I Thought Everyone Could Do That: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|'''Haley''': Celia... Humans can't shoot energy out of our fingers.<br />

 

Someone has an unusual talent. The twist is, they don't ''know'' it's a talent; it comes so naturally to them that they just assume that everyone else can do it too.

== Anime & Manga ==

* Aisia from ''[[Da Capo]] Second Season'' starts off believing that the ability to use magic is so common that the school Asakura attends must be an academy for teaching magic. Obviously she is wrong.

** When the group needs to get across a deadly booby-trapped hallway, Goku and Krillin easily jump across. Goku says to Bulma it's her turn, and Bulma angrily yells that there's no way she can jump that far. Goku is surprised.

** Gohan tries ''so'' hard to blend in with normal high school students. Then he jumps thirty feet in the air while trying to play baseball like they do.

 

== Fan Works ==

 

 

** Until the middle of ''[[Harry Potter (Franchise)/Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets|Harry Potter]]'' (when he does it in front of an audience for the first time), Harry assumes that all wizards can [[Sssssnaketalk|talk to snakes]] -- in fact, he doesn't even realize he's speaking a different language when he does. In the sixth book, it takes him some time to understand than Morfin Gaunt is speaking [[Sssssnaketalk|Parseltongue]] in the [[Pensieve Flashback]], as he only hears it as perfect English.

** Not an innate ability, but when Harry is told the legend of the Deathly Hallows, {{spoiler|one of them is a mythical cloak which granted the wearer true invisibility and never lost its power... which Harry soon realizes is the cloak he'd had since his first year at Hogwarts, and had always assumed was an ordinary (if rare) magic cloak.}}

* In the ''[[Foundation]]'' series, the Mule briefly mentions that it took him a while to realize he could control people's emotions, and even longer to realize other people couldn't.

* [[Robert Heinlein]]'s ''[[Stranger in A Strange Land]]''. Valentine Michael Smith thinks that all humans have his mental powers of making objects hover in the air or disappear; he doesn't realize that the abilities taught to him by the Martians are not known on Earth.

** It's mentioned that Susan thought nothing of her ability to <s> walk through walls</s> make herself unnoticeable, and assumed for the longest time that ''everyone'' could do that. Even in her second appearance (by which time she knows her origin), she finds stopping time to be so easy that she wonders why ordinary people can't do it. This is partially justified, in that many of Susan's (and Death's) "supernatural" abilities really ''are'' much more straightforward than the way regular humans approach reality. For instance, it’s not that she can see things that aren’t real, it’s that everyone else can ''not'' see things that are.

** Tiffany Aching knows that being able to step out of your body and look at it from the outside isn't an ordinary thing for a human to do, but she's not sure if it's an ordinary thing for a ''witch'' to do. (It isn't.)

* Fitz's daughter Nettle in the ''Tawny Man'' trilogy is a DreamWeaver, but doesn't realize that this is anything special. She doesn't understand why other people have nightmares, because why would anyone want to stay in a dream they didn't like?

* Happens all the time in the setting of [[Orson Scott Card]]'s ''[[Alvin Maker]]'' [[Alternate History]]. The narrator rambles in the fourth book:

{{quote| Like a lot of folks, he has a knack and doesn't even know it because that's the way knacks work: it just feels as natural as can be to the person who's got it, as easy as breathing, so you don't think ''that'' could possibly be your unusual power because heck, that's ''easy''. You don't know it's a knack till other people around you get all astonished about it or upset or excited or whatever feelings your knacks seems to provoke in folks. Then you go, "Boy howdy, other's folks can't ''do'' this! I got me a knack!" and from then on there's no putting up with you till you finally settle down and get back to normal life and stop bragging about how you can do this fool thing that you used to never be excited about back when you still had sense.}}

* Two-for-one example in [[The Riftwar Cycle]]: William and Gamina both know that William can communicate telepathically with animals. But he doesn't realize that this is unusual, and she doesn't realize that [[Adults Are Useless|none of the adults know about it]].

 

== Live Action TV ==

* In a sketch on ''[[Mad TV]]'', recurring character Rusty Miller, a geeky college student, is having a trivia contest with two girls, and infuriating them by getting every question right. Except the last question, which asks the average length of a penis. The girls get it right by answering six inches. Rusty protests that the machine is wrong, and the average is ten inches, then leaves the bar in disgust. The girls give each other a look, then rush out after him. [[Ho Yay|As do several guys]].

* Used to dramatic effect in ''[[Six Feet Under]]''. Brenda explains that when she was little, she read a report about the possibilities of a nuclear war breaking out. She explains that from that point on, every morning she woke up, she would feel thankful for being alive, yet also feel closer to nuclear apocalypse. When Nate asks how she could live like that, she says she thought that's how everybody else lived.

** In Sikozu's first appearance, she's rather surprised to discover that Crichton can't [[Wall Crawl|shift his centre of gravity]], having presumed that all the species she had associated with so far (Scarran, Grudek, Sebacean, Human) were able to do so. Unfortunately, she only finds this out while bandaging Crichton's mauled legs -- courtesy of the [[Monster of the Week]] Sikozu had easily escaped from.

** In another ''Farscape'' example (though this time more of "I Thought Everyone ''Couldn't'' Do That''), Crichton discovers that every member of Moya's crew has better eyesight than he does when he claims there's nothing written on a basin, and the others take turns reading the small warning text aloud.

"You can't do that?" }}

* ''[[Alphas]]'': Marcus Ayers' ability gives him enough [[Awesomeness By Analysis]] to create [[Disaster Dominoes]] on purpose and he's convinced that everyone else can do the same thing, thus believing that [[There Are No Coincidences]], which drives his paranoia.

 

 

== Video Games ==

 

 

== Web Comics ==

** Hey, it's not her fault she doesn't know what humans can do! [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0530.html Humans don't ''have'' an entry in the Monster Manual anymore]!

* For a while in ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'', Aylee keeps forgetting that earth creatures need things like sleep and oxygen to survive, and don't have quite her [http://www.sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/031118 ability to heal].

* In ''[[Girls in Space]]'', [[Alien Among Us|Zoe]] doesn't mention to her employment councilor that she's an [[Omniglot]], because she thought everyone on Earth spoke all Earth languages.

 

== Web Original ==