Cobra Kai / Tropes A to H

Main Page | A-H | I-R | S-Z

---

A

• The Ace: The series treats Mr. Miyagi as this posthumously, though it was pretty true before then. He is the only fighter in the entire franchise who has never lost a fight. He even beat Kreese, Silver, and Barnes three-on-one. Daniel lampshades this when he breaks a beer bottle with a chop while Johnny is holding it, mentioning that he learned the trick from Mr. Miyagi. Even Johnny has to concede that, while he didn't always get along with him, Mr. Miyagi was the best fighter in the franchise.
  Daniel LaRusso: Nobody was more badass than Mr. Miyagi.
  Johnny Lawrence: (Nods and gets back to training)
• Action Girl:
  • Daniel LaRusso has been training his daughter Samantha in karate since she was a little kid. He even had his own dojo inside the house. She's Still Got It and becomes her father's student again over the course of the show.
  • Aisha's rise as a Cobra Kai student — starting from knee-dropping Miguel on her first day of lessons — shows that she is an Action Girl as well.
  • Tory is a Dark Action Girl who makes her first appearance in Season 2, when she holds her own against the Cobra Kai star pupil Miguel on her first day.
  • Devon and Piper join the rosters of Eagle Fang and Cobra Kai, respectively, in Season 4, and prove themselves to be both capable and competitive.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • When Johnny makes fun of Cruz's huge mustache at Robby's house, his buddy Trey can't help chuckling a bit.
  • When the first match-up between Tory and Miguel starts to get a bit hot and heavy, Johnny somewhat acidly remarks that they "... can play 'hide the plantain' (referencing a discussion in season 1 between Johnny and Carmen about the difference between plantains and bananas) in their own time." This gets a chuckle from Miguel.
  • In Season 5, Louie spots Anoush at a night club when he previously declined the invitation to said outing as he had a date. When Louie learns that Anoush is dating his sister, Vanessa, Louie (understandably, knowing Anoush's history of dating women) freaks out and the two begin fighting. For all the trouble Louie causes, even Daniel and Amanda find this incident funny, considering Louie predicted that their nightclub outing will result in a "limo, drinks and some trouble".
• Adults Are Useless:
  • Part of the reason why Johnny, despite his insensitive methods and aggressive philosophy, attracts so many bullied high school kids is that their teachers, for all their efforts in educating students in microaggressions, are oblivious to the bullying they face, both online and face to face. It's even mentioned when Miguel's mother, after seeing his bruised face from Kyler, suggests that he go to the teachers for protection, Miguel says that would only make the matter worse.
  • Amanda and Daniel have shades of this trope as well, the former being a Stage Mom who worries more about the social status of Sam's friends than whether or not they are a good influence, while the latter is somewhat overprotective but is still too wrapped up in running his business and in his feud with Johnny to really give Sam the guidance that she needs. Not to mention they both let Anthony get away with everything under the sun.
  • Although they mess up with their own children, both Johnny and Daniel avert it with their students. Johnny brings much needed confidence to Miguel, Aisha, and Hawk, while Daniel teaches Robby focus and work ethic, helps Demetri overcome his insecurities, and gives Chris a path to be strong without having to be aggressive.
  • When Hawk's gang chases Demetri in the mall, they pass by a security guard who is on break, oblivious to what's happening around him.
  • Robby's mother prioritizes going out with men or getting drunk at bars than seeing to her son's wellbeing. Near the end of Season 2, she agrees to go to rehab and begins averting this trope.
  • In the Season 2 finale, after multiple fights break out, Demetri tries to get a teacher. The teacher doesn't even bother. That might've been justified given what Doug Rickenberger just did to the teacher who intervened seconds before, and is mentioned at the start of Season 3 to be the policy.
  • Season 3 goes through lengths to either justify or subvert this trope. The school gets called out for not having teachers available during the brawl, which was rebutted by laws not allowing them to intervene in school fights (sadly Truth in Television in some areas). Amanda realizes that she doesn't have nearly as much of a handle on the situation as she thought she did and starts meeting Daniel and Sam halfway. Johnny finds a much better middle ground with his methods.
  • Season 4 continues down this trend, but with a less sympathetic light compared to Season 3. Many of the adult characters mean well, but personal egos and personality flaws prevent them from being as helpful as they would like to be. It is averted in one case, however, with Amanda, who is able to help Tory finally start to come around by simply being there for her and consistently offering help and support, without bringing karate into the picture.
  • Season 5 dips in and out of this, as the adults gain much of the focus on the season. While Daniel still has a habit of making things worse, the show goes out of its way to show that it's less him and more Terry Silver being able to consistently push his Trauma Buttons. Otherwise, the adults are generally much more even-keeled than the past, Johnny especially, which allows a lot of conflicts to be solved and handled where they wouldn't have been previously.
• An Aesop:
  • Holding onto past grudges, no matter who started it or how justified it may be, is toxic and can bleed into the lives of those you care about the most.
  • People need reliable parental/mentor figures in their lives. Good mentors can turn entire lives around if given enough time and effectiveness, while bad ones can send people down paths that lead to misery. As both Daniel and Johnny learn, the hard way, teaching impressionable teenagers is a huge responsibility and you should provide a positive influence towards them. Otherwise, they'll head towards a path of self-destruction. So if you get a chance to be a mentor, you'd better be damn careful what you say and do because your students are always listening and will learn from the example you set.
  • Just because you choose to ignore people who bully you, doesn't mean bullying will go away by itself. The only way you can stand your ground against bullies is to learn to defend yourself, physically and mentally.
    Miguel: Instead of burying your heads in the sand, pretending that bullying doesn't exist, or that you could just get rid of it, what you need to do is teach kids how to defend themselves.
    Sam: Physically and mentally. Because sometimes the scars you can't see are the ones that hurt the most.
  • Hate poisons everything and everyone it touches.
  • Your way is not the only way. Be willing to open yourself up to another way of thinking.
  • Even if you're uncertain about what goals you want to achieve in life and how you'll go about it, there's no one fixed, rigid pathway to achieving them.
    Daniel: You could reach any goal you want; it just might mean taking the circular path.
  • Making mistakes is not desirable in life, but as long as you take it as a learning experience, hold yourself accountable for those mistakes and don't repeat them, you'll grow as a person moving forward.
    Johnny: We all get shit wrong sometimes. Some of us get it wrong a lot. But if you own up to your mistakes, you always have a shot at making things right.
  • Many bullies or people who are angry and cruel didn't become that way overnight but as a way to survive bad stuff that happened to them and the only way they can meaningfully change is through real help and better guidance, as well as taking responsibility. Part of ending the rift between Sam and Tory involves Sam realizing that Tory, for all her flaws, has had a genuinely hard life and becoming more sympathetic to her struggles and Tory learning to accept help from Amanda and others, while Kreese serves as an example of someone who never got the help he needed and whose bad impulses were reaffirmed over the years. Also, Robbie, Kenny and Tory's arcs and them falling into Kreese and Silver's hands show that if people, especially young people, don't get help and guidance from a good source, they will get it from someone else, someone who isn't necessarily pointing them in the right direction or has their best interests at heart.
  • A victory that is rigged in one's favor is not worth it. Since the end of season 4 all the way to season 5, Tory's All-Valley Tournament win is tainted due to the fact Silver paid off the referee to make sure Cobra Kai won, as a result feeling unworthy of being a champion. And when she calls Silver out over the bribery, he doesn't even bother to defend himself, or even cover up his tracks because of his vast wealth and resources he uses to expand the dojo. Tory would use that confrontation against Silver to expose him as a fraud in the season finale, leaving the Cobra Kai students stunned by the revelation, and ultimately discard their Cobra Kai gear on a defeated Silver.
• Aesop Amnesia:
  • Johnny didn't seem to learn a thing from his first defeat or how wicked Kreese's method of training turned out to be, and tries to indoctrinate the same kind of training style onto Miguel. When Daniel calls him out on it, he tries to defend himself by saying while Kreese was an asshole, his lessons worked. In the end, all of his students turn into reckless bullies who are destroying their lives just like Johnny did in the past. And to make it worse, Kreese himself shows up thanking Johnny for bringing the old, vicious Cobra Kai back.
  • Daniel seems to have lost the balance that he learned while Mr. Miyagi was still alive. While his concerns over the return of Cobra Kai are ultimately vindicated by the end of Season 1, he still approaches them with a grudge rather than a more nuanced view, and ends up doing a few things that make his wife wonder what the hell has gotten into him.
