two different storylines had her literally screaming at her older children, one of whom was an adult, when they expressed interest in getting a motorcycle) and neglecting April when she got too big to be cute (The infamous ravine incident.). - Jeremy's mom in Zits sometimes exhibits these tendencies, although whether this is actually how she is or merely how he sees her is typically open to question. - The Cord: The Mother and the titular cord. For much of the short, she uses it like a leash, at first to keep him safe and out of trouble and but, later, to keep him close, even keeping him from having a relationship. Later on, this trope is deconstructed, \|\|when the Mother dies and, with her gone, the Son doesn't know what to do\|\|. - Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): - Mark Russell has shades of this towards his daughter Madison, although he's still not quite as bad as in Godzilla vs. Kong. He thinks she's still Just a Kid even though anyone without a parent's bias would know that Madison is way past that stage of her life after what she went through in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), and Mark borders on being overprotective when trying to shoot down her demand that she see the hybridized San and Vivienne Graham in person. Mark gets better later in the story though. - Downplayed with Thor, who displays a protective attitude towards Viv and San due to having somewhat latched onto Vivienne as a surrogate child and says You Are Not Ready when they're about to head out to battle an unknown enemy for the first time since their previous Metamorphosis, although after some arguing, Thor relents. - Subverted in Amazing Fantasy. Inko dotes on her son Izuku but tries not to be overbearing while doing it. She quickly sees through his lies about where he's going at night, but decides to trust him and doesn't confront him about it until the night before the U.A. Entrance Exam. This is after she begins worrying about how his pseudo-celebrity status as the "Prowler Kid" would drag him into trouble. - Arrow: Rebirth: Moira. After Oliver shows understandable anger and panic over Laurel's first kidnapping, her immediate reaction is to have him forcibly sent to a psychiatric facility. While she does later admit that this was an overreaction born out of her protectiveness of him, the fact that this was her first reaction does not speak well of her. - Kushina from As You Wish is written as one of these for her son, Naruto, up to and including: making him sleep in her bed every night since he was a baby, attending his classes at the academy with him, and tagging along on his first mission outside of Konoha. - Celestia's morally dubious actions in City of Guilds seem to come from her being like this to all of Equestria. She seems genuinely sad that the ponies who ended up in Ravnica have gone native, but that doesn't stop her from considering mindwiping and kidnapping them back, or in the case of Applejack and Rainbow Dash, killing them and lying to their friends. Feather theorises that the reason Celestia is doing this is to uphold the status quo. - Deconstructed in Dealing with the Aftermath, where Molly Weasley knows she's coddling her children, Harry, and Hermione too much - but they remind her strongly of her brothers whose headstrong actions got them killed during the previous war. Her youngest son, along with her two surrogate children, get into life-threatening situations multiple times a year and she's terrified that one day their luck will run out. - Downplayed with Louise towards her familiars in A Familiar Void. Her overprotectiveness is brought about by a combination of her lack of understanding of their abilities, and Bugs tendency to get into trouble. - In Harry Potter and the Quantum Leap Molly Weasley casts a charm which detects virginity on her children every time they come home from Hogwarts. - In fact, a common fan theory is that part of the reason why Molly's two eldest children took jobs over a thousand miles away from home was to get away from her. - Homecoming: Marty thinks Clara gets too nervous about such things as the way he plays with her sons, although he cuts her some slack since she's new to the time period. - I Hope You're Prepared For An Unforgettable Wedding!: The trope-naming Agnes Skinner has this trait on full display in this fic. Her adamant opposition to Seymour moving out and leaving her alone without anyone to parasitically rely on, and the state of depression she falls into when he finally does leave her, both receive a lot of focus. However, while in the show she treats him with scorn and only keeps him around because he's obedient to a fault, in this fic, she's shown to actually care about Seymour deep down, and in the epilogue, it's revealed that what she came to miss most after Seymour left the nest wasn't having him do everything for her, but rather, getting to spend time with him. - Pizzazz is one in Lasting Fame. She paid her son's landlord so that they'd evict her son, just cause she wanted him back home. - Living The Dream: When Dana Greenfield met God after the rapture, she asked to be sent wherever her son Lance went to. Upon finding him, they got into a shouting match about how Lance doesn't want to live with her anymore. When Lance refused to budge, Dana tried to convince the captain of the Royal Guard to drag him out of his house. Eventually she realized Lance deserved to be independent, but she had this revelation while breaking into his house and watching him sleep. - Mrs. Weasley definitely qualifies as this in The Meaning of One, though even Harry and Ginny have to admit that it's understandable given the situation (her youngest child and only daughter is unexpectedly whisked away to school a full year earlier than expected and is something even more intimate than married to a boy Mrs Weasley had never so much as met). A particular point of contention is that, due to the mechanics of their bond, Harry and Ginny must share a bed (it's nearly impossible for either of them to sleep without skin-to-skin contact with the other), something Mrs. Weasley does not handle at all well. - Nobody Dies: Word of God literally calls the alternate version of Lilith of Neon Genesis Evangelion that appears on the story with this exact term — as in, she's an immortal Eldritch Abomination that is partially responsible for the creation of mankind and she's been nailed to a cross and stabbed with an ancestral weapon and placed in a vault half a mile underground so she will stop calling and asking if you've found a nice girlfriend yet. - While she isn't her mother, Satsuki, from The Outside, plays this role with Ryuuko, with her subtle domineering presence and her rules, the one especially strict with Ryuuko going outdoors. However, this seems to be played with, as she might have somewhat of a reason to act the way she does, as with her questionable health, her parents splitting, and her father dying, along with being unequipped to deal with the world, she's alone otherwise, so she overprotects and coddles Ryuuko and tries to raise her in accordance to what she perceives to be best to keep some stability. Of course, like most portrayals of this trope, this doesn't have a good effect on Ryuuko, as, Ryuuko is deprived of a normal upbringing because of it. - As we find out, from what's implied, their mother, Ragyo, was a downplayed and more justified portrayal (along with being something of a Doting Parent) as, because, Satsuki often sick and because she was the first baby she carried to term (according to an author's note), she would overprotect and didn't think to probably encourage her daughter out of her comfort zone. However, it's mentioned that she didn't mean to and laments that she didn't teach Satsuki "what to do". - Purple Days: In this A Song of Ice and Fire fanfiction, Cersei Lannister as per canon. Joffrey — who's evolved from the incompetent utter monstrosity he was in canon into The Wise Prince after more than a century in a "Groundhog Day" Loop — gives her a "Reason You Suck" Speech, lampshading just how much she coddled him, helping create the vile wretch that he was before his massive Character Development. She lashes out and slaps him; a morose Joff just comments she should have done that a long time before. - In Robb Returns, Lysa Arryn is one to her son, Robert - so much that \|\|she deliberately poisoned him to keep him weak and dependent on her.\|\| - In Rose Redemption AU, Rose acts as a more benevolent version of this, referring to Steven as her "baby" and holding him every chance she gets in an effort to make up for lost time. - SAO: Mother's Reconciliation: Kyouko, hands down. In chapter 14, Kouichirou freely admits to Asuna that the main reason he was away from home working all the time was to get away from their mother and her overbearing attitude and that the entire reason he bought a copy of SAO and a NerveGear to begin with was to find an escape. - Lilith tends to be a touch overprotective when it comes to her son, Nero, in The Silver Raven. When Nero was selected to fight Grom, she vehemently refused to let him fight, and after he managed to convince her, she made him wear several layers of enchanted armor (and by several, we mean enough to the point where he looked like, in Emira's words, "a giant ball of metal"). Nero even calls her smothering to Edric. Eda notes that she most likely inherited the trait from their own mom, Gwendolyn. - The fan-made Steven Universe episode entitled "The Smothering" exists in an alternate universe where Steven is raised by Lapis, Jasper, and Peridot instead of Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl. In this continuity, Peridot acts like this to Steven to the point of taking his vitals when he's asleep and making him go to bed in the middle of the day after his first mission. Steven ends up Calling the Old Man Out (or in this case, woman), and Peridot agrees to give him more freedom. - In Warmth, Minamo's mother is upset that her nearly 30-year-old daughter hasn't found a husband yet. She patronizes Minamo as an immature Manchild because she isn't attached to anyone yet. - White Sheep (RWBY): Salem, the immortal Queen of the Grimm, is extremely protective of her son Jaune. She's like this with all of her children, but it's worse with Jaune. All of his sisters can leave the tower and explore human lands, while Jaune is constantly locked away for his "protection." This isn't all that dissimilar to what Salem's own father did to her thousands of years ago. It's no wonder Jaune ran away from home. While Jaune admits his reaction was childish, he still insists that he felt like he was backed into a corner and had no other choice because his mother wouldn't listen to him. - Queen Elinor in Brave falls into this at times while wanting the best for her daughter Merida, who does not appreciate that her mother "is in charge of every single day of [her] life", which leads her to make a wish about "changing" her mother... \|\|and getting her and her brothers morphed into bears.\|\| - The Lion King 1 ½ reveals that Timon has one. Her situation is a bit understandable since she's raised Timon all by herself (with the help of her brother/brother-in-law, Max) and she's tried her best to help him feel like he belongs. - In Spirited Away, Yubaba keeps her baby sheltered in a room, telling him he must never leave because of germs, and relentlessly indulges him, producing a Spoiled Brat. \|\|When he is transformed into a mouse and his mother does not recognize him, he goes with Chihiro, becoming her friend; on their return, he shows his mother that he can stand on his own and demands that she be nice to Chihiro.\|\| - Mother Gothel in Tangled needs Rapunzel's healing hair to retain her beauty and has successfully scared Rapunzel into staying in the tower for almost two decades. - Turning Red has Mei's mother Ming, who is overprotective of her daughter to the point of confronting a teenage convenience store clerk Mei had drawn some rather suggestive art of after assuming he was a "groomer", and sneaking onto the grounds of Mei's school and getting into an altercation with security. Much of the conflict in the movie comes from Mei realizing just how tired she is of her mother's strictness and perfectionism. - Isabel Kabra in The 39 Clues, \|\|to the point of threatening to KILL her kids if they won't do what she says\|\|. - Absolutely Truly: Lucas Winthrop's mother is very protective of him. She was first seen in the book showing up at his classroom to bring him an extra pair of mittens because she was concerned he would get cold. - Mandy's mother in Jacqueline Wilson's Bad Girls; Mandy was a "miracle baby" born in her mother's mid-forties, and her mother refuses to see her as a miracle non-baby, insisting on making her wear her hair in plaits and choosing childish dresses for her (as an eleven-year-old in the 1990s) and choosing her friends for her. At the climax, Mandy's father even suggests that Mandy would be better able to stand up for herself if her mother didn't keep babying her. Additionally, Mandy gets bullied at school due to her mother's babying. - The Belgariad has Polgara the Sorceress, who seems to teeter on the edge of this in her relationships with the Heirs of Irongrip, Errand, the entire country of Arendia, and just about everybody else who crosses her path. She keeps calling people 'dear' and telling them they're 'good boys'. Given that the Heirs of Irongrip are positive magnets for trouble (as in, they both have people hunting them and they find new and interesting ways to test her nerves), Errand is supernaturally oblivious to danger \|\|(unsurprising, given that he's an Amnesiac God)\|\|, and Arendia is worse than both put together in its tendency to go up in flames every time she even blinks, you can see why. - More specifically, this becomes a particular problem with Garion, both because he's The Chosen One and in most danger of all the Heirs, and implicitly because Polgara was manipulated by Chamdar, who mind-controlled Garion's grandmother off a cliff, burned Garion's parents alive, and nearly kidnapped Garion himself but for the arrival of a homicidally enraged Belgarath. Consequently, she is incredibly overprotective of him, and Garion - who, unlike most Heirs, she was a fully fledged Parental Substitute to from birth - begins to resent it in his teens and starts acting out and she responds by pushing harder. In the end, matters are resolved when Belgarath puts his foot down. - In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Doña Maria could not prevent herself from persecuting Doña Clara with nervous attention and a fatiguing love. Maria, who has no one else in her life to love, focuses all her energy and attention on her daughter, which winds up alienating Clara from her mother. - The Cat Who... Series: In book #16 ( The Cat Who Came to Breakfast), Mrs. Appelhardt is the very controlling matriarch of her family, especially of her daughter Elizabeth. - In Tamora Pierce's novel, Cold Fire from The Circle Opens, Morrachaine Ladradun is arguably this to her adult son, Ben Ladradun. She meddles with his finances and actively tries to keep him away from his job as a volunteer firefighter. He eventually has had enough and \|\|kills her, implied in a brutal way.\|\| - In Codex Alera, Antillus Dorotea is like this to her son, Crassus, to the point of \|\|horribly abusing and trying to kill his older half-brother so there's no threat to Crassus' inheritance. She gets better, though how much of that is her and how much of it is being imposed on her is up to interpretation.\|\| - Dancing Aztecs: Wally's mom is somewhat firm about keeping him in her sphere of influence. Even once he achieves financial independence he has a hard time imagining leaving. - In The Dead Zone, Frank Dodd's mother is a particularly horrible example. In a flashback, when he had his first erection, she was so appalled that she attached a clothespin to it for hours, telling him it was what it would feel like if he caught a disease from a "nasty fucker" (a designation they both apparently apply to any female, including a nine-year-old girl!). She kept him from moving out of her home, keeping his room decorated like that of a child with clowns and ponies, and it was only with the help of the unaware Sheriff Bannerman that Dodd managed to get up the nerve to leave her long enough to attend police training. She uses her ill health as a weapon and guilt as a tool of manipulation. - Discworld example with Nanny Ogg. She is very much like this with most of the Ogg family, especially her own sons. Including Jason, the blacksmith who is built like a troll and is the greatest farrier in the world. She also seems incapable of seeing her cat, Greebo, as anything other than a tiny ball of fluff, despite Greebo being the meanest, nastiest creature within several hundred miles of Nanny's house. To her unlucky daughters-in-law, however, she verges on Evil Matriarch. - In the fourth Dragon Jousters book, Kiron finally finds his long-lost mother. Who then proceeds to spend the rest of the book nagging him to marry the girl she picked out for him and reclaim the family farm. The fact that Kiron is already engaged, is a close personal friend of the new king, and is now head of an entire branch of the military (And dragons can't just be casually passed to a new Jouster as a cavalry horse can, which makes retiring to pursue a different career difficult), which effectively makes him high-end nobility, is irrelevant. Finally, at the end of the book, both Kiron and the girl his mother wants him to marry (Who likes him, but doesn't want to marry him, and wants to do more with her life than rebuild a farm) both tell her to shut up. - In Emily of New Moon, Terry's mother loves her son to the point of hating anything that she feels he might love more, even going so far as to poison his dog. - Marinell's mother from The Faerie Queene is adamantly against her son falling in love and forces him to remain celibate. She has the excuse of acting on a prophecy, but in the end, her meddling leads to his death. - Get a Grip, Vivy Cohen!: Vivy's mom has had this problem since Vivy was five, when she wandered off at the beach and hid under a boardwalk, then fell over and scraped her knees after she was found. Now when Vivy wants to take up baseball, her mom pressures her to play softball instead because she thinks it'll be more her speed. When she finally lets Vivy join an Apricot League team, she tries to interfere whenever anything goes even slightly wrong, and even bans Vivy from playing in anything other than practice games for over a month after Vivy is hit by a ball and gets a mild concussion. - One of the more heart-wrenching conversations in The Great Divorce is on this theme. The mother in question mourned her son to the point where she ignored her other children, her husband, and God. George Macdonald suspects if the narrator listened to her conversation further, she would demand that her son come to hell so that she could have him. - The Han Solo Trilogy: Bria's mother was like this. She was constantly pushing her to make a "good match", no matter what Bria thought about it. Even after Bria found out that her fiancé had cheated and she dumped him, her mother insisted on her getting back together with him, and wasn't happy with her life choices generally, always belittling them. All this led to Bria having very low self-esteem, contributing to her running away to become a pilgrim on Ylesia (which, it turns out, is a scam for enslaving people). - Naturally enough for a Mama Bear, Molly Weasley from Harry Potter has moments of this, particularly with regards to her eldest son Bill's relationship with Fleur Delacour. Unusually for this trope, she gets over her initial doubts about Fleur (who she thought was simply attracted to Bill by his looks and glamorous job as a Curse-Breaker - magical Indiana Jones, basically) after the latter very firmly demonstrates after \|\|Bill's looks are mangled by Fenrir Greyback's vicious attack\|\| that she really does love him and doesn't give a fig about his looks. After that, the two get along quite well. - Skeeter's mother in The Help constantly badgers her about her lack of a husband or even a boyfriend, her nontraditional interests and goals for women of the time, and her quirky looks. - Dorothy Parker's short story "I Live On Your Visits" is this trope in spades. The mother in this story is a bitter hard-drinking divorcee who delights in making her son feel guilty about having any kind of life without her or thinking kindly of his father's second wife. - In Death: A number of female villains are this, like in the books Memory In Death and Born In Death. At least one of these villains has created Mommy Issues. Squick. - It's Not the End of the World: Debbie's mom tells her daughter to wear several pairs of underpants when she goes ice skating so that she won't catch a kidney infection from sitting on the ice. Karen reflects that her friend's mother is overly concerned about diseases. - In L. M. Montgomery's Jane of Lantern Hill, Jane's grandmother meddled with her mother's life to keep her with her. - Journey to Chaos: When Tiza learns who her mother is, she realizes that \|\|Sathel's\|\| constant worry and fawning should have been a dead giveaway. - In The Key to Charlotte, Charlotte's parents assume her Love Interest Zakaria only wants to take advantage of her and try hard to discourage their relationship. Charlotte is irritated by their overprotectiveness. - King of the Bench: Steve's mom is a "turbo-hyper-worrywart" about every sports activity he takes part in because he's an only child. - Queen Isabel is completely devoted to her children and cares for them all herself in The Kingdom of Little Wounds. She's a terrible caregiver, and this backfires horribly. - The Kitchen Daughter: Although Ginny was twenty-six at the time of her parents' deaths, her ma wouldn't let her drink, go on dates, get a job, move out, or go to other cities alone. Ma said they'd talk about it after Ginny finished college, but Ginny was never able to finish her Oral Communications class. - Like a Fish Understands a Tree: George has Down syndrome. His mum believes he's too "special" to do various things he wants to do, like get a job and play video games that aren't made for little kids. At home, she doesn't let him handle knives and is shocked to learn that he's been taking cooking lessons at the recreational center and is very good at it. When he wants to move into an apartment with his girlfriend, she does whatever she can to prevent him. - The Long Ships: Åsa mothers Orm fairly vigorously, though this is quite understandable since she has lost three sons at that point, and her other surviving son is a bit of a Jerkass. This leaves Orm with a hypochondriac streak, and in the end leads him off on his first journey; he was denied permission to join his father and brother on their raid, and was abducted by other raiders when they were away.) - In The Manchurian Candidate, war hero Raymond Shaw is dominated by his mother Eleanor to the point that she's able to force him to break up with the girl he's fallen in love with. This winds up central to the plot, as \|\|being so conditioned to obey his mother leaves him ripe for Soviet brainwashing. His trigger is even a Queen of Diamonds playing card because it reminds him of his mother. Oh, and Mrs. Shaw is the Communist agent who's feeding him his orders\|\|. - The Mark of the Horse Lord: Murna has walled off her real personality in order to protect herself from her mother the Queen's all-consuming love. - The Noob novels have this as Arthéon's backstory and deconstruct the idea of a current-day Geek having such a mother. He was initially interested in sports and other social activities, but his mother would be so vocal about encouraging him that it broke his concentration, giving her the impression he wasn't made for such activities. He ended up having to give them up altogether and turned to activities he could do from home, including playing the MMORPG in which most of the story is set and ending up in the game's top guild before it actually became the top guild. His mother, however, convinced that New Media Are Evil, forced him to stop playing at 8 P.M. every night (he was just turning twenty around then), forcing him to resort to Real Money Trade to keep up with his guildmates. His avatar got banned by Game Masters because of it and the genuine depression that ensued was a wake-up call for his mother, who finally decided to get him a new computer and tell him she was okay with him playing. And thanks to the adaptation of a case of Real Life Writes the Plot from the original webseries (the actor playing Arthéon became less available for Season 3), the third novel has her send him to boarding school. - In Orange Clouds, Blue Sky, Skye's mom won't let Skye's autistic sister Starr do chores, even though she wants to help out. When Skye and Starr are staying on their relatives' farm, Starr helps out with the animals, which she enjoys, but Mom accuses the family of turning Starr into a slave. - Norman Page's mother in Peyton Place, who controls every aspect of his life and forbids him to spend time with girls. (Her harsh punishments have disturbing sexual connotations as well.) Her overbearing treatment is implied to contribute to Norman's nervous breakdown when he's away from her for the first time, as a soldier in World War II. - In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Wu strategist Zhou Yu attempts a Batman Gambit to ensnare rival country Shu's leader Liu Bei into an Arranged Marriage with Sun Shang Xiang, the younger sister of Wu leader Sun Quan, for the sake of reclaiming disputed territory and ultimately killing Liu Bei. The plot falls apart when the Sun siblings' mother, the Empress Dowager, personally takes a liking to Liu Bei and dares any one of her son's men to lay a finger on her prospective son-in-law. (In third-century China, where Confucian ideals of extreme filial piety held sway, even battle-hardened warlords took their aged parents' commands very seriously.) - Many of Saki's stories feature aggressively coddling (and often psychologically abusive) mother figures, the best probably being "Sredni Vashtar". Interestingly, the Smother is not always the biological mother: In the aforementioned "Sredni Vashtar", it's the protagonist's adult cousin, appointed his guardian. - In The School for Good Mothers: Helen, Frida's first roommate at the school, was reported to by her seventeen-year-old son's therapist for babying him, as it is considered a form of emotional abuse. She admits to cutting up his food and helping him shave and does not get what is so weird about that. - Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not: In "The Adventure of the Sacrifice Stone", Lady Sarah has vowed that her son will never marry. When his son brings home a fiancée, she initially tries to drive her away with hostility and then attempts to buy her off. When this fails, she decides to murder her. - Small World (Tabitha King novel): Roger's mom, exemplified in a flagrantly passive-aggressive letter in which she attempts to guilt him into leaving his (alleged) high-paying, prestigious job in order to move back into her basement on the other side of the country. - A Song of Ice and Fire: - The books feature, among other iffy mother figures, Lysa Arryn, the widow of Jon II Arryn. She's afraid the same assassins who killed her husband will come after her son Robert aka Robin — so far, so justified. Then you find out she still breastfeeds her son. Did we mention he's six? Oh, and she caters to his every whim as well... including his wish to see Tyrion Lannister go flying out a window...and plummet several thousand feet to his death. \|\|It eventually comes out that she was the one who killed her husband, so even that justifiable reason for her over-protectiveness isn't actually justified. Hell, she killed Jon because he wanted Robert to be fostered with another lord, and she couldn't stand the thought of her baby going anywhere else...\|\| - Cersei Lannister, Queen Regent of Westeros, who's lived her entire life under the proverbial Sword of Damocles in the form of a prophecy that says she'll have three children, they'll each be crowned and die shortly thereafter and she herself will be strangled to death by her own younger brother. It's little wonder she goes into Mama Bear overdrive from that point on, but it looks like she can't fight fate, as everything in the prophecy is starting to come true, right down to \|\|her two younger brothers nursing the thought of killing her eventually, and her eldest son Joffrey being killed while her other two kids' survival depends a lot on her...\|\|. - It's also partially due to this behavior that Joffrey ended up so vicious. Through a combination of obsessively sheltering him from any positive influences and relentless coddling of his own negative behavior, she ensured that he had the petty stubbornness of a child, with all of her own shortsightedness and cruelty to go with it. - Lady Olenna may seem to mostly be a harmless if snarktastic old biddy. Don't let that fool you: she's more than willing to step in and clean her little boy's political messes up for him behind his back when he gets in over his head, even now he's Lord Mace Tyrell with children of his own and (supposedly) the main power in Highgarden. Or, do it in front of his face, for that matter (it's not like he'll notice). And, will tell him what an idiot he is (just like his fool of a father, if you hadn't guessed) where anybody can hear. At least she's a fairly benevolent form of the trope... as long as you don't try harming him, his siblings, or their kids. - D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is almost solely about Mrs. Morel giving her love completely, whether inappropriately or not, to her sons. Her close relationship with Paul affects his life in a very unhealthy way especially when it comes to women. - In Summer in Orcus, Summer's mother never lets her do anything because she's terrified of anything happening. She's not allowed to go away to camp, she's not allowed to play on the front lawn in case somebody kidnaps her. On particularly bad days, her mother even worries about things like Summer drowning in the bath. This has a lot to do with why Summer is willing to go on a dangerous quest to find her heart's desire. - Greta in Summers at Castle Auburn is very much a smother to Elisandra, and in her desire to see her daughter become queen, she doesn't seem to know anything about Elisandra as a person. This isn't out of malice, Greta simply doesn't look deeper than Elisandra's façade of calm. - Sword at Sunset: King Arthur thinks that his Bastard Bastard Medraut had a creepy, damaging relationship with his mother Ygerna, who conceived and raised him as a weapon against his father. - Teen Power Inc.: In The Missing Millionaire, a woman who works with Mrs. Free is over thirty, but her mother still has her on a curfew and makes her ask permission before letting her date anyone. \|\|It turns out that two of the suspects/motel guests in the book are that woman and a man she secretly married and is preparing to elope with\|\|. - Madame Raquin in Thérèse Raquin, though she doesn't really mean to be. But she babies Camille and rules over Thérèse. - In C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, a retelling of Cupid And Psyche, Orual, Psyche's sister, raised her since Psyche's mother's death, and is a rather zealous mother figure. - In Susan Dexter's The True Knight, Queen Melcia toward her son. It leads to her executing people who fail to rescue him from Forced Transformation and \|\|inability to see that being restored to human form was killing him.\|\| - You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle: Deborah is so smothering and horrible that she's very nearly managed to break up her son's engagement. She treats his fiancee as basically a walking womb to provide the grandchildren, and her daughter only comes home when she absolutely has to. She writes an advice column in the newspaper that her own son has written to anonymously multiple times asking for advice as to how to deal with her...suffice it to say she's a hypocrite and suggests that a mother would politely back off if asked! - Played for Laughs with Andy Summers's dissonant "Mother," from Synchronicity by The Police. The narrator goes over-the-top insane from his mother's constant phone calls and from every girl he dates ending up becoming his mother, which could mean either that his mother insists on chaperoning all his dates, that she forbids him to date other women at all, or that his Mommy Issues lead him to date only women who resemble her. - Victoria Wood's song "Reincarnation" has this: I want to be Eileen Gumm, Who calls herself "just a mum". I want to have three big lads, And a husband that I've driven nuts. I'll struggle and sacrifice, To make sure they have things nice. I'll give them such good advice, They'll absolutely hate my guts. - The Blue Öyster Cult's portrayal of Joan Crawford (who has Risen From The Grave to spend her afterlife smothering daughter Christina). Mommy is indeed home... - Pink Floyd's The Wall: - Pink's mother, who was very overprotective of him following the loss of his father during The War, gets a song dedicated to her called "Mother", which is about her overprotective and smothering nature, which would shape his relationships with women during the course of the album. Mama's gonna check out all your girlfriends for you. Mama won't let anyone dirty get through. Mama's gonna wait up until you get in. Mama will always find out where you've been. Mama's gonna keep baby healthy and clean. Ooooh babe. Ooooh babe. Ooh babe, you'll always be baby to me. - Taken to a frightening degree in "The Trial" when you consider the double meaning of the line "Why'd he ever have to leave me?" It's telling that during the film version of the trial, instead of just being part of the titular wall like the other two characters present, she's depicted as becoming the wall itself. - And "OF COURSE Momma's gonna help you build your wall!" Pink: Mother, did it need to be so... high? - The Queen in The Decemberists' "The Hazards of Love" tries to have her adopted son William's girlfriend Margaret raped and murdered to prevent her from stealing him away. Which ends up being a major driving force in his decision to sacrifice his own life to save Margaret. Mothers beware. - The mother from The Who's Tommy can be interpreted as one. Man, those rock stars have mommy issues! - Mika has several songs about a mother giving unsolicited advice to her son and nagging him to be perfect, such as "Lollipop" (telling him to avoid love and relationships because they never end well), "Elle Me Dit" (asking why he's wasting his life), and "All She Wants" (wanting him to be straight and married with a perfect life). - The Vocaloid song "You're a Useless Child" combines this trope with Abusive Parents. The mother in the song repeatedly tells her child that he is worthless and useless while constantly reminding him that she is the only one who will ever love him and that he should stay with her forever. The child eventually kills himself, and the mother finally realizes what she has done to him, but it is too late. - Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues: - Jacob's mother smothers him to abusive levels; dictating how Jacob's life should be, demanding he tell her everything that happens in his day, and meddling in his social life until he has none. - Emmanuel's mother wants to control every aspect of his life, most importantly his problems with his weight, which has ruined any sense of personal control that Emmanuel had. - Sarah Bishop in Dino Attack RPG is somewhat understandably concerned about her daughter being involved with an apocalyptic battle against mutant dinosaurs, but to say she's very protective of Kate would be a major understatement. - Blackbirds RPG: The Allmother is a particularly nasty take on this trope, being a malevolent goddess who seeks to completely control every single action taken by every single person. Ironically she isn't an actual mother and is noted to have been infertile when she was mortal, joining the Oligarchs specifically because her infertility meant that she wouldn't be able to forge any direct blood ties to the throne. - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons has, as one of the many magic items, a parody of its Rug of Smothering called a Rug of Mothering, which behaves like this trope. - The Lunar Exalted get various Limit Breaks themed around certain animals. One Compassion-based Limit Break, The Curse of the Mother Hen, means that the Lunar in question will spend at least the next day making sure his companions are all well taken care of. The book illustrates this with Strength-of-Many (a bull-totem Lunar) in war form trying to stuff porridge down a guy's throat. - Also a defining quality of the Yozi Kimbery. Her most well-known jouten (an ocean) was based around the symbolism of literally drowning people in her affection. She constantly breeds all manner of creatures that she'll either love obsessively or hate for not returning her affections to the degree that she considers suitable. This also tends to be rather cyclic; it's implied that Kimbery births and loves purely for the sake of having a reason to hate and kill the things she creates that cannot satisfy her desires. - A particularly comprehensive fan interpretation of the maybe-Yozi Cytherea portrays her this way. - The Qedeshah from Vampire: The Requiem, an all female Bloodline that incorporates the scariest aspects of motherhood. - One of the main plot points of Leonard Gershe's Butterflies Are Free, in which the mother (played brilliantly by Eileen Heckart, both on stage and in the 1972 film adaptation, for which she won the Oscar) fights desperately against her blind twenty-something son's desire for independence after he moves out. \|\|It all works out okay.\|\| - Mae Peterson in Bye Bye Birdie: "So, it's come at last. At last it's come, the day I knew would come at last has come, at last. My sonny-boy doesn't need me any longer." - And it only gets more over-the-top from there. "Fancy funerals are for rich people. I don't want you to spend a cent. Just wait til Mother's Day, wrap me in a flag, and dump me in the river." - The Glass Menagerie has Amanda Wingfield, a Beloved Smother to her son (she won't let him become a poet and complains about his choice of reading material) and her daughter (she ends up flirting with the young man her daughter likes, even after she invited him to dinner with the express hope that he would fall for and eventually marry the daughter). She's not entirely villainous, though: part of the reason she's so controlling is that the family is desperately poor and she worries that her Shrinking Violet daughter, who is mildly disabled, will never find a job or a husband. Amanda is also a Fallen Princess, having been a stereotypical Southern Belle in her glory days; when the play begins she's reduced to calling the fire escape "the veranda". - Lady Bracknell from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. - The Witch in Into the Woods, who keeps her (forcibly-adopted) daughter Rapunzel locked in a tower in the depths of the forest... to keep her safe and "shielded from the world". - Madame Rosepettle in Arthur Kopit's play Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You In The Closet And I'm Feelin' So Sad is a completely over-the-top Large Ham version of this. - In Once Upon a Mattress, Queen Aggravain tells her son she wants him to get married, but only to a real princess, and she keeps creating impossible tests for the princesses who want to marry her son so he never has to leave. The King can hardly argue with her, as he can't speak. - The computer mother of Broken Age still treats 14-year-old Shay like a toddler, appears as an omnipresent glowing face that follows Shay almost everywhere, covers the entire ship in yarn and plushies, and keeps Shay on a strict schedule of fake "adventures" that he can't hurt himself in and has to repeat ad infinitum. Although as she seems to be nothing more than a sophisticated program designed to look after young children it's not really her fault, \|\|too bad she's really a human being who just acts like that.\|\| - The leader of the fighter guild in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is seen as this by the guild, but not without good reason; one of her sons was killed in action and her last son (who isn't actually that good a fighter) is killed later. - Final Fantasy IV: The After Years: Sibling example. While Porom genuinely cares about Palom, she subjects him to a relentless barrage of scrutiny, criticism, and corporal punishment in her attempts to correct his misbehavior. As a result, he considers her overbearing and intrusive and complains that she acts more like his mother than his twin on several occasions. - Fire Emblem: - She might be the eldest sister instead of the mother, but Lady of War Fiora from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade shows some Smother traits in her supports with her little sister, Shrinking Violet Florina, whom she had to raise. Florina: Thanks, Fiora. But...I... I have to do it my way. You can handle it out there alone, right? Well, I need to make sure that I can, too. Fiora: Oh... But I worry about you. When we were in training, you used to get so scared... Florina: Yeah, but I'm fine now. Fiora: Really? But the Caelin Knights are all men, aren't they? I just think of you, all timid and scared among them... So, Florina... You really don't mind it? Didn't they give you a hard time for being a woman? Now if they did, I want you to let me know. Because I will tell them a thing or two... Florina: I-I'm fine. Lady Lyndis took good care of me... And everyone was really nice... Fiora: Oh? Well, I still worry. - In Fire Emblem: Awakening, Brady criticises his mother \|\|Maribelle\|\| for having been this. It's less because he hates her (in fact he adores his mom), and more because he wants to be the one protecting her instead \|\|since he comes from a Bad Future where she died and he couldn't save her\|\| "The you from the future smothered me, to be perfectly honest. You'd pack lunches for me, hold my hand while walkin' upstairs... You were so busy doing the heavy lifting for me that I turned into a total wimp ! \|\|Ya wouldn't even let me fend for myself in the end.\|\| So next time, lemme protect YOU!" - Fire Emblem: Three Houses has a variant: Flayn is smothered by her overprotective older brother Seteth. Seteth manages to avoid most of the Knight Templar Big Brother aspects, but their support conversations centre around him realizing he's upsetting his sister and learning to take a step back. \|\|In truth, Seteth is Flyan's father, more directly qualifying him for the Rare Male Example of this trope. He acts like this as shortly after losing his wife, his daughter had to hibernate for centuries to recover from terrible wounds. This hole in her historical knowledge and social skills makes her a Bad Liar about her real identity, further worrying him.\|\| - Friday Night Funkin': Mommy Mearest, while a bit less extreme than her husband, is still more than willing to screw with Boyfriend simply for dating her daughter. Shes perfectly fine with Daddy Dearest holding a Mall Santa at gunpoint while the two rematch Boyfriend at Christmas, and the two send him and Girlfriend on vacation with the hopes of him dying during it, which lead into the events of a yet-to-be-released week, which itself is what leads into Week 7. - In God of War (PS4), the goddess Freya made her son invulnerable to all threats, physical and magical, so that he would Feel No Pain. Too bad for him that this meant he could feel nothing else, and he went insane over it. When the player meets Freya, she fully admits that her desire to save her son was selfish, but also refuses to break the spell, even saying that the spell can't be broken to her son's face. Freya says that, in time, he'll come to thank her for it. \|\|When Kratos and Atreus figure out his weakness and kill him anyway, Freya swears eternal vengeance on Kratos and Atreus, even though it was a Mercy Kill and they did it to save her.\|\| - One of 47's targets in Hitman (2016), an Italian bioengineer named Silvio Caruso, was treated as The Unfavorite by his mother as a child until his father died and his older brothers ran away. She then latched on to Silvio and started psychologically manipulating his worldview to make him totally dependent on her, such as telling him his favourite spaghetti sauce was her own special recipe that only she could make when it was really just store-bought canned sauce. Her most heinous act was to pay their pool boy to seduce his prom date and have sex with her, take pictures of them in the act and show them to Silvio while telling him that "Romantic love is fleeting. Only a mother's love endures." It's no wonder, then, that Silvio grew up to be an introverted, travel-phobic, gynophobic, insecure manchild. \|\|Mama Caruso suffered a Karmic Death when Silvio finally snapped and smothered her with a pillow.\|\| - The Jackbox Party Pack's Monster Seeking Monster features the Mother, who is randomly assigned one other player as her child and gains a heart for every night they don't get a date. Thus, the Mother is incentivized to actively sabotage her child's romantic prospects. - Fyson the Rito merchant in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild really does love his mother, but he nonetheless finds her overbearing when it comes to trying to get him to help her run the family store. He jumps at the opportunity to open his own independent store in Tarrey Town. - This is Haruka's Freudian Excuse in Senran Kagura. Due to her father not being home most of the time, her mother kept Haruka housebound, treating her as little more than a doll she could adore. Even after Haruka escaped to her Shinobi training, she carries a lot of resentment and personality issues thanks to it. - Emile from Theresia: Dear Emile is a particularly horrifying example; she forbids her daughter Leanne from talking to anyone or leaving the church she's staying at. \|\|When a boy named Sacha tries to talk to her, Emile immediately tries to kill him...and later actually does when Sacha attempts to escape with Leanne.\|\| - Toriel of Undertale quickly becomes the adoptive version of this as soon as the player meets her. Along with being very kind, she marks the switches to press, tells you to let her resolve your battles, and holds your hand through a harmless spike maze just to make sure you aren't hurt. She also dodges the question of how to leave the Underground and will refuse to let you anywhere near the exit of the Ruins until your demands to leave have her decide to block it off permanently. \|\|This behavior stems from losing her first two children on the same day years earlier. It also stems from how Toriel had encountered six other children that also met her in the same way as the player character and watching them leave her to escape the underground, only to be killed by Asgore and/or his soldiers.