Simple Yet Awesome

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
The Browning M2: in continual service since 1921, with only one modification to the design.

"This [alien staff weapon] is a weapon of terror. It's designed to intimidate the enemy. This [P-90] is a weapon of war. It's designed to kill your enemy."

—Jack O'Neill, Stargate SG-1

Sometimes the simple solutions are the best ones. While the best solutions are sometimes the boring ones, occasionally they achieve a sort of elegance that keeps them from being dull. While lacking the over-the-top badassery and flashy visual effects that would make it Awesome Yet Practical, their very simplicity gives them a sort of awesomeness all their own. These are timeless answers to enduring problems, and can always be relied on to do what needs to be done, without needed unnecessary ostentation to call attention to themselves. While other things come and go, things that are Simple Yet Awesome endure.

Less impressive than Awesome Yet Practical, but not as dull as Boring but Practical. Something that's Simple Yet Awesome is something that you'll find yourself using over and over again, and enjoying it, despite its lack of Visual Effects of Awesome.

Examples of Simple Yet Awesome include:

Advertising

  • The Little Caesar's mascot's Catch Phrase: "Pizza! Pizza!" It's not what he says, it's how he says it that makes it awesome.

Anime and Manga

  • Dragon Ball: The most useful technique in the entire franchise is none other than the humble Solar Flare, a non-damaging technique that temporarily blinds the opponent and never stops being useful, all the way from the original series through GT.
  • In Hellsing, Captain Pip Bernadotte and his Wild Geese prove that you don't need to be a supernatural ultra-badass to take down vampires. They do it with conventional military tactics—open ground seeded with land mines and covered by machine gun positions.
  • Holyland is all about straightforward, effective moves for surviving street fights. It's still really awesome.

Comic Books

  • Batman does things like this occasionally.
    • One Issue of The Batman Strikes! had Batman defeated villain Black Mask by walking into his lair and... offering his henchmen jobs. Without Mooks, there wasn't much that Black Mask could do.
    • Batman also once took down the Injustice League by paying off Mirror Master and donating to the orphanage he grew up in. Every once in a while, being one of the wealthiest men in the DC Universe comes in handy.
  • Early on in Chris Claremont's first X-Men run, the X-Men have to fight a bad guy who's on a space station. Does Claremont give us a hypertech Reed Richards-designed ship? No, we get six pages of a midnight launch of an ordinary space shuttle that make it seem just as cool as anything out of sci-fi.
  • In almost every versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Donatello uses one of the most primitive of weapons, a wooden bo staff, yet is just as badass as the other three Turtles.
  • Catwoman is another character known for making a primitive weapon - a bullwhip - awesome.

Film

  • Black Hawk Down: Two Delta Force snipers kill dozens of attacking Somalis while defending a crashed helicopter with nothing but small arms. No artillery, machine guns, or gunships, just superior training and professionalism against a Zerg Rush. The two snipers were eventually overrun and killed, but they successfully saved the helicopter pilot they were defending, and received the Medal of Honor for their actions.
  • The Bourne Series was intended to be the Simple Yet Awesome counterpart to the Awesome Yet Impractical James Bond series. No crazy gadgets or tricked out vehicles for Mr. Bourne, just a cool head and some serious training.
  • Possibly in a reaction to The Bourne Series, James Bond film Casino Royale seriously tones down the gadgetry and over-the-top save the world plots in favor of a more realistic, "down to earth" tone.
  • Batman Begins and The Dark Knight do the same thing with the Batman franchise, by reinventing the source material as gritty and practical instead of campy and ridiculous.
  • Ash in Evil Dead 2 has to figure out how to start his chainsaw when he's got a boomstick in his left hand and a chainsaw in place of his right. So he adds two little protruding bits of scrap metal to his harness, which allows him to pull the ripcord quickly, easily, and badassly.
  • Near the beginning of Taken, Liam Neeson's character has to catch a mook. In Paris, no less. Surely there will be a free-running scene! But no, he simply climbs into the mook's abandoned car and runs him down. He later acquires two handguns, but instead of using Guns Akimbo, he tucks one into his belt and doesn't draw it until he's exhausted the other's ammo. Most of the movie ends up being Liam Neeson's ex-CIA character subverting standard action movie tropes with much more practical approaches. It's awesome anyway.
  • Johnny English Reborn when chasing down an highly athletic Chinese thug, Johnny uses practical means to chase him, the thug jumps up a fence Johnny opens the gate, the thug athletic jumps over some obstacles Johnny uses a ladder, and so on....

