Achievements In Ignorance / Anime & Manga

• Aho Girl: Akuru likes to spend his time playing Concentration by himself. Yoshiko and Sayaka insist on coming over to his house to play the game too one time, and dimwitted Yoshiko manages to match card pair after card pair through sheer dumb luck. Akuru, who sees the game as a way of improving focus and memory, is annoyed at this.
• In All Around Type-Moon, Rin Tohsaka, while learning to use a computer, makes a mistake and summons the player Saber from Fate/EXTRA. Let's reiterate: Rin summoned a Servant from an alternate future, an act of the Second True Magic, simply by being Hopeless with Tech. And at the end of the chapter, she manages to summon the game's other servants.
• Bleach
  • Ichigo is rather prone to this, as he's naturally incredibly strong, but is very inexperienced and has no idea how his powers are supposed to work. In the very first chapter, he manages to give Rukia a few nasty surprises by being able to break her kido and absorb almost all of her power, using just his unfocused natural reiatsu and ignorance about how most people can't just free themselves from kido bindings or overpower a shinigami's own reiatsu using theirs.
  • Kenpachi manages to outshine Ichigo by managing to become a captain without even managing to unlock Shikai, which is the basic Zanpakuto power that's usually required for even the least of seated officers, and being the only named Shinigami to not know his Zanpakuto's name. Even Ichigo learned Shikai prior to challenging the Gotei 13 (though due to his own inexperience, he can't turn it off). When he finally does learn Shikai in the final arc, we find out that he's also managed to manifest his Zanpakuto spirit — the pre-requisite for Bankai and something most Shinigami spend at least a decade trying. He did this before becoming a Shinigami, and without realizing that the entity was a Zanpakuto spirit. He instead adopted her, named her Yachiru Kusajishi (her real name is Nozarashi), and made her his lieutenant.
• In Cahe Detective Club, Nana Mizuha wins an "All you can eat" contest with this. The sad thing is, she wasn't even trying and was taking her time, to the ire of her Unknown Rival Yurika Minamigawara.
• Carnival Phantasm: When Illya sends Berserker out on an errand to buy batteries, he spends all day searching, and accidentally defeats the other Servants and wins the Holy Grail War in the process. Illya only realizes this when the Holy Grail he brings back instead of batteries grants her wish for batteries.
• In Chainsaw Man, Asa's primary ability is that if she perceives herself as "owning" something, she can turn it into a controllable weapon. However, she's also rather naive and ignorant due to a poor upbringing, which means her understanding of how much things cost is highly suspect. This means that she can declare she's buying something for far less than it's worth (for instance, buying an entire aquarium for one million yen, or roughly 10,000 dollars), and succeed because she doesn't know how much it actually costs.
• According to the light novels this is what happened when Suzaku first piloted the Lancelot in Code Geass. As he's just an "Eleven" he's not supposed to pilot Knightmares and his only experience came from a time Britannian military put a bunch of fresh recruits into the Knightmare equivalent of a Cockpit Procedures Trainer in order to gather some unspecified raw data for reference. This trope kicked in with the help of his Charles Atlas Superpower, turning the Lancelot into the threat against the resistance in the first season and remaining a great threat even in R2.
• In Delicious in Dungeon, one of the original ten golem cores had been lost due to Senshi dropping it down a drain when washing it. The core eventually reached the sixth floor and once it froze over accidentally created an ice golem.
• In Dog Days, everyone is under the impression that the hero summoning spell that brought Cinque to Flognard is "one way"; that is, when Cinque returns to Earth, he'll lose all memories of his adventures and will never be able to come back. After he's gone home, Ricotta does some research and discovers a sort of loophole in the spell that will allow Cinque to regain his memories and to return some day — and he just happened to have performed every single requirement of that loophole in the process of saying his goodbyes to his new friends. Granted, the conditions aren't amazingly stringent^note The Hero has to give gifts to three different people (preferably from his homeland, but not required) as well as giving a written promise to return to the summoner, but he still managed to get them exactly right without realizing it.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Dragon Ball:
    • During Goku's first onscreen transformation into a Great Ape, his friends had no idea what to do to stop his rampage. Recalling how Goku would lose strength whenever someone grabbed his tail, Yamcha and Puar cut it off in hopes that it would at least make him pass out in pain. It ends up causing him to revert back all together.
