This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Hit-and-Run:
Pulled this– "* Subverted cleverly in the third Night Watch book. The protagonist Anton discovers that the vampire Kostya has used a magical book capable of turning people into Others or increasing the power of Others to make himself the most powerful vampire ever, and is planning to teleport into orbit in order to turn the entire human population into Others. When he confronts Kostya over this, he demonstrates the power of the book and inadvertently causes Anton's power to increase drastically. Just before Kostya is about to teleport, Anton is being filled with power by the heads of the Night Watch, Day Watch and Inquisition, who all recommend powerful attack spells to use. Instead, Anton devotes all of the energy to a simple shield spell, so that Kostya will be unable to read his mind and hear his realization that Kostya's calculations will inevitably cause him to fall short of the space station he is aiming for, and that the vacuum of space will completely drain him of energy, leaving him stranded to eventually burn up on reentry. This about describes Anton in a nutshell, really. He always ends up doing something like that. The third book was incredibly poignant about it, considering Kostya used to be his friend. Plus the line itself: "We are all Absolute Zeros."
Exactly. It's not a subversion or an example, just a character doing something unexpected. (Possibly the troper misunderstood this trope to mean simply the use of force?)
Claire89: From the page: "Two words. Popeye. Spinach." What? This is definitely an example of someone being too brief, against the advice of How To Write An Example.
Seven Seals: You know, before this trope mentioned it, I never even considered Hawkgirl as a candidate for What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?, but when you think about it, the ability to fly and hit things really hard with a mace does pale in comparison to the powers of the rest. I disagree that she didn't fall prey to this because she had good dialogue, though. She didn't fall prey to this because she was badass. Point in case: her battle cry (typically some variation of "RAAAAAUGH!"). OK, I guess that's technically dialogue.
Tanto: The fact that her mace was made out of Green Rocks and could do whatever the writers needed to it do didn't hurt either.
Seven Seals: Apart from being electrified and "anti-magical" in a general sense, I don't recall it being overused that way. The "Nth metal" in the comics is a much more egregious offender, being used to explain just about everything unusual about the Hawk characters.
Tanto: I remember she used it as a defibrilator in the Wild Cards episode.
Seven Seals: ...OK, that's pretty far out there; probably some writer going "hey, wasn't her mace, like, electrified?" Beats hooking up jumper cables to someone's chest, I guess.
Kilyle: Say, does Captain Planet count, in that they summoned him every episode to deal with the Big Bad? (Not having watched the show much, I have no facts to go on.)
Cassius335: I can't help but notice that none of the examples actually involve a hammer.
Seth: That's because you never read Maslow. It comes from a saying of his that boils down to 'If you only have one ability/Skill you begin to see it as a soloution to everything'. His metaphor for that is in the main body "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail".
Seth: There's always Groo. Aside from being the godchild of Fate herself, which protects him from all manner of schemes both vengeful and proactively self-defensive, he has... swords. And lots of skill with swords. Not that he's beneath taking an errand or two, but he usually messes that up, or else does the errand far too late, or talks about it to the wrong person. And then a couple armies storm the village and he kills everybody with his swords. Swords rule!
What series is this from?
Andyroid: The comic book Groo the Wanderer, by Sergio Aragones.
Cosmetor: Thor is not a subversion, merely a non-example.
Fast Eddie: Other than having the word 'hammer' in it, this quote has nothing to do with the trope...
- "Planning doesn't matter. Strategy doesn't matter. Only two things matter: Force, in as great a concentration as you can manage, and style. In any battle, there's always a level of force against which no tactics can succeed. You can have your finely crafted watch — give me a sledgehammer to the face any day."— Xykon, Order Of The Stick — Start of Darkness
Kilyle: I'd like to recommend this quote, however, from The Nostalgia Critic's review of Godzilla:
- Just blow shit up! It's all we know how to do!
