"I am the strongest woman in the world! Well, my world, at least. This one has some... competition."
A character who, while amazing in their own world, is either outclassed or unexceptional in this new one.
They're the iconic superhero in Everytown, America, but now they're in a world where everyone is a Flying Brick. A regional karate champion is knocked out in two hits in an international tournament full of masters. A Grade Skipper advances to a class where they are no longer the best student. They're a genius on Earth, but they get abducted and find that everyone off-world can compute advanced calculus too.
When Everyone Is a Super, no one is.
While Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond has a character go from From Zero to Hero due to the clashing circumstances of the new place they find themselves in, here it's the opposite. With Power Creep in place, a character's skill level is Overshadowed by Awesome when faced against peers and opponents who have normalized the thing that made our main character abnormal. When your hero is an Experienced Protagonist, a good way to create tension for them is to put them in situations where their experience would only help in the most basic ways.
Crossovers are very popular in this regard. Characters who are established as The Ace, the World's Strongest Man, the World's Most Beautiful Woman, or other archetypes defined by being winners in their continuities wind up encountering other characters who have faced foes with similar powers and abilities in their own setting and beaten them.
Sub-Trope of Fish Out of Water.
Compare A Hero to His Hometown (local celebrities who're nobody outside their hometown), Always a Bigger Fish (where there is always someone better), Beef Gate (the gameplay equivalent that shows the player that they're not ready for the bigger ocean yet), Eviler than Thou (where someone "out-bads" the Big Bad), Fake Ultimate Hero (where the hero was never impressive to begin with), Graceful in Their Element (where the factors are environmental), Large Runt (where the comparison is size-based), Not Rare Over There (where a resource is rare in one place and common in another), Power Creep (where new content is always superior), So Last Season (where the way to defeat the last opponent won't work for the next one), Summon Bigger Fish (where you bring in a new threat to defeat the old one), Surrounded by Smart People (where The Smart Guy meets their intellectual peers), Villain Forgot to Level Grind (where the bad guy is easier to beat at a later stage), We Have Those, Too (where special qualities are rendered common), Well-Trained, but Inexperienced (a character is skilled, but lacks street-smarts), and Wrong Context Magic (where a character's abilities break the established rules of the new setting).
Contrast Instant Expert (when a character immediately becomes good at a new skill they acquire), Like a Duck Takes to Water (where a character thrives in their new environment), and Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond (an unexceptional character becomes exceptional in a new setting). Likely to happen in crossovers.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Bakugan, the entire first season involves the titular creatures being blasted from their native dimension of Vestroia to Earth, where they become Mon that earthlings use in card game battles. In this season, monst of the Com Mons have Power Levels ranging from the high 200s to about 400, while most of the powerhouses end up going from 450 to 550, with the hero and Big Bad settling on power levels of 1000 at the end of the season, but this is because they absorbed their world's life sources and essentially attained godhood. The first act of the next season also focuses on Bakugan from Vestroia and mostly keeps this scale intact, although one Bakugan with a natural power level of 600 shows up, with the villains also creating a second one as a machine version of one of the first season's strongest Bakugan. In the second act something of a Lensman Arms Race takes place, with 600 to 800 becoming the new norm and the hero ending up at 900, but all of these are either Mechanical Bakugan, Cyborg Bakugan, or Bakugan holding ancient energies and as such are far above the norm for Vestroia. Season 3 introduces two new warring realms in the form of Neathia and Gundalia, each with their own Bakugan, where the aforementioned 600-to-800 range is reserved for the resident Com Mons, while 900 and up becomes the new norm. By the end of the final season, 1000 is still a respectable number, but far from being the nascent godhood it was in the first season; It's just what is required to be relevant.
- Bakuman。: Nobuhiro Mashiro, the main character's uncle, was considered the best student in his art club, but compared to other manga artists, his art is relatively crude and he doesn't know some techniques. Moritaka notes that his uncle only became aware of how bad he was when he started drawing for Jump.
- Bleach:
- Protagonist Ichigo Kurosaki may be an abnormally powerful human with Shinigami powers in Karakura Town, but once Byakuya Kuchiki shows up it takes him less than a second to cut Ichigo down, forcing him to work really hard before he can get anywhere near Byakuya's level. And he is still only the first of many such enemies.
- Baraggan Louisenbairn was such an abnormally powerful Hollow that in the ancient past he conquered Hueco Mundo and became its self-styled God-King, with few Hollows being able to defy or challenge him. This left Baraggan incredibly bored as he had the might of Hueco Mundo at his command but nothing to do with it. Then Aizen showed up one day, casually decimated his standing army and forced Baraggan to yield to his authority before making him the Segunda (2nd) Espada.
- Xcution are unbelievably powerful against normal humans and ordinary Hollows; however, they are, with the exception of Tsukishima with his Story-Breaker Power and Ginjo, Boisterous Weaklings compared to Arrancars, Menos Grande, Sternritters and the captains and lieutenants of the Gotei 13. Despite most of them having gained a powerup from pieces of Ichigo's Fullbring, five captains and lieutenants of the Gotei 13 who were Willfully Weak at the time still Curb-Stomped them. The funniest part of all of this is that they wanted to destroy the Gotei 13, so it'd be a miracle if they didn't die in their first step in Soul Society had they managed to come there!
- Invoked by Mephisto in the Shimane Illuminati arc of Blue Exorcist: up to this point, Rin has been facing small fry and had one major victory against the Impure King (by using the power of another demon to purify the decay). In order to make sure he understands that he's still in the kiddy pool, Mephisto resumes the "sparring" match Rin was having with Amaimon, the weakest of the 8 Kings of Hell, only this time Amaimon burns out his human shell to show his demonic powers.
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: David Martinez's physiology and relative mental fortitude gives him greater tolerance to cybernetic implants than the average person, letting him use a military grade Sandevistan with minimal side effects. He believes this makes him one in a million, and he quickly gains reputation as an edgerunner and attracts unwanted attention from Arasaka for their cyberskeleton project thanks to his heightened tolerance. However, he isn't unique. He was just one of multiple prospects on Arasaka's list. And even his high tolerance is just that: tolerance. Eventually, his heavy augmenting catches up with him and he teeters on the edge of cyberpsychosis even before he ends up installing the cyberskeleton. And when he squares up with Adam Smasher, an actual one in a million, Adam beats David down without breaking a sweat and tears the cyberskeleton to pieces, all while mocking David for thinking he was "special". And just as a nail in the coffin, Adam Smasher casually makes use of his own Sandevistan, and when questioned dismisses it as "a rudimentary implant".
- DEVILMAN crybaby: Implied with Satan. While far and away the most powerful being on earth to the point where not even Akira can defeat him in combat and dies trying, he's still outclassed completely when the Powers That Be show up. While he never gets his rematch with God and the angels due to having crossed the Despair Event Horizon, their ability to destroy and recreate the earth is far beyond anything he displays. Furthermore, given how he looks identical to said angels apart from lacking their Holy Halo, Satan probably wasn't even a fallen paragon, just one single malcontent of negligible importance among countless thousands of Heaven's denizens.
- In The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, Ryoko Asakura is one of the best students at North High, but she finds herself unable to answer a math question that her peers at Koyoen Academy are studying at the same time, since the latter is a prep school that covers more material.
- Dragon Ball:
- This happens to the heroes in the jump from Dragon Ball to Dragon Ball Z. Goku and Piccolo, the strongest fighters on Earth, are both significantly weaker than Raditz, the weakest antagonist from outer space by a wide margin. However they push themselves to be the strongest in the universe in the span of about two years when Goku defeats Frieza, emperor of Universe 7, as a Super Saiyan. At that point they became the Bigger Ocean and kept training to hold on to the title. Almost every other challenge were threats artificially created to fight them (the Androids, Machine Mutants, Super 17), used instant shortcuts like wishes on the Dragon Balls to level the playing field (Gomah, Zamasu, Moro, Gas, Granolah), or straight up had to steal the heroes' powers (Cell, Buu, Copy-Vegeta, Baby, Goku Black, Moro again). In other words, it mostly stopped being a story about getting stronger to face new opponents, but of new opponents getting stronger to face them (setting off and then promptly losing the Lensman Arms Race)
- Krillin, Tien, Yamcha, and Chiaotzu are the most powerful compared to all of the Earthling population, but are not able to catch up to aliens, demons and gods who are stronger than them. Fortunately, they prefer living their lives and protect the Earth.
- Both Shin, the Supreme Kai and Creator God of the Universe, and Babidi, the master of the most terrifying demon Buu, were shocked to find out that the Earth Saiyans were far and away stronger than they could've expected. Both Goku and Vegeta outclassed Dabura, the strongest of the Demon World. Goku himself stated if he went all out at Super Saiyan 3 he could've defeated both Fat Buu and Kid Buu. In the filler tournament, Goku also proved himself to be the one of the best warriors in Other World. Meaning of people pure enough to keep their bodies after death, he's nearly the strongest who has ever lived.
- In the Buu Saga, Babidi's minion Pui-Pui has the environment of his room changed to resemble his home planet, thinking the heroes will be crushed by its gravity, which is 10 times greater than Earth's. Unfortunately for the poor sod, Vegeta also comes from a 10G planet, and everyone in the room regularly trains in conditions of far more than that: Vegeta trains in 500x gravity, and Goku had been training at 100x a decade prior.
- In the Dragon Ball: Yo! Son Goku and His Friends Return!! special, Avo and Cado pride themselves as being as strong as Frieza was. This is disappointing news to the Z Fighters who decide to let the elementary school age Goten and Trunks deal with them for practice. The narrator lampshades that the whole story is a failure of the Sorting Algorithm of Evil and these new opponents appeared way too late in the timeline to even be memorable.
- In Dragon Ball DAIMA Gomah discovers that the Z Fighters have defeated both Buu and Dabura making him the strongest in the Demon World by default. He gets so scared that he uses the Dragon Balls not to strengthen himself, but to weaken them. Miniaturizing Goku, Vegeta, and Piccolo into children is a big hit to their maximum power potential. Even so, the Z Fighters ransack the entire Demon World with ease in their Mini forms and were likely still stronger than base Gomah. Gomah only challenged them after using an Amplifier Artifact on himself and still was about evenly matched with SSJ 4 Goku Mini. When the Z Fighters were restored to their adult bodies SSJ 3 Vegeta outclassed super Gomah on his own, and SSJ 4 Goku totally blew him away. The reason Gomah held out at all is because his amplifier essentially granted Victory by Endurance and Complete Immortality, but in a sheer test of strength he was no match for either Saiyan.
- One of the few other times the heroes would discover an outright bigger ocean is when they challenge, and ultimately befriend, Beerus the God of Destruction. Beerus reveals that though they're the strongest mortals in their universe, there's a tier of Gods of Destruction that outclass nearly all mortals, and Angels that outclass all Gods. And there are 11 other universes that may have stronger mortals.
- In the Dragon Ball Super Universe 6 Arc, it's established that the denizens of Universe 6, while holding a lot of similarities to Universe 7, pale in comparison to the Z-Fighters and are taken down easily despite being their universe's best fighters. This is best illustrated when Frost — Universe 6's answer to Frieza — agrees to fight Vegeta unrestrained after holding back, only be defeated with a swift kick from the disgusted Saiyan. Hit is the exception, fighting evenly with Goku in Super Saiyan Blue, but he eventually loses in a rematch.
- The Z-Fighters later came out on top of the multiversal Tournament of Power. Goku also tapped into power greater than Jiren, the top individual competitor, in about 40 minutes. So they were already stronger than most of that uncharted ocean Beerus revealed to them to start with. And these are only threats that push them in one-on-ones when they're fighting for glory. If they use their full arsenal including fusion just to win, Gogeta and Vegito are always untouchable. By the end of Dragon Ball Super, the Z-Fighters are the strongest mortal team in at least 8 of the 12 Universes, besides constantly level grinding to keep up with a revived Frieza. And they may be in striking distance of God of Destruction tier.
- Subverted with Moro: he's a resident of the Universe 7 who manages to outclass Goku and Vegeta after they beat up the strongest people of seven other universes.
- Eighty-Eight Divided by Two: Kanade was considered a world-class pianist in Hokkaido, but when she went to study piano in France, she found herself utterly outclassed by the incredible talent on display. It left her with an inferiority complex, and when she returns home at the start of the series, she vows to never touch a piano again.
- In Final Fantasy: Unlimited, Lisa Pacifist is a master of the Kigen Arts and would be one of the more powerful people in her own universe, which is mostly based on early 21st Century Earth. In Wonderland, however, Lisa is regularly overpowered and outmatched by the monsters and sorcerers in it.
- In Fist of the North Star, this is much of the idea behind Jagi's character. To most regular people, Jagi comes off as a terrifying, near-invincible warlord, thanks to his wielding of Supernatural Martial Arts in the form of Hokuto Shinken. However, of the four living users of the style, Jagi is actually by far the weakest, due to being Incompletely Trained, and he is forced to use other methods, such as training in the rival art of Nanto Seiken (a style he is suggested to be outright bad at) or just fighting dirty, to try to fill the gaps in his style. When an actual master of Hokuto comes calling, it becomes clear that Jagi has only survived this long by avoiding confrontation with the actual A-listers of the setting.
- GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class: Defied by Uozumi, the vice-president of Geijutsuka's Art Club. He's noted to be quite a good artist by his middle school teacher, but he is also color blind, and he knows that his skills aren't that great compared to other students who want to build a career out of it. This is why he's in the college prep track instead of the art design class.
- In Grendizer U, Mazinger Z is the strongest Super Robot on Earth, having been the machine that constantly thwarted Dr. Hell. However, when Koji tries to pilot Mazinger Z against the Vegan Empire, he finds himself completely outmatched, with his machine literally getting ripped apart until Daisuke and Grendizer save him.
- Isekai Quartet, being a crossover of eventually six isekai franchises, particularly hits the cast of Overlord (2012) hard with this. It is reinforced that the cast of Overlord is so overpowered in their own series because the world they've been transported to has very low power levels in comparison to their original one. Thus, placed in the same context as the characters from the other series featured, they find themselves encountering fair matches like Tanya, characters that can handle their strength like Naofumi, and some that have the means to counter them like, of all people, Aqua (when using Turn Undead against Ainz in their very first encounter, which left the Lich understandably afraid of her). And then there's Reinhard.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable: Having never encountered another Stand user before (and not even knowing that his Fighting Spirit Killer Queen is called a "Stand"), Yoshikage Kira simply assumed that there weren't others like him until his encounter with Shigechi taught him otherwise. Even after that, he's quick to assume that Killer Queen is invincible in a straight fight, and isn't terribly impressed when an injured Jotaro attacks him with Star Platinum. That changes when it turns out that Jotaro was holding back, and he catches Kira off guard before Star Platinum sends him flying with his signature Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs. This serves as a wake-up call for Kira, who upon realizing that there are Stand users out there who could kill him if given the chance (and they would have plenty of motive) avoids Jotaro and his friends like the plague for the rest of Part 4.
- In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid Vivio, Einhard, and their friends attend a tournament with other young mages who also specialize in physical combat. In a complete subversion to usual Tournament Arc tropes, the girls lose early on with only Einhard being able to briefly battle the prodigy champion before being taken out. They are understandably demoralized by this.
- This is the biggest flaw of the Black Knights in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom: The Black Knights are Super Soldiers on a level higher than Coordinators and armed with telepathy outfitted with Mobile Suits that can absorb beam energy and use it to power their suits. Because of this, though, the team attacks via confusing their opponents and overwhelming them when their main weapons can't affect them. They're able to defeat Kira and his friends through this the first time, but the second time they're able to overcome them with new weapons, new tactics and liberal use of loved one's memories.
- My Hero Academia: The root cause of Katsuki Bakugo's Inferiority Superiority Complex is based around the fact that he was born with an exceptionally powerful Quirk that grants him the power to emit explosions from his hands. As a result, he was seen as the most likely to become a successful Pro Hero compared to his peers. This, combined with the fact that his childhood friend, Izuku Midoriya, was willing to do the same despite having no Quirk of his own, led to Bakugo viewing anyone else striving to equal him as a personal attack. When he finally makes it into U.A., his raw talent is matched against other students who can do the same with their intelligence, strategies, and power. While Bakugo is still exceptional, he doesn't get the same level of reverence that he did in middle school or when he was a child, and much of his blustering is dismissed by his peers (except for Midoriya, who always admired him despite the bullying). His time as the golden child has also proven to stunt his heroic character, as his inability to empathize with others leads to him winning the Entrance Exam with 0 Hero points, the League of Villains kidnapping him in an attempt to recruit him, and later failing the Provisional License Exam because he was docked too many points for yelling at the pretend hostages to "save themselves" which was technically true since they weren't actually injured enough to require outside help (and were in fact docking points from the students who wasted too much time trying to help them while neglecting other more injured "victims"), showing he actually possesses accurate situational crisis awareness but absolutely no tact in handling citizens. It never really goes away, as despite Character Development his popularity on the pro hero boards keeps getting hurt by his yelling at the people he’s trying to save.