  • Even at the end of the season, when Daniel has supposedly begun to find his balance again, he forgets one of the most important aspects of Miyagi-Do karate when he decides to open a dojo and take students. Miyagi-Do is meant to be passed "from father to son." While this obviously doesn't need to be literal, it's supposed to involve a close one-on-one bond between teacher and student, like from Daniel to his daughter. Miyagi himself scoffed at the idea of teaching it to a class.
  • It gets so bad that in Season 2, despite preaching that Miyagi-Do is about finding balance and fighting only for self-defense... Daniel routinely ignores his own advice in his single-minded obsession with destroying Cobra Kai (which is even more glaring considering that he previously spent an entire film learning how horrible it is to hold lifelong karate grudges). His vengeful attitude trickles down to his students, which stokes the fires of the feud between the two dojos for the entire season until inevitably an all out brawl breaks out on the first day of school, and Daniel not keeping on top of Robby's anger issues leads to him ignoring Miguel's attempt to end their fight and breaking his spine.
  • Daniel points one out in Season 4. In Part III, Mr. Miyagi told Daniel that he would find his own way in life, and in karate, using the foundations of what Mr. Miyagi had taught him. At the All-Valley, Daniel comes to realize he'd been so obsessed with living up to Mr. Miyagi's legacy he never realized he could, and had to, adapt what he had learned for himself and his students.
  • Despite suffering many losses, Kyler is too egotistical and stupid to ever learn from his experiences. Even when his victims have learned karate or on the off-chance that Kyler himself has an overwhelming advantage against an opponent, he still prefers humiliating and torturing his opponents like he did to a semi-crippled Miguel in the Season 3 finale rather than fight properly and soundly beat his opponents. Hawk even points out to Kyler that all his victims have kicked his ass by now and the reason why he always loses: Simply because he is too stupid to ever learn his lesson. As of Season 5, Kyler has been defeated by Miguel (Twice, once when he had his gang backing him up and the second time when Miguel was still injured from his broken spine and he still loses against him), Hawk (once in a sanctioned match and the second time for real), Robby (even with the entirety of Cobra Kai backing him up), Kenny and finally, Demetri (even with two others as back-up, Kyler still lost).
• Aesop Collateral Damage:
  • All the business owners in the Cobra Kai dojo's strip-mall who got their rents doubled as a result of Daniel manipulating Armand Zakarian to get back at Johnny. Amanda calls him out on it as soon as she finds out and Daniel realizes the error of his ways, but Zakarian's tenants are still screwed.
  • Played much more tragically in the aftermath of the big fight between the Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do Students during the first day of school, where Sam needs stitches and a broken rib, while Miguel spends much of Season 3 in a wheelchair. All because Tory chose to pick a fight with the girl her boyfriend cheated on her with.
  • The consequences of the school fight bleed into everything. Because of it, the LaRussos have their name dragged through the mud to the point they are on the brink of losing their dealership and thus the jobs of all their employees there. Even when they avoid that, Amanda's attempt to end this through "diplomacy" only incenses Kreese to the point that he sends a snake to the dealership to scare the customers and employees.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Many of the dumbest decisions any of the characters make are done drunk, as excessive alcohol consumption often induces poor judgement... that's already impaired by strong emotions, such as Johnny pretty much every time he gets really drunk, Miguel at the canyon party when he thinks Sam is dumping and/or cheating on him, and Sam at Moon's end-of-summer party when goaded by Tory.
• The Alcoholic:
  • Just about the only thing we see Johnny drink is Coors Banquet, and his apartment is littered with beer cans. He makes an attempt to clean himself up and start drinking orange juice, but even after a date involving some pretty heavy drinking, he goes home and pops yet another beer.
  • Johnny's ex-girlfriend Shannon has traits of this, spending more time at picking up men at bars than being an attentive mother to their son Robby. In Season 2 she checks into rehab.
• Allegiance Affirmation: Robby pulls one during the Season 3 finale, showing their loyalty to Cobra Kai by attacking Johnny, his own father, after the latter nearly kills John Kreese; and then telling them, as well as Samantha (his ex-girlfriend), Miguel and Daniel (who he used to see as a father) to Get Out! of the Cobra Kai Dojo while he returns to Kreese's side to train for the next All-Valley.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys:
  • Johnny believes this wholeheartedly, as evidenced by his story about how he originally met Ali, and how he tries to encourage Miguel by stating that every girl wants to date a Cobra Kai.
  • Still, Johnny may have a point, as evidenced when after Eli becomes "Hawk", with his mohawk, punk attitude, and tattoo, he starts getting a LOT more attention from Moon...until he becomes a bully himself, leading Moon to break up with him, something Demetri takes pride at taunting Hawk over.
  • Demetri gains a lot of social standing after the school fight, with girls flirting with him in the hallways (much to Hawk's ire) and him eventually entering a relationship with Yasmine.
  • Deconstructed when Miguel turning into a bad boy becomes the fatal fracture between him and Sam, and it takes him shedding his ties to Cobra Kai to get that relationship back.
• All There in the Script: The girl Stingray takes to Moon's house party in S2E9 is called Fawn, but her name is only mentioned in the credits.
• All Your Powers Combined: One of the overarching themes of season 4 is the students who have been a part of the different dojos are the ones that end up doing the best in the All-Valley, combing their styles to overcome their opponents.
  • Eli and Robbie are the finalists of the male division, both having learnt Miyagi-Do and Cobra Kai. Eli also arguably possesses some of Eagle Fang's techniques, since unlike Robbie, he was actually trained by Johnny at one point.
  • Samantha ends up making her way to the finals of the women's division, using the Ealge Fang techniques Johnny taught her to overcome a Cobra Kai opponent who is expecting nothing but Miyagi-Do. While she does lose the final bout with Tory, she manages to hold her own by utilising both her styles.
  • Tory was very interested in the secondhand Miyagi-Do techniques Robby brought to Cobra Kai, in the interests of closing the skill gap with Sam and finally beating her fair and square. Not coincidentally, this coincides with Tory getting genuine, non-karate-related help from Amanda, making her a much more balanced fighter and person. Silver bribed the ref to ensure Cobra Kai won, but Tory and Sam's fight was the most even one they've had yet, and Tory very nearly won legitimately.
• Almighty Janitor: Johnny is a deadbeat father and an unemployed repairman, but he's also a master of Cobra Kai karate and becomes an influential force in the local community after opening a strip-mall dojo. Even after presumably not fighting in years, the only injury he takes while kicking the crap out an entire group of bullies is when he strains his own leg booting one of the punks square in the face.
• Alpha Bitch: Yasmine of the "rich girls" clique in season 1 is a mean-spirited bully who looks down on everybody and uses social media to torment them. She eases up over the course of Season 3, as getting publicly humiliated by Aisha gave her a taste of what it was like to have everyone laughing at her now.
• Alternate Continuity: The Karate Kid ends with Johnny getting up and giving Daniel the trophy, accepting defeat and being a gracious sport. This series asks "What if he didn't?"
• Always Someone Better:
  • Miguel is this to Robby, and not just at karate. In addition to defeating Robby at the All Valley Tournament, Miguel has a better relationship with Robby's father than he does, and is Robby's main rival for Sam's affections, with Robby (correctly) fearing that Sam still has lingering feelings for Miguel even while she's dating Robby. Then after the school brawl, Miguel becomes a local hero for overcoming his paralysis and Sam leaps back into his arms, while Robby is vilified and spends months in juvie for having accidentally injured him in the first place. Miguel has pretty much the life that Robby wishes he had.
  • This parallels the relationship between Daniel and Johnny. Daniel starts the series as a well-respected and successful local businessman, while Johnny is unemployed and directionless. To add insult to injury, Daniel's business bases its marketing around his victory in the All Valley, while Johnny's own All Valley champion status is mostly forgotten about. Daniel also proves to be a better father figure to Johnny's own son than Johnny ever has. And due to his failure to get past his breakup with Ali, Johnny has been unable to have a lasting relationship with any woman and has also been a deadbeat dad, while Daniel got past all of his previous relationships and met Amanda, and they have been happily married for nearly 2 decades. He is also a very devoted, if imperfect, father to his children.
  • Ironically, Robby himself is this to Hawk during the brief period in which both are members of Cobra Kai towards the end of Season 3. Hawk already resents Robby for eliminating him from the All Valley, beating him in a skirmish at the mall and putting Miguel in the hospital in the school brawl, and he is not pleased when Kreese allows him to join the dojo and shows clear favoritism towards him, and Robby wins the admiration of Tory and Kyler by successfully completing Hawk's failed plan to steal a snake from the zoo. However, this is subverted in Season 4 when Hawk, now back to being Eli, defeats Robby to win the All-Valley by using a perfect combination of everything he's learned from Miyagi-Do, Cobra Kai, and Eagle Fang. Also notably during the fight they seem to earn each other's sincere respect.