\|\| - In Cupid, you play as the deranged, disembodied voice of the "Mother" character, giving advice and dishing out verbal abuse on your \|\|possibly adopted\|\| daughter, Rosa. "Mother" is a complex character. Yes, she is abusive and toxic, but her main purpose is to \|\|save Rosa from becoming a dark creature that feeds on other people's love/sanity\|\|. In some endings, Rosa can fight back against the player's wishes, claiming her independence from "Mother's" commands. - Hidemi Yamagami of Season of the Sakura is this towards her son, Shuji, still insisting on doing everything for him as if he were a little kid, when he's already 16 years old. When Shuji first comes home with his various love interest, she cries and says she doesn't want another to steal him away from her. - #Blessed: Avusavia has a brief conversation with her family where her mother tries to butt into her life. - In A-gnosis' comics on Greek myth, Demeter is overbearingly protective of Persephone — not without valid reasons related to their Jerkass God relatives, but it leaves Persephone uncomfortable asking for her advice on actual problems. It's part of the Parents as People tension between them. Hekate: Give me one good reason why I shouldn't let [Demeter] know everything! Hades: Because it would result in Demeter being even more overprotective of Persephone, which would make Persephone unhappy and damage their relation? Hekate: [Beat] Damn. That was a good one. - Alice's mentor Rougina in Alice and the Nightmare displays all the signs of a manipulative parent and seemingly controls every aspect of her protege's life. It's possible that the mirror she gives Alice as a gift enables her to see everything Alice does. - Off-White: Jera towards Isa. - Ursula's parents in Precocious, who basically raised her in an opaque, home-schooled bubble, and are still obsessive Helicopter Parents. - Stand Still, Stay Silent: Sigriður, Reynir's mother. She told Reynir that people who aren't The Immune aren't allowed to travel internationally just so he would stay home. At twenty, Reynir found out that he actually wasn't forbidden from travelling to other countries, decided to go on a trip, and accidentally ended up spending a few weeks with a research crew working in a Plague Zombie-infested area. When Reynir comes back from it alive and well, Sigriður's Anger Born of Worry comes out as her telling Reynir he wouldn't have gone on the trip if he loved her. Her reaction to finding out Reynir has magical powers is to get enthusiastic about how useful they are going to be back on the family farm. Reynir has a father, but he's mostly an accomplice of the treatment. - Mrs. Prestige in Anime Crimes Division is this combined with Fantasy Forbidding Mother. She attempts to mold her daughter Diesel to be a carbon copy of herself and looks at her Otaku interests with disdain, believing live-action TV to be superior. This led to Diesel leaving her home for Neo Otaku City and she hoped to be accepted by the people there. Upon realizing that Diesel has no intention of following or relating to live-action TV culture and might possibly have feelings for her partner, Joe, she is not happy. It gets even worse when she is revealed to be the leader of TOXIC, and intends to convince her daughter to give up on being an Otaku and join her. - Zaboo's mom in The Guild. She breastfed him till he was eleven, made him go with her into the ladies' room until he was fifteen, and still gives him baths. - The Nostalgia Critic's abusive mother has made him think she's his world. And while his twin Ask That Guy with the Glasses fantasizes about killing her regularly, he still calls out for her when his usual music doesn't play and freaks him out. - Revenge Films: Jill's mother \|\|tried to break up her daughter's marriage to Jack since she felt lonely. Since she bugged the entire house to record Jill's conversations, she burned the audio of her screwing her ex into a CD to play at her wedding to this effect. When she got caught and Jack proclaimed he was getting married to Jill, she cried and then proceeded to stalk Jack with the intent of slandering and eventually killing him, which became the last straw for Jill\|\|. - The SCP Foundation has two examples, each of whom is a mother who continues to try to control the lives of their daughters after the mother died: - With SCP-2190 the deceased mother will, once every two weeks, contact someone in desperate need of money and hire him to try to break up the marriage of her daughter and the daughter's husband. - With SCP-4925 if the daughter does anything to try to get some privacy in regards to her cellphone note : leaving the cellphone behind, turning it off, turning off ringing, setting it to "do no disturb", or turning off GPS tracking then eventually a new cell phone will manifest near her and ring, and more and more cellphones will continue to manifest until she answers one. Upon answering it the dead mother will berate her daughter for her recent life choices until the daughter gives in out of guilt. - Demeter to Persephone in Thalia's Musings. Persephone rebelled by eloping with Hades, to whom she is now Happily Married. But she still spends half the year with Demeter anyway. - Ultra Fast Pony portrays Twilight Sparkle as a somewhat delusional wannabe mother towards Spike. She calls him "my daughter" even though Spike is a male (and a dragon at that). It's implied that she even had Spike castrated. In the episode "For Glorious Mother Equestria", Spike starts going through the dragon equivalent of puberty, Twilight tells him to "stop obeying the laws of nature". Twilight: Sorry, Applejack, but Spike's gone crazy! And by crazy I mean he's acting normal for a dragon, but crazy for a pony. Which he should be. - In an episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Jimmy creates a robot version of his mother when she goes on a trip to the spa. The robot acts normal at first, but it starts acting very different and starts doing things like making green slop for meals, forcing Jimmy to go to bed early, and refuses to let Jimmy or Hugh leave the house for any reason. The latter becomes so bad that the robot ties up Jimmy and Hugh when they try to leave. - The Amazing World of Gumball: - Hector's mother controls her son's life to minuscule details to ensure he never feels any strong emotions, including keeping a desiccated hamster who she claims "Is just sleeping", censoring a comic book so it looks like a very happy and dull story or making him think incredibly boring jokes are funny (Why did the chicken cross the road? For a very good reason!). Unlike many of the examples of this page, it's not her son's interest she's acting out of: Hector is a massive Kaiju and if he gets overwhelmed by anything (like being called "boring"), he can easily go on a city-wrecking rampage. - Richard's mother was shown to have been like this to him when he was young, having been overprotective of him to the point where he was afraid to do anything other than sitting on the couch and eat. - Nicole's mother wasn't much better. When she first appears in "The Choices", she's not only shown counting down the minutes that Nicole will supposedly graduate from college and marry a doctor, but she also berates Nicole for her straight-A report card... because there was an "F" in the space for gender ("Being a girl is not an excuse!"). This, combined with her husband's Hair-Trigger Temper, explains a lot of Nicole's personality traits. Thankfully, when Nicole finally sees them again in "The Parents", they've mellowed out a bit, allowing them to work on rebuilding their relationship with their daughter. - Archer. Picture Lucille Bluth above if she were not only your mother but your spymaster as well. - Atomic Puppet: Joey's mother Vivian, while a very sweet and loving woman, is overly worrisome about what her adolescent son does, despite also being completely oblivious to the fact that he's Atomic Puppet. She's much better than Mookie's mother though, who is very controlling of her 35-year-old supervillain son. - Stewart's mother from Beavis and Butt-Head, although she means well she is very overprotective of him and treats him as if he were a five-year-old even though he's around 12. - Linda Belcher from Bob's Burgers tends to lapse into this when trying to bond with her children. Her motives vary from child to child—she tries to bond with Louise because she's jealous that Louise has a stronger bond with Bob, and she tries to bond with Gene and Tina because of a nasty case of empty-nest syndrome. Her going overboard ends about as well as one would expect, with her attempts to bond almost always pushing her children further away. Fortunately, however, they usually make up by the end. - Gazpacho's mother from Chowder, even though we never see her onscreen. Gazpacho always complains about her though- albeit cautiously, since she might hear him. - Todd from Code Monkeys. Recently, it's become a full-blown Oedipus Complex (as he has implied and outright stated that he is literally having sex with his own mother). - Dinosaur Train: Millie Maiasaura lives up to the "good mother lizard" stereotype of her species a bit too much since she is reluctant to let her kids anything that she considers dangerous. Mrs. Pteranodon tries to help her become a bit more lenient. - The Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop episode "Double Trouble" shows Dr. Zitbag's mother to be overprotective and demanding. At the end of the episode, she disrupts the wedding between the Exorsisters, Zitbag, and a clone of Zitbag with the mind of a duck all because she's upset about her son getting married without telling her. - DuckTales (1987) features two examples of this trope: - Ma Beagle keeps her boys well under her thumb. The one time four of her boys rebel against her ("Beaglemania"), she frames them for robbery and ruins their singing career so as to get them back. - Mrs. Crackshell, Fenton Crackshell's television-addict mother, is very much the boss of their trailer home. - Cosmo's mother in The Fairly OddParents!. She eventually falls in love with Wanda's father because they both hate the people their children married. Their plans to 'get' each other's kids cause frustration (they love their respective kids) and admiration (they like each other's evil). - An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had a bird who had been held hostage by Lucius returned to his mother...who immediately ran right back into Lucius' grip when her mother proved way too annoying to deal with. - In Julius Jr., Diamondbeard's mother. She keeps getting in his way and seems to be able to tell what he's up to despite almost always being on the ship. - Morgan le Fay towards her son Mordred in Justice League, especially after he breaks the eternal youth spell. As if the BrotherSister Incest which led to his birth hadn't been bad enough. - Kaeloo: It is eventually revealed that Mr. Cat's mother was one of these. He temporarily moves back in with her in Episode 240 and when Kaeloo goes there to invite Mr. Cat to move back in with her, we hear his mother repeatedly screaming at him to "come to Mama!" and calling him names like "nice little kitty". Mr. Cat himself also often mentions that she's often prone to yelling at him and his brothers. - In King of the Hill Lucky's sister Myrna was shown to be very strict and disciplinary to her children. She wouldn't let them watch TV or have sugar and they were very timid and jumpy, and upon seeing their behavior Bobby exclaimed "Those kids ain't right!". - Clyde's fathers in The Loud House, especially his father Howard, were overprotective to the point of installing seatbelts on a couch. However, by the end of the episode "Snow Way Down", they learned to lighten up. - Dr. Barber of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack has a terrifying relationship with his tiny, unseen mother who lives in his dresser drawer. - The Simpsons: - Agnes Skinner, the Trope Namer. She shares an unhealthy relationship with her son which often borders on psychosis. When Seymour was out of the house, Agnes phoned him regularly demanding to be taken out of the bath, shielded from the glare of car lights on the street, and other such petty requests. (The episode "The Principal and the Pauper" plays around with the trope rather darkly when it's revealed that Seymour is an impostor, and she actually disowns her real son primarily because he isn't subservient to her. We're not allowed to mention that, though.) - "Trust, but Clarify" shows that Bart's friend Milhouse has a smartphone app called "Smothr" that lets his mom Luann surveil him throughout the day. - Early seasons of South Park did this a lot with Sheila Broflovski in a parody of this trope along with plenty of Jewish stereotypes. This was made a major plot point in The Movie. - The Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "Where Pleasant Fountains Lie" gives us two examples as the A and B Plots: - The A Plot deals with Lt. Commander Andy Billups's mother, Queen Paolana of Hysperia, and her desire to get him back home so he can take over as king. Similar to Lwaxana Troi, she's been a pest to the Cerritos in her attempts, but unlike Lwaxana, she's more devious in her plans \|\|like faking her own death to force Andy to come back\|\|. - The B Plot reveals that Mariner has been treating Boimler like this, thinking he's just not ready to participate in more dangerous missions. When Agimus reveals this to Boimler, he gets pissed. - Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In "Sleep Spells", Marco psychoanalyzes Princess Star to try and figure out why she's casting spells in her sleep and fails miserably until he holds up a Rorschach inkblot card with a single dot, at which Star gasps. Star: That reminds me of my overbearing mother suffocating me with all the duties of becoming a queen for the rest of my life! Marco: I think we may have found the root of your problem. You have mother issues! Star: Yay, I have mother issues! Marco: No, that's bad! Star: Aww, I have mother issues. Marco: It's okay, Star. Identifying the problem is the first step to recovery. Star: [with stars in her eyes] Recovery! - While Star's relationship with Moon is a bit troublesome, the show does go and explain why. \|\|We learn that Moon lost her mother when she was barely older than Star, due to a villainous monster sabotaging mewman-monster peace talks. As such, she's forced into the position of Queen and with very few confidants or anyone she can trust (the first being River, the young man she would eventually marry.) She's forced to go to the Black Sheep of the family to learn a forbidden spell to end the war. However, the Chains Of Commanding forced her to adopt a Tough Leader Façade. Her preparing Star is in the event something happens to her and her overprotective stance is out of the fear she may lose her daughter. Indeed, when it looked like she did lose Star, she just began breaking down in tears. Furthermore, Star is forced to step to become Queen when Moon disappears for some episodes and it's painfully clear she's missing her mother.\|\| - Star Wars Resistance: In a male example, Senator Hamato Xiono did everything for his son Kazuda when he was growing up, with the result being that Kaz got very frustrated due to his lack of independence and doesn't know how to do a lot of things. - Steven Universe: - Connie's mother, Dr. Priyanka Maheswaran. Controlling to an arguably abusive extent, forbidding her from watching a medical television show for being unrealistic and coming down very hard on her when she learns Connie lied to her about Steven's family. She controls Connie's day down to the last hour and minute and seems to take pride in knowing exactly what Connie is doing every minute of the day (including snooping on Connie's internet usage). Connie reacts in a very common way children react to controlling parents she sneaks around behind her back and is terrified of her mother finding out the truth. At least until "Nightmare Hospital", in which after coming across the corrupted gems and finding out Connie had been dealing with all sorts of weird stuff since meeting Steven and the Gems, it dawns on her that she had been too overbearing and promises to loosen up as long as Connie won't hide important stuff from her. - Like Dr. Maheswaran, Barb Miller loves her daughter Sadie and wants the best for her. Unfortunately for the laid-back, easygoing Sadie, Barb's ambitions involve over-enthusiastically supporting, pushing into, and eventually completely taking over anything Sadie is remotely interested in, in hopes of Sadie excelling and becoming some kind of superstar. Barb also seems to enjoy buying stuffed animals and making lunches for Sadie, despite Sadie apparently having already graduated high school. The fact that Sadie doesn't eat the lunches and leaves the stuffed animals in a pile on her bedroom floor does not seem to have gotten through to Barb. It takes Sadie having a panic attack and lashing out at Barb after being stampeded into doing a stage act that would have wound up publicly humiliating Sadie to make Barb (and Steven) reconsider their position. - The Venture Bros.: - Myra in regards to the titular Venture Bros. Nothing says motherly love like tying up a pair of pubescent boys and shoving your breasts in their face, screaming "LET MOMMY LOVE YOU". After her first appearance, it is left somewhat ambiguous whether she is really the boys' mother. When she reappears three seasons later, her smotherhood has run rampant through the asylum where she is interned, with more or less the entire population (including some guards) dedicated to her as self-proclaimed "Momma's Boys". In the end, she seems to reveal definitively that she is not the Ventures' true mother, but it hardly matters at that point. - "Colonel Bud Manstrong, listen to your mother!". He's clearly somewhere in his forties, but his mother is very much controlling his life. Bonus points for the episode she appears in being a parody of The Manchurian Candidate, with the movie being mentioned by name. - In "What Goes Down Must Come Up", the Smother is an A.I. named M.U.T.H.E.R., and the smothering is more literal than usual. Jonas Venture created her to help run his new fallout shelter, but they disagreed about "parenting issues". Dr. Entmann : Jonas thought the survivors of a nuclear holocaust might be too distraught to function as a society underground, so he wanted to pump small amounts of mood-enhancing drugs into the ventilation system. And M.U.T.H.E.R., this bitch, she didn't agree. Brock : What'd she do? Dr. Entmann : Well, you know when your parents catch you smoking, they make you smoke the whole freaking pack as punishment...	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverprotectiveMom
Overturned Outhouse - TV Tropes A general rule of thumb if you go to a place like a concert or a park: if there are only portable toilets and no public restrooms in sight, then you should either just hold it until you get home or improvise, 'cause there's a chance that the port-a-potty will end up getting tipped over. Tipping over port-a-potties and outhouses is a very common prank done by people who are looking for some laughs or are getting revenge on someone (although it can happen by accident, too). The offender will wait until their target goes inside, and then they will push the toilet onto its side, and sometimes, they'll tip it over on top of its door so that the user can't get out. The inevitable result is that the victim will be covered in waste, most of it not even being their own. Yuck... Another variation is when the cover of the toilet gets destroyed or the walls fall down, which will expose the person using it to everyone who can see them, much to their embarrassment. A form of Toilet Humour. ## Examples: - Eight Crazy Nights: Davey overturns an outhouse while Whitey is using it, causing him to be covered in shit. He proceeds to freeze Whitey solid in ice using a hose (causing the shit to freeze to him) and leave him stranded to possibly freeze to death. Whitey only survives because deer lick away the ice (and shit). Davey does this all just to be mean, but Whitey forgives him. - Jackass 3D gives us the Poo Cocktail Supreme, where Steve-o is put inside a Port-a-potty and slingshotted into the air, covering him in faeces. - North Country: Played for Drama when Josey is harassed by a few of her co-workers while she's inside a portable toilet and they end up tipping it over. - Space Cowboys: In his backstory, Hawk tipped over an outhouse he thinks has his romantic rival. Instead, the occupant was the girl he was smitten with. He caps the story off with "I married her". - Derek Robinson uses this twice in his novel of the Battle of Britain, A Piece of Cake. - A pilot who is bullying and being unpleasant to a newcomer to the squadron gets his comeuppance when the bullied pilot waits for him to go to the port-a-lav parked near the pilots' waiting area. He uses a tractor to tip it over and drag it round the airfield while the bully is in there. - A Very Senior Officer, who is caught short on a visit to the base, uses it at exactly the wrong time - when German fighters conduct a low-level raid. Cannon fire from the Germans bowls it over, with the Air Commodore seated inside. - A Played for Drama example happens in the Stephen King short story A Very Tight Place, published in Just After Sunset. Protagonist Curtis Johnson is locked up in a tipped over portable toilet by his neighbor Tim Grunwald, and left trapped there in the heat of a Florida summer day to die. - In Charles Sale's The Specialist, Lem Putt (the narrator) is an expert privy builder, who explains that he builds his outhouses with a sturdy beam embedded five feet deep in the ground so that they can't be pushed over by pranksters. He goes on to tell the sad tale of the Clark family, who built their own privy rather than follow his advice; they didn't anchor their privy, and it got pushed over, trapping their 97-year-old father inside. - Happens in the CSI: NY episode "Tri-Borough". One construction worker pushed over a port-a-potty another was in because he was frustrated at the guy having replaced him. However, it actually wasn't what killed the guy—\|\|that was a falling frozen block of airplane toilet water\|\|. - In Ray Stevens' Christmas song, "Redneck Christmas", the kids turn the outhouse on its side to use as a sled. Unfortunately, Grandpa was in there: Grandpa: Darn fool, idiots! What are you doing?! Boy 1: Sorry, didn't know you was in there, Grandpa! Boy 2: Merry Christmas, Grandad! Grandpa: I got your "Merry Christmas" right here! Come back with that catalogue! - In a "News From Lake Wobegon" segment of A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor's fictional childhood includes outhouse tipping as a standard Halloween prank. Usually, the pranksters would focus on the powerful guys like the mayor and banker. Of course, they couldn't hold it in all night, and even taking a shotgun along (to scare the kids away) didn't help. - In Bully, one mission has Jimmy knock over a port-a-potty at Old Bullworth Vale with a lawnmower while Mr. Burton, Bullworth Academy's gym teacher, is using it as revenge for getting Zoe Taylor expelled. - In the level "Eye of the Storm" in Crysis 2, you can knock over an outhouse at the start of the level with a fully-powered punch, to the annoyance of the CELL operative inside. - A quest in DragonFable involves tipping over an outhouse on a hill with Sir Kuss inside. You don't get anything for completing it, though. Sir Kuss:...oh..... oh my..... oh man, it's EVERYWHERE! It's in my Sneevil wounds... WHY... why would you DO this? You're not even getting any experience for this! You... you're just... you're MEAN. That's what you are. (Oh man, this will never wash off). - In the Family Guy video game, there's a "Simon Says" Mini-Game involving copying the farts of the guy in the other port-a-potty, and pressing the wrong button results in the one Peter is in falling over. - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: During the mission where CJ takes revenge on a construction site for catcalling his sister, the foreman hides in a port-a-potty, which CJ not only bulldozes into a pit, but he buries the foreman alive in concrete. Due to the serious Disproportionate Retribution involved, some interpretations have CJ be unaware there was someone inside. - In Monster Truck Madness, the announcer will yell "Hey! I'm in here!" if the player knocks over a port-a-potty with their truck. - In Not Tonight, the music festivals have an overturned portable toilet in the background. - 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue: The last task in the Barnyard level involves your puppy ramming the Farmer's tractor into his outhouse, on the excuse that the farmer recently installed indoor plumbing. - During the first night mission in South Park: The Fractured but Whole, Captain Diabetes demonstrates his "Diabetic Rage" ability by flipping a port-a-potty that's blocking your path at a concert. - The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The End" Richard buys a portable toilet to use as a bunker for the family to protect them from the (not really) end of the world. At the end of the episode, when he tries to kick the door open with the family (sans Gumball and Darwin) inside, it tips over and they get covered in toilet water. - In the Beavis and Butt-Head episode "Take a Number", the two spend hours waiting in line for a Port-A-Potty at a rock concert. When they finally reach the end of the line, the two fight over who gets to use it first, with Beavis managing to get inside and lock the door. Butt-Head retaliates by tipping the Port-A-Potty over. - In one episode of Ed, Edd n Eddy, while being chased by Eddy with broccoli, Ed accidentally knocked over an outhouse. It then turns out that Rolf was in it. Rolf: Can't Rolf have one moment of peace? - In the Family Guy episode "To Love and Die in Dixie", the Griffin family gets put on Witness Protection and is sent to a rural community. When Peter goes outside to use the outhouse, it gets tipped over by a bird. Peter: Ah! Oh, God! Oh, it's everywhere! Ahhh! It's in my raccoon wounds! Oh-ho, God! - King of the Hill: - In "Kidney Boy and Hamster Girl: A Love Story", the walls of Dale's "Porta Room" fall down when the screws pop out while Hank is using it, much to Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer's amusement and Hank's embarrassment. Dale: He's a squatter! - In "Business is Picking Up", Jimmy Wichard and his buddies lock Peter Sterling in a port-a-potty and roll it down a hill. - The Loud House: In "Tripped", Mr. Loud rams a line of portable toilets with Vanzilla, and they topple over like dominoes. Turns out the last one was occupied. - In the Phineas and Ferb episode "The Magnificent Few", Doofenshmirtz's mind-controlled termites eat a wooden outhouse while someone is using it. - In the Regular Show episode "Portable Toilet", Mordecai and Rigby accidentally get locked inside Muscle Man's special portable toilet while eating a sandwich inside it as a dare. The duo try to break down the door, only for the toilet to fall down and knock them out. Muscle Man unknowingly sends them to a military base to be used as target practice when he returns to it. Muscle Man: Make sure she gets a good home! Helicopter Pilot: She will! Decommissioned units get sent to the military for target practice! Muscle Man: That's so honorable! - The Simpsons - In the episode "King of the Hill", Homer leans on a port-a-potty, knocking over the top part and exposing Comic Book Guy. Comic Book Guy: Oh... It appears I will have to find a new Fortress of Solitude. - In "Trash of the Titans", Cletus's outhouse is knocked over by the force of compacted garbage erupting out from under it. Cletus: Hey Brandine, I think I done busted mah stink-bone! - In a prototype trailer for Total Drama, Duncan knocks over two port-a-potties, one of which is occupied by a girl who screams bloody murder.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverturnedOuthouse
Adaptation Expansion - TV Tropes "The movie follows the book, sort of, if you can imagine a cute balloon inflated into a zeppelin." This is the complete opposite of Compressed Adaptation. It occurs when a short, very simple tale is adapted into a medium with much larger space requirements, such as film or serial television. To meet the size requirements, the storyline will have to be padded with some new stuff, and sometimes a lot of it. Cue Alternative Character Interpretations that require elaborate backstories, minor characters given much larger parts, completely new characters, and sometimes Plot Holes, sequels when the source material had none, Plot Tumors, and a triple dozen subplots that were not in the original work, to name but a few examples. This has a tendency to make the story unrecognizable as a retelling of the original, if done badly. In some instances, the original story might end up as one small part of a much larger, more convoluted story. This will usually be the climax, in which case the film essentially gave you an hour or more of Back Story. This most often happens with movies based on novellas, short stories, video games or children's books. In the children's books instance, this can lead to the introduction of Darker and Edgier into a normally benign story or the reintroduction of elements lost to Disneyfication of classic stories. While this trope can be associated with the fan complaint "They Changed It, Now It Sucks!!", it also can be done excellently. Remember that Tropes Are Tools and extensions for adaptations might need to happen to fill the required runtime, just going about it right is the problem most productions face. Compare Expanded Universe. See also Adaptation Distillation, Compressed Adaptation, Humble Beginnings, Patchwork Story, Not His Sled, Updated Re-release. An adaptation In Name Only goes even further than this, throwing out the original plot and making things up out of whole cloth. ## Example Subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other Examples: - The Last Supper: In The Four Gospels, the individual reaction of the Apostles to the news of a traitor is not described, and neither is the physical appearance of the Apostles or Jesus. In visualizing the Last Supper, Leonardo uses the personalities of the Apostles as described elsewhere to extrapolate how he thinks they would react and puts the ideas to paint. - The Mega Man (Archie Comics) comic turned a series of video games with little more than Excuse Plots into a full-fledged series with a greater sense of continuity. - Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) was once a continuation of the SatAM series, then it started heavily incorporating the Sega continuity, and then it evolved into a highly extensive adaptation of both continuities, adding its own elements, and filling in many holes left in by both, even though it's still its own continuity. As of the reboot, it's now a direct adaptation of the games universe with a bunch of original elements thrown in for flavor, as well as a few lingering SatAM influences (namely the original Freedom Fighters, though they've been completely overhauled as well). - Ni GHTS Into Dreams expands heavily on the lore of the games, including how Twin Seeds was founded and the details of NiGHTS' betrayal of Wizeman, as well as Earth stuff happening. - The comic book adaptation of Pocket God not only puts the pygmies on a larger island, but also gives them different personalities and designs to distinguish them from each other. Later in the series, a tribe of female pygmies is introduced, which the video games lack. - In The Multiversity, Grant Morrison is featuring an ongoing theme of presenting Batman counterparts on each Earth who were all inspired by something besides a bat, as a reference to a short story by Martin Pasko from Batman #256. In the context of the multiverse, Scorpion (inspired by a scorpion) is on Earth-41, Stingray (inspired by a stingray) is on Earth-34, Owl (another Bruce Wayne inspired by an owl) is on Earth-35, Shooting Star (inspired by a shooting star) is on Earth-47, and Iron Knight (inspired by a suit of medieval armor to become a literal knight) is on Earth-36. Morrison seeks to pose the question of how far the character can be stretched before they're no longer Batman. - The comic book adaptation of Injustice: Gods Among Us greatly fleshes out and expands the world of the game, and features a much larger cast of characters. - The manhua adaptation of The King of Fighters XII, considering that it was based on a plotless Dream Match Game that essentially served as an beta release of The King of Fighters XIII, thus had to make up a whole plot involving the cast getting caught in the crossfire between Magaki and Nameless, alongside throwing in several cameos from characters such as Kasumi Todoh, the American Sports Team, and perhaps most surprisingly, Wolfgang Krauser, Laurence Blood and Axel Hawk from Fatal Fury 2. - Likewise, the comic adaptation of Contest of Champions features a much more substantive and character-driven story than the Let's You and Him Fight Excuse Plot of the video game. - Warlord of Mars and its many spin-offs and limited miniseries are based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars. Certain original storylines that are exclusive to its publisher Dynamite Comics expand on main characters backstories that were not covered in the book, such as Warlord of Mars: Dejah Thoris, a prequel set 400 years before the arrival of John Carter, focusing on the titular heroine (as well as Carter's Love Interest)'s life and adventures before she met the Earthman. - Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Carl Barks' comic book adaptation of the Donald Duck short "Trick or Treat" expands a bit on why Donald is so mean to his nephews (he hates Halloween because of trick-or-treaters interrupting his privacy), and adds a few extra gags (like Witch Hazel disguising herself as an attractive lady duck, and later summoning a monster to steal Donald's candy). - Mortadelo y Filemón: In the 1988 album "Los sobrinetes" (The Little Nephews), Mortadelo and Filemón coincidentally introduce their nephews, who look exactly like them, and wear exactly the same clothes but with short trousers, with no introduction or even mention of their parents. - Rainbow Brite focuses more on Wisp's Earthly life before she becomes Rainbow Brite, including her friends and family. - In Superman Smashes the Klan, much of the story is expanded upon from the original radio show to the point of some parts being related In Name Only. Characters only mentioned or having small roles have much bigger parts in the story along with never before had characterization. - Ultimate Spider-Man: The first arc doubles as a three-issue expansion of Amazing Fantasy #15, thus expanding on Uncle Ben as a character and showing why his death deserved to be seen as tragic. - Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons is one for the origin and history of Wonder Womans version of the Amazons. The main inspiration of the series is the backstory given to them by George Pérez in the first issue of his run on Wonder Woman back in the eighties, which covered about half of the 36 pages of that issue. The first issue here alone is over 70 pages. - The Mickey Mouse newspaper strip started out with an adaptation of the first Mickey Mouse short produced, Plane Crazy, but after Minnie parachutes off the plane, Mickey runs into a storm and finds himself crash landed on an island filled with pirates, and the strip goes on from there... - When Counting Crows covered Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi", they added a couple of verses, giving the song an environmental message that wasn't really present in the original. - The Red Hot Chili Peppers cover of "Love Rollercoaster" adds a rap verse that was not in the original song. - The third movements of Gustav Mahler's second and third symphonies are greatly expanded instrumental versions of the Lieder "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" and "Ablösung im Sommer." - Yes's cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "America" (originally recorded for a record company sampler and available on the remaster of Fragile), due to having multiple extended instrumental passages, changed a 4-minute folk-pop song into a 10-minute progressive rock epic - Nursery Rhyme Johny Johny Yes Papa: If you listen to the original song, this is all about a child sneaking into the kitchen to eat some sugar out of the jar. In this YouTube video, it has several variety of sweets and desserts than just only sugar and also has An Aesop about eating lots of snacks will make you sick after lying. - The finale of Aaron Copland's Third Symphony incorporates a reworked version of "Fanfare for the Common Man" as the introduction to a much longer movement. - To Be a Bug Catch is my (New) Destiny expands on the lore of Viridian Forest, confirming it is part of a long band of forest that covers mountains and plains all the way to Johto, also containing the Ilex Forest as part of itself. This also includes a relationship with Celebi. - When the Brush hits the Canvas: Being a novelization, several elements of the original game are expanded upon. - Hyrule's unchanged world map since A Link to the Past is explained to be a result of a general economic and societal decline. - The Eastern Palace is explained to be an archeological site that had been named a "palace" after the Hedge Maze that surrounded it - its true name having been lost in time - and almost impenetrable. Some more detail is given in its construction. - At one point, Ravio launches on a full-blown lecture of how exactly magic functions. - Stalfos are explained to be skeletons of people fallen in battle or died in a cursed place. - The reason there are no boats or ships is because the Zoras are so fiercely territorial that they destroyed Hyrule's art of sailing by attacking ships. - RecD: Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course does not properly explain the Big Bad's motivations for wanting to take over the astral plane, and it only vaguely hints at what he plans to do with his newfound power. RecD's cover of "Baking the Wondertart," however, gives him a proper backstory and motivations: \|\|All the residents of Inkwell Isle 4 were constantly demanding Chef Saltbaker to make bread, cake, and other confections for them. Saltbaker was overworked and stressed. This filled him with rage, driving him to the point of insanity\|\|. When he gains control of the astral plane, he planes to \|\|fill the world with the salt making up his body, shred everything and everyone up with his salt grains, and reform the world into one made of salt\|\|. - Stern Pinball's Batman greatly expanded the role of Scarecrow, elevating him from a mere cameo in the film to a near-equal for the Joker. - 1865 is largely inspired by a play Steve Walters and Erik Archilla created in college called Mars which follows the life of Edwin Stanton. - While it also had some Adaptation Distillation, the Radio Drama of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance also has an Adaptation Expansion of the game, such has the appearance of Nono's airship and the event when Ritz, Mewt, and Doned's arrival in Ivalice is shown. Also, there are new character, whose name is "Moogle Knight" and "Madam Kiri". - The Audio Adaptations of Alex and Clare In The Community naturally have to create plots out of whole cloth, to convert a three panel gag strip into a half-hour sitcom. - The Star Wars Radio Dramas included several scenes that were either cut from the films or entirely new. - The A New Hope play starts as early as a few months before the movie. We get Leia using the Tantive IV to smuggle medical supplies to Rebel forces on Ralltiir, learning about the Death Star plans and acquiring them from Rebels on Toprawa, and Luke watching the battle between Tantive IV and the ISD Devastator (a cut scene that had a couple frames from it shown in one of the Visual Dictionaries a decade and a half later). - The Empire Strikes Back showed the Battle of Derra IV, which was alluded to in several later EU materials including the first four books of the X-Wing Series. We also got a conversation between Han and Luke after he got the storm shelter put up in the Hoth wastes. It also explained Lando faking punching Han when they first meet as Lando wanting to see if Han still had his old reflexes. - Return of the Jedi included Luke constructing his new lightsaber. Being that it was performed after the current EU got into full swing, we also got a Call-Forward to The Thrawn Trilogy in the form of a conversation between C-3PO and an undercover Mara Jade. - The radio adaptation of The Twilight Zone followed the plots of the original television episodes, but also added in several new scenes due to each episode being about 10-15 minutes longer than the television stories they were adapting. - The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's films: - The adaptation of "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" expands on the thirty-page short story by adding Bess Houdini and recurring character Nathaniel Ward as major players in the narrative, in addition to including Houdini's stage show and introducing a subplot about Houdini trying to buy a sarcophagus and mummy from a museum. - The adaptation of "The Call of Cthulhu" is framed as a police investigation, which \|\|causes a significant change from the original story at the end\|\|. - Dagon: War of Worlds takes Lovecraft's original very short story "Dagon" and turns it into a full-blown, feature-length sequel to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" in the style of Orson Welles's famous The War of the Worlds broadcast. - The radio version New Dynamic English has the original content from the software (such as the Harris Family) but there are also new characters and it supposedly takes place after the events of the software (Max quits being a businessman after missing his family, Kathy left her job for the newspaper in New York). - During the original run of the BBC comedy The Men from the Ministry, episodes where restricted to 25-30 minutes so scripts where often cut, sometimes heavily. However, when Finland's public-broadcasting company YLE made a Finnish version, they had no such restrictions. This lead to episodes being anywhere from 25 to 48 minutes, often featuring material which was either partially or completely left out from the originals. note : If one listens to the Finnish version and then listens to corresponding episode in the BBC run, they can notice sometimes set-ups for gags that have been cut, or lines of dialogue that where either punchlines or references to jokes that never happen. - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde expands upon the novella considerably while adding common tropes found in adaptations. In particular, Jekyll's childhood, glossed over in his confession in the novel, is focused on at the start of the series. - Dino Attack RPG is a massive Adaptation Expansion of LEGO Dino Attack. The original LEGO Dino Attack line had a very simple plot: mutant dinosaurs are attacking the city, and four guys are trying to stop them. However, the Dino Attack RPG revealed that this has happened all over the world, bringing in other LEGO-themed locations and showing the impact that these events have had on them. The Dino Attack Team of the original theme consisted of four men, but the RPG has shown that it is actually much larger and there are women helping out. It's also explained what happened to the citizens of the various places that have been invaded (an issue completely ignored in the original line), and there is even some background as to why the heck all this is happening in the first place. - The One Ring, being based on The Lord of the Rings, has a great deal to say about areas the books don't explore much, particularly the history of the lands of The Hobbit after the events of that book. - Pokemon Tabletop United is a fan-made RPG adaptation of the Pokémon series, which seeks to further diversify Pokémon and improve weaker species, by adding many more abilities and special traits than in the handhelds. - Ravenloft itself is an expansion of an extremely well-received 1st edition adventure, also called "Ravenloft", and its sequel, "Ravenloft 2: The House on Gryphon Hill". - The digital game for Sentinels of the Multiverse is more along the line of clarification. With the addition of nemesis dialog and the expanded or new bios for variant heroes in the video game version, more tidbits about the universe, the relationships between the heroes and villains and their personalities came to light than had been previously available: - The Freedom Six Wraith's art caused a lot of speculation in the fandom as to why she had The Operative's weapons; her video game bio and dialog with Iron Legacy clarified that she had in fact killed The Operative and The Chairman and taken their place. - While the familial relationship between Tachyon and her nemesis The Matriarch had been known via Word of God for some time, their nemesis dialog is the first place it was confirmed within the game itself that they were cousins. - The video game's bios also confirmed that Freedom 6 Unity was a separate entity from the original Unity, who died of her wounds from Iron Legacy's attack in that timeline, while the original promo bio left it ambiguous. - The stage versions of Disney's animated features can be up to an hour longer than their source material, almost entirely through adding new songs. Characters who did not sing in the movie get songs, sometimes more than one; characters who did sing... sing even more. For instance, Gaston bribing the asylum keeper in Beauty and the Beast? That's the basis for a song. Eric dancing with Ariel in The Little Mermaid? That's the basis for a song. Many existing songs also have new lyrics added. - The stage musical of Aladdin includes brand new songs alongside the previously Cut Songs "Why Me", "Proud of Your Boy", "Babkak, Omar, Aladdin, Kassim", and "High Adventure" — and the formerly-deleted characters who sing the latter two. - The Little Mermaid's stage adaptation elaborates on Triton's and Ursula's backstories, especially in the revised production with the latter's new Villain Song "Daddy's Little Angel"; Eric's royal heritage, conflict of interests between exploring the seas and inheriting the throne, and obsession with Ariel following his rescue, the latter told in "Her Voice"; Ariel's relationship with her father and sisters; and her identity crisis as a mermaid, first touched on in her introductory number "The World Above". Alongside Eric's aforementioned "One Step Closer", the Mersisters and Flounder get a Song in the Limelight titled "She's in Love" upon observing Ariel's lovesickness for Eric; and Scuttle and his fellow seagulls have the tapdance number "Positoovity" as they coach Human!Ariel with walking on her new legs. - Frozen's stage adaptation focuses on Anna and Elsa's childhood a bit longer than the film, with their parents playing much more prominent roles in the prologue. Queen Iduna is given a brief backstory as having come from the Hidden Folk, who replace the trolls. Kristoff goes from having one song in the original movie ("Reindeers are Better than People") to six songs (the new ones being "What Do You Know about Love", "Hygge," "When Everything Falls Apart," "Kristoff Lullaby" and "Colder By the Minute"). Elsa gets several more solo songs ("Monster" and "Dangerous to Dream") highlighting her internal conflicts. Oaken is still a One-Scene Wonder, but his scene is now a Song in the Limelight called "Hygge". - Two for the Seesaw had a cast of two and required no more than two apartment settings on either side of a split stage. When it was adapted into the musical Seesaw, half a dozen minor characters and many additional settings were added. The result was not a hit. - Choreographer Jerome Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein created a 20-minute ballet called Fancy Free, and used it as the basis for their first Broadway musical, On the Town. The adaptation was loose enough that no music was recycled. - Most of the second act of The Nutcracker is original to Tchaikovsky. - All of the Gilbert and Sullivan works are expansions on short stories, poems, and other of W. S. Gilbert's writings. Of these, the poems ("The Bab Ballads") have also remained fairly popular, especially in Britain, but copyright claims by the magazines he published meant his only attempt to publish a collection of stories ended up getting pulled from the market. - The Musical of Vanities added a Distant Finale where the characters reunite in their home town in The '80s, remedying the rather anticlimactic (and rather unhappy) ending of the original. Also, in the off-Broadway production, the story is told from a How We Got Here point of view, rather than directly following the girls through the ages. - Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street follows the Christopher Bond version of the Demon Barber, giving him realistic motives instead of just being a one-dimensional bad guy. - When Shakespeare turned Thomas Lodge's novella Rosalynde into the play As You Like It, he added several characters of his own (most notably Jaques, Touchstone and Audrey) and had them recur frequently as comedy relief. - The various stage adaptations of Chess all expand upon the Concept Album. Some additions that are particularly notable: - The original London production gave the chess players names, introduced characters like CIA agent Walter, and added songs like "Interview" and "The Soviet Machine". - The original Broadway production added lots of dialogue scenes and songs like "How Many Women" and "Someone Else's Story". - The original Swedish production gave a new song to Svetlana and recycled a cut melody to give to Molokov. - The 2013 West End musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is faithful to the novel but finds its own way to make Charlie a more proactive protagonist (see Film above) by expanding on both his character and Willy Wonka's. Charlie becomes a Cheerful Child and budding inventor who is in absolute awe of Mr. Wonka and his creations in a way the other four Golden Ticket finders are not. Mr. Wonka turns out to be a Mad Artist as well as a Mad Scientist. Charlie not only has to stay out of trouble but \|\|prove that he is a kindred creative spirit\|\| to find his happy ending. Finally, \|\|it turns out that Mr. Wonka is secretly on Charlie's side all along\|\|. Several supporting characters are rounded out as well, with Charlie's family and Mrs. Teavee becoming Ascended Extras. - The stage show of Jingle Bells, Batman Smells, P.S.: So Does May from the Junie B. Jones books includes material from Shipwrecked! presented in flashback form. It also includes a few other small additional scenes, such as a fantasy sequence of Junie B. imagining herself unwrapping and squeezing a giant a Squeez-a-Burp as her classmates and Mr. Scary cheer her on and Also sprach Zarathustra plays. - Shrek: The Musical uses an extra half-hour that the film doesn't have to elaborate on the backstories of Shrek, Fiona, and Farquaad, as well as give more focus to the Fairytale Creatures as characters (especially Pinocchio). - An American in Paris considerably expands upon the plot of the film, particularly where Lise is concerned. - The stage version of Anastasia uses the extra time of a stage show to fill in aspects of plot and character. In particular, Dmitry and Vlad's pasts are more fully fleshed out, and the context of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath become integral to the plot, rather than incidental or glossed over. - Hadestown was, from the start, a more fleshed out version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, with additional anti-capitalist themes. The stage musical was originally a very abstract, sparse experience with relatively little in the way of explicit story it was after the release of the album that Mitchell began to flesh out the story with more songs ("Road to Hell" and "Chant" and their reprises most notably) to make the setting and the nature of events much clearer. One of the biggest changes made to the production when it came to Broadway was the idea of the seasons being thrown out of whack by Hades and Persephone's deteriorating marriage and Orpheus' quest to write a song to bring back spring, which was present to an extent in the 2017 version but not made as clear or as important. - The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht is an expansion of a short story he'd written several years earlier. The play mostly follows the outline of the short story, adding flesh to the bones, but one significant expansion is in the role of the judge who settles the dispute at the end: the short story has a straightforward wise judge character who is replaced in the play by a complicated trickster, one of the play's most memorable characters, with a character arc and a backstory that takes an entire act to unfold. - The 1774 version of Orfeo ed Euridice, rewritten for the French stage, included extra songs and the famous Dance of the Spirits ballet sequence in Elysium, extending the length of the opera significantly. - Virgil's account of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth was fairly short, started with Orpheus and Eurydice already in love, and only had Persephone hear Orpheus out. In the play Orpheus: A Poetic Drama, Hades appears alongside Persephone, how Orpheus and Eurydice met is explored, and focus is given to how Hades runs his Underworld and why he sees Orpheus's intrusion as dangerous. - Orpheus in the Underworld, besides adding a lot more gods than the usual take on the myth, had a revision made in 1874 expanded the two-act opera to four, with additional revisions adding optional scenes in Neptune's underwater kingdom. - I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: - The Adventure Game of "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", which was written by the original author, Harlan Ellison, gave each of the five protagonists extensive backstories. This included Nimdok, who in the short story, never even revealed his real name. (He still doesn't, incidentally.) The player also has the chance to improve on the Downer Ending of the original story by guiding the protagonists through specific tests set up by the evil computer. - During development, the game's designer asked Ellison why this evil A.I. would choose those five particular characters to torture. The question fired Ellison's imagination and thus the characters received more development in the game. - Final Fantasy: - The backstory of the original Final Fantasy is heavily expanded on to tie into the backstory of Dissidia Final Fantasy, to the point that Dissidia almost gives more plot for the first game than the first game itself did. - Final Fantasy was hit with this a second time with the release of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, billed as a (possible) prequel to the 1987 game. Specifically, it's a \|\|Protagonist Journey to Villain story for Garland himself\|\| that completely recontextualizes \|\|the Stable Time Loop at the center of FFI as a deliberate gambit by Garland and the Four Fiends (with the help of Astos) to bring about the true Warriors of Light in order to free Cornelia from the machinations of the Lufenians (who are depicted similar to how they're described in Dissidia: a technologically advanced, trans-dimensional civilization)\|\|. The first DLC, Trials of the Dragon King, similarly expands upon Bahamut's role by revealing \|\|he's not even native to that world\|\|, implying he's \|\|a revived and reformed version of the Bahamut from Final Fantasy XV\|\|, and \|\|having him strike a deal with Garland to empower the Warriors of Light so that they might stand a chance against him in their fateful battle at the Chaos Shrine\|\|. - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a large, 20+ hour computer game loosely based around the movie by the same name, a 163-minute minimalistic presentation emphasizing long takes and simple scenes, which was itself based around a short novel called Roadside Picnic. C-consciousness, the various factions, and the like exist to pad the story in the video game. - FusionFall Legacy, being a reimaging of the original MMO, expands upon it in many ways: - The time travel accident that strands the player in the future was just another one of Dexter's experiments ruined by Dee Dee in the original. The Legacy intro portrays it as a full-blown public event. - Several nanos are being added to the game. - Video games based on movies, especially in recent years, will inevitably end up doing this if they don't want their game to be shorter than the movie. - Madagascar: To allow for more levels, the game goes into detail about events the movie glossed over (Marty's escape from the zoo and Marty's quest to find Alex after he goes feral) and also adds in some new story elements (how the New Yorkers helped the lemurs set up their party, Marty, Gloria and Melman finding objects to reconstruct the liberty statue) in the process. - The video game for Kung Fu Panda adds in a ton of levels involving fighting various factions that have randomly chosen to attack rather than train. - This tradition goes all the way back to the good ole days, where the hero from a movie (whether or not the movie is based on existing material) will usually have to fight a bunch of henchmen or even freakish oddities that not only didn't appear in the film, but