- Naruto:
- Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke had pretty much established themselves as pretty strong genin... until Haku showed up, seemingly killed Zabuza with a flick of the wrist, and disappeared without a second notice. When they try to fight him again, Haku reveals he had been holding back (and holds back through the entire fight). The only challenge he gets is from Naruto's first use of the Nine Tails' chakra. And even then, it's only because Haku doesn't go in for the kill while he's taking a beating. This becomes even more apparent when Orochimaru and the other major villages are introduced, and it takes a LOT of training from Naruto to catch up to Gaara or Neji in Part I and surpass the latter. By the tail end of Part II, though, Naruto and Sasuke are quite clearly among the strongest ninja in the world.
- Likewise, Sakura is praised for her chakra control; but as she learns during the Chuunin Exam, most of the participants have roughly as good (if not better) control and are far superior to her in every other aspect.
- Jiraiya, and to an extent the other Sannin (Orochimaru and Tsunade), are large fish in a normal pond, being incredibly strong ninja in their own right, but they only managed to get into a draw against someone like Hanzo in their prime (this was back when they were a team), and then there are those like Nagato (who easily annihilated Hanzo, though the latter's skills had stagnated for years by that point). Jiraiya's final thoughts are to compare himself to a frog in a well that has made it to the ocean (referencing a Japanese proverb similar to this trope). Granted, being ninja, power isn't always the thing. Nagato mentions that had Jiraiya been aware of his capabilities, he would've most likely lost, implying only the element of surprise allowed him to beat Jiraiya despite having more abilities.
- One Piece: This is a common problem pirate crews face, especially those originating from the Four Blues. Some may rise to become the strongest in their home seas, but upon entering the Grand Line, most will often find themselves being pitted against opponents who are leagues stronger than they are. This happened to Don Krieg, the strongest pirate in East Blue, who was Crazy-Prepared in all circumstances, but lost his 50 ships shortly after entering the Grand Line because Mihawk was bored.
- In the Baratie arc, Roronoa Zoro, despite being the most infamous swordsman and bounty hunter in the East Blue, is curbstomped by Mihawk. The Warlord even lampshades the name of this trope:
Mihawk: You may have a reputation, but you're still just a bunny. [...] You're a little frog, croaking in your puddle. Time you learned how big the world is.
- The Straw Hat Pirates are a prime example of this process. After rising to become the most wanted pirates in East Blue, Monkey D. Luffy and the others arrive in the Grand Line to find enemies that are much stronger than what they faced before, and the strength of their enemies only increases the further they travel. This happens because the majority of Luffy's opponents in the East Blue were overall less familiar with Devil Fruit users and so Luffy tended to win more easily compared to many of his later opponents on the Grand Line, in which Devil Fruits themselves tend to be more frequent and varied, making Luffy's own Gum-Gum Fruit look more mundane and weak (at least until Luffy trains it more). After arriving at the end of the first half of the Grand Line, the Straw Hats face an enemy so strong that Luffy of all people decides that they need to retreat or else the whole crew would be slaughtered. This is then compounded when Luffy witnesses firsthand the gap between himself and the world's most powerful fighters during the Marineford Arc. These events all serve to convince Luffy to have the crew take a two-year hiatus from their journey to train and prepare themselves for what lies ahead in the second half of the Grand Line, known as the New World.
- In the Jaya arc, when Rockstar brags about his 94 million bounty to the Whitebeard Pirates, he's laughed off as a nobody that they've never heard of, and Whitebeard is insulted that Shanks used Rockstar as a messenger boy rather than speaking to Whitebeard himself. In the New World, bounties around 100 million are a dime a dozen; sending someone with such a relatively low bounty to speak with Whitebeard might as well be the equivalent of sending your newest intern to serve as an international diplomat. Especially hilarious after it is revealed (hundreds of chapters later) that Whitebeard's bounty is about 50+ times higher than Rockstar's. For context, this scene happens shortly after Luffy's bounty rises to 100 million, showing how far he has to go.
- In the same arc, Bellamy the Hyena had the largest bounty in the area he had made base at, and was all too happy to gloat about it and taunt and rough up Luffy and Zoro because they didn't want any trouble. When he sees Luffy's newest bounty come in, he panics a little before convincing himself the bounty's a fake. When Luffy finally decides to go after Bellamy seething with pure fury over Bellamy roughing up their new friend Montblanc Cricket and ransacking his house, Bellamy accepts and goes through a long charge up with his Devil Fruit that makes him so fast he can't be seen...then Luffy sends him through the docks in one strike in what's pretty much one of the most one-sided fights in the manga.
- After buffing himself and his crew with Energy Steroids (which was the only reason they were able to take over Fishman Island to begin with), Hody Jones honestly thinks he's powerful enough to invade the surface world and become Pirate King. Not only do the Straw Hats wipe out his crew with barely any effort, they then go on to face much more powerful people (Marines and pirates alike) after entering the New World. To note, Hody was defeated by Zoro with one slash. Underwaternote . Before Luffy even had the chance to fight the guy himself. Once that happened, it was fairly obvious how the rest of the arc was going to go for the antagonists.
- Zoro's fight with Mihawk was called back in the Fishman Island arc when Zoro's first "serious opponent", a Drunken Master octopus swordsman named Hyouzou, bragged about being the strongest swordsman in Fishman Island. Zoro kept calling him a frog until Hyouzou was sufficiently incensed, at which point Zoro stated he was bragging like a frog in a well, unaware of the world.
- Logia Devil Fruit users have a strong tendency to run into a wall: while they may be invincible powerhouses in Paradise, being able to use Haki is considered the bare minimum to survive in the New World, allowing most people there to bypass a Logia's intangibility:
- Downplayed with "God" Eneru. He is much stronger than anybody on the Sky Islands, and he has an almost unbeatable Devil Fruit power, even explicitly referred to as possessing virtual invincibility, and his Haki allows him to predict his opponents' moves. In fact, Luffy only defeats him because his rubber body cannot conduct electricity. However, Luffy comments that while Eneru may be a Physical God in the sky, on the Blue Sea there are so many strong guys that Eneru would look like a weakling if he ever went down there, since Haki is so prevalent on the open sea. That said, Word of God has noted that due to a combination of Eneru's skill with his Devil Fruit and his high intelligence and creativity (questionable sanity aside), he would still prove to be a dangerous criminal if he ever went down to the world below. The general consensus is that he's no pushover even by the standards of the New World.
- Captain Smoker, while certainly badass, was also a Logia user stationed in the weakest sea, before entering the first half of the Grand Line in order to capture Luffy. Neither sea has many (or any for the East Blue) people even capable of touching him, let alone fighting him. As a result, Smoker was literally bored because the pirates were too weak. However, when "The World's Most Wanted Man" Dragon the Revolutionary comes to town, he makes Smoker quake in his boots without even doing anything to him. Later, New World pirates like Ace and Hancock drive him off with little visible effort, even though Luffy couldn't until the Time Skip, and when Smoker reaches the New World, he starts losing several fights despite being able to use Haki now.
- When New World pirate Pekoms, whose Devil Fruit power is a lowly turtle Zoan note , curb stomps swamp Logia Caribou, he gives the advice that Logias who rely exclusively on their Devil Fruit will die quickly in the New World. While Caribou is terrifying to frauds like Demalo Black, he is no match for the really dangerous pirates like the Straw Hats, simply because he didn't take that advice.
- This is driven home on in the next arc with the Arc Villain Caesar Clown, a Logia-type who has control over all types of chemical gas, including poisonous ones. Pre-time skip, he would have been one of the most dangerous opponents the Straw Hats faced period, but with Luffy coming out of two years of training (not to mention bringing an Acquired Poison Immunity and Haki to the table), he looks like an utter chump once forced into a straight fight. His snow Logia ally Monet doesn't fare any better, being defeated quickly by Zoro when she tries to face off against him. To add salt to the wound, Zoro doesn't even use Haki to defeat Monet, he merely shows her how deep the abyss in strength between the two is, terrifying her into Power Incontinence that results in her taking a fight-ending blow.
- This also applies to the Seven Warlords of the Sea, with the exception of Mihawk (who was able to fight Shanks evenly when the Emperor still had both of his arms). They're all very strong, but most of them pale in comparison to the Four Emperors (as Crocodile and Moria were defeated by Whitebeard and Kaido respectively in the past, and Doflamingo was afraid of Kaido), and would struggle to defeat even the Emperors' top officers.
- Close examination of Germa 66 compared to the rest of the world shows them to be this, like a cross between the New Fishman Pirates and Don Krieg's armada, but not as out of depth as either. For all their build up and reputation, their overall threat level is pretty average compared to what the New World has. Army of fodder, even with their advantages, is still fodder and they have only five powerful warriors at their disposal and even then they are far from the top dogs they act like given they not only need special suits to reach full potential (in a World of Badass where people are superhuman without needing advanced technology), but were still easily trounced by an Emperor's crew when they weren't given the advantage of a surprise attack. The fact they only seek to rule North Blue, which isn't even close to the New World in threat level, and needed to ally with an Emperor's crew to try and reconquer it, speaks volumes. And the fact none of them apparently have Haki if the Vivre Cards are any indication (as it listed none for any of them), likely due to being used to technology, soldiers and enhancements, is another ding against them.
- Eustass Kid has the highest bounty of any of the Supernovas when introduced, but even he can't do much against the likes of the Pacifista and Admiral Kizaru. After the Time Skip, his bounty is notably high even for the New World and he's a notable threat, but he has a habit of trying to contend with the strongest people in the series, such as Kaido and Shanks. This is ultimately his undoing, when managing to (barely) defeat Big Mom alongside Trafalgar Law convinces Kid that he can go toe to toe with an Emperor by himself, only to get taken out in a single attack by Shanks.
- In the Baratie arc, Roronoa Zoro, despite being the most infamous swordsman and bounty hunter in the East Blue, is curbstomped by Mihawk. The Warlord even lampshades the name of this trope:
- One-Punch Man:
- This is Suiryu's problem and the source of his pride. He's legitimately strong and would fit into the lower ranks of S-Class perfectly, but he's limited his worldview to what he sees in the tournament ring. Fighting only people much weaker than him has blinded him to just how many monsters and heroes out there are stronger than him. He finally understands this once he fights the Dragon-level Gouketsu and realizes that for all his strength, he can't make the monster even blink (for context, "Dragon" threats are among the most powerful monsters in the world and only surpassed by "God"-level ones. Even monsters on the rank below it, "Demon", are dangerous enough that even a low-ranked S-Class Hero can lose).
- While she can't possibly be promoted, Tatsumaki, who is treated by the association as the strongest member of the S-class, fits the trope as well: her telekinetic powers are immense (she, along with her younger sister Fubuki, are considered the "Witches" of the esper world), to the point that when an alien warship tried to bombard the area she was in she casually stopped all their projectiles and sent them back much faster; but she's especifically one of the strongest espers in the world, and in terms of overall power even she is outclassed by the #1 S-Class hero Blast, Garou at his apex, and especially Saitama.
- Pokémon the Series:
- Ash's Charizard is, for most of Kanto, the Orange Islands and the first part of Johto, the strongest Pokémon on Ash's team. Then they come across Charicific Valley, which houses the strongest Charizard on the planet. Charizard learns the hard way that he isn't nearly top-class within his own species, and decides to stay in the valley to train. He then averts it increasingly during every following appearance, growing visibly larger and more powerful and, by the time of the Battle Frontier season, he can throw down with legendary Pokémon.
- The original head writer's personal notes and bible of the series, Pocket Monsters: The Animation, has this in play. Pallet Town, Masara Town in Japanese, is named after Masara Oak, the most skilled trainer to ever have come out of Pallet Town. The town was renamed in his honor, he had a statue placed for him in the center of town, and his grandsons became the town's mayor, postmaster, and famous Professor/local eccentric scientist. His ranking out of ten thousand: 921. The conflict between the higher executives' vision and the vision of Shudo, said head writer, never did get to a point of addressing if Ash or Gary ever ranked higher than 921, and if such the town would have been renamed Ashburg or Garyville.
- Although it's notable Pocket Monsters: The Animation breaches heavily into alternate continuity, as well as being far more cynical than the anime, basically to the point of deconstruction. Among massive changes are Pallet Town's visible poverty and criminal problems, Gym Leaders losing their license after any 4 consecutive losses to challengers, and Gym Leaders bribing challengers to not lose (greatly contradicting how Misty's sisters basically gave up badges without any worry), Brock's father not appearing, and his siblings having various fathers, Ash never getting a Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle. So it's doubtful how canonical to the anime concepts in the Pocket Monsters: The Animation light novels are, if at all, especially seeing Takeshi Shudo himself used Charmander/Charmeleon/Charizard in multiple episodes and movies he directly wrote. So the revelation of the strongest trainer to ever come out of Pallet Town being quite weak in the grand scale just seems to be another part of the light novel being more cynical and deconstructive toward the anime and the franchise.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica: This is Sayaka Miki's problem, and why she is often considered the weakest magical girl in the original anime. She's perhaps above-average in terms of strength, and she quickly learns to use her powerful Healing Factor to cover her shortcomings, being functionally immortal as long as her Soul Jar is intact. Unfortunately, she's up against Kyoko and Homura, both of whom have years of experience and have had much more time to build up their resources, and is constantly comparing herself to Mami, who had both experience and exceptional power, and Madoka, who's in a category of her own. Averted in the sequel movie Rebellion, in which she has taken several levels in badass and is on par with both Mami and Homura in power and skill.
- Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story has this pop up with all the Holy Quintet to some extent, most notably Mami as Kamihama has Magical Girls who are as experienced if not more so than her, and several who are more powerful. The Holy Quintet's individual members are all still very strong relatively speaking in Kamihama, Mami might no longer be the most experienced and skilled Magical Girl in any given story but she's still easily one of the most skilled in any room she's in and not a Magical Girl to just dismiss as irrelevant, but its still a notable difference from usual for them. Oriko and Suzune also suffer from this, struggling in ways they usually don't in their native series despite still being fairly powerful and skilled and, especially with Suzune, lacking the teamwork that Kamihama and the Holy Quintet have.
- Rurouni Kenshin:
- Saito points this out in regards to Sanosuke, stating that while his abilities may make him one of the strongest fighters in Tokyo, he doesn't match up to either him or Kenshin (who are some of the strongest fighters in Japan due to their experiences in the Bakumatsu). It's eventually subverted, as Sanosuke becomes strong enough to hold his own even if he's not quite as powerful.
- According to the mangaka, Kaoru is probably one of the top ten best kendo fighters of her generation. However, her odd-job man, who was a veteran of the last great war in which swordfighting was really a thing back when she was in diapers, is one of the top ten swordfighters of the century, and other contenders for that chart (such as Saito and Shishio) keep turning up over the course of the series.
- Versus (2022) has this as one of its fundamental premises. The humans of thirteen different worlds are on the brink of extinction at the hands of thirteen different Natural Enemies; on one world it's a horde of demons, on another a parasitic plague, a third is menaced by a crazed god, and so on. Each one is top dog of their respective worlds, and humanity is helpless against them. But after humanity accidentally merges the thirteen worlds together, the Natural Enemies begin clashing against each other, and realize with varying degrees of excitement and horror that they're no longer on top of the food chain: they're now surrounded by peer predators, each one a genuine threat to their existence, and forced to fight battles they're no longer guaranteed to win.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The crux of Ryo Marufuji's aka Kaiser's deconstruction in Season 2. Kaiser was considered The Ace at Duel Academia for his dueling skills and never lost a duel cleanly, but when he graduates and goes to the professional leagues, he manages to rack up a brief winning streak before he's defeated in humiliating fashion by Edo Phoenix. While Kaiser's One-Hit KO strategies revolving around Cyber End Dragon make him a daunting opponent for teenagers in school, against professional duelists like Edo, they have the means to play around and overcome him. This loss breaks his confidence and kicks off a losing streak that only reverses when he gets fully broken and embraces a more ruthless dueling style that focuses on winning no matter how underhanded or brutal he has to play, being reborn as Hell Kaiser.
Comic Books
- Absolute Batman: This world's Batman is one of the physically-strongest incarnations in all of DC and, in contrast to most over variants, has the social skills his main self can't come close to. However, the major villains Bruce finds himself up against are all wealthy, experienced killers with connections and powers Bruce can only dream of; to say nothing of The Joker, an Eldritch Abomination who's probably the most-aware of The Conspiracy and is actively feeding it. The hulking Genius Bruiser Batman is the underdog.
