Armsmaster: And Sword of Paracelsus is an advanced computer. It has no offensive function on its own.
Piggot: And yet, the girl can use it to access her full power. Did you think it was coincidence I've never authorized anything more advanced than a calculator for her?
Assault: Wait, you're crippling her? On purpose?
Piggot: And yet, the girl can use it to access her full power. Did you think it was coincidence I've never authorized anything more advanced than a calculator for her?
Assault: Wait, you're crippling her? On purpose?
Normally, when someone possesses the potential to become great, it's generally assumed that others will help them reach their potential. However, some certain other person may decide to instead limit said someone's potential.
Malevolent examples of this are usually motivated by personal gain, such as tyrants who don't want their minions to potentially overthrow them, teachers who don't want their students to potentially surpass them, or leaders who want to keep one or more of their subjects dependent on them. Benevolent or justified examples may be motivated by being not wanting the controlled to become arrogant, the controlled party genuinely being dangerous if left unchecked, and the controller believing the other party isn't ready to reach their full potential.
How exactly a person's potential is limited can vary; someone who's Dumb Muscle might be kept dumb so that they don't become too smart to manipulate. A person who's either Weak, but Skilled or Unskilled, but Strong might be kept from being Strong and Skilled because their controller can deal with someone who is only strong or only skilled, but not both. Someone who is given training to improve themselves might have said training either be sabotaged or deliberately designed to limit the trainee's strength.
Thing is, fiction dictates that the "controlled" person would not stay controlled forever. Perhaps the controlled person manages to figure out what their controller is doing and either discreetly/blatantly go against said controllers' "teachings", find someone who is willing to help them. Or the controller's willingness to keep their pawn weak ends up backfiring by encountering a foe or situation that the pawn could have defeated/solved if they had been allowed to reach their potential, which may lead to Time to Unlock More True Potential.
Sister Trope to Conditioned to Be Weak, in which a powerful character is controlled by making them too afraid or timid to rebel. Some Sabotutors might do this subtly by withholding certain knowledge or by teaching certain things wrong. Characters subjected to this trope can end up Incompletely Trained. A favorite tactic of The Svengali as well as Control Freaks. Compare and contrast Deliberate Under-Performance and Wilfully Weak when someone limits their own potential. Very often overlaps with Tall Poppy Syndrome, especially when people around them are jealous of their potential and fear that they might outshine those people. Can overlap with Alternate Teaching Method if the inferior method of teaching was delibertly inefficient.
Sometimes involves the use of a Power Limiter. Sometimes done as a precaution against Power Incontinence. For the polar opposite of this trope where someone decries another for wasting their potential, see Lamenting Wasted Potential.
Compare Reassigned to Antarctica and Shoot the Dangerous Minion, other ways to stop a potentially dangerous person from being a thorn in your side.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Bleach: In "The Thousand Year Year Blood War Arc", it's revealed that the Central 46 passed a secret law forbidding Zaraki Kenpachi from receiving formal training, as he is already monstrously strong despite his lack of training, and they feared that a trained Kenpachi would be unstoppable if he ever went rogue. After Yamamoto's death, they overturn the ban out of desperation, as Soul Society needs all the manpower it can get to have a chance of defeating the Vandenreich.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS: A few months into their training, Teana grows frustrated with Nanoha's teaching methods because the latter does not challenge her enough, so she and Subaru devise a Dangerous Forbidden Technique of their own and execute it in the middle of a mock battle against Nanoha. Nanoha is not amused and, one White Devil incident later, has a serious talk with Teana, explaining that pushing oneself too hard, too fast is how she herself had almost died and lost a chunk of her magical power 8 years prior. She did intentionally hold Teana back, but only because she saw the same potential for unintended self-harm in her student; she also reveals that a technique similar to what Teana attempted earlier was already on her curriculum, albeit for much later.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Kyubey never explains how magical girl powers work, only giving them their powers and telling them to go hunt witches. Once his true nature is revealed, it becomes clear that this is on purpose because it means they'll die or succumb to despair quicker, which is what he really wants from them.
Comic Books
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): Subverted in "The Fall of Sunset Shimmer". Sunset accuses her mentor Princess Celestia of limiting her potential by not making her an alicorn princess even though she is powerful enough to be one, but Celestia responds that she is not ready, and has not earned the title of princess.
- Ultimate Universe (2023): The supervillain the Maker altered Earth-6160's history so that many heroes would never rise to oppose him. Sometimes he'd kill them, but a few he spared simply by preventing their origins.
- Ultimate Spider-Man (2024): One of the first stops the Maker made was preventing the radioactive spider biting Peter, so he'd never become Spider-Man. As issue #8 reveals, this was because Peter was considered that much of a risk of all the heroes on Earth.
- The Ultimates (2024): When the Maker was altering history, he arranged an accident for Hank Pym that gave him severe brain damage, enough to stop him being the genius, if eccentric or just outright mentally unwell, scientist he usually is.
