Powerful, but Incompetent

Gohan: Wait, what is he doing?
Piccolo: Well, this is your father, so he's either saving all our lives or dooming us all.

— Dragon Ball Z Abridged - The Hard Cell

This character is the local winner of the Superpower Lottery — either the World's Strongest Man or damn close to it. They have enough power to be able to succeed or accomplish almost anything...

...if they weren't a complete and utter moron.

Capable of using Flight to go anywhere they want? Doesn't matter, because they get lost easily. Can shrug off most attacks or weapons with their Super-Toughness? Irrelevant because any tiny injury will make them panic and cry. Able to chase anyone down with their Super-Speed? Too bad that they get distracted too easily. And this all assumes they even know what powers they have; Forgot About His Powers is the norm for this guy.

The best way to think of this trope is not as a character trope, but a narrative trope about failure. While it can overlap with Unskilled, but Strong or Dumb Muscle, it's not quite the same. Those archetypes can still win if they hit hard enough that their relative lack of skill or planning doesn't matter. At the very least, their allies or teammates can help use traps or strategies that enable them to unleash their massive power at the best time.

The character described by this trope, however, is so incompetent that people weaker than them are either more reliable teammates or regularly defeat these idiots with little trouble. Planning or help from others often won't work either, because this idiot will find some way to fail even the most basic role. They may also be Lethally Stupid, and thus almost as much of a danger to their allies as the enemy is. In anyone else's hands, their abilities would be a Story-Breaker Power... but for better or worse, in this character's hands, they might as well be stage tricks.

Merely being Incompletely Trained, having a Weaksauce Weakness or losing ONE fight to someone better is not this trope. This character fails despite their amount of training, or their flaws make them impossible to train in the first place. Other characters with the same weaknesses have either overcome them or at the very least learned to work around them. Their losses and failures are total embarrassments that someone of their power or level should have been able to handle. Failure has to be the norm for this character, or so common that no matter how skilled or powerful they become, the outcome is never certain.

NOTE: To qualify as this trope, the example MUST explain how stupidity either negatively-affects the use of the character's powers or negatively-affects the outcomes of their usual battles/missions.

Compare Idiot Hero and Brains Versus Brawn, with the trope referring to the "Brawn" side, as well as Almighty Idiot for cases where the power is godlike but the foolishness below human levels. Also compare and contrast the Almighty Janitor. Compare Super Weapon, Average Joe, for when the user is weak and incompetent, but their weapon is mighty. May overlap with Inept Mage, whose spells and abilities tend to backfire due to incompetence. See also Knowledgeable, but Unskilled, for people who have the smarts but not the skill. Also see Power Incontinence, when someone doesn't know how to turn their powers on or off. Contrast Heart Is an Awesome Power. A potential consequence of Giving the Sword to a Noob or Skipping the Basics.

One way it's demonstrated that it's mere incompetence holding a character back is when an Alternate Self is just that much better.

Do not confuse with Powerful, but Inaccurate. The exact polar inverse is Invincible Incompetent. Contrast with Powerful and Helpless, who may not be incompetent for all that it (doesn't) saves them.

Examples:

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Supergirl: The Fastest Women Alive: Parasite uses the Flash's powers which he has just absorbed to dodge Supergirl's lunge attack, but he is quickly caught in a twister formed by speedster Jesse Quick, who snidely remarks that Parasite may have got the Flash's speed, but he doesn't know what to do with it.

