Curb Stomp Battle/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The first battle of Arkansas Post in 1824: The Arkansas War by Eric Flint. 1200 undisciplined freebooters face 1200 trained soldiers.
  • A novel in the Coruscant Nights Trilogy has Captain Typho, Padme's old bodyguard, try to avenge her death at the hands of the newly-minted Darth Vader. It's really obvious who wins, but earlier in the novel Typho did beat the Force-Sensitive bounty hunter Aurra Sing, and he'd bought part of the carcass of an animal that blocked Force abilities, and he'd lured Vader into coming alone and not having any (physical) weapons. Still, he got destroyed, and fast. Should have gone with a live ysalamiri, Captain. He did manage to really shake up the Dark Lord by having his last words be an accusation about killing Padme.
    • In Death Star, there is a point where five hundred X-Wings show up to attack the almost-finished first Death Star. They don't have the plans and neither Luke nor Biggs nor Wedge are with them, but still, five hundred X-Wings. All of them die; the superlaser's very first test firing is on their carrier, they can't make a dent, and the battle station's TIE pilots eliminate all of them. Considering that at Yavin the Rebellion had thirty X-Wings at most...
    • One of the qualms some fans had about the New Jedi Order series was that the first dozen books or so were about the good guys losing over and over (and over and over and over) again.
    • Any battle Thrawn's in, no matter his resources, will be this. He only dies when his Noghri bodyguard kills him, and the only battle he was present in that he could be said to have miscalculated was also because it was very first encounter with a Jedi Master--a very mad Jedi Master.
      • Actually, the battle where Thrawn steals the Vagaari gravity well generator almost results in his death, when his cruiser is hit. It's only because of the quick thinking of a human that he survives that battle. Also, during his first encounter with the Trade Federation, Thrawn's small border fleet (3 cruisers, 9 fighters) faces a large Trade Federation task force (2 TF battleships, 6 Techno Union missile-armed transports, 7 escort cruisers, 3000 droid fighters). If Thrawn did not have prior knowledge of the Trade Federation tactics and droids (the Chiss have no droids), his small force would've been torn to pieces. On the other hand, the Outbound Flight may have survived then.
        • He hadn't had prior knowledge of the Trade Federation fleet. He did call up some humans to ask about it, but it was his first encounter with them.
    • In the last book of Rebel Force Ferus Olin faces Darth Vader for the last time. Many prior novels had had those two face off - Ferus was one of Anakin's contemporaries who left the Jedi before he could become a Knight, survived Order 66, and formed a small early rebellion with several surviving Jedi members in it, though it was destroyed with a prototype superweapon. In every battle that mattered Ferus lost to Anakin/Vader after a lot of struggle - this time he was fighting as a Delaying Action to keep Vader away from Leia. And this time, Vader just toys with his old enemy a bit, then dispatches him easily.
  • The Tom Clancy book Executive Orders features the operational strategy that proper warfare is taking organised and technically advanced armed forces and arranging them skillfully with the express purpose of Curbstomping. The UIR tank corps gets this treatment rather forcefully toward the end of the book.
  • The Malazan Book of the Fallen series is inordinately fond of this trope, especially with regards to resident badasses Quick Ben and Karsa Orlong. It tends to lead to as many anticlimaxes, when battles are foreshadowed for most of a book, then are finished within a couple of pages.
    • To be fair, in most of these battles, someone comes in with a stacked deck. Quick Ben never comes at 'anyone' straight up. Hence the moniker. Also because Erikson believes swordfights should be portrayed more realistically, and that means even with skilled swordsmen, they end in seconds. So while YMMV on the literary value, it's justified.
    • This is pretty much how the island nation of Malaz ended up becoming an empire. It's ruler recruited very powerful mages, highly skilled assassins, traded for large quantities of powerful explosives and gained the allegiance of an army of unstoppable undead. With these resources he trained an elite army and proceeded to curbstomp all the neighbouring nations.
    • In the series you know that things are really bad when a Badass Army which has been doing the curbstomping for a couple books already, itself gets curbstomped simply because they were in the way.
  • Warrior Cats: Tigerstar vs. Scourge, mostly because of The Worf Effect.