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes: Subverted in a Sunday strip where Calvin is reading a book on the couch with his parents. He wants to stay up later and read more, but they say they don't want him to get too smart, because if he did, he might realize they're actually bug-eyed aliens from Neptune. They dunk him in a bowl of batter and prepare to cook him into a batch of "Earth boy waffles" before he wakes up and realizes it was All Just a Dream.
Fan Works
- Banishment actually isn't so bad
: Cologne discovers while training Ranma that Genma secretly sabotaged his training while they were travelling together in order to prevent Ramna from becoming too powerful to control. Cologne, by contrast, has no desire to control Ranma as she wants Ranma to be strong enough for her granddaughter Shampoo and understands that trying to control people leads to them resenting the controller in the long run.
- Dysfunctional: Tanya can use all of spells from her last life ranging from supersonic flight to high yield artillery bombardment, but her ability to actually cast them is limited by the pocket calculators she uses as spell foci. Piggot decides to not authorize a better focus to keep Tanya from using her more dangerous spells. When Shirou traces the Sword of Paraclesus which lets Tanya use her spells freely, Piggot declares it and any similar foci to be Class-A Tinkertech which Tanya is not allowed to access.
- Escape from the Hokage's Hat: When Naruto is under medical examination following the Sasuke retrieval mission, it's discovered that he's had a truly staggering number of seals secretly placed all over him, severely limiting his physical and mental developement, to the point that the Kyuubi's massive chakra reserves are the only thing keeping him from being an invalid. Tsunade suspects they were placed as a knee-jerk reaction to Naurto being vocal about his desire to become a Hokage.
- Push Comes To Shove: Most of the Leaf Village sought to limit Naruto's strength and keep him ignorant due to the fact that they saw him as nothing more than a weapon who couldn't be allowed to grow too strong or intelligent lest he become too powerful and/or smart to be controlled. Unfortunately, their plans were ruined when the Toads decided to seriously train and educate Naruto; when Jiraiya tries to justify the village's actions to Tsunade, she counters by pointing out that they wouldn't have to worry about Naruto turning on them if they had treated him with decency.
Films — Live-Action
- Subverted in Attack of the Clones. Obi-Wan is definitely not limiting Anakin's potential, but Anakin believes he is, especially after he fails to save his mother Shmi from the Tusken Raiders. Come Revenge of the Sith, this is one of the many insecurities that Palpatine exploits to drive a wedge between Anakin and the Jedi Order and ultimately convert him to the Dark Side.
Anakin: It's all Obi-Wan's fault. He's jealous! He's holding me back!
- Captain Marvel: Vers was told upon being found by the Kree that the chip on the back of her neck is the source of her powers, and is trained by the Kree to control her emotions in order to be a better warrior. The chip was actually a photon inhibitor, meant to limit the powers Carol Danvers had gained from the Space Stone, with her training all geared towards making her an obedient soldier to the Supreme Intelligence.
Carol: (to the Supreme Intelligence) I've been fighting with one arm tied behind my back. But, what happens when... (reaches behind her neck and snaps off photon inhibitor)... I'm finally set free?
- Implied in Kill Bill, where Pai Mei is the World's Best Warrior and has trained several characters, but keeps his best moves, including the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, to himself. When the Bride finally uses the technique on Bill, he seems more shocked that Pai Mei actually taught anyone how to do it than the fact that he's about to die.
- Reign of Assassins: During her training with Wisdom, Shi Yu/Zeng Jing learns that her fighting style, while effective, has four flaws, which he exploits. Later, it’s revealed that the Wheel King intentionally taught her four mistakes while training her.
Literature
- Atlas Shrugged: Lillian explicitly compares her husband Hank to a prized racehorse which has to be bridled and slowed lest it throw its rider (in this case, her) off. More generally, the looters as a group seek to limit great people from achieving their potential, as part of their subconscious hatred of life.
- Brave New World: All people are grown from embryos in labs and genetically engineered to be smarter and more beautiful if they will be in a higher caste, or stupider and uglier if they will be in a lower one. The two lowest castes of people, Delta and Epsilon, are exposed to alcohol in-vitro to make them dumber. As babies, they are conditioned to be fearful of books and flowers, so they won't want to educate themselves or go out and enjoy nature.
- In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Norrell conceals magical knowledge from Strange out of fear of being surpassed and belief that many kinds of magic should not be practiced, which Strange knows but puts up with as Norrell is his only possible tutor. He doesn't perfectly remember what he's decided to lie about though, and Strange complains bitterly of an incident in which Norrell started to explain why he considers sealing one's power into an object a bad idea despite earlier having told Strange the magic doesn't exist, and was so shocked when caught out that Strange was forced to cover for him.
- Mistborn: The Original Trilogy: Vin's earring turns out to be a Hemalurgic spike, which technically enhances one of her allomantic abilities a little but largely functions as a Power Limiter by giving her a connection to Ruin, as Hemalurgy is his magic, thus stopping Preservation's mists from empowering her. Ruin had the earring inserted into Vin's ear in her childhood to prevent her from inheriting Preservation's powers and ascending to functional godhood to challenge him.