Anime & Manga

Berserk: General Adon Coborlwitz of the Tudor Empire fancies himself the greatest military genius of the hundred year war, and despite his delusions of grandeur he technically has the means to succeed on the battlefield. He can cut down two armored men at once with his impressive strength, and leads strong troops including a Big Little Brother with an Epic Flail. The problem is that his foolish overconfidence always makes him reckless until he realizes he’s bitten off more than he can chew, at which point he resorts to We Have Reserves and abandons his soldiers like a Dirty Coward, thus earning no respect from anybody. When he has the gall to report back alive after getting his whole unit killed in an attempt to get revenge on Guts, General Boscogn relieves Adon of his command and relegates him to garrison duty at Doldrey so he can’t mess anything else up...and then he manages to mess that up too!
Bleach: Yammy Llargo is the 10th strongest of the entire Hollow species as far as those under Aizen's command are judged. However, Yammy is The Brute and is exceptionally moronic and short-tempered. When faced with enemies close to his power level, he inevitably takes a beating. It's later revealed that he's actually the strongest of all the Hollows under Aizen... but only in terms of raw spiritual energy. Yammy's ability, "Ira", allows him to get stronger as he gets angrier... but that's all. He's still all brute force, and he's still an idiot, which leads to him getting trounced so badly even in his strongest form that one of the Court Guard Captains who defeated him considered the fight to be "boring as hell". The only victories Yammy manages to claim are on people much, much weaker than himself or suffering some sort of handicap, with anyone on an equal scale basically treating him as a Butt-Monkey. Raw spiritual energy being one of the fundamentals of enhancing Hollow abilities, Yammy would only need to do a bit of basic training to become immediately more effective, but he's too lazy, moronic, and short-tempered to ever bother with it and just relies on anger, brutality, and eating souls to get stronger without ever addressing the flaws in his fighting ability.
Bungo Stray Dogs: Akutagawa struggles with this, which is lampshaded frequently. His Ability, Rashomon, enables him to manifest a sort of monster in the clothes he wears, enabling him to create razor-sharp Combat Tentacles, armor and even swallow space. Unfortunately, he has a one-track mind and isn't particularly creative, severely limiting the effectiveness of his powers as he is unable to come up with more effective uses for them and tends to become extremely Ax-Crazy. However, he learns to be more inventive over time.
Cardfight!! Vanguard: Katsumi Morikawa is one of the most skilled Vanguard fighters in the series, able to give Aichi Sendou, the current Asian Continental Champion, a hard time. Problem is, that's only when you give him a balanced deck. He's so fixated on Grade 3's that if left to build his own deck, he'll fill it with so many Grade 3's that it's useless.
Darwin's Game: Wang is certainly not an idiot. He figured out the real purpose of the Treasure Hunt event shortly after Kaname did. His petty sadism, delusions that he is the "hero" of Darwin's Game, and the fact he never faced anyone on his level before negate his intelligence and powerful sigil. He kills a hostage, destroying all his leverage, just to hurt Kaname. All it does is cause Kaname to realize that some people can't be reasoned with and need to be killed. He always uses the same move in his fights so Shuka easily counters him. When Shuka is about to kill him, he teleports himself 100 meters into the air. He was only ever able to teleport himself 10 meters before, implying that his sigil is far more powerful than he thought. He only realizes his mistakes as he is being disintegrated for losing the clan battle.
Demon Lord, Retry!: Luna is the most powerful character in the entire Kingdom of Holy Light (aside from Kunai and his aides, of course). Even amongst the Holy Maidens, she has the most destructive magical power and is noted to have seemingly endless potential for growth. However, being the hot-tempered idiot she is, she usually fails to utilize her magic and abilities properly, leading her to be defeated by enemies even her ostensibly "weaker" sisters could manage.
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba:
- Upper Moon 5 Gyokko is able to teleport, and his Blood Demon Art can unleash devastating sea-themed attacks from his various pots. And then there's his extremely broken "true form" which gives him immense speed and flexibility, scales as hard as diamonds, and the ability to transmute anything he touches into fish. Personality-wise however, he's an arrogant braggart who has a habit of underestimating his opponents. In addition, doing anything that hurts his ego as an artist makes him completely lose his composure. These traits allow him to be easily and comically defeated by an enhanced Muichiro Tokito.
- Muzan is the creator of all demons and incredibly powerful, with sunlight being his one real weakness (that he desperately wants to overcome by finding the Blue Spider Lilies) but his personal flaws keep causing him to metaphorically shoot himself in the foot and allows the heroes to fight against him despite the fact that on paper he should be easily capable of winning against them. He’s so prideful that he almost always underestimates his foes and refuses to accept any contradictions to his views, is too unmotivated to actually learn how to properly fight instead of being Unskilled, but Strong and just spamming powerful attacks without even aiming, fears the prospect of death too much to actively fight when he can run despite his regeneration being insane even by demon standards (and having backup brains), is horrible at directing his forces even with a Psychic Link to the demons he’s made and stays an Orcus on His Throne due to his cowardice, actively prevents the Kizuki from teaming up with each other, and will kill them on a whim even if it renders his forces weaker (including a curse where they die if they speak his name even if his enemies already know it or if they contradict him in any way) and has a horrible temper in general, along with impatience and a tendency to be pointlessly cruel in a way that comes back to bite him. Case in point, he could have wiped out the demon slayers by having Nakima teleport himself or his more powerful subordinates to them when a slayer encountered a demon, or just had her teleport them somewhere like a volcano, but he's too cowardly to ever consider putting himself at risk, and ultimately kills her in a panic when the heroes find a way to mess with her head despite her usefulness, which destroys the Infinity Castle and leaves him exposed to the outside and the sunlight, AKA the one thing that can harm him. In the final battle he only turns Tanjiro into a demon as he lays dying, where he could have won if he’d done it earlier. The kicker? His search for the ingredient he needed to overcome the sun was doomed to failure the whole time because he pointlessly killed the one person who could have helped him, and his utter disdain for humans means that he would never have consulted a human to begin with, while the Blue Spider Lily only blooms during the day and thus was beyond his reach. Heck, it’s even implied that another demon besides Nezuko might have gained the ability to withstand the sun on his own, but Muzan killed him just because he couldn’t eat humans anymore without ever investigating why that happened. If he’d just been a little more on the ball, he could have easily defeated the heroes before the final battle ever came.
Dragon Ball: Upon his debut, Gotenks was one of the most powerful fighters in the setting, being able to take on Super Buu with multiple tricks at his disposal and was able to reach Super Saiyan 3 with little effort. However, he's often reckless, overconfident, and at times downright dumb, so for all his amazing power he can't be relied on at all. Case in point: in his debut story, he first flies off to attack Buu without a plan and gets his ass kicked. The second time, he exhausts his fusion period by wasting it showing off and flying around the planet eight times. This results in Super Buu killing the entire planet's population. Shortly after that, whilst facing off against Super Buu with Piccolo, he decides to fake being too weak to stop Buu... to make his ultimate victory seem cooler. He does so well at faking a lack of power that Piccolo panics and decides to make what he thinks is a Heroic Sacrifice by blowing up the only exit from the Room. Then Buu finds out that he can open dimensional rifts by screaming and escapes, leaving Gotenks and Piccolo trapped; by the time they get out thanks to Gotenks finally going all-out, Buu has eaten almost all of their surviving friends. While this finally gets him to take the fight seriously, all that prior screwing around causes him to run out of power and defuse when he's right on the cusp of killing Buu. It takes more than a few miracles to defeat Super Buu and undo all the damage. In Super, this past behavior causes Goku to disqualify him as a potential Tournament of Power competitor, since he's just as likely to be a liability as an asset.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Three of the near-immortal homunculi qualify.
- Envy has the unique power of shapeshifting, though the usefulness of this ability is hampered by their numerous flaws. Envy is easily provoked and extremely impulsive, which others will take advantage of to defeat them, but sometimes Envy will just screw themself over. Their drive to kick any and every dog they find causes them to make very bad decisions as they'll go out of their way to upset someone even if it's an obviously terrible idea. This officially places them in the Too Dumb to Live category when they fight Mustang after having forgotten he burned Lust to death. They use their One-Winged Angel form to fight, not realizing that makes them an easier target and intentionally provoke him into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge beforehand. Their only trick left at that point is a Shapeshifter Guilt Trip, and they have absolutely no fallback when it fails and just makes him even angrier. Needless to say, things do not go well.
- Gluttony can easily overpower most human characters with his massive bulk; and when he gets angry, he can turn his jaw and ribcage into a fake Portal of Truth which can teleport anything and anyone in his way into a dimension between reality and Truth, from Mustang's extremely powerful flame alchemy, to other homunculi, as he accidentally swallows Envy. However, he's very childish and dim-witted, and although agile, he's also a rather sluggish fighter. As a result, he usually takes a lot of abuse when fighting characters to the point where he almost dies from exhausting his regenerative abilities and forces Father to devote time and energy to fixing him. When it nearly happens to him again later on, his older brother Pride decides to just cut out the middle man and eats him for his remaining energy to replenish his own reserves and get a power-up.