  • Several battles in Honor Harrington, mainly because the Manticorans have the best tech in known space. One incident involved the Manticoran admiral, with a small task force, demanding the surrender of her opponent, the admiral of a large fleet that outnumbered her several - to - one, and also had (or so they thought) the best technology and training in known space. When the demand is refused, the Manticoran admiral effortlessly blows away the enemy flagship, and then declares her intent to blow up the entire chain of command until she finds someone reasonable. When you have the capacity for one of your pod battlecruisers to Macross Missile Massacre pretty much any five enemy ships, this is the case except with massive outnumbering.
    • She didn't have podbattlecruisers. Just 8 Nike class battlecruisers 8 Edward Saganami -C cruisers and some tincans, versus the 20 battle cruisers of the Solarians.
    • Another Manticore Missile Massacre in Mission of Honor: 71 Solarian superdreadnoughts versus a handful of Manticoran heavy cruisers with -- the crucial point -- a crapload of Apollo pods. The Solarians surrender after one salvo kills or cripples a third of their fleet, from far outside their own range. Also, may apply to Operation Oyster Bay, which curb stomped Manticore and Grayson's orbital industry. There'll be fewer Manticore Missile Massacres without the factories to make the missiles...
    • Another example is found in At All Costs when the Apollo missile is first introduced, and Honor's outnumbered fleet effortlessly trashes three Havenite fleets before reducing the entire orbital infrastructure of Lovat to rubble.
    • On a more personal level, Honor Harrington vs highly experienced duelist who is hired to essentially murder people legally. He doesn't even get his arm pointed in the right direction before she drills him. With a nonlethal shot. Intentionally. From the hip. And keeps firing, hitting him higher and higher up the body in a matter of seconds before she puts the last one between his eyes.
  • The opening sea fight of the war in The Great Pacific War is this, and everybody knows it even before it happens. Modern Japanese dreadnoughts with long-range firepower are going against the smaller and mostly outdated vessels of the US Asiatic Fleet. The US Admiral's pre-battle plan is entirely based on how to lose in the least bad way possible.
  • Zig Zagged in Redwall. Villains can sometimes be killed by accident or after a really long fight scene. Villains that are experienced fighters (Ungatt Trunn, Cluny the Scourge, Feragho the Assassin) can put up a real fight and sometimes even kill the protagonist, causing their opponent to invoke Taking You with Me. Other creatures that are reputed to be great fighters (Princess Kurda in Triss) will normally be killed either by accident or when their skills are actually called upon to be tested. And some, like Gabool the Wild and Mokkan the Marlfox, die by an accident or when they're in a position to not fight back.
    • Bluddbeak takes on three adders, despite being blind, old as dirt, and rheumatic. Ah, what's the point of a spoiler tag? He loses.
  • Happens several times in the Axis of Time trilogy. It's to be expected however, considering that the basis for the trilogy involves mismatching World War II technology against a military force from 2021...
  • In The Wheel of Time series, Muggles generally don't stand much of a chance against channelers, who just have too damn many awesome powers, but the Asha'man in particular really rub this in, as they undergo Training from Hell for the express purpose of becoming living weapons. When they show up, people tend to explode. Messily. For their first battle, they teleport into the middle of an enemy camp and proceed to turn the surrounding army of elite desert warriors into chunks of gore while they chill behind their force fields.
    • Then there was the time Rand balefire-nuked Graendal's mansion... we find out in the following book that she escaped, but wow.
  • In Rainbow Six, the battle in Brazil: 30 ecoterrorists against 15 Rainbow troopers. Only about 4 of the ecos make it to safety. It's so one-sided that Clark and Ding, hardened special forces men and former intelligence officers who're no strangers to playing the Anti-Hero, find it pure murder.
    • Justified with the first three counter-terrorist missions. Once the Badass Crew gets into action, they take down all the Tangos without losing a man - but before beginning the operation, we are shown how they need to gather information and plan out the execution. The men also train over and over ad nauseum in preparation for taking a mission. Using flashbangs to disorientate the targets before going in doesn't hurt.
    • Also, the last 300 pages of The Bear and The Dragon are almost 100% Americans blowing up whole Chinese armies in scene after scene, battle after battle. Well, occasionally they let the Russians have some fun too. Other than a brief subplot with a nuclear missile, the outcome is never even close to contested.
  • In John C. Wright's War of the Dreaming second book, two of these happen within a short span: Acheron's advance guard vs the US Pacific Carrier group, where the round goes to the humans and Morningstar vs the fighter jet air strike group. Unusual in the instance that it's The Cavalry that gets stomped.
  • Combined with a Noodle Incident in Good Omens. Crowley accidently gets into a jeep full of American soldiers on their way to a nuclear base. Two paragraphs later, it's Crowley's jeep.