- Daredevil
- Wilson Fisk (the Kingpin) is often a great challenge for Spider-Man, sometimes not, but pretty much always a great hurdle for Daredevil to overcome. He's not just physically strong, but he's been manipulative enough to gain control of the Hand. When it came to keeping control of the Hand though, well, they left Fisk hospitalised once, mostly to make a point. He also got ruined when he tried to deal with global terrorist organization Hydra and later found himself under the thumb of the nationalist corporatist group the Power Elite. The 2019 series shows that he's unable to rise beyond a certain level, as the old money elites who wield real power view him as a jumped-up mobster, no matter how much wealth and influence in the world of crime he accrues. Fisk is great when it comes to the city's criminal underworld, but he can quickly end up out of his depth when venturing beyond, and he knows it. Instances where he tries to do are rare, and instances where he succeeds even more so.
- Bullseye is a terror who can control any battlefield by turning anything he can lift with his fingers into a deadly projectile. In Daredevil's own book, that is. When up again foes who can stop bullets with their eyelids, or worse, eyeballs, Bullseye's deadly gimmick starts to seem a lot less so. In Thunderbolts he got humiliated by the comparatively minor character American Eagle, who then broke Bullseye's neck to add injury to insult, and he was also casually swatted aside by Luke Cage, whose focus was on Venom, in New Avengers.
- Echo's ability to read and perfectly duplicate human muscle movements, as well as instantly recall memories, often makes her an oppressive opponent to fight against in the Daredevil stories where she instantly picks up martial arts that take others years to decades to learn and maintain. She almost got into some trouble with Wolverine when attacks to his nerve clusters had minimal effect and he started sprouting claws. The fact that the Hand don't fear death because most of them were The Undead was utterly lost on her, with the Avengers having to save her once, and having to save her three more times when she ran afoul of shapeshifting aliens.
- The Darkness: Jackie Estacado can wield the powers of the Darkness, an eldritch entity that grants him immense strength and powers, which makes him practically unmatched on the mortal plane. Then, in a crossover event, he went to Metropolis and faced Superman and lost.
- The Demon: During Garth Ennis' run, at one point an Ancient Evil named the Gothodaemon is awakened, and it's described as a 500 year old Eldritch Abomination tied to Gotham that both absorbs its crime and madness to grow more powerful and influences the city to be so chaotic in the first place. Any other of Gotham City's protectors would be utterly helpless to stop such a being. Unfortunately for the Gothodaemon, he attracts the attention of Etrigan, a Prince of Hell who is both a lot older and a lot more powerful, and is able to defeat the Gothodaemon with relative ease.
- Subverted and Zig-Zagged in Doomsday Clock:
- Adrien Veidt/Ozymandias was the World's Smartest Man in Watchmen and Genre Savvy enough to subvert usual villain trappings and outwit all the heroes. However, when he meets Lex Luthor, the latter quickly pulls apart his plan and dismisses him as a hack. But as it turns out, even though he'd faced a few setbacks, Veidt was just as much a Magnificent Bastard in the DC Universe as he was in his own.
- Doctor Manhattan was a more complicated case: in his own universe he was a Physical God in a world of Badass Normal heroes while in the DCU he's... still a Physical God, just surrounded by more fantastical heroes. But in his own world all the heroes were ineffectual, overzealous or downright psychotic, so he'd developed a mentality that Superheroes as a concept were inherently unnecessary and did more harm than good. While he wasn't out of his depth in the DC Universe, it did provide him with a drastic change in perspective.
- Grendel: Hunter Rose, the Genius Bruiser Diabolical Mastermind who is the original, 20th-century, Grendel. In his own universe, he's so powerful a Badass Normal that only a superstrong werewolf has a chance of beating him. However, in the Crossover miniseries with Batman and The Shadow, he provides a decent challenge to both of them but gets his ass kicked both times, as they're used to fighting high-grade Badass Normal costumed villains.
- The Incredible Hulk: In The Incredible Hulk (1968), during The '80s, when the Hulk was exiled to the extradimensional Crossroads by Doctor Strange, he suffered from this big time. Doctor Strange's banishment spell had one important characteristic: it only sent the Hulk to dimensions in which he couldn't be a great danger to its inhabitants. The result was that the Hulk was sent to lots of dimensions where his great strength was unexceptional as compared to the other denizens. Fortunately, the spell also had a failsafe that whisked the Hulk away from the current dimension he was in if he became too unhappy.
- The Hulk faced this issue again in New Avengers when The Illuminati deal with Parallel Earths crashing into each other. On one Earth they come across an Expy of the Justice League of America and the local Superman Substitute makes it clear to him that "Hulk's strongest there is" only applies in his own Universe.
- In the original run of Jack Kirby's New Gods, Superman finds himself on New Genesis's Supertown, a place with fantastical technology where Everyone Is a Super. Though he's initially happy to be there, wondering if it might be a good home for someone like him, he quickly comes to realize that in a place like Supertown, a figure like Superman isn't very necessary—he is by no means weak by New God standards, but far more of them contest his strength than he's used to. After a few abortive attempts to "save" people from things they could easily handle (a falling pillar was actually being used for practice by a telekinetic, a scary monster was actually an artificial laborer who got spooked), he admits that the people there don't need his protection. Highfather advises him that while he's welcome on New Genesis anytime, the place where his talents are most needed is Earth.
- Spider-Man: By street-level standards, Spider-Man is one of the most powerful heroes, being a Lightning Bruiser capable of lifting tanks and surprising Daredevil with his speed. However, by the standards of the wider Marvel universe, Spider-Man is not that special, being overshadowed by many superheroes like Thor, Hercules or the Incredible Hulk. On the other hand, he's always been extremely resourceful and routinely fights supervillains like Rhino, Carnage, and Green Goblin, who are powerful enough to represent significant threats to more powerful heroes, so he's not at a disadvantage when he teams up with other heroes.
- Tim Boo Ba
, a pre-Fantastic Four monster story from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. TBB is the absolute monarch of his world, brought down by a drop of water spilled by a preteen boy on the model world he lives in.
- Ultimate Invasion was the result of this. After the destruction of the old Ultimate Universe, the Maker (Ultimate Mr. Fantastic) tried his hand at being a supervillain in the Prime Timeline of Earth-616 but failed on account of the fact that he wasn't as smart as the original Mr. Fantastic. He was a major threat in his home universe, but still suffered defeats, and things only got worse for him after ending up in a reality with numerous people almost as smart or even smarter than him, as well as countless more heroes that have way more experience and wits than he could account for. This resulted in several embarrassing struggles with the Fantastic Four, The Avengers, the New Avengers, and Venom until he decided Screw This, I'm Outta Here.
- Venom:
- As Venom, Eddie Brock never fared that well when he branched out and fought other heroes (Darkhawk, Daredevil, Iron Man, Quasar, etc.) besides Spider-Man, who he was a nightmare for due to being more powerful, knowing his secret identity, and being immune to his Spider Sense. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #317 includes a scene where Eddie visits an oblivious Aunt May as a means of intimidating Pete into no longer asking for help from any of his superfriends like the Fantastic Four, making it clear that if Pete won't keep their feud just between the two of them, then he won't either. Averted during his stints as Toxin and Anti-Venom, where he can kick a lot of ass. Mac Gargan and Flash Thompson also never ran into this problem, presumably because they already were an experienced supervillain and soldier, respectively. In his second stint as Venom, Brock has so far not really run into this problem, presumably owing to the Symbiote being more powerful and Brock being more experienced.
- Lampshaded in Venom Annual #1, where a group of villains at the Bar with No Name tell each other Venom stories. Black Cat speaks of how she once got the jump on him and kicked him into an exploding car, the bartender speaks of how Venom once fought Wolverine, who mocked him for picking only on Spider-Man and got the better of him in that particular bout, and lastly a third patron speaks of how Venom once went toe-to-toe with Juggernaut - while claiming the entire time that Venom was out of his depth and got curb-stomped, although the actual flashback shows Venom fending him off. Mac Gargan — who once was Venom himself, mind you — starts outright mocking Venom and asking why anything he just heard should give him the scares. Then it turns out the third patron was Venom in disguise and he sends the bar's entire patronage running for their lives. Mac Gargan is not amongst the lucky ones, with the ending of the issue implying that Venom ate him, though later it would be revealed that he survived.
Fan Works
- Abyssal Escalation: After transcending to the Abyss Lau-Som-Bheu discovers that, for all his power, he is but mere prey to the more powerful inhabitants. After fleeing from them for an unknowable amount of time and being greatly wounded Lau-Som-Bheu sought to escape the Abyss, and succeeds, ending up on Earth Bet.
- The Boys: Whether it be the comic books, its 2019 Live-Action Adaptation, or a Fusion Fic of them, it's usually a Fandom-Specific Plot for Homelander and the members of the Seven of The Boys to suffer being the "big fish in a small pond" when facing opponents or threats outside of their native universe in crossovers.
- The Boys Avenging: On Earth-7622, Homelander is the strongest supe in existence, capable of defeating most 'threats' against him with minimal effort. But over the incursion between Earth-7622 and Earth-616, it's theorized by Mr. Fantastic, and later confirmed outright by Homelander's first attempt at going up against the inhabitants of Earth-616, that he's nothing special when compared to the strongest that Earth-616 has to offer, with even street level heroes like Spider-Man and Luke Cage proving capable of easily wiping the floor with him (with Wolverine even managing to successfully wound the previously thought unwoundable Homelander for the very first time with his adamantium claws). All of which, in combination with him subsequently getting reduced to begging for his life after a laughably one-sided 'fight' against Magneto, proves that he can't even be considered a mid-tier superhuman by Marvel standards.
- The Boys: Real Justice: In their native universe (TV series version), the Seven are its premier superhero team. However when both they and Billy Butcher and his team crossover into the DC Comics universe, Homelander and the other members of the Seven are on multiple occasions shown that they can't compete with Superman and his Justice League teammates like Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, and Aquaman. Furthermore, their mediocrity becomes apparent when faced with villains from a world with more experience with superhumans.
- The Boys are also this while in Gotham City, as the criminals of Gotham had been fighting against Badass Normal heroes leagues above them for years. As a result, the Boys' operations against them are easily foiled and they are seriously hurt in the process. This eventually leads to their arrest once their luck runs out.
- Stan Edgar is a powerful and influential businessman on his Earth, but the resources of Vought pale compared to the Justice League's power, wealth, and omnipresence. Unlike Homelander, he has enough foresight to see he doesn't hold a candle to the Justice League and decides to skip town.
- Ways to Kill Homelander is an anthology fic where Homelander is the Butt-Monkey who's often killed attempting to face other fictional characters who are more powerful than him.
- Can a monster act like a hero?: In To Love Ru, Yami/Golden Darkness is a deadly and feared assassin with superhuman strength and speed and the power to shapeshift. She finds herself outclassed when dealing with threats from the Nasuverse like Servants. She later admits that she was just a big fish in a small pond before seeing how big the world is.
- Code Geass: Paladins of Voltron: The Holy Britannian Empire is the most powerful nation on Earth, and even controls over a third of the planet's surface. But when the Galra arrive, they quickly prove how small the Britannians are by defeating the European Union within a week and conquering the rest of the planet with little effort.
- Code Prime: Knightmare Frames are the most advanced weapons humanity has developed, yet on more than one occasion, they get slaughtered in droves when fighting against Cybertronians due to a combination of superior technology, and additional combat experience.
- Suzaku may be a talented pilot, and the Lancelot is one of the most advanced knightmare frames on the planet, but in his first engagement against Bumblebee, he gets outmatched by the young Autobot, who's had years of experience fighting a war.
- Cornelia pilots a knightmare that's inferior to the Lancelot, but she has more combat experience than Suzaku. But every time she faces off against the Autobots, she loses in almost all of her battles against them, with her first major defeat being against Optimus himself, who was holding back throughout his whole duel with her.
- Kallen is one of the best pilots in the Black Knights, but in her first engagement with a Decepticon, she gets her ass handed to her soundly. Said Decepticon was none other than Airachnid, who's easily one of the most dangerous Decepticons there is, so she never really had a chance against her.
- The Lutece Twins in Hands Of Fate. In their own setting, the Luteces are the most powerful beings above anyone else, being scattered across the multiple dimensions and being able to be anywhere in time and space they choose. In the Marvel Multiverse, however, this is not particularly special, nor is it enough to overcome the various entities that are far more powerful than them. To wit, as Peter notes, while they play hopscotch with the laws of time and space, whatever entity that brought him into the Avatar world (a powerful demon implied to be Mephisto) is something that's left them completely stumped and unable to overcome, which is why they can't just send Peter back home themselves.
- A Dumbass Isekai Protagonist's Guide to Surviving Murder Drones: Similar to the original web animation, the Disassembly Drones are very much a huge threat to the average Worker Drone population with their superior physical abilities and many weapons tailored to killing them. However, as the JNV trio finds out the hard way, they're at a disadvantage either against Worker Drones using combat frames, war crime weapons, and other items to counter them or against Absolute Solver-infected Worker Drones in general.
- Helluva Witch: While Belos was a force to be reckoned with on the Boiling Isles due to a mix of the Demon Realm's wild magic and his authority as Emperor, as soon as he finds himself in Hell, he's made into just another sinner bitterly trudging around the Pride Ring blaming others for his own wickedness. When he tries using force in Hell, he finds his head blown off and humiliated by imps (who actually rank beneath him in Hell's hierarchy).
- Hunters of Justice: At the beginning of the story, Salem, the most powerful being on Remnant, is curb-stomped by Brainiac when he invades her planet with the intent of "preserving" it like he has with so many others, and the only reason she survived is because of her immortality. Later on, when she arrives on Earth, she gets a visit from Ares, who plainly spells out that she's nowhere near the most powerful being on her new planet, let alone the rest of the universe, and the Spectre, who crushes her heart and admits that the only reason he isn't killing her is that he's not the person meant to end her life. The whole encounter rattles her, and when they're gone, she's forced to accept that she can no longer expect to be top dog anymore.
- The Infinite Loops: One thing that certain loopers struggle to adapt to is the idea that, while in their home universe, they're top dog, the multiverse contains beings not only far older but also far stronger and experienced than newer loopers could ever dream of being.
- More than Meets the Spy: Yor Forger is unquestioningly the deadliest assassin in Ostania, if not the entire world, being a Multi-Melee Master with Super-Strength and fighting skills so far beyond almost everyone else that it isn't even funny (except when Played for Laughs, of course). Unfortunately, the events of the story bring the cast into the Autobot-Decepticon War, where it becomes apparent how out of depth she is, given that she's now fighting giant robots with advanced sci-fi weaponry. Missions 17 and 18 show this in full when she first fights against Barricade, a mid-rank Decepticon who's nonetheless an unstoppable terror on a weaker world like Earth. What results is a Curb-Stomp Cushion that ends with her overwhelmed, beaten, and bloody to the point where she's in dire need of a hospital.
- My Hero Academia: It's often a Fandom-Specific Plot that whenever the cast of the MHA world were to interact or react to superpowered beings outside of their own native universe, they find themselves either amazed or frightened of how they're incredibly weak against them.
- From The Void And Darkness: All for One becomes obsessed with claiming Izuku's quirk in a bid to use it to defeat All Might. Izuku's quirk allows him to essentially summon killers from Dead by Daylight, including crossover characters, many of whom are far more dangerous than him. End result? Izuku's killers pull off a Systematic Villain Takedown and the Entity takes All for One to turn him into a now quirkless survivor.
- Mischief: Since the existence of aliens and magic is kept a secret to select few individuals, several MHA characters find out how outclassed in terms of power and skill in comparison to the vastness of the Marvel Universe. All Might is a prime example. For nearly his entire life considering One for All as the world's greatest secret. After being let into The Masquerade, he wonders if the Quirk would even make it to the Top 10. As for his status as World's Strongest Man, well, Thor, Hulk, and several other major hitters from Marvel are still alive on modern age. Even when All Might can wield Mjölnir and is temporarily brought back to full power from before his fight against All for One, he is no match for Thor, for the simple fact that the hammer only channels the God of Thunder's own power, and he possesses millennia of experience.
- Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!: Izuku Midoriya, being a Composite Character with Superman, one of the most overpowered characters ever created in fiction, tends to induce this among his classmates in UA.
- Subverted with Katsuki Bakugou; thanks to being Childhood Friends with Izuku and thus living in his shadow all their lives, he is perfectly aware of how far he still needs to go as a hero. So, while his ego is still sizable, it's mostly under control when he finally starts at UA.
- Played straight with Shouto Todoroki. As the son of the Number Two hero and having been bred specifically to have a Quirk that would allow him to surpass All Might, Shouto's ego has swelled significantly, much to his detriment. When he enters UA, that ego receives repeated beatings due to his classmates having high-level superpowers as well, with at least two explicitly more powerful than himnote . This is especially prevalent with Izuku, who outstrips Shouto without even trying. As a result, this causes him to act recklessly in numerous instances to prove himself better than Izuku and reassert his superiority.
- The Hunter Amongst Villains: The Top Ten Pro Heroes of Japan, as well as the many criminals and villains, find themselves at a complete humbling experience against the Hero Hunter Garou from the One-Punch Man world. Even All Might being restored to his prime (and gaining access to the previous One for All users' Quirks), along with the help of Stars and Stripes' New Order Quirk, could barely hold their own against Garou, who had also Took a Level in Badass during the fic. To say nothing about All for One and the League of Villains being brutally defeated by Garou while he's unconcious.