  • In the third season, it's revealed that Chozen Toguchi (the main antagonist of the second film of Karate Kid) is this for Daniel. When the two meet after more than thirty years Daniel finds out that not only Chozen has reformed himself but also has become a master of his own dojo in Okinawa. When they fight again (albeit in a sparring match rather than a duel to death) Chozen proves to be leagues above Daniel in combat skills and even reveals that he knows techniques of Miyagi do karate that Daniel never knew about. Is not just at martial arts, but Chozen has left his past grudges a long time ago and is now a worthy successor of Miyagi, something that Daniel still struggles to be.
• AM/FM Characterization: The music choices when Daniel's in the frame tend to be warm and mellow. Conversely, Johnny gets 80s metal/hair metal songs for his leitmotif.
• Ambiguously Jewish:
  • Martin Kove has said that he considers John Kreese to be Jewish, as Kove himself is Jewish.
• Analogy Backfire: Happens twice with Demitri, both times involving Game of Thrones.
  • First, he compares himself to Samwell Tarley. Daniel points out that Sam defeated a White Walker.
  • He later compares letting former Cobra Kai student join Miyagi-Do to letting the Wildlings behind the Wall. Daniel reminds Demitri that the Wildlings helped Jon Snow during the Battle of the Bastards. An embarassed Demitri admits he should have used a different analogy.
• And Starring:
  • Veteran character actor Ed Asner, who plays Johnny's stepfather Sid Weinberg, gets this credit.
  • From season 2 onwards, "With Martin Kove as John Kreese"
• Androcles' Lion: In Karate Kid Part II, Daniel saved a little girl in Okinawa during a typhoon. In the present day, thirty years later, that girl grew up into a CFO for Doyona who shows up just in time to save Daniel's dealership from going under.
• Animal-Themed Fighting Style:
  • The "cobra strike" move is based on a cobra's lunge and strike.
  • Cobra Kai Karate has a move for escaping an opponent's hold called "slithering".
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Daniel's son Anthony is an overweight Spoiled Brat who does nothing but play video games and make demands of people.
• Antagonist Title: As of Season 3, after Kreese takes back control of the Cobra Kai dojo and steers it down a far more villainous path.
• Apologetic Attacker:
  • Miguel apologizes before kicking his female sparring partner Aisha at Johnny's behest.
  • Demetri also apologizes before and after he knocks Hawk out in the Season 2 finale.
  • Season 3 has Bobby apologize to the Lord above and to a very drunk Johnny before sweeping the leg.
• Arc Villain:
  • Season 1: For the first half, it's Kyler Park—given that his bullying is what led Miguel to learning karate from Johnny and Johnny himself reopening Cobra Kai. After Miguel defeats Kyler and his gang in the lunchroom, the rest of Season 1 turns into a Good vs. Good situation that reaches it peak with Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso coaching their students (Miguel Diaz and Robby Keene respectively) in the All-Valley finals.
  • Season 2: John Kreese (the original big bad from The Karate Kid) returns and fully cements his big bad status by taking over the dojo after the West Valley High School brawl]]. Though in terms of the current generation of bullies, it's Eli "Hawk" Moskowitz who serves as the season's central antagonist (leading an attack on Demetri, trashing Miyagi-Do, and escalating the school brawl).
  • Season 3:
    • Kreese becomes an even bigger threat now that he has fully taken over Cobra Kai and turns it into the thug dojo that was seen in the original Karate Kid, with Tory Nichols gradually replacing a disillusioned Hawk as his most ruthless student.
    • During Robby's time in juvie, Shawn Payne becomes his biggest rival and main antagonist which culminates into a battle with him after Robby takes Kreese's strike-first philosophy to heart.
    • In Kreese's flashback, Captain Turner becomes this, being the one who taught Kreese (and Terry Silver) his "no-mercy" philosophy (through the art of Tang Soo Doo) and becomes Kreese's final boss by battling him over a pit of snakes.
  • Season 4:
    • Kreese again, as he prepares his dojo for the 51st All-Valley Tournament with Robby and Tory as his champions and most vicious fighters. Except now he has the help of his war buddy and Karate Kid Part III main antagonist, Terry Silver. Silver however proves to be much more cunning and dangerous than Kreese, and later usurps him as the sole Big Bad after he beats up Stingray and frames Kreese after the latter takes advantage of his war buddy's loyalty and abuses it.
    • Anthony LaRusso becomes this to Kenny Payne's arc (being the latter's biggest rival and most frequent bully), at least prior to Kenny whooping him in Episode 7 (with Zach Thompson as the bigger bad influencing Anthony via peer pressure). This is tragically reversed in the season finale, in which Kenny fully embraces the Cobra Kai creed and vows to become an even worse bully to Anthony himself.
  • Season 5:
    • Silver effectively becomes the season's Big Bad, now that he has fully taken over Cobra Kai with his ambitious plan to franchise the dojo, not just all over the San Fernando Valley, but worldwide as well. Next to him, Sensei Kim Da-Eun is his dragon with her personal agenda in spreading her grandfather's controversial legacy to America, as well as Kenny, who easily becomes Cobra Kai's most corrupted student and the leader of his Gang of Bullies that harass the Miyagi-Fangs.
    • Miguel's biological dad, Hector Salazar, for the Mexico arc with him being the reason why Miguel leaves to Mexico for two episodes—leading to a series of events where Johnny and Robby go after him. Even prior to meeting Miguel, Carmen (indirectly) warns the audience that he was a bad man. When he is first introduced, he seems to be a charming Family Man showing great gratitude for Miguel saving his young son. However Hector eventually reveals his true colors to Miguel, and while he doesn't attack him, he plays a role in Miguel realizing that the only father figure he really had was Johnny.
• Arc Words: Cobra Kai mottos: "Strike First, Strike Hard, No Mercy," and "Cobra Kai Never Dies."
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: It will probably be easier to name the anti-heroes and antagonists who do not fall under this trope than to name the ones that do.
• Artistic License – Education:
  • In "Counterbalance", Miguel beats up Kyler and his posse in the cafeteria and after the fight is over, is dragged to the office where the counselor attempts to call his mother. However, Miguel's grandma, who doesn't speak English, answers the phone instead. In the end, Miguel is implied to get away with the fight without his mother finding out and without a hint of some sort of punishment. In real life, Miguel would most likely be kept in the office until the school could get hold of his mother, and he would certainly be getting suspended for fighting in school, as most schools have zero tolerance policies and suspend everyone involved in a fight with no regard for determining who initiated hostilities, who threw the first punch, or whether the assaulted party fought back or let themselves be wailed on. That Miguel got off so lightly could be justified by the school's lack of competency when it comes to dealing with bullies, and their hesitancy to do anything about bullying until someone sues the school or gets put in the hospital (like happens in the Season 2 finale).
  • The setup for and consequences of the school brawl in the Season 2 finale:
    • Tory assaults a teacher, hijacks the intercom, and announces she's going to kick Sam's ass for kissing Miguel. She then leaves to seek out Sam in the hallway, and they engage in a fight, which escalates into an all-out riot. In real life, Tory would never have been able to get into the office to speak over the intercom. Even if she did, she would've been quickly tackled and restrained by school security or cops stationed at the school. Furthermore, no school would release students into the hallways after Tory threatened a student's life on the PA, nor would there be any gathering of students in the hallways waiting for a fight to start; the school would have been locked down instantly, as in a time period where school shootings are commonplace, it would be assumed that Tory has a knife or a gun and is about to shoot up the school.
    • Once the fight breaks out, there is not a single security guard to be seen anywhere in the halls. The principal says to get security on the radio, but we don't see them until at least five minutes later when one of them breaks up Nate and Bert. In a big city school in Los Angeles, there'd be least a dozen or so security guards on the scene in seconds, along with dozens of police officers and SWAT teams. There's also the fact that only one teacher is shown trying to break up the fight. Sure, it's not their jobs, but if something like that were to happen in real life, there would be at least a half-dozen teachers piling on the kids trying to break them apart. And the students wouldn't be getting trained by Kreese in the Cobra Kai backroom that evening, they would all be arrested and sitting in holding cells at the police station until their parents bailed them out. Most of them also likely would've been expelled, sent to an alternative school and placed under constant mandatory behavioral counseling.