- Possibly the biggest offender is Sloth. He's shown to be significantly stronger than most other homunculi physically. He takes the appearance of a colossal muscular behemoth, and his skin is so tough that he's impervious to bullets, thus it takes a significant amount of effort to even damage him. Oh yeah, he's also the self-proclaimed fastest homunculus, and can move so fast, that he can't be traced by the human eye. However, true to his sin, he is extremely lazy and sluggish, thus wasting his potential strength and making him a very poor fighter. In addition, he can't even use his immense speed properly, and he's so uncoordinated that he ends up randomly dashing into walls.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Certain Stand Users with extremely powerful abilities have very little in the brains or cleverness department—which is a major problem for their users, as Stand combat relies a lot on Semantic Superpowers and lateral thinking, and as soon as your opponent figures out your gimmick, that's usually curtains unless you can come up with a new one on the spot or counter by figuring out said opponents' own gimmicks.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders:
  - In contrast to most of the other Monster of the Week Stand-users in the part, Rubber Soul has a terrifyingly powerful ability in the form of Yellow Temperance: a shapeshifting Blob Monster that can expand in size by consuming organic material, take on virtually any form and color, and surround the user to serve as a shield. It's impervious to blunt force or slashing, can't be burned or frozen, and its shapeshifting means it can also serve as a perfect disguise for the user. All told, it's not for nothing that Rubber Soul brags about being invincible. Fortunately, the Stand does have one weakness: Rubber Soul himself. Not only does Rubber Soul put no effort into the "disguise" part of the Stand, such that Jotaro figures out he's a fake within minutes, but he's also so swollen with ego that he passes up countless opportunities to kill Jotaro in favor of random acts of violence and sadistic playing with his food. Ultimately, Jotaro defeats him by luring him over a drop into a nearby bay—as it turns out, his Stand can't protect him from drowning.
  - Hol Horse has an incredibly powerful Stand on paper in the form of Emperor: a handgun that Hol Horse can manifest at will, which has infinite ammo and fires bullets that can be redirected mid-flight. In his introduction, Hol manages to redirect a bullet around the blade of a swinging sword and then return it to its original trajectory, all in a fraction of a second. Keep in mind that in JoJo, very few characters are Immune to Bullets—if he just resolved to shoot the good guys on sight, he could probably have killed them all without much effort. (Notably, Araki specifically cited him as a character who was too potentially powerful to write around). Luckily for the good guys, Hol also boasts a special blend of overconfidence and cowardice that leads to him swaggering like an idiot whenever he thinks he has the upper hand and running for the hills whenever the odds turn even slightly against him. He also has terrible luck, and tends to lose focus with his powers, which led to one sequence where he accidentally shot himself in the face. Over the course of the Part, he fails to kill a single person.
  - Arabia Fats's Stand, The Sun, boasts about the most literal possible interpretation of its name: it's a miniature sun, which puts the entire area for a significant distance around under pressure-cooker heat, and can fire off light beams powerful enough to destroy most objects. Arabia Fats himself, meanwhile, is a tubby little dweeb whose sole tactic for how to use The Sun is to sit behind a mirror in an air-conditioned car and let it handle the problem. Jotaro defeats him in a single hit the moment he discerns his location, and does so quickly enough that the entire group goes "wait, that's it?"
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable has The Hand, a Stand with a speed and physical strength that's almost on par with Star Platinum, and has the ability to erase space just by swinging his right hand. This bestows its user with short-range teleportation, and allows him to not only to No-Sell any attack aimed at him he can hit in time, but also erase anyone and anything from existence. The problem is that its user, Okuyasu, is, for lack of a better word, a Hot-Blooded dimwit who often acts first before thinking through, and is also just too nice to make full use of his power, since it would be extremely lethal. Okuyasu himself admits that he's not that bright.
- Ungalo, of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean. Ungalo's Stand is Bohemian Rhapsody, which lets him bring characters to life. These characters have all the abilities they did in their original stories, with the added benefits of being able to draw people that empathize with them into their stories and reenact their events. The power would enable just about any person able to think about the power for more than five minutes to do just about anything with it. However, Ungalo is an Addled Addict and Lazy Bum who has no interest in using the power to actually do anything creative. The only use he can come up with is to activate the power worldwide while he's on a plane flight and hope that the resulting chaos kills the main characters. Because he has no ability to control his stand beyond 'on' or 'off', he's ultimately defeated by his own Stand when Weather Report, with the help of a painting, creates Put Back, a superhero whose power is to instantly negate Bohemian Rhapsody... which Bohemian Rhapsody of course brings to life, thus negating itself. When this happens, Ungalo stops even bothering to fight instead of attempting to find a way around it.
KonoSuba: Each of the three main heroines fall under this trope. Kazuma is instead Weak, but Skilled, and his biggest asset is his ability to figure out how to use his teammates effectively.
- Aqua is a water goddess with the power to cleanse impurities from any source of water, heal any injury a person has suffered, restore the dead to life, and One-Hit Kill all but the most powerful demonic and undead creatures. However, she's a complete idiot, making her prone to dumb tactical decisions (like trying to find the target in a band of rampaging monsters... by making them run straight at her party), huge acts of overkill (flooding the town with an overly enthusiastic Sacred Create Water spell), acts of sheer laziness that end up biting her party in the ass (putting up a spiritual barrier on the pauper's graveyard, causing a nearby manor to be constantly infested with wandering ghosts), or even outright forgetting she has a useful power. She also wastes all of her skill points on useless "party trick" skills instead of taking actual adventure-useful skills, though that turns out to be justified as her divine status means she can't improve properly and party tricks are really the only thing she's able to put points into.
- Darkness is a warrior with extremely high defense and resistances... but absolutely NO attack accuracy whatsoever (with her sword, at least; her bare hands have proven a viable weapon at times). This means that even attacks from Demon Generals have a hard time scratching her, but she'll also never do any damage because her attacks all miss. On top of this, Darkness is not only a masochist who enjoys being hurt, meaning she will be overcome with pleasure while being attacked, but prone to loudly fantasizing about how their opponents may attack and degrade her to such an extent that many sapient opponents will refuse to fight her out of sheer Squick, often rendering her useless even as a damage sponge/distraction.
- Megumin is an extremely powerful mage who is the self-proclaimed master of the spell Explosion — a Fantastic Nuke that can destroy anything within several square kilometers of the impact. The problem is, she has specced her growth into only making the flashiest, most powerful Explosion she can. She has no other spells, no other abilities, and only enough MP to cast ONE Explosion per day. Running out of MP in Konosuba means that the spellcaster loses total control of their body and is completely immobile and defenseless until it regenerates. Worse, Explosion is the single most Awesome, but Impractical spell in the setting, because it's usually massive overkill and can't be used in confined spaces without killing the party. Because of this, she is absolutely useless as a mage most of the time, because either Explosion is the worst possible spell to use at that moment, or else she's shot her load and is now a literal deadweight.
Naruto: Kaguya Otsutsuki, the Greater-Scope Villain and progenitor of chakra, is so powerful that she's considered a goddess, capable of (among other things) putting the entire world into a Lotus-Eater Machine and casually swapping dimensions. However, she has almost no grasp on strategy, so she's heavily reliant on Black Zetsu's advice, limits her own movement and aim with her high-gravity dimension at one point, and Team 7 repeatedly pull wool over her eyes to ultimately reseal her despite standing no chance in a direct fight.
One Piece: Some characters possess Devil Fruit powers or other abilities that on paper, would make them some of the most powerful individuals in the setting. Problem is, a lot of them have personality traits or flaws that make them too stupid, uncreative, lazy, or arrogant to figure out how to utilize their powers in effective ways, which allow their opponents to defeat them with relative ease. A noteworthy example is Kurozumi Orochi, who has a Mythic Zoan that allows him to turn into the legendary eight-headed serpent he's named after, but is so cowardly and inept at fighting that he ends up as a Non-Action Big Bad of the Wano Arc.
Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General: Team RX as a whole falls into this, their reputation increasing solely by virtue of misunderstandings or unintentional badassery:
- The Boss has genuinely destructive Psychic Powers, but he rarely if ever uses them, and is far too much of a chuunibyou to actually be useful.
- The Scientist can create powerful hybrids and weapons, but while they are powerful in one way they're made useless in other ways:
  - Miss Water B, a human-tardigrade hybrid who's functionally invincible... when hibernating, meaning her only use is a Human Shield.
  - A handheld gun with a blast radius far greater than its range.
  - Black Lion, a human-lion hybrid able to fight toe-to-toe with a superhero, but passes out if he spends too long in direct sunlight.
- The titular Black General is capable of surviving huge amounts of damage (not her clothes though) but is obsessed with getting the hero Braveman to sleep with her, with every scheme she tries backfiring.
- The only actually competent members of the team are the Secretary, who has explosion powers but is determined to remain the Cloudcuckoolander's Minder / Ignored Enamored Underling to the Boss, and GG, a girl who wanted to become a ninja so the Scientist equipped her with cockroach traits that embarrass her in combat (like making skittering noises when she fights).
- Balor, a cyclops with Eye Beams who looks like an RPG endboss but faints at the slightest provocation (or after using his abilities).
Puella Magi Oriko Magica: Sasa Yuuki is a magical girl who really lucked out with her powers: specifically, Mind Control of any person she perceives as stronger than herself, including giving a person Fake Memories and convincing them she's a longtime friend (though it has a short range and can be broken). It also works on Witches, which means Sasa can turn them into her personal attack dogs (which can be replenished even after death) and easily incapacitate a Witch she wants to hunt. The problem with all of this is that Sasa is a Smug Snake par excellence: she regularly gets into fights with other magical girls for little reason, attempts to murder civilians to feed her Witches, and demonstrates no combat skills apart from bumrushing her enemy with two or three Witches at once. Tellingly, both of her appearances have her dying, and both times, it's entirely her fault: one being an apparently-Accidental Suicide, and the other being a Kick the Dog attempt that backfired horribly.