would have no place in it. There are many examples with the Back to the Future NES games probably being the most egregious. - Games based on superheroes will often try to make the playing field more even, so a character possessing titanic strength in the comics will be just somewhat stronger than a regular guy (e.g. Superman and Batman) and some characters will be possessed of powers that just never existed in the comics, usually including attacks that clear the screen of all the bad guys. - Games based on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings films carry over the likenesses of the characters established in the films, continuing to run with the additional details not found in the books. - Fist of the North Star video game adaptations: - Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage featured new moves for every character so they'd have an expanded move list. All moves were created by the artist of the original manga, Tetsuo Hara, so this actually means that not only are said moves canon, they also show what many characters that didn't get a chance to really showcase themselves were capable off. This is especially welcome with the Nanto characters, like Shin and Souther. Also many events in the original manga extended (such as battles with major bosses like Heart) or had new scenarios added in (for example the battle with Zeed were only several pages in the manga and the entire gang was massacred in one location while Ken's Rage features a true raid where Zeed thugs were found in every corner looting and murder). - There was a console RPG adaptation of Fist of the North Star titled Hokuto no Ken 3 (since it was the third game based on the series on the Famicom) that adapted the storyline of the entire manga (up to the Kaioh arc at least). The game ended up having a sequel titled Hokuto no Ken 4 that featured a new storyline set several years later that revolved around the next Hokuto Shinken successor. - Magic Knight Rayearth game adaptations adds much new lore to the existing Mythos wherein the original manga was only 6 volumes with events jumping immediately to another. For example the Sega Saturn game adds in so many characters, new locations (including towns which strangely were absent from the source material), and many side stories thrown. The SNES games, while mostly sticking with the manga's plot, also adds new towns, expands upon the locations visited in the manga (adding new events, larger dungeons, etc) and most notably gives the Magic Knights many new spells that never existed in any other incarnation of the story. - The majority of The Warriors serves as a prequel to the movie, explaining the characters' backstories. The final missions have the players play through the events of the film, plus an extra epilogue. - The Sega CD version of Snatcher features an extended opening sequence that adapts the prologue comic from the manual, which depicts Gillian and Jaime's last conversation before Gillian begins his first night as a JUNKER agent. It also features an ending that reveals what happened to \|\|Mika and Katrina before Gillian leaves to destroy the Snatchers' main base in Russia\|\|. - The Turok franchise. In the original comics, a pair of Indians get stuck in a valley full of dinosaurs... and that's it. In the video games, "Turok" is a title given to the eldest child in the Fireseed family, assigned to protect the portal between Earth and another dimension where "time has no meaning". Tal'Set Fireseed ( Turok: Dinosaur Hunter), Joshua Fireseed ( Turok 2: Seeds of Evil), and Danielle/Joshua Fireseed ( Turok 3: Shadows of Oblivion) take up the mantle and venture to the Lost Lands, stopping Omnicidal Maniacs from taking it over and hunting down the bio-mechanical dinosaurs, demons and aliens that have spilled through into our world. Read that over and look at how we got from "two Indians in prehistoric valley" to that video game plot. - The Godfather: The Game expands on some parts the movie skims over. For example, in the movie, Bruno Tattaglia's whacking is given just an offhand mention. It gets expanded into a plotline mission in the game. - Super Robot Wars occasionally does this, particularly characters who are Spared by the Adaptation, be they heroic or villainous, such as \|\|Master Asia\|\| in Super Robot Wars Reversal, Fonse Kagatie in Shin Super Robot Wars, \|\|Tekkaman Rapier\|\| and Jonathan Glenn in Super Robot Wars Judgment. - One of the more prominent examples is a manga for Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden, which involves Time Travel. The story showcases what happens during the timespan between the first game and Alpha Gaiden (which is only referred in one or two lines in the game), some background on the Machinery Children, expansions on battles and what exactly happened to the cast from Alpha that is left behind by those who are transported to the Bad Future. - Super Robot Wars: Original Generation will generally expand on the cast by giving them more detailed origins. In Alpha 2, Ibis Douglas' past is hinted at, but never explained in detail. Original Generation 2 showcases her beginnings as a rookie pilot who dreams of heading off into space and being chosen for Project Terrestrial Dream. Often, Adaptation Distillation is also in the works: while her story from Alpha 2 is repeated in the Second Original Generation, it's executed differently - Ibis does not accidentally kill her mentor in a freak training accident; \|\|he dies off-screen from illness\|\|. - The Star Wars: Battlefront games add battles that were implied or logical extensions of the films, such as the theft of the Death Star plans and the liberation of Cloud City. - Spider-Man 2 is based upon the movie, but adds loads of characters and villains that would never have made it into the film due to time (e.g. Black Cat, Shocker, Rhino). Fans liked it. The first installment did this as well, probably the most noteworthy was that the burglar who shot uncle Ben turned out the be the gang leader of a gang called the Skulls so you had to go and beat them up first before you could find out where the shooter was. - The game of Spider-Man 3 continues the tradition: as well as the New Goblin, Sandman and Venom from the movie, the game introduces villains such as Lizard, Kingpin, and Kraven. - LEGO Adaptation Game: - All of the games like to do this, most of them taking 3-4 movies totalling around 8 hours of content and turning them into 10-20 hours of gameplay, but some of them like The LEGO Movie Videogame or LEGO The Incredibles take 1-2 film totalling 2-4 hours and lengthen them to have the same amount of content, to the point there's pretty much more original content than adapted source material. - LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens not only takes what is around a 2-hour movie and turns it into 15 hours worth of gameplay and cutscenes, but it also has bonus levels bridging Return of the Jedi to the new movie, filling in some details about what happened between the two films. - In GoldenEye (1997), several levels take place in the nine-year gap between the opening sequence and the proper beginning of the film. This includes Bond visiting a nuclear silo (and seeing Ouromov) and visiting the incomplete Severnaya bunker. Later on, near the end of the game, Bond also pursues Alec Trevelyan through a series of flooded caverns as the villain runs towards the control centre antenna. - In the N64 adaptation of The World Is Not Enough, there was a subway sequence with a bomb threat that was not featured in the film (set between the boat chase and "Cigar Girl"'s suicide), among other additions, such as getting a full chase level out of a scene that lasts ten seconds in the movie. - Like the film, the video game of The Haunted Mansion had to build a brand new backstory for the mansion, including a backstory for Madame Leota. - In The Lord of the Rings Online Turbine has been forced to do this in order to make an MMO out of Tolkien's work. More specifically it gives more back story to the events taking place outside of The Fellowship's journey. Most of these take place immediately before and during the events depicted in The Lord of the Rings, but they occasionally give flashbacks taking place well before. - An SNES version of Lord of the Rings had lots of this as well, but done very poorly. First you had to assemble the party of four Hobbits (Pippin and Merrin separate), and find old Gaffer's glasses in a cave west of the Shire, otherwise Samgee wouldn't join. Then several hours later, you had to find 12 talismans otherwise you couldn't get through some tombs that were never in the book... - This was such a factor in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel that many diehard Tolkien fans dropped it despite the popularity of the games. Notable points of contension include the use of previously unseen wildlife, the alternate timeline of Minas Ithal falling after the death of Helm Hammerhand instead of well before, and the identity of a few ringwraiths \|\|notably Isildur, who is supplanted by Talion himself before the War of the Ring, and the two ringwraith "sisters" seen in the Blade of Galadriel DLC\|\|. - The console ports of Return to Castle Wolfenstein have a prologue mission set in Egypt, not found in the PC version. - The SNES port of Prince of Persia added many new levels and traps, as well as boss battles. - The PS2 version of Splinter Cell has an additional mission at a nuclear power plant, to make up for the system's graphical limitations. This causes a minor plot hole in the other versions, which still act as though the mission happened, leaving players confused about some "missing Americium-239" Lambert freaks out over. - Iron Tank, the NES adaptation of SNK's TNK III, was greatly expanded from its arcade counterpart, with branching paths, bosses, new enemies and weapons, and a "Blind Idiot" Translation ("Watch out, use radar, gigantic enemy objects up ahead!"). In fact, most NES adaptations of arcade games did this, making up for the severe technical shortcomings of the time with additional content. Sometimes they ended up being completely different from their predecessors, and sometimes even surpassed the original in gamers' memories ( Bionic Commando, Ninja Gaiden, and Rygar being prime examples of the latter). - The Pitfall! arcade game, strangely enough produced by Sega, featured enhanced versions of the overworld of the first Pitfall and the underworld of the second, and added Minecart Madness and Temple of Doom stages. The Atari 800 computer version of Pitfall II was also expanded. - Areas 4 and 8 in the SMS version of Wonder Boy are exclusive to that version, and feature entirely new environments and enemies. The boss levels of each are set in the skies, and feature tougher bosses that throw lightning and have different theme music than the rest. The sequel's SMS port also have an extra stage set in a Ghost Town. - The PC Engine CD version of Raiden, in addition to the obligatory Redbook music, had two additional levels with their own music pieces. Much later, the Xbox 360 port of Raiden IV also had two exclusive stages, somewhat alleviating the short length of the original arcade game. - Debatable with Parasite Eve; it is an adaptation of a franchise that started out as a movie and a novel, but at the same time, acts more as a sequel/continuation of the original story where it happens in a new location, this time New York. - realMyst adds a new Age to the original Myst, plus additional backstory tying it into the wider story of Atrus's family and people. - Hudson Soft's Challenger for the Famicom took most of the gameplay and the English title of Stop The Express and made them the first stage of an otherwise original Action-Adventure game. - The SNES port of Sonic Blast Man is a standard Beat 'em Up in which the bonus game in between levels is the actual arcade game, with a much lower chance of injuring yourself. - Rockman 4 Minus Infinity is a Rom Hack of Mega Man 4. It still has the same plot as the original, but the levels have been expanded, there are new minibosses and the powers obtained from the Masters have changed. - Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable is designed with multiple routes diverging from how the story originally unfolded. It also depicts \|\|the Witch forms of Mami, Kyoko, and Homura\|\|. - Despite being based on three movies in total, The Matrix: Path of Neo still manages to add in more material for the game. Examples include more detail going into Neo's training, Neo being trapped on a stray code resembling a subway and facing down a SWAT team right after the famous one-on-one fight with Agent Smith, and Neo rescuing more inhabitants of the Matrix in between the events of the first and second films. - There is also a minor branching path in that you can choose to follow Morpheus' instructions to escape the agents by climbing outside of Neo's workplace building. - The Sega Genesis version of Wardner, titled Wardner no Mori SPECIAL in Japan, expands Stage 4 and divides it in half, and lengthens the final stage with a Boss Rush and several vertical shafts. - The NES version of Willow takes the basic plot of the film, adds new detail to existing locations, and adds a number of villages, items, monsters, dungeons, and characters, introducing the village of Dew, the Eagle Clan, the dragons Po and Matanda, and Kchil of the Nail Clan. Bavmorda is the messenger of the Spirit of the Skies, and Fin Raziel is the messenger of the Spirit of the Earth. - The NES port of Contra expanded the fifth and final level of the Arcade Game into a four-level sequence. Some of the previous levels were also lengthened. Super C was more drastic, replacing the arcade's fourth stage with four completely new levels, as well as changing the order of or replacing certain bosses. - King's Quest II was mainly a Fantasy Kitchen Sink mishmash of unrelated elements, making the plot feel very much like an Excuse Plot. The Fan Remake by AGD Interactive, on the other hand, added to Kolyma's lore and tied most of the characters and places together, such as making the witch Hagitha the Big Bad of the game (though she still works under the Greater-Scope Villain of the remake trilogy, \|\|The Father\|\|,) and making Dracula \|\|Count Caldaur, the ruler of Kolyma who mysteriously vanished years ago\|\|. - Donkey Kong '94 is this to the original arcade game. - Several Bleach games gave some characters all new powers to account for them not being actually introduced in the manga yet. This includes Kyoraku getting wind powers, Ukitake using water and electricity, and Harribel shooting Sword Beams of all shapes and sizes. - Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 massively expanded on several fights from the source material, such as the efforts to subdue the Nine-Tails on Naruto's birthday, Kakashi's fight against \|\|the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist\|\| (which as mentioned above was also adapted to the anime) and the five Kage versus \|\|Edo Madara\|\| fight, an Offscreen Moment of Awesome that had yet to be shown period. - Marvel Future Fight is more or less an adaptation of Jonathan Hickman's Avengers Saga, but with content from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while expanding out some of the alternate universes from the incursions and including significantly more comic characters. - Total War: Warhammer: - A couple of the games legendary lords (army generals and faction leaders representing specific characters), such as Helman Ghorst and Duke Alberic of Bordelaux, have only a couple paragraphs of description in the tabletop lore, but in the video game become much more developed characters, with their own unique items, abilities and quest battle chains. - In order to make up for Bretonnia's somewhat limited unit choice in the tabletop material, CA ended up flat-out inventing a number of units, such as footsquires, holy water trebuchets and hippogriff knights, to fill out its roster and make it more competitively viable. - The Lizardmen get several new units, including Feral Cold Ones (a pack of Cold Ones, a type of raptor-like dinosaurs normally used by the Lizardmen as cavalry) and likewise "feral" variants of the other dinosaur mounts as one-model monster units, with the reasoning being that giving the Lizardmen more dinosaur units would make playing as them more fun. There is also a Bastiladon variant with a Revivification Crystal, included to give the Lizardmen more options for healing and buffing. - Norsca. In the tabletop game, Norsca never had its own army book and had little presence outside of the background lore — its only presence in the game proper were some units in the Warriors of Chaos army. In Total War: Warhammer, it becomes a fully playable, independent faction separate from the Chaos Warriors, with its own separate gameplay mechanics and unit choices, many of which were created for the game. - The Tomb Kings, upon their debut in Total War: Warhammer II, received several new units, namely Nehekhara Swordsmen (to address their lack of mid-tier infantry) and Nehekhara Riders (to address the same concern, but this time for cavalry). Additionally, the Hierotitan finally received a model and is one of their special construct units. - The Vampire Coast is the second game's version of Norsca, being relegated to some fluff and a few Vampire Count units in the tabletop game. Here, they receive an entire roster, with four legendary lords — two taken from Dreadfleet, while one was created for the game. - The Daemons of Chaos were a single army in the tabletop, but here, they're four different armies, with each incorporating units that normally belong to the Warriors of Chaos. - Kislev is Total War: Warhammer III's version of Norsca and the Vampire Coast — only mentioned in the tabletop game, they're a full faction here, complete with Legendary Lords (one a Canon Foreigner), new units, and a new Lore of Magic. - The Empire of Grand Cathay from the third game. In the thirty years since Warhammer started, Cathay has never been portrayed on the tabletop, meaning quite literally everything in their roster had to be created wholesale for this game. - One of the more notable and well-received features in SPV3, a Custom Campaign that serves as a re-imagining of the original Halo: Combat Evolved campaign, is the addition of level extensions to the missions The Pillar of Autumn, Halo, Assault on the Control Room, Two Betrayals and The Maw. These extensions have revitalized many of the level layouts that dedicated fans have become familiar levels. Many fans have stated that because of how well these extensions flow with the existing level layouts, they could easily be mistaken as part of the original level design. - Pokémon remakes all tend to do this to some degree. - FireRed and LeafGreen adds the Fame Checker, an item that stores various trivia about sixteen of the game's most important NPCs. Most importantly, there's a whole new area called the Sevii Islands, where a lot of the newer Pokémon are located, and is host to an extended postgame where the player has to disband a branch of Team Rocket that is unaware of Giovanni ending Team Rocket's current operations. - HeartGold and SoulSilver elevates the Kimono Girls to plot relevance, with their roles bolstered to have their presence needed for meeting their respective versions' mascot legendaries. The game also introduces the Pokéathalon, restores certain areas that were cut down or removed in the original like Viridian Forest, and expands upon Crystal's Suicune subplot. - Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire greatly expands upon Teams Magma and Aqua, giving the admins and leaders more distinct personalities when they were nearly identical in the originals. There's also more backstory given on the Abandoned Ship, and the postgame Delta Episode actually goes out of its way to expand upon and explain the series' timeline and universe. - Fire Emblem Gaiden's remake, Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, gives the vast majority of the original's characters far more presence, whether it be through more presence in the main game, base/village conversations, or the now-standard Support Conversations. There are also a few new characters, and Memory Prisms allow the player to view flashbacks expanding on various new and old characters' backstories. - Return of the Dark Sorcerer contains an optional extended intro that expands on the backstory of the mission to locate and seize the frozen esper during the prologue of the original Final Fantasy VI as well as additional pieces of dialogue in existing scenes to better flesh out some things that were Lost in Translation. - The Legend of Zelda: - The 3DS remake of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask adds tons of previously-absent details to certain shops and buildings, such as the Bomb Shop Owner's single note about bomb-powered moon travel being expanded to multiple rocket sketches littering the entire store, or the house at Romani Ranch now having UFO pictures hanging on the walls to foreshadow the arrival of "Them". - The Switch remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening fleshes out the minigames that were minor parts of the original game, including the Trendy Game (now a full physics-based claw game), the fishing spot (more fish to catch and multiple lures), and the raft-riding game (which now uses the Hookshot and has an additional time trial mode). They also provide more rewards. - Dragon Quest: - Dragon Quest IV: Aamon is given more development in the remake, which adds a new chapter to firmly establish he was behind Rose's murder and Psaro's descent into madness. - Dragon Quest V: - Bishop Ladja gets considerably more screentime and involvement in the plot in The Remake than in the original. To elaborate, he's the one who petrifies you and your wife instead of Kon (as a last-ditch effort before kicking the bucket). Also, instead of being killed in Talon Tower as in the original, he survives to personally execute King Korol for his failure to defeat the party and ends up being fought at the entrance to The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. - Party chat will also flesh out your human party members since all of them will have something to say nearly every time you talk to someone, visit somewhere, or after an event. - Dragon Quest Builders 2: - The game is pretty much "Adaptation Expansion For Dragon Quest II: The Game" and expands especially on Malroth and the nature of the Children of Hargon enormously. - In the original game, Hargon and his minions had absolutely no motivation for being opponents beyond "we're the villains"; here, the nature of their Religion of Evil is expanded on tremendously and it deals with the way monsters in general tend to see themselves and their place in the world (and how Hargon exploited that). - Similarly, Malroth in the original game had basically no characterization whatsoever, being basically just being a big scary demon for you to fight at the end of the game since Dragon Quest I had established the tradition of needing a bigger foe at the end; in the original game, and especially original English release, Malroth was barely even mentioned prior to his appearance. Here, the Malroth you meet at the start is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who gradually becomes friends with the Builder, and exactly what the Master of Destruction is, and what his relationship with the idea of Creation (as personified by the Builders) is a central theme of the game. \|\|Malhalla and the final sequences of the game in general also up his Villain Pedigree tremendously. In the original game, he was one of Toriyama's far less inspired designs and wasn't terribly threatening (looking more like a low-tier Dragon Ball villain than anything); the Malhalla sequence repackages God!Malroth as a deific Reality Warper whose limbs can manifest out of nowhere and gouge out massive chunks of terrain, can manifest black holes which visibly suck blocks away into nothing, who can get big enough that his sheddings can be used as building materials, who can spawn "shadow fiend" versions of monsters that are pure automatons of Destruction and his proper god form is way more threatening than it ever was in DQII\|\|. - As a side note: the game takes that whole "Malroth is barely mentioned" thing from DQII and actually makes it a plot point. It comes up that barely any members of the Children of Hargon actually know the "holy name" of the Master of Destruction, which is why the various members of the Children you meet don't take much note of Malroth at first. \|\|Pastor Al is clearly starting to wonder about him toward the end of Furrowfield, and the King of Moonbrooke similarly seems to have some suspicions; it's the high-up members you meet in Malhalla who actually know who Malroth might be, and by that time, you're trying desperately to find him.\|\| - Even Hargon gets a bit of this, despite being seemingly dead thanks to the events of DQII. \|\|It turns out the illusory Midenhall was a lot more than the Scions of Erdrick ever realized, and it's part of Hargon's Batman Gambit to cheat death if defeated; he essentially re-created himself and a whole little world outside of the castle area by using the Creation side of the duality that Malroth's power represents. While it's essentially illusory and will fade in time without extraordinary intervention, it would still give Hargon just enough time to re-empower Malroth and have him shed any remaining shreds of mortal attachment he might have, turning Malroth into a true avatar of pure Destruction. He did not, however, reckon on the attachment Human!Malroth would form with the Builder, despite wanting a Builder in the illusion to draw out Malroth's urges toward Destruction.\|\| - Mario Kart 8 keeps the tradition of the series of bringing back tracks from previous games remade with newer graphics, but while previous games tried to recreate those retro tracks in every detail, Mario Kart 8 takes many liberties and adds a lot of graphical details that weren't in the originals, and they also change the layouts and gameplay elements to acomodate for the new mechanics. But the tracks that had the most changes were the ones from the SNES and GBA games; those games were 2D, but used Mode 7 to simulate 3D at the cost of a completely flat terrain, so the remakes made the courses way different and ditched the flat terrains for more ups and downs. The tracks Cheese Land and Ribbon Road look almost nothing like the originals even if you compare them side to side. Here's a comparison of all tracks. - The PC Engine CD version of Emerald Dragon added in some story details and extra sections that weren't in the PC version. These changed mostly carried over to the SNES version. - Hearts of Iron: - The mod Hearts of Iron: 1984 uses Hearts of Iron's engine to simulate a world war based on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Since every country is playable yet the original material has a very limited scope ( Nineteen Eighty-Four is entirely told from the perspective of a single character living in a specific part of Oceania), the modders imagined various details to fill the blanks: - There are counterparts to Big Brother for the other super-states. Eastasia is led by Immortal Father, who uses a portrait of Mao Zedong, while Eurasia is led by Mother Russia, who uses a portrait of Valentina Terechkova) - The "disputed zone" is split between five playable countries (Free Africa, Free Arabia, Free India, Free Indochina, and Free Indonesia), who all have their own leader. - To make the game more manageable by AI or human players, the mod features an alternate mode where each of the three super-states are split into five (technically independent) allied playable countries with their own borders, names, and flags. For instance, Oceania consists of Airstrip One (UK and Ireland), Thirteen Sectors (Eastern coast of USA and Canada, flyover states), Gran Pacifica (Western coast of USA and Canada, Texas, Central America), Gran Columbia (South America), and Frontier (South Africa, New Zealand, Australia). - Equestria at War fills in the blanks for the setting of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic with three new continents (Equus, Griffonia, and Zebrica) worth of countries, cultures, religions, histories, and characters. - Frogger: The Great Quest: The PC version has an entire new level set between "Dark Trail Ruins" and "Starkenstein's Castle", simply called "The Dark Trail", where you have a boss that was not in the PlayStation 2 version. - The first Nancy Drew PC game were based on actual Nancy Drew books; the first five were adapted from the Spin-Off Nancy Drew Files series, with the next few coming from the primary Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. They drifted back and forth between the two series after that, including adapting both the very first book ( The Secret of the Old Clock) and the most popular book ( The Secret of Shadow Ranch.) Somewhere around The Legend of the Crystal Skull, they started writing their own stories. - The original Half-Life was the original Trope Namer for Disappointing Last Level (known then as Xen Syndrome), because the final levels in Xen were noted as being boring and lacking many of the puzzles that made the rest of the game interesting while providing nice breaks from combat. The Fan Remake, Black Mesa, took extreme pains to make the Xen chapters far more vibrant and interesting, adding in new maps and enemies while expanding on what was already present. At least one developer at Valve admitted to finding Black Mesa more fun than the original Half-Life, and Valve allowed the mod to be put up for sale by the Crowbar Collective with only two restrictions. - One Piece: Pirate Warriors adds more from its source material. - You actually get to fight Akainu as Luffy and kick his ass. - Also Whitebeard's use of Conqueror's Haki was an Informed Ability in the manga and anime, whereas he actually uses it in this game. - Taken even further in the fourth game, when the special system was changed to give every character a list of possible specials, from which they can use up to four at time. Now, every character confirmed to have Conqueror's Haki is capable of using it as a special, even characters who have yet to be shown using it. - To this day, we've never seen Shanks properly fight in the manga or the anime. Thus to make him a playable character in 3 and 4 they had to come up with a moveset from the ground up, one involving liberal use of charging his weapons with Haki to mow down armies with lightning fast speed and literal lightning, courtesy of his well-developed Conquerer's Haki. - A Little Lily Princess is Romance Game based on A Little Princess. To allow all the routes to be a full story past the Point of No Return, each of them is a mix of material from the original novel and material that was to added flesh out each character in a way that is consistent with their portrayal in the novel. This is especially true for Alpha Bitch Lavinia, her best friend Jessie, and Mariette, whose permanent departure from the story is part of the Riches to Rags moment in the novel. - Toy Story 3: Several levels in the story mode are based on scenes that don't appear in the movie, such as a brand new Imagine Spot with Bonnie and an entire aside level where Rex plays the Buzz Lightyear game from the Fake-Out Opening of the second film (which itself also undergoes expansion from what we see in the film). \|\|And that's not even mentioning Haunted Bakery...\|\| - The SpongeBob Movie Game does a lot to stretch out the plot of the film, as scenes generally never stayed in one location for long. - There are entire levels based on the otherwise brief scenes of SpongeBob's dream at the beginning, the aftermath of SpongeBob and Patrick's ice cream bender at Goofy Goober, and the duo leaving Bikini Bottom in the Patty Wagon. SpongeBob and Patrick traveling through the desert after getting carjacked is two levels. - Plankton's mass mind control plot unfolds after the above instead of after SpongeBob and Patrick escape the Thug Tug. Both desert levels involve thwarting Plankton's attempts to lure more people to Bikini Bottom to build his army. - The scenes of SpongeBob and Patrick sneaking into the Thug Tug get their own level which greatly expands on the interior of the building, them escaping in the reclaimed Patty Wagon is another, and the frogfish is a proper boss fight. - The musical sequence in the trench is now three levels, one of which is another mission to stop Plankton's advertising, and a fight against Dennis, followed by an entirely new Dream Sequence level to represent what SpongeBob and Patrick dreamed about after being taken to Shell City. - The escape from Shell City itself is its own level, followed by another fight against Dennis, which is easily the least changed from the film. - Rather than getting launched directly into the Krusty Krab 2 at the climax, SpongeBob and Patrick have to fight through Planktopolis in one level, followed by one last vehicle level where the Patty Wagon is magically restored (after being eaten earlier) and a two-phase Final Boss fight against a Brainwashed King Neptune. - Darm in Ys II was very much a Flat Character, being little more than a mindless force of destruction. This is not the case in the prequel Ys Origin, however, as it actually elaborates on his backstory quite a bit. - The classic Creepypasta "Genetic Memory" is written as a theory exposed to the reader. The illustrated version contained in this video adds a frame story and \|\|a Twist Ending\|\|. - FTL: Kestrel Adventures This whole series is based on a playthrough of the game. In episodes 18-21, the Kestrel ends up in Kaban the planet where the Rebellion was formed. - The original Final Fantasy is a game that's pretty short on story; most characters have no discernible personality and the overall plot is little more than a stream of Fetch Quests broken up by the occasional boss battle. 8-Bit Theater loosely adapts the plot of the game, but turns it into over 1200 strips. Consequently, characters who had maybe two to four textboxes of dialogue are now major recurring characters, the Light Warriors have any character at all, and the plot is a much more complex, with twists, characters, factions, and ideas that weren't even implied in the original, turning the rather generic D&D-esque storyline into a full-on Crapsack World. - To Prevent World Peace was originally intended as a short story about Magical Girl villains. It, er, blossomed out of control. At last count, the author planned for sixteen chapters and was thinking of creating other short stories around the same characters. - Knights of Buena Vista adds extra scenes to Frozen, such as a battle against pirates and Anna thwarting robbers on the street. - Five Kids at Freddy's expands on the story of the missing children incident hinted at in the original games. It is planned to follow all five kids trapped in the pizzeria, with the story stretched out over three days. - Erstwhile adapts lesser-known stories by The Brothers Grimm. Most just follow their version, with the occasional name or exposition thrown in; "Snow-White and Rose-Red," however, adds two new scenes to set up the Official Couples and ending better. (One where Snow White talks to the bear, and another when the girls go in town, see a poster about the missing prince and meet his brother.) - This fan comic retelling of Ib expands both the story and the characters some (e.g. letting Silent Protagonist Ib talk) so the story will flow better in its new medium. - The original "noedoleckiN" concept was comprised of poorly-made logo edits created by younger creators. In ᴛʜᴇ ɴᴏᴇᴅᴏʟᴇᴋᴄɪɴ ᴀʀᴄʜɪᴠᴇꜱ, the anomalies have actual backstory in the form of an otherworldly entity wreaking havoc at the hotels in Universal Orlando Resort. - Batman: The Brave and the Bold: - "Night of The Batmen!" is based on issue #13 of the show's tie-in comic. The writers had to add a lot of padding to stretch the story out into a 22-minute TV episode. - "The Super Batman of Planet X!" does this for the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh. In the comics, the only details revealed about him were that he was an alien scientist named Tlano who was inspired to become a superhero after observing Earth's Batman. The cartoon actually shows his personal life and gives him a love interest, supporting cast, and even an Arch-Enemy. - The cartoon adaptation of The Bear gives backstory as to how he ended up in the girl's town in the first place (followed a bird, got stuck on an ice flow and taken to a zoo by a cargo ship), along with sending him back to the Arctic at the end. It also gives him a reason for visiting the girl, to return the teddy bear she dropped. In the book, he just comes and goes from the house and there wasn't a sequence with a bear made out of stars. - How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. If you read the original book, you'll notice that it lacks Seuss's whimsical naming conventions. According to legend, he wrote it on a dare that he not use his signature made-up words. In the cartoon, with the bet no longer an issue, entire verses are added with the names in full effect. - The children's book The Little Engine That Could has had it done twice; once as a 30-minute movie in 1991, then as a full-length CGI film in 2011, with an All-Star Cast. The first was more true to the book than the second. - Fox's Peter Pan & the Pirates massively expanded on the mythos of Peter Pan. All the characters — Peter, Wendy, John, Michael, all the Lost Boys, Tinker Bell, Jane, Hook and all his pirates, the mermaids, Big Chief Little Panther and Tiger Lily — are all greatly fleshed out in terms of characterization, and all get a Day in the Limelight at one time or another, as well as some extra characters who were made up just for the show, like Hook's brother Captain Patch, Tiger Lily's brother Hard-To-Hit, the fairies and their King and Queen, and many others. - While the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon's adaptations of comic book stories are usually paced to correspond to their source material — one issue will almost always translate into one episode — two exceptions stand out. The first is the arc composed by the episodes "The Search for Splinter," "Turtles in Space," and "Secret Origins" multi-parters, which take five issues' worth of material and expands it into ten, while the second is its adaptation of "Sons of the Silent Age," which, after completing a mostly faithful adaptation of the comic book by the fifteen-minute mark, fills out the rest of the episode with a plot about preventing an uncared-for nuclear power plant from spilling radioactive material into the river which was the setting for the story. - The original ThunderCats cartoon had an open-ended conclusion that left us hanging on an epic battle between Lion-O and Mumm-Ra. However, Wildstorm made several faithful comics to profoundly extend and conclude the story — with a few non-canon adventure comics thrown in for good measure. - The classic Rankin/Bass Christmas specials based on preexisting songs and poems all feature this trope in spades: - Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer expands the plot from "a reindeer is bullied because of his shiny red nose, but then saves Christmas by guiding Santa's sleigh" to "a reindeer is bullied because of his shiny red nose, runs away from home, teams up with Hermey the dentist-elf and Yukon Cornelius, visits the Island of Misfit Toys, faces the Abominable Snow Monster, and then saves Christmas by guiding Santa's sleigh". - Frosty the Snowman expands the story beyond "Frosty is brought to life by a magic hat, plays with the kids, and then leaves" to include his special friendship with little girl Karen, their attempts to travel to the North Pole where Frosty will be safe from melting, the villainous magician Professor Hinkle who originally owned the magic hat and wants it back, Frosty's Disney Death when Hinkle locks him in a greenhouse to melt, and Santa Claus's saving the day in the end. - The original song of The Little Drummer Boy just has a poor boy visiting the baby Jesus, having no gift to give him, playing his drum for him instead, and the baby smiling at him. All the other details found in the special (the boy's name being Aaron, his parents' murder and his resulting misanthropy, the details of how he arrives at the manger, all the other characters' roles, etc.) are new. - The basic plot of the original The Year Without a Santa Claus poem is that Santa doesn't feel like delivering presents this year, the kids gets whiny about it, but one kid named Iggy Heppelwhite tells his classmates that Christmas is about giving, the kids take his word to heart and give presents to Santa, and that cheers him up and gets him to go on his annual trek. Rankin/Bass' version added in the subplots about people not caring about Christmas anymore, and Mrs. Claus sending elves Jingle and Jangle to look for Christmas cheer, and of course, the Miser Brothers. In fact, Iggy Thistlewhite is the only character in the special who originates from the poem (besides the standard Santa characters, of course). - The BBC's Christmas adaptations of Julia Donaldson picture books do this, mostly adding extra scenes which emphasise plot points (the carnivores exchanging notes and realising they were tricked in The Gruffalo) or character notes (establishing why all the animals would like to travel with the witch in Room on the Broom, and that the cat isn't keen on the idea), while leaving the actual story as it is. - The Toot & Puddle special I'll Be Home for Christmas is this of the original book, adding in a number of new subplots and other material to fill a 45 minute special. - The original six Madeline specials are highly extended versions of the Madeline books. The subsequent cartoon series, which ended up running four seasons, took the expansion further with new, original stories. - The Zipi y Zape 2003 animated series introduced some of Zipi and Zape's classmates that were never seen in the comics, such as Invi, Evilina or Wanda. - The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! and its sister cartoons had to take characters from the source material who really had nothing in the way of personality or development and write a show about them. Their characterization of Luigi being a Lovable Coward is also largely considered by fans to be the inspiration for Luigi's personality in newer games as well. - Tie-in SpacePOP books show how Geela took over, and mention that Tibbitt is a present from her late father. They also go into more detail about the princesses, Geela, Chamberlin, and their lives, as well as the episodes' content. - The cartoon expands on Juno's reality TV experiences, as well as adding a scene after an interview where Geela tries to arrest the princesses and the crowd helps them escape. - The Magic Pudding: Bunyip Bluegum's quest to find his parents was invented for the movie to provide the story with some structure; in the book he just sets out to see the world with no particular aim in mind. - The Animated Adaptation of The Duckling Gets a Cookie?! (a Pigeon Series book) from Scholastic and Weston Woods has an added scene at the end. In it, \|\|The Pigeon sees the Duckling with the second cookie, without nuts, that he got after asking politely for it. He gets angry that the Duckling got another cookie and thinks that the Duckling's cookie, without nuts, looks tastier than the one with nuts that the Duckling gave him\|\|. - Quite a bit of this happens across various episodes of Superbook (2011). Some examples: - The Bible generally portrays the rebellion in Heaven in only one short statement: "And there was war in Heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon (Satan); and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not." note : Revelation 12:7-8 In the episode "In The Beginning", we get to see a short but action-packed portrayal of that battle, with Lucifer and Michael going for each other in the clash before Michael personally throws Lucifer out of Heaven (while paraphrasing Isaiah 14:12-15 for good measure). Michael: How you are fallen from Heaven, oh Lucifer, son of the morning. How you are cut down to the ground, you, who weaken the nations. Yet now you are brought down to the lowest depths of the pit. - In the Bible, the battle between David and Goliath is depicted as a Curb-Stomp Battle in David's favor when he knocks Goliath out with a stone to the head (and then cuts off the giant's head with his own sword). Here, in the episode "A Giant Adventure", the confrontation is drawn out a little with David having to dodge Goliath's attacks prior to slinging the stone. Additionally, the episode explicitly shows David's older brother Eliab as being ready to challenge the Philistines, only to immediately draw back when Goliath first appears (in the source material, while Eliab is part of the Israelite army, he's not specifically pointed out except for when he scolds David for being at the battlefield). - The first half of "Jesus Feeds the Hungry", which is about Jesus's miracle of turning water into wine at the wedding of Cana, tells the story from the viewpoint of the servants, who the kids and Gizmo are working with in the kitchen area (in the source material, the only time we hear about the servants is when Jesus gives them instructions for the miracle to happen). Prior to the discovery of the wine having run out, Chris learns about the local wedding culture from the son of the wedding's steward, while the steward and Gizmo discuss how to maximize the quality of the food while using smaller portion sizes per guest. - Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters takes a well-known novelty toy with little worldbuilding to it and revamps it as a superhero animated series with its own supporting cast of allies and villains, a setting with its own lore, and major story arcs. - Green Eggs and Ham, the Netflix Animated Adaptation of Green Eggs and Ham book turns what was originally a simple misadventure wherein Sam-I-Am tries to get a grumpy guy to try the eponymous food(s) into a buddy comedy wherein Sam-I-Am and the grumpy guy must team up and go on an odyssey across a Seussian world to return a rare bird to its natural habitat, with many different parties out to stop them. - The Rotten Ralph animated specials The Taming of the Ralph (adapted from the first book) and Not-So-Rotten Ralph (adapted from the book of the same name) had more content added to the stories to fill out a half-hour running time, with the former including a conflict where Ralph is prevented from going home to his owner Sarah because the alley cats Fleabag and Lulu hold him prisoner and refuse to let him go until he helps them finish a song they are writing as well as the latter having Ralph's misbehavior escalate a bit before Sarah's family sends him to Mr. Fred's Finishing School. - Fangbone! expands greatly upon the content of the Fangbone! Third Grade Barbarian books, adding a much larger cast of characters and building upon the setting of Skullbania. Notably, Venomous Drool is actually a much more prominent character in the show than he was in the original books. - Thomas & Friends: - Series 1-2 and 4 (and half of 3) were based on the Railway Series books, but the other half of Series 3 and Series 5 onwards have been original. Ironically, not every story in the Railway Series has been adapted to television, but since the books and TV series are now completely different from each other there is little chance of these stories making it to the screen. However, Season 20 adapted the book Small Railway Engines. Yes, 25 years later, more stories were adapted. - In 2015, a special entitled The Adventure Begins was released, which retold the first two books but added slight additions: Specifically Thomas' first day on Sodor, Thomas getting his blue #1 paint job for the first time, the original #1 Glynn the Coffee Pot, Thomas helping Henry with his fear of rain, Annie and Clarabel originally being James' coaches before they were given to Thomas, and most notably an extra scene being added to the "Thomas and the Breakdown Train" chapter where Thomas tries to save James during his runaway before he derails. - Franklin did an entire season based almost entirely on material from Paulette Bourgeois and Brenda Clarks' original picture books, but then went on to air six seasons as well as a CGI spinoff of original material. The first two movies, however, were also based loosely on elements from the books, the first movie more than the second. - Hilda: The graphic novels that the show is based on contained only five books when the first season went into production, and the fifth had to be omitted due to ending on a cliffhanger that wouldn't be resolved for another few years. Meanwhile, the four books they did adapt only provided enough material for five episodes, so several new stories had to be created to get a complete 13-episode season. - Watership Down (1999): After the show runs out of source material from the novel at the end of season 2, it uses original storylines for its third season. - Mr. Benn: With one exception, the television series adapted all the original books, and even had a one-off revival to adapt a later novel. Later books, in fact, adapted episodes of the television series. - Merchandise-Driven works almost always are this. A cast and crew will, in a nutshell, be handed some toys and maybe a bit of a back story and told "advertise this". Other than that and some Executive Meddling along the way they're basically free to do whatever they want with it. - Works based on The Lord of the Rings add details not present in the books, including naming the unnamed Nazgul, adding new towns, expanding the world map, adding new characters or adding detail to minor characters to the point of becoming new characters.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvertookTheSeries
