Weak but Skilled/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: They're not very strong...but they know how to use what they've got.

  • Straight: Alice is a frail warrior with weak attacks, but with some combination of training and intelligence, she is as effective as the heavy bruisers.
  • Exaggerated: Alice is tiny and looks like she shouldn't be fighting at all - but she's so skilled that she wallops deities with ease.
  • Justified: Alice knows she's not very strong, so she studies and trains to maximize the efficiency of her attacks.
  • Inverted: Unskilled but Strong
  • Subverted: Alice reveals that she prefers to get by on her smarts, but when push comes to shove, she's packing some Super Strength.
    • Alice looks like this, but it turns out that her "skill" was actually a mean streak of luck that has gotten her Mistaken for Badass.
  • Double Subverted: That was her version of a Limit Break, and she can't access it regularly.
    • After realising what she's gotten herself into, she decides to train and get some real skills, since luck alone can't hold out forever.
  • Parodied: Alice is so weak she can't even lift her own weapon, and is so hilariously clumsy that her opponents fall down laughing... which means the judges grant her victory after victory since a full body takedown is a win.
  • Zig Zagged: She usually fights using smarts, but she can call on Super Strength...occasionally. But it happens often enough to where it's semi-reliable. She just fights smart the rest of the time.
  • Deconstructed: When Alice fights someone who has as much skill but is more powerful, she gets her arse kicked.
    • Sometimes the power gap is just too huge that no amount of skill and Combat Pragmatism can close the gap. A Muay Thai expert can't walk away from getting nuked or punch out a battleship after all.
  • Reconstructed: ... so Alice decides to learn how to be Crazy Prepared and pull a Batman Gambit so the strong and skilled opponents don't win (at least not in the long run).
  • Averted: She's a reasonable mix of skilled and strong.
  • Enforced: The setting has robots built in very specific power tiers, thinkers with frail bodies and fighters with limited processing ability. Since Alice-tron is a thinker model, she studies and trains to use her frail body in ways that a fighter model isn't adapted to.
  • Lampshaded: "Watch out for Alice. She may not look like much, but she knows how to hit you where it hurts."
  • Invoked: After getting outpaced by her teammates, Alice decides to study and train to keep pace.
  • Exploited: Bob, who is unskilled and weak, pretends to be Weak but Skilled as a bluff.
  • Defied: Alice keeps seeking out the Bigger Stick so she is never left wanting for power.
  • Discussed: "Alice is probably the most dangerous fighter in this tournament, since she's smart and skilled she can adapt to any opponent!"
  • Conversed: "This show's author must really hate the trope Hard Work Hardly Works, because Alice is beating up a bunch of those characters."

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