    • And has a cassette player.
  • In The Dresden Files novel Small Favor, the fallen angel Magog tries to take on Eldest Brother Gruff. Magog gets annihilated in a single shot, without Eldest Brother Gruff even really trying. Dresden likens it to Gruff swatting him like "an uppity pixie."
    • Also, the scene in the first book that pits Harry and Marcone against a traitorous gangster. Not. Even. A. Page.
    • Harry vs Xenomorph Expy in the dark in Proven Guilty. No-Holds-Barred Beatdown with a side of Unstoppable Rage.
    • Michael in Small Favor vs several hundred hobs (evil Winter fae), some of which are armoured and some the size of Mountain Gorilla's. Michael barely breaks a sweat. Of course, wielding freaking Excalibur helps.
  • The first book of the Safehold series pits the island kingdom of Charis against every other naval power in the world. Contrary to what everyone in the book expected, the fact that Charis's was the only proper Navy combined with the technological innovations provided by Merlin Athrawes allowed Charis to decimate its foes so completely that two books later they're still racing to recover.
    • And have just realised that the massive galley fleet they're building will be useless against Charis' galleons.

"Oh, they'll be a huge improvement over the old ships. Unfortunately I'm coming to suspect that that means it will take one of Cayleb's galleons three broadsides to sink them instead of just one."

    • Any time Merlin gets into a swordfight, a Curb Stomp Battle results.
    • A Mighty Fortress, the fourth book, has the Church finally recovering from their past failures and getting ready to launch the Navy of God. Despite some successful misdirection, the Charisian leadership find out about this, and manage to get a force in place to intercept. The Navy of God had nearly 140 ships (though not all of them were fully armed yet), the Charisian force had about a fourth of that. Thanks to the Charisians attacking in the black of night and making the first ever use of signal rockets and exploding shells, Seven of the Navy of God's ships return to safe harbor. The rest are either destroyed or captured. The Charisian cost is higher than the first time around, but was still an overwhelming victory.
  • Both Wizarding Wars in Harry Potter went mostly this way with the bad guys delivering. It is implied that in the second one they didn't suffer even a single man dead or captive. Until the Final Battle, where the good wizards kicked the ass of the Death Eaters.
    • Snape vs. Lockhart
    • Snape vs. Harry in book 6 - he casually brushes aside all of Harry's attempts to attack him.
    • Dumbledore vs. Death Eaters plus Voldemort in the fifth book. That old man can surely kick an ass!
  • Ender's fight with Bonzo probably counts. Bonzo was older, bigger, stronger, and intent on Ender's blood and the fight was set up for several chapters. But when it finally happened, Ender defeated Bonzo in three strokes, finishing with a Groin Attack. It's later revealed that Ender killed Bonzo in the fight, and suggested that Bonzo was already dead when the last kick landed.
    • Note that curbstomping is central to Ender's strategy. As he explains it, he really hates fighting, so when he has to fight for real, he prefers to win so thoroughly that he preemptively wins every other fight he would have had. Bonzo wasn't the first bully to be on the receiving end of this philosophy. And yes, Ender unknowingly killed that one too.
  • In Mikhail Akhmanov's novel Invasion (the first of the Arrivals From the Dark series), humanity's finest get their asses handed to them by a massive alien starship. The so-called Battle at Martian Orbit is decidedly one-sided. The alien ship is surrounded by a dozen Earth cruisers, armed with nukes, swarms (a Magnetic Weapons that fires a fast-moving icicle spread), and scores of fighters. The alien ship launches "combat modules" armed with Antimatter weapons that make short work of the fighters and the cruisers in a matter of minutes, while losing only several of these modules in the process. Before going out in a blaze of glory, the cruisers manage to launch a Macross Missile Massacre nuclear barrage at the starship with a combined force of 400 gigaton. The alien ship's Deflector Shields easily absorb the destructive energy without the crew even feeling it. The aliens then send a video-recording of the battle to world leaders as a demonstration of their power.
    • Two more examples take place in the fourth novel of the series, Dark Skies, about 250 years after the events of the first novel. The Earth Federation sends a battlegroup to liberate three human colonies from a race known as the Dromi (a cross between Lizard Folk and Fish People), believing the occupational forces to be minimal. The battlegroup finds an entire Dromi clan facing them and is promptly obliterated by the sheer numbers, despite having superior weaponry (the antimatter weapons reverse-engineered from the aliens in Invasion). The second example occurs at the end of the novel when an entire fleet arrives and blasts the Dromi away.