Pacified Adaptation - TV Tropes In a franchise that contains lots of (if not defined by) high-octane thrills and violence, some iterations are noticeably tamer than the original. This can be done for pragmatic reasons, seeing some of the action in the original bogs down the story and distracts the viewers from more important things that are happening. While not always the case, this can be the result of a Genre Shift, as some genres are more predisposed to action and violence than others. If one were to adapt an Action Horror, Shonen or Superhero story into something Lighter and Softer, like a High School AU or a Slice of Life Drama or an Ecchi-Comedy with Magic Realism elements, then it's less likely bodies will start dropping. Sub-Trope of Adaptation Deviation. Compare Lighter and Softer, Bowdlerise and Macekre for attempts to make works more family-friendly, which may include toning down the action such as fighting and violence. Contrast Actionized Adaptation, where the adaptation is more action-packed than the source material. Unrelated to Adaptational Wimp. ## Examples: - Ghost in the Shell (1995) is an Adaptation Distillation that focuses on the Puppet Master storyline from the original manga. The Puppet Master storyline is indeed a large part of the manga's storyline, but it's only one part of a greater series of mostly actionized events that focus on Section 9 being a counter-terrorism unit. The 1995 adaptation places a much heavier focus on philosophy of humans and technology but sets up the action scenes to really deliver when they happen. - Grimms Notes The Animation, despite adapting a game with a big focus on battles, action, and making your Heroes stronger, has a really bad habit of pulling Battle Discretion Shots for its combat scenes, to move the plot forward and add a bunch of "comedy" scenes. The party is ready to kick a group of Villains' asses? Cut to commercial! And, on return, the party has already taken them all out. This also resulted in a few enemy characters being Adapted Out, since most of them were irrelevant to the story. Even the fights against the Chaos Tellers only last for a couple of minutes. - .hack: - The original .hack R1 Games are heavily combat-dominated Eastern RPGs, but their animated adaptation/prequel .hack//SIGN is largely a talkie show, with only a handful of combat scenes scattered across 26 episodes, while the remaining runtime consists of dialogue, navel-gazing, and awesome music. - The .hack//G.U. games are just as heavily combat-oriented as their predecessors, but the prequel anime .hack//Roots has very few action scenes, with the characters mostly discussing what they want to become for themselves as hints of a greater mystery leading up to the games starts to unfold. It serves more as a set-up for Haseo to set himself down his path as the Player Killer-Killer that he's become infamous for being at the start of the first game. - While Season II of the Rosario + Vampire manga escalates the plot from a quirky Harem comedy with monsters to an action-packed Shonen drama with global stakes, the anime adaptation is Lighter and Softer, placing more emphasis on Fanservice and a more episodic format. This can be justified since Season II of the anime was released before the shift occurred in the manga. - The anime adaptation of Violet Evergarden is significantly less violent than its source story, and makes present-day Violet much more morally opposed to violence as opposed to her light novel self, who avoids killing mostly because her boss asked her not to but is still willing to deal potentially fatal violence in defense of self and others (such as shooting a terrorist in both legs and throwing him off a moving train). Tellingly, the anime Violet never uses a gun again after the war ends and she is discharged from the army, but the LN Violet does use guns on several occasions, conceal carries a pistol along with knives and stilettos almost everywhere she goes, and uses her salary to buy new weapons when they strike her interest. The anime also avoids the subject of what the army made her do to prove herself as a living weapon \|\|violently slaughtering multiple criminal prisoners in a sadistic type of Gladiator Games\|\| which the LN showed in all its bloody detail. - The 1976 adaptation of Carrie. In the original book, Carrie burns down not only her senior prom, but most of her hometown. The film, however, was made in a time before CGI on a budget of just $1.8 million, which is still worth less than $10 million even when adjusted for inflation. As a result, the production kept only the destruction at the prom, Carrie killing \|\|Billy and Chris in a car explosion\|\|, and the finale where she burns down her house, and even that last one had to be scaled back when an effects shot malfunctioned and they didn't have the money to redo it. The 2013 version made each of those scenes more bombastic, including having Carrie cave in a street and blow up a gas station as collateral damage when she kills \|\|Billy and Chris\|\|, but kept Carrie's rampage limited to just them. The 2002 made-for-TV version was the only one that filmed the destruction of the town, and that one was hobbled by low-budget CGI. - One of the criticisms of 2015's Fantastic Four was that it was lacking in action or super heroics, due in large part to the film's poor pacing — in an hour and a half of runtime (not counting the credits), the main characters don't get their superpowers until an hour into the film, and the film's only major action sequence begins around the 80-minute mark. - The 2014 iteration of Godzilla focuses on the human characters a lot more than the monster fights. This has been a very common criticism of this adaptation series as a whole, although this one is particularly guilty of it. - The Hunger Games: While still a pretty violent affair, being a story about teenagers killing each other as competition, much of the violence is less rendered than what the book entails. Things written on paper tend to get very graphic, describing things like bones cracking or bodies splitting open in gruesome places. The movie is able to get away more with a Gory Discretion Shot here and there to keep things PG-13. And blood in general is kept less prevalent despite lethal wounds being dealt at many points. - Jurassic Park is one of those rare adaptations where the source novel actually has more action than the movie. While there is still plenty of danger and peril in the film, the human characters usually survive dinosaur encounters with a combination of quick thinking and some incredibly lucky breaks, whereas in the novel several characters proactively fight back against the dinos and even manage to kill a few. - Zig-zagged with Guest from the Future in relation to the book on which it is based. The 21st-century sequence, which corresponds to the book's first part, is an Actionized Adaptation. However, the 20th-century sequence, compared to the book's second part, is this trope. Though all the chase scenes from the novel are retained, all the fights (Alice and Yulia vs. the pirates at the hospital, \|\|the gym teacher vs. the pirates at school, the children vs. Rat in the final showdown\|\|) are gone. Even the long and dramatic volleyball match with the 7A class is cut and replaced with long jumps that involve no competition with another class and last a couple of minutes. - Coming Out of Their Shells seems to be trying to push a pacifistic narrative. While other versions of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were taught ninjitsu by Splinter and pushed to exercise stealth and anonymity, here it's the exact opposite; Splinter teaches them The Power of Rock and how they should reach out and touch hearts, which makes them the least ninja-like iteration of the turtles yet (and that's saying something). There is only one fight scene and its mostly the Turtles throwing around foot-based puns when Shredder's minions show up. - Gettin' Down in Your Town ramps it up and never actually features the Turtles fighting. The only fight is between Casey and Shredder, and on top being rather dodgy, it only goes for a minute or two. - The Cuphead Show! has much less of a focus on combat and violence than the game it's based on, a frantic run-and-gun platformer. The titular duo of Cuphead and Mugman don't show any prowess for combat or firing cartoon bullets from their fingers, and even the game's bosses that appear pose a very downplayed physical threat. - Zigzagged with Transformers: Rescue Bots. While Transformers as a whole is a war-based series, Rescue Bots is about a team of young, well, Rescue Bots learning to be effective search-and-rescue operatives while working with human allies. Notably, Rescue Bots takes place in the same continuity and concurrently with the much darker Transformers: Prime, with Optimus Prime being a major supporting character. However, no mention is made of the Decepticons or the larger world-threatening conflict throughout the series' run (other than a vague reference to "those who would do us harm" in one episode) and the closest there is to a Big Bad is amoral Mad Scientist Thaddeus Morocco.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PacifiedAdaptation
Over-the-Top Secret - TV Tropes General Maynard: Mr. President, I'm here to bring you up to speed on a program we've been running out of Cheyenne Mountain for the past seven years. President Henry Hayes: I've already had my top secret briefing. Maynard: Yes, Mr. President. But not this. You know the trope. In order to emphasize just how ridiculously important something is, it is classified as "Above Top Secret." Maybe it has a special name, maybe it doesn't, but the point is that high-ranking people who thought they were privy to every secret are...not. The head of an intelligence agency may come across a locked computer file requiring "Level 11" security clearance or some other fictional requirement. This trope is the result of a common misconception of Security Clearances. In Real Life, just because you have a "Top Secret" security clearance doesn't mean you can read through the files of Area 51 other peruse Black Site files at your leisure. You still need to demonstrate a "Need to Know", a justifiable reason why you should have that information. For example, a person working on destroyers would need to know information about destroyers, and might need to know details about cruisers if trying to work out doctrine in which the two classes of ship work together, but said person would have no reason to ask about tanks while on his current assignment. Unfortunately, in fiction, "Need to Know" is generally just a mechanism used to postpone telling people things they DO need to know until some point after the moment when knowing the information would have helped. When someone talks about having "Code Word Clearance", they mean that the code-word of a particular project or operation is listed in their security file, which means that they can access any information filed under that code-word. This is also why anyone talking about information being classified "Above Top-Secret" is ridiculous, since you can use the same compartmentalizing system to isolate especially sensitive information. And those compartmentalized systems often require an additional Sensitive Compartmented Information and/or Special Access Program clearance in addition to a regular TS. Which can be made even more complicated if it includes information regulated by the Department of Energy. See also Classified Information, and Serial Escalation. If an entire organization is classified as such, you're likely looking at an instance of No Such Agency. Not to be confused with Above Top Secret, which is a website about conspiracy theories. ## Examples: - New Avengers: Despite being Director of SHIELD, and therefore supposedly privy to all SHIELD info, Maria Hill is exasperated to find out there's still things the tech people keep from her, even during a serious situation. - The Headhunt establishes the Federation Starfleet as using a two-layer clearance system inspired by real life systems. Before briefing her security chief on a break-in at Facility 4028 Eleya double-checks his security clearances. Dul'krah is cleared to see any data classified up to sigma-9, and can view data classified up to chi-4 if he's cleared for the code word. The relevant file is classified lambda-5 under the code word ICARIAN BRIGHT GEPPETTO. - Distance Learning for Fun and Profit...: When PRT Director Costa-Brown (secretly Alexandria) demands to know the identity of the Tinker behind Gravtec, arguing she has top secret clearance, she is told that (a) the responsible individual is not a Tinker, so it falls outside her remit, and (b) her clearance is irrelevant. - The Weaver Option: Before Taylor takes over the Nyx Sector, there is an absurdly large number of secret clearances due to previous administrations' corruption. Part of her government's work is to streamline this, resulting in a color-coded clearance system. Taylor herself doesn't have access to the top-level clearance, which is restricted to Inquisitors. - In G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the title organization is described as above top secret. Of course, sometimes it seems like everyone on the planet knows about them, so it's one of those examples. Then in the sequel, the \|\|COBRA\|\| President of the United States publicly announces GIJOE's destruction, no doubt leaving the entire world to wonder what he was talking about. - In Men in Black 3, J is told that the exact details of what happened between his partner K and Boris the Animal is above his pay grade. He's a senior agent only a step or two below the chief, so he's quite surprised. Shortly thereafter, he finds out about time travel— which is also above his pay grade. J: Okay— I need a raise. - Independence Day: The Secretary of Defense has kept the existence of a recovered spaceship and alien corpses at Area 51 a secret even from the President, in order to maintain Plausible Deniability, so the President doesn't learn about the secret laboratory beneath Area 51 until Julius Levinson confronts them and the truth comes out. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff points out that a good time to share this secret would have been some time after the aliens themselves arrived in force over Earth and before the military launched a fruitless attack against them without knowing anything about their capabilities. - During Transformers, a high-ranking Sector 7 officer shows the Secretary of Defense some video of a Decepticon taken by a Mars probe that was reported having crashed, saying that it was "classified above top secret" by President Herbert Hoover (in the 1930's). - Anyone who even mentions General Warren Monger's secret monster storehouse in Monsters vs. Aliens receives a dart to the neck and passes out instantly. - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - Tora! Tora! Tora!: It is mentioned early on that the President and his staff are not cleared to directly handle or view any of the signal decripts of Japanese message traffic due to a past incident where one such decrypted message was found in an office wastebin rather than properly disposed of. Thus, the absurd situation where the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces effectively lacks the clearance for some of the information the military is handling. - Joked about in The Forgotten, where cops talk about the Feds muscling in on their investigation, stating that he would say God only knows what they're doing, but he's no sure that He is in the loop. - In The Laundry Files, the Laundry is classified under a portion of the British Official Secrets Act that is itself classified: if you know about it, you're required to sign it in blood (to create a magical oath binding your tongue) to say that you won't reveal it. The Laundry itself uses a code word system to determine clearance for various projects and documents: main protagonist Bob Howard tells a security reviewer at one point that he and his wife Mo, also a Laundry officer, are careful to compare code words before discussing work, and Bob once fires off a very irate phone call to his superior to get himself cleared for whatever mission Mo just came home from that left her on the verge of a nervous breakdown if she can't talk to someone about it. - There is a collection of Australian espionage stories called For Australian Eyes Only, which is supposedly a real security classification designating intelligence that is not to be shared with allied foreign intelligence services note : America has the security tag NOFORN for any items that cannot be shared with foreign personnel no matter their clearance, so it's likely that other countries have similar classifications. - The Enemy by Desmond Bagley. The protagonist Malcolm Jaggard works for a British intelligence organisation that deals with industrial espionage. He dates the daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur, and on a whim runs her father's name through the computer. To his surprise all details are classified above his level. He goes and fills out the forms to access the information, only to find it's classified at an even higher level and he's hauled up before his boss to explain why he made the inquiry in the first place. \|\|The entrepreneur turns out to be a Soviet scientist who defected to Britain years before.\|\| - Frequently invoked in Hullo Russia, Goodbye England, where the pilots of the Vulcan nuclear bomber force are under continuing and unremitting security surveillance. One, Flight Lieutenant Silk, is under suspicion because his wife is a member of Parliament associated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. - Played for humor at the beginning of Starpilot's Grave, when Lieutenant Ari Rosselin-Metadi and Mistress (Lieutenant-Grade) Llannat Hyfid return to base from their kidnapping in the prior book and are promptly awarded the Space Force Achievement Medal note : the least valuable award the Space Force could give, nominally meaning the recipient has completed four years of satisfactory active duty and normally for the initiated the implication that managing this was unexpected is unspoken-yet-understood before the entire post save the gate guards and emergency room. The commandant then informs the audience that the citation is not only too classified to be read aloud in public, but classified at a level that even he was not cleared to read it (or mention the classification level) and only knew that it was signed by the Head of the Grand Council (Ari's father, General Jos Metadi, is a Joint Chiefs-equivalent level officer and appears to have called in some favors). - The Stargate Program in the Stargate-verse. - There's an episode of The Avengers (1960s) where it's mentioned that British Intelligence has at least two secrecy classifications: "Top Hush" for regular top secret material, and for anything exceptionally sensitive, "Button Lip". - Scandal sometimes deals with government secrets that are deemed too sensitive to be revealed to the President's Chief of Staff or even the President himself. In particular the work Huck did for the government was so horrifyingly illegal that his record is kept secret from the White House even after Huck becomes the main suspect in an attempt on the President's life. - Zig-Zagged on Bones. The Victim of the Week was ex-CIA, and the CIA won't tell Booth & Brennan anything because they don't have high enough clearance. Booth points out that he does have high enough clearance. The CIA man makes Brennan leave the room, though, because she doesn't. As she's leaving (and in full view of the CIA man), Booth assures her that he'll fill her in later. - Seven Days - The project itself is so classified that the President knows nothing about it. After a couple of encounters with Parker, he does know he is part of something and is determined to find out. His clearance is insufficient. - There was an episode where Parker had a run-in with some unit, and stated he had a very high clearance level. A soldier from the unit stated that he has a level high enough to shoot Parker on the spot. - The X-Files is filled with these, some of which being so secret that it seems no one really seems to know the secret information, only knowing bits and pieces of it. Deep Throat: There are limits to my knowledge, Mister Mulder. Inside the intelligence community, there are so-called "black organizations." Groups within groups conducting covert activities, unknown at the highest levels of power. - The characters of Spooks often talk about various classifications of files in regards of how tightly their contents are meant to be protected. The series 4 episode 'Diana' goes so far as to mention a "No Eyes" file: one that was never meant to be taken out of the room it was stored in. - Blake's 7 - In "Animals", Double-X information can only be passed verbally, with no stored records. Servalan has to track down a member of the project team and deliver some unsubtle threats before finding out what she wants to know, and she's a commissioner in the Secret Police at the time. - The crew of the Liberator encounter the planet Horizon at the edge of the galaxy when they nearly run into the forceshield protecting it. There's no information on the planet whatsoever in their databanks, so they later get a pursuing Federation flotilla to destroy itself by colliding with the same forceshield, betting their lives on the likelihood that the Federation mooks won't be any better informed. - Finding the location of Star One (a base containing the Master Computer which controls the Federation) is the Story Arc for Season Two. It's so secret that anyone who could possibly know its location has either been killed or brainwashed into forgetting it. This backfires badly because when things start going wrong with Star One, even the people running the Federation don't know where it is! - In Star Trek: Discovery, there's the Battle near Xaeha, in which the Discovery, the Enterprise, the Klingons and others teamed up to battle the mad AI Control. Officially, Discovery was lost with all hands, but only a select few know they actually jumped to the future and that truth is also under lock and key to prevent Control from returning. - In Paranoia, the highest security clearance is Ultraviolet. Everyone knows this. \|\|The Iceman Returneth features clones of a couple of The Computer's original programmers from the Old Reckoning, assigned Gamma Clearance and entrusted with maintaining its core systems. Later editions mention rumors that Gamma Clearance or something like it exists, which even Ultraviolets are warned not to discuss without clearly stating that it doesn't— and even if they believe otherwise, probably the best they can do is manipulate their rivals into prying into the subject and getting busted for it.\|\| - In Alpha Protocol, the titular program is stated to 'not exist.' "And the agencies that suspect we might exist? They don't exist either." It's so top secret that no one even knows where the base is; even top-level agents are drugged unconscious and shipped halfway around the world before being woken up. - The terrorist organization Cerberus was like this in Mass Effect: an Alliance Navy admiral had to go to the Shadow Broker in order to find anything at all about them. Then came Mass Effect 2 and that was thrown completely out the window in favor of them being a group that everyone knows about who slaps their logo on everything remotely related to them. - Iron Helix: The very existence of the Iron Helix weapon was so secret that the crew of the ship that was transporting it didn't even know they were transporting it. - Deus Ex first introduces its own fictional security clearance hierarchy used within UNATCO, with nine levels of security named after the Hierarchy of Angels, and then applies this trope by later revealing there is "God-level" clearance even above that. - Phantom Doctrine: "Above Top Secret" is the title of the first chapter in the KGB campaign, alluding to the counter-intelligence nature of Agent Kodiak's cell on trying to weed out agents within the Soviet bureaucracy. The local militsiya are not on your side, for instance. - During World War II, the fact that Britain had cracked most German coded communications was about the most secret fact on the Allied side — classified "Ultra". Exactly what the consequences of this were is still somewhat debated by historians note : all agree that breaking Enigma shortened the war significantly, the disagreement is over how much, but there's a basic problem with this sort of situation: every time you act on your knowledge of enemy communications, you risk that enemy deducing what you've done. Most of what was done to conceal the secret of Ultra was actually rather mundane— things like having a reconnaissance flight "happen" to chance on enemy ships, or sending transmissions (on systems they knew the Germans had broken into) praising fictitious local agents for their solid intelligence work after the fact, to send the Germans on a fruitless spy hunt. But it was alleged that the bombing raid that obliterated much of Coventry was let through rather than risk the secret. That's since been shown to be untrue, but yes, it was seriously claimed that Winston Churchill sacrificed an entire city to keep that secret. Similar precautions were taken in regards to "Magic", which was the corresponding program for intercepting and decrypting Japanese communications. - There is a confirmed story that when the King of England toured Bletchley Park during the war and recognized one of the women working there, he asked her what she did there, and she told him that she wasn't permitted to say. Which is understandable since, while British monarchs technically retain some governmental authority, in practice they've been reduced to figureheads. - Harry Truman was never told about the Manhattan Project during his term as Vice President, he was only informed upon his promotion to President. Considering that his predecessor as Vice President is really only famous for saying that the office "wasn't worth a bucket of warm piss", it highlights just how useless the VPOTUS historically is. In fact, Stalin had more knowledge about the Manhattan Project than Truman. - The President, on the other hand, has nearly absolute authority over classified information, since by law the office of POTUS is the source of all classification authority, and can declassify almost anything if he so chooses (the exceptions being certain documents that can't be declassified by ANYONE- nuclear secrets and ongoing espionage deployments being some examples). note : If declassifying an eligible document would be a really bad idea, he'll be so advised. But if he insists, there's nothing any of the President's subordinates can legally do to stop him or her from beginning the process of declassification But even then, the President can't just browse through a database of all the top secret information to satisfy his own curiosity. For one thing, no single database containing all the nation's top secret info exists, because it would be such an obvious security risk if an enemy spy or hacker ever breached it. Instead, the President would order somebody involved with any given top secret program to read him into it. If it's urgent that the President know right away (as in the case of Truman and the Manhattan Project, since after Roosevelt's death his authorization was needed to use the atomic bomb in combat), one of the higher-ups in the classified program will come to the President and tell him that he needs to be read in. If the President isn't seen as specifically needing to know about a program, on the other hand, nobody will tell him that it exists. This is often seen as for the President's own good, because he can't be politically harmed by something that he had nothing to do with. And even with his legal authority to demand access to any classified information, the President can't demand access to a program whose very existence he has no inkling of. - The same applies to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate, and chairs and ranking members of House and Senate committees, especially the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, which by law have access to a great deal of classified information. They often get closed-door classified briefings about things that Congress as a whole is not allowed to know. But that information isn't always volunteered to them without being directly demanded. Sometimes this is for legitimate national security reasons, other times it's concealed for shadier purposes. In any event, unless they know enough about a program to specifically demand more information about it, they're completely reliant on executive agencies to deem them to have a need to know. - During the 2022 investigation into Donald Trump's mishandling of government documents, the general public became aware of how certain documents are labelled by the US government, including: TS (Top Secret), TS//SCI (Top Secret//Sensitive Compartmented Information note : information that must be carefully handled and shared only within a specific group that has explicit permission to see it, and can only be shared in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a room built to prevent bugging or evesdropping), HCS (HUMINT [Human Intelligence] Control System note : Information from human sources i.e. spies, defectors, or double agents), ORCON (Originator Controlled note : information so sensitive that the originator must give consent for it to be shared), and NOFORN (No Foreign note : information deemed too sensitive to share with foreign allies). - In Russia, совершенно секретно (top secret) is not the highest classification. There is an extra category named особой важности (of special importance) that ranks above it. This topic was never described, are we clear? It never happened.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverTheTopSecret
Ominous Owl - TV Tropes "If you were an alien abductee, you might have memories of seeing owls in the city, or owls on the subway, or owls sitting outside your apartment window, or owls sitting INSIDE your apartment window, wearing space clothes and preparing a rectal probe." Owls are, to put it bluntly, creepy. They just are. Perhaps it's because most of them are nocturnal or that they eat cute little mice or that they can spin their heads all the way around note : Not really, but they can turn their heads further around than most animals (270 degrees total compared to 180 degrees for a human). And then snap their heads around to the other side so quickly you could be forgiven for thinking they'd actually gone 360. It could be those (relatively) gigantic, piercing eyes. Or perhaps it's the sounds they make at night (except for the beating of their wings, which are so soft and fluffy you'll never hear a thing. Bad news for rodents), in the dark, when you're in the forest. It doesn't really matter why they are creepy, they just are. Owls have long been viewed as harbingers of disease, death, destruction, and bad luck. To the Hopi, they were a symbol of evil sorcery; to the Romans, they were funerary birds, signaling ill will in the daytime (unless you were collecting their eggs, in which case they signaled a Hideous Hangover Cure); and the Aztec god of death, Mictlantecuhtli, was often portrayed with owls. Geoffrey Chaucer also had a thing for them. Harbinger is the kew-word here, all too often the owls are used in films as normal, non-threatening (to humans) animals who merely enrich the eerie ambiance with their huge glistening eyes and especially their otherworldly hooting. So remember: if you ever see an owl, clutch your Tootsie Roll Pops tightly and run in the other direction. See also Brutal Bird of Prey, Creepy Crows, Vile Vulture, and Circling Vultures for other types of scary, creepy birds, as well as Bat Out of Hell for another scary nocturnal flyer, and The Owl-Knowing One (for when the owl is an Evil Genius). Contrast Cute Owl (though there might be some overlap when Cute Is Evil). ## Examples: - In Cyborg 009, a mother owl and her babies actually live in an abandoned castle in Germany where Albert/004 fights a robot with his same looks and powers. \|\|During the fight, the nest gets knocked off its site and out of reflex 004 shields the owls with his own body... which saves his life, as the robot couldn't predict his human reaction and its programmed strategies are all screwed.\|\| - An episode of Digimon Tamers had a creepy (complete with glowing red eyes) talking owl who creepily tells the protagonists about the Devas. The entire scene is very odd, as one review can attest: -good God what the hell is up with that? He's not a Digimon or anything... just a talking owl that seems to exist only to give Takato and Henry nightmares. His unfortunate speech patterns takes the sting out of it a little (as does his talk of a "chicken of vengeance"), but he just stands there with those crazy eyes talking about the coming of the Devas like some goddamn Cheshire cat. Then he flies away like nothing happened! - There is yet another Fukuro among the assassin group Trinity Raven in Fairy Tail, who is also noticeably creepy. He has a man's body but an owl's head (also two missiles on his back with the word "JUSTICE" printed on them), and one of his abilities is to swallow his opponents whole and use their magic until they digest fully. It's worth noting that "Fukuro" is Japanese for "owl." - Professor Hoot the Owl from Happy Happy Clover, while nice and helpful, does have moments where he comes across as very creepy and a bit unnerving. This is more notable in the Manga in one story where he warns students about humans and going outside the forest. - Doku-Chan from Jagaaaaaan, a ball-shaped owl with a pair of pilot glasses, fulfills all requirements as he enters Jagasaki's life and gives him a roundabout briefing about what's going on after his first encounter with a Fractured Human. - The manga Jagan wa Gachirin ni Tobu takes this trope to its worst possible conclusion in the form of Minerva, an owl shaped abomination whose eyes continuously spill blood from their sockets, and whose mere gaze can kill any living thing almost instantly after forcing them to expel blood from their eyes, ears and mouths. Its gaze was so potent that after escaping containment from a U.S. military aircraft carrier, it killed off the entire crew and decimated several Japanese cities just by flying over them. It was also nearly impossible to kill even with ranged weapons like guns, since it could sense its attackers' blood thirst. It took the efforts of a completely blind (courtesy of Minerva) expert hunter, a Batman Gambit, and a jet battle in midair to finally bring the wicked-eyed bird down. - A recurring motif in Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, with normal ones appearing in the opening, as well as more nightmarish humanoid ones appearing in a flashback of Fujiko's. - \|\|Kouichi\|\| from Nabari no Ou is actually an owl with a human heart. His partially transformed form after being shot in the heart is more than a little creepy. - In One Piece, every member of CP 9 has an animal motif, and the creepiest one is definitely Fukuro who is based off of an owl. Among other things, his mouth has a zipper on it that he has to unzip if he wants to talk. - Mukuro from Reborn! (2004) has a Snowy Owl as his box animal. Not so creepy until you see it with his red/blue heterochromia. Unsurprisingly, the owl is named Mukurou. - In Tokyo Ghoul, the Ghouls with this Animal Motif are particularly frightening. - The legendary One-Eyed Owl, the most powerful Ghoul seen in the original series. Rumored to be a Half-Human Hybrid prone to committing cannibalism, it appeared suddenly a decade prior to the series and began a killing spree targeting Ghoul Investigators. It was only when The Ace challenged it that the Owl was forced to retreat \|\|even managed to defeat them but spared due to personal reasons\|\|, going into hiding. The mere thought that it could show up again terrifies CCG, and with good reason. When it finally appears, it becomes clear just how monstrous a Ghoul can become. - Kind and grandfatherly Yoshimura — normally associated with The Owl-Knowing One — becomes this trope when sufficiently provoked into coming out of his peaceful retirement. When he fights, it is typically presented as a Mook Horror Show. - The sequel gives us another such Ghoul, \|\|former Plucky Comic Relief Seidou Takizawa. Reforged into a Minion and driven mad, he gleefully murders everything in his path\|\|. That he looks like a strung-out Goth adds to his creepiness, as does him comparing human brains to jam. - Another one who has this trope is \|\|no other than Koutaro Amon, who also received Yoshimura's kagune and thus his abilities, and suffers both of the pros as well as the cons.\|\| - The Wolf's Rain anime series had a creepy owl that made appearances at times, most likely as a symbol for death. - In the zoo chapter of Yotsuba&!, Yotsuba is utterly terrified of the owl. She ends up trying to scare it (so that it stops staring at her)... and then it spreads its wings and hoots. Cut to her hiding behind her dad's legs. - Magic: The Gathering: - On Alara, strixes are kept as pets in the bio-mechanical realm of Esper. As the name might suggest to any Latin scholars, they're venomous or parasitic evil clockwork owls. - Mindshrieker, an owl spirit from Innistrad, feeds on spells that it tears right out of its victims' minds. - Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Raidraptor archetype consists of cybernetic birds of prey, including Strixes. While not evil, their owner in the anime is still a brutal '90s Anti-Hero, and the owls look scary. - The DCU: - All-Star Comics: There is often a shadowy dark owl perched behind The Loreli while the cruel witch is giving orders. - Owlman is the Evil Counterpart of Batman in the Crime Syndicate's Mirror Universe. - Another Batman example is the vilainous organisation The Court of Owls introduced in Scott Snyder's run on Batman Volume 2. They're a clandestine society who have apparently secretly controlled Gotham for centuries, and the "owls prey on bats" imagery has been played up for all it's worth. - In Hellboy: The Corpse, when the Fairy King makes his first appearance, he has an owl perched on his arm. - B.P.R.D. 1946 and 1947 feature a vampire count who shapeshifts into an owl. Sometimes he does it to make murdering Nazis easier and sometimes he does it to get around faster. It's just his thing. - A horror comic had a short story called "Hooters" where evil owls killed buxom women on a camping trip. - Macduff, a wooden doll in form of an owl that formerly was the pet of Gepetto, joined Jack Frost in his adventures. \|\|Perhaps it was an omen, as the series ended with literally everyone getting killed.\|\| - In the Marvel Universe, there's a villain named The Owl, who's primarily a member of Daredevil's Rogues Gallery. He eventually had surgery done to make him look more like an owl. - This cover◊ from Mouse Guard. The scene itself is even more brutal and awesome. - Tintin: In The Castafiore Emerald, Bianca Castafiore, after arriving at Marlinspike Hall, complains about having her sleep disturbed by a "monster" who appears outside her window (perhaps having climbed up the ivy), makes footsteps upstairs in the attic and occasionally makes a weirdly owllike cry. Tintin directly investigates this matter after the theft of the emerald and sees that the attic intruder was in fact just an owl. - Ultimate X-Men: There was an owl in a tree outside Weapon X when Nightcrawler broke free, to set the ominous nature of the place. - Usagi Yojimbo: - The comic reflects the Japanese idea that the Owl is a symbol of death. In one story, Usagi and Gen spot one perched near a hut. When they looked inside and found their old friend, Zato-Ino, in a hut and gravely wounded, that bird was a bad omen. However, they are able to successfully treat the pig and Gen spitefully goes out to taunt the bird and drive it away. Later the Owl is diving for a cute little lizard, but the little guy is saved by an attacking Tokage who tackles the Owl and eats it. - There's a very mysterious assassin called "The Lord of Owls" who appears in one chapter. - Watchmen: The second Nite Owl was probably going for a heroic but still intimidating version of this imagery with his theme, but doesn't quite pull it off. - The World is Filled with Monsters: Strygians, gigantic hawk owls turned into creatures of living shadow by exposure to dark magic. - Breath of the Wild, a fanmade novelized adaptation of the game of the same name, there's an original entity called the Owl Spirit, or just the Owl. As its name implies, it takes the form of a giant golden owl. \|\|It's Zelda's spirit animal, expanding her sealing power from just a sealing power to wielding the power of this enormous spirit animal\|\|. It's not ominous on its own, except for one scene where \|\|Paya, empowered by the Sheikah Orb, has a vision where she sees the Owl as wielded by Zelda become suddenly corrupted by Malice in the same vein as Calamity Ganon.\|\| - An owl appears during the Headless Horseman's introductory sequence from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, as the starting point of the course of classic scary Halloween motifs. - Disney's Alice in Wonderland. While traveling through a spooky forest Alice encounters an owl with a neck like an accordion that makes music as it flies, as it is still a Wonderland forest. - The black owl seen at the start of Isle of Dogs appears to be this as it hangs around Trash Island. \|\|It's subverted when the owl proves useful when carrying messages for the island dogs.\|\| - Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole has a cast made up almost entirely of owls, so naturally some are good and some are evil. The Pure Ones are a nasty bunch, a group of barn owl supremacists who want total power over the owl kingdoms. It's not just limited to the Pure Ones barn owls either; brothers Jutt and Jatt (long-eared owls), the traitorous Allomere (a great gray owl), and High Tyto Metal Beak (a sooty owl, which is ironic since in the books, sooty owls are low in Pure Ones ranking systems) are also pretty nasty owls. - The freaking terrifying owl that attacks the furlings in Once Upon a Forest. - In Rock-A-Doodle, there is the sunlight-hating Duke of Owls and his minions who love to eat little animals. - Although he's ultimately friendly, to Mrs Brisby at least, the ancient owl in The Secret of NIMH is intensely scary. - Macha the witch's overall motif in Song of the Sea. She's closely associated with owls, and the stories about her cast her as a Wicked Witch who turns people to stone. \|\|However, it turns out that she's not so ominous once she realizes the consequences of her actions.\|\| - The movie The Adventures of Milo and Otis, a story about a lost kitten and a puppy, has a scene in the treetops at nighttime where the kitten talks with a horned owl with glowing eyes who pops out of nowhere. Though he is friendly, he is, needless to say, quite terrifying for younger children. - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The mother owl in "All Gold Canyon" may or may not be some sort of supernatural guardian of the valley's peace. A Prospector steals one of its eggs \|\|and ends up being shot In the Back by a claim jumper. But when seeing the owl watching him, the prospector felt guilty and returned all but one of the eggs, which may be why the wound isn't fatal and he's allowed to leave with his gold.\|\| - In The Fourth Kind, the owls are actually \|\|Aliens coming to abduct you\|\|. - An owl provides a Cat Scare to Arthur at one point in Horror of Dracula. - The Owls in I Know Who Killed Me. They don't mean anything, nor are they particularly foreboding. They're just there. - The appearance of Jareth, the goblin king, in Labyrinth (and his departure at the end) involved his becoming an owl... actually, Labyrinth's entire opening shot is a (for the time) impressive CG sequence of said owl flying around the opening credit shots and eventually becoming a real owl with a carefully executed editing sweep shot into the first scene. - The rather intense Owl-to-human transformation in the Russian version of Night Watch. - The killer in StageFright -Aquarius- wears an owl mask, which was part of the theatre production he crashes. - In Bless Me Ultima, owls are a sign that a bruja (or evil witch) is around. It's also a subversion, as the main owl in the story is connected to Ultima herself, who is a curandera rather than a bruja. \|\|In fact, when the owl is killed, Ultima dies not long after as a consequence\|\|. - In The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, \|\|Big Bad Eostra\|\| was once the mage of the Eagle Owl clan, so eagle owls are considered creepy bad omens. Other kinds of owls are cool, though. - In chapter 22 of The Cold Moons, the badgers come across a screech-owl and find it to be an omen. According to badger superstition, screech-owls often forebode death. - A Darkness More Than Night: The killer leaves a porcelain owl at the murder scene as a token. - Neil Gaiman's "Daughter of Owls," wherein a baby girl foundling is superstitiously thought to be, yes, born of owls and thus the townsfolk will not raise her, only giving her food. - The Discworld series makes fun of this trope (as it does virtually every trope in existence). - The Epebian goddess of wisdom was supposed to have an owl as her signature animal. Unfortunately, due to her church hiring a sculptor who wasn't very good at doing birds for her statue, she ended up with a penguin. - In two different Discworld novels, Reaper Man and Snuff, owl-shaped clocks in quiet country parlours create discomfiture in the leading characters. Death, temporarily rendered mortal, is reminded of the passage of time and his own impending mortality, whilst Sam Vimes decides he hates owl-shaped clocks on principle because of their sinister nature. - Spooky owls crop up a lot in Paul Cornell's Doctor Who New Adventures. - In Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles, one trial facing Freckles in his job is being caught on the train and hearing the unnerving hooting. Night closed in. The Limberlost stirred gently, then shook herself, growled, and awoke around him. There seemed to be a great owl hooting from every hollow tree, and a little one screeching from every knothole. - In the story "The Ghost Car" in Chris Woodyard's book Haunted Ohio II, the deaths of a certain family's members are heralded by a number of owls that fly away one by one until none are left. This occurs after a man muffled in a coat knocks on the family's door before vanishing. This happens on winter nights for two years in a row. When the knock comes on the third year, the family does not open the door, at which the knocker chuckles and says, "Soon no one will occupy this farm but the owls." - Subverted in the Young Adult novel Hoot. While burrowing owls are tiny and adorable, their existence on a construction site spells doom for the pancake house that is supposed to be built on it. - In Jincy Willet's short story "Justine Laughs at Death," an extended parallel is drawn between the Serial Killer (and rapist and torturer) Ripley and an owl he sees outside his window, with the owl's menace and predatory nature initially reminding Ripley comfortingly of himself (once the metaphor is extended, it gets... less comforting). - In Midnight Tides, book five of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, owls make noticeably frequent appearances. One pattern is certain: they get progressively deader and appear in connection to Reluctant Warrior Trull Sengar and may be a symbol for his growing enstrangement from his people. Owl #1 is seen happily munching on a freshly caught mouse while Trull's world is still alright. Owl #2 has both a bloodied beak and bloodied claws and is seen in hurried flight, at a point where Trull's world is starting to come apart at the seams. He finds owl #3, freshly dead, shortly before realizing how there's no going back, and owl #4, long dead and decaying, is found by his betrothed in her empty house, right about the time everything's clearly gone downhill. - As explained in the above quote, owls are symbols that you've been abducted by aliens in More Information Than You Require. The book also contains instructions on how to cook an owl. One of the steps is to remove their clockwork innards. - In a story in The Muddle-Headed Wombat series, an owl antagonizes the protagonists for setting a tree house in its home tree. It decides not to bother the trio anymore when the treehouse ends up underneath the tree instead. - The villain of Nighttime Is My Time is a Serial Killer who uses an owl as his symbol. He calls himself the Owl and is referred to by this name in his narration to conceal his identity from the reader. The villain chose this alias because owls are stealthy nocturnal predators, like him. It also stems from an incident in his childhood where he had to play an owl in a school performance but was so nervous he ended up humiliating himself and was slapped by his father; he was later mocked for it in high school too, so he reclaims it as a symbol of his power and vengeance against those who have wronged him. The Owl also utilizes owl-shaped pins as his Calling Card and wears an owl mask while committing his crimes. - In the Obsidian & Blood trilogy, owls are the preferred sacrifice of Mictlantechtli, the Aztec God of the Underworld. - Alan Garner's novel The Owl Service recasts the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd to modern Wales. - In Ruben Eliassen's Phenomena there is a woman surrounded by obscure mystery, some of which reaches What Do You Mean, It's for Kids? standards; she is later revealed to be the mysterious owl who has been following them so far. - Justified in Poppy, since most of the cast are mice. However the mice and the owl, Mr. Ocax, have an odd relationship in which the mice are forced to pretend that Mr. Ocax is their kindly ruler/landlord. - RWBY: Fairy Tales of Remnant: in The Warrior in the Woods, the third Grimm the hero encounters are three huge owls who are jet black and possess deadly stares. They have razor sharp feathers and deadly talons. He manages to kill two of them, but is unable to finish off the third without help. - Stephen Bauer's fantasy novel Satyrday centers on the attempts of the protagonists — an orphaned boy, the satyr who raised him, a fox-spirit, and a sympathetic raven — to combat a malevolent owl and his plot to kidnap the Moon (who is a character in her own right). The owl is tyrannical and very cruel, a prime example of this trope. - George Eliot complains about a clumsy attempt to invoke this, in her essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists": she falls into this medieval vein of description (the italics are ours): "The banner unfurled it at the sound, and shook its guardian wing above, while the startled owl flapped her in the ivy; the firmament looking down through her 'argus eyes,'- - The Southern Reach Trilogy: In Acceptance, a letter written by the biologist about her time in Area X tells of how she found a peculiar owl on the island. It's never entirely disclosed, but due to the peculiar behavioral patterns of said owl — not taking flight when she approaches, bringing her a dead rabbit, nesting close to her — , she comes to suspect that \|\|this is what Area X transformed her husband into\|\|. - Whitley Streiber's novels on alien abduction have the running theme that just before or after an abduction, owls will be heard hooting nearby. The books establish an association between wide-eyed grey aliens and huge-eyed owls. - Parodied in James Thurber's comic essay "There's An Owl In My Room", which is mostly about pigeons and how un-sinister (or poignant, for that matter) they are, but it does refer to the sinister nature of owls as a contrast: You could dress up a pigeon in a tiny suit of evening clothes and put a tiny silk hat on his head and a tiny gold-headed cane under his wing and send him walking into my room at night. It would make no impression on me. I would not shout, "Good God Almighty, the birds are in charge!" But you could send an owl into my room, dressed only in the feathers it was born with, and no monkey business, and I would pull the covers over my head and scream. - In Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, Lord Sepulchrave \|\|is driven mad by the destruction of his library, starts believing he is "The Death Owl", and eventually commits suicide by allowing himself to be eaten by owls.\|\| - Les Voyageurs Sans Souci: When the main characters arrive at the abandoned castle, they are said that it is haunted by ghosts. Sébastien and Agathe also learn those supposed ghosts are called the Lords/Princes of Night by the local birdlife, who take care to not fly near from the castle after sundown because they are terrified of them. Both kids decide to wait until night to climb the tower and spy on the ghosts, finding out they are a flock of eagle-owls. Unfortunately they are discovered, and have to flee from an angry and very scary eagle-owl. - Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden: "I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and underdeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all [men] have." - In the Warrior Cats series, owls are often thought of as ill omens. Justified, since an owl seems quite large to a cat, and owls have been known to carry off kits. However, ThunderClan does occasionally look for owls at night, because if it's windy and they're having trouble scenting prey, they can follow an owl and find prey that way. - Inverted in Jurassic Park; when Nedry is lost in a rainstorm and trying to find his bearings, he's not phased when he hears a soft hooting that he mistakes for an owl. It's only when he realizes that it's not an owl that the ominousness kicks in. \|\|Indeed, it was the Dilophosaurus, which quickly bestows a Cruel and Unusual Death on him.\|\| - In Them: Adventures with Extremists, British journalist Jon Ronson and Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones infiltrate Bohemian Grove, with the latter freaked out over the owl statues everywhere which he was convinced were related to Satanic rituals by the powerful elite. Ronson however dismissed the whole thing as a bunch of aging businessmen and government types reliving their fraternity days. - The Colbert Report: Owls are on notice. Stephen Colbert refuses to talk about it, saying "they know what they did". Possibly something to do with Owlbears? - Game of Thrones: This owl◊ \|\|is an enemy spy◊!