- Pale: The Allaires purposely teach their apprentices little about the Practice (After making them cut ties with their friends and family) so that it's easier to forswear them and make them their slaves. Mr. Allaire learned this from his mother and is currently teaching his daughter to do the same. Grey, one of the Allaire ex-Forsworn, tells Avery (a practitioner for less than a year) that she probably knows far more about the Practice than they do as a result.
Live-Action TV
- The Umbrella Academy (2019): In season 3, Reginald Hargreeves concludes that his original season 1 incarnation deliberately undertrained the Umbrella Academy in the use of their powers, preventing them from gaining the confidence to reach their full potential, simply so that they'd be easier to control. By contrast, Reggie's current incarnation gave the Sparrow Academy full training, only for them to overthrow him out of revenge. As such, when he joins forces with Klaus on a much friendlier basis, Reginald opts to teach him the full scope of his powers this time around...
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer Fantasy: The nation of Bretonnia is secretly kept in Medieval Stasis by the Wood Elves behind the cult of the Lady, who want to prevent it from becoming industrialized like the neighboring Empire and start clearing forests for coal. Thus gunpowder weapons are banned on Bretonnian soil (the Bretonnian navy is the heaviest-armed in the world) and knights are given the Blessing of the Lady that allows them to resist ranged damage and (unlike reality) keeping them viable against the massed gunfire of other factions (their peasant levies, not so much).
Video Games
- City of Heroes: Reichsman is an Evil Counterpart to Statesman from an Alternate Universe who's just as powerful as his counterpart; however, the rest of the Amerika Korps, the evil version of the Freedom Phalanx, are actually weaker than their heroic counterparts because the Reischman limited their training out of the fear that they would rise up against him.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: In the Dragonborn DLC, Telvanni Magister Neloth is a master trainer of the Enchanting skill, able to train you all the way up to 90 (the Cap is 100). He's also an Insufferable Genius — if you ask for training after that point, he refuses on the ground that he doesn't want you to surpass him.
Neloth: It wouldn't do to have you become better than me after all...
- In Final Fantasy XIV, the main antagonists of the A Realm Reborn and Heavensward Summoner questlines are lower-ranked Ascians working for Lahabrea who realize that the Warrior of Light is trying to harness the power of primals for their own use. These Ascians of the Twelfth Chalice move to stop the Warrior from furthering their mastery of arcanima and Allagan summoning techniques to ensure that they won't become too powerful for the Ascians to manipulate. The final confrontations of the Heavensward questline sees them try to kill the Warrior before they can access Bahamut's powers.
- Jade Empire: Master Li trains the protagonist in martial arts, but deliberately built a flaw into their fighting style that only he knows how to properly exploit. He's also secretly grooming them to be a Tyke-Bomb, and when they assassinate the emperor for him, he pulls a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on them, uses the flaw to kill them, and claims the imperial throne for himself.
- In League of Legends, the mage Syndra had dangerous and difficult to control powers fueled by her own negative emotions and was sent to a mentor to help her learn how to use them. When she confronted him about the fact that her magic had weakened but grown no easier to control and that he didn't appear to even be trying to teach her anymore, he confessed that he'd been devoting his efforts to suppressing her power, causing her to become extremely angry, fueling her powers further, overwhelming his concentration and causing him to stop suppressing them at all. He didn't survive.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- Played for Laughs in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Link's copycat Nyeve "graciously" offers to take him on as an apprentice, and ends each of the three Curb-Stomp Battle sparring matches he suffers early with the excuse that Link won't improve if he overdoes it. Eventually, Nyeve humbles himself and lets Link go all out in the minigame.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, it turns out that Byrne studied and served under Anjean, but was not allowed to progress beyond a certain point. This was probably for the best, since he had a Face–Heel Turn and admitted that he only became an apprentice in the first place because he wanted the great magical power he expected to earn for doing his job.
Webcomics
- Girl Genius: Agatha was given a brooch as a kid that acts as a Power Limiter on her "spark" of mad science, and told to wear it at all times. This was because they knew that her genius would make her a target very quickly (long before she was educated enough to defend herself) if left unchecked, as well as make her a conduit for the evil "Other".
Web Original
- SCP Foundation: In the mythos of the Scarlet King, his fifth daughter-bride was A'nuht. The children she had with him were powerful wizards, but he crippled them so they would never rise up against him.
Web Videos
- In The Legend of Zelda: The Sage of Darkness, Davik trains Link in the use of the White Sword with the promise that he can use it to defeat the forces of evil. This is a lie; the White Sword is fueled by The Power of Hate, meaning that Link is unable to draw the more powerful Master Sword and use it to defeat anyone Davik doesn't want him to defeat.
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, Yugi takes a look at Joey's first deck and is shocked that the cards are better than his. He lies that they are worthless and offers to take him to his grandfather's place to set up a new deck.
Western Animation
- Star Wars Rebels: It is implied that the Inquisitors (Dark Side users trained to hunt down the remaining Jedi) have been deliberately under-trained to make sure they don't grow powerful enough to threaten the Rule of Two. Against an untrained or Incompletely Trained Padawan, they prove lethal, but any time they're pitted against a fully-trained Force user (most notably in "Twilight of the Apprentice" where they're pitted against Maul, a full-fledged Sith Lord), they go down in seconds.