Authority Equals Asskicking/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Being a higher rank makes you stronger.

  • Straight: Jack is the leader of the Super Awesome Team, and, as such, is stronger than everyone else in his group.
  • Exaggerated: Jack is the leader of the Super Awesome Team, and he can annihilate whole armies with very little effort.
  • Justified:
    • He has been in the team longer than anyone else has, so he is more experienced at what he does.
    • Being stronger is the only, or at least the best, way to gain a higher rank.
    • Jack's higher rank means he gets better equipment.
  • Inverted:
  • Subverted: Jack constantly says he is better than everyone else on the team, but he is actually no better than any of them...
  • Double Subverted: ...until you push his Berserk Button.
  • Parodied: Besides fighting, the leaders of Super Awesome Team can't do anything normally, leading them to break everything or make conventional tasks into a show. The members of the team will either not realize that they shouldn't smash the table nor utilize their combat training to scramble the eggs, or simply sigh and carry on.
  • Deconstructed:
    • Soldiers go to any length, any length, to get that higher ranking.
    • Or, because of their combat prowess promoting them, they do a really bad job at what they're given.
  • Reconstructed: However, the higher-ranked soldiers manage to keep the lower-ranking ones in line because of their higher power.
  • Zig Zagged: Jack constantly says he is better than everyone else on the team, but he is actually no better than any of them, until you press his Berserk Button, but he turns out he still isn't much better than the others, until you press another Berserk Button...
  • Averted: He is equally strong as the rest of his team.
  • Enforced: "We need to make the higher-ranked ones stronger, otherwise they'll be too easy to kill!"
  • Lampshaded: "You've gotten quite some muscle." "Oh, yeah, got promoted yesterday."
  • Invoked: When Jack gets a promotion, he immediately starts working out so he'll be stronger than the rest.
  • Defied:
    • Jack deliberately doesn't work out more than he used to when he gets promoted, because he doesn't want to be stronger than anyone in the army.
    • Alternatively, Jack rejects the promotion for the same reason.
  • Discussed: "Did you see how strong Jack has gotten? Has he gotten a promotion or something?"
  • Conversed: "Why does it always seem to be that higher-ranked guys seem to be stronger?"
  • Played For Laughs: Jack doesn't even NEED his team half the time, and the team knows it.
  • Played For Drama: Jack is an absolute monster in combat.

I order you to go back to Authority Equals Asskicking, right now, or I'll kick your ass!

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