    • Everyone who participated in the fight gets suspended for two weeks, while Tory and Robby are expelled (Tory for instigating the brawl by challenging Sam to a fight and then injuring her, Robby for putting Miguel in the hospital with a spinal cord injury). Although reality is being applied here, with even Sam and Demetri getting suspended because most schools have zero tolerance policies towards fighting regardless of who started it, it's unlikely Robby and Tory would have been the only ones expelled. Hawk and Doug Rickenberger would likely have also been expelled and sent to juvie, and probably for longer than Robby since they had malicious intent and hurt a lot of people, as well as having no reason to fight (Hawk was the one who escalated things by literally pushing Sam back into the fight as she was trying to flee from Tory, and Rickenberger beat unconscious a teacher who tried to intervene).
• Artistic License – Law:
  • Kreese convinces the landlord to sign the lease over to him instead of Johnny, which is treated as though Kreese has completely stolen the dojo away from Johnny, but the business itself and all of the property in the building would still belong to Johnny. Johnny could, if he chose, leave Kreese with an empty studio and no license to conduct business within it.
  • In the Season 2 finale, Stingray is interviewing for a job as a security guard at the school, despite having no experience, no qualifications, and no permits or licenses that would permit him as an adult to work with children. He wades into the school brawl, blatantly only targeting the Miyagi-Do students, using karate techniques, and congratulates a Cobra Kai student (Hawk) rather than attempting to de-escalate all of the fighting students. For this, he gets put on probation and must remain a considerable distance from all students, when in real life he would most likely be thrown in prison for blatantly attacking minors (especially notable since the only thing that kept Tory out of juvie for cutting Sam with a spiked bracelet was being her ill mother's caretaker).
  • After the school fight, Tory gets expelled, and is placed probation as an alternative to juvenile hall because she's the primary caregiver of her sick mother and her brother. She's left having to work two jobs to make ends meet while also trying to get her GED, until Kreese coaxes her back to Cobra Kai by intimidating her seedy landlord. In the real world, Tory would not have been allowed by her probation officer to return to Cobra Kai. Probation comes with conditions and if they are violated, Tory could be subject to fines or go to prison, and be separated from her family. In real life, Tory would be required to attend public school somewhere else or take an online program, be required to take mandatory behavioral counseling, she would have to work to provide care for her mom and brother, and she absolutely would be prohibited from taking karate classes or associating with anyone in Cobra Kai. Since Tory is the sole earner for her family, she'd have no choice but to take her probation terms more seriously than she does in the show. We don't see a probation officer make a home visit or call her to check if she's meeting the conditions of her probation at any point either, although we do see Tory have to check in with one at an office (which is where she runs into Robby when he shows up for his first appointment).
• Artistic License – Martial Arts:
  • All of the kids who begin training in Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do develop to black belt level (and beyond) both in terms of rank and skill. By the time of the tournament Cobra-Kai students and Robby have been training for less than a year. This should be much too fast for them to have the same physical conditioning and performing some of the advanced techniques they are displaying. Similarly, they are all elevated to black-belt level in martial arts when they really should be beginners. Particularly egregious given that many of those they are competing against would be from more established dojos and would likely have been training much longer than any of these students. This is partially an artifact from the original movie, where Cobra Kai had been training for a long time while Daniel only had a few months. While a point was made that Miyagi's personal instruction gave Daniel an edge, it was very much a Cinderella story regardless. With an entire school of newcomers, Cobra Kai doing as well as they did is significantly less likely. This actually gets brought up in the 9th episode of Season 4: Eagle Fang's newest recruit, Devon, is soundly defeated by Tory when they match up, and Devon tells Johnny afterwards that she's only been training for 6 weeks, but vows to return next year and kick everyone's ass.
  • Kyler and the other bullies are evidently wrestlers and do show some techniques from wrestling in their fight scenes, but they are easily overcome by the primarily striking-based karate students and Johnny, even when they have those characters in wrestling holds that would be very difficult to escape from such as a rear-naked choke position - something against which karateka would likely not do much better than untrained people. Partially justified as the Cobra Kai students, and Miguel in particular, are taking their training extremely seriously and training frequently and hard while Kyler and his friends are shown as slackers. Miguel, Hawk and Sam are also shown to use the occasional grapple and throw, giving them knowledge on fighting other wrestlers. It also helps that Johnny taught Miguel how to get out of a rear-naked choke in the first place.
  • Zig-zagged with the general fighting style displayed by the karate students in the series. Most of the fights incorporate grappling techniques such as throws and sweeps that would be more typical of Judo or Jujutsu/Jiu-Jitsu than karate. Although traditional karate does incorporate some of these grappling techniques for throws, locks and sweeps, and some school still train them, sport karate (the kind that would likely be winning points-based tournaments) would typically focus much more heavily on fast striking than any grappling techniques. However, this might be justified in that Cobra Kai's style of karate is derived from Tang Soo Do as taught to Kreese and Silver by Captain Turner in Vietnam, and Johnny is specifically teaching his students how to defend themselves from bullies in a street fight, with winning tournaments being a secondary goal.
  • Johnny's teachings in general. Johnny flat out says he doesn't allow parents in class when Stingray first shows up to the dojo. In real life, American parents would demand to supervise the class and see what their kids were being taught. Especially at a dojo whose creed is "strike first, strike hard, no mercy." He almost definitely would have been cancelled and probably even sued by these parents.
  • The film series had its' own share of artistic license, but the fighting in general was fairly grounded and depicted realistically. This series ramps the combat closer to a traditional action movie, with more acrobatics and roundhouse kicks able to redirect someone's forward momentum entirely.
• Artistic License – Military:
  • The US servicemen who briefly appear in Daniel's Okinawa trip are not wearing any patches or nametapes on their uniforms, and are wearing incorrectly colored t-shirts.
  • Notably averted in the Vietnam War flashback. The Viet Cong really did use poisonous snakes as weapons, in multiple modes, and were also known to treat POWs cruelly, so forcing American prisoners into trial by combat over a snake pit isn't that much of a stretch.
• Artistic License – Sports:
  • Robby enters the All Valley Karate Tournament as an unaffiliated combatant in the Season 1 finale, which might work in certain types of tournaments or brackets but proper sponsorship and verification of abilities would be expected at this level (in the original film Miyagi had to lie about Daniel being a black belt, and they even stole one for him to wear).
  • Aisha and Bert's participation in the All Valley Tournament in Season 1 establishes that the tournament does not have the gender or weight divisions that would be expected of a combat sport in real life, so that all of the main characters can fight in the same tournament. The former point is addressed in Season 4 as the tournament board end up creating gender divisions due to the optics of glorifying boys to hit girls, but the latter remains and if anything becomes even more pronounced as we end up seeing a middle schooler, Kenny, compete in the same division as everyone else. While it is promoted as the under-18 tournament it seems very odd that they'd allow such a massive difference in age.
  • In a holdover from the original films, Season 1's tournament only has a kumite (point sparring) competition, when real-life karate tournaments would also have kata (empty hand form) or kobudo (weapon form) events. This also gets addressed in Season 4, as a skills competition including kata, board breaking and weapons displays is added to the tournament.
  • Another holdover from the originals, there's not a hint of protective gear anywhere, either in the dojos or the tournaments. When you've got a bunch of teenagers punching and kicking each other in the head, helmets and mouthguards should be required at a minimum.
• Asian Airhead: Kyler is a rare male example, relentlessly bullying Miguel and his friends, and later Sam with false rumors of her promiscuity after she rejects his advances, and the one responsible for reigniting the feud between Daniel and Johnny by claiming Johnny jumped him. He also turns down Daniel's expertly prepared sashimi, unaware of its status as a Japanese delicacy, and when asked where his parents are from (As in, what country they originated), Kyler answers "Irvine?"
• Ass Kicking Pose: Daniel strikes one on a huge billboard advertising the LaRusso Auto Group, playing up his karate persona.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Johnny subscribes to this fighting philosophy.
  Johnny: So I'm gonna teach you the the best defense that you can know. And the best defense...is more offense.
• Awesome Mc Cool Name:
  • One of the tournament committee members who overturns the ban of Cobra Kai from participating in the All Valley Tournament compliments Johnny, saying that Cobra Kai is a "badass name for a dojo, by the way." Which earns a fistpump of agreement from Johnny.