Literature

  • Predating the Bourne movies by several decades, John Buchan's Gentleman Adventurer Richard Hannay is an extremely competent spy who relies upon very practical strategies. For instance, he is a Master of Disguise, which he accomplishes through altering his mannerisms more so than his appearance.
  • Many hitmen in Tony Hillerman's novels fit this trope—they accomplish cool things by meticulous planning and step-by-step execution (no pun intended).
  • The Dresden Files is fond of this.
    • How do you deal with a Native American Eldritch Abomination that eats magic and is practically immune to everything you throw at it? Opt for the Nuclear Option.
    • How do you kill a wizard, which can usually manage to cast a revenge-curse before they die even if you manage to mortally wound them? With no warning, via sniper rifle, at sufficient range for the bullet to arrive before the sound of the gun.
    • Firearms are used extensively against supernatural horrors, notably when Marcone led a squad of mercenaries into a counsel of vampires by way of the Nevernever.

Live-Action TV

  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured an episode that dealt with an ancient demon described as "cannot be killed by any weapon forged". It was eventually realized that this was descriptive, not prescriptive, and weapon technology had come a long way since it first appeared. They blew it up with a rocket launcher.

The Judge: What's that do?

  • Burn Notice runs on this. Most of the plans they use are designed to be as simple as possible to execute while completely blowing their target's mind.
  • The Stargate Verse uses this extensively.
    • Stargate SG-1 explains the difference between an alien staff weapon and a P-90 in the page quote.
    • One of the most important things they're trying to do in the show is keep Bad Things from getting to Earth through the Stargate. The primary way they do this? Keeping the door closed. Which causes anything trying to get through to disintegrate.
    • Stargate: Continuum features a type of stargate wormhole that allows time travel by routing through a certain, extremely rare type of solar flare. The obvious solution is to invent some way to artificially induce one, right? Nope! Just use a deep space observatory to watch the hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy and wait for one to oblige you.
  • Robot Wars had a huge amount of this. In particular, Chaos 2, which had a simple pneumatic flipper, but claimed the UK title twice in a row.
    • The srimec, or self-righting mechanism. It can both flip your opponent over, making him unable to move, and flip you back over if he does it to you.

Tabletop Games

  • Pokémon TCG: Base set pokemon Blastoise is very good (with an ability letting it break one of the basic rules of the game by playing more than one energy card per turn), but is usually overshadowed by much more popular Charizard.
    • It should be noted that Charizard only foreshadows Blastoise in the minds of people who never played in early tournaments (in which Blastoise-based "rain dance" decks were one of only two main viable archetypes).
  • Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition has "save or die" spells, which (instead of dealing damage directly like Fireball or Lightning Bolt) usually give the enemy huge penalties that lets you kill them in other ways. Prominent examples include Grease (a low-level spell that makes the floor slippery, making it harder for the enemy to move or dodge, and may make them fall over entirely) and Glitterdust (which blinds everything in an area by covering it in glowing golden dust).
  • Magic: The Gathering has its share of huge, flashy spells, but some of its most powerful and exciting cards have very simple, basic effects like "Draw three cards or force opponent to draw three cards", "Add three mana to your mana pool", "Take an extra turn after this one", or "Deal 3 damage to target creature or player." Even creatures with no abilities at all can be exciting and powerful.
  • Meta-example, The Call of Cthulhu RPG. Newbie players often think this is a "crunchy" game (as in, game with overly-complicated rules) but in truth, the rule system is actually very simple. Still, the game has been popular since 1981 (having helped make Lovecraft himself popular to folks who grew up in the 80s) and released its 7th edition (still with pretty simple rules) in 2016, so it must be doing something right.

