Defeat by Modesty/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A fighter of either gender (though usually female) calls off the fight when she ends up fully or near naked.

  • Straight: Alice and Bianca are fighting in a tournament. Bianca accidentally (or intentionally) rips off Alice's top. Alice, rather than continuing the fight, gives up.
  • Exaggerated:
  • Justified:
    • Underneath all her warrior bravado, Alice really is modest and ending up naked in front of leering eyes is her greatest fear.
    • Alice's clothes give her the power to fight. If they get slashed or removed, she becomes weak.
  • Inverted:
    • Alice is in a Stripperific fighting outfit and gives up when Bianca tries to clothe her.
    • Alternatively, Alice suffers Clothing Damage and doesn't mind being naked (or half-naked), but Bianca has an aversion to nudity and calls off the rest of the fight.
  • Subverted: Alice is stripped naked and continues fighting regardless...
  • Double Subverted: ...but Bianca still wins because the judges disqualify Alice for being naked.
  • Parodied/Played for Laughs:
    • The fight is no better than a foxy-boxing match mixed with a cat-fight and everyone knows it. The winner is whichever female fighter ends up naked first.
    • Before the match, Bianca tells her male friends that she's heard tell that her opponent Alice (the sexiest, most beautiful fighter in the league) has one weakness -- she won't fight if someone rips off her clothes. The male fighters hoot and holler in lecherous anticipation -- until we go to a Whip Pan of "Alice" -- a short, fat, hairy, disgusting, androgynous troll in Stripperific battle armor.
    • The fight turns into an Overly Long Gag in which Bianca tries to remove Alice's armor, but discovers that she dresses in a crazy amount of layers. Bianca calls off the rest of the fight because of how monotonous stripping her has become.
  • Deconstructed/Played for Drama: Alice treats her defeat by modesty as if she's been raped and vows never to fight again.
  • Reconstructed:
    • Alice gains the wherewithal to fight again when Bianca gets defeated the same way Alice did.
  • Averted:
    • Bianca doesn't think of removing Alice's clothes.
    • Alice's clothes don't come off during the fight.
  • Enforced: Fan Service.
  • Lampshaded: "Why did I wear such a revealing outfit to fight in?"
  • Invoked: Bianca, a big fan of Fighting Dirty, deliberately attempts to remove Alice's clothes so she'd be too embarrassed to fight back.
  • Defied:
    • Alice fights in non-revealing armor.
    • Alice doesn't mind fighting semi-nude (or at least waits until the fight ends to cover herself, or fights harder because her embarrassment over being exposed has sublimated into pure, unadulterated rage).
    • Alice goes in nude, so there's nothing to rip off.
  • Discussed: "And Barbara goes for Alice's top! What a fight this turned out to be!"
  • Conversed: "Why'd Alice stop fighting? Everyone's already seen her boobs."
  • Exploited:
    • Bianca knows that Alice is very modest and doesn't believe in nudity, so she uses this trope to beat her.
    • The writers of this fight know that sex sells, so they use this trope to get male readers interested.

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