  • Subverted with Eagle Fang, Johnny's second dojo that he forms in season 3 from Miguel and other students Kreese kicked out of Cobra Kai. Johnny says the name "elicits power and dominance," but Mitch and Bert find it bizarre and ridiculous.

B

• Babies Make Everything Better: Season 5 features a reconstruction of this trope. Johnny and Carmen have been perfectly happy together, until Carmen thinks she's pregnant. While she is more than ready, Johnny is scared he'll make the same mistakes he did with Robby, despite wanting to be there for her. This causes a temporary rift between them, but Johnny decides Carmen means too much to him to let his past demons get in the way. He spends the rest of the day working tooth and nail to get ready for the baby by shaping up his apartment and removing anything that may be hazardous for the baby. Carmen is touched by the gesture and reveals she is pregnant. While this fixes the rift between them, Johnny soon realizes there are other things he needs to fix before the baby comes. He finds a temporary job as a rideshare driver and DoorDash delivery driver, and while he hates it and sucks at it, Lyle, of all people, assures him that even if his job sucks, a good family makes it worth it. Johnny commits to the job far more seriously upon hearing this. The hardest part, though, is fixing the rift between the baby's eventual half-brothers, Robby and Miguel. Daniel inadvertently convinces him to resort to some drastic measures that prove effective. He doesn't tell the boys about the baby until after the two forgive each other. While the baby does make things better, it only serves as an incentive for Johnny to try to fix things; everything else was him putting the work in rather than everything being washed away because of the baby.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: The Wheel Technique, focused on sensing your combat partner and operating in perfect tandem, allows two to fight like twenty. Sam and Robby become adept with it early in Season 2.
  • In the final battle of Season 3, Sam and Miguel are briefly shown in this position as the Cobra Kais initially enter the house. Later, Hawk and Demetri are in this position after the former changes sides and do the Wheel Technique themselves.
• Badass Boast: Hawk's "Prepare to face the fury of the Hawk."
• Badass Bookworm: Several of the karate students are academically gifted, particularly Miguel, Aisha, Hawk, and later Sam and Demetri. Except for Sam, their "nerd" status is part of their being bullied and fighting back.
• Badass Creed: Cobra Kai's "Strike first, strike hard, no mercy".
• Bail Equals Freedom:
  • In the pilot, Johnny is arrested and bailed out by his stepfather in the process of saving Miguel from a gang of bullies. The arrest is never brought up again (though Johnny would have a reasonable case for dismissal given the circumstances and the fact that Miguel, the homeless woman, and the mini mart owner could all testify as to what was happening), though the fight is when Daniel sees Kyler's injuries.
  • Downplayed in Season 3. In "Aftermath", Johnny is once again released on bail after getting into a brawl outside a bar. Johnny's court appearance is never shown onscreen, but it's stated that he only avoided jail time because his friend Bobby, who is a pastor, convinced the judge of his good character and he was let off with probation.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In season 1, after Robby gets hurt in the torunament, Daniel starts rubbing his hands together, seemingly about to use Mr. Migayi's Healing Hands technique. Only to then call for a medic instead.
  • In the non-joke variety, Season 3 features a flashback of a 60's diner employee getting bullied by a Jerk Jock, played by Martin Kove's son Jesse, so we're led to believe that Kreese is the jock, but it turns out he's the employee.
  • When Daniel is in Japan in season 3, we see blocks of ice slid into place, appearing to set up an ice breaking challenge, like from the second movie. The camera zooms out to show that the ice blocks are tiny, and this is a fancy bar.
  • In season 4, the audience is led to believe that Tory has become a stripper after losing her previous job (she and other girls are shown in a dressing room applying makeup and 'costumes' while the business owner encourages them to 'make tips'). Cut to reveal she's just a children's entertainer (dressed as a mermaid) at a party venue. Sam is very amused when she sees this.
• Bank Toaster: A rare non-bank variant, as LaRusso Auto gives each customer a free bonsai tree. Tom Cole even counters this by offering his customers a free drought-resistant cactus.
• Bar Brawl: What happens when Johnny and his old Cobra Kai buddies (sans Dutch) get together for One Last Field Trip and end up in a bar. After some jerkass insults Tommy, a brawl erupts between the Cobra Kai gang and the jerkass's friends. All of the former Cobra Kais managed to hold their own during the fight.
• Bash Brothers: One of the first things Daniel tries teaching Sam and Robby is the wheel technique, which involves moving in tandem with a partner in a close space without directly seeing what they are doing. He starts on solid ground, then ups the training by putting them on a wooden disc in a pond so they can each feel balance shift as the other moves. This proves to be valuable training for them later on when confronting Hawk's gang at the mall. Amusingly, in the same episode Daniel gets pulled away and has to work hard to meet their quota at the car dealership, he convinces Amanda to work with him and they accomplish a similar thing except when it came to closing car sales.
• Bastard Understudy: Terry Silver, who was completely loyal to Kreese in The Karate Kid Part III, was this the entire time in Season 4. After winning the tournament, he gets Kreese framed and arrested and takes over Cobra Kai. Whether this was due to his own personage or Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal is yet to be seen.
• Batman Gambit: Daniel uses one to get the Cobra Kai dojo's rent doubled. He invites Armand Zakarian, who owns the strip-mall, to dinner and pretends to want to buy it. Zakarian immediately gets suspicious of why Daniel would want to buy such a worthless strip-mall in a crappy part of the valley and during the negotiations Daniel "lets slip" that a nearby mall charges twice as much as Zakarian does in rent. Then he withdraws the offer and Zakarian goes ahead and raises the rent on all the stores at the mall. Daniel achieves his objective just by manipulating Zakarian's suspicious nature and greed.
• Battle Couple:
  • In Season 2, Sam and Robby team up to defend Demetri when the latter is attacked by Hawk and his gang.
  • Tory and Miguel begin dating and start training together.
  • In Season 3, Sam and Miguel reconcile and also get their respective dojos to combine. They are standing side by side when the Cobra Kais attack the LaRusso house, though they get split up to have one-on-one fights with Kyler and Tory.
  • By the Prom episode in Season 4, Robby and Tory vs. Sam and Miguel become another example.
  • A non-fighting example occurs when Daniel and Amanda face a shortage of employees at the dealership and resort to helping with the car sales together.
  Daniel: Danny and Mandy. Still the best sales team in the Valley.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Johnny gets hit by this twice. At first, he wishes he could attract a full dojo of students. But when he accomplishes just that, he is dismayed to see the new students are all nerds and "losers" who can barely fight. Then he wishes he could turn them into genuine badasses, and he accomplishes this, too — at the cost of them becoming the kind of bullying jerkass he himself once was. Oh, and their success also brings John Kreese back into Johnny's life.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: A huge theme through Season 3. Miyagi-Do shows a lot more outward aggression and starts a lot of physical brawls with Cobra Kai when Cobra Kai is being more of a nuisance than anything. Additionally, Amanda pulls a Season 1 Daniel move by trying to get Kreese evicted.
• Beeping Computers: at the beginning of Season 2 Episode 3, Johnny obtains an old Dell laptop with Windows XP. Every time he opens a new application, or even the Start button, the computer emits a beep. Those beeps aren't even the kind of beep a computer would ever make, because they are sampled from Command & Conquer.
• Berserk Button:
  • Johnny's Firebird might be a hunk of junk that costs more to fix than it's worth, but if you risk scratching the paint, he WILL make you regret it.
  • Criticizing Kreese's cobra tattoo is also a really bad idea, especially if you're a smartass kid.
  • Sam is Tory's button. Hearing from Kreese that Sam's back with Miguel is enough to prompt Tory to lead a gang assault on the LaRusso house.
• Best Her to Bed Her: Sam and Miguel during "The Good, The Bad, and the Badass". Sam's in a frisky mood after they just saved the All-Valley tournament, so she goads Miguel into a bit of sparring. Eventually, Miguel gets Sam into a loose headlock, and they stare at each others' lips, intent on kissing, only for the moment to be ruined at that moment as Robby shows up.
• Betty and Veronica:
  • Season 1
    • Nice guy Miguel Diaz's Betty to douchey Kyler Park's Veronica for Sam LaRusso's Archie.
  • Season 2
    • Miguel's aggressive Veronica to Robby Keene's nice guy Betty for Sam's Archie.
    • Nice girl Sam's Betty to Dark Action Girl Tory Nichols's Veronica for Miguel's Archie.
  • Season 3
    • Robby eventually become the Veronica to Miguel's Betty for Sam's Archie. See also Betty and Veronica Switch.