Video Games

  • Mirror's Edge: Everything you can do in the game can be done in real life, albeit with a lot of practice and a lot more pain. Yes, even that three story jump you just did in a cutscene.
  • The SMG in Just Cause 2 is a nice example. It's fairly effective, and, though you can't order it right away, ammo is plentiful, between enemies who use it, and the crate containing one given to you at the start of most faction missions. In addition, any given respawn point (faction HQ) probably contains one for the taking.
  • The Iroquois Light Cannon in Age of Empires III. It can't be built until the Industrial Age, and doesn't do as much damage as any other cannon in the game, but is long-ranged and has enough bonus damage modifiers to fill the roles of three European cannon units at once, and has an incredible level of mobility. It's also slightly cheaper, and (with Siege Discipline) takes up relatively little population.
  • Team Fortress 2: The Spy's main weapon is a simple Butterfly Knife. It's the weakest melee weapon...unless you hit them in the back, resulting in an instant kill. This knife has been the bane of players everywhere since the beginning of Team Fortress 2.
  • The Godfather game: You can get through the whole game just using Boom! Headshot! to One-Hit Kill.
  • In Kingdom of Loathing, most classes have special skills like the ability to drown your foe in sauce or dance battle them until they are rendered harmless. Turtle Tamers get the ability to headbutt, knee, and whack them with their shield. Oh, and, they will always hit, the second delevels, and the third stuns, which makes for a very easy fight for as long as your MP keeps up.
  • The Grand Theft Auto series is full of this sort of thing. Someone running from you? Create a roadblock of stolen cars. Need to avoid a swarm of heavily-armed enemies? Drive a car up to a wall and climb on top to hop over.
  • Tetris. Adaptations of this game since its debut in 1984 upgrade the graphics and sometimes the music, but virtually nothing regarding the gameplay, simply because it doesn't need to change, and it's still enjoyable close to forty years later.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game is often called one of the best licensed games and one of the best side-scrollers of all time. Even though gameplay-wise, each Turtle really only has three attacks, no real combos, and there's little difference between them. It is simplicity at its finest.
  • Helltaker is an indy freeware Puzzle Game without much of a plot (the lady's man protagonist going into Hell to "collect" a harem of hot demon gals) with simple game mechanics which could be completed in about an hour. Despite this, it has become a Cult Classic with a webcomic adaptation.

Web Original

  • From SCP Foundation, SCP-173. The actual article is rather short (four paragraphs), not all-too original (a statue that kills you if you don't watch it constantly) but it is the highest rated and most viewed SCP for the simple reason that it was the first, which got the site started.

Western Animation

  • The first episode about Clay from Xiaolin Showdown is centred around this trope. He holds the record for completing the obstacle course by turning around and getting the objective, seeing no point in going though the traps as long as he got the objective. Later he beats Jack Spicer in catching a bird by filling his hat with seeds and getting the birs to land unlike Jack who got beaten and bruised by chasing the bird.
  • Similar to the Comic Books example above, Batman is able to take down another incarnation of the Injustice League by making a donation in the Ultrahumanite's name to the villain's favorite public radio station.
  • The theme song for Inspector Gadget. The lyrics have a grand total of four different words in them, but it's one of the most recognizable in 80s cartoons.

Real Life

  • The humble crossbow, in use for centuries, can put an arrow through your chest at the pull of a trigger.
    • And a regular bow, though taking more skill to use well, is even simpler.
  • Simple Yet Awesome solutions are the dream of every mathematician and computer scientist ever. So much so that they describe these solutions as beautiful or elegant.
  • The Beautiful Game. All that is required to play is two teams and a small round ball, and the rules are also easy to learn: don't use your arms (unless you’re the goalie), and kick the ball into the net. Even in the professional levels where you need much more than that, the rules and equipment required are simpler compared to most other sports. It’s relative simplicity has helped made it the world’s most popular sport—so much, that its biggest event, The World Cup, is THE biggest event in the world.
  • The Browning M2, as pictured. Designed by the famously prolific gun designer John Browning back in 1918, the "Ma Deuce" remains the quintessential and most prolific heavy machine gun in the world, still used even today by modern armies. Its mountings have evolved over time, but the core weapon itself remains largely the same as when Browning designed it.
  • The Ak-47 and its counterpart the M-16 are both the most ubiquitous guns in the world, and everyone with an army uses them at all times.
  • During the Sengoku era Japan solved the problem with using firearms in damp weather, which had impaired them since their creation, by simply putting a waterproof box around them.
  • To some, Minimalism, less in detail, more on space.
  • Pizza chains like Domino's and Pizza Hut never seem to tire of coming up with new ideas for specialty pizzas, but it seems the favorite will always be simple pepperoni.
  • Peanut butter and jelly. Ham and cheese. BLT. The simpler a sandwich is, the more awesome it is.
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