\|\| (context). - In the pilot episode of Longmire Walt is making coffee when he sees an owl perched outside his window in broad daylight, a pretty unusual occurrence, and when he turns his back for a moment it's gone. Later on a scene features a stuffed one in the background while he's unknowingly talking to the killer. In the folklore of the Cheyenne, who inhabit the part of Wyoming where the series is set, owls are an omen of evil things. - John Oliver once noted on Mock the Week that owls can kill tigers, because they have the high ground. - Murder, She Wrote made extensive use of the "distant, hooting owl" effect especially in later seasons to herald the inevitable Body of the Week. - On MythQuest, Gwydion and Math sentence Blodeuwedd to spend eternity as an owl, shunned by both man and bird, for murdering Pixelmator. - In Reservation Dogs episode 3 has a fake owl outside Uncle Brownie's house. Since the kids are all Native they see this as an ill omen and try to avoid looking at it, and the owl's eyes are even pixellated (presumably for the sake of any Natives watching the show). - The Suite Life of Zack & Cody: In "The Arwin That Came To Dinner", the twins are trying to help Arwin after his mom moved out of the house, and they find a collection of owl statues that look like they are staring at you. The twins decide they have to get rid of them because of how creepy they look. Zack decides to find a new home for them, and places them in Mr. Moseby's office. Mr. Moseby sees the owls, and he's freaked out. - Tales from the Crypt had an episode with a man who gets the auditory system of an owl. - Owls in Twin Peaks are supposed to be the eyes of BOB and/or the Black Lodge, but their significance is never really explained. Then again, neither is anything else of consequence to the series' overall plot. - Would I Lie to You?: Greg Davies used a drawing of the "Hoot Owl of Death" as sort of a Black Spot when he was a child. - In the video for Neko Case's "Maybe Sparrow", a barn owl threatens the little songbird (even though the lyrics name a hawk as the enemy). - The video for Enya's "Evening Falls" includes a shot of a barn owl (a la Jareth, mentioned above under Labyrinth) landing in a stone casement. Considering the Deliberately Monochrome video is already filled with unsettling and saddening imagery, and the song is inspired by an old Ghost Story, this appearance is apt. - The GazettE's seventh album Beautiful Deformity was mascotted by a chimera consisting of five animals, each representing a member of the band. Aoi, the guitarist, was represented by an owl, the chimera's eye. In live viewings of the album's final song each animal was ripped apart by vines, making the owl and other animals gory and even more creepy. - Watch the video for Outkast's "Ms. Jackson" and you may remember that owl forever. - A couple of Lindsey Stirling's videos, e.g. her Zelda medley, use owl hoots to set the scene and make it seem scary. - The Bible: At one point, Job complains that in the extremity of his misfortune, he has become "a brother to dragons and a companion to owls." Though some translations render it as "a companion to ostriches," which somehow reads as slightly less eerie. - Original references to vampires turning into flying creatures had them become owls, not bats. This may be because the Middle Eastern Lilith/Lilitu was often symbolized as an owl, and often took the form of an owl. - The Cahuilla Indian god of death, Muut, was represented by an owl. - The demon Andras is a man with the head and wings of an owl. - There's the saying Cuando el tecolote canta, el indio muere ("when owl hoots, an American Indian dies"). - Most Native cultures in Mexico and the American Southwest consider owls ill-omened — many of them believed hearing an owl hoot is an omen of death. Though Old Man Owl occasionally does some good in Navajo legends, most owls one might meet are probably shape-shifted ghosts. The related Apache tribe wear owl feathers to keep ghosts away. Even when Old Man Owl does his good deed, it's creepy, considering what he says when given a deer-liver as thanks: "Turn your back, my grandchild, I allow nobody to see me feed." - Meanwhile, the Choctaw have the Skate'ne, a malicious witch who sought to harm the locals only to be chased by a bobcat before she could do anything. Knowing she was unable to attack the tribe as she originally intended, the evildoer proceeded to morph into an owl, enabling her to escape in such a way that the bobcat would be unable to pursue her. - The Seminole have the Stikini, which are witches that can become owls by throwing up their organs and hanging them from trees. Even speaking their name is said to summon them. - Owls also were the symbol of Mictlantecuhtli, god of death and ruler of the Underworld in Aztec Mythology. - The Aztecs as well as their neighbors the Mayans feared owls: hearing the hooting of an owl was an omen of misfortune, hearing the scream of a screech owl was an omen of your own death, and seeing a horned owl was the beginning of one's own spiritual corruption and doom. This tradition continued into some parts of modern-day Mexico, with tales of a witch known as "La Lechuza" that (similarly to the Choctaw Skate'ne) would shapeshift into one resulting in some fearing every owl they come across. - The Aztec god Tlacolotl was a patron of evildoers, sorcerers and darkness. He is similar to Tezcatlipoca, though — unlike the Smoking Mirror, who is the dark half of the Light and cultivates evil so it can be exposed and dealt with — Tlacolotl cultivates wickedness for the sake of wickedness. In the Codex Cospiano, Tlacolotl is represented as a horned owl nesting in a temple as the blind sorcerer god of obstacles, ice and immobility. Itzlacoluihqui, sometimes described as a negative counterpart to Tezcatlipoca, makes an offering of blood and burning incense, apparently in an attempt to blot out the sun. [http://www.kunst-fuer-alle.de/english/art/artist/image/mexican-school/8713/16/index.htm#] - In some parts of Medieval Europe, it's thought only owls could abide the presence of ghosts, so an owl nesting near a house is a sign that it's haunted. - On the one hand, owls are considered a death omen in Japanese Mythology. On the other, they're also considered to be really stupid. A notable example is the Tatarimokke, a ghost born from a grudgeful dead child carried around by/possessing an owl. In Ainu mythology, however, the eagle owl was seen as a messenger of the gods and worthy of reverence, and carvings of eagle owls on houses were used as wards against sickness and pestilence. Little horned owls and barn owls are viewed as being demonic beings, though, playing the trope straight. Though, while the little horned owl is considered demonic, it's said that it is able to detect whether someone has evil in them, and that if it averts its gaze from you or only squints at you, you have darkness within you, whereas if it stares at you with eyes wide, you are a good person. As for barn owls, thinking them to be demonic after hearing the hideous screech they can make is perhaps rather forgivable. - Stolas/Stolos, a demon and prince of Hell in the Ars Goetia, is represented as an owl. Also an example of The Owl-Knowing One since he is presented as a tutor, albeit one who teaches poisons and other demonic knowledge. - In several African tribal beliefs, particularly in the Congo, owls were and are considered evil beings that eat the souls of humans. - The stikini (a.k.a strigini or ishtigini) from Creek and Seminole myth is a witch who turns into a heart-eating owl by vomiting up her organs. You can also turn into one by saying the word "stikini". Go on, say it aloud... - Also from North America, among the Algonquian and Athabaskan peoples, owls were heavily associated with another nocturnal flesh-eating monster, the wendigo (the deer-headed wendigo is strictly an invention of modern pop culture). In certain dialects, the word for owl and the word for the monster were one and the same. - Some cryptozoologists have argued that the infamous Mothman is actually 'merely' a giant owl from Pleistocene Cuba. They call it Bighoot. - In Classical Mythology: - While owls are mostly known as birds of Athena, the eagle owl was sacred to Ares instead. To priests who used birds as means of divination, seeing either of those was definitely an Oh, Crap! moment, as both were gods of war. - Also the screech owl, better known as the barn owl, note : the bird that officially bares the name screech owl nowadays is a new world animal and was unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Prior to its discovery the barn owl was also sometimes called the screech owl because of its call. was sacred to Hades and associated with the Furies and the Underworld. While Hades and the Furies were not evil, they were seen as frightening and not to be trifled with. This led to these owls often being seen as ill omens in avian divination. - The Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd has the most beautiful woman ever seen created from a field of flowers. But as she is not human, she has no heart, and is therefore faithless to the man who loves her. She is punished for her infidelity by being turned into an owl — in Welsh, the name is derived from the words "flower-faced" — fated to roam the forests by night, and seeing none of the daylight or sunlight that sustains flowers. - The "Bohemian Grove" secret society that pops up in many New World Order conspiracy theories apparently worships the owl goddess Lily. - Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree: The mice are terrified of owls. Fortunately for them, the owls are too busy celebrating their own holiday to notice the mice in their tree. - Age of Aquarius: The owl-like Goetic demon Stolas appears in a piece of narrative text about the Utopists. Played for Laughs in that they summon him only to pick a feather from his tail, making him comically angry. - Dungeons & Dragons: - Spellweavers are humanoids with six arms and the heads of barn owls. They're generally benevolent, but they don't talk and look kind of creepy. - Subverted with the grim, a 2nd Edition good-aligned monster that often took the form of an owl. It hangs around cursed graveyards and other creepy locales, but does so to help keep evil forces from escaping such places. - Exalted: - Pathfinder has the syrinx, who are xenophobic owl people who want to enslave all other sapient beings. On the other hand, there's Tanagaar, empyreal lord of vigilance, an unambiguously good - though somewhat solemn and ominous - owllike celestial being. - Vampire: The Requiem (and its historical setting, "Requiem for Rome") has the Strix: strange, ghostly owl-like beings who may be responsible for, among other things, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the creation, followed by subsequent destruction, of a Clan of vampires. They possess corpses, and sleeping vampires, and walk about causing mischief. Needless to say, they're the bad guys and the boogeymen. They're also based on an actual Roman myth. They also appear in the Hunter: The Vigil sourcebook on taking on vampires. They make a guy murder his girlfriend so they can ride the corpse. - In the mid-1970s, Mawnan, a village in Cornwall, was hit with a rash of sightings of a large, owl-like creature known as the Cornish Owlman. Some accounts describe it as threatening children and teenagers. - Digger: Considering owls' reputation as a death omen, having your elder healer named "Owl Caller" isn't a good sign. - El Goonish Shive used owls as a Running Gag. Moperville North high school has a mural warning "Read, or the Owl will Eat You". A big owl appears as an RTFM enforcer in Goonmanji arc out of continuity. Then in a guest comic the owls make good on their threat, devouring an Analfabets Anonymous meeting (well, not really, but close 'nuff). Subverted with Hedge, whose dramatic moments are always ruined by owls getting in the way. - Muut (see Mythology, above) shows up in Gunnerkrigg Court, but here he's an owl-man. Later we also have an appearance by a Chickcharney. - Lucid TV: Being full of owls is a serious medical condition◊. - Space Owls show up twice as of April 2012 in Questionable Content. They knock people unconscious, at least according to Faye, who is telling the story to cover up her own handiwork. However, it's not to be evil or creepy. - Stand Still, Stay Silent: The luonto of Onni, the most powerful mage among the recurring characters, is an Eurasian eagle-owl. - Thistil Mistil Kistil One of Loki's forms - Helluva Boss gives us Stolas, inspired by the owl demon of the same name from the Ars Goetia. His hobbies include astronomy, botany, cheating on his wife with an Imp and \|\|scaring the shit out of federal agents.\|\| - The Twins (2022): When Lake and Lucas hop the fence into the junkyard, eerie music begins to play, the whole scene is awash in blue, and an owl with glowing eyes appears hooting ominously before snatching a mouse in its beak to emphasize the looming danger. When Lake is startled by the owl, Lucas makes fun of him. \|\|After Lucas is killed, that same owl retuns, this time with glowing red eyes.\|\| - Adventure Time's Cosmic Owl is a pretty chill dude, but when he appears to Jake in a dream that appears to predict his (Jake's) death, Jake calmly, completely, even enthusiastically accepts that he's going to die which freaks Finn out terribly. - Avatar: The Last Airbender: - The Knowledge Spirit, Wan Shi Tong, combines the inherent creepiness of a giant talking owl with the ability to stretch his neck like some sort of feathery snake. He makes a comeback in The Legend of Korra, even less tolerant of humans (especially Aang's descendants) and \|\|is even allied with Unalaq\|\|. - The standard owls in this universe really are cats as birds; one was used to aid in the creepy atmosphere of "The Puppetmaster". - The 1960s-era secret agent spoof Cool McCool had a villain named The Owl, seen in the opening credits. - In the Freakazoid! episode "Candle Jack," the first instance of "Scream-o-vision" occurs when an owl appears in the frame and hoots at the audie - In the 31st-century New New York of Futurama, owls are pests, considered to be vermin like the rats and pigeons they were introduced to eliminate. They ended up filling the ecological niche those pests vacated. Owls can be domesticated, though, and trained to attack trespassers. - He has been mentioned already under Comics, but the Owlman of Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths is \|\|an Omnicidal Maniac who thinks the only action that would have any meaning would be to destroy every single Earth there is in the multiverse.\|\| - In Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, we learn that the owl Feng Huang, formerly the most powerful member of the previous Furious Five, was corrupted by her power, and turned evil. - Subverted by Owlowiscious in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Spike feels that way about him for supposedly stealing his place as "Twilight Sparkle's number 1 assistant" (he also thinks Owlowiscious' 180 degrees head rotation looks creepy). However otherwise Owlowiscious falls pretty squarely into The Owl-Knowing One. - Used for dramatic effect in Over the Garden Wall. Both Wirt and Beatrice, on different occasions, come across a spooky owl in sitting a dark tree, which serves to make the woods of the Unknown even scarier. - The Owl House: Eda is a witch with an owl motif, owning a staff ending in an owl figurine and living in the eponymous Owl House. In one episode, Luz directly asks how she initially got the moniker of Owl Lady; Eda herself claims that it's because she's incredibly wise, while Hooty and King suggest that the connection might be more literal, due to her tendency to cough up owl pellets and hoard shiny objects in a nest. While those are part of it, the main reason turns out to be \|\|she's been cursed to turn into a demonic owl creature if she doesn't regularly take an elixir to prevent the transformation\|\|. - The creepy opening sequence in the Peanuts Halloween Special It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown features an owl hooting into the camera just before the commercial break. - Phineas and Ferb had an episode where Candace dreamed that she was in The Wizard of Oz: When Candace and co. make it to the forest, one of the things that startles them is an owl... but not just any owl; it's actually a whacked-out version of an owl with Stacy's head... - Rupert and the Frog Song. The evil, glowing-eyed white barn owl swooping down towards the viewer with a shriek is certified terror. Can be seen at around 4:25 of this video. - An episode of The Scooby-Doo Show note : Originally made as a revival of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, but that's just nitpicking had a Monster of the Week called the Willawaw, whose attacks on a person were heralded by an owl hooting the pending victim's name. Since the episode included Native American characters, the lore was likely inspired by the Native American traditions listed in the "Myths & Religion" folder above. - An owl in the famous Silly Symphony "The Skeleton Dance" managed to scare a freaking skeleton out of his lack-of-skin. (Though the skeleton DID pull himself together and knock the owl's feathers off with his own skull.) See for yourself.◊ - In the South Park episode "Insheeption", Mr. Mackey is revealed to have a hoarding problem stemming from a childhood incident when he was molested by a Woodsy Owl mascot ("Give a hoot, don't pollute!"). When Mr. Mackey faces up to this traumatic memory in a dream, the owl mascot turns into a monstrous embodiment of Mr. Mackey's trauma. Eventually, believe it or not, the other people in the dream have to bring in Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street to stop the owl. - In Star Wars Rebels, the owl-like, long-tailed convor birds that show up here and there in the galaxy aren't malicious in any real way, but when they show up, it almost always means a lightsider is in danger from the Dark Side. - In Wakfu, the main villain of season 3, Oropo, has his cloaked appearance modeled after owls, along with his security robots. - If you're looking for an animal with a pretty appearance but a hidden dash of eeriness, look no further than the Barn owl; often depicted as being elegant and graceful creatures, they're highly efficient hunters, capable of flying almost silently thanks to their thick feathers acting as natural sound dampeners... but they can scream like a Banshee. - Angry owls have been offered up as possible explanations for several reported ghost hauntings or sightings of aliens, specifically the cases of the Kelly-Hopkinsville goblins and The Flatwoods Monster. - Macrame owls were horrifying to quite a few children in The '70s. Very much so. - Much of the mythology regarding owls as omens of death could have its roots in the fact that they would frequently appear in old times when someone was ill. If a vigil was kept at night there would be lights burning, the light would attract insects, the insects would attract mice and the mice would attract owls. Alternately, the owls might have been around every night, but it was only when humans stayed up late for a vigil that they'd actually notice them. - Smaller birds will gang up to mob and harass nocturnal species of owls if they catch sight of them in daylight, when the predators are too dazzled by sunlight to fight back effectively. Certainly they consider owls to be ominous. - Some moths have sizable round markings on their wings that resemble an owl's eyes, the better to emulate this trope when a potential predator comes near them. - The Bohemian grove features a giant creepy owl statue.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OwlBeDamned
Ow, My Body Part! - TV Tropes Common Stock Phrases when someone suffers Amusing Injuries. Sometimes invokes Inherently Funny Words for added funny, a common one being "spleen". There's also something amusingly askew about people's surprising level of biological accuracy when they're in pain. This can happen during fight scenes when someone targets a specific body part or even if the person bangs his head on something by accident. When this happens to someone's hand, expect some version of "Ow! That's my X'ing hand!", where X is some Overly Narrow Activity ideally, one only that character engages in. See also Not in the Face! and Crack! "Oh, My Back!" ## Examples: - From the Hilarious Outtakes for the dub of Ouran High School Host Club: However, that doesn't mean I'll fall victim to their— ow in the head. - Soul Eater: - Maka's next episode narration had her complaining every body part of her hurts after she let BlackStar hit her (and really hard too). - Speaking of BlackStar, during an early episode the group is fighting Stein, BlackStar runs up for an attack only to be deflected by Stein's chair with a yell of "Ow, my face!" - In Fate/Apocrypha, after \|\|Spartacus is captured by Vlad and a handful of the Yggdmillennia faction,\|\| Astolfo tries to sneak off, but is caught by his master. He immediately pretends to be an old man complaining about his aching back. - In One Piece* with Brook repeatedly cartwheeling face first down a slant. Brook: There goes my finger... and my ribs... and my skull.. and my pelvis... and my spine... this isn't at all humorous! - Becomes a Running Gag in the last arc of Cerebus, as Cerebus is very old and quite decrepit, and it basically hurts to move. - Inverted in The Tick, as the Chainsaw Vigilante tries to cut The Tick to convince him to give up superheroing, but discovers exactly which individual body parts are Nigh-Invulnerable, including an "Underarm of Steel!" and "A 'Hey, watch it!!!' of Steel!" - In The Smurfs story "Smurphony In C" (and its Animated Adaptation), when Gargamel chases after Harmony after he plays the turlisiphone (or shazalakazoo), the evil wizard starts to complain about parts of his body aching until he collapses. - Tim Rickard's comic sci-fi Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! features junior member Winky, constantly put to some horribly dangerous duty, and constantly crying (off-panel) "Ahhhh! My SPLEEN!" - A strip from Liberty Meadows had to be rejected because the pig character attempted a Cheek Copy and wound up breaking the machine beneath him, with a groan of "my nads!..." - Pearls Before Swine will often have Pig getting hit in the "Oompa-Loompas", which will result in him saying something like this. - One Madoka-style take on Teen Girl Squad featured "Ow, my future!" - In the Persona 5 fic Nudist Queen (NSFW) the boss fight with Akechi quickly devolves into Ren shooting him to interrupt his evil gloating, always represented by, " BANG" "Argh! My [body part]!" Eventually Ren stops it, only for them to be interrupted by Akechi's cognitive double, and Ren shoots the double to keep the bit going. - Megamind: "OW! My giant blue head!" - Rango: "I think the metaphor just broke my spleen." - SpongeBob SquarePants The Movie: When King Neptune's ultra-shiny bald head is exposed... - In The Emperor's New Groove, Punch-Clock Villain Kronk reels off a list as he tumbles down some stone stairs: "Back! Elbow! Shoulder!" - In the film version of Curious George: "Ow, my knee! Ow, my forehead! Oh, knee-forehead combo!" - Fidget in The Great Mouse Detective: "Ow, my foot! My only foot!" - The Jungle Book: - Prior to being dislodged from the tree, Kaa has this response to hitting his head on an overhead branch after being smacked in the face by Bagheera: Kaa: Oh, my sinus... - After Kaa has been pushed off his tree branch, rapidly uncoiled, smashed flat into the ground, and has to crawl away with his body bent into an accordion, complete with sound effects: - Oddly, that quote was repeated verbatim in The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie. By a gourd. - Kung Fu Panda: "Ohhh... my tenders..." - The Simpsons Movie sees Homer get mauled at one point by his own sled dog team and screams "Ow, that's my whipping arm!" as they do so. Of course, since he'd been whipping them non-stop for the entire day (even when they were resting) that might have been the whole point. - The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water: - After a lengthy absence from the series, the "MY LEG!" Running Gag makes a triumphant return here. - Squidward follows suit later: "Ow, my neck!" - Batman: Assault on Arkham: Captain Boomerang is given a Groin Attack by Killer Frost for hitting her head, prompting from him "Ahh! My goolies!". - Everyone's Hero has "My head! My butt! My head! My butt!" coming from a talking baseball that's bouncing down some metal stairs. - The Emoji Movie has "My colon!" from an emoticon. - Joe Scruggs created a song titled "Wiggle in my Toe", where he complains about his body twitching from his toe to his hair, and how he can't stop. - In the play Sheik, Rattle n' Roll, the vizier orders his two henchmen to fight the invading heroes. One of them grabs his leg and yells "Ow! My gamy leg!". The other one clutches his head and yells "Ow! My dandruff!". - The parody musical Holy Musical B@man! features multiple examples of characters yelling out incredibly specific body parts that Batman has injured, including patellar tendons and tibia. - The protagonist of the Postal series sometimes utters quotes of this nature: The Postal Dude: Hey! Now I can't feel my legs! Ow, my clavichord. - In Tales of Symphonia, when the heroes walk into the unnaturally dark Temple of Darkness, Lloyd steps on Zelos's foot, prompting him to say, "Ow! My precious foot!" - Some Mooks in No More Heroes lament their spleens after Travis delivers the deathblow on them. - Team Fortress 2: - "Meet the Sandvich" BLU Scout: My blood! He punched out all my blood! BLU Soldier: You call that breaking my spine? You RED team ladies wouldn't know how to break a spine if— (CRACK) AAAAAAAAAGH! MY SPIIIIIINE! - Also in "Meet the Engineer", an offscreen mook is shot with a rocket from the Engineer's biggest turret and screams "My! Aaaaaaaarm!" - Upon which a severed arm then flops on screen. Oddly, though the mook's voice was the Scout, the arm is recognizably a Sniper's. - In gameplay, a Heavy who runs afoul of a Pyro will shout a more generalized (but still very specific) instance of this trope: Heavy: My flesh! It burns! - In Knights of the Old Republic II, when HK-47 tortures an HK-50 unit (both of them ridiculously sadistic/kinky robots), the latter cries in anguish "My photoreceptors, my photoreceptors!" Too bad that scene was cut from the released version. - One of Deadpool's lines in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is "My kidney!" - In Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, Ultimate Deadpool (who has the quirks of his mainstream counterpart) also belts out an "Ow! My uterus!" as Ultimate Spidey brings the hurt. - In Black & White, there's a little guy who can throw around for kicks. He shouts out random (and sometimes unlikely) body parts as he bounces around. "Argh, my back. Oh, my arm! Ow, my philtrum!" - The Simpsons games: - In The Simpsons Hit & Run and its predecessor The Simpsons: Road Rage, Bart bouncing around in his vehicle of choice will sometimes groan "My ovaries!", an in-joke from the show. See The Simpsons entry below. - In Virtual Springfield, you can find a voodoo doll of Homer under Bart's bed. Poking it with a pin in various places prompts the responses "D'oh, my arm!", "D'oh my leg!" "Ow, my butt!" and "Marge, my face hurts again!" - In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, after Rawk Hawk gets crushed by Bowser, he eventually mumbles "Ow... my aching hair...." - Dawn of War also has "Augh, my spleen!" In one scene has Gabriel Angelos, Chapter Master of the Blood Ravens, calling down orbital strike in a cold fury. The somber scene is cut through with a cultist yelling that same line as the bombardment blasts right on top of him. - DEADLOCK uses "Ow, my eye!" and "D'oh, my spleen!" when civilians and infantry are taken out. Though possibly not used in the game, the disc also held a third sound file that went "Gah, my limbic system!" - Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: - In Homestar Ruiner, Homestar says "Ow, my snot!" after he falls out a window with the other party-goers who have invaded Strong Bad's house. The joke is that your original goal through the episode was to "Beat the snot out of Homestar." - In Strong Badia the Free, Strong Bad yells "Ow! My freedom!" as the Poopsmith inflicts some police brutality on him for not paying the King of Town's new e-mail tax. - In MySims Kingdom, the character Buddy is prone to falling over. He's holding a stack of flyers in the opening, and he scatters them everywhere when he falls, accompanying it with "Ow, my face!" - In Dungeons & Dragons Online, one quest "Dirty Laundry" has money launderers who, when you hit them, say things like "Ow, my arm!" and "Ow, my spleen!" - In MARDEK, when you defeat Muriance, he takes another hit and announces: "AGH! My upper left section of my right lung! Also my spine! the Pain!" - In Catherine, after Vincent \|\|breaks up with Catherine and she beats the crap out of him in the bathroom of the Stray Sheep\|\|, he can be heard yelling "Ow, my spleen!" at one point. - In Happy Wheels, the Wheelchair Guy will sometimes shout "Ow, my leg!" when his legs are broken. The Pogostick Man will shout "Ow, my arm!" if his arms are broken. - In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, a turtle who runs over the spikes in the water will say, "My toes! My toes!" Also, if he steps on a loose board on the pirate ship, it smacks him in the face, prompting him to say, "Ohhh, my nose!" - In Mass Effect 3, the Citadel DLC has Joker doing this when he's caught in firefights. Joker: Ow, my pancreas. - After the player low-blows a student in Bully, he'll groan and say this: Student: Ow...my children... - Skullmageddon from Double Dragon Neon does this with bones. Skullmageddon: Ow, my tibia! - During a Bees Hate You run in Kingdom of Loathing, one has the opportunity obtain a certain 'Buzzkill' trophy. The Alt Text? "Ow My Everything". You're entitled to the "Buzzkill" trophy, for getting thoroughly murdered by bees. - In Tony Hawk's Underground, it's possible (and very rare) to fall and have your custom character roll on the ground while clutching their leg and crying out, "Ow, my knee!" In spite of the level of injury you can put them through trying different stunts, the knee seems to be the only body part that warrants this kind of reaction. - Orcus, the first boss from Total Carnage, will shout these things after having portions of its body blown off. After taking enough damage, Orcus will shout, "My head! My head!" - The final boss of the Anamnesis Anyder in Final Fantasy XIV will occasionally summon flunkies to aid her in the battle via them popping up from trapdoors. She'll also conjure large watery hands to attack any player caught in its line of sight. If the players manage to get the yet to be summoned minions to appear in the way of the watery hands, they'll be hit by them when they pop out and get killed. One of the minions may say "Ow, that's my liver!" - Conker's Bad Fur Day: The Big Big Guy boss is a sentient boiler piloted by two fire imps and possessing two balls of brass that act as his weak points. To damage the boss, Conker smashes the balls together with a pair of bricks, prompting the imps to yell ""My balls! MY BAAAALLS!". - The Annoying Orange: various episodes from around 2014 onward contain a sound effect of someone screaming "Ah! My leg!" when something is thrown and crashes offscreen. Occasionally, "Ah! My arm!" has been heard, and in the 20th episode of "Ask Orange", we hear an instance of "Ah! My butt!" - Captain Distraction said "Ow, my aching head!" as he fell to the ground. - In Episode 26 of The Most Popular Girls in School: Rachel: (gets hit by a car) MY SHIN! - Used a few times in the Homestar Runner cartoons and Strong Bad Email: Strong Sad: (over sounds of drilling) Ow! Both my face and hands! Homestar: (after getting doused in hot oil) Ah, my face! My deliciously fried face! - One of Simmons' running character gags in Red vs. Blue is that he does this whenever he gets injured in some way. At one point he even does it when Sarge gets injured: "Ooh, the back of your head!" - One early promo for Project Gotham Racing had Sarge install a TV screen in the steering wheel of a Warthog so he could play the game and drive at the same time. When informed that this is dangerous, he responds, "Nonsense! It's all about hand-eye coordination." Later, you can see his Warthog go careening over a hill, and when it crashes back to Earth he shouts, "Ow! My hands and eyes!" - Played for Laughs a couple times in Bionicle Adventures: - A Running Gag on Teen Girl Squad: "Ow! My skin!" "Ow! My tan lines!" "Ow! My the-fact-that-I-was-alive-only-a-second-ago!" "Ow! My lack of familiarity with Greek mythology!" - dascottjr parodied this in his literal version of "I'd Do Anything For Love" with "Ow, my only scene!" after the cops get "Chandelier'd!" - A non-body-part example exists in Element Animation's "Testificate News" as a UFO runs amok abducting every testificate in sight. Braveheart Testificate: They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom! [Is promptly abducted] Oh, no! My freedom! - DEATH BATTLE!: - Deadpool does this kind of thing during his fight against Deathstroke. "Oh, my kidney!" "My spleen!" "My leg! Oh! It's cramping!" Of course, he can regenerate any of his organs... - The second quote was used in Joker vs. Sweet Tooth when the latter kicks the former out of his weaponized ice cream truck. - The Frollo Show: " My balls!" Frollo sings this after Gaston gives him a Groin Attack. - RWBY Chibi: Because the series is Lighter and Softer compared to it's source material, characters react to some injuries in this manner. Cardin: (as the shopkeep beats him over the head with a broom) Ow, my head! I use that sometimes! - Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: - Many a character will say "Muh penis!" whenever they've been hit with a Groin Attack (or in some cases injured in general). Occasionally there will be substitutions like sack, nuts, painis, or in a few rare instances, spaghetti noodle. - After getting crushed by Bowser and Mario's karts in "Stupid Mario Kart", Fishy Boopkins can only weakly cry out, "My uterus..." - When Bob gets injured he tends to yell "Ow, my ovaries!" - The "bone hurting juice" anti-meme. The drinker tends to say something like "ow oof ouch my bones ow". - SpongeBob SquarePants: - Whenever a disaster happens (such as boat crashes or explosions), there's a stock sound clip of "My leg!" - This clip was used a LOT in the first couple seasons and for awhile was rarely heard after that. However, it has mostly returned in the last three seasons albeit as a saying in addition to the stock sound clip. - The running gag's popularity even gave it an episode of the same name where they say the catchphrase 43 times! - "MY EYES!" - Played with in one late episode. "My face! My face! Also, my leg...but mostly my face!" Also played with in the film. - Played with in one episode when Patrick says after falling, "I think I broke my abacus", then pulls out an actual abacus. - School bully Francis from The Fairly OddParents! also uses this line in one episode where Timmy turns invisible to avoid a beating, but decides to confront his fears (and pick up his perfect attendance medal). Francis tries to punch Timmy; the medal busts up his hands. Francis tries his other hand. Doesn't work. The same went for his head, after which Francis apparently decides to use his spleen. - In another episode, Cosmo and Wanda put Timmy's Dad on a website that will instantly place him in a cool career by simply clicking Cosmo. Every click pokes Cosmo's body in different parts causing an injury and making him say the line every time. First he gets poked in the eye followed by the arm and lastly (off the computer screen) in his spleen (re-using the above joke). - In a third episode Cosmo is disguised as a carton of popcorn, and after Timmy grabs some of the popcorn Cosmos shouts "My brains!" followed by saying "babble and drool" while doing so. - In "Yoo-Doo", Timmy's yoo-doo doll gets tossed around during school, and after he ends up falling down the stairs, he comes out of the school building walking injured with a cane, complaining, "My aching everything!" - In "Birthday Wish," a three-part flashback of Timmy ignoring the invitations to Tootie's birthday party and instead focusing on the included free pass to Mike E. Mozzarella's Pizza Fun House, and the delivery man keeps saying something like this each time he's hurt. The first time, the delivery man gets the invitation thrown in his eye and he screams "AAAAH! MY EYE!!!" The second, Timmy sends him and his giant novelty invitation flying off a coil-spring floor tile and he yells "AAAAH! MY SPINE!!!" The third, Timmy sics Cosmo as a tiger on the delivery man dressed in a Mike E. Mozzarella rat costume and he cries out "AAAAH! My SWEET MEATS!!!" - Invader Zim: - In "Dark Harvest", a human kid gets hit with a dodgeball and crumples, shouting "Argh! My organs!" Zim: Mwahahahaha! Inferior human organs! ( gets pegged in the gut with another dodgeball ) Ow, my Squeedlyspooch ! - "Parent Teacher Night" has an aspirin commercial with a guy yelling "MY SPINE!!!" after his back gives out. - The Simpsons: Homer: "If I don't find another bar, I'll have to give up drinking." (His liver cheers "Yay!") Homer: "Shut up liver!" (punches liver) "Ow, my liver..." - Futurama: - In the episode "The Deep South", there's a gag where Bender casts a fishing line and Fry cries "Ow, my small intestine!" from off camera. - "You can crush my body, but you can never crush my spirit." Stomp! "Ow, my spirit!" - After being packed in a cardboard box, Fry is repeatedly flipped over on the way out of a courtroom. Fry: Ow, my head! Ow, my feet! Ow, my head! Ow, my feet! The Professor: Keep your chin up. Fry: Ow, my chin! - When Bender zaps Fry in the groin with the F-ray: "Ow, my sperm!" Upon trying it again, Fry simply responds, "Huh... didn't hurt that time." - A Running Gag on Class of 3000 involves a character tossing something off-camera. A few seconds later, a crash is heard, followed by a kid crying out, "Ow! My eye!" Later in the same episode, the same (or another) character will toss something else off-camera to similar crashing and the kid crying out, "Ow! My other eye!" We see him for a few seconds twice in 'The Devil and Lil'D'. Once when Lil'D is drumming on... everything (including, evidently, the poor kid's eye), and again when Principal Luna hits him in the face with a shirt. - In Beavis and Butt-Head, when trying to build a case against someone, Beavis fakes an injury. Beavis: [holding his chest] Ow, my liver! My liver! Butt-Head: Lower, dude. Beavis: Oh yeah. Sorry. [holding his crotch] Ow, my liver! My liver! - ¡Mucha Lucha!: - Usually when Cat of CatDog got hurt he'd yell, "MYBODYMYBODYMYBODY!" - In an episode of Johnny Test, Johnny throws a paper airplane offscreen and someone yells "Ow, my eye!". He promptly throws another airplane offscreen and we hear "Ow, my other eye!" in response. - Ed, Edd n Eddy: - Parodied even more than normal when Ed was faking being hurt after he crashed his plane (when he never had one to fly). Kevin doesn't buy it for an instant. Ed: Ow, my liver. Ow, my lasagna. Edd: Ed, lasagna isn't a major organ. Ed: It isn't? - And then later: Ed: Ow, my fingernails. Ow, my skin. Ow— hi, Kevin. - Garret Bobby Ferguson from the Regular Show episode "High Score," after a Groin Attack from Mordecai. GBF: Ow! My \|\|chin!\|\| - Dan Vs.: - Wakfu: Evangelyne falling down the stairs of a tall tower because of her high heels, in season 1 episode 4. Evangelyne: Aaah! My head! AaahaaA! Aaah! My back! - Family Guy: - In the episode "Three Kings", in every Stephen King segment, Joe plays a character who ends up getting his legs broken and every time shouts, "OOHHH! MY LEGS!". - And the time Stewie is inside Peter's body trying to kill all of his sperm before he can have sex and give Stewie another sibling, and blasts his duodenum in an attempt to stall for time. Peter shouts "Oh geeze my duodenum's acting up!" and rushes into the bathroom. - "Believe It or Not, Joe's Walking on Air": Joe screams "AAH! MY PERFECT ASS!" when Bonnie shoots him there. - South Park: In the premiere episode "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", Cartman screams "OWWW MY ASSS!" while farting fire due to the aliens' probe. - Adventure Time: - In "Freak City", Jake tries to show how Finn can still fight evil despite being turned into a giant foot by launching him out of a catapult into the groin of a passing two-headed giant, who yells "Our crotch! Our evil crotch!" and staggers away. - In "Daddy's Little Monster", during the fight with possessed Marceline, Finn gets knocked into Jake, who shouts "Ow, my hippocampus!" - In "The Tower", when Finn knocks over his enormous tower and it crashes into the Candy Kingdom, Princess Bubblegum can be heard shouting "GYAAAH! MY ARM!" - On Daria, Mystic Spiral actually made a chorus line out of this: "Ow my nose, ow my face" - On Archer, Cheryl tends to respond to loud noises with "Ow! My earballs!" - The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: Carl says "Ow, my scapula" any time something hits him. Which is very, very often. - In The Powerpuff Girls (1998) episode "I See A Funny Cartoon In Your Future," Madame Argentina applies pins to the keisters of three Powerpuff voodoo dolls. Blossom: Ow! Buttercup: Ow! Bubbles: D'oh, my tail bone!" - Little Princess: Princess says, "Ow, my leg" twice in "I Want My Plaster", both times after falling from a tree. - Gravity Falls: - In "Carpet Diem", Grunkle Stan is conked by a golf-ball offscreen, and is heard yelling "Ow, my head! It hit me right in the head!" - In "Blendin's Game", Blendin Blandin trips and falls while escaping from time-jail and goes "Ow, my time knee!" - Played straight, then parodied, in the American Dad! episode "Iced, Iced Babies"; Stan gets pepper-sprayed by Francine, causing him to stumble around hurting himself. Stan: (gets sprayed) My eyes! (hits the bedroom door) My mouth! (backs into the bathroom doorknob) My back! (spots a dead plant on the shelf) My begonia! (turns on the radio playing...) "My Sharona"! (turns on the TV showing...) My Best Friend's Wedding —Aah, my eyes again! - Kim Possible: Ron Stoppable at least once said "Ow, my pancreas!" while Trapped in TV Land and fighting with Dr. Drakken. - One scene in The Critic features Jay showing a silent movie of a soldier in, what is persumably, World War I, only to be stabbed in the back with a bayonet. A caption then appears saying, "Ouch! My kidney!" - Cow and Chicken: Characters had a fondness for "Ow, I cracked my spleen!" - A rather more serious example of this occurs in the Fireman Sam episode "Trevor's Bus Boot Sale", whilst searching a rubbish dump for items to sell at his bus boot sale when an accident causes an old cooker to fall Trevor's legs, pinning him to the ground. Trevor: "Oh, my legs!" - Worse still, said accident has caused some dangerous chemicals to a barrel of sodium hypochlorite to mix with a bag of household cleaner to form a poisonous fumes and poor Trevor was trapped by the cooker. Thanks goodness Norman was around to alert the fire brigade. Otherwise, Trevor would have perished. - Bob's Burgers: - A Running Gag on the show is Linda getting hit in the face and exclaiming, "Ow, my face!". - In "Yes Without My Zeke", Jimmy Jr. gets hit in the junk when Zeke tackles him, and Jimmy yells "Ow, my penis!" He says it again after taking a hard fall on a freshly-waxed floor. - DuckTales (2017): - In the episode "Daytrip of Doom!", when Huey is fleeing from Webby in a dart game: - In the season finale, Louie claims \|\|Magica DeSpell\|\| destroyed an artifact (actually a normal mirror) and cursed herself with grave misfortune, increased gullibility, and "a swift kick in the ribs." - On The Deputy Dawg Show, a character who gets hurt will yelp "Ooh, my ( insert name of injured body part)-bone!" - In one episode of Total Drama Island, Owen ends up falling off a cliff and hitting a rock, a cactus, a goat, a fire hydrant, a dynamite plunger, a bundle of dynamite which then explodes, an open bonfire, and finally the ground, to which he responds with "OW, MY SPINE!" - Chef in Total DramaRama has been incapacitated all day getting worked on by a chiropractor. When he's finally out, he stubs his toe and comments on every bone in his body shattering, illustrated by x-ray shots, ending up collapsing to the floor in pain after his brain goes too. - On What's New, Scooby-Doo?, Fred falls down a snowy slope and breaks his leg. Fred: Ow! My leg!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OwMyBodyPart
Overworked Sleep - TV Tropes Sometimes the fate of the world rests on them finding a solution. Sometimes they are just extremely dedicated to their job. Sometimes they just are too hard-working for their own good. But the end result is that they fall asleep while in the middle of their important task. Often an Establishing Character Moment, but can often happen near the climax as the pressure gets to them. This usually involves a desk job of some sort, since falling asleep while using a lathe or driving a car would be a lot less peaceful. Expect other Sleep and Wakefulness Tropes tropes to follow, especially Messy Hair or Comforting Comforter. Compare Seriously Scruffy, which uses a lack of grooming to demonstrate the strain someone's under, and Heroic RRoD, which deals with physical exhaustion. Not to be confused with Sleepyhead, which is where people just nod off without really caring where they are. The usual consequence of Overworked Sleep is sympathy for their amazing effort rather than being reprimanded for their laziness. See also Asleep in Class. Unfortunately for some, this is often Truth in Television. ## Examples - Ah... and Mm... Are All She Says: When she's got a deadline, Toda frequently falls asleep with her head on the desk, her manuscript pages all around her. - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Togusa pulls an all-nighter investigating Interceptor technology. The next morning, the other members of Section 9 comment on him falling asleep on the couch. - During one of Shriayuki's first visits to the castle after moving to Clarines in Snow White with the Red Hair Zen has been working nonstop after getting in trouble for sneaking out. When his aides tell him she's there he finally leaves his office in order to visit with her only to promptly fall asleep, though he did warn he was about to. - Shirayuki herself has one of these (in Episode 5 of the anime adaptation) when she, along with Zen's group investigate a garrison they had lost contact with, it turned out the reason was a mass illness. The others only realise Shirayuki's state when they casually mention that she makes fresh batches of medicine for each of the soldiers shifts which had reached 3 shifts of 8 hours by that point. - In Judge Dredd, the future policemen are encouraged to go to sleep in works' time. The kicker is that Judges who have done a thirty-hour shift in very busy time get maybe ninety minutes in a machine that stimulates and accelerates deep sleep - condensing nine or ten hours into that ninety minutes. Then they are expected to go out on the street and do it all over again for another thirty hours... - Marvel Comics character Jackson Arvad became the superpowered Will-o-the-wisp as a result of this. Because he fell asleep after working all night, he was unable to prevent a lab accident that ultimately gave him his powers. - In the Robin Series, Tim normally does not fall asleep while working as Robin, though Catwoman once caught him taking a bat-nap on a roof when he was recovering from the Clench. Sometimes his habit of falling asleep anywhere and everywhere in his civilian persona does not work out in his favor, like the time he fell asleep on a roller coaster during a date with Zoanne. - Wonder Woman (1987): - Etta Candy, Julia Kapatelis, Steve Trevor, and Matthew Michaelis all fall asleep at the table or on the couch after working through the information in the files on the "Ares Project" Etta secretly copied and studying the talisman Diana got from Harmonia to no avail. - Dr. Leslie falls asleep at her desk while trying to figure out a way to save Vanessa, who is dying due to the Silver Swan modifications but would die on the table in her current state if they tried to remove them. - Missing (Sherlock Holmes): Holmes falls asleep in a chair in Lestrade's office after spending a week worrying about Watson and trying to find out what happened to him when he disappeared. - All Mixed Up!: In Chapter 6, Olive and Otto go into Oprah's office only to find her with her head on her desk, fast asleep and surrounded by empty juice boxes. They wake her up, but she can't even finish her sentence before she yawns and slinks right back into her chair. Likewise, Olive and Otto, who are both suffering from Sleep Deprivation along with Oprah and Oscar, go through this, having stayed up until late in the night trying to figure out why agents are being turned into seemingly random objects and falling asleep on the couch the second they step foot into Otto's house. Oscar, meanwhile, is on the verge of falling asleep for the same reason as Olive and Otto, but Olive zaps him with the Coffee-inator to wake him up and boost his energy levels. - In My Dream Is Yours, O'Malley is unable to fight off his Sleep Deprivation any longer and ends up falling asleep while on duty as a tube operator. Shortly after, he has a Catapult Nightmare which involves dealing with creatures. - In OSMU: Fanfiction Friction, Opal apologizes to Oswald for leaving him behind on his Blind Date with Oksana due to Oprah calling them about an outbreak of rabbits dancing the calypso in Houston, Texas, stating that she, Omar and Orla were so exhausted from solving the case that they fell asleep as the Van Computer drove the van home. Oswald takes her apology, and the apologies of Omar and Orla, at face value, being very understanding about why they had to leave him behind. - In Good Company: We see how much of a Workaholic Carter Durier is thanks to one of these. - Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: Wayne Szalinski falls asleep while working to repair the machine responsible for the titular remark. - The Fantastic Four (2005) movie had Reed Richards falling asleep on his keyboard, and the CGI people giving him "qwertyitis" note : the marks on his face from using his keyboard as a pillowbecause while asleep he can't control his rubbery body. - In Miracle Run, Corrine falls asleep at the table while working on a letter about her autistic sons' educational rights. - Kathy from Jimmie (2008) works as a translator. When her employers bump up her deadline from spring to Christmas, she works so hard that she falls asleep on the couch with the book she's translating and her notes next to her. - In Dog Days (2018), overwhelmed new mother Ruth falls asleep with one of her twins in her arms. Dax turns to the father, Greg, but he's also fallen asleep in his chair. - Atlas Shrugged: Dagny Taggart, being the hard-working capitalist that she is, has a few of these. - Discworld: Sam Vimes is often doing this. - In I Flew With Braddock, a collection of stories about the fictional World War 2 pilot Matt Braddock, a junior mechanic falls asleep in the cockpit of a plane after finishing a job and is threatened with a court martial. Braddock tells him he'll be a defense witness as the entire base had been working around the clock to rectify a long-term slide in performance and standards due to a poor commander and he'd panicked at the news of an upcoming inspection. The court martial was dropped rather than expose his incompetence to an independent panel during the investigation. - In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry falls asleep in the library desperately trying to find a magical way to breathe underwater the night before needing to do so for the second Triwizard Tournament task. - In Sanctuary, Morgan is trying to study the ancient book they found under the ripped-up floorboards of a destroyed room, but they're so exhausted from everything that's happened that they fall asleep before midnight, which they almost never do. They wake up a few hours later. - The West Wing: Josh - sound asleep at his desk, oblivious to the janitor loudly vacuuming around him, but waking up as soon as his pager goes off. - NCIS: Much of the cast do this multiple times. They often live for their work, causing other relationships to suffer. - Horatio Hornblower has an interesting deconstruction. Hornblower falls asleep on duty (a capital offense), despite his best efforts after being ordered to keep 36 hours continuous watch by the mad Captain Sawyer. - One episode of The Drew Carey Show had Drew working through the night to find the savings necessary to save the company's health plan, and falling asleep at his desk immediately after he does so. - The made-for-tv movie Apollo 11 that aired in honor of the 25th anniversary had a scene that showed Neil Armstrong falling asleep in the simulator because the guys had been training so much. - The Office (US): In "Local Ad", Pam is absorbed in perfecting the animation for Michael's ad. She's tired, so she looks up - and it's 2 am. She falls asleep while trying to decide whether to risk driving home while sleep-deprived or staying there with Michael (still editing in his office) and Dwight (watching Michael edit). - Brooklyn Nine-Nine: A mistake by Peralta forces the squad to stay at the station for 48 hours. Jeffords has it worst because he was already spending as little time at home as possible to avoid his awful brother-in-law and spends the episode falling asleep standing up or doing pull-ups. - Babylon 5: In the second season \|\|during the Narn-Centauri War\|\|, Dr. Franklin is having to deal with so many patients in addition to running Medlab that he's found asleep at his station at one point. \|\|He also admits he's been resorting to stims to keep himself going, which has ramifications later on.\|\| - Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Usually combined with Asleep in Class as Buffy spends the night patrolling for vampires, so her school studies tend to suffer. - In "Beauty and the Beasts", Giles is furious when Xander Harris falls asleep when he's supposed to be guarding Oz in his werewolf phase. When he discovers Buffy asleep on guard duty surrounded by Tome of Eldritch Lore she's been researching, he just smiles. - Happens several times in Season 7 when Buffy is under more stress than usual and refuses Giles' advice to get some much-needed rest. The lack of sleep explains a lot about her poor decision-making and people skills in that season. - Loki: When Loki and Mobius realize in Episode 2 that the Variant is probably hiding in apocalypses since any action there won't be registered by the TVA, they start to go through all files on such events. Since they haven't found a way to narrow it down yet, they have a lot of files to go through and in the next cut, Loki is sleeping at the desk. - Star Trek: Voyager. In "Muse", after forgoing sleep to search for their missing crewman (claiming that as a Vulcan he can go for weeks without sleep) Tuvok falls asleep on the bridge, snoring loudly. - Velvet: Ana and Alberto stayed up all night to recreate the props for a presentation that were lost by the airline. They are so exhausted that they oversleep the appointment time and almost lose the opportunity. - Chernobyl: This serves as an Establishing Character Moment for Ulana Khomyuk. We first see her asleep at her desk after pulling an all-nighter. - In The Coma: Youngho falls asleep during his exams because he had been pulling an all-nighter and ended up taken into the eponymous location. - Death Stranding: Sam will take any chance he can get to catnap. He can rest pretty much anywhere safe on the map (that is outside of MULE/terrorist camps and BT zones). You can make him sleep (rest and then sleep button prompts), but he will also nod off if he's only resting and if left standing idle in the overworld. - Fork Parker's Crunch Out: Sometimes, employees will fall asleep at their desk. This can be fixed by bringing them coffee to wake them up. - In Mass Effect 2: If you help Liara \|\|become the new Shadow Broker\|\|, her assistant will mention that she has developed a habit of falling asleep at her terminal due to her vastly increased workload. - Obsidian has a vidbot whose sole job is to shred documents. If you talk to him, he'll claim he wasn't sleeping, angrily ask why so many people come through his office, then instantly falls asleep again. - Survivor: Fire: Implied when the father is seen asleep at his desk. - In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, this happens to Towa late in the first game, who not only has to deal with the paperwork that comes with being Student Council President but also the paperwork that Instructor Sara pawns off on her. She promises to help Rean come up with an idea for the school festival, yet when he meets up with her, he sees she fell asleep before he arrived. - The Simpsons: In Lisa's Pony, Homer passes out in the doorway of the Kwik-E-Mart after taking a second job at the Kwik-E-Mart to pay for the titular creature. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: - In the Justice League episode "Only a Dream", after staying up all night for three days and beating the crap out of a nightmare-producing Villain of the Week, Batman falls asleep in a chair. - Code Lyoko's Jeremie Belpois occasionally falls victim to this trope, falling asleep at his computer or at the Supercomputer. - Gravity Falls: In the episode "Sock Opera", Dipper starts suffering from this after an entire week of trying to crack the computer's code. \|\|Bill Cipher takes advantage of this and tries (and succeeds) in convincing Dipper to make a deal\|\|. - Plankton in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Sleepy Time", seeing as the episode shows him sleeping at his desk. - During the final coding of MS-DOS, Bill Gates would often fall asleep at his keyboard only to wake up and continue coding from exactly where he left off. - In Japan, falling asleep at your desk from overwork is fairly common and is seen as a sign that you're dedicated to your job, to the point where some people fake it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverworkedSleep
I Do Not Own - TV Tropes "I do not own this trope. It and any characters that may appear in it are the intellectual property of Unknown Troper @ 208.110.194.128. Please don't sue me." — Micah , who launched but didn't suggest this trope Fanfic writers frequently see the need to begin their fiction with statements that look sort of like the page quote, usually as part of the Fanfic Header, but it can also be found in the descriptions for fan art and/or fan comics. These disclaimers are not only completely useless from a legal point of view — in fact, they might even be counterproductive — but they're also generally redundant, especially if posted on a website like FanFiction.Net which already includes its own well-written legal disclaimers. This kind of "I Do Not Own" disclaimer comes from a misunderstanding of copyright law; fanfic writers seem to believe that it's concerned with taking credit for someone else's work. note : High school English class is a particular culprit, as teachers will often admonish plagiarism by pointing out that it's also copyright infringement, but students don't grasp that there's a difference between the two. So as long as she is explicit that she didn't create the characters or setting, she's not taking credit for the work, and is thus home free. The problem is that copyright law is concerned with protecting the original author's rights, whether or not the fanfic writer takes credit for the work. You can be liable for copyright infringement as long as the creator of the original work loses money because of your fic. (This can happen even if you don't charge for your fanfic; the rights holder can argue that he could have written your story just as easily and charged money for it, except your free version is there, so now he can't.) Some fanfic authors try to head off legal consequences by pointing out that they have little, no, or negative assets; this never works because rights holders don't care about your assets so much as protecting their own assets and stopping you from doing further damage. The point is that this kind of "I do not own" disclaimer doesn't really improve your legal situation if you're a fanfic writer. It may even make it worse; if you admit that you don't own the original work, it's much harder to claim that you didn't realize it was copyrighted by someone else. And "willful infringement" of copyright — i.e. you've been told that you're violating copyright, but keep doing it anyway — leads to triple damages, and if you point out from the start that you don't own the work, you may be starting at willful infringement. (On the other hand, the disclaimer also implies that you think what you're doing is legal, so then that's not "willful infringement". You see why good lawyers are so expensive?) So all of this raises a question: if almost every fan-created piece of art infringes on copyright, disclaimers or not, then why is it still so prolific? Because of Sturgeon's Law; a good ninety percent of this fan stuff is utter crap. It's not nearly good enough to even dent the revenues of the original work — this realization goes back to Star Trek fan magazines in the 1970s (which, incidentally, is also the origin of this sort of disclaimer). What can lose a rights holder money, though, is the terrible publicity from suing a fanfic author. People who have never seen the original work before would certainly not check it out if they thought the rights holder was a litigious jerk. It might drive current fans of the original work away out of retaliation for such an act of cruelty, or out of fear that they'll be sued for liking the work "the wrong way." Most rights holders don't mind fanfic because it helps consolidate the fan community in general; those who do are rare enough to be listed on Fanwork Ban, and many of them have more ethical than legal reasons to do so. Rights holders tend to be more proactive where the fan work can actually lose them revenue (like homemade video games), but they tend to start with a Cease and Desist order in those cases in the hopes that the parties can reach a mutually acceptable conclusion. Regardless, it's generally accepted from both sides these days that the original creators can and should look the other way when it comes to people creating fan work of their original content if the fans are doing it out of passion and not a desire to profit off of someone else's work. Thus, the "I Do Not Own" disclaimers are more of a tradition than an attempt at legality. They are often used to show gratitude to the original creators for giving us the original work; some compare them to Homer's invocation of the muse. Some authors also use them to clearly demarcate which elements of their story are canonical and which are invented ( e.g. "I don't own any of these characters, except my Author Avatar"). As such, people frequently use vague, cutesy, or parody disclaimers, along these lines: - "Stuff in this story is owned by some company; I didn't look it up." - "Disclaimer: I claim dis." - "I don't own this work, but I wish I did!" (and its Hate Fic equivalent, "I'm glad I don't own this work.") - "I still don't own this work. I haven't even asked about it." - "I own not, you sue not." - "I don't own anyone in this story, except for [attractive character x]. He's mine! glomp ^_^" - "I own nothing" or "All I own is a piece of chewed bubblegum and a bottle of vodka — so if you want to get drunk and eat pre-chewed gum, sue away!" - "Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue... / I do not own, so please don't sue." - I do not own [work X]. If I did, [characters Y and Z] would have totally hooked up by now." - "If I owned this work, don't you think I would have better things to do with my time than write fanfiction?" - "I totally own these characters and this universe! I'm a millionaire! See? Nobody cares." Some writers (such as Bobmin) may go even further and turn their disclaimers into short comedy sketches (which can be useful in pointing out a good fanfic before you even start reading it). In the strange realm of Real-Person Fic, disclaimers of this type have the additional purpose of clarifying that the work of fiction is indeed a work of fiction, and not a report of true events and an attempt to libel the people represented. It's not copyright infringement these authors need to worry about, but rather defamation. (The disclaimer doesn't work here either, at least in England.) These disclaimers can get extremely meta when used by Recursive Fanfiction, but they're still necessary even though you're copying from someone who's copying from somebody else; although the original fanfic author doesn't have any real legal recourse, it's still remarkably unimaginative and unscrupulous to copy someone else's fanfic. For a more professional equivalent, see This Is a Work of Fiction. ## Examples - The disclaimer at the beginning of almost all Abridged Series goes something like: "The following is a non-profit fan-based parody. [Original work] is/are owned by [original work's creator(s) and/or studio(s)]. Please support the official release." Admittedly, most of these are added in the desperate hope that YouTube won't pull down their presumably Free Use-protected parodies with accusations of copyright infringement. - Second Wind's author tries to come up with a different witty disclaimer for every chapter. In Chapter 18, he says hes running out of material. - From a Star Wars fic: "Thanks, Uncle George, for letting us play with your toys! We promise to put them back in the box when we're done." This could be inspired by the Acknowledgments pages of actual Star Wars novels, nearly all of which end by thanking Lucas for creating the GFFA and letting the authors "play in his sandbox." - From Rob "Kenko" Haynie's Ranma fic Fair Warning: (Yo, Rumiko-chan! Borrowing the kids for a while, don't worry. I'll have them dry-cleaned before I return them. —Kenko) - M. McGregor likes to have fun with these: "I don't own these characters. I don't even own the humorous disclaimer I was going to put here." "If these characters belonged to me, I would be living somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. I'd have a nice luxurious cabin near a mountain somewhere. It would have solar panels, central air-conditioning, and hot and cold running supermodels. The cold supermodels run to warm themselves up. The hot ones run cause they accidentally lit themselves on fire while trying to cook me dinner. Silly supermodels, you don't know how to cook! "Anyway, I don't own this stuff." - From this fanfic, likely a Troll Fic: - Fanfiction of Joss Whedon's works nearly universally comes with a clever disclaimer, often "Joss is Boss" (particularly for Firefly fics) and "Everything is owned by Joss Whedon" (ironically, the only one of those works he actually owns himself is Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). In particular, the fic (Meltha has this disclaimer: All characters are owned by Mutant Enemy (Joss Whedon), a wonderfully creative company whose characters I have borrowed for a completely profit-free flight of fancy. Kindly do not sue me, please, as I am terrified of you. Thank you. - The disclaimer on a website devoted to the TV reality competition The Amazing Race: The Amazing Race is the property of CBS Television and World Race Productions — we don't own it, we just like to play with it. - One Transformers fic has this disclaimer: - "This fic bears no intentional resemblance to any persons living or dead. If I'm doing my job right, it should bear a very great resemblance to persons made up and not owned by me." (From here.) - Clell65619 generally does this for his Harry Potter fics on FanFiction.Net" - His standard disclaimer is "I don't own Harry Potter and wouldn't particularly care to. I would like a rental agreement with option to buy for Hermione Granger. A short term contract with Nymphadora Tonks wouldn't be turned down. A Long-term agreement with Luna Lovegood would probably be a whole lot of fun. Any time Padma Patil wants to open negotiations, call me and oh for a weekend with Fleur. Oddly Lavender and Padma's sister (despite being her twin) Parvati do nothing for me." - On Harry Potter and the Distaff Side: "I own none of this. I do not own Harry Potter or any rights to his image or personality. I do not own the moon or the stars. I do not own human genders, other than my own personal original factory equipment. Honest. Nope, not me. I most certainly do not own the rights to a billion dollar literary work. Damn it." - From another Harry Potter fic: Jo owns the characters, the plot, and my soul. I own only the spaces in between. - From this (femslash) fic of A Series of Unfortunate Events: Written by a Fan of Lemony Snicket * — a phrase which here means "Someone who is most certainly not Lemony Snicket and would greatly appreciate it if he did not sue her."* - Death Note fanfics tend to have disclaimers along the lines of "If I owned Death Note, [character X] would still be alive" or "I do not own Light, but he probably owns me." The first and only disclaimer of Kira Is Justice ends with "And remember, this will be the last time you'll be seeing this." - "Disclaimer: Little boy..." from the Super-Ultra-Mega Ranma ½ crossover On Ranchan's Crossing Bridges. - Fittingly, given the nature of his act, some fics involving Stephen Colbert have two disclaimers: one for the copyrighted fictional characters, and one for any Real Life people who become involved during the course of the story (frequently reporters or political figures). - Fanfic involving The Beatles often has something like: "I do not own The Beatles. They belong to Apple Corps., EMI, and their management..." (or MPL if it's a post-Beatles McCartney fic). One Beatles fanfic has: "Please don't sue. I spent all my money on a copy of Let It Be." - "I don't own (emotion, I) RENT" is seen probably half of all RENT fanfics out there. Clever and funny the first time, mildly annoying the fiftieth. - The disclaimer for The Last Days of Foxhound reads: Metal Gear Solid and its characters are ©1999 Konami. Metal Gear Solid * is a registered trademark of Konami Co., Ltd. This webcomic is intended as a parody. * I'd be flattered to get sued over it, but please don't . - The Private Diary of Elizabeth Quatermain has this disclaimer: The only thing to which I can lay legitimate claim is the personality of Elizabeth (who says that she is perfectly capable of owning that herself, thank you very much). - In one Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok fic, the author exclaims that her attempt to claim legal ownership of the Norse Gods resulted in her brother's car being blown up and her getting sued in multiple dead languages. Oh yeah, and the original mangaka's characterizations don't belong to her either. - The disclaimer on this Kim Possible fic takes it to a ridiculous but logical conclusion: I own nothing, which is why I'm currently sitting naked in an internet cafe. I'm getting some pretty funny looks, I can tell you. - Not so much a disclaimer as an hopeful lawsuit deterrent, one Supernatural fic featured the header, "Our porn makes more people watch your show." - A now-defunct site had the following disclaimer: - Paraphrase: "I do not own the characters in House. I do own the complete sets of DVDs. One cancels out the other." Found on "Casualty" by Angelfirenze, an "M"-rated House "Fix Fic" running in an Alternate Universe. - This Discworld fic has "Disclaimer: Do I LOOK like Terry Pratchett?" - One Love Hina fanfic has a disclaimer which reads, in its entirety, "Myuuuuu!" - One fic holds that the characters (who are all human) bear no intentional resemblance to any persons living, dead, or [something increasingly ridiculous with each chapter]. - The disclaimer of one Star Wars fanfic includes: Some items, such as lightsabers, Jedi robes, etc., are owned by various characters, and Anakin Skywalker was owned by Watto once, but now he's not, so if you see an undisclaimed fic about him by Watto, report it immediately. - The installments of Radio Free Cyberton's parody of the Transformers film usually contain this disclaimer: "Any resemblance to characters owned by Hasbro or Takara is hoped to go unnoticed by their attorneys. All celebrity voices impersonated... obviously." Otherwise averted, though, in that they actually used music from the Transformers soundtrack with permission. - Chapter 33 of Spoiled Brats, a Ranma fanfic by DarkFyre99, actually quotes the first paragraph of this article (as it stood as of November 2009) as its disclaimer. - Phantom's Secret Diary by Anthiena has: Butch Hartman says it was all his idea, so blame him. On the other hand, I think he'd say at least three words you can't say on TV if he saw this fic. - One chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality begins "#include "stddisclaimer.h"; in fact, the first 33 chapters include a variety of humorous disclaimers, often with shoutouts to various fandoms. The author also posts this on chapter 7: Whoa. A spokesman for Rowling's literary agent said that Rowling is okay with the existence of fanfiction as long as no one charges for it and everyone's clear that the original copyrights belong to her? That's really cool of her. I had no idea. So thank you, JKR, and thine is the kingdom! - Chapter two of a crossover fic of Wicked Lovely and the indie band Larrikin Love, featuring Niall and said band's lead singer as a pairing, has this disclaimer: Do I look like I own Niall and Edward? Really? Wow, that would account for the millions of dollars I DON'T have. - The Kim Possible Crack Fic Morning, Pumpkin features many amusing examples of this: I do not own Kim Possible, or any related characters. I also do not own a 1997 Chevy Impala, but that is completely irrelevant. note : There was no such car, anyway; no Impalas were produced for model years 1997 to 1999. I do not own Kim Possible, or any related characters. If I did, Dr Drakken would have a German accent (cliché I know, but really, doesn't the name "Drakken" sound German?) I don't own Kim Possible, or any related characters. Of course, even if I did none of you would believe me. I do not own Kim Possible or any related characters. Please don't tell on me. I do not own Kim Possible or any related characters. I also don't own Family Guy (that's important, remember that) - The author of The Dresden Files in fact only allows fanfics if they include a proper disclaimer, so all fanfic will have this sort of disclaimer by default. - From MLIA-Anime's Haruhi Suzumiya fanfic A Memorable Moment: I own the characters of Haruhi Suzumiya as plushies. I don't own the show. - Touhou Project: - ZUN, creator of the series, requests that you do this. Most disclaimers are something along the lines of "Warning: This is a derivative work of Touhou Project. It contains scenarios which differ considerably from the original work, and should not be taken as an accurate depiction of its characters or setting. Please proceed with caution if you wish to preserve your image of the original works. If you dislike such fanworks, please [do not continue reading/press the back button on your browser/etc.].". - ZUN himself did this in Curiosities of Lotus Asia, not with a character or a universe ( Touhou being a doujin series), but with a \|\|Game Boy\|\|. Post-script to Afterword of Deity's Tool : By the way, by no means am I trying to get in a fight with Nintendo . - On the poster of How I Became Yours: Rise of the Agni Army, author Jackie Diaz wrote, in a stunning display of class: ...and to all you bitch ass half cocked so called artists on DA, I DON'T OWN AVATAR THE LAST AIRBENDER(c) or the original characters from it. never said I did. The art and fiction from both HIBY stories I do own. read the fine print next time you fucking morons. write about that in your forom because I know you will. And by the way I'm doing better than ever! thanks for the fame! - The description for this Bleach video has the following: DISCLAIMER: blah blah blah i don't own bleach, Tite Kubo does blahhhh if i did, i would've made someone toss a bucket of pink hair dye at ichigo :P - My Immortal does this many times when quoting song lyrics. - Sonic the Hedgehog webcomic series Sonic Wrecks has long and detailed copyright disclaimers at the bottom of each comic, filled with shout outs and more jokes tying into the comic itself. - A student-made film, parodying Angels and Demons, mentions the plan to immediately file for bankruptcy should any company sue, thus wiping out their student loans. It's posted on Youtube here. - This Adventurers! strip has: "Squall belongs to Square. They can keep him." - From this * Static Shock* fanfic: Disclaimer: We do not own Static Shock or it's characters and unfortunately, during the move, I broke my coffee pot so I DON'T OWN A COFFEE POT EITHER!cries** - In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic It Takes a Village, they get insaner each chapter. Most take the "wish I did" tone, until: My ponies! Muaahahahah! Mine, all mine! M-my p-ponies! Mine? Please? Maybe one? Just a little one then? How about a background one? Aw dammit. Selfish Hasbro. - From a Portal fanfic "SEXY TIEMUU" describing the horrors of Portal fandom: Disclaimer: Valve owns Portal, thank God, because look what everyone here * would be doing with them if they owned it.* - From a The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen fanfiction, Beyond Family: I did not invent most of these characters and can't claim ownership. A large majority of them were created over one hundred years ago and belong to a number of dead Victorian writers (if they do not like what I do to their characters, they are free to haunt me). - For a number of Tin Man fanfictions by animegus farmus, there are some rather entertaining disclaimers: Disclaimer: I don't own Tin Man. If you have a problem with that, well I'm the person who just passed you giggling incessantly. Don't worry I'm not insane...much. Disclaimer: You own what you own, I own what I own, and we agree that we each don't own what the other does own. Disclaimer: I owneth this not. Disclaimer: Ownership, by any other name, would still not be mine. Disclaimer: I...do...not...loadingloadingloading...own...connection lost. Dialing-up. Ringringringbeeeeeep...loadingloadingloading...Tin...Man Disclaimer: Don't own it, I admit it, you can't sue. If you do I'll just plead insanity , my stories will back me up (so will my friends for that matter). Disclaimer: d n t wn T n M n. Can I buy a vowel? Disclaimer: Hyperactive-disclaimer-of-not-owning-this-because-I-don't,don't,don't. Disclaimer: Yoooou shall watch the spinning object, give to me the ownership of Tin Man, yes you shall... Disclaimer: As I explained to mommy when she wistfully commented that it would be nice if I could make money with my stories, I don't own Tin Man thus no can do. Disclaimer: Share and share alike I say, you share with me Tin Man, and I'll share with you um, my house plants? Yes, I will share my house plants, in fact, you may have them all. Aren't I generous? Disclaimer: When I successfully conquer the galaxy I shall own this, too (and make more Tin Man they shall). Until that time, I'm afraid I own nothing. Sigh. - From this Digimon fanfic: I don't own Digimon. I don't own any Digimon Characters. I don't even own my own Plot Bunnies!( they revolted last summer long story.) Disclaimer: I don't own digimon....or, for that matter, a working pen. I own digimon. I am also a four hundred foot tall purple platypus bear with pink horns and silver wings. - An interesting variant occurs in The Prayer Warriors: Disclaimer: I do not own the Bible, God does. I will not feel sorry for using Percy Jackson as it is evil and should not have a disclaimer. - From a Star Wars/ BIONICLE crossover: Bionicle isn't mine. Neither is Star Wars. Otherwise I would have ended the 3D Clone Wars TV series a LONG time ago and replaced it with a Bionicle one. - Dagayemar, a PMV artist well-known for his My Little Disney set, usually has something like: I do not own My Little Pony or Disney, but I do own this deed to the London Bridge! That guy in the trench coat over there was selling it at a ridiculous deal! I just had to give him the number to my bank account and it was all mine! Now, what to do with my new bridge? - The disclaimers for The Grim EDventures of Ed, Edd, n Eddy always refer to The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy (one of the series involved) as "that Grim show". When Original Character Edna is added to the story, the disclaimer becomes the following: I do not own Ed, Edd, n Eddy nor "that Grim show" but the original characters are mine... Especially "The Fourth Ed"! - Chapter 5 of Ed, Edd, 'n Pony opens with the following disclaimer: Ed, Edd, 'n Eddy belongs to alright, you know what? Screw this! It's not like they even read these fanfics!...or do they? Um, in that case, Danny owns EEnE, and Hasbro owns MLP. So, if any of them are reading this: Don't sue me bros! - John has some fun with these in Eddward Wright: Ace Attorney, starting with Chapter 7: If I owned Ace Attorney , Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney would have been released in the United States already note : at the time, it hadn't. And if I owned Ed, Edd n Eddy , this would already be animated and I would be swimming in jawbreakers. If I owned Ace Attorney , Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth 2 would have been released in the United States already. And if I owned Ed, Edd n Eddy , I wouldn't be wasting my time on a fanfiction and I would actually be animating it. Of course I own everything! In fact, I am personally head in chief of the staff behind Gyakuten Saiban 5 , making sure it is released in the states before Japan, because fuck Japan! It's all about America, fuck yeah! Nobody's believing me. I am now the co-writer for Ed, Edd n Eddy Highschool ! How cool is that? So I now own all of the characters! Yeah, right, as if you'll fall for that ol' trick. I own everything. I am also an alicorn . I'm just kidding, of course. I'm a male, and alicorns are only female as far as I know. - "If I owned Berserk, Casca would have been cured by now," is a disclaimer not unheard of in the Berserk fandom. - At least one Doctor Who fanfic featuring characters from both Big Finish Doctor Who and Doctor Who New Adventures had a disclaimer along the lines of "Bernice Summerfield is the property of... actually, I don't even know any more." - At the bottom of every page of the Doctor Who fanfic archive A Teaspoon And An Open Mind is a disclaimer reading: Doctor Who and its accoutrements are the property of the BBC, and we obviously don't have any right to them. Any and all crossover characters belong to their respective creators. Alas no one makes any money from this site, and it's all done out of love for a cheap-looking sci-fi show. All fics are property of their individual authors. Archival at this site should not be taken to constitute automatic archive rights elsewhere, and authors should be contacted individually to arrange further archiving. Despite occasional claims otherwise, The Blessed St Lalla Ward is not officially recognised by the Catholic Church. Yet. - The Ranma ½ Elsewhere Fic Boy Scouts ½ ends each story with such a disclaimer. Early stories were just a brief note saying something to the effect that the story used elements of Ranma ½ without permission, and also that the story was not directly affiliated with or meant to directly represent the values of the Boy Scouts of America. Very quickly these post story notes expanded to also provide various anecdotal authors notes, and to occasionally disclaim additional things when homages to things other then Ranma ½ occurred. - Monty Oum's Web Animation Haloid, in its end credits, says that the Spartan VI suit and other Halo/Halo 2 material are the property of Bungie Studios and Samus Aran and all likenesses are property of Nintendo. Later they say "Bungie and Nintendo are awesome, please continue to be awesome by not suing me. This is fanart and does not profit me in any shape or form." - On the intro pages to each of the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf stories on Vic George's Imaginarium: SMURFS and all character likenesses are trademarks of Peyo/IMPS Licensing (Brussels). This story is not authorized nor endorsed by the current copyright owners. - Parodied by EATATAU!!!, which has a sidebar on every page of the website with a Long List of things that Games Workshop, rather than the author, doesn't own, including things like "Eldar" and "Space Marine" that are Older Than They Think. - Parodied by the Naruto fanfic Naruto: the Secret Songs of the Ninja, where the first chapter starts with a normal one of these before breaking off half-way through to incredulously ask what the point is of stating something every reader already knows. Chapter 2 followed up on this and each successive chapter comes up with a new joke: - The author's note to the fifth chapter of Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles disclaims ownership of the "original books" in these exact words. - From this My Little Pony/Danny Phantom crossover: I own nothing, not the characters, the space where this story exists, or even the eyes that you are using to read it. This is for entertainment purposes only, no money involved. - The author's note at the end of the first chapter of "Masks" reads thus: Disclaimer: I do not own the show 'Danny Phantom' and I am making no profit off of this story other than my own self-gratification. Quotes in the story are excerpted from 'I am a Pencil', written by Sam Shore. It is a story about a teacher, his kids, and their world of stories. I don't own that either, but I do own a copy of the book and helped myself to one of the better sections. Lancer needed something to read and I figured a book about teaching kids to write would be appropriate. - Harry Potter Becomes a Communist opens with: I dont own HP. JKR does butt it should be owed by the stat cuz privacy property is evil lol. Workers of the world urinite! If you flam you have false consciousness. - In the Naruto fanfic True Potential, every chapter starts out with one in some form, with DryBoneKing sometimes jokingly trying to buy out the rights from Masashi Kishimoto. - The end of the first Canto of Lord Byron's Don Juan reads: "The first four rhymes are Southey's every line:/ For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine." Of course, this was essentially pre-Internet Don Juan Fan Fic, since Byron didn't own Don Juan either. - Both Rakenzarn Tales and Rakenzarn Frontier Story both open with the same disclaimer: "This story has no relations with any existing series. Except for a few Original Characters, most characters appear in this game are owned by their respective owners."	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OwnershipDisclaimer
Oxygen - TV Tropes Oxygen may refer to: If a direct wick has led you here, please correct the link so that it points to the corresponding article.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Oxygen
Pacifist Wind - TV Tropes Unlike the typical personality traits associated with wind and air (light-hearted, indecisive, and airheaded), characters with wind or air Elemental Motifs are sometimes depicted as being naturally pacifistic, gentle, conflict-averse, and/or generally non-aggressive. This is the most noticeable in works where characters have Elemental Powers as a form of Personality Powers: in comparison to other characters or people associated with the other elements, characters with wind powers would be the ones most likely to be Martial Pacifists and Technical Pacifists who only use their abilities defensively as a Barrier Warrior or only when they've exhausted all other non-violent options and are forced into a fight. And even then, they won't be all that happy to be doing so. They may even forfeit violence entirely, favoring diplomacy over fighting, or choose to take a supportive role, using their abilities for healing and protecting their allies. The pacifism may be justified in-universe because of the potential lethality of wind powers when abused, given the element's omnipresence and versatility. This avoidance of aggression and violence often also translates into a gentle and kind demeanor, with many wind associated characters being The Heart, an All-Loving Hero, and a Friend to All Living Things. To their adversaries, they will extend mercy, empathy, and even friendship. The likely roots for this association (and why this tends to show up more in works from or inspired by East/South Asian cultures) are found in the Tantric traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Dharmic religons. These religions discuss the importance of chakras or focal points within the body that are used in a variety of meditative practices. The fourth chakra, Anaharta, is located by the heart and signifies the detachment and clarity of thought one can achieve in the face of opposing or contradictory forces. The sound of these forces clashing against one another has lead to Anaharta's association with the element of air. The clarity one receives by tapping into Anaharta is essential for cooperation and peaceful integration between these forces, leading Anaharta to also be associated with understanding, compassion, empathy, kindness, peace, harmony, forgiveness, and unity, common qualities for a pacifist to embody. Some Elemental Personality systems (like the Western Zodiac) associate air with communication and intelligence—two traits that lend themselves to diplomacy and talking through issues—as well as indecisiveness and fairweather attitudes, which may also be a point of origin for the trope. Regardless, this helps show that this trope and the more common wind associations are not opposites and can even be used alongside one another. Sub-trope of Elemental Personalities. For aggressive and violent depictions of wind, see Razor Wind and Wind from Beneath My Wings. For another Dharmic religion inspired wind association, see Wind Is Green. Contrast Psycho Electro which associates electricity and lightning powers with aggression, sadism, and psychosis. ## Examples: Anime & Manga - Ah! My Goddess: Belldandy's magical affinity is to wind and her defining trait is her abundant kindness and gentleness to virtually everyone she meets. She is such an exemplar of Incorruptible Pure Pureness that a demon has commented that her kindness alone is a potent spiritual attack. She rarely will be an aggressor or even use her superior magic abilities offensively even when provoked...unless someone threatens Keiichi or gets her jealous. Compare her to her much more hot-headed and aggressive sisters, Skuld and Urd who have water and fire & lightning affinities, respectively. - Air Gear: Played with. Sora Takeuchi (whose name means "Sky" in Japanese) is introduced as the perpetually smiling, idealistic, wheelchair-bound, former Wind King and leader of the infamous group Sleeping Forest. While the past he discusses did see him engaging in fights and battles, whatever happened that crippled him has turned him into a calm, Big Brother Mentor to Ikki and a neutral party to the ongoing battle to conquer Tropheum Tower taking place between Genesis, Sleeping Forest, and Kogarasumaru. \|\|This is then subverted after Sora reveals himself to be a False Friend to Ikki—only building him up to be strong enough to get the Sky Regalia just so he can steal it from him—and Evil All Along as the true leader of Genesis. Interestingly, his nefarious plan still has shades of this trope as he wants to democratize ATs by giving everyone in the world the ability to ride and use AT tech to solve all of the worlds problems. Even still, he would be standing at the top of this "egalitarian" world as its sole ruler with everyone forced to follow his will.\|\| - Cardcaptor Sakura: Although she's able to use magic related to all of the elements, Sakura's first and most used card is Windy (and later, Fly and Jump are regularly used by her) making it her Signature Move and much of her official artwork depicts her with wings, blowing wind, and other wind-based Elemental Motifs as well as sakura Flower Motifs. While she is willing to take a fight to fulfill her mission, as an All-Loving Heroine and Friend to All Living Things, she tries to end things peacefully first. Even when she can't, she's always kind to her former enemies and befriends them afterwards. In fact, \|\|she almost fails the Final Judgment because she was so reluctant to fight back against Yue\|\|. - Fairy Tail: Unlike her fellow Blood Knight Dragon Slayers Natsu and Gajeel, Wendy Marvell personally doesn't enjoy combat and would rather solve things peacefully if possible. In fact, before she learned to fight, she used her wind magic primarily to heal and enhance the powers of others. Over time, she's become one of the most powerful members of a guild that ranks among the strongest in the world, and has proven time and time again that though she may avoid a fight if possible, she is not someone who should be toyed with should she have to fight. - Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star: - Mai Mishou has two alter egos, Cure Egret and Cure Windy, which allow her to fly, fight with wind magic, and has overall improved agility. She has a gentle, soft-spoken, and non-confrontational personality to go along with her Sensitive Artist characterization. This is to provide contrast between her and Saki, her Genki Girl partner for the series in a Energetic and Soft-Spoken Duo. - Later downplayed with \|\|Kaoru\|\|. She doesn't start the story with any wind association and exhibits much more of a cold, detached Brutal Honesty personality for most of the story. However, \|\|when her and her twin sister Michiru are forced to fight Saki and Mai, whereas her Michiru on a denial fuelled rage, Kaoru realizes that fighting Saki and Mai isn't right, calms Michiru down to avoid doing so, and reconciles with Saki and Mai. Soon after, Kaoru acquires the ability to transform into Cure Windy.\|\| - The Seven Deadly Sins: Elaine is the sister to King, the king of fairies, and is the Guardian Saint of the Fountain of Youth. She specializes in wind magic named "Miracle Wind", is a non-combatant throughout the series, and apart from her disdain towards humans for always trying to take from the fountain of youth (that she eventually grows out of), she has a kind, gentle demeanor and angelic appearance. Film—Animation - Happy Heroes: The Stones has a series of posters that symbolically correlate the Supermen and their Car Knights to one of five elements, regardless of its relevance to their in-universe abilities. Sweet S., The Heart of the team defined by her kindness, has the in-universe ability to make bubbles of any size and resilience that she uses primarily as shields to support her other team members as a Barrier Warrior. She is enveloped in a circular gust of wind in her character poster. - Pocahontas: The titular heroine is closely associated with the wind note : promotional images often depict her with wind and leaves blowing through her hair, her Character Signature Song is titled "Colors of the Wind", and the version of her character in Ralph Breaks the Internet can actually control wind to an extent, and she is primarily known for her noble, peaceful and loving character. She is the only person in her tribe who tries to deal with the settlers peacefully instead of trying to forcibly drive them out through violence. Video Games - League of Legends: Invoked in Janna's playstyle. Janna is an elemental wind spirit who supposedly came to be from the prayers and wishes of ancient Zaunnites and has made it her mission to protect specifically the weak and downtrodden of Zaun. She is an Enchanter champion whose wind-based abilities are almost completely focused on protecting, buffing and healing your team, disabling enemy abilities, and displacing the enemy team, making her a Badass Pacifist when played well. - Most of Lidelle's spells in Puyo Puyo involve wind, and she is very gentle and timid, going as far as to ask other Puyo competitors she plays with to go easy on her or lose the match. - Soul Series: Talim is a Filipino Wind Priestess who sometimes has Blow You Away powers. She is a Martial Pacifist and All-Loving Hero in a cast full of scoundrels, rogues, dedicated warriors, and in which even the monk character has a Superpowered Evil Side, making her easily the most pacifistic character in the roster. The Libra of Souls mode in Soul Calibur VI explains further that the wind priestess fighting style is for ceremonial and strictly defensive purposes. - Touhou Project: Downplayed with Sanae Kochiya, who is a human wind shrine maiden and distant descendent of the goddess Suwako Moriya. While she enjoys chasing after and exterminating Youkai, in comparison to Reimu, the main protagonist of the series who is also a shrine maiden, Sanae has a far less aggressive personality and fighting style; her weather in Touhou Hisoutensoku ~ Choudokyuu Ginyoru no Nazo o Oe even causes players to regenerate health, making it not uncommon for fangames to play this up and turn her into a dedicated healer. Web Video - Critical Role: Keyleth of the Air Ashari is a kind, innocent, pacifistic druid who often argues for more restrained and humane solutions compared to her battle-happy teammates. She eventually becomes a formidable warrior and \|\|her people's leader as the Voice of the Tempest, emphasizing the air/storm motif\|\|, but only throws down when she needs to or is seriously angered. Western Animation	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PacifistWind