- The Odds Were Never In My Favour: The European Magical Tournament is this for Hogwarts candidates Cedric Diggory and Geoffrey Hopper even more than the canon Triwizard Tournament was for Harry. They are good students and spellcasters who perform admirably throughout the qualifying trials to enter the tournament, but their qualifying trials were so easy compared to the other schools that they are grossly outclassed by many witches and wizards who have greater power than they without even trying hard.
- Of Maple Syrup, Skeletons, and War Crimes: Downplayed. While Ainz and the Great Tomb of Nazarick are far from weak in their own world and with most of them maxed out to Level 100, other players are capable of defeating them due to class builds and strategies. In a version of the Marvel Comics Universe, Ainz and the Floor Guardians may be near the top rankings for people in this world in their areas of specialty, but they aren't at the top, and there are beings of other planes or dimensions or out in space that easily overshadow them. One example would be Dr. Strange to Ainz in the magic department, mostly due to his status as the Sorcerer Supreme with an encyclopedia of skills and years of experience fighting cosmic horrors. However, Ainz’s arrival opened the doors to extra-dimensional beings that Strange had to battle alone for months nonstop to drive them back. While Strange decides that he could probably take down Ainz, the battle will be incredibly long and difficult.
- One minor subplot in Please Stop Eating the Hell Butterflies has Shiba Ganju infiltrate the Gotei 13 and destroy it from the inside with his brand of chaos. Despite being a hellraising lunatic outside of the Shinigami's walls, inside them he has to compete with the level of chaos created by the loyal Shinigami trying to screw with Yamamoto and each other, as well as the actual villians. Yamamoto is neither fooled by Ganju's attempts, or impressed by what chaos he can drum up.
Yamamoto: This is Seireitei. If you want to be considered an "insane badass", go back to Rukongai.
- In the Superman/Warhammer 40,000 Crossover Stars of Hope, this is what the Chaos Gods are subjected to and forced to acknowledge. Once Superman arrives in their universe, they seemingly gain all knowledge of who he is, what he is, and more importantly, just what kind of world his home reality is. And it's not even the only separate reality in the Overvoid, a letter left by Mr. Mxyzptlk revealing that the Xeelee Universe is canon to this fic too. So while the Chaos Gods are still dangerous and powerful, they're not as special as they initially believed. Ahzek even makes a similar comparison when Tzeentch explains it all to him, calling the Warp a single drop in a vast ocean.
- Resonance Days: In their origin series, the Andalites are a powerful race of scholars and warriors who act as Big Good. In this fic, they're just another race that got suckered by the Incubators, same as everyone else.
- Strange Potter: While many wizards of Harry Potter are powerful, it’s quickly made clear that this is only within the scope of their secluded society. Once MCU Dr. Strange and his sorcerers get involved, they find themselves outclassed easily by the knowledge and magic they wield, as well as the technology and combat skills like those of the Avengers. Harry states that had Voldemort attempted to take over the Muggle world, he’d have received a massive curb-stomp in retaliation. Blaise also explicitly points out that Dr. Strange “makes Albus Dumbledore look like a squib!” The man himself is horrified at just how powerful Thor and Wanda are, and even Natasha would’ve killed him by putting a knife into the wall next to his head before he could even react.
- The Victors Project:
- One of the many District 6 tributes to share the name Chevy over the decades of Games is voted into the First Quarter Quell and confidently expects to win the Games due to his experience in the drug gangs. He forgets that Career volunteers are also experienced fighters and the kinds of outlier kids who tend to get voted into the arena include tough, mean kids who fight dirty and, in some cases, had months to guess that they'd be voted into the arena and took that time to prepare for it. Chevy is not the Victor the trumpets sound for that year.
- Lyme asks to take the tribute trials without the preceding years of Career training, proclaiming that her athletic ability and wilderness survival skills are more than adequate. Boudicca has no confidence in this and tells Lyme that the only other two kids who she ever let take the trials without preceding training both thought they were strong and determined enough due to hard life in the quarries and an abusive household, respectively, but neither became a tribute and one was broken badly enough to commit suicide after the trials.
- Zigzagged in With This Ring during the future glimpses where the protagonist has been trapped in the world of Gate. Once hostilities calm down, the Sanderan Empire learns that although they are top of the heap on their own world, they are centuries behind every nation on Earth. However, they are so far behind that Japan doesn't mind sharing the basics of things like gunpowder since that isn't remotely enough to make the Empire a threat — especially when the gate is likely to close soon. As a result, the Sanderans look forward to the prospect of equipping their armies with primitive guns and cannons, which would not allow them to compete on Earth, but will make them unstoppable amongst their neighbours.
Diabo: As much as it burns my pride to admit it, we are to them as those early barbarians were to our ancestors.
Films — Animation
- Monsters University: Mentioned, in that at a prestigious university, everyone was an excellent student before coming, and they can't all be at the top of their class anymore and will just annoy their professor if they act like they are still the best without the skills to prove it.
Professor Knight: One frightening face does not a scarer make, Mr. Sullivan.
Films — Live-Action
- The Axe: Bruno is a successful engineer and manager with fifteen years of experience. After being downsized, he spends two years failing to get hired over all the other downsized people with even more experience who are out to find new jobs in the industry. He solves this problem by murdering every unemployed middle manager with a better resumé than his.
- Bloodfist: In the second movie, John (the third-rated heavyweight contender in the world) and Bobby (an Army Rangers unarmed combat teacher) both put up fantastic fights against the Super Soldiers they are pitted against, but their styles of combat aren't the best to use against drug-enhanced, far more murderous people with greater resistance to pain than some of the other fighters who hold their own better.
- In Can't Hardly Wait, Trip McNeely, a Huntington alumnus and former Big Man on Campus, explains to jock Mike Dexter (who has just dumped his long-term girlfriend Amanda in anticipation of scoring with girls in college) that college is not like high school; popular jocks like them are a "dime a dozen" and college girls overlook them, leaving them to falter.
- Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999): Amber's excellent tap dancing skills ultimately make her the winner of her small-town beauty pageant and take her to compete at the state level, where she is left daunted and stunned to realize how much more effort, training, and skill all the other contestants are capable of. She does win, but only because of a massive Disqualification-Induced Victory.
- I Know What You Did Last Summer: Helen was the high school beauty queen who went to New York after graduating to become an actress, only to find it's full of high school beauty queens and she no longer stands out. Between that and the guilt of having helped conceal a murder, she's home again within a year.
- Ice Princess: Gen Harwood is a sensational skater, but her friends are better, and she resents how her Stage Mom pushes her to sacrifice her social life competing for events that she's not good enough to win anyway.
- Legally Blonde: At UCLA, Elle was the beloved sorority president with a hot boyfriend she was sure she was going to marry. Once she arrives at Harvard Law to win him back, she is completely out of her element, where no one takes her seriously and she gets thrown out of class the first day. She eventually overcomes this, not only winning a huge case her first year but becoming the class-elected speaker two years later.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Spider-Man: No Way Home:
- Otto Octavius is an absolutely brilliant scientist to the standards of any world, but he comes from a world that was more mundane than Earth-199999 (the MCU), two decades in the past at that. As such, the new world he finds himself in is rife with geniuses that develop technology similar to or better than Otto's own. The Iron Spider's nanotech rather easily overrides the operating system of his tentacles and at the end of the film, he marvels at the pocketwatch-sized Arc Reactor, which is more or less a perfected, safer alternative to his own nuclear fusion device.
- In fact, all the villains that appear in No Way Home fit this trope in the MCU. In their own universes, they were incredibly dangerous threats, due to being the only known superhumans in worlds which were fairly grounded in reality. In the much more advanced and mystical universe they find themselves in, the villains are out of their depth to varying degrees and struggle to adapt. Tellingly, they all end up captured and restrained halfway through the movie thanks to the magic of Doctor Strange and are only able to fully run amok once MCU Peter lets them out in an attempt to cure them and prevent their deaths.
- Also applies to the alternate universe Spider-Men. While they are powerful and skilled heroes, unlike the MCU characters they come from universes where they are essentially the only superhumans, meaning in the MCU reality they are far less unique.
- Bullseye and The Russian were both very big deals in their respective original movies, but when they returned in Deadpool & Wolverine, they didn't even get the honor of being Co-Dragons for Cassandra Nova, instead being demoted to non-speaking Mook's in her army of C-List Fodder. Probably because their abilities just weren't that impressive next to the sheer amount of X-Men (Film Series) villains who also got sent to the Void.
- Taskmaster may have never lost against unpowered humans in Black Widow (2021), but early into Thunderbolts* (2025), Ghost one-shots her because Taskmaster can't mimic or counter superpowers like phasing and invisibility.
- Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026): Frank Castle, AKA The Punisher, is a borderline Genre Refugee with how out of place he is. Barring that being in a Spider-Man film leaves him with less Darker and Grittier material than he does in the shows he's previously appeared in, it's also demonstrated how a street-level Vigilante Man and One-Man Army so used to hunting The Maggia and back-alley drug-pushers would fare against the larger scale masked heroes-vs-villains side of things, i.e. not so well. When dealing with the runaway tank, Spider-Man is able to keep Frank from pursuing by webbing up his weapons and knocking him out of his van. Later, Frank follows Peter to give him backup, only to find himself facing off against a mind-controlled Hulk, who is a) bulletproof, and b) back to his original Unstoppable Rage-self. Finally, he manages to find a vantage-point to kill Jean Grey from a safe distance, only for Spider-Man to take the bullet instead, nearly jeopardizing Grey's redemption as well as endangering a friend's life.
- Spider-Man: No Way Home:
- Men in Black (1997): After Jay agrees to join the Men in Black, he tries to tell Kay that, since he was chosen, that means he's needed and Kay, at least, recognizes his skills, so he would prefer not to be called cutesy names just because he's the new guy. Kay quickly gives him an ego check:
Kay: Cool, whatever you say, Slick. But I need to tell you something about all your "skills": as of right now, they mean precisely dick.
- Discussed in Pitch Perfect 2. Beca is one of the interns for a music producer and makes a good impression with a mashup idea during a recording session, prompting the producer to ask to see what other work she's done. She does, but he's unimpressed because it was just more mashup mixes (her specialty for the Barden Bellas group) instead of original material. He remarks that any kid with a laptop can do that but it's not enough if she wants to become a music producer, and that she's talented but so are the other interns working at the company, asking her what is it that makes her special?
- The Quick and the Dead: The first man to volunteer for the quick-draw contest is Gutzon, a self-proclaimed "Swedish champion" gunfighter. In Arizona, this gets him roundly laughed at, but he's accepted into the competition anyway. He's also the first competitor knocked out, courtesy of the Kid, who asks to the crowd afterwards: "Am I just that fast... or is Sweden a very slow place?"
- In The Shawshank Redemption, Brooks is a deeply tragic example. He is an Old Convict who has been in prison for fifty years. As the prison librarian and for a long time the only one who has gone to college, as well as for being a Nice Guy in general, he is very respected by the rest of the inmates. When he is paroled, he is given a menial job at a convenience store and gets no respect from anyone. It leads to him killing himself, unable to adjust to the modern world. Even before his parole, Red understands his situation:
Red: In here he's an important man, an educated man. Out there he's nothin'. A used-up con with arthritis in both hands. Probably couldn't get a library card if he tried.
- Step Up: The Mob spends the fourth film becoming a social media street-dancing sensation before heading out to make a living as commercial dancers. The next movie has them jaded as they compete with dozens of other skilled, well-motivated, and well-hyped dancing groups who flock to even the smallest audition.
- Top Gun: Maverick: All of the new mission candidates are Ace Pilots with distinguished records, but Maverick shows all of them up during training exercises and Payback (perhaps the second-most confident of the group) never even qualifies for the mission.
Literature
- Ivan Krylov has a fable called "The Ant", where the titular character is famous in his anthill for being both incredibly strong and a brave fighter, but when he attempts to go out and impress humans, no one notices him.
- The Bee Dungeon: The first stingless princess has been granted a swarm of attendants and soldiers that could conquer any of the hives around her, but upon entering Belissar's Tower, she finds her army dramatically outmatched in both quantity and quality, with hundreds of soldiers to her twenty, plus advanced and evolved soldiers bigger than an entire hive.
Her mother's entire reign, the entire empire…it turned out they were just small bees in a much larger hive than they had ever imagined possible.
- Catching Fire: Invoked by President Snow after Katniss and Peeta win the 74th Hunger Games through a mixture of skill, luck, and social engineering but then prove to be a threat to his regime. He makes the 75th Hunger Games an all-Victors event so they'll be going back into an arena full of experienced killers who, on average, are more cold-blooded, better-trained in combat, and experienced at playing crowds than Katniss and Peeta, who are at a disadvantage for much of the Games and only survive because half of the other Victor-tributes are actively helping keep them alive and bring Snow down.
- Cradle Series: People who reach the top Power Levels of the Sacred Arts on the planet Cradle can ascend to the greater cosmos, where they start off as pretty average compared to entities like the Space Police. This makes the Monarchs of Cradle fairly contemptible on a cosmic scale, since they'd rather stick around and indulge their rampaging god complex than continue their spiritual advancement, even though they're corrupting the planet just by staying there.
- Ex-Heroes: The Unbreakables are super-strong Super Soldiers who form an impressive military unit, but once they go from nearly fighting actual superheroes to working alongside them, they are mostly reduced to glorified sentries and The Cavalry.
- A rare positive example in The Footfalls of Chess Horses. Tyupa is a Child Prodigy who is a victim of Greatness Mistaken for Failure at his school, bullied by students and teachers as hopelessly stupid and lazy. One of the nicknames he gets is Smart Alec. Then, after he is transferred to a specialized school with a focus on physics and maths, he finally finds academic challenges and fulfillment, while the nickname Smart Alec is forgotten, "probably because", as the narration remarks, "there are plenty of smart alecs around".
- Goblin Slayer: The titular hero is presented as an unparalleled goblin exterminator to the point he attained Silver Ranking after a few years due to killing them by the thousands, since he trained and prepared himself his whole life for this single purpose. With that said, when it comes to fighting anything else other than goblins he is hilariously inept, since he suffers a bad case of Crippling Overspecialization. This trope equally applies to the goblins he fights, since they represent a very terrifying threat for villagers and rookie adventurers, and yet they are cannon fodder compared to the larger threats faced by high level adventurers — which speaks something truly bleak about this setting. It's for this reason that the Goblin Slayer isn't taken seriously as an adventurer, since he is perceived as nothing more than pest control in their eyes. However, this belief only applies to rookies to minimally experienced adventurers: true veterans of the frontier are just as aware of how heinous the goblins are — the problem is that the pay for clearing out a goblin nest or rescuing a woman from one is completely disproportionate to the risk involved (which ironically is part of the reason why goblins are so numerous in the first place). As such, the other Silver-ranked adventurers instead see Goblin Slayer as straight up crazy for doing nothing but goblin quests.
- In The Great Divorce, several damned souls refuse to enter Heaven in good part because they refuse to accept that in Heaven, everyone is great and famous.
- George MacDonald tells the narrator about a man called Sir Archibald who devoted his life exclusively to finding out what afterlife is like. He went to Heaven, but as nobody was interested in his lectures and speculations (since they had the real thing then and there), Sir Archibald finally opted for Hell instead.
- An apostate bishop who used to be very popular on Earth mainly refuses Heaven because he has stopped believing in one, but he also prefers giving talks in the Theological Society in Hell and feeling himself important to repenting and realizing he has put the talents he is so proud of to bad use.
- A painter is very disheartened when told that everyone, not just the great painters, is famous in Heaven. When informed he is utterly forgotten on Earth, he leaves back for Hell immediately.
- Holmes on the Range: World's Greatest Sleuth has the Amlingmeyer Brothers participate in the eponymous detective tournament and struggle to keep up with contestants who have years more of detective experience, intellectual brilliance, and more confidence than them, which is best shown by how they come in second-to-last during the first round after still doing a decent job of quickly solving the clue they get. They do ultimately improve, but its also notable that many of their competitors are at a disadvantage due to things like King Brady delaying his efforts by working through a proxy body double, M. Valmont being given clues in badly-written French, and Boothby Greene not being a real detective in the first place.
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?: In the spin-off Familia Chronicle: Episode Lyu, when Chloe and Lunoire first moved to Orario, they were both Level 3 and due to how rare it is for there to be anyone like that outside of the city, both arrived feeling invincible. They were quickly disabused of their delusions of invincibility when they failed their first jobs in Orario and had to flee.
- John Putnam Thatcher: In Going for the Gold, Olympic downhill skier Dick Noyes may be capable of some Big Damn Heroes during a Race Against the Clock, but, while better than most skiers in the world, he is also the second slowest downhill skier in his event and has no illusions about this.