    • Goku trained for the 22nd World Martial Arts Tournament by running around the world without using the Flying Nimbus cloud on account of advice from Master Roshi. When asked how he got to the tournament, he said he swam from Yahhoy, which turned out to be on the other side of the world from the tournament.
    • Cell's reaction to fully regenerating after blowing himself up indicates that not even he expected he would survive such a technique, as he seems genuinely surprised by it.
    • Super Buu manages to tear a hole in space-time to escape the Hyperbolic Time Chamber simply by screaming out of frustration from not having any candy. Similarly, his reaction to the hole forming suggests that he didn't know he could do this.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods: The God of Destruction, Lord Beerus, comes to Goku and friends looking for the "Super Saiyan God". According to a prophetic dream, this person will become Beerus' rival. Goku tries to fight Beerus when they first meet, but Goku's strongest form is beaten by a flick to the forehead and a chop to the neck. We learn that the Super Saiyan God is a form a Saiyan can assume with some help from 5 other pure-hearted saiyans. Goku transforms and finds he can now stand up to Beerus, but is disappointed that he got this power from his friends and not from his own training. That is, until Beerus points out that halfway through the fight the transformation wore off, but Goku continued fighting just fine anyway, having acclimated to the use of divine energy.
  • Dragon Ball Super: When Goku Black figures out that Vegeta used anger to power up, he tries the same thing. He turns his Laser Blade into a scythe capable of launching a Sword Beam that can rend a slash in spacetime which he could use to summon clones. An incredulous Vegeta asks him what he just did, and Black responds with, "I have no idea," and muses that the level of power he just achieved is now beyond even his comprehension.
• In Dr. STONE, during the America story arc, Arc Villain Dr. Xeno sends an army of soldiers armed with machine guns and grenades to fight against the comparatively primitive fighters of the Kingdom of Science. But since some of those on the Kingdom of Science's side have never seen advanced weapons like these before, they fail to recognize just how dangerous they are, so they're not intimidated into surrendering as Xeno expected. This lets them fight off these heavily-armed soldiers using only spears.
• In Earwig and the Witch, Erica's first spell is a complicated concoction that makes her and Thomas immune to other witch's magic. Despite having no formal training, being a first attempt and Thomas forgetting most of the words (replacing them with swears he learned), the spell works, rendering Bella's worm-spell ineffectual. The second spell is one that gives Bella extra hands and she managed to pull that off too.
• In Farming Life In Another World, the protagonist Machio Hiraku manages to accomplish a great deal of impossible feats by being totally ignorant of the world he's been reincarnated in and the many blessings that a perpetual screw-up of a God gave him, such as a copy of a divine spear that can also transform into farming equipment. To list some: he manages to successfully make a farming settlement in the middle of the Forest of Death, tame a breeding pair of the highly intelligent and dangerous Inferno Wolves, and force a Demon King into giving his growing settlement protection at 10% tax rate than the going rate of 50-60%, all because he had no idea how anything in this world was supposed to work or what he was dealing with.
• In Fairy Tail, Natsu grabs Virgo just as Duke Everlue summons her, resulting in him getting dragged with her to the Celestial Spirit World and then to Everlue's location. Shocked, Lucy asks Natsu how he's still alive, as the Celestial Spirit World's atmosphere has no oxygen so only spirits like Virgo can survive in it. Natsu says he hadn't noticed. Then again, he was only there for a few seconds at most. It's most likely because Natsu is a demon.
• Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA:
  • Flight is an advanced magical skill that requires complex calculations to perform. Illya shocks the others by casually doing it just because she watches a lot of anime and thinks magical girls are supposed to be able to fly. Miyu, on the other hand, inverts this — she cannot fly because she thinks it's impossible, despite Illya doing it right in front of her. When Illya tries showing Miyu an anime depicting a flying magical girl, Miyu just points out all the scientific reasons why it shouldn't work.
  • Later, when Illya's mind is implanted in a plush doll, she is able to make the doll move and speak by intentionally invoking this reasoning.
• Gundam:
  • In Gundam Build Fighters, when China tries her hand and building a Gunpla and finds herself in a Gunpla battle, she defeats her main rival due to the fact she stuffed her Gunpla, Bearguy III, with cotton, helping to absorb the shock of an otherwise fatal attack. She didn't do this as a deliberate strategy, she did it to adhere to Bearguy's backstory of being a stuffed animal turned into a robot.