    • Episode 5 teases Kumiko's Nice Girl Betty and Amanda's Mama Bear Veronica to Daniel's Archie. Given that Daniel is already married to Amanda, he sticks with Veronica.
    • The final two episodes also tease Carmen's Betty and Ali's Veronica to Johnny's Archie. Seems like he also sticks with Betty.
  • Season 4
    • Anthony becomes the Veronica to Kenny's Betty for Lia's Archie. However, this is also a Betty and Veronica Switch when Kenny embraces the Cobra Kai creed.
• Betty and Veronica Switch: In Season 2, Robby is the nice guy Betty to Miguel's Veronica for Sam's Archie. Over the course of Season 3, Miguel takes a level in kindness as he recovers from his injuries and never gets influenced by Kreese, while Robby makes a Face–Heel Turn under Kreese's influence. Sam chooses Betty in both cases.
• Beware the Nice Ones: At the beginning of the series, Aisha Robinson is arguably the meekest and most inoffensive of all the characters who have lines. On her first day of Cobra Kai lessons, Miguel — clearly aware of Aisha's plight of being forced to spar with no training — apologizes to her before knocking her down with one kick. It doesn't stop Aisha from tackling Miguel, executing a brutal kneedrop on him, and leaving him groaning on the mat.
• Bilingual Dialogue: Miguel's grandmother primarily speaks Spanish, but she understands English and can speak it a little bit, so all the conversations at the Diaz home tend to involve both languages.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: John Kreese and Terry Silver in Season 4, after the former convinces the latter to return to Cobra Kai. However, it isn't long before the two start to clash over teachings, leading Kreese to try and rein Terry in. By the end of the season, however, Terry is able to frame Kreese and oust him from the picture, becoming the sole Big Bad for the next season.
• Bittersweet Ending: Season 3 ends on this, compared to the more "bitter" than "sweet" ending of Season 1 and the straight Downer Ending of Season 2. Kreese is still running Cobra Kai, has successfully converted Robby over to his side, has contacted Terry Silver, and Tory has completely given into her hatred and rage. However Johnny has reconciled with most of the people he cares about, he has started a healthy relationship with Carmen, Hawk has finally seen the error of his ways and rejoined the protagonists, Miguel is now close to 100% healthy and rekindled his romance with Sam, and Johnny and Daniel merged their dojos together at the prompting of their students finally at some level of peace with one another. The season ends with Daniel and Johnny beginning a training session with everyone having the same end goal: getting rid of Cobra Kai once and for all.
  • Season 4 also ends like this, though it only barely avoids Downer Ending this time around. Cobra Kai wins the Grand Championship at the All Valley thanks to Tory's victory over Sam, thus Daniel and Johnny are no longer allowed to teach karate and this will allow Cobra Kai to expand. Miguel, who almost re-aggravated his Game-Breaking Injury ends up running off to Mexico to find his father after the stress of the season has built up with his relationships with Johnny, Sam and Carmen come to a head. Kenny is completely corrupted by Cobra Kai, and Terry Silver has gone 100% off the deep end, getting Kreese arrested and taking over Cobra Kai completely. Tory also finds out that Silver paid off the ref so her victory is tainted. However, Robby realizes how far he's fallen and has reconciled with Johnny, Tory seems to be coming around after getting a lot of help from Amanda, Eli has found some inner peace and won the All Valley in the boys' division, finally beating Robby, and Daniel enacts some Loophole Abuse to have Chozen take over teaching Miyagi-Do.
  • Season 5 is definitely more on the "sweet" than "bitter" side. The Miyagi-Fang alliance manages to expose Terry Silver as the fraud he is and managed to hold off Cobra Kai long enough to upload the evidence, dissolving the dojo by exposing Silver's true nature and losing the students' loyalty in him. Daniel manages to confront his fear of Silver once and for all by defeating him in combat while Johnny manages to defeat Kim Da-Eun's senseis who played a part in making Tory's life a living hell. On top of that, Silver himself gets arrested. On the bitter end, Kreese has escaped prison with his current motives unknown, Kim Da-Eun has yet to be defeated and still out there while Silver may very well be a threat to the Miyagi-Fang alliance given his vast amount of resources. Additionally, Chozen's health is not confirmed after the wound he received from Silver.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: Although the central conflict of the series revolves around Grey-and-Gray Morality, there are a number of secondary and minor characters who have no redeeming qualities whatsoever and exist mostly to provide a contrast to the sympathetic villains. These include Kyler, whose unadulterated sadism makes misguided Cobra Kais like Hawk seem more sympathetic by comparison, Anthony's "friend" Zack, who pressures him into bullying Kenny, and Tory's sexually exploitative landlord Rodney and Evil Aunt Kandace, who give an insight into how horrible Tory's life is and why she's so quick to lash out at others as a result.
• Blackmail Backfire: Johnny tries to blackmail Sid into giving him money for Miguel's surgery by threatening to go public about an "incident" involving Sid and his secretary. Sid is completely unfazed by the threat.
  Sid: I didn't get where I am because I cared about my reputation.
• Blame the Paramour: Tory witnesses a kiss between her boyfriend Miguel and her rival Sam. Rather than confront Miguel over this, Tory challenges Sam to a fight at school the following day. The attempts by Miguel and Robbie to de-escalate the situation fail and the fight explodes into an all out brawl across the school that ends with Miguel being paralyzed by Robbie.
• Blaming the Victim: The season 2 finale has Tory start a fight with Sam which escalates into a gang brawl between Miyagi-Do and Cobra Kai students, resulting in both Sam and Miguel being hospitalized. Even though Tory started the fight, Sam is still treated as if she is equally or entirely to blame and gets suspended for two weeks. At a PTA meeting to decide how to deal with school violence, one of the parents accuses Sam of "tramping around" with Tory's boyfriend as if that excuses Tory attacking her.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Two plot-relevant examples from Kyler — his account of what happened with his fight with Johnny and his spreading of malicious lies about what Sam did with him in a movie theater (she punched him after he tried to grope her).
  • Kreese when he and his gang of Cobra Kais show down with Johnny's Eagle Fangs in a park. Kreese claims to care about his students, despite the fact that he expelled Bert and a bunch of other kids because they refused to feed a live mouse to a snake, expelled Mitch for losing a single fight to Kyler, and didn't bother visiting Miguel at the hospital, instead visiting Robby (the kid who put Miguel in a coma in the first place). And let's not forget he outright tried to kill Johnny in a parking lot after he got the second place trophy in the 1984 All-Valley.
• Bond One-Liner: After Demetri trips Hawk during soccer practice in Season 3:
  Demetri: I guess that's why the Europeans call it football.
• Book Ends:
  • Season 1 has Daniel discovering that Johnny reopened Cobra Kai, and confronts Johnny in the dojo before asserting "This is not over." At the All-Valley Tournament at the end of the season, Johnny promises Daniel that he will regret getting involved when it's over and Daniel scoffs saying "Like this will ever be over."
  • Season 2 starts with Johnny showing mercy to Kreese immediately before getting attacked for it. At the very end of the season, Miguel shows mercy to Robby, and gets kicked over a balcony for it.
  • Season 3's first episode ends with Daniel offering to team up with Johnny for a specific purpose. Season 3 last episode ends with Daniel and Johnny finally on the same page, merging their dojos to fight against Cobra Kai.
  • Season 4 begins with Silver rejecting Kreese and ends on a similar, if harsher, note.
• Boring, but Practical: Having dealt with Robby's antagonists at the beach (which Robby used Daniel's iPhone to record; "Moment of Truth," S 2 E 4), Robby suggests using the footage — simple and relatively straightforward tactics in a plain setting — to promote Miyagi-Do. But Daniel doesn't want his school to be burdened by flashy, violent marketing, preferring instead to wait for the right "fish" to find him. This boring approach does end up being practical, as it's shortly after this point that Daniel's class starts to grow.
  • At the tournament ("Mercy," S 1 E 10), almost all of Miguel's tactics work this way. Right up until he meets Xander Stone and then Robby Keene, he steers clear of anything flashy.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Johnny and Daniel have Opposing Combat Philosophies that bleed over into their lives. Both eventually come to appreciate the other's methods, which fits nicely with Miyagi-Do's lessons of balance.
• Bowdlerization: Promos have Johnny referring to his students as part of a "pansy-ass" generation. Presumably they were worried people would be offended by the actual line, where he calls them a "pussy" generation instead.
• Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: Daniel has shades of this when he asks his daughter Sam if there are any guys she knows he should be worried about. He also tries to make his daughter promise she will stay away from anyone who's a member of the Cobra Kai dojo. His wife Amanda has to be a more calming voice for Daniel, who just wants to fix things. Daniel is proven right on a lot of Sam's bad choices (like Kyler), but she has to learn that firsthand. While Sam has to prove her dad wrong about Cobra Kai.
• Brick Joke:
  • During the All Valley Tournament Committee meeting in Season 1, one of the members suggests "shaking up" the tournament and boosting attendance by swapping the red mats with a white fist for blue mats with a gold fist, but most of the members think it's a stupid idea. When the actual tournament rolls around, however, we see that they went with his proposal anyway!
  • Johnny and plantains. The first time the Diazes invite him to dinner, he says the bananas are good. When corrected, he says "In America, they're bananas." When Johnny finds out Miguel is dating Tory, he tells him to focus on his training by stating "You can play hide the plantain later," and gets a chuckle from Miguel.
  • The woman who bitched at Johnny in the first episode re-appears as one of Johnny's Tinder dates in Season 2.
  • In Season One, Johnny is on the phone with a parent, explaining they accept both genders. He then says "Gender what? Is this a joke?" And hangs up. In Season Four, he gives Piper a speech including a comment about gender fluidity. He still clearly doesn't understand what it means.
• Bring It:
  • Johnny's attitude towards Daniel at the end of their first real confrontation in the new Cobra Kai dojo.
    Daniel: "You and I — this — we aren't done." (turns to walk out)
    Johnny: (with a smirk) "I'm right here, man."
  • Played for Laughs when Sam goads Miguel into a bit of sparring while they're in a frisky mood.
    Miguel: Okay! [stands up] Alright, you lookin' to take on the champ?
    Sam: [smiles] I seem to remember flipping you on the ground with surprisingly little effort!
    Miguel: [gets into fighting position] Well let's see you do it again. Don't hold back.
    Sam: [grins, assumes fight stance] I wouldn't worry about it.
• Broken Pedestal: Johnny starts to realize that his students are turning into sociopaths because of the foundational Cobra Kai lessons after seeing them used against Robby, so he starts trying to pull in a different direction talking about honor and discipline. While Miguel is more open to this change of approach, the other students start seeing this as hypocrisy to what he has been teaching (in addition to finding out Robby was his son, making his punishment of Miguel and Hawk seem based on favoritism rather than honor), and start to side with Kreese because he hasn't been backing away from it.
• Bullied into Depression: Hawk joins Cobra Kai because he's being relentlessly bullied over his lip scar. Aisha's reason is a combination of cyberbullying and fat shaming. Both are behind Miguel as the top three students of the Order Reborn dojo.
  • Happens to Kenny Payne in season 4. He gets bullied by Anthony LaRusso and his friends for being the new kid. After talking with his older brother he finds Robby who mentors him and inducts him into Cobra Kai.
• Bully Hunter:
  • Given prominent focus throughout the series. Johnny just happened to be nearby when Kyler and his gang started beating up on Miguel, which incited some memories of his own past as a teenage bully, but he didn't get involved until his car got dinged up in the process. He didn't have much interest in becoming a sensei but justified reopening Cobra Kai under the idea of taking kids who needed help and giving them something to work for. He later expresses disgust that kids would cyber-bully... as physical teasing at least takes some courage and ownership of your actions. He starts to realize the path he is going down has its own problems and decides to change his tune to prevent his students from becoming monsters.
  • Daniel is fully aware of this trope and the pitfalls of trying to fight back. When he creates Miyagi-Do Karate even he has to step back a few times to remind himself it is not about beating Cobra Kai but about being able to counteract the toxicity and hopefully inspire them to be better. Unfortunately, the rivalry that develops between the two dojos poisons both schools, leading to an odd form of Mob War developing in the community.
  • The Miyagi-Do attempt to become this in Season 3, after Cobra Kai continue to come after them in "revenge" for Miguel's injury. It goes as poorly as you'd expect, with the major incident leading to Demetri getting his arm broken by Hawk while Sam's PTSD triggers leaving her unable to properly help.
• Bullying a Dragon: In the first episode, Kyler and his goons get belligerent with Johnny when he tells them to leave Miguel alone. In the resulting fight, Kyler and all three of his friends end up on the ground — repeatedly — and Johnny honestly suffers more from not stretching first than any of the (few) attacks they manage to land on him.
• Butt-Monkey: Mitch is pretty much the quintessential one in this show. The cast routinely gives him demeaning nicknames, he's constantly put in humiliating scenarios and is otherwise not given a ton of shine. However this gets deconstructed (as Cobra Kai tends to do). All of the above leads to him performing a Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal and a Face–Heel Turn, noting that he's tired of being treated like absolute crap by the protagonists.

C

• Call-Back: Has its own page.
• Calling the Old Man Out:
  • Season 1: Johnny goes to his stepdad Sid, who has been shown to be a mean and uncaring man, to give back all the money Sid has given him. Sid scoffs, sure that Johnny will come crawling back soon and begging for more. Johnny makes it clear that he has no more use for Sid at all.
    Sid: Of course you'll be back. You need my money!
    Johnny: I never needed your money, it was just the only thing you had to give. Goodbye, Sid.
  • Season 2: After getting played by surrogate father figure Kreese for most of the season, Johnny finally throws him out of his dojo and warns him to stay away from Johnny's students. Unfortunately, it doesn't stick.
• Casting Gag: William Zabka and Diora Baird (who plays Johnny's ex) played a couple in Hot Tub Time Machine. Whether or not it's intentional is up for debate, but show producer Josh Heald also wrote Hot Tub Time Machine.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • The Rocky franchise exists in the Miyagi-verse, since Johnny mentions first meeting Ali during a screening of Rocky III and he and Daniel liken the idea of having a friendly rematch as akin to Rocky and Apollo in that movie. The first and fifth Rocky movies were directed by John G. Avildsen, director of The Karate Kid trilogy.
  • Johnny's favorite movie is Iron Eagle, which starred Rob Garrison (Tommy) as Packer.
  • When Amanda confronts Kreese at his dojo, she calls him Rambo. The sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, starred Martin Kove as Michael Reed Ericson.
  • In season 3, when Johnny and Miguel are looking for pictures of Johnny to post to his Facebook profile, Johnny offers up younger pictures of himself...captioned as Billy Zabka.
  • Season 4 has Carmen and Johnny getting into a brief discussion about Top Gun and its star, Tom Cruise... as in Tom Cruise, the costar of Ralph Macchio in The Outsiders.
  • Robby Keene's middle name is Swayze, named after Patrick Swayze... who also starred with Ralph Macchio in The Outsiders.
• Chance Meeting Between Antagonists: These occur so frequently that it seems like fate really wants Daniel and Johnny to collide. To the point where "You've got to be kidding me!" is practically Daniel's catch-phrase.
  • In the Season 2 premiere, Daniel and Robby happen to run into Johnny at the hardware store, allowing Robby and Johnny to have their first confrontation since the All Valley Tournament.
  • The LaRussos go out on the first first date in a while on the same night that Johnny and Carmen go on their first date. Not only do they happen to go to the same restaurant at the same time, they get seated at adjacent tables and can't be moved because the restaurant is booked.
• Chaos of the Bells: In the Season 3 finale "December 19", an electric guitar rendition of "Carol of the Bells" plays as Tory leads the Cobra Kais in an assault on the LaRusso house.
• Character Development: Many of the legacy characters from the original films have gone through this in the years since we last saw them, while the younger generation go through this due to one of the main themes of the series being impressionable teenagers caught between different teachers.
  • Johnny goes from being the archetypal '80s Jerk Jock bully in the original film, to a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who teaches kids how to defend themselves from bullies. His relationships with his students help him to see the flaws in Cobra Kai's original teachings. He also develops a close, father-son type relationship with Miguel, in contrast to how he failed as a father to Robby. He drops some of his xenophobic attitudes after getting to know Miguel and his family better (compare his complaining about immigrants in the first episode to correcting Kreese when he refers to Miguel as Mexican in Season 2) while still remaining a Politically Incorrect Hero overall. In Season 3, he gets closure on his past failures after a pep talk from Ali, allowing him to commit to a serious relationship with Carmen, and he and Daniel finally put their rivalry aside.