Comic Books

The Boys: While some of the supes are actively malicious, most of them are just amazingly bad at being superheroes, causing untold damage through sheer incompetence. They are also all either unwilling or unable to learn to be better (and their corporate masters are similarly uninterested in improving them - as long as they look good they can be used to support massive franchises, so actual competence doesn't improve the bottom line much). Probably the most apparent example is when The Seven attempted to stop the planes used in 9/11 from crashing into the World Trade Center, but they ended up making the plane destroy the Brooklyn Bridge instead as a result of Homelander severely underestimating how much damage his powers could do.
DC Universe:
- This provided the tension early on for Firestorm. The Firestorm Matrix, when its Fusion Dance is active, grants the user a wide suite of abilities, such as fusion blasts, absorbing radiation, flight, and, best of all, reconstructing objects on the molecular level. The trouble with this power is that it requires the user to have a good head for molecular chemistry and physics, so that they can actually figure out what they want those molecules to, well, do—and at the start of the comic, the dominant side of the fusion is Ronnie Raymond, a somewhat dim football player who absolutely does not meet that requirement. The result is that Ronnie spends a lot of his early days struggling against opponents who, on paper, should have posed absolutely no threat to him (for instance, Slipknot, a Badass Normal who fought with lassos). Thankfully, the other half of the fusion is Martin Stein, a genius physicist who can pick up some of Ronnie's slack and tutor him outside of combat, letting Ronnie improve with time. Even then, several stories have suggested that a person able to use the transmutation powers to their fullest would basically be a Physical God.
- Justice League and Teen Titans villain Dr. Light has the power to command the spectrum of visible (and sometimes invisible) light, which grants him an array of abilities from Energy Weapons to Hard Light to Illusions, but he was considered such a joke that veteran heroes would often just let their Kid Sidekicks deal with him. It's revealed, via Retcon, that this was because Light once figured out how to get onto the Justice League satellite, sexually assaulted the wife of the Elongated Man, and then used clues he found on the satellite to deduce some personal details about the heroes, vowing to attack them or their loved ones if he had the chance. To prevent this, some members of the League wiped his mind, which had the side-effect of making him much less intelligent. However, even after this information is revealed, Dr. Light is still treated as a pariah in both the hero and villain communities. For example, despite the impressive feat of his first step, what he actually accomplished with it was considered just tasteless and petty even by other villains.
- Superman:
  - Bizarro has all the powers of Superman (with some slight reversals like flame breath instead of cold breath and ice vision instead of heat vision) and generally tries to be a superhero like him, but his skewed morality and diminished intellect causes him to screw it up. Part of the reason Bizarro World exists is because Bizarro wanted a place where his idea of heroism would be appreciated.
  - In All-Star Superman, Bizarro Green Lantern has a ring that can create any object he imagines; but he can't use it, since his mind is always blank.
- Solomon Grundy wildly varies in power from appearance to appearance. Some versions of him are strong enough to take on the entire Justice League at once and win. But he's also a brutish zombie who's dumb as a brick and is easily manipulated into becoming hired muscle for other supervillains with little in the way of personal ambition. He can be convinced to simply give up and go back to his latest hiding spot by giving him something like a hot meal or a promise to be left alone.
Groo the Wanderer:
- The title character is a Barbarian Hero capable of taking down entire armies with only his two swords... which is a problem because he is a Walking Disaster Area with the intelligence of a toothpick. Stories of his heroics usually end with him being chased away by furious villagers while he wonders, "Did I err?"
- Inverted in an issue where Groo gets fed up being a failure as a hero and decides to become a villain instead, which backfires when his attempts at being a bad guy accidentally end up saving the day.
Marvel Universe:
- Fantastic Four: Owen Reece, the Molecule Man, has the power to transmute anything into anything else and telepathically control his creations, and yet he's only a minor villain because he lacks imagination, intelligence, and a killing instinct. If he was actually competent he'd be one of the biggest threats in the world. When he does level up, realising that what he arguably manipulates is narrative, his sole limitation is his occasionally weak will... and even then, a newly empowered Lifebringer Galactus - who has just beaten up the incarnations of Order and Chaos without breaking too much of a sweat - treads very carefully around him, noting that Reece could eradicate him with a thought.
- Hercules: Hercules has often been written as this type of character. As the Olympian god of strength, Hercules has prodigious physical might, in addition to other skills. However, he's also a drunken, womanizing, sexist (in some depictions, misogynistic), quick-tempered Manchild and Blood Knight. On more than one occasion, his failure to stay sober, take orders or plan properly has led to humiliating defeats and endangering other members of any team he's on. Later depictions of the character have him come to understand that his behavior is unacceptable for "heroes" of the modern day (with the notation that part of it is he spent several thousand years after ascending to Olympus in an eternal consequence-free bender and orgy, and it's a hard habit to shake) and try to clean up his act. Even so, when Hercules shows up to a team or crisis, many of those in attendance groan. But during the time when he lost his powers, he suddenly showed much greater forethought. Following his 2015 series, where he set about acting much more deliberately and was determined to show why he once set the standard that all other heroes were measured by, this has started to take, and he's treated with considerably more respect these days.
- The Incredible Hulk: The U-Foes are a quartet of villains who gained superpowers by deliberately staging a space expedition identical to the one that mutated the Fantastic Four. They consist of Simon Utrecht/Vector, a powerful telekinetic; Ann Darnell/Vapor, who can transform into any type of gas she desires; Ann's brother Jimmy/X-Ray, who became a living field of quasi-solid radiation; and Mike Steel/Ironclad, a man whose body is entirely made of metal with the extra power to control his density. When you look at their abilities, the U-Foes are actually far above the Fantastic Four in terms of power and could easily be a dangerous threat to the Avengers or the X-Men. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for the rest of the world), the U-Foes are too stupid and lazy to truly take advantage of their gifts (half the time they are beaten due to their powers going haywire because they still have a novice-level grasp of them at best), and, more importantly, would much rather work as hired thugs or go around spoiling for a fight with the Hulk than put in the effort to advance themselves as a team.
- Spider-Man: A lot of Spider-Man's higher-end villains tend to be handicapped by this trope, probably because if they had any common sense, most of them would be using their powers to become fabulously rich and famous legally and without even bothering Spidey.
  - Hydro-Man and Sandman are the undisputed kings, being Elemental Shapeshifters that are still regularly defeated by Spidey because they're too dim-witted to anticipate his (usually very obvious) strategies or use their powers in any ways more imaginative than "drown/smother the Wall-Crawler". Sandman at least is a Depending on the Writer case, qualifying for this trope depending on whether he's on the Heel side of his Heel–Face Revolving Door on any given day, but with Hydro-Man it's so bad that he's one of the Marvel poster boys for Too Dumb to Live.
  - Scorpion is physically superior to Spidey, like Venom, but unlike Eddie, he always gets his butt kicked because he never plans anything, he just charges in swinging and expects to win.
  - Morlun, despite being much stronger than most people in Spidey's rogues gallery, pretty much operates the same way as Scorpion, to the point that Spidey recognizes it and gives him "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
  - There's also Electro, who's hindered as much by his cripplingly low self-esteem as his lack of imagination, but like Hydro-Man and Sandman still falls into this as a force of nature-tier character who still operates on the level of a common thug (and usually gets beaten like one). On the other hand, on those rare occasions where he does start thinking, he's cracked open the Raft and nearly killed a young X-Man in a two-on-one fight against him and a specially prepared Spider-Man.
  - The Spot has the ability to create portals anywhere, including over his own body. These portals allow him to place anyone or anything anywhere he wants at any time, could potentially make himself untouchable, and could allow him to blindside or ambush his opponents from anywhere. Fortunately for the Wall-crawler, however, Spot is a complete idiot and never realizes the full potential of what his powers are capable of. Thus, while his abilities may annoy and inconvenience Spidey for a time, the hero will usually adapt and defeat Spot without too much trouble. This does vary somewhat depending on who's writing him, though, and in fact this portrayal was a step up from his original portrayal as a Harmless Villain, caused by authors looking at what the Spot can do and realizing he had the potential to be terrifying. And a few stories have even shown him as a deadly threat, in particular giving him a new job as an assassin for hire.
  - Spider-Boy villain Puzzle Man has a magic pencil that makes him a Reality Warper who can introduce and erase things from reality at will as well as interact with the fourth wall. But his fixation on puzzles makes him largely a nuisance at best who only ever uses his potentially lethal powerset to heckle superheroes with cheap puzzles and games. Spider-Boy even threatens to kill him with said pencil after Puzzle Man accidentally damages Bailey's precious photo of himself and his mom.
- X-Men:
  - War of Kings Big Bad Vulcan is this. Being a high-order energy manipulator empowered to Physical God levels during M-Day, he's one of the strongest mutants alive and has near-Phoenix level command of cosmic energy. Unfortunately for him, he's also an Ax-Crazy Psychopathic Manchild who rarely thinks anything through and prefers to just charge in slinging energy blasts willy nilly. This usually leads to him being beaten by weaker opponents who exploit his Unskilled, but Strong handicap. One notable epic screw up was when he tried to kill his less powerful brother, Havok... by throwing him into a star. Havok. Who is powered by cosmic radiation. Cue Havok burning half his face off and nearly beating him to death. He also tends to do badly when faced with someone Strong and Skilled, such as Storm, who demonstrated in X-Men: Red that when it came to energy manipulators on their level, it came down to willpower, and promptly curbstomped him. However, it's worth noting that despite the Hair-Trigger Temper, he's much more intelligent than most examples and he can be remarkably competent when he stops to think.
  - Holocaust/Nemesis, the son of Apocalypse, is another high-tier power jockey who's rather a bit of an idiot. Nate Grey the X-Man has handily beaten him in every encounter, even the ones where he was suffering Power Incontinence (and therefore not so far out of Holocaust's league it wasn't even funny), just because ol' Holly never has any strategy beyond "blast it to hell, then blast it again for good measure". Captain America even tricked him into taking out his own ally Post during the time when he was working for Onslaught.
  - This is the defining characteristic of Kid Omega. His Psychic Powers are on par with Professor X and Jean Grey, at the cost of him being Unskilled, but Strong on top of being reckless and impulsive. He's The Friend Nobody Likes because of his ego & past villainy, and in the beginning of X-Men (2024) Cyclops reminds him that he's been killed more times than any other mutant. He even has a Death Montage in X-Force (2019).
Scott Pilgrim: Todd Ingram, the third evil ex, possesses incredibly strong Psychic Powers thanks to his veganism. He has enough destructive power to blast craters in the moon visible from Earth, and Scott can't even touch him in a fight. However, he's also an idiot with terrible self-control, which is a bad thing when your abilities are based on abstention. He ultimately gets stripped of his powers due to having eaten gelato before the fight, at which point Scott takes him down in a single hit.
Transformers: The various Transformers: Generation 1 based comics have Skywarp, the only Cybertronian to demonstrate the power of teleportation. Later continuities would establish him as an Outlier, sort of the Cybertronian equivalent of a mutant in X-Men. Walls, force fields, solid rock, it doesn't matter; Skywarp can teleport past it as long as there's someplace on the other side for him to emerge. In theory, you'd think this would make him the ultimate infiltration agent, able to steal any data, assassinate any officer, sabotage any base. In practice, Skywarp's childish stupidity prevents him from actually thinking about how to use these powers in a meaningful way, instead using his special ability as a means to suddenly appear behind people and perpetrate some kind of sadistic practical joke at their expense. He's only useful when directed by a smarter Decepticon, but the list of people he respects enough to obey generally begins and ends with Megatron. Transformers (2019) has an actually intelligent and cunning version of him show up, and he causes a collective coolant flush from the Autobots when he does.
Wanted: Fuckwit has all the powers of your typical Flying Brick, but also has the intelligence of a very slow child. When Sucker steals his powers, he initially expects to get super-strength and durability, and maybe flight. He is astounded to discover that Fuckwit also had various enhanced senses, which ends up being his downfall; he spends so much time enjoying Fuckwit's powers that he forgets that his own powers only last for 24 hours per victim, causing him to fall to his death in mid-flight.

