History InformedAbility / Literature

** ''Breaking Dawn'' also describes the Volturi as selfish tyrants who use their powers and flimsy excuses to justify killing vampires and having ones they find useful press-ganged into their service. When the Volturi actually show up to verify that [[spoiler:Renesmee]] is not a threat, they're generally quite reasonable and listen to the Cullens' side of the story, [[spoiler:ultimately leaving in peace when it turns out Renesmee can grow up without revealing the existence of vampires to the world]]. (There are some ulterior motives in this, in that [[spoiler:Aro only decides to leave after Alice shows him a vision of the results of a Cullen vs. Volturi battle, which involves Bella and Edward ripping his head off and setting him on fire. Howeve, this only happens in the film; in the book, no such vision happens.]]) Additionally, the laws the Volturi hold all vampires to are hardly unreasonable and mostly consist of "don't let humans find out about us" and "don't create murderous vampire children", laws which actually protect both vampires (safety from human-made advanced weaponry) and humans (safety from vampire empires where humans are cattle or slaves).

* ''Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse'':
** Thrawn in the Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse is a good example of ''why'' this happens. He's supposed to be a brilliant tactician, but most of those writing him aren't tactical experts, so they must either leave his abilities vague, show him outwitting the protagonist [[YouAreTooLate in nontactical ways,]] or give his opponents an IdiotBall. Later appearances rectify this. Even in his [[Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy original appearance]] it was a major plot point that his abilities were massively overblown in-universe: He ''was'' good, but looked much better simply because his predecessors had been complete jokes.

** Also in the Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse, the [[GeneralFailure ruefully incapable]] [[Literature/JediAcademyTrilogy Admiral Daala]] applies. Immediately after being spoon-fed her [[FreudianExcuse elaborate background story]] as Grand Moff Tarkin's ingenious secret protegé kept down by [[StayInTheKitchen sexism,]] she arbitrarily loses ''three quarters'' of her fleet in a series of glorious defeats before even really starting her campaign. Sucks to be a villain in a universe where ''everybody'' has ContractualImmortality, it seems. Karen Traviss does a decent job of making her more effective in the ''Literature/LegacyOfTheForce'' series - although she gets herself ''unanimously elected as the leader of the free galaxy'' - but add her previous incompetence to her doing ''nothing'' for about thirty years and the net effect makes it even worse. Ultimately, the novel ''Literature/DeathStar'' had [[{{Retcon}} her suffer some minor brain damage in a Rebel attack]] as a means to explain what happened to her vaunted military capability. Her profile in ''The Essential Guide to Warfare'' would clarify her vaunted tactical abilities as too invested in EasyLogistics and a WeHaveReserves mentality that might have flown in the heyday of the Empire, but in a post-Endor galaxy were wildly out of place.

-->'''Card:''' Here's a reason for making the character a musician -- I don't have to create his oh-so-brilliant work. Even Creator/AynRand, making Howard Roark an architect, had to describe his buildings, and alas, they are now very dated... With music, though, readers know that it can't really be recreated in fiction, merely referred to. But in a movie, the music has to exist. When I tell you in the story that people come from thousands of miles to hear Christian Haroldsen's nature-based synth music, or from dozens of miles to hear him improvise jazz on a honky-tonk piano, or learn his folksongs and are moved by them, you can believe it. In the movie, though, somebody has to compose that music, those songs; somebody has to perform it. And then you have to believe that people would respond that strongly to music that you have actually heard. If the music composed for the film is not utterly brilliant, will you believe the rest of the story? Will you care? Will the movie even work?

* In the ''Literature/BabysittersClub'' books, the reader is informed in every book that Claudia is a fantastic artist. This is something of a JustifiedTrope, however, since it's very difficult to show that in a literary format. Interestingly enough, spinoff series ''California Diaries'' actually had Amelia's drawings in the titular diaries, by Stieg Retlin. They're at about the quality of, well, a moderately popular artist on tumblr today.

* In Creator/RobertEHoward's "Literature/QueenOfTheBlackCoast", Belit and Literature/ConanTheBarbarian are said to form a BrainsAndBrawn -- but all the brain seen from Belit is deciding to go somewhere, and Conan does most of the thinking that is done. Actually this is typical of most Conan stories by Howard and was most probably an intentional subversion of common pulp tropes: while strength, tenacity, and ferocity are what Conan (and, more generally, the Cimmerians) are famed for and what he builds his reputation on, most of his actual success stems from cunning, trickery, and quickly taking advantage of strokes of good luck. There is a running, sly implication in many of the novels that the whole "barbarian" thing presented to the reader is an intentional front to lead his enemies to expect savage assaults in daylight when what's coming is more like a knife in the dark.

** ''Breaking Dawn'' also describes the Volturi as selfish tyrants who use their powers and flimsy excuses to justify killing vampires and having ones they find useful press-ganged into their service. When the Volturi actually show up to verify that [[spoiler:Renesmee]] is not a threat, they're generally quite reasonable and listen to the Cullens' side of the story, [[spoiler:ultimately leaving in peace when it turns out Renesmee can grow up without revealing the existence of vampires to the world]]. (There are some ulterior motives in this, in that [[spoiler:Aro only decides to leave after Alice shows him a vision of the results of a Cullen vs. Volturi battle, which involves Bella and Edward ripping his head off and setting him on fire.]]) Additionally, the laws the Volturi hold all vampires to are hardly unreasonable and mostly consist of "don't let humans find out about us" and "don't create murderous vampire children", laws which actually protect both vampires (safety from human-made advanced weaponry) and humans (safety from vampire empires where humans are cattle or slaves).