- Overlord (2012): It's a karmic Running Gag for the stronger and more deplorable natives of the New World to find themselves being brutally curbstomped by the titular character and his guild, mainly since their Levels are much lower than them (e.g. the power system of the New World is so low that a Level 30 character is considered something legendary).
- The White Dragon Lord, Olasird’arc simultaneously plays this trope straight and inverts it. While he is a Dragon Lord (making him a big threat to the many natives of the New World), he's only the strongest being in the nest and is a small fry to the other, older Dragon Lords, with even the Quagoa being capable of killing him if they're willing to risk heavy casualties. Once Ainz comes into the picture, Olasird’arc ends up getting killed rather easily by the Player's Grasp Heart.
- The Elf King, Decem Hougan, is a "Godkin" whose Level is estimated by Ainz to be above level 70 and has some very useful skills, with one of them allowing him to use Summon Magic to bring forth an Earth Elemental with a much higher level. This resulted in Decem growing with complete hubris regarding his existence in the New World, with everything revolving around how it would benefit his own needs. Unsurprisingly, once Ainz comes into the picture and gives Decem a brutal beatdown, the latter could only attempt to flee with his life and cling onto his delusions before getting killed off by his daughter.
- Unsurprisingly, this serves as the biggest flaw in Zesshi Zetsumei's Blood Knight and Challenge Seeker tendencies. Word of God states that she was the "Overlord of the New World" before Ainz and Nazarick's arrival, being a high Level 80 character in a world where being Level 30 is considered Legendary, with the only ones who could give Zesshi a challenge and defeat her are the Level 90+ Dragon Lords. Unsurprisingly, Zesshi is incredibly bored in her very first appearance in her debut in Volume 4, as nothing can truly challenge her, and the only times where she experiences loss is the constant and sometimes fatal beatings from her Abusive Mom as "training". By the time she goes up against Nazarick for the first time in Volume 16, specifically Mare, she gets a brutal wake-up call with all of her attacks and spells being No-Sell’d by the young dark elf, with even her Finishing Move being countered. Soon after, she suffers complete A Taste of Defeat by the end of it.
- Return of the Runebound Professor: Having reached tier 7, Alister expects to be the top of the heap, stronger than anyone else in the Arbalest Empire, to be treated as a god, and see the noble houses quail before him. He's startled to be immediately confronted by someone much stronger, pinned down when he tries to resist, and told that tier 7 isn't as rare as he believed, it's just that he's no longer allowed to remain in the Empire.
Garina: Once you get to a point where you aren't a complete waste, it's time to move on so you don't squish the playground on accident.
- The Harry Turtledove story "The Road Not Taken" features different parties doing this to each other in two ways: humanity has just mastered the ability to send crewed ships across the solar system (over a period of years) when an alien invasion fleet takes the same journey in a matter of days. Once the aliens land, it turns out they only have black powder weapons, which are obsolete next to a 21st-century Earth arsenal.
- Zigzagged in Son of Interflux when talented young artist Simon finally begins attending art classes with other kids. His work gets criticized more than most of his classmates', but he also thinks that the Living Legend teacher seems especially intrigued by it. He ends up placing fairly low at the big competition, only for his teacher to tell him that this is because his work is too brilliant for ordinary judges to appreciate and that he is the best student in the class by far.
- Starbreaker: Sylvas was the greatest mage by far on his world... a world where there were only first-circle mages, when in the outer galaxy most mages graduate at fifth-circle. He does turn out to have the talent and drive to become truly great, but it takes him a while to get used to how out of his depth he is.
Fahred: As if none of the more powerful mages on your world ever told you about it.
Sylvas: I was the most powerful mage on my world. - Star Wars: A recurring theme in both the new Expanded Universe and Legends, such as the X-Wing Series and Amara Kel's Guide to TIE Pilot Survival (Probably) , is that new squadrons of fighter pilots are all made up of very good fliers for them to get there in the first place, but once they get there, some of them are below average for the group, lack the insight and humility to know this right away, and risk dying on one of their first missions unless they learn better.
- Rogue Squadron in particular notes that even talented pilots are often used to being the local Ace Pilot, and thus never learned how to properly coordinate with others of equal skill. In this line of work, knowing how to function as part of a group is far more important than individual piloting skills.
- Tales of Kaimere: Cenozic mammals brought from Earth to Kaimere have to deal with this when it comes to the descendants of non-avian dinosaurs that came million of years later. Mammals had the opportunity to grow big and diversify after the K-T extinction, leading to apex predators like big cats and bear-dogs and large herbivores like chalicotheres and proboscidians. However, the Dinosaurs that can breed faster and, especially in the case of Saurischians with their airsacs, get bigger on less food were able to outmatch them.
- Big cats are currently the top predators in much of the world. But against both the robust megaraptors that are at least 20 times bigger along with vassal predators like giant terror birds and sub-adult monarchs, they are the equivalent of mesopredators.
- Chalicotheres were initially brought to Kaimere to replace the large titanosaurs lost in the Dynastic Extinction as forest gardeners. But in the Known World, the small Titanosaurs were able to reach their size on less food and repopulate faster. And that was before large armored titanosaurs from Kairul arrived, making the chalicotheres extinct in Ni'Kar and Arvel save for a relic in the arid far west of Arvel and, ironically, a Kairulan Chalicothere called the Glanos that followed the hard-to-digest Hauze Grass.
- That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Upon his reincarnation as a slime and being named by True Dragon Veldora, Rimuru Tempest was already an A Rank monster capable of fighting and absorbing just about any monster, and once he got out into the Jura Forest itself, he quickly amassed a small nation and a diverse suite of new powers from absorbing weaker monsters. When he defeated and absorbed the Orc Disaster, a monster well on the way to becoming a Demon Lord, Rimuru was already twice as strong as the minimum power requirement to be considered one himself, as well as the strongest being in the Jura Forest. The thing is, that's still not an insurmountable threat to the other nations of the world who have champions capable of fighting on that level, and "self-proclaimed" Demon Lords are often killed off by the current ten Demon Lords, to the point the human nations often expect it to happen before they have to worry about anything. When Milim Nava, contender for the title of strongest Demon Lord, shows up to see what's all the fuss about this slime, Great Sage warns Rimuru she's so much stronger than him he would never defeat her in a fight. He has to use honey and her flighty nature to get in her good graces instead. Rimuru later goes up against the Demon Lord-level threat Charybdis and can only break even with the beast despite having his whole nation backing him up before Milim one-shots it with a single restrained attack. The tipping point comes when Tempest is attacked by the Kingdom of Falmuth, and Rimuru is unable to help in the initial attack because he is nearly killed by the Saint Hinata Sakaguchi, who despite being human is strong enough to have killed two Demon Lord tier fighters at the same time when she was comparatively weaker than when she fought him. These events, coupled with the desire to revive those killed in Falmuth's attack, are what motivate Rimuru's decision to undergo the ascension to become a True Demon Lord by slaughtering and taking the souls of the Falmuth army and take his seat at the table of the Demon Lords as an equal, as only with that level of power and respect will he be able to achieve his dream of a peaceful nation.
Live-Action TV
- The TV side of the MCU contains multiple examples:
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
- The Inhumans are a major threat to the (mostly human) S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, but even the strongest — i.e., Hive and Lash — don't have near the power of, say, Thor or The Hulk. This becomes fairly obvious when Ghost Rider is introduced and curb stomps both Quake and Hellfire.
- Kasius in Season 5 has elements of this. To the remnants of humanity, he's their untouchable Evil Overlord. To the galaxy at large, he's The Un-Favourite Black Sheep of his family, who's been shipped off to oversee operations on an Insignificant Little Blue Planet.
- Daredevil: Wilson Fisk (Kingpin) is by far the scariest and most dangerous villain the MCU has ever had...in New York City. Unfortunately, Fisk lives in a world where aliens, sorcerers, supernatural monsters, and other supervillains are plentiful throughout the entire universe (and in some cases, multiverse), meaning that unless you live in the Big Apple specifically, he's a blip on the radar at best. Fisk is at least aware of this and sticks to his lane so as not to draw the eyes of superheroes that would have an easier time handling him than the street-level heroes he's accustomed to. Also, even Hawkeye, a bona fide Avenger, is wary of him, making him a downplayed example.
- Jessica Jones (2015):
- Jessica Jones and Luke Cage are good examples. Compared to normal people, they're complete powerhouses, being able to lift cars and, in Luke's case, shrug off bullets. But since they share a universe with the likes of The Avengers, they're relatively low on the superhuman totem pole. For reference, their powers are basically the same as The Hulk's, but they're leagues below the Jade Giant in terms of power. Considering the rest of the Avengers include Powered Armor users and a Physical God, it's safe to say their powers aren't a big draw. Even Super-Soldier Captain America and Badass Normal Black Widow and Hawkeye have fighting skills that make them much more effective than Unskilled, but Strong Jess and Luke (although Luke is shown to be a capable fighter in his own series, but living in a World of Cardboard causes him to focus too much on not killing to combine his strength and skill effectively).
- Kilgrave also counts; his powers in this series are borderline Story-Breaker Power, but like his comic counterpart, he's not exactly an Avengers-level threat. Particularly since many Avengers can No-Sell his virus based powers (the Vision isn't human, Thor is immune to earthly viruses, the Hulk has a healing factor, Iron Man's suit can filter the virus out, Hawkeye is immune to mind control after the first movie, and Captain America can (at least in the comics) resist him through sheer willpower while the Super Serum he was given altered much his body's metabolism, including curing him from his previous illnesses) and he's something of a one trick pony who doesn't have any additional fighting skills or powers to fall back on. And his mind-control powers are leagues below Wanda's at her weakest, as Kilgrave needs him to be present and listen to his powers to be effective. A case of Exact Words can counter Killgrave's mind control, while Wanda doesn't need to talk or even be present to mind-control people.
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In "Witch," Buffy figures that her role as head cheerleader at her old high school will make it easy for her to audition for an opening on the Sunnydale cheer squad, only to find some of the other applicants talking about coaches they have preparing them for the tryouts.
- Castle (2009): In "The Dead Pool", Alex Conrad is a Genre Savvy mystery writer with a promising future as a writer and maybe a detective, but the older writers he wants to hang out with are quick to tell him when his thinking is unoriginal and less insightful than he imagines.
- Cold Case:
- In "8 Years," May returns from New York after a few years of failing to become a professional singer due to the number of other talented wannabes she couldn't rise above.
Clem: How is that possible, you're the best singer I ever heard.
May: Turns out a lot of people can sing. - In "Shuffle, Ball, Change," Grant is a talented wrestler, but seeing how good the other candidates in the Junior Olympic program are freaks him out enough to fake an injury to quit.
- In "8 Years," May returns from New York after a few years of failing to become a professional singer due to the number of other talented wannabes she couldn't rise above.
- Gilmore Girls: Zig-Zagged with Rory Gilmore.
- In the first season, Rory is beloved in Stars Hollow and a star student at the public high school, getting into the prestigious Chilton in spite of being raised by a single mom in a small town. But Rory struggles at first with the new workload and commute, as well as the one-sided rivalry with Paris Geller, getting her first D and having a meltdown when she misses a test due to her car getting hit by a deer. Once she adjusts, however, she manages to be in the top 3% of the class. By her senior year, she becomes valedictorian.
- At Yale in Season 4, Rory again initially struggles with adjustment of not being the big fish, this time due to being away from home on top of the college workload. After getting a D in a class and being recommended to drop said class, she feels like a failure and falls back on her married ex-boyfriend Dean for comfort.
- In Season 5, she initially seems to do great in her internship with the Stamford Gazette, subverting the previous trend. Double subverted when Mitchum Huntzberger tells her she hasn't "got it" as a journalist based on her internship performance, though it's unclear whether this was Tough Love or Kick the Dog due to Rory dating his son.
- Glee: Rachel and Mercedes are clearly the most talented singers in the New Directions and are able to help rocket the club to its first Nationals victory in years by their senior year, but after they graduate school they find themselves floundering.
- Mercedes heads to L.A. to make it as a singer, and while she's able to coast off of viral fame from one of her high school performances she can't handle her image-obsessed manager and fires him; when she manages to get a new label a few years later she still has to accept that she's an up-and-coming artist and doesn't have any star-power to fall back on.
- Rachel is accepted to NYADA, a prestigious performing arts school in New York that's very difficult to get into. She quickly finds herself surrounded by people of equal drive and talent, and has no more teachers willing to cut her slack because she's not as special here as she was back in Lima. Even when she manages to land a starring role in a revival of Funny Girl, her attempt at chasing more fame backfires on her and she's told that girls like her are a dime a dozen in that town. Sure enough, a few more mistakes have her running back to Lima with nothing to show for it and it takes her several years to rebuild both her reputation and her professionalism in order to make it.
- Growing Pains:
- Seasons 3-6 have this be a recurring theme with Mike, who has a lot of raw acting talent from the occasional amateur play from high school onward and eventually a TV guest role or two. This keeps making him confident enough to go to auditions where he finds out that there are far more qualified and talented people than him filling up the line and desperate to get a part. A particularly poignant moment that helps end Mike's acting dreams is when he finds the star of one of his favorite old shows in that desperate situation.
- Subverted in "Homecoming Queen," where valedictorian and Extracurricular Enthusiast Carol feels she is being put into this position after being propelled out of her clique comfort zone and being nominated for Homecoming Queen along with a bunch of popular girls. However, as one of them points out to her, she actually outclasses them from a certain perspective, and everyone else is as nervous and unsure of themselves as she is, and none of them are really far ahead of the others in beauty, popularity, or other Homecoming Queen attributes.
- Jeremiah: Wasteland Warlord Theo starts out as the leader of an organized, gun-totting gang that preserved some valuable infrastructure, runs a mid-sized town with a thriving marketplace, and has techies building an electric generator. After her Heel–Face Turn, she is more of The Friend Nobody Likes at Thunder Mountain than a respected shot-caller (at least until she proves herself under new circumstances) due to how her new ally has running water, scores of military weapons, a lot more manpower, and more potential allies in dozens of groups from across the country who have done things like build fish farms and hydroelectric generators, grow lots of crops, have a Ye Olde Nuclear Silo nearby, or have got cars working again.
- Malcolm in the Middle: Reese was the most dominant bully in his and Malcolm's middle school during the first couple season. With an Evil Power Vacuum even forming between every wannabe-tough guy in school, when he briefly tried to give it up. But when he (and later Malcolm) gets to highschool, it's made clear what a nobody Reese is in the grand scheme of things when he's not the toughest kid in the yard, as he lacks the social skills to make regular friends and doesn't have Malcolm or Dewey's smarts to fall back on when he can no longer just push everyone around.
- The Heck family from The Middle are a whole family of Loser Protagonist's, but the oldest child Axl was a smug ace who was handsome, athletic and Big Man on Campus at his High School. Then he goes to collage and quickly begins struggling, socially, academically and on the football team. From then on a big part of his character arc is wondering if he peaked in highschool and figuring out how to get by without coaxing on natural skill or charisma.
- The Phil Silvers Show: In one episode, Bilko gets a particularly hunky new platoon member to audition for a Tarzan movie, hoping to ride the guy's coattails to wealth and fame, only for the other auditioning bodybuilders to be even beefier, to the point where the judge calls Bilko's subordinate "Skinny."
- In the premiere of the third season of Resident Alien, Max's friend Sahar reveals that she has tested into a prestigious gifted school in California. She is Put on a Bus for most of the season due to a scheduling conflict with her actress. When she returns in the penultimate episode of the season, she asks Harry Vanderspeigle to not tell Max that she's back yet. She explains that she quit the gifted school, that she was only average there, that all the other students there were older and smarter and she had never been average before.
- In the third season of Son of a Critch, Fox's older brother Silver is finally expelled from St. Bridget's, having gotten too old to continue attending a middle school. Unable to find placement in a high school or secure employment, he ends up trying to parlay his years of experience as St. Bridget's worst bully into some sort of criminal venture but ends up in jail because it turns out that it's a lot harder to intimidate a cop than it is to intimidate teachers or kids.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation:
- In "First Contact", Chancellor Durken is the leader of the One World Order on Malcor III and used to think he was as high up as one could get. Then his First Contact with the crew of the Enterprise showed him that there were actually many other more advanced civilizations out there in the cosmos. He takes it well, summarising it with the below quote.
Durken This morning, I was the leader of the universe as I knew it... this afternoon, I am only a voice in a chorus...But I think it was a good day.
- The Federation as a whole believes they are prepared to explore deep space after they emerged as the dominant power in the Alpha Quadrant following a series of wars with the Klingons, eventually integrating them. However, the Enterprise-D's first day on the job sees them encounter a Reality Warper known as Q who taunts them that they are not ready in the slightest, yet they proceed. A while later, Q comes back to warn them again, and this time, when Picard rebuffs this information, Q flings them deep into the Delta Quadrant, bringing them face-to-face with the Borg, who very quickly knock Picard off his high horse and force the Federation to reevaluate their position as pacifist explorers now knowing what's out there.