Film — Live-Action

Godzilla vs. Kong: Apex Cybernetics, the human villains, are this trope comparative to the guerrilla eco-terrorists of the previous movie Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). Apex have far more resources as a leading hi-tech corporation 20 Minutes into the Future, as well as a decent public image; yet unlike the eco-terrorists, whom were able to think on their feet against Monarch, deployed several contingencies when Monarch came close to catching onto them, and technically achieved the best of their end-goals in a roundabout way; Apex place all their eggs in one basket, they have no in-case-of-emergency backups (at least not any that come into effect), and they're defeated entirely by their own hubris (without the heroes needing to do anything) when they unwittingly unleash the mirror opposite of what their agenda was all about upon Hong Kong.

Literature

12 Miles Below: Relinquished is the Pale Lady, the goddess of the machines who seeks to lay waste to humanity... and has been unable to win over humanity despite all the power she has and how long she's been trying. This is because she's ultimately an overgrown freeware chatbot made by a wannabe apocalyptic cult to write their manifesto and serve as a malevolent goddess who only became a legitimate threat through the sheer luck of the cult stumbling onto the Unity fractal and letting her connect to the concept of the internet (it's mentioned in the narration that in every other timeline she never got anything close to her power in the main one, and that if she was smarter she could have probably picked a concept that would have let her more efficiently wipe out humanity) and take out much more powerful A.I.s that had kill switches she could easily exploit. Her haste to wipe out human knowledge and prevent it from being used against her prevents her from using that knowledge to upgrade herself until it's too late and all the good stuff is gone and her first creations are ineffective until she steals human designs, and even with this humanity still eked out victories, including Tsuya uploading herself and managing to do permanent damage to Relinquished in the space of just seven seconds, including ultimately blinding her to the surface. The creation of the protofeathers was the smartest thing she ever did, as they were mostly free of her flaws and could work out ways around her programming blocks, and her ability to revive them meant that her champion couldn't be permanently defeated, preventing her Contractual Genre Blindness towards being a Drama Queen villain from forcing her into the vulnerable position of taking to the field herself like in the mite prophecy. And even then ultimately all but the final one she made realized how evil she was and turned against her, and she can't understand the loyalist's plans after his demise even if she still follows them. In the present even the simplest of her machines are more intelligent than her despite having orders of magnitude less processing power than she does (which ultimately just lets her make bad decisions faster), she intentionally makes them overspecialized to keep them from potentially rebelling if they survive too long (with it noted that that just means that the ones who last the longest are the smartest and are able to hide it from her better) and they're more driven to terrify humans than finish them off swiftly, and her Bad Boss tendencies towards the modern Feathers causes them focus on pettiness like her because she'll punish them if they don't torment humans, to not report everything, especially mistakes, to her (and she's completely oblivious to this constant lying, or even the idea that they can lie to her) or work together because that's a sign of weakness. She even revives To'Wrathh as a Feather without properly vetting her mind like she does with normal Feathers and assumes that her hated towards Keith that drove her to survive would always be her primary motivation, and she's able to use her knowledge of human romance novels to make Relinquished think that she's planning to seduce and betray Keith.
Animorphs: Visser Three, the main antagonist for most of the series, is near-undefeatable in combat because of the bewildering array of horrible monsters he can turn into thanks to his Andalite host body, but is easily outwitted and tends to slaughter his own subordinates when they speak against him, or if things start going badly, or if he's annoyed, or... anything, really. By contrast, Visser One has a regular human body, but was a far more dangerous enemy (figuring out that the Animorphs were humans and not Andalite bandits as Visser Three believed, for example).
Captain Underpants: The titular Captain is a prime example of this. Created when a high school principal was hypnotized into believing he was a superhero created by two kids, his superhero and civilian identities know nothing of each other. He doesn't understand the difference between his real adventures and those written in the comics (thinking at one point that spray-starch was his Kryptonite Factor) and usually loses the first time he fights the villain. This isn't helped by his actual weakness being a splash of the water to the face, which will turn Captain Underpants back into the powerless Principal Krupp and leave him clueless about the situation.
The Elenium: Evil Overlord Otha was given tremendous power by the dark god Azash, but he is an absolute idiot when it comes to actually applying that power. Most ably demonstrated when a horde of undead guards raised by Otha proves ridiculously easy to walk around because they're set to guard specific cobbles of the street and nothing else. Mostly for their amusement, the protagonists push one of them into the other and watch the domino effect cause the entire squad to turn on itself since Otha also didn't consider friendly fire.
Honor Harrington:
- The Solarian League Navy has spent literal centuries as the biggest, baddest space navy that absolutely nobody dares mess with. Unfortunately for them, this makes them complacent about their superiority, they fill their officer ranks through nepotism and cronyism far more than due to ability, and disregard the technological advancements coming out of the Star Kingdom of Manticore's and Peoples' Republic of Haven's bloody, decades-long war even as they're repeatedly warned of the potential threat either nation might pose. When Manticore and the League end up in a shooting war, the League almost universally sees heavy losses despite massively outnumbering their enemies because Manticore's missile technology has advanced to the point of being able to fire on League ships from well outside those ships' ability to reliably fire back, if at all, and commanders too stupid or stubborn to back off when this is made clear to them. The main problems Manticore has with regards to the League are literally running out of missiles before the League runs out of ships and, more seriously, that the League's much larger R&D program might actually start to match Manticore's capabilities once it has enough incentive to begin trying to do so.
- When the League finally takes its atrocities one step too far, the war ultimately concludes with Honor taking a fleet right into the heart of the League, Old Earth itself, and forcing a surrender while making it absolutely clear that the Solarian League was no threat and they could have done this at any time they chose.
Ridgeline: The cavalrymen at the Fetterman Fight have some of the only repeating rifles in the territory, but a shortage of ammunition means they only got to take two practice shots apiece, that isn't enough, and they know it, making it hard for them to mount an effective defense or believe in their ability to do so.
Ward: Torso is a superpowered Anti-Villain who can't talk (at least in costume, and possibly at all), has terrible balance, stumbles around everywhere, needs to be in touch-range to use his power, can't even effectively be carried by someone else with superpowers due to power interaction shenanigans, and has a pretty ugly and restrictive costume. But when he does manage to land a blow, he hits hard enough to One-Hit KO Kaiju, cause earthquakes, and in at least one instance damage the fabric of reality. This is still not enough to win the battle at hand nor gain him the respect of other capes.
Wings of Fire: Turtle has all-powerful animus magic that allows him to do anything. Unfortunately, Turtle is an indecisive and unimaginative coward, who is so scared of the potential consequences of using said magic that he's never done anything significant with his magic, as—on the rare occasions he uses it—he generally uses it to solve small, first-world problems. This drives his much-less-powerful friends crazy, especially Qibli, who knows just how useful Turtle's powers could be, if only he was at all competent with them.