Own Goal - TV Tropes Geoff: Gavin wins it for Ray by erecting the Tower on Ray's place! Gavin: NO! Ray: YES! Geoff: The Tower goes to Ray! Ray wins the Tower of Pimps! It's a tiebreaker in the game that is being played, and it's up to the main character to score the winning point to win. He shoots, he scores!... into his own goal, that is. A trope that sometimes occurs in any kind of sports genre where a character is given a chance to be a superstar for their own team, only for them to blow it so hard that they score in their own team's goal. It usually happens if the character is a Butt-Monkey, The Ditz, or an Idiot Hero within their own series that they accidentally do this. This trope actually does happen in real life in many sports. It is what's known as an "Own Goal" and may occur near goals in melees where a player will accidentally score on their own goal from the ball ricocheting into it. Other factors may be from disorientation where it messes with the character's observational skills. Usually Played for Laughs. Subtrope of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. An example of Epic Fail. Related to Yank the Dog's Chain and may lead to a Downer Ending. ## Examples: - Captain Tsubasa: One of the many humiliations that befalls resident Butt-Monkey Ryo Ishizaki is when he scores an own goal in a game against the Hanawa team. He later redeems himself for it, though. - Kuroko's Basketball: - Seijuurou Akashi purposefully scores an own goal when playing against Shutoku to make his team get serious, as he thought they had gotten too relaxed after initially getting a large lead on their opponents, resulting in Shutoku overtaking them. He then promises that if they lose the game, he will pay for the own goal by quitting the team and ripping out his eyes. - The Generation of Miracles' last game in middle school concluded with one of them making an own goal. They did this for a lark, so that the scoreboard showed a score of 111-11 (with the Generation of Miracles winning). This is considered the height of the Generation of Miracles' arrogance and it is part of the reason why protagonist Kuroko left them and nearly quit basketball altogether. - * Sgt. Frog: In Episode 42a, Keroro and his platoon are facing off Momoka's butler, Paul, and his team for a chance to win a trip to Momoka's private spa resort. During the last few minutes of the game, both teams are still tied 0-0. Realizing they still have a chance to win, Keroro's overconfidence and inflated ego get the better of him, as he uses his Finishing Move using his hands* right into his own goal, therefore losing to Paul 0-1. Needless to say, Keroro is berated by his platoon for being so impetuous. It get worse in the dub, when he blames his error on his own teammates. - Slam Dunk: - Played for Drama during the final seconds of the match between Kainan and Shohoku, wherein the novice Sakuragi passes the ball to Vice-Captain Takasago (who, in fairness, kind of looks like Captain Akagi). - Played for Laughs when Sakuragi accidentally taps the ball into the basket of Ryonan during their InterHigh qualifiers match. - KikoRiki: "Soccer Game" has the cast play a soccer match to settle a debate as to whether strategy or attitude are more important in sports. Carlin (playing the gatekeeper) scores the very first goal this way; he got so distracted throwing the soccer ball between him and the opposing team's gatekeeper, Rosa, he didn't notice until too late that he accidentally shot it into his own goal. - Calvin and Hobbes: - In one story arc, Calvin plays baseball at school. He gets assigned to play the outfield, and goes so far outfield that he doesn't even notice when it's his team's turn at bat (he can see the teams switching sides but nobody bothers to tell him to come in). Someone hits a fly ball in his direction, and he catches it to get an out—and only afterwards realizes it's his own teammate at bat. The rest of the team turns on him for this mistake (even though, again, nobody told him to come in), and Calvin quits the team in response. - In another Sunday strip, Calvin and Hobbes play a two-person football game, and keep introducing bizarre new rules to give themselves advantages. At one point, Hobbes claims that he swapped the two teams' end zones, so if Calvin scores a touchdown he'll actually earn points for Hobbes' team instead. - In another strip, Calvin is playing with a baseball and bat by himself when he hits the ball high into the air, then runs and actually manages to catch the ball. He celebrates his accomplishment for a moment before realizing that he's out. - Early Man: The first time Dug ends up on the pitch (via a case of mistaken identity) he manages to get possession of the ball and kicks it into his team's goal. As the opposition celebrate, Dug is dragged in front of the Lord of Bronze City and his identity as an outsider exposed. - Rio 2: When Blu accidentally breaches a territory rule between the blue macaws and their rival tribe, the scarlet macaws, while looking for a gift for Jewel, the birds decide to go to "war" against each other to settle the dispute of ownership of the territory he intruded upon, with "war" being a match of air soccer. Blu is substituted for one of the players near the end of the game, and seems to make a winning point... until he finds out all too late that he scored for the scarlet macaw team's goal, losing the blue macaws both the game and the territory. Jewel's father Eduardo in particular, who already sees him as a poor choice for his daughter's husband due to being formerly domesticated, is furious with him for this mistake, adding it to his growing list of reasons for considering him unwelcome among the wild blue macaws. - In the Abbott and Costello film Here Come the Co-Eds, Oliver (Costello) makes a shot at goal in a basketball game that bounces off the backboard, flies the full length of the court, and lands in the opposition's basket. - Narrowly averted in Kenny & Company. Kenny starts running in the wrong direction with the football, but Doug runs after him, grabs his shirt, and says, "Other way, dummy!" - In The Odd Life of Timothy Green, Timothy's parents wished for a child who would score the winning soccer goal. They didn't say for which team. - One story in Isaac Asimov's George and Azazel has George ask the Azazel to make his friend a better basketball player. The demon adjusts the reflexes to the point that the ball always flies into the basket as soon as it touches the guy's hands... problem is, George, while explaining the rules, forgot to mention that you're only supposed to hit one of the baskets. Once the coach almost strangles the poor player, he's forced to quit. - Mindblind: During Nathaniel's short-lived attempt at soccer when he was seven, he kept running in the wrong direction no matter how many times his father tried to explain where the goal was. - In Ratburger, Zoe smuggles her rat Armitage to school and he climbs onto her head in class. This incident is listed in a comedic list of other strange, embarrassing things that could happen at school, one of which is "You score a goal at soccer and walk around high-fiving your classmates only to be told by the coach that it is, in fact, an own goal." - In Unseen Academicals, scoring own goals is one of the title team's many problems as they're learning to play Foot-the-Ball. Hilariously, when the goalposts are switched between teams at halftime, one of the wizards attempts to argue that the already-scored goals should be transferred between the teams as well. - Friends: After Joey refuses to accept money to cover his bills Chandler attempts to deliberately lose at foosball as a way of giving him the money anyway. The plan goes well until the final double-or-nothing round where Joey hits the ball only for it to bounce off the wall and back into his goal. - In the Full House episode, "Wrong Way Tanner", Michelle is so excited about her first soccer game that she kicks the ball the wrong way and scores the winning goal for the opposing team, thus earning the titular nickname from her teammates. - The Partridge Family: In "Days of Acne and Roses," it's mentioned that an awkward boy with a crush on Laurie lost a game this way, causing the opposing team to carry him out on their shoulders. - Old Master Q have one comic strip set in a soccer match where Master Q accidentally scores a goal for the other team. What makes it more embarrassing is that Master Q is the goalie. American Football - American football has seen a remarkable incident of an "own touchdown", on October 25th 1964 during a game between the Minnesota Vikings and the San Francisco '49ers, when the Vikings' defensive end Jim Marshall lost his sense of direction, ran the ball 66 yards down the field into his own end zone for a "touchdown", and threw the ball away in celebration, scoring a two-point safety against his own team. Hockey - Strictly speaking, own goals don't exist in the NHL. If a team manages to score on their own net, credit for the goal is given to the last player on the opposing team to have touched the puck. Several goaltender goals were achieved in this manner: - The very first NHL goal attributed to a goaltender was a result of Colorado Rockies defenseman Rob Ramage making a pass back to the defensive blue line while in the offensive end after a save by New York Islanders goalie Billy Smith on November 28, 1979. The pass missed the intended target, and, as a result of the Rockies goaltender being pulled as part of a delayed penalty call note : in the NHL, plays aren't stopped for a penalty call until the offending team takes control of the puck; this results in teams almost always pulling their goalies for an extra attacker because an own goal is the only way they can be scored on slid into the empty net, with the goal being attributed to Smith. note : The Islanders ended up losing the game 7-4, making Smith the only goalie to date to have scored while being on the losing team - On January 2, 1999, Ottawa Senators goalie Damian Rhodes was credited with a goal after New Jersey Devils Lyle Odelein attempted to pass the puck to fellow defenseman Scott Neidermayer. Neidermayer failed to stop the pass, and, as the Devils goalie had been pulled due to a delayed Senators penalty, the puck ended up in the Devils net. - On February 14, 2004, after a save by Buffalo Sabres goalie Mika Noronen, Toronto Maple Leafs forward Robert Reichel attempted a pass from behind the net, only to miss completely. The Leafs had pulled their goalie for an extra attacker in an attempt to tie the game with roughly a minute left, and the puck sailed into the empty net. - On April 15, 2006, after a save by Nashville Predators goalie Chris Mason, Phoenix Coyotes forward Geoff Sanderson accidentally missed a pass and sent the puck into his team's empty net on a delayed penalty call. - On December 26, 2011, while in the offensive zone and while his team had pulled their goalie for an extra attacker, New Jersey Devils forward Ilya Kovalchuk attempted to pass the puck back to defenseman Adam Henrique after a failed shot on goal. The pass went wide, bounced off the boards, and ended up in the empty net. Carolina Hurricanes goalie Cam Ward was credited with the goal. - Devils goalie Martin Brodeur scored this way twice in his career: - February 15, 2000: In a game against the Philadelphia Flyers, Brodeur launched the puck into the other side of the ice. The Devils took a delayed penalty before the Flyers retook control of the puck. On the way out of their defensive end, forward Daymond Langkow was checked by a Devils forward, and accidentally knocked the puck toward his own empty net as he tried to keep his balance. - March 21, 2013: In a game against the Hurricanes, a breakaway attempt was stopped by Brodeur in a play where the one of the Devils' defensemen took a delayed penalty call. In the resulting play, a behind-the-net pass from forward Jordan Staal missed the defenseman and landed in the Hurricanes' net. - There are a few very infamous own goals in the Stanley Cup Playoffs: - In the 1986 Smythe Division Final, the Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames were tied 2-2 in the third period of Game 7 when Oilers defenseman Steve Smith skated out from behind his net and passed the puck off his own goalie's skate into the net. The Flames would go on to win the game 3-2 and series 4-3, denying the Oilers the chance to be champions for a third straight year. - In Game 5 of the 2007 Stanley Cup Final between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks, with the Ducks leading the series 3-1 and the game 2-1 late in the second period, Senators defenseman Chris Phillips lost control of the puck while skating from behind his own net and the puck was accidentally put in by goaltender Ray Emery. The Ducks would go on to win the game 6-2 and the championship. This makes Chris Phillips the only player in NHL history to score a Cup-winning goal for the opposing team. Soccer - In soccer, an own goal typically happens in multi-player melees near the goal, when a defender tries to tackle an offensive player, or make a pass back to his own side, and accidentally knocks the ball into the net. It's also regarded as an own goal if a shot bounces off a defender into the goal, or if a defender or goal keeper manages to touch a shot but fails to stop it before it goes into the goal. - In the 1994 FIFA World Cup, Colombian soccer player Andres Escobar's own goal contributed to their loss against the United States, resulting in him being shot dead by disgruntled gamblers a week later. It was reported that his killers shouted "Goal!" after each shot. - In the 1994 Caribbean Cup qualification match between Barbados and Grenada, Barbados needed to win the match by two goals in order to advance to the next round but were only leading by one (2-1) near the end of the match, so they purposely scored an own goal to force extra time. They did so because of an unusual rule put in place for the tournament that a goal scored in extra time counted as two goals. It worked, Barbados won 4-2 and advanced. - In the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup, dark horse team England saw their cup run end rather tragically this way in the semifinal against Japan. The game went into stoppage time 1-1, at which point a Japanese player crossed the ball into the final third and English player Laura Bassett attempted to clear while sliding, but got the angle wrong and sent it into her own goal off the crossbar. They went on to defeat Germany in the 3rd place match. - The 2001 UEFA Cup Final match between Liverpool and Deportivo Alavés is a rare occurence where an own goal is the deciding factor that determines the winner. Liverpool got a free kick in extra time, and Gary McAllister, their best dead-ball kicker at the time went on to make a shot. Alavés' player Delfí Geli attempted to block the shot with a header, but he accidentally put the ball into his own net. Liverpool ended up winning the match after that, thanks to the golden goal rule. - CouncilRyS RPG: One of the strongest physical attacks that Ceres Fauna can learn is "Soccer Smash", the description of which notes that using it to deal high damage also results in Fauna scoring in her own goal - a Mythology Gag to when she accidentally did exactly that in a stream of Nintendo Switch Sports. - The Buzz on Maggie: In one episode, Maggie coaches Pupert for various sports in hopes of getting him to beat their brother Aldrin at one of them after he humiliates Pupert. After losing in all of them, Maggie invents a sport called "Fun Ball" where scoring involves having fun when shooting the balls into baskets. At the end, Pupert gets bored of playing, tosses the ball, and manages to make a goal... In Aldrin's basket. - Dennis the Menace (1986): In "The Longest Half-Yard", Dennis and his friends play a football game against a rival team. When Joey has the ball, one of the players from the other team turns him around as he runs towards their goal, resulting in him ending up scoring a touchdown for them. - Jimmy Two-Shoes: In the episode "Bend It Like Wreckem", Jimmy fills in for soccer star Wreckem and tries to score the winning goal, only for the ball to ricochet and fly into the wrong goal, decimating the cheese monster goalie who already had a hole shot through him. - Kid vs. Kat: In "Kat To The Future Part 1", Coop becomes disoriented from getting tackled by the other team after showboating too much and kicks the ball into the wrong goal, with everyone in town, including his past self, calling him out on how badly he screwed up. Luckily, he manages to fix this mistake using Kat's time machine when he tells his past self about it. - Legends of Chamberlain Heights: This happens to Grover in the Season 1 finale episode "25th Hour." After he makes the winning throw to send the Black Holes to the playoffs and receives fame from it, they lose the next game by 118 points (12 - 130) and Grover himself only manages to score two points, in the wrong basket. - Miraculous Ladybug: The episode "Penalteam" has Chloé get herself akumatized during a class soccer game so she can bully everyone else out of playing, forcing Ladybug to assemble her own team of Miraculous wielders to stop her. Things hit a bit of a snag when she finds out that Adrien/Chat Noir is terrible at soccer, as proven when, playing as Adrien in the casual class game, he picks the ball up with his hands instead of kicking it. Things only get worse when he as Chat Noir plays against Penalteam, wherein he scores the first goal for his team... into their own net. He does get better as the match progresses, but it's telling that his best contribution to the match is when his Miraculous begins timing out during overtime, giving the heroes the idea to stall Penalteam out with their respective powers until she gets fed up and calls it quits. - Molly of Denali: In "Turn On the Northern Lights," During basketball practice, Tooey dunks into a hoop...on the other side of the gym, and not where his team's hoop is. Thank goodness it was just practice. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Common Ground", Quibble Pants and Rainbow Dash spend most of the episode attempting to win over Wind Sprint, the daughter of Quibble's new lover Clear Sky, by convicting her he's a sporty sort of person. This culminates in them playing a buckball match against Ponyville's team, buckball being a sport where earth ponies attempt to buck a ball past the opposing team's pegasus into a basket held by their team's unicorn. Being so Athletically Challenged, though, he flubs his first two scores in a rather humiliating manner, but then manages to make a perfect score... in the wrong basket. He tries to Rules Lawyer his way out of this by pointing out that the official rules don't strictly specify which basket an earth pony needs to kick a ball into to score a point, but Wind Sprint leaves the match in disgust before a ruling can be made. This is what prompts Clear Sky to eventually convince Quibble to give up on pretending to be good at something he obviously isn't. - In OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes Enid does this when playing for the Point Prep Ultra Football team because she both doesn't really understand the game and is too distracted playing with Rad to care, though at the begining of the match rather than the end of it. - Almost happens in Rocky and Bullwinkle during the "Wossamatta U." arc, Boris' team was cheating by using lethal weapons and combat tactics. The referee only allowed it because they had a mook standing behind the referee with a loaded rifle and a bayonet pushed against his back. To counter this, our heroes use some old Confederate battle plans from the the American Civil War. At one point, Bullwinkle is given the ball but he insists on literally interpreting the battle plan in which he is to run north, which would have him performing this trope. Fortunately, the referee blew the whistle ending the quarter, which according to Boris, meant the teams switch sides and thus now Bullwinkle is running the right way. - Schoolhouse Rock!'s segment on interjections has a football player getting spun around in a scrum, resulting in his tossing the ball the wrong way and breaking a 7-7 tie for the opposing team, leading to some choice interjections from the crowd. The game was tied seven all, When Franklin found he had the ball, He made the connection, in the other direction, and the crowd started shouting some, interjections! Aw! You threw the wrong way! Darn! You just lost the game! Hooray! I'm for the other team! - Invoked in the Wacky and Packy episode, "The New York Sweats"; when the titular caveman and wooly mammoth are roped into the titular football team, the team's star player, Bowery Joe Creameth tries to make Wacky look bad by tricking him into running in the direction opposite of what the coach told him. Packy soon catches on and uses his trunk to suck Wacky up, then blow him in the right direction, leading to the New York Sweats winning the game. - Takes place in the first Gobbowl match in Wakfu, courtesy of Idiot Hero Sadlygrove. With a hilarious epic buildup, at that. He whines afterward that it was still a beautiful goal, while Ruel has to be restrained by their teammates from strangling him.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OwnGoal
Oxygenated Underwater Bubbles - TV Tropes Simply put, air bubbles that float up from the sea floor in games with an Oxygen Meter. Grabbing them restores some or all of your Oxygen Meter. Exactly how they're made underwater, and contain enough oxygen to allow the character to breathe longer, is virtually never elaborated on. You just have to not worry about it too much, because chances are, you'll need these bubbles either way to keep yourself from drowning when you're underwater. Most often, they tend to be spaced through water-based levels as designated stops to breathe while submerged for long periods. If the character is somehow able to breathe underwater in ways that should actually be impossible for them to do (such as a human character with an overall lack of any scuba gear), then you have Super Not-Drowning Skills, instead. Common in Video Games where there's no other way to survive underwater besides surfacing for air. Compare with Artificial Gill. ## Examples: - American McGee's Alice has underwater sections where you need to seek oxygen periodically. There's no visible oxygen meter, but after a while without air, Alice will drown. Air is stored inside the Turtle's shell, although since this is Wonderland, the details of how this all works are fairly irrelevant - it works because Alice expects it to work. Oxygen bubbles up from underwater plants and some vents, or occasionally for no visible reason. - The Ecco the Dolphin games occasionally feature oxygenated currents and oxygen bubbles trapped in underwater caves; they show up as giant bubbles on Ecco's sonar map in the first two games. Shelled Ones (clams) kind of look like they're giving you oxygenated bubbles, but these are actually for replenishing health. Just watch out for poisonous Shelled Ones. - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has these for its underwater segments, as well as poisoned purple bubbles that drain a ton of your breath meter, almost assuring you'll drown if you don't surface ASAP. - An Untitled Story features oxygen bubbles in DeepDive, although their purpose is more for bouncing off from, especially since there are much more reliable jets of oxygen found in the same area that don't take a while to appear. - Blue Port J: Summer Sky Prelude feature these (in a surprising rarity for this game considering the Signature Style of its developer). The girls can gobble up air leaks to refill their Oxygen Meter. Typically, these air leaks don't appear unless you've dived so deeply into the ocean that the air leaks end up being the only practical way that your character can avoid drowning, because otherwise, surfacing would be too far away for any of them to reach in time. - In the underwater levels of Duke Nukem Forever, Duke can replenish his oxygen meter by swimming through air bubbles rising from ruptured pipes. There is even a Boss Fight where you have to dart between ammo dump and bubbles while avoiding the boss' attacks and shooting at it. - 40 Winks has underwater vents that spew breathable bubbles. Just running through them is not enough, however; you have to linger on them to get a full-sized gulp of air. - Banjo-Kazooie: One area in Clanker's Cavern has a huge pit you need to swim into, but it's very, very deep. A friendly fish named Gloop appears down there who spits out oxygenated bubbles. He appears nowhere else, however, making him a Unique Helpful Mook. The sequel takes it to the extreme in Jolly Roger's Lagoon: Mumbo's magic oxygenates all the water in the level, removing the need for the air meter entirely for that level. - Oxygen bubbles pop up in an underwater level in Karoshi 2.0; of course, this being a game about comitting suicide, you're supposed to avoid them so that you can die. - LittleBigPlanet 2 has bubble generators which you can swim by for bonus air. - Kirby Mass Attack has those bubbles since it's one of the few games where Kirby cannot breathe underwater infinitely. - Rayman 2: The Great Escape normally uses Blue Lums to restore air underwater, but Carmen the Whale produces air bubbles that work identically. Rayman Revolution replaces the Blue Lums with bubble vents. - Every 2D game in Sonic the Hedgehog (plus Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Colors, and Sonic Generations) that contains a water level of some kind features spots that spawn air bubbles that Sonic would have to breathe in to avoid drowning. In some games (such as the originals), the breathable bubbles would appear at irregular intervals, sometimes forcing a drowning Sonic to desperately wait for one. This is remedied in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, where there is a Water Shield that, should Sonic, Tails or Knuckles have it on, will eliminate the need for breathing in the bubbles. - Super Mario Bros.: - While coins in Super Mario 64 somehow gave you some of your air/health back, inhaling an air bubble would fill it up completely. - Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel also have air bubbles. - Despite taking place in a tropical seaside resort, Super Mario Sunshine only has these bubbles appear in one specific instance: the battle against Eely-Mouth. - In Super Mario Odyssey, you can find air bubbles in both the Lake Kingdom and Seaside Kingdom. They're not as necessary, since you can also use the game's Capture mechanic to possess a Cheep-Cheep, allowing you to not only breathe underwater but maneuver more easily. - Vexx has bubbles in The Below (and a side-area in Dragonreach) that refill your air. Vexx can hold his breath a long time without them, though. - Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze has such bubbles in its underwater sections, usually released from a treasure chest or a scaphander helmet. There also are continuous strems of small bubbles at some key points of the stages. - Freedom Planet has bubbles in some of the water sections which will expand and allow you to breathe as long as you're standing in them. Similar to Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the Water Shield will also allow you to breathe normally underwater \|\|and in otherwise deoxygenated areas, such as the section of Final Dreadnought where Brevon vents the atmosphere to try and take out the heroes\|\|. - Yooka-Laylee takes this to new heights with one of Yooka's moves, an oxygenated underwater fart that fully envelopes himself and Laylee, and gives the duo access to their on-land moveset underwater. - In RiME, bubbles appear on some kind of of tube-like creature. They're replenished a few seconds after being used, so you can spend an arbitrary amount of time underwater if you don't get lost or stuck. - In Sonic Shuffle, the first board, Emerald Coast, has underwater sections. Sonic and his friends can only spend five turns underwater, and if they drown, they lose a turn. Fortunately, there are air bubble spaces that they can land on to refill their oxygen meters. - One of the puzzles in The Time Warp of Dr. Brain had you controlling a lungfish in an underwater maze. As you swam, your oxygen would gradually run out, but you could refill it by sucking up bubbles or by finding air pockets. - The underwater area in Mother 3 features an Oxygen Meter refilled not by bubbles, but big-lipped mermen who deliver oxygen via a kiss. Everyone stands around blushing afterwards. One of these oxygen supply "machines" also appears later in the Empire Porky Building, this time as a centaur, just for laughs. - The Kelp Reef in Wandering Hamster features large bubbles you can walk into to reset the timer representing your Oxygen Meter and keep it from counting down. - In A Witch's Tale when Liddell is under the sea, she'll constantly take minor damage and lose air until she finds air bubbles. - The gimmick of NapalmMan's/TomahawkMan's stage in Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Team ProtoMan is that the ship's computer area is flooded, so you can grab these to refill your Oxygen Meter. - Club Penguin: During the Aqua Grabber minigame, the player pilots a machine underwater in order to collect, depending on the level, pearls or soda cans. The player has to inhale air bubbles every now to avoid a drowning-caused game over. - In Elsword, bubble vents are found in one single dungeon (the second one, specifically) of Hamel. Like the 40 Winks example above, just walking through it won't suffice; the player has to stand there for a few moments to refill the Oxygen Meter based on how much has been drained. - Final Fantasy XIV's Royal City of Rabanastre raid has the first boss flood the arena, giving players stacks of Breathless that instantly KO once they reach 10. To avoid this, players kill the Flume Toad adds that conveniently appear at the same time and stand in the bubbles they leave behind. - Some areas in World of Warcraft have fissures which spew enough oxygen for your character to breathe underwater. - In NetHack the Elemental Plane of Water has randomly moving air bubbles that you can walk in. Being turn-based, much of the level involves waiting for the bubbles to move to the exit. - Tales of Maj'Eyal has a few underwater levels with stationary (and depletable) bubbles that you have to travel between to avoid suffocation. - In Grounded, the pond has an aeration hose running through parts of it, occasionally releasing bubbles of oxygen. Given that its purpose is aeration, it's not surprising the hose releases pure oxygen. The bubbles in question are naturally tiny (only a few millimeter in diameter), but given the size of the protagonists, that's plenty. - In Subnautica, there exists a species of "brain coral" that, according to its scan data, metabolizes carbon dioxide from the water to build its shell and releases the waste oxygen in a form that, by coincidence, the player's air tanks are equipped to make use of. Downplayed in that only a set amount of oxygen is provided per bubble; you usually need to catch multiple bubbles to fully refill your tank. - Minecraft: - Blocks such as signs cannot be waterlogged, meaning they can be placed underwater to create pockets of air. Such pockets also occasionally show up naturally due to glitches. Since water won't flow through the block either, it's possible to make a deadfall trap look like a waterfall. - Magma blocks create columns of air bubbles when placed underwater. Unfortunately, they also pull your character down to the seafloor (and can destroy boats if you're not careful) and will deal a bit of damage if you touch them, so they're not a perfect way for exploring the ocean. Conversely, soul sand can create bubble columns that push entities upwards. - In Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Phantom Blood, Jonathan is dragged into a lake by a zombie to prevent him from unleashing his Ripple (which requires breathing). Jonathan then realizes that from the way the lake was formed, the bottom must contain pockets of air, since it's bubbling up now and then, and dives down to extract enough air to fill his lungs with. Exactly how he could be sure that the air was breathable after being trapped for centuries under a lake is not mentioned. - Dr. STONE features an extended sequence of this at one point. \|\|During the Treasure Island arc, most of the good guys are petrified and thrown into the ocean. Ryusui tries to restore Taiju, but realizes that the revival fluid will just dissipate uselessly in the water, so he uses the mouthpiece of his oxygen tank to create a pocket of air around Taiju's body so he can administer the fluid. After being revived, Taiju sucks a big lungful of air from the bubbles coming out of the mouthpiece, not from the mouthpiece itself, before setting to work getting Kaseki out of the seabed.\|\| - The Girl from the Sea: While Keltie the Selkie can't control the water itself in any of her forms, she can bestow a cloak of air bubbles that protects against drowning. - In the Pocket God story arc, "A Tribe Called Quest", the pygmies encounter a tribe of anthropomorphic crustaceans called Bubble Breathers. True to their name, they blow bubbles with their oxygenated saliva. The pygmies use these bubbles when their oxygen tanks go empty. - In the Star vs. the Forces of Evil supplementary comic "Deep Trouble," Star, Marco, Pony Head, and several others are in bubbles while in the Underwater Kingdom. - In Zelda and the Manacle of Cahla, while Zelda wears the Pearl Mask to traverse underwater areas, her magic owl sidekick Groo encases himself in a bubble. Which he totally knew he could do. - In the Pony POV Series, this is how Derpy got her cutie mark. As a filly, her mother tried to kill her by having her fly over a river while wearing a heavy "good luck necklace". She fell in, but used bubbles caught in her wing feathers to breathe until she could get to the surface. Her own interpretation of her cutie mark is that her bubbles represent how she does her best to never give up. - Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022): In a nod to the games, Sonic sucks in an air bubble when underwater \|\|trying to free the trapped Knuckles.\|\| - In Dungeons & Dragons, the Elemental Plane of Water contains enormous air bubbles that non-aquatic residents occupy - since the plane lacks gravity, the bubbles don't move much. The air comes from the Elemental Plane of Air, since the planes occasionally interact. - In the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode, "Robotnik Jr.", the titular robot traps Sonic in a sewer. In a nod to the underwater levels of the video games, Sonic breathes in air bubbles to avoid drowning. In this particular case, the bubbles even allow him to talk underwater. - In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Team Avatar and their allies sneak up on the Fire Nation with a submarine approach. But Appa can't fit in a sub, so Katara creates a bubble around his head to trap some air. - Some types of diving beetle (and one diving spider) trap a thin layer of air against their bodies and use these to breathe. The spider even makes an underwater web to trap air in, allowing it to live most of its life underwater.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OxygenatedUnderwaterBubbles
Pacing a Trench - TV Tropes The collected debt would then go on to pay for the floor repair. When a character waits for someone or thinks about something really important to them, they will normally pace around the room while doing so. Maybe they will walk back and forth in a straight line, or maybe they will walk in a circle. That's normal. But some characters tend to really like doing it. They walk along the same path so much that they actually wear down the floor, and if left to pace long enough, you might find them in a literal trench made by their own feet. Hopefully the plot might call them before they end up in China. This is normally a comedy trope to show that the character has been thinking about their problem so much and concentrating so hard that they haven't noticed they have dug themselves into a hole. ## Examples: - Used in this Chokotoff commercial. An explorer is offered the daughter of a jungle tribe chieftain as his wife. Since he doesn't want to marry her, but knows that openly refusing will mean certain death, he asks for one chokotoff the time to think about it, which he is granted. By the time he finally finishes his chokotoff, the tribe members who were dancing around him have dug such a deep trench that he can simply step over them and leave the village. - Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Whenever Scrooge McDuck is in a rough situation, he goes to the Worry Room. He had often paced so much in that room that he's in at least a few feet inside the floor. In one extreme case, only his hat was visible above the floor. - Léonard le Génie: A common gag is for Leonard to walk in circles while working away at a problem, usually waist-deep by the time inspiration hits. - In The Aeronaut's Windlass, first book of the The Cinder Spires series, the brothers of the Temple of the Way have worn grooves into the stone floor with their accustomed paths. - In Danny, the Champion of the World, Danny's father gets really excited when he reveals how he wants to poach the entire flock of Mr Hazell's pheasants, in order to cause his shooting party to be a total washout. Despite an injured leg, he hobbles down the caravan steps, and paces back and forth in front of Danny, waving his arms. Just before their great poaching expedition, Danny hops from one foot to the other, causing a customer to wonder if he is about to go to the dentist. - In The Famous Five book Five Fall into Adventure, the villain Red is locked in a tower room with his two minions, Simmy and Jake, who watch Red as he paces up and down the room like a caged lion. - The Dr. Seuss book, Hunches in Bunches has a moment where the protagonist tries following a "nowhere hunch" which simply walks in circles "til we'd worn the rug right through." - In Theodore Thomas' short story "The Test", the protagonist of the story is dragged into what is apparently a mental hospital with his heels sliding along within two grooves that were worn into the floor, indicating that he wasn't the first to be admitted in such a manner.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PacingATrench
Overworld Not to Scale - TV Tropes A traversable representation of a Video Game's region at large, or 'overworld', slightly abstracted and depicted at a much smaller scale than the other areas of the game, so that the player can travel between distant areas faster than they could if it were all depicted "to scale". That distant town that's said to be 100 miles up yonder mountain range? You'll get there in just a few minutes of walking by map. Largely an RPG trope, made famous by Eastern-style RPG's like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy where (especially in the days of tile-and-sprite based 2D graphics) the party character(s) were always rendered the same onscreen size, regardless of the overworld map's actual scale. Like other areas in the game, the player is free to travel anywhere on this map they have access to, with Chokepoint Geography being the only (or at least primary) thing to prevent them from potential Sequence Breaking (no, you can't walk around that plot-important town to reach the mountain range behind it). Also like other areas of the game, expect to be ambushed by Random Encounters as you travel across it. For the sake of convenience, most of these maps ultimately 'wrap around' in all four directions; that is, if you can travel indefinitely in the same direction, you'll end up looping back to where you started. Don't expect to find many scripted events or NPC's to interact with, or places to shop (or rest and heal) directly on the overworld map — this world map exists for Travelling at the Speed of Plot between point A and B, nothing more. So if you know you're about to embark on a long, cross-continent trip, better stock up (and save your game) before you leave town. On the other hand, many RPG's will allow you to save your game anywhere on this map, where you'd otherwise have to find a specific Save Point to do the job. Note that despite its small scale, traveling between two very distant destinations can still take awhile (mostly due to aforementioned Random Encounters) — one of the reasons you can look forward to getting your hands on a Warp Whistle or Global Airship. If the game reveals that there is a second world (dark or otherwise) or time period with its own map, see Alternate World Map. Compare The Overworld proper which is more detailed and closer to scale, and Point-and-Click Map, which is abstracted even more, and you basically just click on the destination you wish to enter. For even one more step in the abstract direction (popular with non-RPG games) to the point that the map is essentially cosmetic trimming, see "Risk"-Style Map. See also Portal Endpoint Resemblance, which also involves the entry point of a level essentially being the level in miniature. Tangentially related to Units Not to Scale, which is more of a Strategy Game trope than RPG. See also Thriving Ghost Town. Not to be confused with the Fantasy World Map often included in works of literature set in a Constructed World. ## Examples - 1/1 Heroine (or RPG Heroine Who Looks Giant On The World Map But Actually Is That Big) is an animation series that subverts this. As the title implies, YUU-chan really is as big as she appears to be on the overworld. Hilarity ensues as she ends up in typical RPG situations that don't account for this size change, like fighting Mooks that are smaller than her heels, or recruiting party members that are regular-sized and trying to find a good role for them. - Chrono Trigger has the world map loop at the edges, giving the impression that what you see is the entire world (and shaped like a donut). - Chrono Cross is set entirely on a single archipelago, so its map is limited to the archipelago, but it is freely explorable (and with no Random Encounters!) and there are a variety of destinations. - Dragon Quest is the Japanese Trope Codifier, using some variation of it in almost every game to the series. Averted with Dragon Quest VIII, whose world map is drawn to roughly the same scale as the areas inside it. You can still explore anything you can access on foot, and you do have a Warp Whistle (the "Zoom" spell) at your disposal from early in the game. - In adventurer mode of Dwarf Fortress, you can walk from one town to the next by walking in fully zoomed-in mode note : and if you want to cross a mountain range, you must do it this way, and it will take the same amount of in-game time as walking across the fully zoomed-out map, so in this case it really is nothing more than a convenience for the player (not just in saving in real-world time, but also in navigating across long distances). When near or in a town/city, the "overworld" map has a zoom-factor between the two extremes, letting you see the overall layout of the town and letting you quickly move down long streets (though you still have to shift down to the to-PC-scale map to do anything but move). - The Final Fantasy series has used one in most of its games, the first nine in particular. The aversions come from Final Fantasy X (and its sequel), which don't have one - your Global Airship travels by Point-and-Click Map. Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XII don't have any either. The latter game does have distinct world map areas, almost completely bereft of friendly Non Player Characters and littered with monsters to keep you entertained. However, these are entirely to scale. One quickly comes to appreciate the numerous fast-travel options provided when the sidequesting begins in earnest. - The Glory of Heracles games have world maps as such. Uniquely, the world map in Glory of Heracles III does not loop around, \|\|and at one point in the game, you have to fly off of the world map entirely to reach the Underworld.\|\| - Golden Sun also features it: the first game only takes place on one-and-a-half continent with no other means of transportation than your feet, but the second lets you visit the entire flat world (aside from the parts available in the first): after a while, you gain a Cool Boat, then wings to put on your boat, then a Teleport Psynergy in the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. - The Legend of Zelda: - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is a fairly straight example, in keeping with its RPG Elements: About the only purpose it serves is to connect existing locations, with occasional wandering monsters to harass you. In fact, the entire map of the previous game fits into a small plot of land south of Death Mountain. - The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: The Geat Sea averts the trope, because it is depicted at the same scale as the islands occupying it, leading to long sequences of sailing across blue waves from point A to B with nothing but the occasional monster harassing you (or ocean storm) to break up the voyage with. The Wii U remake makes travel faster, though. - The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword use a hybrid approach; you can freely go anywhere the ocean water (or train tracks, or sky) permits you, and there are a few things to keep you occupied (like shooting rocks or monsters) in the process, but these maps exist primarily to facilitate travel, and most actual gameplay interaction is inside each given destination. - The Lufia series uses this, too. - Lunarosse has its world map as such. It's mostly notable if you pay attention to how long ocean voyages are supposed to take once you get your ship. A ride to the nearest continent from your island base is supposedly an hour and a trip between two continents is indicated to take a day, yet you can accomplish both within seconds if you know where you're going. - In Mass Effect, you control a planet-sized Normandy as you go around the galaxy doing stuff. - Neverwinter Nights 2 got an overworld of this type in its second expansion Storm of Zehir. Random encounters and the party are modeled very much out of scale with the map and the locations, though at the start of an encounter the action shifts to a smaller map of correct scale. - Implied in the Pokémon games, as Non Player Characters will occasionally mention how long it takes to go from place to place, or note how far away the player character's hometown is. For example, Norman mentions that it takes him about 30 minutes to get from his gym in Petalburg to his home in Littleroot in the Hoenn games. You can run that distance in about thirty seconds, if you don't take your time to fight some wild Pokémon along the way. (And that's to say nothing of the anime, where it can take weeks to travel from town to town.) - Quest 64 has what could be considered a world map, but it's built to the same scale as the rest of the game instead of being shrunken down (as in, say, Final Fantasy VII). Played straight in the Game Boy port Quest RPG, though. - Early maps of Rakenzarn Tales worked like this. The day/night cycle did help create the illusion that the distance was bigger than it seemed, but you'd still be plodding through the regions at a fairly fast rate. This was later dropped in version four for a Point-and-Click Map. - Skies of Arcadia has you literally fly around the overworld in whatever airship you have at the time. It's the only time you can save freely, the world itself is scaled down to fit, and it's actually notoriously bad about the high random encounter rate, which the Gamecube port fixed a bit. - In Star Trek Online, ships are huge in sector space compared to stars and planets, planets are huge compared to their stars, and everything is huge compared to space itself (the stars ought to be pinpricks compared to each other at the distances given, and nothing else even ought to be visible). Justified: Sector space is implied to be a depiction of an actual map in your ship's stellar cartography or astrometrics lab, rather than what someone on your ship would actually see out the window as you travel. This was made a bit less severe with the revamping of sector space in Season 10. - Super Mario World uses this, and it gets a homage in both Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game and I Wanna Be the Guy: Gaiden. - The Tales Series, excepting Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World and Tales of Xillia, which use a Point-and-Click Map instead. - In Terranigma, Walking the Earth ( the Earth) is made easy by the small-scale overworld, with Chokepoint Geography being the only obstacle to travel. - The Legend of Heroes "Trails" series uses an interesting variation: it avoids making the entire world seem too small by limiting its various game sub-series to typically single countries or parts of countries, like the Liberl Kingdom, the Crossbell Free State, etc. and making the "overworld" seem more conventionally walkable, with multiple zone maps between towns. However, the zone maps themselves are still not quite to scale; as one example, the first trip the Crossbell hero team takes out of the city is a walk that will take about 10-15 minutes of playtime, while the narrative treats it as if it was a multi-hour hike that leaves two team members — a former dilettante and a computer science nerd — completely exhausted, and even the other two fairly winded. - Ultima I or Akalabeth (depending on how you figure things; Akalabeth is pretty abstract in how it handles the world map) is probably the Trope Maker here, unless somebody can come up with something that predates 1981 or 1980, respectively. Starting with Ultima VI, the series' overworlds became to scale and seamless. - Games created with Unlimited Adventures can include "overland" levels, which is basically a big, static map with a white token representing the player party which can be moved around. - In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, this is actually where almost the entire game takes place: while the characters appear at reasonable size within the castle, that's just a base for preparations and the arena, with the vast majority of the game taking place directly on the massive overworld. Without Fight Wooshes, the units fight tactically across the map squares, and Word of God is that players should assume that each unit actually represents a whole battalion of soldiers.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverworldNotToScale
Oxymoronic Being - TV Tropes What do you get when you cross living fire with a fish? Aya: By the way, you're also a living human, aren't you? Why do you work in the Netherworld? Youmu: Me? I've never thought of that. But I'm a dead human, too, so... hmm. Starfish Aliens and Eldritch Abominations are plenty strange, but an Oxymoronic Being's mere existence is self-contradictory, like a tall dwarf or a short giant or a kind demon (in the Christian sense) or an Anthropomorphic Personification of nothing. To make one, take any two mutually exclusive characteristics; anything that somehow has both is an Oxymoronic Being. An Elemental Embodiment of an Elemental Fusion may be this if it represents opposing elemental forces, such as fire and ice or air and earth. For the record, no, "honest politician" and "military intelligence" don't count. Compare and contrast the Paradox Person, whose existence actually defies the natural order. See also Hybrid-Overkill Avoidance, which aims to stop this, as well as Hybrids Are a Crapshoot, where Hybrid Overkill Avoidance is averted but not quite to this extreme. May be vulnerable to disappearing in a Puff of Logic if their self-contradictory nature is pointed out. ## Examples: - Starburst had been running advertisements with people like this for a while; for example, an albino lifeguard or zombies as "living dead". One of them managed to be stunningly offensive by having the "contradictory" traits being Korean ancestry and Scottish nationality. It basically amounted to a painful national stereotype going off on a racist tirade against a kid. Strangely, this is one of the most commonly-run of the series of ads. - Beastars: - Melon is the hybrid child of a leopard and a gazelle. The resulting mix-and-match grab-bag of contradictory biology and instincts is part of why he ended up an unstable serial killer. - There's a minor character who is a trypophobic giraffe. She is afraid of her own reflection because she is triggered by the sight of her own spots. - Chainsaw Man usually follows Devil, but No God, but somehow one devil embodies the rather bizarre fear of angels. The resulting "devil angel" looks like a stereotypical (humanoid) angel, holds no ill will to humans, but doesn't really care about them either, and is a Walking Wasteland who would kill them on contact. - Dragon Ball Super: Near the end of the Future Trunks Saga, we're met with \|\|Fusion Zamasu\|\|, who is this trope on two levels: He's a fusion, that much is true. But the weird thing is that he's basically the fusion of the exact same being; \|\|one of his components, Goku Black is a version of Zamasu who stole Goku's body using the Super Dragon Balls. Because of this, he has an echo effect on his voice instead of his components speaking in unison like other fusions.\|\| He's also essentially an immortal who is partially mortal, as \|\|while Goku Black was mortal (since his wish was taking over Goku's body), Future Zamasu wished for Complete Immortality.\|\| This combination of paradoxes has serious effects on his battle with the heroes, though what exactly it was varied between the manga and anime. In both cases it proved to be so much of a threat that \|\|the heroes had to summon the Omni-King of that timeline to delete all reality in order to kill him.\|\| - Anime: \|\|Because Goku Black's body uses injury to constantly adapt and improve itself, while Zamasu's body has Complete Immortality which attempts to render his body static, Fused Zamasu becomes increasingly deformed as he takes damage, swelling in size and regenerating wounded body parts as a purple goopy mess. Eventually Trunks is able to destroy his body entirely, killing him... but this just causes him to become an even more extreme oxymoron - with Zamasu now being both immortal and dead, his distorted Healing Factor spikes to infinite levels and begins expanding his disembodied spirit until it consumes the entire multiverse.\|\| - Manga: \|\|His fusion has a time limit, but his two components were integrated so perfectly (especially after losing and regenerating much of their shared body while fused) that his Healing Factor became confused and interpreted splitting back into two people as an injury, causing Zamasu and Goku Black to "regenerate" into two Fused Zamasus. Things go from bad to worse as the battle continues, as it turns out that any part of his body separated from him will now regenerate into another Fused Zamasu, with no upper limit.\|\| - Gundam Build Fighters is a show about miniature models of giant robots. That's fine. Most of the models exist at the 1/144 scale. Where this gets weird is an episode where a Zaku model appears that dwarfs the rest, being a 1/48 scale model. This machine is part of the Mega Size Model line, but is described as a Giant Zaku...making it a giant miniature model of a giant robot. - Karin is basically a human vampire; she doesn't drink blood (she injects it into others instead), is unaffected by sunlight and doesn't have any cool powers, but her blood parents are vampires! - In Naruto, Kisame's personal amount of chakra is great enough to draw comparisons to the Tailed Beasts, and thus he has been given the oxymoronic nickname "The Tailed Beast Without a Tail". note : This sounds slightly less stupid in Japanese, as there the words for "tail" and "tailed (beast)" are much more different. To make this even more hilarious, in spite of his nickname \|\|when he fuses with Samehada he does have a tail(fin), though it's possible that those don't "count" as tails in Japanese.