  • Similarly, the instruction papers for Gundam Build Divers's Momokapool Gunpla reveal that Momoka's desire to turn a Kapool into a penguin-themed Gunpla lead to the suit being a lot more stronger and durable. She didn't care much for a "strong" Gunpla, she just wanted a cute Gunpla.
• At the very beginning of Hajime no Ippo, Takamura challenges Ippo to catch a certain number of leaves falling from a tree. He expects Ippo to use both hands. Except he doesn't tell Ippo that. Ippo works his ass off to achieve the feat the same it was demonstrated by Takamura: one-handed.
• Toya Akira from Hikaru no Go is forced to play a series of blind go games while cleaning a storage room. He succeeds against the more experienced players but cannot follow the logic of the novice because he has no real strategy.
• I Got My Wish and Reincarnated as the Villainess (Last Boss)!: According to God, in Elizabeth's past life she has been killing grim reapers left and right all her life without realizing it, while being too frail to leave the bed for her entire life, causing God to describe her as an Sickly Prodigy. This carries over to her present life: without even realizing she is doing it, she defeats the wraiths and reapers drawn to her dark magic while doing radio exercises, allowing her to level up to that of a soldier at the age of six.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • In the non-canon light novel Jorge Joestar, one of the stories takes place after the universe was reset by the Stand Made in Heaven thirty-six times. Three characters from the original universe have survived through all these resets: Giorno Giovanna, whose Gold Experience Requiem allows him to No-Sell any attack, including the end of the universe, Ultimate Kars, who was on Mars at that point, which was not affected, and... Rohan Kishibe, who managed to No-Sell thirty-six separate Class X-4 Apocalypses simply by being too preoccupied with writing his manga to acknowledge the end of all things. Apparently, if other books of this author, which are noticeably linked to each other, are to be acknowledged, it's more of a case of Clap Your Hands If You Believe, since consciousness-induced spatiotemporal manipulation was a major plot point in the "Disco Detective Wednesday".
  • Vanilla Ice from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, when stabbed through the throat multiple times and having his head twisted around 180 degrees, claims he 'doesn't have time to die' and keeps on fighting as if he weren't injured at all. In reality, Dio has made him a vampire, though Ice himself doesn't realize this and continues to believe he's resisting death through pure willpower until Polnareff lures him into a sunbeam and he begins to disintegrate.
• Komi Can't Communicate: At a local festival Komi wins the top prize at a tricked rope-pulling game stall, filled to the brim with false leads and mind games... By simply not thinking about anything and choosing a random string.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1999), Mido manages to indicate that Queen Gohma's eye is her weak point by randomly throwing a rock into it in a state of absolute fear and desperation.
• My Hero Academia:
  • In the My Hero Academia: Two Heroes movie, the young heroes attend a party on the lower levels of a 200-story tall tower with state-of-the-art security. Once both the party and the security system is hijacked by terrorists, they have to race to the top floor using the stairs, since the lifts are blocked by the system. On the 80th floor, they end up cornered by two of the terrorists. All seems lost, until Bakugo, Kirishima and Todoroki step in and help hold the villains back. How did they manage to get there right on the nick of time? Up to that point, they were unaware of the terrorist attack: they ran late to the party, and got so hopelessly lost on the tower that they somehow ended up almost halfway up the tower ahead of the team that actually wanted to go up.
  • At the end of the Paranormal Liberation War Arc, it is revealed that One for All is a Deadly Upgrade for anyone that has a Quirk, as it overwhelms their bodies and makes them age faster than normal. This was something that no one knew about until All Might began to research the former Torchbearers, as most of them died fighting All for One before it became an issue. Both Nana Shimura and All Might ended up choosing precisely the one type of person that could wield One for All without suffering from the backlash.
  • All Might wielded One for All for forty years before passing it to Izuku, which allowed him to imbue the Quirk with a part of his own consciousness - one that was able to relay his research on One for All to the other wielders, allowing them to put together critical information on One for All's true nature.