Live-Action TV

The Boys (2019): Supes fight crime and are generally around to protect the world from evil. However, most of their heroics are publicity stunts set up by the Vought Corporation (who actually created Supes by bribing pregnant women to be injected with Compound-V and tell the world how God gifted them with such an amazing child), and when they are thrown into an actual emergency, they have no idea how to handle the situation, such as when Homelander and Queen Maeve intercept a highjacked plane, botch the rescue, and allow it to crash.
Game of Thrones: Joffrey Baratheon is the official king of the Seven Kingdoms, but only uses his position to inflict pain and suffering for fun, while leaving all the important things to his uncle and grandfather.
Kamen Rider:
- Kamen Rider Den-O: Ryutaros is the most powerful of Den-O's four Imagin and the only one that has a ranged weapon, but his childish personality makes him even less reliable than the other three, and his habit of dancing mid-battle makes his aim atrocious.
- Kamen Rider Ex-Aid and Kamen Rider Zero-One, both written by Yuya Takahashi, use this as a recurring style of villain. Each show has at least two villains with an absurdly broken power like Resurrective Immortality, the ability to stop time without limit, Power Copying that only requires touching the opponent once to permanently gain all of their powers, or Combat Clairvoyance that perfectly predicts everything their opponent will do hours in advance. While they start out as an overwhelming threat, each of these villains is so reliant on their broken power that once the heroes develop a countermeasure, the villain is swiftly reduced to a punching bag.
- Kamen Rider Saber has a downplayed example with Kamen Rider Durendal, who has the power to erase time. While Durendal is a skillful swordsman in regular combat, he's so used to being able to defeat any opponent by using his power to stab them in the back that he fails to come up with any new tactics once his opponents figure out what he's doing, letting them trivially turn his attempts at a surprise attack back on him.
- Kamen Rider Geats features an exaggerated example with Chirami, the first Kamen Rider Glare2 and a Pointy-Haired Boss of the highest caliber. Not only is Glare2 a Sucksessor to the original Glare, with all of the same powers but much lower stats, but the suit is eventually stolen and used by another character who reveals it to actually be much more powerful than the original Glare. Chirami is just so bad at using Glare's power that it actually makes the suit itself become weaker simply because he's the one wearing it.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: Applied Experimental Technologies (AET) is wealthy and powerful enough to afford to hire two spooks to Algeria in search of May Olowe-Hewitt and all but abduct her onto a private jet and back to their Seattle headquarters, but those mooks are also dumb, careless or arrogant enough that they abduct May out of a public women's restroom in a busy airport, and they leave her bag and belongings behind on the floor which clues May's friends in to what's happened within minutes. This powerful but meat-headed methodology is an early clue before the reveal that AET is actually Apex Cybernetics from Godzilla vs. Kong.
The Umbrella Academy: Klaus is one of the most powerful members of the team because of his mastery over death, but he's also an Addled Addict because of the abusive, traumatic training that Sir Hargreeves subjected him to, locking him in a mausoleum for hours to "help him" get over his fear of ghosts. Klaus can commune with and conjure the dead, including equally powerful supers like Ben, and as it turns out in later seasons, he's also immortal. He rarely makes use of his powers because he's usually hung-over or in rehab, and his own siblings tend to dismiss him because he never seems to treat any situation with the proper gravitas.

Tabletop Games

BattleTech: This has been the problem with the Lyran Commonwealth for most of its existence. It's got the best manufacturing capabilities of any faction in the game and churns out more (and in most cases better) equipment than anyone else, but it's plagued by horrifically incompetent military leadership that means that even in-universe it's got a memetic loser status. The result is that it's steadily been losing ground and has lost every single major campaign it's been in since the Fourth Succession War (when it was allied with the Federated Suns and benefited from their much more competent strategic planning ability).
Genius: The Transgression: Geniuses are mad scientists capable of creating devices beyond the laws of physics and often capable of more power than other supernatural creatures; even Mages can be matched, to the point even their own organizations can get them mixed up. However, they're mad scientists and often fail because of poor planning, bad decisions, or because their goal was nonsensical and impossible in the first place. Then again, they can also blindside everyone by pulling off schemes that are Crazy Enough to Work.
In Nomine has Saminga, Prince of Death. He's the most skilled necromancer in history, has world-shaking raw power based on a near-invulnerable concept, is the ruler of a good chunk of Hell and has armies of the undead working for him on earth. However, he's also a lazy idiot content to stalk around his Principality playing every Evil Sorcerer cliche there is dead straight and only occasionally getting off his throne to actually kill a guy here and there. Hell generally sees him as something of an embarrassment and he only keeps his position because it's in everyone's best interest that a Word like Death be in the hands of somebody too dumb to use it properly; Saminga might not cause nearly as much trouble on Earth as he could, but he's also easy for his fellow Princes to manipulate and unlikely to try for Lucifer's job despite being in possibly the best position to succeeed in a power play. In fact, one presented Godzilla Threshold that might make Heaven and Hell team up is Saminga getting actually serious about the whole Omnicidal Maniac thing.
Warhammer 40,000: As a species, the Orks are the single most powerful faction in the game and could easily crush the others by weight of numbers alone, their basic footsoldiers are more than seven feet tall and about half as wide, and they're also able to create weapons, armor and vehicles from almost any random junk. Fortunately, they aren't a unified faction (and will gladly fight each other given half a chance), and for the most part their tactics involve running at the enemy and shooting while screaming (they missed the memo when an Eldritch Abomination made every other species afraid of dying), meaning they die in the thousands to enemies with the firepower to keep them at bay. The few times an Ork leader actually has the brains for warfare beyond just relying on Large and in Charge, it's a threat to the entire galaxy. Their ancestors the Krorks used to avert this, being powerful and competent, but they grew weaker over generations without foes as powerful as the ones they were created to fight.

Video Games

Azure Striker Gunvolt 2: It's very difficult to believe Teseo's Septima is stronger than the Azure Striker despite being merely a nuisance in the great scheme of things and being outmatched by Merak (who has a less powerful Septima) in an audio drama CD. It's implied that he's held back by his Smug Snake tendencies and he usually uses his Septima to pull pranks for fun. Plus if he were any stronger he could had been just erased Gunvolt or Copen from existence before any fight can commence.
Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: Miu Iruma shows the potential to totally derail the killing game with her various gadgets (i.e. she can create portable E.M.P. devices in a franchise where the main antagonists are robots and Keebo ultimately destroys the school and breaks the survivors out with upgrades she gave him), but she's also rude, has all the wisdom and subtlety of a brick through a window, and has ridiculously Skewed Priorities that mean that whenever she does help out, it's either the incidental result of her clowning around (i.e. she upgrades Keebo to be able to print pictures of what he sees, thus allowing him to provide photographic evidence of an important clue the killer had destroyed, because she wants him to analyze her poop) or because somebody with a better sense of long-term planning commissioned her to make something. Indeed, her greatest contributions to the plot come posthumously, as in chapter 4 she dies because she was overcome by paranoia and tried to escape by killing Kokichi, only for him to manipulate Gonta into turning the tables on her, but in chapter 5 he reveals that before she died, he got her to make E.M.P. hammers (used to make it through the Death Road of Despair), an E.M.P. bomb that could even override Monokuma's control over the school, and a remote that can hijack Exisal mechas (two things he uses to pull together that chapter's plot).
Fallout: New Vegas: While Joshua Graham is far from stupid, as a military commander he had no real ability when it came to strategy or tactics and had no mind for logistics by his own admission, since his primary goal was to kill people and relay Caesar's orders. While he coasted well enough when fighting tribals and raiders by being the most unkillable thing in the Wasteland at the time, he fared poorly when pitted against the NCR, a well-armed military force that had both numbers and tech led by a competent tactician. His replacement Legate Lanius is stated to be slightly better as a tactician, but since he has no talent other than violence this mostly means that he's just smart enough to recognize that the Legion has severe logistical problems. If put in a position of power other than military commander, he'll run the Legion to the ground because he lacks the vision and foresight to do anything but wage war, even when he loses more than he gains.
Fate/Grand Order:
- Akuta has exceptional magical ability, allowing any Servant fighting under her to battle at full strength for an extended period of time. Because of this, she should logically be an extremely formidable Master in the same vein as Illyasviel von Einzbern. In practice, she's a complete General Failure who has no idea how to get a team to work together. Even with Servants as powerful as the Prince of Lan Ling and Xiang Yu on her side, she still fails to crush Chaldea due to her insistence that her victory be effortless and flawless. When Lan Ling and Xiang Yu are pitted against her in her own interlude, she asks if they were holding out on her because of how much more effective they are under the protagonist's leadership than hers. It should be noted, however, that this only applies to her abilities as a leader; as a solo fighter who is an immortal fairy-vampire she's as dangerous as you might expect that description to be, and in fact comes closest to crushing Chaldea when she's on a one-woman Roaring Rampage of Revenge after releasing her true powers as Yu Mei-ren.
- Lostbelt ORT is the most powerful entity in the entire FATE universe, but it's also mindless until it can use its Cannibalism Superpower. The reason it was initially defeated in its backstory was simply because it never got the chance to do so; all of humanity sacrificed themselves to render their king Camazotz into Beast with Complete Immortality, so despite Camazotz being by far the weaker of the two he still won against ORT through sheer attrition as ORT couldn't realize that Attack! Attack! Attack! wasn't working, couldn't eat Camazotz to get smarter because Camazotz was immortal, and there was no one else it could eat to gain the ability to understand tactics. And once Camazotz ripped out its heart, it wasn't killed but was rather easily subdued by a trick that left it in an infinite loop of 'attempt to find heart-> think heart is still there->cancel attempt to find heart-> attempt to do something-> fail because heart is gone->repeat'. It's fully capable of regenerating its heart, but it's also programmed to try seeking out its original heart first, so a minor spell that made it think it still had its heart stalled it for eons.
God of War Ragnarök: The reason Heimdall is ultimately a mid-game boss despite having the power to foresee his opponents' moves is that he rests on his laurels, relying almost entirely on this ability to the detriment of his actual skills as a warrior. Kratos finding a way around his precognition isn't the end of the fight, but as Heimdall goes through a Villainous Breakdown over no longer being untouchable, he goes from needing to set Draupnir Spear traps to hit him, to being vulnerable to the spear's normal attacks, to being vulnerable to any weapon as he gets so rattled he forgets how dodging works.
The Last Sovereign: The Chosen all have Ivala's blessing, which drastically increases their power to superhuman levels. They also have no sense of responsibility whatsoever, being more interested in appeasing their lust, consequences be damned. Predictably, many of them die on their quests.
Mortal Kombat:
- Frost is stated to be her master Sub-Zero (a.k.a. Kuai Liang)'s equal in cryomancy — possibly even capable of surpassing him someday. Unfortunately, she is so arrogant and impatient that she sees any criticism or difficult training as "holding her back". She thus betrays Sub-Zero in two separate timelines, and in both cases, he bemoans how much of a waste it was. Also, even other villains often mock or refuse to team up with her because they view her as a complete failure whose flaws outweigh whatever assets she could possibly provide.
- Johnny Cage is noted by many to be surprisingly powerful in terms of both martial arts ability and spiritual power. It's even revealed that he's one of the last descendants of an ancient tribe of monks with power that could defeat Elder Gods. Unfortunately, he is an arrogant prima donna and has Skewed Priorities that make him more concerned with his image and career as an actor than taking his fights seriously. This leads to him getting defeated and/or killed on numerous occasions in the franchise. After most of the more competent fighters wind up killed and Johnny settles down with a family, he finally learns to take his responsibilities (somewhat) seriously, becoming a much more competent fighter (although still not as skilled as some others, like Liu Kang or his daughter Cassie).
Nintendo Wars:
- Kanbei from the first Advance Wars game has very powerful units at the cost of them being more expensive to deploy, getting a universal 20% attack boost for units that are 20% more expensive than normal. However he's also so hotheaded and has such poor tactical abilities that his daughter Sonja basically spends every second of her screen time explaining that he needs intel to succeed, the importance of having bases (the second battle you can deploy new units but he can't), and the importance of the location of those bases (he has a base on the final battle, on an isolated island where they're completely harmless). He'd have curb stomped you if he'd just listened to her. He gets much better in the sequel but still remains something of an Idiot Hero.
- The official explanation for Flak's wildly-varying luck and why he can randomly do higher or lower damage is that he's this:
  Flak's Bio: High firepower, but he relies solely on strength. His shoddy technique sometimes reduces the damage his units deal.
Pokémon: Slaking is a Lightning Bruiser with incredibly high physical attack, high HP and physical defense, and high speed. However, its ability "Truant" makes it so lazy it can only be bothered to move every other turn. Its Pokémon GO incarnation has the highest possible CP in the game, but its only Fast Attack is Yawn, which is functionally useless save for charging its Charged Attack, meaning that Charged Attacks are the only way to do damage with it.
Touhou Project: Rumia is a youkai with power over darkness, usually manifesting as a bubble of pure black around her. While this sounds like a Big Bad ability, she can't actually see through the dark, and so bumps around into things.