Picard: Perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency to prepare us for what lies ahead.
- In "First Contact", Chancellor Durken is the leader of the One World Order on Malcor III and used to think he was as high up as one could get. Then his First Contact with the crew of the Enterprise showed him that there were actually many other more advanced civilizations out there in the cosmos. He takes it well, summarising it with the below quote.
- Star Trek: Voyager: This is a recurring problem with the Voyager. While created with the greatest technology Starfleet can give, the Delta Quadrant frequently displays them being both the most dangerous force around, and completely outclassed by the locals. Most notably, displaced dinosaurs refuse to believe they have a common home and nearly kill the crew and nothing they do to escape them works, forcing their one ally to give up the claim to give them a way out.
- Stargate SG-1: Discussed in "Prodigy" when Sam attributes Cadet Jennifer Hailey's acting out to disillusionment with her future Air Force career: among other things, she makes a snide remark about Hailey probably being a straight-A student in high school, only to then come to the Air Force Academy where everybody else was also a straight-A student.
- The Wire: Stringer Bell, the business and money-laundering brain of the Barksdale drug empire, is the best money-maker on the streets of Baltimore, but once he tries to venture into legitimate businesses such as real estate, he can't understand the workings of the boardroom world and loses a fortune due to con jobs and bureaucratic red tape.
- Young Sheldon: Child Prodigy Sheldon Cooper is the smartest student in his small town, eventually attending East Texas University while barely a teen. But when he spends a summer in Heidelberg, Germany, he finds that other students are more advanced than he is, and is even called a dummkopf by his teacher. What's more, his tutor is no older than he is and has several honors to her credit.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The planes beyond the Material Plane traditionally serve as the bigger ocean, with the expectation that high-level characters will be increasingly likely to travel out into other planes where the average outsider or elemental wildly outclasses all but the most powerful of Material creatures, mostly being kept from running rampant in the smaller ocean by the ongoing cold war between the gods.
- The Epic Level Handbook suggests that the player characters could surpass the level cap, then travel to other realms, worlds, or dimensions and find out that they're far from the first to become Epic-level. The interdimensional city of Union has several epic organizations, including even the City Guards.
- In Exalted, the Dragon-Blooded are what remains of a huge corps of superhumans, the rest of whom were rendered extinct, driven into exile in the wilderness, or magically veiled from everyone else in existence. They are also the weakest of said superhumans, and — though that 'weakness' is a very relative term — must contend with immortal gods who remember the other Exalted and know Dragon-Blooded aren't that special in the grand scheme of things. Oh, and since the Dragon-Blooded founded a religious dogma based on killing other Exalted on sight, they start any encounter with the latter on very shaky ground. They can still compensate with raw numbers and lots of mortal troops.
- Mage: The Awakening: Many powerful mages don't pursue Archmastery for fear of this. If someone is a veteran Master of magic and a leader in Magical Society, they're in the upper echelon of the world they know. As soon as they become an Archmaster and transcend the physical world, they land on the bottom rung of a cosmos-spanning cold war against gods, Eldritch Abominations, and worse.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Aspiring champions of Chaos are constantly subjected to this. Sure, they're the most powerful warrior their tribe has ever seen, leading them to victory after victory. Then, they feel the call and begin moving towards a major Chaos hub, and quickly discover that not only are there thousands just like them, but they're now at the bottom of the totem pole and have to start climbing or be crushed.
- Warhammer Fantasy: Imperial Wizard Lords and full-fledged Kislevite Ice Witches are the pinnacle of magical power in human lands, short of those who trade their souls for extra Black Magic, but High Magic-wielding factions like the Elves and Slann outclass them entirely. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay mentions that the Wizard Lord career is the elf equivalent of basic training. This is because a human Wizard Lord who has mastered their wind to its limits is at most one eighth of an Elven Archmage, as using High Magic requires mastery of all 8 winds. The Slann are on entirely different level period; the corpse of the first spawned Slann, Lord Kroak, is more powerful than anyone alive.
Theatre
- In the Heights: Nina grew up an intelligent girl whose family and neighbors all swore would go on to do great things. When she received a prestigious scholarship to Stanford, they treated her as The One Who Made It Out. Unfortunately, when she actually got to Stanford, she struggled to balance her grades, financial responsibilities, and mental health and dropped out of school, something she's ashamed to admit when she returns home. By the end of the play, however, she's more sure of herself and decides to return to school in the fall.
- Legally Blonde: Discussed multiple times.
- As in the film, Elle was the golden girl at UCLA, as the pretty, popular sorority president with a 4.0 GPA (in fashion merchandising) and a hot boyfriend. At Harvard Law, her looks don't matter as everyone thinks she's a joke. While she works hard to overcome this and even obtains a coveted internship from Callahan, his sexual harassment sends her spiraling enough to consider dropping out to go, "back where I'm known, back in my own very small pond", but is convinced to stay by Vivian. In this version, she not only wins the case but becomes valedictorian instead of class speaker in spite of her starting out with middling grades.
- Warner, likewise, has subtle notes of this, as he reminisces with Elle in "Serious (Reprise)" about missing being the big man on campus at UCLA, saying "we were like gods back then". Warner, while he gets one of the coveted internship positions, eventually drops out to be a model, showing he missed the attention.
- Minor characters Enid Hoops and Aaron Schultz are introduced in "The Harvard Variations" as ambitious overachievers, with Enid being a former Peace Corp activist who has led many successful humanitarian efforts and Aaron being an award-winning, rich software developer. They get schooled hard by Professor Callahan in "Blood in the Water", showing that law school is a whole different beast. Enid, for her part, manages to secure one of the coveted internship positions, but Aaron disappears into the background.
Video Games
- The crossover event between Arknights and Rainbow Six Siege shows how outclassed Team Rainbow is in Terra. For context, Team Rainbow is composed of the very best of special forces, military personnel, and other exceptional individuals, the elite of the elite. Now put them in Terra where the average person there has Super-Strength relative to homo sapiens, that Tachanka has trouble drawing a bow that a regular Terran would have no issue pulling one-handed, and how Terrans can wield Arts. Team Rainbow can only keep up with thanks to their experience and tactics, making them Weak, but Skilled in comparison.
- Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon: Having an Armored Core makes Little Ziyi an elite by default when the Rubicon Liberation Front only has five of the things. But said AC is made of previous-gen surplus frame parts and equipped with two slow-firing explosive weapons and a buckler, leaving it with rather low DPS over time and no way to actually exploit the ACS strain it can build up. Combine that with terrible maneuverability and serious ammo issues that make any prolonged mission a dicey proposition, and despite Ziyi (barely) not being at the bottom of the arena ladder YUE YU is still in serious contention for the worst AC configuration on Rubicon, LOADER 4 included.
- BlazBlue has Makoto Nanaya, who serves as a reconstruction of this trope. While not the best with book smarts and possessing only average ars magus aptitude, she was one of the top students at the Torifune Military Academy off of sheer gumption, understanding of the people around her, and her beastkin physiology giving her exceptional strength and reflexes, even though her peers included people capable of handling high-yield magical weapons (Mai, Tsubaki, Noel, Jin). Two of them were artificially engineered for such high seithr output, but that's besides the point. Where the "bigger ocean" comes in relates to the rest of the cast, whose stronger performers include the aforementioned Noel and Jin, at least one living Weapon of Mass Destruction (Ragna), heroic figures from history with all the power that implies (Valkenhayn, Jubei, Hakumen), honest-to-goodness archmages (Relius, Nine), and literal Physical Gods (Izanami, Terumi/Susano'o). Gameplay notwithstanding, one can't expect someone like her to last very long in a straight-up brawl, and against those last few she'd be proper fucked. So what does she do? The best she can. And some of what she does for her friends has far-reaching consequences, much to Terumi's ongoing detriment.
- Cyberpunk 2077: V is effectively a supervillain with Power Degeneration, as the chip that's slowly killing them also gives them incredible cyberware tolerance, allowing them to reach their peak potential within a few months and tear through anyone the gangs and Mega-Corps throw at them... and in the Phantom Liberty DLC, V is contrasted against the true Greater-Scope Villain of the entire series: What Became Of The Internet. The rogue AIs who rule the oceans and shirk in forgotten laboratories have spent trillions of processing cycles evolving into hyper-intelligent predators who are only held back from the mortal world by the largest AI of them all, and they're slowly winning. Every rogue AI in the game easily slices through any cybersecurity they run into, and when a drop of this power pours into Songbird and takes over a single secret facility, it completely shifts the genre from a Power Fantasy to Survival Horror as V desperately hides from an industrial robot souped up on AI subroutines, with the AI's superior hacking locking all of V's skills down throughout the hunt. V goes from Johnny Silverhand Reborn to a mouse skittering from an invincible death machine in a cavern that looks like Cyber-Hell.
- Elden Ring: This becomes something of a problem with Ironfist Alexander. Despite being a decent warrior jar in his own right, seeing the power of Radahn gives him a dose of reality as to where his abilities stand. He takes step after step to become a stronger vessel, eventually deciding that he needs to absorb your remains to reach his peak. Despite all his training, the battle is scarcely more difficult than any other non-boss battle in the area. He dies content despite knowing that all his actions did not make him much stronger and likely hurt himself without any improvement gained.
- Final Fantasy VII: Don Corneo talks a big game as the top man in Wall Market, but in the grand scheme of things is just a guy that Shinra tolerates to keep the people down in the slums appeased. When he proves to be more trouble then he is worth, he is quickly forced to flee with the few stooges who are still loyal to him. And when he is finally found in Wutai, the Turks easily take him down even after the New Meat Elena gets herself captured.
- Final Fantasy VIII: Seifer is the talk of Balamb Garden as one of the new upcoming members of SeeD, until a foolhardy call during the exam costs him his chance. Later on he switches sides with the Sorceress and commands the forces of Galbadia after her coup. While likely the strongest fighter outside the party, without learning any real skills outside his swordplay and magic means that he falls behind the party in effectiveness quite a bit. Tellingly, he is only able to bring about the Sorceress's plan because the party is too distracted by Rinoa's coma to stop him.
- Final Fantasy XIV:
- Rathalos suffers from this. In his home world, which is largely devoid of magic, he's a very dangerous creature. On Hydaelyn, his lack of aether might make him hard to read (which translates to a lack of AOE markers for most of his attacks), but he's a very mundane threat compared to the sorts of things the Warrior of Light faces on the regular. The only reason he's a Trial instead of a Hunt mark is that the Felyne who put a bounty on him didn't bring it to Clan Centurio properly. Notably, the Extreme Trial doesn't actually change much about Rathalos' parameters; it just brings some Monster Hunter conventions into playnote , and adds a hard enrage.
- While Orcus is a powerful unchained voidsent inhabiting the body of the greatest reaper to have ever lived, he picks a fight with the Warrior of Light, who regularly slays gods and has beaten at least one sovereign of the void by the time they face him. Notably, the Warrior takes him down mostly alone rather than with a party, only getting Drusilla's help in the latter half of the fight. Orcus then dies with little fanfare as Drusilla takes her revenge on him. Instead, his defeat serves more as proof that the Warrior of Light has come into their own as a reaper.
- Blanstyr in the Armorer storyline is such a perfectionist in the smithing world that he drives out most potential recruits and is constantly at odds with guildmaster H'naanza over it. It isn't until the player character comes along that he realizes he actually has a ways to go to call himself the best armorer in Eorzea. The other expansions serve to show that while he might be the best armorer in Limsa Lominsa, he's considered small fry to the rest of the armorer world.
- In Dawntrail, Zoraal Ja is played up as an amazing warrior who seeks to unite Tural as the Dawnservant to show them that War Is Hell by launching a war of conquest throughout the rest of Hydaelyn. When he gains the military might of Alexandria, he's able to cause terror to his former homeland of Tuliyollal once. When he tries again, he's driven back due to a united front bolstered by the reunited Scions of the Seventh Dawn and the might of Vrtra. He, despite having spent those years training and cybernetically augmenting himself, is ultimately just the level 99 trial boss (out of 100) and doable with a Trust group of NPC scions, when major existential threats otherwise require the player to bring along 7 other legendary warriors on par with their skills..
- Genshin Impact:
- La Signora is the Eighth Fatui Harbinger and the legendary Crimson Witch of Flames, being strong enough to put Vision bearers on the ropes even with the implications that she's been past her prime for several years. However, with the gradual introduction of several powerful factions and other entities, even amongst her fellow Harbingers, it's made clear that the gap between her and the gods she seeks to overthrow is far wider than she thinks. But due to Signora being so drunk on her own massive ego, which only got even more inflated from her "victories" over the Anemo Archon (which is later revealed to have been one he willingly gave her because he didn't want innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire) and the Geo Archon (getting him to fulfill a contract to obtain his Gnosis), she fails to realize just how low on the pecking order she really is. Even the almost equally arrogant Sixth Harbinger Scaramouche felt the need to warn her that she was overestimating her abilities way too much, which she completely brushed off. All of this eventually culminates in her death at the hands of the Raiden Shogun, who is so much more powerful than her that she swiftly and effortlessly puts Signora in the ground without even needing the extra boost from her Gnosis.
- Despite his status as the Second Harbinger, whose power is claimed to be on par with the Archons, Il Dottore ends up falling victim to this as well. He's an Omnidisciplinary Scientist with many achievements in the scientific community under his belt, but like with Signora before him, he's only able to get so far to the gods he seeks to usurp before getting smacked down by one or more of the greater forces of Teyvat. Unlike her, however, he's fully aware of the power gap and actively tries to compensate for both it and his susceptibility to fate using his intelligence, but even then he still ultimately manages to come up short. This is best shown during the Nod-Krai Archon Quest where he uses his research in various fields combined with the power of the Eternal and Iridescent Moon Marrows paired with an artificial Frost Moon Marrow of his own creation to ascend himself to godhood, but gets swatted by Columbina when she returns with the true Trilune authority. It happens again in Luna IX when he tries to hijack Irminsul by having Pantalone inject a portion of Dottore's soul into its system, only for Nahida's knowledge of Irminsul to far surpass his and she finds a way to stop the Doctor for good.
- Played for laughs in an event. Itto trained his fighting beetle to be the very best it could be and defeated all other fighting beetles around, defeating ones with elemental powers and massive size differences. Put up against an actual monster though, even the most basic of vishap, and he is defeated easily. When a mechanical beetle takes all their skill and tenacity to defeat, he is in utter awe that it was only using a percent of its real power. Afterwards, Itto decides to create his own mechanical beetles to win against the vishap. A later event shows that even mechanical beetles are still very outclassed by monsters to show how big the gap in strength is.
- God of War:
- Kratos is infamous for killing gods and titans from the Greek pantheon on regular basis. When he is thrown into Norse mythology in the 2018 PS4 game, his primary rival is Baldur who pushes the Spartan warrior to his limit and puts up a fight almost as savage as Zeus, the Final Boss from the previous game. Keep in mind that he is a relatively lesser god known for being a tracker rather than being a warrior. Imagine how much more powerful the likes of Odin and Thor are like...
- It should be noted, however, that Baldur is Blessed with Suck in such a way that he has been rendered impervious to all forms of harm until the final boss fight where he has been rendered vulnerable by mistletoe, regardless of whether Kratos still has the god-killing power of previous games. Kratos fights and snaps his neck several times in the story to no avail. Magni and Modi on the other hand put up far less of a fight, though. It's also implied that it's more that Kratos is out of practice from centuries of quiet living and the events of the games help get him back into the swing of things.
- Guardian Tales: Valencia is legitimately a very strong and skilled warrior, but she's nowhere near as powerful as she thinks she is. When she proclaimed that she was the strongest fighter in all of Demon World and set out on a journey to prove it, she beat most fighters so effortlessly that it outright bored her. Her ego was severely deflated when she had back-to-back encounters with Old Erina and the Other Knight which proved she had a long way to go to be a real world-class fighter.
- Honkai: Star Rail:
- Welt Yang came from the world of Honkai Impact 3rd. He was one of the "Herrschers", the "harbingers of Honkai" who are meant to be Apocalypse Maidens but managed to conquer the Honkai influence and use his power to protect humanity; specifically, his power as "Herrscher of Reason" is to recreate anything he can understand with his mind. Back in his homeworld, he was hailed as one of its greatest and most experienced heroes; however, in the setting of Star Rail, the cosmology steps up to cover more worlds, as well as the universe-level powers such as the "Aeons". While Welt is still quite powerful, he's no longer unique or exceptional compared to the many other beings in the universe.
- The same goes for Cerydra, Imperator of Amphoreus. On Amphoreus, she is The Dreaded Semi-Divine conqueror who managed to Take Over the World. She has even bigger dreams of spreading her conquest to the stars. But Amphoreus is just one young tiny world in a big universe, with countless better established factions and their own heroes. Her empire wouldn't stand a chance against them. When Mem, an Amphorean with a Psychic Link to an outsider, shares memories of the outside world, Cerydra realizes that her dream is hopeless.