  • Kelsier's final battle against the Lord Ruler in The Final Empire is pretty much this. It's immediately after one of the single most awesome fight scenes in the book, wherein Kell kills an Inquisitor, making it all the more shocking when the Lord Ruler basically just rips his face off without breaking stride.
    • One of these is deliberately engineered by Vin in the final book. She takes on thirteen Steel Inquisitors at once to try to put herself in enough danger to trigger an Eleventh-Hour Superpower. Turns out she got the mechanism wrong, but it worked out anyway- halfway through, the fight turns from the Inquisitors breaking every bone in Vin's body to Vin smashing a castle on top of them.
    • Vin and Zane team up for one battle in Well Of Ascension, going up against a heavy force of soldiers and Hazekillers. They kill 3-4 hundred people in under ten minutes.
  • World War III from the Keepers series (or pretty much every battle from WWIII in this series). The Germany-based Apex Empire takes over the world in a year. The Allies were completely outwitted (even for the decade prior to the short war, which was when Germany created its new empire) throughout. For starters, the entire population of the Allies had to be evacuated to North America just so they wouldn't be slaughtered (militarily) right from the outset. Even before the war became global, Germania (Germany plus Austria and the Czech Republic), along with Israel, essentially conquered the Middle East in three days (one of which was spent utterly defeating the combined invasion force of the Middle East against Israel), while killing almost no enemy combatants. The Apex Empire eventually deploys a superweapon that can only be described as an animalistic, small-mountain sized moving fortress/SHOOPDAWHOOP canon/Dakka worship doomsday weapon. To put things into perspective: the Allies, right before the war, designed a moving fortress that was supposed to be huge, like a superweapon. Well, each of the legs of the Juggernaught (the Apex's superweapon) is the size of the Allies' moving-fortress. And it had dozens of legs. Essentially the Real Life version of Flawless Victory, in the form of a WORLD WAR.
  • Every battle or war between the Draka and anyone else is one of these, with the Draka's victims enslaved afterwards. It doesn't hurt that the Draka military equipment is two or three generations ahead of everyone else, and that the Draka train in martial arts from the age of five.
  • Monster Hunter International: When Owen, who is a badass, fights Agent Franks, he gets his ass handed to him. Effortlessly.
  • In The Silmarillion the Battle of the Sudden Flame is probaly the greatest curb stomp in the book. The fortress of Angband is surrounded by the combined armies of the high elf lords of the Noldor and friendly tribes of men. Melkor, the original bad guy of Middle Earth and Sauron's master, starts off by covering the fields where the elves are with fire, then lets loose an army he's been spending years building. Led by the Glaurung, the father of all dragons, an awesome tide of orcs spews forth to crush the armies of the elves. The elves are so crushed by this battle that they never regain the momentum. Kingdom after kingdom falls to the hand of Melkor. The only way to save Middle Earth is to get the gods come and save them.
  • In David Weber's Out of the Dark, humanity gets curbstomped when the alien invaders launch a pre-emptive strike that kills roughly half the population on Earth, destroys most of the planet's cities and military infrastructure. Unfortunately, they piss off Dracula. Deciding to be the good guy, he and perhaps a dozen or so vampires he creates (all dedicated resistance fighters) effortlessly obliterate the entire invasion force, and steal their ships. The epilogue of the novel is dated as "Year One of the Human Empire" as Dracula and some of his people are taking their captured warships to visit destruction on their invaders and, it is implied, express humanity's extreme displeasure at the other galactic species who allowed this to happen.
  • One of these is mentioned in the prologue of James Blish's The Quincunx of Time. A vast enemy force attacked, "a massed armada that must have taken more than a century of effort on the part of a whole star-cluster ... under the strictest and most fanatical kind of secrecy." And the Service was waiting for them with three times as many ships, all positioned so perfectly that any attempt by the armada to fight would've been plain suicide. "The attack had been smashed before the average citizen could ever even begin to figure out what the attackers might have thought it had been aimed at."