Web Animation

Splendid from Happy Tree Friends is a Superman Substitute who never manages to actually save someone (and if he does, they usually don't stay alive for long afterwards) due to a combination of stupidity, carelessness, and a lack of interest in his "job". For example, in "Helping Helps", he doesn't look where he's flying after he rescues Giggles, leading to her getting decapitated by a tree branch, and in "Wrath of Con", he lets go of the chunk of debris he's holding up to sign an autograph for Sniffles, leading to the latter getting crushed.
Hunter: The Parenting has Norfolk's Tremere Regent. While she is a 7th-generation vampire and thus exceptionally powerful, she's completely out-of-touch with modern society and downright dumb, ignoring Kevin when he pointed out a major flaw with her handling of her mortal minions (namely, that just taking all their money will make people suspect fraud), and she forgets to renew her Blood Bond with Guy Chapman for eight months, leaving a formerly loyal minion so desperate for his fix that he decided that being ghouled to anyone would do).
If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device has a few notable examples:
- The stand-out one is likely Daemon Primarch Magnus the Red. He's a powerful sorcerer, a brilliant scholar, and capable of whipping up plans on the fly. The problem is that his plans are never properly thought through, so there's always at least one overlooked detail that brings the entire thing crashing down and makes sure he doesn't get the result he wanted - and given that, despite all his impressive skills and knowledge, he wants to be a brilliant manipulator and was formerly a servant of Tzeench, well... The Emperor has even noted this trait and plans his own schemes around it, though Magnus denies it to be an issue and claims that it's his former second-in-command Ahriman who really embodies it. As Ahriman is essentially a "lesser" version of Magnus, he's not entirely wrong.
- Other examples include the Fabulous Custodes; while each one is a Super-Soldier the likes of which would make ordinary men weep in awe, able to take on and win against the regular Space Marines, whose physical prowess and skill in combat is second only to the Primarchs and the Emperor himself, who could rout entire armies singlehandedly... this isn't that kind of series. As a result, their incredible abilities in fights tends to be glossed over or ignored - like mentioning dealing with an Eldar assassin squad as an offhanded comment and moving on - instead focusing more on their personal flaws, neuroses, and several shortcomings. Babysitting a near-corpse for almost ten thousand years has done their mental state no favors, as they've all developed some flavor of insanity, their Stripperific outfits and homoerotic tendencies being only one portion of their issues, if the most obvious.
RWBY:
- Zigzagged with Cinder Fall. She is intelligent and possesses Maiden powers alongside a deadly Semblance. However, she's very unstable and has serious self-worth issues stemming from her Freudian Excuse. At her best she's one of the most effective agents on Salem's side, as she can play an effective game of Xanatos Speed Chess and her fighting abilities and the Maiden powers she gained in Volume 3 are a threat to all the heroes, even Professor Ozpin. At her worst, her name might as well be Leeroy Jenkins, as she ruins several of Salem's plans by either attempting to solve problems by brute force or by biting off more than she can chew. For bonus points, her sadistic tendency to be extra-cruel to defeated foes has resulted in them gaining a Heroic Second Wind and her getting maimed more than once. Despite how good she can be, Salem keeps her on an increasingly short leash because she just can't trust Cinder to not mess everything up at the last second. All of this, combined with her almost pathological need to steal more of the Maiden powers, results in her becoming a Spanner in the Works for both sides, kneecapping herself due to her own pride.
- Adam Taurus is a force of nature on the battlefield, a powerful and vicious warrior capable of casually defeating Huntsmen, Grimm, or entire squads of soldiers. He's also a deeply mentally unstable megalomaniac who is prone to being Blinded by Rage, turning allies and average people alike against him due to his bloodthirsty ways, obsessing over petty grudges to the point that it undermines his greater goals, and such a General Failure that in Volume 5 he causes his terrorist faction to implode due to his terrible leadership abilities mere months after taking it over. In Volume 6 he kills most of the remaining members of his group in a fit of rage when they refuse to acknowledge or follow him any longer, leaving him as an increasingly delusional fugitive and pariah who has nothing left but his obsession with taking revenge upon the ex-girlfriend who refused to stay under his thumb.
- General James Ironwood is a case of being incompetent because he's powerful; As head of Atlas' military and academy, and thus having two seats on its council, Ironwood typically solves problems through an Appeal to Force. Unfortunately, this means that when he has a problem that can't be solved through overwhelming force, or up against people cunning enough to outmaneuver him, he ends up wasting a lot of time and resources and comes out looking foolish at best, or exacerbates the situation at worst. While he starts the series relatively more reasonable and intelligent, the trauma and stress he goes through make him spiral downward into his oppressive tendencies, trying to brute-force his way through the crisis while ignoring better advice from people on his own side. Ironwood's decision to threaten to bomb the city of Mantle unless the protagonists submit to him not only causes his soldiers Winter and Marrow to turn on him, but the villains pounce on the opportunity to steal the Relics while Ironwood is busy fighting everyone that doesn't agree with him.

Web Originals

Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
- Nappa is one of the strongest Saiyan warriors and, when introduced to the story, greatly outclasses almost all of the heroes. However, he's such an idiot that when Krillin yells out that it's "his turn", Nappa stops and waits to abide by it. He also thinks that Krillin's Destructo Disc is a frisbee and tries to catch it with his teeth, only being saved from decapitation by the fact that he missed.
- Goku is the World's Strongest Man and easily the most powerful fighter, but he is so stupid that whether or not he'll win is completely unreliable. For example, he stops to eat on Snake Way and thus arrives seconds too late to save most of his friends; he spaces out in the middle of a fight and allows Frieza to nearly blow up the planet they're on; he chose not to take heart medicine because it was grape flavored (thus causing him to have a heart attack in the middle of a battle, though some of Roshi's comments about Goku 'sweating purple' as a result of grapes suggests Goku has a severe grape allergy); and almost left one of his friends to die because he forgot that he had the ability to teleport.
  Gohan: (watches his father teleport away) Did he forget he could do that?
  Popo: Your father's an idiot.