- On the planet of Punklorde, all legal residents are assigned a cartridge defining their Character Level at birth. Punkelorde practices a Fantastic Caste System where your level is everything, including your social status and even the limits of your abilities. As an illegal orphan, Silver Wolf started out with no cartridge, classifying her as level zero, and was treated like dirt, until the day she found a blank cartridge that was dropped by the Trickster God on a whim. She reached level 99 and assumed it was the Cap, only for the god to inform her that it was only the stage of Punklorde's cap. Unsatisfied, and encouraged by the god to never be satisfied, she departed for the greater cosmos to face greater challenges and raise said cap.
- Hunter: the Reckoning: A Time of Monsters hints at this with Lydia. To you, Lydia is a terrifyingly-powerful Ventrue who can survive being hit by a train and can easily Dominate your mind unless you have absolutely iron will, with command of an army of mooks with military-grade weapons and the ability to hand out six-figure salaries on demand. Astute fans of Vampire: The Masquerade will notice that Lydia is implied to be a thirteenth-generation neonate. She's a Middle-Management Mook for the Camarilla, coming in to clean up a Masquerade breach by some other mooks.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Midna was a step above others in the Twilight Realm due to her possession of a piece of the Fused Shadow. When the villain Zant was given a fraction of Ganondorf's power, he quickly took control of the Twilight Realm and forced Midna to rely on Link and Princess Zelda for help. When Midna tries to take Ganondorf on with the full power of the Fused Shadow after previously being able to destroy his spell shielding Hyrule Castle with it (and completely obliterating a defeated Zant even earlier), he survives the resulting attack that destroys Hyrule Castle seemingly without injury and crushes the artifact with one hand.
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it is revealed that the new incarnation of Ganondorf, of all people, was this. He started out as a powerful Magic Knight of the Gerudo Desert, quickly rising to prominence as their King. But when he tried to launch an assault on Hyrule with a swarm of Molduga, they were quickly wiped out by the combined forces of Zelda, Rauru, and Sonia. After ruefully conceding that brute force would not be enough against Hyrule, he swore false allegiance to the kingdom before assassinating Sonia and stealing her Secret Stone to become the Demon King.
- Mega Man Battle Network 3: Tora, one of Lan's opponents at the N1 Tournament, admits this afterward. He and his Navi, KingMan.exe, are unbeatable in their hometown, but faced stiff opposition from all over the world at the tournament proper, eventually losing to Lan and MegaMan.exe in the semifinals.
Tora, to Lan: After I lost to you, it hit me that I'm just a big fish in a small pond. I need to get out and see the ocean!
- Mega Man Legends has villainous examples:
- The first game has when the Bonne Family roll up to Kattelox Island to plunder their ruins for the Mother Lode. They have no problem subjugating the island with their humongous mechas and airships since the island has only conventional weapons like handguns and police cars. When a real threat like Mega Man shows up, however, they get stomped. This continues in the sequel as well, when they conquer the vaguely Arabian-themed island no problem until, again, Mega Man shows up and gives them what-for.
- The sequel introduced the Glyde Pirates, who again have no problem subjugating an uninhabited island (save for a lady and her two adoptive children) or an island with non-functional defense systems, but again once Mega Man shows up or those defense systems become operational again they get curb-stomped in pretty short order.
- In the early parts of Neverwinter Nights 2 you keep hearing about two legendary men from your home town who both outgrew the place and moved on to bigger things when your character was a child. You run into both later on, and while both achieved some measure of success it's more "middle management" level than the greatness everyone expected.
- Palworld: in the Terraria crossover, Pal Tamers are able to summon the Moon Lord as a raid boss. While he is still pretty powerful, he's gone from the single most powerful and dangerous thing in all of Terraria whose very presence passively corrupts the entire world, to just a mid-tier raid boss that will probably be ganged up on and destroyed by a bunch of Mons.
- Pokémon:
- Gym Leaders' signature Pokémon, especially for early game bosses, tend to be major roadblocks that you have never seen before. Later, you will find the same specimens at much higher levels. For a classic example, Brock's Onix is the toughest mon you will have faced up to that point. After you get to the Rock Tunnel, though, Onix are common, and they're all higher level than Brock's.
- Later games and other media suggest that Willfully Weak is likely in play. HeartGold and SoulSilver, for example, allow players to rematch all of the Johto and Kanto Gym Leaders, who use stronger teams with levels comparable to the Elite Four. Likewise, Pokémon Sword and Shield has the Gym Leaders ranked in order of performance with the better Leaders showing up later in the Gym Challenge with higher-level Pokemon, but for the final competition and the Galarian Star Tournament, their levels are all elevated into at least the 50's. Pokémon Origins, while not canon to the games, shows Brock selecting his usual Red/Blue team when he learns Red has no Badges, implying the Gym Leaders are playing down to their competition for the sake of fairness. Likewise, when Red challenges Giovanni but acknowledges him only as the leader of Team Rocket and not the Viridian City Gym Leader, Giovanni decides to use only his strongest two Pokémon and proceeds to steamroll most of Red's team in the process.
- In PokéPark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure, you meet a Slowpoke who challenges you to a race. It's an easy race. In the sequel, Wonders Beyond, you meet the same Slowpoke again, who boasts that he's trained hard to become the fastest. That is- the fastest Slowpoke. Hence it's still an easy race.
- Gym Leaders' signature Pokémon, especially for early game bosses, tend to be major roadblocks that you have never seen before. Later, you will find the same specimens at much higher levels. For a classic example, Brock's Onix is the toughest mon you will have faced up to that point. After you get to the Rock Tunnel, though, Onix are common, and they're all higher level than Brock's.
- Project × Zone: In chapter 13, Riela is hesitant to display her Valkyria form to the other heroes, since her status as a One-Woman Army in her home series means even her allies are terrified of her. She does transform after some encouragement but is surprised when the rest of the team reacts with mild surprise at best. She may be the strongest being in her world, but in the context of this Massively Multiplayer Crossover, her powers are nothing special.
Demitri: Nothing rare about it. I could unleash that level of power anytime.
Riela: They don't look too fazed... - Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart: It's implied that beneath the pageantry and robot armies, Emperor Nefarious is no different than Dr. Nefarious, his successes being more a matter of just being in an "easier" universe than his mainstream counterpart. When we're first introduced to him, Emperor Nefarious had conquered most of the galaxy and the rebels are fighting an uphill battle against him, Captain Quantum placing a bug on him more a matter of luck than anything else. When he tries launching his campaign of conquest into Ratchet and Clank's dimension, he is surprised by how much of a fight the native heroes are able to put up with the rebels' help and loses his cool in the process.
- Resident Evil: This is a great deal of Wesker's characterization after his rebirth. While superhumanly strong, fast and brimming with intelligence and determination, the fact is that his abilities aren't completely unique causes him no shortage of mental conflict. The fact he learns that everything in his life was constructed that way accelerates the problem. This leads him to develop a complex to outdo everyone else and create Uroboros and remake the world to his liking as a god.
- Star Fox occasionally reminds players that Slippy is actually a very competent pilot despite his tendency for foolish actions and mistakes. He just so happens to be on a team with a pair of exceptionally talented pilots and a highly skilled veteran. Case in point, Star Fox (2026) shows that the team has little-to-no doubt that Slippy has enough skill and technical know-how to beat the impossible odds of surviving a crash-landing from space onto the surface of Titania, which he indeed managed to do with only a minor headache for his troubles. Other games like Star Fox: Assault show that he's skilled when using other vehicles like the Landmaster, but he mostly makes up for not being a genius pilot by being a genius engineer instead.
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order: Cal Kestis can be a formidable warrior on his own, but as a Jedi he has a lot to learn. This is demonstrated by the fact that Inquisitors are considered very serious threats, a fallen Jedi Master would have killed him were it not for outside help and a Sith Apprentice is considered unstoppable. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor shows that Cal is starting to subvert this and be a master in his own right. The previous Climax Boss, the Ninth Sister, is the Starter Villain of the prologue and the Climax Boss of this game Rayvis was a notorious Jedi killer. Dagan proves too much for Cal alone, but he was one of the best during the High Republic, showing that while Cal might not be at the level of Obi-Wan, Darth Vader and Yoda, he would still be a great Jedi.
- Soulcalibur VI: Guest Fighter Geralt is remarkably and exceptionally strong in The Witcher, where there are few people who can stand up to a witcher in combat, save for mostly certain mages, monsters, and exceptionally skilled people like Leo Bonart, as well as a handful of enhanced people. In the Soul Series, while still considered powerful, individuals and monsters capable of posing a threat to a witcher through the use of magic, powers, or skill are much more common than in the Witcher universe. It helps that the abilities exhibited by characters in Soulcalibur are typically much wilder and more powerful than many of the types of magic in the Witcher universe, as well as powers and magic generally being somewhat more common amongst the cast.
- That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime ISEKAI Memories: During the Crossover event with Overlord (2012), Ainz, Albedo, Shalltear, and Narberal are all whisked away to the Slime world by a dimensional shift, specifically during a Walpurgis Banquet of the Demon Lords at a point in the narrative where Slime protagonist Rimuru Tempest has become one. Tensions quickly result in questions turning into threats and a fight breaks out, whereupon the Overlord cast learns that, while the New World they come from is woefully inadequate compared to their game world of origin YGGDRASIL to the point a Curb-Stomp Battle is expected even when fighting the most "legendary" of beings, Slime characters are more than capable of matching up, as even holding back the likes of Luminous Valentine and Milim Nava easily match blows with Albedo and Shalltear, who admittedly are also holding back, but the fact they're trying at all and can't make headway is proof to Ainz this world is a whole different ballpark. Ainz then decides to join in by casting a powerful spell (which he deliberately keeps weak enough he'll be able to counter it if it's somehow deflected back), only to be shocked when Rimuru casually absorbs it. At that point, Ainz manages to get his people back under control and spends much of the event having to play damage control, reining them in on their crueler remarks, and apologizing for bad behavior until they can get back home (such as when they insinuate they could kill Guy Crimson, one of the two most powerful Demon Lords who didn't participate in the initial fighting but is now looking annoyed to the point it causes Ainz to panic through his lich Emotion Suppression), as he recognizes pissing these people enough to get serious about trying to kill them will not end well.
- Touhou Project:
- Sanae Kochiya was raised on Earth. Due to having divine ancestry and power over miracles, she was worshiped as a deity. When she moves to Gensokyo, where deities are a dime a dozen, she finds that most of the locals are much more powerful than her.
- Cirno boasts of being the strongest fairy, but unfortunately fairies are essentially Cannon Fodder in Gensokyo. That said, Cirno also has a habit of winning fights she has no right to, or using her ice powers in unexpected ways, to the point that one character has warned that Cirno is getting too powerful and becoming something other than a fairy.
- Undertale combines both this trope and Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: As they are beings literally composed of magic, monsters are extremely vulnerable to Killing Intent from other monsters and especially humans. Because of this, even a small human child with enough EXP and LOVE (i.e. the willingness to inflict violence) can slaughter hordes of monsters. Because of this, most weapons in the game are either usually harmless items (Toy Knife) or household items that are dangerous yet would be relatively ineffective (Burnt Pan, Worn Dagger). At the end of the Genocide Run, you find the "Real Knife", which being an actual weapon, serves as the Infinity +1 Sword due to it amplifying the protagonist's homicidal intent.
- In Pathfinder Wrathof The Rightous, this is why Camellia Gwerm is put off by the idea of living in the Abyss despite it matching her personal morality. On Golarion, she's a high society lady who commits horrific taboos against victims behind closed doors. In the Abyss, there are no taboos to violate in the first place, and at best she is utterly pedestrian. At worst, she risks becoming a victim herself.
- Zenless Zone Zero: This is one of the chief problems "Black Wolf" Romeul, Arc Villain of New: Eridan Sunset (A), winds up facing. He's extremely strong, very volatile and picked up a surprising degree of street smarts as an Outer Ring resident. In his old job as a Sweeper in the Ring, this plus the reputation he garnered meant he was pretty much unstoppable, because there aren't any formal law enforcement institutions in the Outer Ring so personal strength and reputation are extremely important. Once Romeul comes to New Eridu, however, these same qualities blow up in his face over and over again: His murderous tendencies mean he completely botches his first job for the TOPS company Rusty Cliff, because he interpreted their order of "make contestants drop out of the Hollow Champion Tournament" as "kill your way through the contestants" instead, forcing the tournament to be suspended and causing a huge scandal. The only reason he isn't flat-out imprisoned then and there is the flimsy plausible deniability about whether he or the roaming Ethereals killed the contestants, and even then Rusty Cliff decides he's too much of a liability and tries to wash their hands of him. Romeul sees through it, but his response just makes things even worse for himself, as he steals all the tournament prizes and drives them into the Hollow before publicly daring pretty much anybody to come in and fight for them, marking him as the #1 most wanted to Public Security, Krampus Compliance Authority and the playable Proxy and their allies. In the end, Romeul still screws up escaping because he just can't resist stopping and trying to murder anything in his way as opposed to just getting out of there, and with the number of enemies he made with his boneheaded decisions it was simply a matter of who among New Eridu's defenders would get to him first.
Visual Novels
- Masters in Fate/stay night and other Fate works are often powerful or otherwise exceptional Magi. However, Servants, summoned as the basic premise of a Holy Grail War, are some of the strongest beings in human history. For a human to match a Servant requires a lot of preparationexample, compatibility against the Servant's skillsetexample, an ability that is exceptional even by Servant standardsexample, or a combination of these. Most Masters do not have this luxury.
Web Animation
- DEATH BATTLE!:
- "Pokémon vs. Digimon" (aka Charizard and Red vs. Agumon and Tai): Discussed by the hosts as, for all their surface level similarities, evolutions in Pokémon and Digimon just don't scale with one another. While Charmander and Agumon are somewhat similar to one another, Greymon is more akin to Charizard than Charmeleon. And while Mega Charizard might be able to take on MetalGreymon under some circumstances, WarGreymon is pretty much a demigod and on a completely different level.
- "Ben 10 vs. Green Lantern": Ben Tennyson's Alien X form is a universal-level Reality Warper, and could end any threats if only all three personalities of Alien X could agree to do so. However, that pales to the capabilities of Hal Jordan and even other, lesser Green Lanterns, who have faced beings similar to Alien X without much difficulty.
- Exploited in "Deadpool vs. The Mask". Deadpool had already survived two death battlesnote , with his Healing Factor making him hard to kill conventionally and his lack of a fourth wall making it impossible to trick him or even make him abide by the show's rules. However, he's hopelessly outmatched against The Mask, a Reality Warper with limitless powers. The hosts specifically picked this unfair matchup to finally get rid of Deadpool.
- "All Might VS Might Guy": One of the reasons that led to All Might's defeat by Guy. Despite coming from a series where 80% of the world's total population has Quirks, All Might is practically the MHA equivalent of Superman, with only those similar to All for One's level of power being capable of going one-on-one with him. But in the Naruto world, where various characters have a variety of more broken ninjutsus and bloodlines through Chakra, nevermind can develop similar to better physical prowess, All Might would be a Magically Inept Fighter who's around a similar Magically Inept Fighter like Might Guy's level of base strength. As Wiz puts it in the post-fight analysis, All Might may have fought a wide variety of opponents like Might Guy, who has been training all his life and has a more versatile set of techniques.
- "Steven Universe vs. Star Butterfly": Steven is the single strongest being in his home series, but Star proves that much more powerful than him that he couldn't win. At full power, he struggles to adjust to a peaceful world where there's nothing left for him to fight and ultimately becomes his own show's Final Boss. This puts Steven at a disadvantage against Star, who has always had something to fight until the final credits of her own show.
- "DIO vs Alucard": Alucard is undisputedly the strongest member of the Hellsing world, so much stronger that his basic game plan is to let the opposition rip him to pieces, regenerate and kill the enemy while they are frozen in fear. Unfortunately for him, Dio Brando is far stronger and actually has experience fighting people who rival his power. While Alucard is able to put Dio on his toes a few times, the power gap is too vast and Dio wins after showing his trickery.
- "Saitama vs. Popeye": Saitama is the single strongest being in his own universe, capable of one-shotting almost anything with one punch, but has no way to overcome Popeye's Toon Physics.
- "Omni-Man vs. Homelander": In his own universe, Homelander is the most powerful being in existence because all superpowered beings were created from Compound V, and since Homelander is Vought's "Golden Boy", very few other Supes can match him in terms of power. It's because of this lack of challenge that Homelander never felt the need to work on being a fighter. Meanwhile, Omni-Man is a soldier of the Viltrum Empire and had been conquering worlds in its name for centuries before settling on Earth. To quote the creators, "One's a warrior, the other's a bully." It says a lot that Omni-Man's opponent in the next DEATH BATTLE! episode gives him more of a challenge than Homelander.