• Naruto:
  • The first part of the Chunin Exam is designed to test students' sneaking and information gathering skills. The test accomplishes this by being ridiculously hard so that the students will need to cheat to get the correct answers. They are penalized for being caught cheating, and lose points for any wrong answer. The expectation is that the students will realize that they need to cheat and not get caught. All of Team 7 passes, but only Sasuke figures out the intent of the test. Sakura works out the answers by hand, and Naruto leaves his test completely blank; neither gets caught cheating (and since he didn't leave any answers at all, none of them were wrong), so they pass. The proctor of the exam is rather amused when he sees Naruto's exam paper.
  • To a lesser extent, Sasuke never seemed to realize that his teammates are unable to cheat and might need him to pass answers like Kankuro, Tenten, or Ino were able to do.
  • In Boruto, the academy's graduation exam includes a similar test, with Shino all but coming right out and telling his students that they should cheat. Several of the students pass the written exam by stealing a copy of the test in advance from the teachers' lounge and memorizing the answers. But since Boruto barely even pays attention in class, he treated it like a normal written test and just answered the questions correctly on his own.
• One Piece is full of this:
  • In the cover art serial, "Wapol's Omnivorous Rampage", Wapol, having been deposed and now a hobo, uses his Devil Fruit power to eat anything and spit whatever he ate all mixed up to create some toys. A scientist examines one toy and discovers a new alloy. So, by just messing around with his powers, Wapol invented a brand new type of metal that would revolutionize technological progress!
  • In "Gedatsu's Accidental Blue-Sea Life", Gedatsu is so absent-minded that he forgets about gravity itself and stands on a wall.
  • In "Eneru's Great Space Mission", Eneru is on the moon (itself a feat, as his "ship" flew by propellers which should not be capable of reaching outer space) blasting stuff with his lightning. He comes across an ancient city, strikes this, and ends up jump-starting the ancient technology by being Trigger-Happy.
  • Papaggu the starfish can act and talk like a person. How? He thought he was human and by the time he realized he wasn't, he was already in the swing of things. Even Luffy didn't understand how that worked.
  • A rather extreme example regarding how Luffy was declared the "Fifth Emperor" of the Sea and saw his bounty tripled in the aftermath of the Totto Land arc. Their entry into Big Mom's territory, the country of Totto Land, was initially supposed to be a discreet rescue mission for Sanji. Circumstances caused the situation to escalate, which eventually led to the Straw Hats allying with Capone "Gang" Bege in an assassination attempt on Big Mom because Sanji refused to abandon his biological family to their fates. The ensuing chaos that resulted from the Big Mom Pirates chasing them down was then sensationalized by "Big News" Morgans. He took a clusterfuck of a secret rescue operation and subsequent collateral damage as a deliberate assassination attempt and a full-on raid on Big Mom's territory and, in his article on the event, declared Luffy to be the "Fifth Emperor" of the Sea. Essentially, the Straw Hats caused their reputations to skyrocket, to the point of becoming ranked among the most powerful pirate crews in the world, by complete accident, without ever stopping to realize the magnitude of the events that had just transpired because they were in crisis mode or about to die the entire time.
  • Kin'emon ends up at the brunt of this during Wano when Denjiro compliments his cunning strategy, knowing that there was a traitor in his midst and purposely told him the wrong location to meet for the invasion of Onigashima based on the final message of the deceased Yasuie, which had a subtle clue indicating the true meeting point. Except Kin'emon didn't know there was a traitor, and he legitimately misinterpreted the message.
  • The pirate Bartolomeo somehow managed to get to the New World without a navigator on his ship. Even Idiot Hero Luffy wasn't that moronic. It is inconceivable how Bartolomeo got past his first island, let alone survive in the New World.
  • Luffy ends up doing this with his own powers. It turns out that his Devil Fruit is actually called the Human-Human Fruit Model: Nika, having been renamed and reclassified as the Gum-Gum Fruit by the World Government so people would think it was nothing special. Upon accidentally eating it, however, Luffy makes the most of the Fruit by continuing to find more creative and inventive uses for it, which actually turns out to be the core of its abilities. In other words, rather than turning a low-tier ability into a dangerous weapon, by being himself, Luffy has inadvertently brought out the true potential of a forgotten power.