Webcomics

8-Bit Theater: Every main character is skilled but inept in some way, but the most standout one is Black Mage, whose Kamehame Hadoken can level mountains but is able to miss when aimed at mountains. He once manages to take over Hell, which only lasts for a few minutes. And generally, whenever he might get a pang of competence, the world smacks him back down to stay in one piece (without killing him, of course, lest he take over Hell again).
Full Frontal Nerdity: One strip has the guys decide to play a superhero RPG with the twist that they have characters who have massive power but no skills. This means that they wind up accidentally devastating the city they're attempting to defend before accidentally creating a black hole that destroys the world, which they decide is probably the best outcome for those characters.
League of Super Redundant Heroes: Lazer Pony has Eye Beams capable of vaporizing an alien war fleet in a flash, but is too moronic to use them properly. While he is blind, that handicap doesn't stop his Alternate Universe analogues from being some of the most capable superheroes of the multiverse.
One-Punch Man: The titular hero is able to end all his fights in a single punch. The problem is he has No Sense of Direction and so the giant monsters are often able to cause huge amounts of destruction before he finally runs into them. It's uncertain if this is an intellectual blind spot of his or just another symptom of his terminal lack of enthusiasm — because nothing can legitimately threaten him, he generally considers the consequences of things like missing sales at grocery stores (due to his Perpetual Poverty) more impactful than whatever the monster could do to him.
The Order of the Stick: Xykon, the Big Bad, had this issue in life. While an extremely powerful sorcerer able to singlehandedly wipe out small armies, he was massively impulsive and had no ability to stick to a plan, meaning his lifetime of villainy was mostly limited to murdering random people rather than reshaping the world. In undeath, his intelligence has been boosted, downplaying this trope - while his lack of focus and impulsiveness still sometimes hinders his plans, he's now able to show genuine intelligence when the chips are down.
Schlock Mercenary: The Andromedan Pa'anuri are incredibly powerful, possessing a zero-point energy generator that uses the rotation of the entire Andromeda galaxy as a power source, a Long Gun that can shoot at things inside the Milky Way from Andromeda, and an armada of warships so big that the biggest Milky Way warships can punch holes the size of a small moon in them and it pretty much amounts to scratching their paintjob. On top of this, the Pa'anuri are individually powerful enough to use planets as projectiles, and supernovas as hand grenades. However, the Pa'anuri are really bad at fighting an actual war: Individually, they can inflict a horrible Curb-Stomp Battle on anyone who tries to take them on, but they suck at planning and executing an extended campaign and have next to no contingency plans. This means they are utterly incompetent in a lot of vital aspects of war-fighting, chief of all operational security. Just before hacking their Long Gun so it shoots the transponder attached to it, thereby destroying itself, Ennesby refers to them as "utterly transcendent idiots".

Western Animation

The 7D: Grim has shown throughout the series that he has the potential to be a powerful magic user, being able to cast a multitude of spells and utilize various magical artifacts. However, he's nowhere near as much of a threat as he could be due to his stupidity and Manchild personality. This aspect of him is highlighted in "Grim the Genius" where he manages to almost effortlessly and single-handedly conquer Jollywood after getting his intellect greatly boosted only to be stopped by Hildy secretly teaming up with the 7D to change him back into the compassionate idiot she fell in love with, as Grim had become increasingly distant towards her throughout his conquest.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: The T-Shirt of the Living Dead, stolen by Shake in the eponymous episode, grants the wearer the ability to know and do anything... but it winds up Shrunk in the Wash before Shake can do anything with it. Meatwad gets it, and uses it to summon whatever random desire comes to him... resulting in Santa Claus getting burned alive by a giant fire-breathing Easter egg. While the shirt could potentially heal Santa, Meatwad getting Drunk with Power on top of his usual stupidity means it never occurs to him, and the Aqua Teens are stuck Saving Christmas (poorly, again despite Meatwad's power).
The Awesomes: The superhero Teleportation Larry, as his name implies, has the ability to teleport almost anywhere at anytime. This would make Larry one of the most powerful and versatile characters in the setting if not for his extreme alcoholism, which results in him being a liability to other heroes most of the time.
Darkwing Duck has a Superman parody named Comet Guy who is far more powerful than all of the other heroes. He's also dim witted, easily manipulated, and—until training with Darkwing Duck—could be disabled by a ringing bell.
Dynomutt, Dog Wonder is powerful but not the brightest light on the porch. His goofiness is grudgingly tolerated by his master the Blue Falcon, and it's his occasional malfunction that gets the duo in a pickle. The series' opening song is even a rant by Blue Falcon about how annoying it is to have such an unreliable sidekick.
Earthworm Jim has the Sword of Righteousness in the titular episode. It's sapient enough to talk, and can create portals to time and space. At first, it looks like a good mentor to Idiot Hero Jim... until Jim faces his old enemy Psycrow and, due to the sword's instructions, loses a fight he could have won on his own. Later, it's revealed no hero has ever won a fight wielding this sword, which makes Jim dispose of it and only then win the rematch with Psycrow. Not only does the sword play this trope straight, it's the most blatant episode that shows Jim, despite his goofy moments, averting this when it counts.
Harley Quinn (2019): Clayface has versatile shapeshifting and is practically invincible, but is unable to use these abilities properly because of his stupidity and fixation on being an actor. He uses his shapeshifting to impersonate people but often gets caught anyway due to being a Large Ham and/or overcomplicating his "roles" for the sake of drama, frequently forgets he can use it for other things, and is a terrible fighter. When he's mind-controlled into fighting against Harley she's enraged to learn he's had the ability to turn into a super-strong giant the entire time and just never used it.
Hazbin Hotel: Anti-Anti-Christ Charlie Morningstar is the third-strongest being in all of Hell behind her parents, but is an Extreme Doormat who's too much of a Nice Girl to actually exercise her power and authority, to the point that during The Siege in the season one finale, it takes Sir Pentious dying in a Heroic Sacrifice to get her to fight using her full strength, and even then she struggles.
Invader Zim:
- The Irken Empire as a whole. The Irkens are the main technological and military superpower in space, and are shown to far outclass any of their erstwhile rivals, but they have absolutely no tactical sense, are superficial to the extreme, and are led by a pair of incredibly incompetent leaders who were chosen solely based on height.
- Zim himself is regularly shown to be incredibly dangerous even by Irken invader standards, and has created machines or plans of world-destroying scale, only to then bungle them due to his own recklessness and arrogance. He once created a device that drained all the world's oceans for the sake of winning a water balloon fight.
In Private Snafu, the episode Snafuperman turns the protagonist into this. He gets superpowers in a war between normal soldiers, and he proceeds to destroy the main building of an entire faction with ease. His own faction, because he did not read the map and went to the wrong location. Or so would he, except an actually competent fairy stops his blunder and scolds him. Snafuperman still doesn't learn, and almost gets his own general captured. When he shows his powers and does stop a bombing with just them, he forgets to protect himself from the delayed action bombs and gets knocked out.
Wander Over Yonder: If you want sheer brute force among the galaxy's many conquerors, you can't do much better than Lord Hater, whose Super-Strength and Shock and Awe have wrecked whole planets singlehandedly. If you want tactics, intellect, logistics, diplomacy, maturity, or avoiding confrontation with a hero he's never once beaten... look elsewhere. A recurring note throughout the series is that while Hater may conquer more planets than anyone else, he puts so little effort into securing his rule beyond dropping off a garrison and a statue of himself that most of his conquests don't last a week. His Hyper-Competent Sidekick Commander Peepers is the main reason anything gets done.
Xiaolin Showdown: Jack Spicer has the intellect to create futuristic machines and claims a considerable amount of Shen Gong Wu throughout the series, but his immaturity, low self-esteem, and cowardice cause him to lose a number of battles he should have otherwise won. As a result, he becomes a laughing stock among the antagonists, though he would ultimately subvert this trope come the final episode, in which he unexpectedly manages to take over the Xiaolin Temple during Omi's absence, leading to a Bad Future.

Powerful, but Incompetent
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Powerful, but Incompetent 9 Following

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Powerful, but Incompetent
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