- "Jason Voorhees vs. Michael Myers": Michael's series never does crossovers, and he is the only one of his kind in it. He never had to face another slasher and isn't used to his targets not going down once he lands a hit. Meanwhile, Jason not only has far superior endurance to Michael, but has gone against Leatherface, Freddy Krueger, Ash Williams and even himself and clearly learned a bit.
- "Bill Cipher vs. Discord". For all his arrogance, Bill is clearly fully aware that there are beings just as powerful as him in the Gravity Falls universe and when confronted by one (such as the Time Baby), he will drop his goofy act and turn completely serious. This is in contrast to Discord, who pretty much has no equivalent in his universe and which in turn has made him extremely carefree. One of the biggest reasons why he would lose is due to probably spending more time toying with Bill than actually fighting him.
- "Rick Sanchez vs. The Doctor": The Ricks in the Citadel have created the Central Finite Curve to wall off the section of The Multiverse where Rick is the smartest person to exist from everything else. As such there are very few things that can challenge him and he's not used to fighting smarter opponents. The Doctor not only is smarter than Rick, but has been having adventures not unlike Rick's for hundreds of years and has a lot of experience facing opponents of equal or greater intellect and coming out on top.
- "Goku vs. Superman": Superman wins all three times. After years of training, destructive battles, and dying Goku has gained plenty of Super Modes to the point of rivaling the Gods of his universe. While he had a slight advantage of being a Child Prodigy in martial arts and being a Saiyan, he still worked to get where he is. However, none of that makes him stronger than Superman, whose powers depend on how much solar radiation his Kryptonian physiology absorbs and being a cosmic lynchpin in the grander multiverse of DC.
- "Galactus vs. Unicron": Unicron is the pinnacle of power in the Transformers universe, but he also hasn't had as many opportunities to fight opponents on his level compared to Galactus, a cosmic entity who has on multiple occasions fought opponents who are capable of matching him in battle.
- "Kratos vs Asura": This is a big part of Asura's defeat. At the end of the game, he is undisputedly the strongest being in his universe, defeating the creator god of the world himself. The gods and titans of Kratos's world, on the other hand, have all done things to both bring about the world and bring about its destruction multiple times, meaning that Kratos has more experience fighting at that level, with weapons created to fight that power and to use those powers with versatility.
- RWBY:
- The Kingdom of Atlas is the most technologically advanced of all of Remnant, and the only kingdom to have a formal military organization. However, despite being capable of taking down the Creatures of Grimm, the Big Bad and her cohorts specialized in Divide and Conquer tactics that allow them to run circles around General Ironwood and the Atlas Military, especially when Arthur Watts, a former Atlesian scientist who developed the current technology, is working against them in revenge. Notably, the last war was before any of the human characters were alive 80 years ago. General Ironwood and Atlas have absolutely no idea how to deal with someone using actual military siege tactics.
- The Jabberwalker is the most feared denizen of the Ever After because it is the only thing capable of permanently killing Afterans. However, it doesn't pose much of a threat to trained Huntsmen like RWBY, being far more inclined to run away from danger when it feels outmatched. It's only after it's been killed by Neo, who turns it into an illusory army does it begin to pose a true threat due to no longer being held back by its skittish nature. Additionally, Jaune manages to hold it off for years in the Ever After (and being hailed as a hero called the Rusted Knight, a fairy tale back at home), due to being a trained and qualified Huntsman from Remnant, but he is consistently considered one of the weakest combatants out of the heroes due to mostly being a support fighter.
- The Stickworld: The Overseers are stick figures chosen by the Creator to be the main protectors of their homeworld. But as the series progresses through Season 3, they're joined by other stick figures who are around the same level in power, if not greater. Eventually, they learn of an entire Stickverse of alien planets that exist beyond the Creator's perception. One such alien, the Ultimate Demon, is strong enough that only Ava had enough firepower to kill her. Then on top of that, four other aliens show up to destroy the Stickworld. The Creator got caught by the first three aliens in separate incidents, and is Depowered by the third one. While the Overseers, Ava, and Zeruel manage to defeat the aliens, the last one is so strong that he outright kills Ava, Rolph, and Justice, leaving Lolph and Zeruel as the only heroes left.
Websites
- Hard Drive has a satirical article about the tragic fate of a fighting game enthusiast who's significantly better than all his friends, to the point that he no longer enjoys playing against them — but can't hack it against other competitive players, and never gets beyond preliminaries in any fighting game tournaments.
- Smogon: Some Pokémon which get banned to a higher tier end up completely unviable there. For example, Terapagos dominated SV OU for the brief period it was legal there, but once it was punted to Ubers, it ended up in the D-rank, reserved for the many Ubers Pokémon which have no niche whatsoever in the tier. It has since found its home in Ubers UU, a tier for lower-powered Ubers, where it has an A+ viability rank.
Web Video
- Totally Toasty:
- The BS Absolute Batman has to deal with features Batman reacting to the Absolute Universe versions of himself and his Rogues Gallery. After seeing how jacked he is and how much more brutal he'll be, he becomes confident that he'd able to handle himself in the new universe. Then he sees the sheer amounts of Adaptational Badass his enemies receive and starts to reconsider his options. By the time he sees how the Joker has been changed, he's shaking in fear.
- If Syndrome tried project KRONOS on The Avengers has Syndrome from The Incredibles travelling to the Marvel Universe and attempting his Project KRONOS on the superheroes there. While his intelligence and robotics made him a dangerous Hero Killer in his world, the Avengers regularly deal with all-powerful aliens, gods, Eldritch Abominations, and other world-ending threats, and possess tech so advanced it makes Syndrome's machines look basic in comparison. The first two heroes he siccs his Omnidroid on, a black suit-empowered Spider-Man and the Hulk, destroy them in seconds. Then Tony Stark arrives at his base, reveals that he knows everything about Syndrome's plans, and casually made a far superior version of his Omnidroid to gruesomely kill him.
- The BS Absolute Batman has to deal with
Western Animation
- In the Futurama episode "The Duh Vinci Code", it's revealed that Leonardo da Vinci originated from a planet of Human Aliens who are a Proud Scholar Race, the Planet Vinci being described as a giant STEM University. While Farnsworth is excited at first, he quickly grows to hate the inhabitants because while he's an Omnidisciplinary Scientist in the rest of the universe, he's seen as an idiot and is ridiculed by the locals. It's also revealed that da Vinci himself deliberately inverted the trope—he was the stupidest person of all on Vinci, so he fled to Earth, knowing that the lowest-ranking Vincian would be considered Earth's most brilliant mind ever.
- Hazbin Hotel: Alastor the Radio Demon is only a big deal in Pentagram City. The deal he made in life to become the most powerful Sinner in Hell does nothing about the fact that Hellborn nobles exist in a league of their own, and archangels being virtually invincible. Alastor learns this the hard way when he assumes that he can go toe to toe with the archangel Adam in the first season finale, so self-assured that he even foregoes angelic weapons for the fight. Alastor proceeds to deal absolutely zero damage and go down in two hits, only managing to piss Adam off with some choice taunts about his lack of fighting prowess.
- Invincible (2021):
- This is a core part of The Immortal's character. While likely the strongest Earth-born hero, compared to the strength the Viltrumites and even a half-trained Mark have he is significantly outclassed. This has led to him having a complex when it comes to dealing with them, as he might be immortal, they are just as invincible.
- Allen the Alien is the product of an alien Super-Soldier project to create a soldier strong enough to defeat Viltrumites. Unfortunately he is way behind a fully trained member and breaks even with Invincible during a spar to test Earth's defenders. When he is attacked by three Viltrumites he is brought to the brink of death in a horrific beatdown. Afterwards however he averts this, the true effect of his powers comes out that he gets stronger when nearly killed and he comes back as strong as Viltrumites after recovering.
- A large part of the Viltrumites aura of invincibility is that they have gone to enormous lengths to hide that their strength isn't actually that unparalleled, taking out any threats before they could be found and exploited by their enemies. They froze the Rognarrs home world when they proved their raw strength actually surpasses them, Space Racer has a gun that could kill any Viltrumite with a direct hit, the Geldarians have Tech Jackets strong enough to hurt and keep up with them on top of having more versatile abilities so the Viltrum Empire instigated a war between them and the Kresh, and Battle Beast killed a Viltrumite while having the handicap of fighting in space without being able to fly.
- Lola Loud from The Loud House is a dominant force in her local child pageants. However, when she enters her first regional pageant, she becomes afraid of losing because of all the top-tier competitors. After a pep talk from Lori, she decides to compete. And even though she doesn't win, she is glad for the experience. Plus, the others take notice of her.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Applejack is the best Rodeo Pony in Ponyville. In "The Last Roundup", she goes to compete in the Equestrian Rodeo in Canterlot to win money to fix Ponyville's town hall, and wins a lot of ribbons... but she doesn't win one blue ribbon, and thus doesn't win any money at the Rodeo, causing her to realize that while she's the best Rodeo Pony in Ponyville, she's not the best Rodeo Pony in Equestria. This leads Applejack to not return to Ponyville because she feels that she would have let everypony down if she did.
- This seems to be the case for "Da Samurai" from the fourth season of Samurai Jack. While The Reveal at the end of the episode is that he's actually a scrawny guy with a beer gut wearing a muscle suit to look stronger than he is, he is still strong enough to take out a pair of robots with relative ease. His problem is that he's completely full of himself; since he's the strongest person in the area he lives in, he lets his ego soar to the point where he believes he's the strongest in the world. His first inkling that this isn't the case is when he challenges Jack, who is so much stronger than he, completely outclasses Da Samurai in just two moves while using nothing but a bamboo stick.
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Played With in regards to the Big Bad, Horde Prime. He is an ancient and powerful Galactic Conqueror with highly advanced technology, huge, elegant spaceships and a large army of cyborg clones of himself, as well as vast legions of cyclops-like robotic soldiers. With his armies and advanced technology, he is able to give the protagonists a more challenging fight than any of their previous enemies, including Hordak-a rogue clone of Horde Prime who had his own powerful, but less advanced army of humanoid soldiers and spider robots. However, it's implied that beneath the pageantry and robot armies, Horde Prime isn't that much different than Hordak. It's apparent that he's fighting at his peak competency and condition in the final battle, but ultimately loses despite this same skill and prowess being what allowed him to take over the entire universe. According to Hordak, galaxy after galaxy fell before the emperor; it just so happens Horde Prime just had a much "easier" universe to take over. By the time the heroes meet him, much of the universe is under his control and any known opposition prior has been fighting an uphill battle against him. He’s just never met foes like the Rebellion on Etheria, or even Adora herself and he is surprised by how much of a fight the native heroes are able to put up and loses his cool in the process.
- Rick and Morty: This is a major problem with the Citadel of Ricks as detailed in "The Ricklantis Mix-Up": everyone there is the smartest person in their respective universe, but when all of them make up a society, a lot of them get stuck working demeaning jobs like plumber or assembly line worker at a cookie factory, while some even become criminals working for the Morty's in Mortytown. Though as we later learn, the Citadel was actually designed to prevent this, because the "Central Finite Curve" they keep mentioning is actually an n-dimensional wall separating every Universe where Rick's the smartest man alive from all the ones where he isn't. It's shown in "Unmortricken" that, outside the curve, lots of people invent portal travel like Rick uses, but don't tend to live more than a few seconds when exposed to the greater Multiverse.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
- General Grievous, a lightsaber-wielding Full-Conversion Cyborg, may be a terrifying individual to face as a regular clone trooper, inexperienced Jedi, or a Nightsister, but whenever Grievous goes up against seasoned Jedi like Kit Fisto and Obi-Wan, he's often sent on the retreat.
- When Maul returns from being left for dead, he has problems with this. While at the top of his game a decade ago, it took a Jedi Master and his Padawan to beat him and he still killed the Master. Spending the time between as a half-dead wreck in a pile of garbage has left his skills to atrophy, and the galaxy being at war means that his abilities are much less impressive. He still is able to stir up trouble, but without allies or the shock of Force powers, every goal he tries ends in his defeat and forcing him to flee. It's not until the finale and Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord that he shows powers fitting his pedigree due to The Force shifting Dark because of Order 66 and the birth of the Empire empowering him, and even in the latter case, while he can handle Inquisitors, he's clearly outmatched by Darth Vader.
- Similarly, Pre Vizsla is the strongest of the Death Watch, a faction of Mandalorians who want to preserve their warrior ways. Mandalorians are known to be the best soldiers in the galaxy, but Pre then gets challenged by the aforementioned Maul. In spite of being Dented Iron, Maul is nonetheless a bona fide Sith Lord, able to give even Kenobi a run for his money. Pre Vizsla stands no chance.
- A few The Simpsons episodes, such as "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson" and "Bart vs. Lisa vs. The Third Grade" have dealt with Lisa in this capacity. Both episodes have Lisa put into a position where she can leave the second grade to take up something more challenging. However, since Status Quo Is God, the challenge is a little too great for Lisa and she retreats back to the second grade. Also, in 22 for 30, Bart discovers a talent for basketball and quickly becomes The Ace of the school basketball team, leading them to victory after victory on his talent alone. Naturally, this all goes to his head but since Status Quo Is God the end of the episode reveals he quit basketball after playing against a tall kid and learning he isn't really that good.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): The Turtles are world-class master martial artists, but when they accidentally qualify for the interdimensional Battle Nexus tournament, they have to go up against some people who are just as tough as they are, with Donatello (admittedly the weakest Turtle by a slight margin) not even making it past the first series of elimination bouts.
- In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) episode "Revenge of the Triceratons", Donatello begins to feel useless compared to Professor Honeycutt (a space-faring scientist with many years of advanced, interplanetary data to work off of), a problem only made worse when he's "3,000 years behind" on transdimensional concepts in physics by virtue of being from a non-spacefaring world like Earth.
Real Life
- In Association Football, due to the disparity between different leagues, it's not uncommon for teams to dominate at a national or regional level, only to be completely outclassed in international competition.
- While the Old Firm of Celtic and Rangers were continental powerhouses during the 1960s and 1970s, with Celtic famously winning the 1967 European Cup with an entirely home-grown squad, they've since fallen behind, as the Scottish Premiership just isn't lucrative enough for them to be able to compete with Europe's elite anymore. As a result, ever since about the 1980s, they've completely dominated the Scottish Premiership and qualified for Europe almost every season, and then routinely gotten knocked out in the group stage (if they even get that far). While Rangers did make the Europa League final in 2021-22, losing to Eintracht Frankfurt, that was only after they were knocked out of the Champions League in the qualifying rounds by Swedish club Malmö.
- Australia were so dominant in the Oceanian Football Confederation that they moved to the Asian confederation in 2006, to give themselves some stronger opposition and a better shot at qualifying for the FIFA World Cup. Despite their regional dominance, Australia had only qualified twice by that stage (and only won a single match), because the Oceanian teams had either been mixed in with teams from other confederations during qualifying, and/or had to win an intercontinental playoff in order to qualify, and Australia simply couldn't compete. Since then, New Zealand have taken their place as Oceania's big fish, qualifying in 2010 (and failing to win a single match) before losing in the play-off three times in a row. With the expansion to 48 teams from 2026 onwards, and no meaningful regional competition, New Zealand are practically guaranteed a World Cup place from now on, but given that they're ranked outside the top 100 as of the time of writing, they're unlikely to achieve much come the tournament itself.
- The Intercontinental Cup, played until 2007 between the champions of the Copa Libertadores and the UEFA Champions League showed an amazing parity between the South American and European teams. It wasn't uncommon for South American teams to topple their European competition even in the last years of the competition's existence. However, the Bosman ruling and the introduction of foreign capitals allowed the European teams to get the upper hand and snatch the best players from all around the world. By the time the Intercontinental Cup was replaced by the Club World Cup, the European teams began showing their power, dominating and hegemonizing the competition even with the introduction of teams from all around the world. The CWC may have an unfair format (European and South American representatives entering in Semifinals while everyone else besides two specific representatives -who have to undergo two prior rounds- entering a round before), but the disparity was already there.
- In American Football as well, each of the three stages, High School, College, and then NFL have heavy skill spikes. Notably, techniques that get championship level college play are just untenable in the NFL due to the increased speed, strength, and skill. Quarterbacks simply cannot take a moment to plant their feet and throw because they will get tackled first. Many athletes don't transition, and this is one reason why some top-level college athletes never make it in the big leagues.
- This is the experience of many high school students, especially smaller schools in rural areas, when they go to college. A fairly bright student finds herself valedictorian of her small high school, just to go to college and find herself struggling to make Bs in competitive majors like engineering. Similarly, many communications majors were editor-in-chief of the high school newspaper, a star of the debate team, or the like. Almost every college football player used to be the star of his high school football team. Much the same applies in graduate degree programs, especially in professional programs such as law, medicine, or dentistry. Pretty much everyone who gets into such programs was among the brightest at their colleges, but now they're surrounded by people at least as bright, if not more so.