  • In Harry Turtledove's short story A road not taken, faster-than-light and anti-gravity drives are very simple machines, ones that every race in the known universe has discovered in their respective Ages of Sail. Every race but humankind, that is; for a bizarre twist of fate, we missed it. As a result, while humankind devoted itself to advanced science, every other race concentrated all their efforts into traveling the stars, ignoring science for the sake of intergalactic conquest carried out with primitive spaceships, arquebuses, bayonets and Napoleonic tactics. So one day the Roxolani come across planet Earth, decide to conquer it, and are faced with the unexpected problem of fighting an enemy so stupefied by their backwardness that they actually worry whether it's fair to even shoot at the Roxolani at all. When they decide that it is after all, things go...badly for the aliens.
    • In the sequel Herbig Haro it's the humans' turn to be on the receiving end as they find a species which has also not developed the drive, and thus hasn't been sidetracked the way the humans allowed themselves to be.
  • Post-Apocalypse novel Malevil features a battle between the six defenders of Malevil with rifles and shotguns against twenty rag-wearing, half-dead, pitchfork-carrying refugees devouring their wheat crop. They didn't want to massacre the wretches, but when one kills Man Child Momo the need to defend their livelihood mixes with the desire for revenge in a massive Shoot the Dog moment.
  • The Princess Bride: Inigo kills four of the best swordsmen in the world in five. Seconds. Flat.
  • In Fate/Zero, in order to gauge Alexander's prowess, Kotomine orders his Servant Assassin, who is split into several forms, to attack Alexander head-on. Even though Assassin had no chance against Alexander, they might be able to kill Waver and Irisviel. Sure enough, Alexander obliges and uses his most powerful attack on the group of assassins: Ionian Hetairoi - Army of the King. A hundred Assassins? Meet the army that nearly conquered the world.

The hundred faces among the Hassans had forgotten about the Holy Grail at this moment. Forgetting victory and the mission of the Command Seal, they had already lost sense of themselves as a Servant. Some ran away, while some screamed fruitlessly. Some others stood dumbly on their spots. The panicked mob of skull masks were indeed just a group of rabble. “Trample them!!" Rider commanded without hesitation. The collective roar of the Ionian Hetairoi echoed in response. The peerless army that once swept across continents once again thundered across the battlefield. This was no longer a battle. It was a massacre.

  • In Halo: Fall of Reach. The space around Reach falls, hard.
    • Not quite, the UNSC's "big sticks" really screwed the final wave of assault quite hard, but yes, in the end it was definitely one-sided to say the very least. The entire company of Spartans (including the two hyper-lethal vectors) wasn't enough to defend even one generator, instead opting to buy time to save less than 2% of the billions living on the planet and protect the location of Earth.
  • In A Song of Ice and Fire Griff and the Golden Company against the defenders of Griffon's Reach.

Griff expected to lose a hundred men, perhaps more. They lost four.

  • Jesus Christ versus the Global Community Unity Army in the Left Behind book Glorious Appearing is such a battle, since not only is Jesus and His heavenly army unkillable (the Dramatic Audio presentation of the book had missiles fired at Him with no success), but also Jesus is armed with the One-Hit Polykill weapon which is The Word of God, which the enemy has no defense against.
    • The anti-climactic Satan's Other Light army vs. God battle in Kingdom Come was over in an instant. All that preparation and God just smokes Satan's army into ashes in seconds.
  • In Wearing the Cape, Hope/Astra nearly loses in her first hero/villain fight, against Brick, a superstrong gang-banger supervillain--partly due to inexperience, but also due to being handicapped by an intruding second supervillain. Later she gets a rematch and the fight is so one-sided Brick doesn't land a single hit, as a dramatic way of showing how much she's progressed.
  • In the last Percy Jackson and The Olympians book, The Last Olympian, there is the fight between the Minotaur, fully armoured and leading a legion of demigods and monsters, vs Percy Jackson. Percy wins. Oh, not just against the Minotaur, but against the whole legion, due to him having the Curse of Achilles.
  • In Sienkiewicz Trilogy Michał Wołodyjowski is this trope. In first two books he is just a minor character, which doesn't stop him from almost killing main antagonist of the first, subverting I Am Not Left-Handed in the process, and utterly humilating main character of the second, all without breaking a sweat.
  • In the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy, much time is spent on a subplot in which the president of the United Federation of Planets tries to convince every other major nation to aid her against a full-scale Borg invasion. Some refuse, but eventually the combined forces of the Federation, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, the Imperial Romulan State, the Cardassian Union, the Breen Confederacy, the Gorn Hegemony, the Ferengi Alliance, the Talarian Republic and the Orions mass to face the Borg. Then the Borg armada destroys the entire combined fleet in minutes.
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