\|\| - One Piece: - Buggy is a pirate who dresses like a clown and calls himself one, but despises comments made about his clown-like nose. Though he employs blades in combat and his powers revolve around him being immune to them, his true worth lies in his proficiency with explosives. He's a Starter Villain who actually served in one of the most infamous pirate crews in history during his youth and is now the leader of a group of people who are vastly stronger than him. - Señor Pink is a disgusting slob who somehow has women fawning over him, is an adult man wearing a baby bonnet and sucking on a pacifier, acts like he doesn't care for his crew mates when his actions and words say otherwise, and has the power of the Swim-Swim Fruit, which lets him swim through solid objects, even though the standard price to pay for eating a Devil Fruit is losing the ability to swim in water. - Tanaka-kun is Always Listless: Tanaka has put considerable time and effort into doing as little as possible. Even his attending class and dutifully doing his homework come into the equation to make things as easy for himself as he can possibly muster. One of the things that Ohta finds out about Tanaka is that his attention to detail towards this goal is surprisingly manicured, and he strikes a very delicate balance in order to laze out inconsequentially and without drawing too much attention to what he's doing. The guy excels at being a Lazy Bum. - In Magic: The Gathering, the Izzet League's Weirds combine two opposing elements — typically a Red element such as fire, lightning or rock and Blue one such as ice or water — into a single creature. They also make great pets! - Yu-Gi-Oh!: - The Anteatereatingant is a (giant) ant that eats (regular-sized) anteaters. The somewhat-confusingly written name is supposed to be parsed as "Anteater-eating Ant". It's translated hilariously wrong in German, where it's now called "Anteating Anteater". - The Fire Kraken, a Fire element, Aqua type monster. Fire breathing squids seems to be a recurring theme in Japanese media. - The Chemicritters are similar to Fire Kraken in that their Type/Attribute combinations make little sense; Carbon Crab is a Fire Aqua Type and Oxy Ox is a Wind Beast Type, and Hydro Hawk is a Water Winged Beast Type. (While there are a few of those combinations in the game, most have an ice theme; Hydro Hawk is a bird made of fluid.) The higher-level Chemicritters make more sense, however. - Marvel Universe: - Daredevil: Technically speaking, Daredevil's super senses allow him to see as well or better as a person with regular vision. So he's a blind superhero without actually being completely blind. Subverted in that these super senses basically give him omnidirectional vision - he can see in all directions at once. - Loki is technically a small giant, since he's the son of the Frost Giants' king and is about the same size as an average Asgardian. - The Ultimates (2015) points out that Lord Chaos, an Anthropomorphic Personification of chaos, doesn't make a whole lot of sense if he's part of a balanced system with his counterpart, Master Order, and is therefore inherently weaker than his brother. - In their quest to find the Scarlet Witch during Avengers: The Children's Crusade, the Young Avengers are accompanied by Magneto, and Patriot half-jokingly calls him the "oldest living Young Avenger". - Infinity Wars (2018): The finale of the Secret Warps miniseries sees the Cosmic Flaw in Warpworld forcibly fuse characters further, resulting in the creation of Weapon Peace, who fights for both free will and rigid determinism...somehow. The disconnect is so bad, she has to cast a spell on her brain to basically surgically remove her own past! - Oxymoron: The Big Bad Oxymoron has a modus operandi where he "corrects" (murders) other people for being contradictory. Like a dangerous criminal who's prone to philanthropy or a police commissioner who's supporting a criminal to use as a mole and taking a pay cut for their child's school expenses. By his own logic, he himself is not an oxymoron since he strives to be pure evil. This is just in his head, however, and he'll come up with any excuse to kill someone, no matter how far-fetched or as a proxy to use against an intended victim. - A Tales of Suspense comic has a scientist proudly proclaim to have "created a Living Hulk!", which doesn't make a whole lot of sense — a "hulk" is the husk of a dead ship. What he meant was that he managed to revive an alien with cybernetic parts, but at that point he hardly could be considered a hulk, then, could he? note : Mind you, the word's usage has somewhat shifted. Many other old-time Marvel monsters had similar names such as The Living Mummy, and much later we would be introduced to a Living Vampire. - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird have claimed that they at first came up with the idea of the titular Turtles because they wanted to create an absurd satire and thought that "turtle" and "ninja" were pretty oxymoronic. (A turtle is a slow, clumsy creature, not one that suggests a martial artist that relies on stealth.) To their surprise, the concept turned out far better received than they thought it would. - A Disney Ducks Comic Universe story about beauty pageants mentions "Miss Housewife". To make it explicit, Miss technically implies unmarried, wife implies married. - FoxTrot: One series has Roger purchase a mobile phone that isn't "mobile" in any sense of the word: it's about three feet tall, weighs a metaphorical ton thanks to its solid steel construction, and it has to be plugged into a wall socket for power (or if you're on the go, you can use the ten built-in cigarette lighter adapters...). - One The Far Side strip featured a duck who was allergic to down feathers and is covered in hives as a result. His wife remarks to a friend that he's gotten used to it as his own personal cross to bear. - A Hero's Wrath: \|\|When it is revealed that Izuku is the reincarnation of Gohma Vlitra and possesses the Gohma's Primordial Mantra, yet still possesses his father's Wrath Mantra, makes him equal parts Gohma and Demigod, something that confounds Kalrow beyond reason.\|\| - In If Wishes Were Ponies, Luna Lovegood encounters Discord in the Hogwarts Station and is given an Animagi form due to the fact that among the 43 attending Pony students heading to Hogwarts: not a single one of them were either a Night Pony or a Crystal Pony. Discord resolves this by transforming Luna Lovegood into a Crystal Night Pony: meaning that she literally sparkles in the light and has been called exceptionally beautiful, not exactly optimal for a Night Pony who are normally quite intimidating, presumably nocturnal, and dark colored as well. - In Thieves Can Be Heroes!, Izuku's status as a phantom thief gets discussed because of this trope. Heroes are widely recognized and popular guardians of the law. The fact that his dream of becoming a Hero is his catalyst for becoming a shifty thief who continuously subverts the law seems contradictory. But it's explained that it's his desire to become a Hero in spite of everything that says he can't is what makes his desire rebellious enough to awaken his Persona. - Touken Ranbu has quite a few fan works that feature female touken danshi. Touken . danshi can't be female by definition - In The Weaver Option, \|\|Malal, the biggest candidate to replace Slaanesh as Fourth Chaos God, represents the idea of Chaos as self-destructive: to him, the idea of Chaos gods and their followers planning and working together is the antithesis of Chaos itself. Malal thus seeks to bring anarchy to everything that could be restrictive of freedom - such as religion itself, even if it causes its own destruction.\|\| - Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse has Miriam, a "giant midget". Ordinary giants are 12 meters tall, minimum, and even half-giants average about 6 meters in height. Miriam, a tiger shark wotan, is only 426 centimeters tall, or just 4 and 1/4 meters. This is even odder because fishmen are known to be capable of growing as large as giants in their own right. - In You With Me, \|\|Stretch is a ghost, a being that's defined in the original movie as the lingering soul of someone with Unfinished Business, whose cause of death was shooting himself in the head.\|\| - Ne Zha: The Chaos Pearl is a fusion of heavenly and demonic magic, and manifests as a being of fire contained within a shell of ice. - Avengers: Infinity War: Eitri, the sole surviving dwarf... who is on the order of ten feet tall, making him taller than the Hulk or Thanos, to say nothing of everybody he actually interacts with in the film. Made even better by him being played by Peter Dinklage, a very short actor who refuses to play small fantasy creatures because he finds it demeaning. - The Belgariad: As a massive intimidation measure in one scene, Belgarath claims to be summoning the King of Hell. The illusion he creates of it appears to be a gargantuan being made of hollow ice, filled with living flames and yet impossibly not melting. - Confessions: To demonstrate that You Cannot Grasp the True Form, the opening juxtaposes the necessary characteristics of God that seem impossible to maintain together, like His extreme activity and extreme restfulness or His ability to cause change and His immutability. - The Cosmere: Harmony holds the Shards of Ruin (making him the cosmic embodiment of destruction) and Preservation (making him the cosmic embodiment of permanence and protection). As a result, despite being the most powerful being in the Cosmere, he can barely do anything since Preservation won't let him destroy and Ruin won't let him keep anything from being destroyed... which of course makes him a contradiction in that sense, too. The fact that he's got the general demeanour of a Grandpa God while also being a eunuch might also count. - Discworld: - Due to his being adopted, Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson is a dwarf who stands at 6 feet 3 inches in his socks. The other dwarfs accept him as one of them because he is devoutly observant of their traditions and even tries to teach his girlfriend to speak Dwarfish. He's just a tall dwarf. - Bloody Stupid Johnson can create circles where "the pi is exactly 3". Pi (the ratio of diameter to circumference) is, by definition, always 3.14159265358979323846264338 and a bit. The only way to make this possible is to imagine a circle being drawn in a non-euclidean 2D world. Even in a non-Euclidean world, pi stays the same. The ratio of circumference and diameter of circle is not fixed in non-Euclidean geometry, but it converges to pi (with its regular value) for small radii. His architecture is very weird as a result. He also created a thirteen-inch foot. A foot is, by definition, 12 inches, and if something is thirteen inches long, then it must be an inch greater than a foot ... unless, apparenlty, you're Bloody Stupid Johnson. And he achieved all this stuff by accident; he was so bad at maths that it warped spacetime. - There are also occasional mentions in the Discworld of mystics who can see "four-sided triangles" when they meditate. - Some werewolves are born without the ability to transform, making them indistinguishable from a human or a wolf except for any offspring they have still being werewolves since they are still biologically werewolves even if they don't fit the definition of werewolf. - Vimes is noted by Vetinari to be very anti-authority (growing up poor then having to deal with the Upper Class Twits of Ankh-Morpork on a daily basis will do that to you) even though, as Commander of the Watch, he is authority. - Openly female dwarves like Cheery Littlebottom are originally treated as oxymoronic (since every dwarf regardless of gender — they all have beards, by the way — is treated as both genderless and male, itself a bit of an oxymoron), but that begins to change as the series and the society progresses. - Neilette in The Last Continent joins a troupe of Drag Queens in her brother's place, so she's a female female impersonator (-impersonator). - The God of Evolution in The Last Continent and The Science of Discworld III sort of embodies evolution, but he's actually creating living beings from nowhere, the opposite of their being evolved. - The Auditors of Reality are roughly the personification of natural law, which comes pretty close to being personifications of impersonality — and if they weren't that already, they try really hard to be it because they hate personality and think individuality means death. This causes them to frequently disappear in a puff of flawed logic, just from accidentally using first-person singular. - The Divine Comedy: Saint Bernard opens up the final canto by referring to Mary as the "Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son." The theological strangeness of Mary has never been so concisely put as in this opening prayer by her greatest devotee. - Dragon Bones has Oreg, who is a solid ghost. He can vanish and materialize himself elsewhere and all that, but when someone touches him feels solid like a normal human being.\|\| And he isn't entirely dead, either. It's very complicated.\|\| - At the end of Canto X of The Faerie Queene's third book, Malbecco becomes a being both alive and dead, sustained by deadly poisons that eat away at his life while barely sustaining him. - A recurring note in Lord of the Rings is the title of the world's tallest hobbit — hobbits being the shortest beings in Middle-Earth. Bandobras Took held the record for a while at four foot five, which Merry and Pippin surpass after drinking ent-draught. - In The Lost Years of Merlin, Shem in the first book is a tiny person (even shorter than child Merlin) who claims he is a giant. This is confirmed when \|\|Shem sacrifices himself to destroy the Cauldron of Death to save Merlin. He immediately comes back to life and starts getting bigger and bigger... It turns out he was born to giants, but apparently had dwarfism.\|\| - Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: Jack's paradoxical nature is actually a plot point; a weapon that was designed to not be used as a weapon, a sword that's most effective when he's let go rather than held. - The Phantom Tollbooth: - Milo meets an average-looking man who claims to be "the smallest giant in the world", who lives next door to "the tallest midget in the world", the thinnest fat man and the fattest skinny guy. \|\|They're all the same guy.\|\| - Canby, warden of the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), is among other things smart as can be and stupid as can be. - The triple demons of Compromise are described as "one fat, one thin, and a third exactly like the other two" — the illustrations show it as fat in part of its body and skinny in another part — as a representation of why the Golden Mean Fallacy is often logically incoherent. - Thursday Next's daughter's boyfriend is, like her, a mathematical genius who discovered a three-digit prime number which is even. That is, a number where the only divisors are itself and 1, but which can also be divided by 2. Since Thursday's entire world Runs on Nonsensoleum, this is pretty typical. - In Witch Week, a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, Simon unintentionally turns himself into one while under a "Simon Says" spell that makes everything he says true. He first claims that he doesn't know anything, then mindlessly repeats a teacher who says he's not that much of a fool, resulting in him being both stupid and clever at the same time. - Galavant: One episode has Galavant getting caught up in a clash between a tribe of very tall dwarves and a tribe of very short giants. They're two bunches of guys of average height and not even they can keep track of who is which. - Kamen Rider Build rides on this logic. The theme of Build's forms are one half "inorganic" and one half "organic" in general (for example, Build's default RabbitTank form), somehow causing a "Best Match" that allows the two halves to work off each other's qualities. - Brain Guy/Observer from the later seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is this. He claims to be an evolved being (specifically, a brain in a pan carried around by a "host body"), but in practice, his "powers" barely do anything. At one point, he even goes "I'm not that omnipotent, Pearl." - Weird Science: In one episode, Gary and Wyatt ask Lisa to make them into vampires so that they can invoke Vampires Are Sex Gods (or at any rate become cool enough to be admitted inside a nightclub). She points out they probably don't want to start feeding on the innocent, so they ask her to make them into vampires that don't suck blood at all. She does. - Wizards of Waverly Place has the character Hugh Normous, a "giant" that is between Alex and Justin's height and uses miniature versions of everyday items to help his self-esteem. \|\|It's later revealed that Hugh is a normal wizard that was adopted by giant parents. Funny enough, he is quite taller than his biological parents\|\|. - "Weird Al" Yankovic: 'I Can't Watch This' mentions a "Transexual Nazi Eskimo". The outdated and offensive terminology by today's standards makes the intentional and absurd self-contradiction even more egregious. - The Undead, in all of their various forms. Despite the fact that they are dead and shouldn't be able to do anything but rot in their graves, they somehow can still interact with the living. This contradictory nature is also what makes them such formidable foes. Not even death itself could stop them. What makes you think the heroes can? Undead that heal themselves quickly or even regenerate (common in video games and RPGs) make even less sense. How exactly can something that's dead heal? Then you start wondering how they can eat (do their digestive tracts even work?) see, hear, and all of a sudden the whole concept makes no sense at all. One possible response would be saying they are no longer dead, but they only used to be, and they're alive once more (albeit in a different form). - Christianity: - The doctrine of the Trinity states that God is one god, and yet also three persons simultaneously. No one's entirely certain just how that works, and no one's supposed to, either; that's why it's called a divine mystery. Everyone who's tried to make sense of it has, without fail, been condemned for heresy by the orthodoxy — see Arianism for one of the big ones. - Nearly all Christians accept that Jesus is both fully God and fully man. How exactly that works is an argument that has been ongoing for nearly a millenium and a half (between the Chalcedonian position note : Accepted in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, and in most Protestant churches when they bother to make a statement about Christology that Jesus is one person with two natures, one human and one divine, held in "hypostatic union"; and the Miaphysite position note : Accepted in the Oriental Orthodox churches that Jesus has one person of one nature that is both entirely human and entirely divine, without either nature "overwhelming" the other). The possibility that these formulations are different ways of saying the same thing was raised relatively recently (i.e. during the 20th century); until then, Chalcedonians and Miaphysites each regarded each other as heretics (and technically still do, since neither side has formally accepted this compromise). - The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard thought that God becoming human was such a perfect oxymoron that it made a great target for faith that was specifically not based on reason. - Both the Incarnation and Trinity, mentioned earlier, have been argued as being contradictions, thus logically impossible. Other attributes of God have also been argued to be incompatible, such as being perfect vs. a creator (a perfect being has no reason to create things), changeless vs. omniscient (a changeless being cannot know things different times, but it's required for omniscience), transcendent vs. omnipresent (a transcendent being must be outside space-time, but an omnipresent being must be everywhere), and the limits of being "all-powerful" (can an all-powerful being do something that would negate its own complete power where by not doing so would also void its power, i.e. "Could God make a rock so big He couldn't lift it?") to name a few of them. Responses have been made of course, and new arguments after that, so the debate continues. - The Book of Job makes mention of the Myrmecoleon, a half-ant half-lion creature. The ant part can only consume grain and the lion part can only eat meat, thus the Myrmecoleon is doomed to starve to death. The monster is supposed to be product of a mistranslation found in the Septuagint (First Greek translation) of the Old Testament, from the Book of Job. - In Classical Mythology, the hippogriff is half horse and half griffin. However, since griffins hate horses and attack them on sight, it's hard to imagine how this could happen. That was the point, originally. The Roman poet Virgil referred to the birth of hippogriffs alongside several other Cue the Flying Pigs-style metaphors for things that couldn't happen in real life, akin to "the lion shall lie down with the lamb" or "dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!" - In medieval heraldry, there are many imaginary beasts composed by mixing up two unlikely animals. This is possibly based on the concept of splitting a shield down the middle and having half of each noble family's device on each half of the shield. - In Norse Mythology: Alviss, a 5'9" giant. A giant dwarf. Norse mythology also includes "giants" who are portrayed as being of rather ordinary size, like Loki. Bear in mind, the identification of Norse "dvergar" and "jötnar" with "dwarves" and "giants" is most likely a product of later writers who were not themselves Norse pagans. - In the Yoruba mythology, the supreme god is composed of three separate entities (Olodumare, Olorun and Olofi) who despite having separate roles are considered the same being. Further adding to the confusion is that unlike Jesus, it/they aren't given any sort of personification, as beyond their roles and names the three supreme being aspects are considered "unknowable" and are properly referred to as an "it" with no gender pronouns, as it is considered the "all-encompassing" aspect of existence. - The common Parody Religion known as the "Invisible Pink Unicorn": If it's always invisible, what does it even mean it's pink? (It's a combination of reason and faith: we know that she is invisible because we can't see her, but we believe that she is pink.) Also the Invisible Red String of Fate, which is one of the things the Invisible Pink Unicorn references. - The ancient Epicureans argued that centaurs could not exist (the belief in them was common at the time, and they also appear in many myths) since, if you really think about it, they make no sense. How could a man eat what a horse needs? Along with that, how does their body even work, since they have two stomachs? Etc. - The mythical cockatrice worked along these lines. In medieval thought, everything was assumed to have a final purpose and to happen for a reason and along certain preordained lines. Every part of a cockatrice's origin story, however, defies or breaks this order. It hatches from a rooster's egg; roosters don't lay eggs. Its egg is missing some integral part, such as a yolk or a shell. It's then hatched by a snake or a toad; animals don't brood each other's eggs. note : Brood parasites such as cuckoos do trick other animals into incubating their eggs, though in this case it's another bird, and snake and toad eggs are very different from chicken eggs. A cockatrice is thus the warped result of natural laws breaking down and things happening that never should, and the creature is as a result a Walking Wasteland completely incompatible with the natural world. note : though that last part might have been a result of it being confused with the sort of similar looking (by that point) but otherwise unrelated basilisk - Communication: Louise is described as a "series of dichotomies", a fact she is all too aware about herself. Benevolence: Immensely proud with nothing of her own to be proud about. A wonderful person to know well and an awful person to know of. Desperately lonely but instinctively refusing contact with others. She was made this way, as you probably know and she is difficult to work with but if you can get her to listen... - Dungeons & Dragons: - Spelljammer has enormous hamsters living between the worlds, appropriately known as giant space hamsters. There's also a lesser-known tiny variety, the miniature giant space hamster, which for most intents and purposes is merely a hamster. They're best known for appearing in Baldur's Gate, in which Minsc has one as a pet. (Well, maybe. He's not exactly sane enough to be a reliable source on that.) - Planescape: The xeg-yi is a strange creature native to the Negative Energy Plane, a dimension of, well, negative energy, something associated with death. Most inhabitants of the plane are undead, but the xeg-yi is explicitly a living creature somehow composed of "unlife" energy, something even its introductory sourcebook points out as contradictory. It has a counterpart in the xag-ya, a similar creature native to the Positive Energy Plane, which doesn't make much sense for a different reason: a living being shouldn't be able to have that much individuality in a plane that is life incarnate. - From 3rd edition onward, "Giant" is a creature type, which is independent from size. Although most giants are at least of Large size, it is perfectly possible to have Medium-sized giants not much bigger than humans (notably, half-giants and forest trolls). Similarly, fire giants are described as looking like giant dwarves in terms of their body proportions. - Third edition also mechanizes Made of Evil/Good/Law/Chaos by making it a creature subtype. Just ascending/falling (rare but possible and given examples on both sides) doesn't remove the subtype despite your alignment now being opposite of whatever it is, and the subtype makes you count as that alignment for many effects, with the result that fallen celestials and ascended fiends metaphysically are and detect as both good and evil (fortunately for both, there are rituals to go full celestial/fiend and switch the subtype, and just sticking it out for long enough is implied by some devil backstories to be enough too). - On the subject of outsiders, slaadi are toad-like humanoids from the Ever-Changing Chaos of Limbo who embody the Chaotic Neutral alignment. However, since total randomness has the paradoxical potential to create order and structure, a slaadi subtype known as gormeel have the Lawful Neutral alignment instead. Naturally, the two kindreds spend their time killing each other. - Elementals aren't alive in a conventional sense, yet there are somehow undead elementals. Cinderspawn are undead fire elementals, creatures of cold flame that attack the living to drain their warmth. Desiccators were once water elementals, but are now shriveled, parched little horrors that can blast other creatures with a dehydrating breath. Dust wights are former earth elementals, crumbling creatures that petrify things around them. And voidwraiths were once air elementals, but are now defined by air's absense, living patches of shadowy vacuum that suck the breath from living creatures' lungs. - Similarly, outsiders — beings from the Outer Planes, such as angels or demons — tend to be incarnations of their home plane's essence, and so can't normally be raised from the dead, and don't normally leave bodies behind when destroyed. But when the demon prince Orcus was slain, he somehow returned as Tenebrous, an undead demon, and threatened the cosmos in that form before being defeated and fully restored to life. - In fourth edition's Elemental Chaos, which replaces the strictly defined mono-elemental Elemental Planes of previous editions, it's normal to find two or more elements merged into a singular mass, or an element acting in strange ways (solid water, liquid air and earth, fire that burns cold, etc). Due to this, the 4e bestiary includes myriad elementals which are oxymoronic hybrids, such as the ashfrost (burning hot ashes and freezing cold ice mixed into a single ooze-like organism), the chillfire destroyer (fire held within a a shell of ice and prone to exploding upon death) and the diamondstorm (razor-sharp gems in a living whirlwind). - In Exalted, the Yozi Oramus is the embodiment of paradox. Cytherea is the first of the Primordials to awaken, yet when she did, Oramus basically said, "What took you so long? I thought you'd never wake up." - Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: - 1st edition features one of the most oxymoronic of beings: Necoho, the Chaos God... of Atheism. Who gets less powerful the more followers he has, and actively works towards spreading skepticism and disbelief. Going by the fact his hypothetical avatar would always bear a smirk of ironic amusement, he probably finds this oxymoronic existence hilarious. - Malal/Malice is a Chaos God whose ultimate goal is the annihilation of Chaos itself. - The Fates of Hadestown are described as three old women all dressed the same when they're young, dressed anywhere from asymmetrically to radically different from each other, and aren't always played by women. This is done deliberately to show them as otherworldly voices-in-the-head as much as characters. - Transformers: Action Masters are Transformers who are unable to transform after consuming Nucleon. Then there are Action Master Elites, who can still transform, making them Transformers that can't transform which can transform. TFWiki.net: There's something not quite right about any of that. - Monster High: In the Freaky Fusion line and associated movie, four pairs of the ghouls get fused together. One of the fusions is between Lagoona, a Sea Monster, and Jinafire, a fire-breathing Draconic Humanoid. - Baldur's Gate: Minsc has a pet hamster named Boo whom he claims is a Miniature Giant Space Hamster. The strange thing is, this isn't impossible. Giant Space Hamsters do exist in Dungeons & Dragons (albeit in Spelljammer, which also has things like civilized Illithids, although it and the Forgotten Realms are connected), and one of the myriad subspecies engineered by their Bungling Inventor creators is a miniaturized strain. It's still more likely that this is just another sign of Minsc's mental instability due to taking one too many blows to the head. note : An "interview with Minsc" by a Bioware representative does suggest Boo was sold to him by Elminster himself. - The Battle Cats has special "Lil'" versions of the standard cats you get during the begining stages. Among these standard cats you get the Titan Cat. Which means you can get a "Lil' Titan Cat", which is barely taller than the normal cat. - In the second installment of the Boktai series, Red Durathror is a Sol-aligned Immortal — in short, a vampire associated with the Power of the Sun. Ironically, this makes her weak to the Darkness element — and at the point in the game where she's faced, the protagonist has just been changed into a Dhampyr with Darkness-based abilities. - Borderlands 2 features goliaths, a kind of Giant Mook, and midget enemies, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin. You will eventually encounter midget goliaths. Depending on what you do, you could well get your ass handed to you by a Giant Midget of Death. - In Discworld II, a poster outside the cinema advertises Attack of the 50-Foot Dwarf. - Dwarf Fortress features Forgotten Beasts, creatures created by primordial chaos. In-game, they're created by randomly mixing any animals, materials, limbs, and strange attacks. Sometimes this can result in paradoxial creatures, the most famous being the "six-legged quadruped note : This means it has six legs but a quadruped's body structure." - Fate/Grand Order features Jeanne d'Arc Alter Santa Lily, a "Lily" (younger and idealized) version of an "Alter" (darker Alternate Self) Servant. The goodness of the "Lily" part of her overrides the darkness that comes with being an Alter, resulting in her being a regular sweet kid. - Final Fantasy XIV: The Ascian Elidibus is a person who is heavily aspected towards darkness and not just because \|\|he is the heart of Zodiark, the GOD of Darkness.\|\|. So what is the form he chooses to take to strike down the Warrior of Light \|\|in their final battle? The form of the ORIGINAL Warrior of Light, representing the aspect that is diametrically opposed to Darkness.\|\| - In God of War (PS4), it's mentioned at one point that not all of the Giants are actually gigantic in size. \|\|Atreus aka Loki for example is the same size as any other little boy despite being half-Giant on his mother's side.\|\| - Kingdom Hearts: The members of Organization XIII are Nobodies, people without hearts, who by all rights of the rules of the series, they should not exist, and yet are able to do so through sheer force of will (with a good dose of Nothingness). - League of Legends has Vex, a perpetually gloomy yordle. To explain, yordles are magical spirits born out of and personifying happiness and companionship, but Vex is a major exception as she's almost completely incapable of feeling either, confused and disgusted by joy and preferring to sulk on her lonesome. This ends up making her instrumental to the return of Viego, the Ruined King, as she's the only known yordle who wields magic and doesn't at all mind using it for apocalyptic purposes. - The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons: Frypolar is a spirit of burning fire and chilling cold, and alternates between these opposite states during its battle. - The Monster Girl Quest series has a few monsters who worship Ilias, a goddess who hates monsters. In Monster Girl Quest: Paradox, this even alters their elemental weaknesses: Ilias-worshipping monsters are weak to Dark instead of Holy like other monsters. - Persona: - Ryoji and Teddie from Persona 3 and Persona 4. \|\|Shadows\|\| are described as the subconscious opposite of human conscious in the games and various official materials, yet Ryoji and Teddie somehow manage to be \|\|Shadows\|\| with a human heart. - In Persona 5, Morgana swears that he's human and fights to "regain his human form" and his memories to go with it — but he keeps having dreams that imply that he's a shadow of some kind, similar to the above. In the end, it turns out that \|\|he isn't a shadow, but he isn't human either - he is the embodiment of hope that was somehow given a human-like heart and has a nature that is similar to, but not the same as, a shadow.\|\| - Pokémon: It's not uncommon for dual-typed Pokémon to combine seemingly opposed types. - Ferroseed and Ferrothorn are Grass/Steel types. Plants are organic while metal armour generally isn't, especially among plants. Kartana is also this type, although being an Ultra Beast, it makes more sense for it to have a conflicting type. - Durant has a Bug/Steel typing. This presents the same problem as Ferrothorn, but you could probably hand wave it as exoskeleton. What you can't ignore, however, is that it evolved its Steel shell to protect itself from its long-time rival Heatmor. Both Bug and Steel types are weak to fire. - Mawile, Klefki, Magearna and Zacian in its Crowned Form are Steel/Fairy types. Fairy types are weak to steel, but these ones are made of it. The Tinkatink line has the same types, though more justified in that they're less made of steel, and more a fairy hauling around an increasingly huge steel hammer. - The Dark-type has long been thought to be the polar opposite of the Psychic-Type, being immune to Psychic attacks with Dark attacks being Super Effective against Psychic Pokémon. Behold Inkay and its evolved form, Malamar, the first dual-type Dark/Psychic Pokémon, introduced in Pokémon X and Y. Of course, this little guy seems to be all about opposites, called the Revolving Pokémon, with an ability called Contrary (moves that lower its stats increase it instead, and vice versa), and attacks with names like Topsy-Turvy and Switcheroo. The craziest part? \|\|In order for it to evolve when it reaches the right level, you have to hold the game system (yes, the one you're holding to play the game) upside-down.\|\| - Regular Stunfisk is Ground/Electric. Electric-type moves have no effect against Ground-type Pokémon, and the nullification of latent electricity is called grounding. - There is a glitch Pokémon referred to in the community as "Invisible Shiny Bulbasaur". Similar to the Invisible Pink Unicorn above, how can you know that it's shiny if it's invisible? (the answer is that shiny Pokémon have sparkles surround them when they appear; the Pokémon is invisible, but the sparkles aren't!) - Gligar, Gliscor and both forms of Landorus are Ground/Flying. Ground-type moves have no effect against Flying-types. - The Fairy type was introduced in Generation VI to serve as The Dragonslayer type, being super-effective against and immune to a former Game-Breaker. Then Altaria received a Mega Evolution, which is Dragon/Fairy. Humorously, this also gives Mega Altaria a double type advantage against other Dragon-types, as Dragon-type moves are also super effective against Dragon. - Larvesta and Volcarona are Bug/Fire — moths that can survive being drawn to a flame. - Volcanion is Fire/Water type. Reasonably enough, it's basically an incarnation of steam and geysers. - Galarian Weezing is Poison/Fairy, thus representing both corruption (Poison) and purity (Fairy). - Galarian Darmanitan hidden ability gives it a Zen Mode that is Ice/Fire type, being a direct contrast of two temperature elements. It's shaped like a snowman with fire coming out where its carrot nose would usually be. - The Mix-and-Match Critter Fossil Pokémon from Galar have a couple very unfortunate cases of this. The Fossils of Galar are broken into top halves of birds and fish and bottom halves of dragons and aquatic dinosaurs; the Galarian 'expert' in fossil revival is Cara Liss, who will take any top and bottom you give her, throw them in her machine, and assume the result was a prehistoric Pokémon. - Dracovish has the head of an ancient fish and the body of a land-based dragon. Its legs give it +40mph running speeds on land, but its head is incapable of breathing unless it's underwater. So what we have is a high-speed sprinter that can't breathe. - Arctozolt has the upper body of a primitive bird or raptor-like creature and the lower body of an aquatic reptile that lives in cold climates. Its upper body is constantly suffering hypothermia due to the cold its lower body produces and it is very sluggish because it waddles around on flippers that are more suited for swimming. - The Impidimp line is a line of Dark/Fairy-type Pokémon, which subverts this. A prominent element of the Fairy type is light and goodness, while the Dark-type is associated with, more so than literal darkness, underhanded and amoral behavior note : The Dark-type is called the Aku, or "Evil", type in Japanese. However, there are also elements of The Fair Folk; Impidimp and its evolutions are based on malignant fae. - Hisuian Zorua and Zoroark are Normal/Ghost, two types that are immune to each other. Ghost-types generally revolve around incorporeal spirits, possessed objects, or representations of the dead. Normal-types, meanwhile, are usually rooted in mundanity of some description. Hisuian Zorua and Zoroark are the spirits of migrant Zorua and Zoroark that have come to Hisui, been killed by raw nature, and been reborn out of sheer malice, thus combining mundane emotions and the power of the dead. - Scovillain is a Fire/Grass type, justifying itself by its composition being just that spicy. - Paradox Pokemon Sandy Shocks is a prehistoric version of Magneton, itself a Mechanical Lifeform. It's also Ground/Electric, the same type combination that qualifies regular Stunfisk for this trope (and the introduction of Sandy Shocks makes regular Stunfisk no longer the only Ground/Electric Pokemon in existence). - Of particular note is Walking Wake, a past Paradox Pokémon, meaning its Protosynthesis ability increases its best stat in sunlight. But its a Water type, and Water moves are normally weakened by this weather condition. But Walking Wake has a move, Hydro Steam, that is itself oxymoronic; a Water move that gets a power-up in Sun. - Scribblenauts: Adjectives can be used to modify summoned creatures, which can result in fairly odd creations. Want to summon a Tiny Giant? A Pacifistic Terrorist? A Gentle Demon? A Vegetarian Cannibal? A Genius Dunce? An Aquaphobic Fish? A Friendly Cthulhu? It's all possible. - Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne presents the Demi-fiend as one. As a Messiah, he holds the power to liberate humanity and guide them to a better future. However, as a Fiend, he is destined to bring an end to all that exists. This gets implied in the DLC of Apocalypse, where the Demi-fiend has followed \|\|the True Demon ending, where he becomes a pure demon and allies with Lucifer. As Stephen only helps Messiahs, whose actions are in humanity's best interests, it becomes a point of confusion for many players.\|\| - Splatoon: The Inklings and Octolings are evolved sea creatures that dissolve in water, being living ink blots and all. For an extra layer of oxymoron, their cultures are so stylish and fashion-forward that areas like lake/seaside buildings and clothes designed for swimming are completely normal for them. - Team Fortress 2: The Horseless Headless Horsemann, a headless horseman(n) with a makeshift head and no horse. - Temtem: A few species are described as such in the Tempedia: - Pupoise, a Digital and Nature type, is a meeting of nature and advanced circuitry. It evolves into Loatle, a Liminal Being that straddles the line between natural and artificial intelligence. - Turoc, a Wind and Earth type, is described as a rock on wings, a meeting of opposites that should be impossible. - Touhou: - Youmu Konpaku. She is half-human and half-ghost (which as a form of undead are themselves oxymoronic), with her ghost half existing as a normally formless white cloud separate from her physical body. How it's possible to be half-human and half-ghost, even in the bizarre world of Gensokyou where you can't let yourself be held back by common sense, is never explained. Apparently it's genetic, as her grandfather Youki Konpaku is the same way. As a kicker, she's also afraid of ghosts. - Koishi Komeiji, extra stage boss of Subterranean Animism. Like her sister, she is a satori, a youkai species that constantly reads the minds of everyone around them out loud, leading to them being the most despised youkai species in the setting. Koishi got around this prejudice by giving herself a Poke in the Third Eye (located on her external heart) which had the unforeseen side-effect of sealing off her heart and mind, leaving her to operate solely via her subconscious. The result is a mind-reader that cannot read minds; not even her own. In Symposium of Post-Mysticism, Buddhist monk Byakuren Hijiri describes her state as being close to Enlightenment and expresses a strong desire to meet her and recruit her to her temple. - Hata no Kokoro's title is "The Expressive Poker Face". She does this by wearing a set of masks representing emotions (which, incidentally, are all her, since she is a tsukumogami). This is possibly the reason why Koishi was made a playable character in the game that introduced her. - Undertale: Inside Temmie Village, there is one Temmie who is allergic... to Temmies. Immediately after saying this, they break out in "hOIVS!" - World of Warcraft: The backstory reveals that \|\|humans\|\| are oxymoronic beings since, they are heavily implied to be corrupted Vrykul, a species of Viking-like beings who are themselves a stunted offshoot of giants. In other words, \|\|humans\|\| are miniature giants. - asdfmovie: A very short sketch stars two apparently normal men, one of whom then claims to be a "very tall midget". - Chuck Norris Facts: Chuck Norris holds every record in the Guinness Book of World Records, which means, among other things, he's a planet, a pizza, a spider, and a distance. - Japanese Twitter came up with the paradoxal concept of "Yuri BL" (that is to say, Yaoi that is Yuri), defined sporadically as either a relationship between two Uke archetypes or two male characters with a romantic arc matching ones commonly found in yuri. The yuri fans didn't like their term being co-opted (along with the Unfortunate Implications of bottom = "the woman"), so they made their own equally paradoxal concept: "BL Yuri", a lesbian relationship matching stock yaoi plots or one between two tachi. - SCP Foundation: Pattern Screamers are things that exist despite being nothing. The nothing is fine as long as it's left to non-existence, but human minds have a tendency to see patterns where none exist, and when confronted with Nothing, that is what they do, giving non-existence an existence as this pattern they see. This is why they scream, and why they're so dangerous; they try to destroy the minds forcing them to exist (i.e. people who know about them) so they can go back to non-painful nonexistence. Pattern Screamers can gain a complete existence with time, but this is an extremely painful process and most don't bother or don't realize that existence can not hurt. At least one Pattern Screamer has gone through with this completion and decided to integrate with human society by becoming a VTuber. - JourneyQuest features Carrow, the Undead Cleric... of an undead-hating god. (Not his fault, it was a botched resurrection spell.) Notably, he has to be careful when using his Turn Undead power, lest he'd affect himself.... - In Jreg's Centricide, there's the Anarcho-Monarchist, who wants both anarchy and an absolute monarchy. - Steam Train gives us Dinkles, who's both a nerd and a Jerk Jock. - Avatar: The Last Airbender: - The spider-fly, which commonly gets caught in its own web. It's noted in the creator commentary as "the most paradoxical animal in the world of Avatar." - There is also the two-headed rat viper. This is used by the Air Nomads as an analogy of consequences of anger: "Revenge is like a Two-Headed Rat Viper; while you watch your enemy go down, you are poisoned yourself." - Ben 10: In one of his many attempts to understand it, Ben pulls off the Omnitrix's faceplate, causing it to glitch out and combine his alien forms whenever he transforms. The final hybrid transformation is one between Heatblast (living magma) and Ripjaws (a fish), which Dr. Animo laughs at and refers to as a "walking fish fry". Needless to say, the Heatblast part dries out the Ripjaws part, and going underwater to let the Ripjaws part breathe extinguishes the Heatblast part. Even so, Ben somehow managed to balance the hybrid form and save the day anyway. - Danny Phantom: Danny Fenton and his Arch-Enemy Vlad Masters are both "Halfas", Ghost/Human hybrids that are both alive and dead at the same time. - Drawn Together: - Futurama: - Justice League Action combines this with Hoist by His Own Petard; Calythos absorbs Martian Manhunter's abilities, including the latter's weakness to fire. Problem is, Calythos is made of fire, so the fight ends pretty quickly from there. - Justice League Unlimited: - The Life and Times of Juniper Lee: In one episode, June meets a giant ("You know, a giant," he said, "as in fee, fi, foe, fum?") who is only three feet tall. June gets a laugh out of it at first, but it really isn't funny to the poor guy; his condition has caused him to be the subject of ridicule all his life by the other giants. (June tries to make a growing potion for him, but suffice to say, things go a little haywire.) - Rick and Morty: - Abrodolph Lincoler, a being Rick created by mixing the DNA of Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. His idea was to create a morally neutral superleader. Instead, he created a being who is constantly feeling cognitively dissonant and morally confused about his very conflicting ideas (for example, believing in the emancipation of African-Americans, but also believing in eradicating inferior genes). - There's also the Sperm Queen, a female example of an inherently male cell. - Robot Chicken had a spoof of Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever movies called Attack of the Giant Midget. Said giant midget was about 6'5"... which is pretty tall, for a midget. - Sabrina and The Groovie Goolies: In a song about how "noises are the strangest things in the world," one of the reasons give for their strangeness is that they're things that can scare you but you can't even see them. However, during the accompanying animation, Hagatha accidentally creates a being that is implied to be an embodied noise — making it also a visible noise. - Sheep in the Big City has military characters with Punny Names that are usually oxymorons: General Specific, Private Public, Major Minor (who is a baby) and Corporal Ethereal (a hippy). - The Simpsons: In one episode, Bart and Lisa are watching a new McBain movie where the action heroes' latest foes are "Commie Nazis". This would suggest a combination of Communism and Fascism, which are actually on completely opposite sides of the political spectrum. (Of course, the McBain movies tend to push the boundaries of belief even more than usual for the show as a whole.) - South Park has the Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka. - In Steven Universe, every type of Gem has a power unique to that type. When Gems are born with defects of some sort (Off-Colors), this trope is usually the result; for instance, Sapphires have the power of predicting events, but Padparadscha's defect causes her to only be able to predict things that already happened. - Sushi Pack: One villain, Paradoxter, enjoys things that are perfect paradoxes, such as sweet-and-sour sauce. His henchmen are jumbo shrimp (as in, man-sized), and in one episode he created animixes by splicing together two different animals, such as a sheep and wolf. One of his henchshrimp points out that he should call himself Oxymoron, since he's a Man-Ox, but Paradoxter does not appreciate this input. - Uncle Grandpa: The titular character; he's both the uncle and the grandpa of everyone on Earth. - The Venture Bros. features Dr. Entmann, who suffered from Gigantism and fought alongside the original Team Venture as "Humongoloid". But as a side-effect, he had severe health problems due to his condition, and Dr. Venture tried to shrink him down to normal proportions. It was too successful, and he wound up insect-sized. He is now a minuscule giant. - Auto-antonyms, or contronyms, a term for words that have two separate meanings that are contradictory or even outright opposite—due to either them being homonyms from different etymologies, or persistent linguistic drift and metaphor. A classic example is the verb "dust", which can mean either "to put dust on something" (as in, dusting for fingerprints) or "to clean dust from something" (as in, dusting the plates). - They Might Be Giants: Referenced — when an interviewer called them "the biggest indie act in the world", they said it was like being "the world's tallest midget". - A quantum computer could be considered oxymoronic: quantum phenomena can only occur when a subatomic particle is not observed. However, a computer's programs must be observed, as the whole purpose of a computer is to compute things. This is one reason why quantum computers have proven so difficult to design. - The No-Eyed Big-Eyed Spider. note : So named because it's an eyeless species of the Big-Eyed Spider family. - Similar to the No-Eyed Big-Eyed Spider, a contradictory name can happen when you have to describe an animal whose common name has a color in it but which is actually a different color because of a mutation. For example, if you saw the description "red green iguana" you might stop and wonder what color it really is, or if perhaps it's both. It's predominantly red, but it's still a Green Iguana, i.e. Iguana iguana. This problem is perhaps most well known with the "gray" wolf, which can be pure black or pure white without any traces of gray. Also a problem with the "red" fox, which can be other colors such as black and silver. - One of the largest cephalopods (besides the giant squid and the even bulkier colossal squid) is called the seven-arm octopus, which is an oxymoron because "octopus" means "eight feet" in Greek. Even weirder, this creature actually has eight tentacles like every other octopus species. It's called the seven-arm octopus because the male keeps one of its tentacles (used in reproduction) tucked away when it's not mating. - In the world of music, an "indie label" is this. Going by the original definition of the term, an artist isn't actually indie unless they don't have a record label (meaning that they produce and distribute all of their music by themselves). The definition of "indie" started to get a bit fuzzy after several pop artists in the indie scene developed a distinct, recognizable sound, and said sound became popular enough that several record labels started working to capitalize on it. - An Everything Is Big in Texas joke goes "A Texan is someone who can't decide whether his state has the biggest or the smallest midgets in the world". - One popular animation website is named Albino Blacksheep. - Similarly, people descended from sub-Saharan Africa (especially countries like Tanzania and Malawi in East Africa's Great Lakes region) have the highest rates of albinism among humans outside of a few Native American communities and South Pacific islands. This makes the odd phrase "black albino" surprisingly accurate in a lot of cases, with "black" describing broader ethnic origins and "albino" describing actual coloration. - On January 28, 2020, a highway in Colorado was blocked for a few hours by a "large boulder the size of a small boulder". This was later clarified to be a typo: the boulder was the size of a small car. - Predator-prey reversal is when an animal that would normally be prey instead eats its own predator. A famous example of this are Epomis beetles, which feed on amphibians such as frogs, even though amphibians normally eat beetles and other insects. Another famous example is the Australian meat ant, a carnivorous ant species that's one of the few animals on the continent that can safely prey on the invasive cane toad, as the ants are immune to the toad's toxins and can overwhelm immature toads that have just finished metamorphosing from their tadpole stage. - Amphibians get their name (meaning "of both kinds of life") from the fact that they start life as fish-like water-breathing animals but become reptile-like air-breathing animals as adults. The axolotl is one of a few examples of an amphibian that doesn't have a two stage lifecycle. It (at least normally) never matures out of its larval stage, which other amphibians have to do before they become sexually mature. So this means that a mature axolotl is both an adult and a larva at the same time and is an animal of two kinds of life that is of only one kind of life. - White dwarf stars, the corpses of low and medium-mass stars, despite such name are not always white. Young ones appear blue due to their high surface temperatures (up to more than 100,000° C), and the oldest ones shine yellow, orange, and even red after billions of years cooling down.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OxymoronicBeing

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