• In One-Punch Man, Saitama 100% honestly believes that his absolutely insane levels of strength, speed, and durability came from sticking to a daily training regimen of 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, and 10 kilometers of running for three years straight. When his "student" Genos points out that that's just mundane strength training (and not even a very difficult level of it, either) and demands to know what his real secret is, Saitama responds "Look, you might not believe me, but that's really all I did." The series eventually suggests that Saitama broke some kind of internal "limiter" during those three years, which is the real answer for his abilities (and his Premature Baldness).
• The Team Rocket trio of the Pokémon: The Series inevitably accomplish this. By the end of their Sinnoh run, they have become such washouts within the organisation that Giovanni has completely forgotten who they are, meaning he starts believing their exaggerated claims of success and promoting them to bigger roles. The one improvement in the position they've made in their employment as a whole is by failing for long enough.
• The Quintessential Quintuplets: Male lead Fuutarou Uesugi has four out of the five quintuplets falling for him, but only three of them actively compete for him and try to win his affection. The one he ends up choosing? Yotsuba, who unlike Ichika, Nino, and Miku, who put in effort to try and appeal to him in different ways, does nothing of the sort. All she does is treating him nicely and be supportive of him, but actively tries to not get too close, as she sees herself as unworthy of pursuing him romantically, despite having been the one who has loved him for the longest time. Hell, she even sabotages her own chances so as to give his sisters a chance, and when the time comes for him to reveal his choice, she's so certain he won't choose her that she leaves before the designated time, and when she finds out she is his choice, she's so shocked she ends up running away in shame.
• The Ride-On King: Purchinov deflecting Edu's hammer into a random direction accidentally kills the Dungeon Core in a completely different room, which lets them leave.
• The Savior's Book Café Story in Another World:
  • Tsukina's literal god-given magical abilities makes her able to cast high-tier healing and defensive magics, using it for things like making restorative food and keeping her books from being damaged. That said, her age and the effort such magic would take makes her level of skill and cavalier use of them very noticeable.
  • The First Savior spends zero time learning magic and all she wished from "God" was that he make her prettier. Since all Saviors come with an unlimited pool of mana, this came with the added side-effect of making her a Charm Person, unconsciously bewitching the Prince of Othel and letting her get away with pretty much anything. Not only that, but the longer she goes without actually using her mana, the more that mana builds up, making her a ticking time-bomb of magic that could destroy an entire country if set-off.
• Shaman King:
  • This trope is used to explain why it is that a bunch of kids are being sent to stop the reincarnated antagonist who has spent nearly a thousand years training in hell to become more powerful and recently is on the verge of merging with God/The Great Spirit. Essentially, the adults have hit the barrier where they begin to realize there are limitations. The kids are too young/stupid to realize there are limitations yet.
  • Harsher in Hindsight strikes in the sequel manga, the cast has grown and DOES realize their limitation, unable to change the world in the slightest, which means Hao wins not only the tournament but also the bet. Rosseau was wrong?
• In Super Dimension Fortress Macross/Robotech, this was the trope that enabled the crew of the SDF-1 to perform an extremely low altitude space-fold jump, which the enemy Zentraedi thought was impossible. The humans still barely understood a portion of the alien ship's capabilities and simply didn't know that using that system so close to a planet was considered an insane move. As it is, the human's seriously overshot their intended destination of the moon to just beyond Pluto and the stunned Zentraedi are left wondering if these supposed space warfare amateurs are actually tactical geniuses. The humans also irreparably banjaxed the space-fold drive -by which we mean to say they made it vanish in a Puff of Logic- but the Zentraedi had no way to know that. This would only be the first of many Indy Ploy or outright accidents that ended up confusing and impressing the Zentraedi.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann:
  • The very first combining happens because Kamina, in his ignorance and insanity, figures that just slamming two Gunmen together will combine them. Lucky for him, he used one made for this task, although it looks at first like that he instead just almost impaled himself.
  • The whole series kind of goes on with this. At one point Team Dai-Gurren completes a difficult operation—later, their supercomputer reveals the odds of their victory had been computed beforehand but hadn't told them because the result showed that success was a complete impossibility.
    "The chance of success for this mission was 0%, but I can see theoretical calculations don't mean anything to you people."
  • Interestingly, this indicates that the supercomputer also invoked this trope - by all accounts, it should have "exploded" due to seeing its impossible calculation mistake, yet it decided to ignore the mistake and continue running, simply because it knows the humans are also ignoring that 0% anyway.

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