  • Chozen has changed significantly since The Karate Kid Part II. In the film, he was a Hate Sink villain who picked on Daniel with little to no provocation, proved himself to be a Dirty Coward by failing to help Daniel rescue a little girl from a typhoon, and then tried to murder Daniel for "dishonoring him". When he returns in Season 3, he has become a much better man. He reveals that Sato gave him a chance to redeem himself and taught him the true meaning of Miyagi-Do karate after he became a Death Seeker, and he took the chance to become a humble master practitioner. He even acts as a mentor to Daniel, teaching him a new Signature Move that he uses to defeat Kreese in the Season 3 finale.
  • Sam goes from being an upper-class girl trying to fit in with the popular clique at school, who is hesitant to step in when her "friends" are bullying her actual friends, and hides her relationship with Miguel from her parents because she's afraid of her dad rejecting Miguel due to his biases against Cobra Kai, to being willing to stand up for her Miyagi-Do peers when they're being bullied and also standing up for Miguel to her dad.
  • Robby in Season 4 goes from someone who is prone and quick to anger and emotion, to someone who is seemingly in control of his emotions at all times. While he has a mean streak still he's ultimately very level headed and even acting in revenge he rarely raises his voice.
  • Eli starts off as an insecure bullying victim before becoming a vicious bully himself as Hawk. A Heel Realization and humiliation from Cobra Kai causes him to lose his confidence and give up Karate until Demetri brings him to Miyagi-Do, wherein Eli becomes the friendly kid he used to be once again, but also regains his confidence.
  • Terry Silver in both story and meta senses. In a meta sense, the show comes up with plausible explanations for his improbable behavior in Part III, particularly that he was using a very 80's substance. In story, Silver appears to have indeed cleaned up his act in the intervening years. Unfortunately, his Character Development was catastrophically un-developed when Kreese came back into his world.
• Chekhov's Gun: Season 5: That red jello that's so popular in the prison cantina? It becomes useful as fake blood in the season finale.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The referee in Season 4's All-Valley finals seems to be just another background ref, sometimes yelled at by the audience but ultimately window dressing. At the end of the episode, we learn that Silver bribed him to ensure Tory wins the championship fight.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • Episode 5 shows Johnny teaching Miguel more specific moves and sparring with him, going into detail about how to change your line of attack, staying aware of your surroundings and how to slip out of a choke hold. Miguel ends up in a lunchroom brawl with Kyler's gang where all of those moves are needed. He even admits it's become second nature to him now.
  • Once a season, Daniel teaches his students a move that they later use in a fight.
    • Season 1: Daniel demonstrates a complex move to Robby that involves propping yourself on one hand to do a two-legged kick from the ground. Robby is shown practicing balancing on one hand, and later uses it in the tournament to score a point against Miguel.
    • Season 2: Daniel teaches Sam and Robby the Wheel Technique, which serves them well when fighting Hawk's gang at the food court. When Hawk changes sides in the Season 3 finale, he and Demetri use the technique to take down several Cobra Kais.
    • Season 3: Daniel teaches Sam how to fight with bo staffs in the LaRussos' home dojo. In the season 3 finale, when Tory corners Sam in this dojo and begins attacking her with a pair of nunchucks, Sam grabs one of the staffs to block Tory's attacks and disarms her.
  • In Season 3, Chozen teaches Daniel a new technique within the Miyagi-Do pantheon which allows him to essentially paralyze the limbs of his opponent temporarily with the use of pressure points. The goal, to subdue foes in order to force surrender or kill in the midst of war. Daniel uses these moves to immobilize Kreese in the season finale.
  • In Season 3, Sam teaches Miguel the drum technique during a bout of sparring, which we see him use that evening (and one episode later) when he gets a second wind to defeat Kyler.
  • In Season 4 Johnny teaches Miguel a "flying tornado kick". He attempts to use this in his match against Eli only for the force of rotation to injure his back once again, albeit only a pulled muscle but it does take him out of the tourney. Notably though, Sam also was taught the technique by Johnny and she uses it to great effect herself in the All-Valley.
  • In Season 4, Johnny and Daniel have an exhibition. When Daniel attempts to use his Dangerous Forbidden Technique, the Pressure Point Paralysis on Johnny, Johnny is able to pin Daniel to the mat with his legs before Daniel is able to disable them, scoring a point. Eli ends up using the same exact move in order to score the deciding point in the All-Valley Finals against Robby, winning him the tournament. This is especially interesting as Eli wasn't even present for said maneuver, only showing up after the fight concluded due to Cobra Kai ambushing him and removing his mohawk. Which means that sometime after joining Miyagi-Do someone showed him the recording of the fight and he learned the skill.
  • In Season 5, one of Chozen's lessons has the students trying to protect chicken eggs from him trying to smash them. They fail miserably until they work together as a unit, putting all the eggs in a bucket and fighting together to keep Chozen away from them. In the season finale, they "protect the egg!" as Anthony grabs the tablet with Silver's incriminating upload, the Miyagi-Fangs outnumbered 3-to-1 by Cobra Kais but holding them off until the evidence can go online.
  • Villainous one in Season 5. Terry teaches Kenny the "Silver Bullet" punch, which Kenny uses to knock Hawk out of the running in the Taikai qualifiers. With the technique established, we can see Terry preparing to use it on Daniel in the Season Finale... and since Daniel saw it in action, he's prepared to defend against it.
• Color Motif:
  • Generally, Daniel and Miyagi-Dos wear blue color clothing, while Cobra Kais wear reds and blacks in the same situation. In season 3, Johnny and Eagle Fangs predominantly wear red and gold.
  • Sam notably wears purple or red-blue patterned clothes when around Miguel, to reflect her position as a bridge between two dojos.
  • Miguel also has a fair number of outfits that feature red and blue in them, for the same reasons as Sam.
  • After Johnny loses the dojo to Kreese, Cobra Kai gradually begins to lose their association with red as this instead becomes the colour of Eagle Fang. By the time Silver opens dojos all over the Valley in season 5, Cobra Kai have an almost exclusively black colour palette.
  • In the finale of season 5, as Daniel fights Silver, having found support and balance, and wins, he's wearing purple.
• Combat Pragmatist: Deconstructed. Johnny struggles to find the line of morality between Cobra Kai standing for winning at absolutely all costs and having some sense of honor. His students often interpret his message more ruthlessly than he intends, forcing him to backtrack. Kreese's version of Cobra Kai embraces absolute pragmatism, which causes Johnny further problems.
• Competing Product Potshot: Daniel LaRusso's advertisement for Miyagi-do Karate alludes to a snake in the advertisement, symbolizing an attack against Johnny Lawrence's Cobra Kai dojo.
• Continuity Drift: The series generally goes the Revision route when making changes to what was implied in the Karate Kid films, avoiding directly contradicting what is stated onscreen, but occasionally makes minor alterations to continuity:
  • Though the first film establishes that Johnny is a two-time All Valley champion, the announcer who declares Daniel the winner of the tournament at the end of The Karate Kid Part III clearly states that Daniel is the first person to win two years in a row. Although both of these things could be true, it would imply Johnny won the tournament as a high school freshman, lost the following year, then won again the year before he faced Daniel. Apparently considering this chain of events too unlikely or convoluted, Cobra Kai's writers simplified things by ignoring the line from Part III and stating that Johnny did, in fact, win the tournament both of the two years before he faced Daniel.
  • A barely-audible line in the first film refers to Bobby Brown as the runner-up of the previous year's tournament. Cobra Kai instead establishes that Tommy was the runner-up, and Bobby placed third.
  • Some Japanese writing in The Karate Kid Part II indicates that Mr. Miyagi's first name is Nariyoshi, though this is contradicted in The Next Karate Kid, where it is stated that his name is Kesuke. Cobra Kai reverts to what was stated in Part II, as Miyagi's gravestone shows that his name is Nariyoshi, though series creator Jon Hurwitz has implied that Kesuke may be his middle name.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In Season 1, Episode 5, Daniel mentions his first trip to Okinawa, which happened in Part II.
  • To The Karate Kid Part III in Episode 7: Daniel mentions Mr. Miyagi's Little Trees as part of a Noodle Incident.
  • When the kids from Miyagi-Do train in a meat locker, there are boxes labeled FERNANDEZ everywhere. It seems Freddy is in the meat business now.
  • Robby finds Daniel's Okinawan hand drum in the Miyagi dojo, and Daniel mentions how it "saved his life," referring to the climax of The Karate Kid Part II.
  • In the season 4 finale, Carrie Underwood makes a guest appearance and sings a song titled "The Moment of Truth." In some countries where Karate did not have a good reputation, The Karate Kid was titled The Moment of Truth. The song, originally by Survivor, was also the basis for the first movie's main theme and plays over the end credits.
• Contrived Coincidence: Much of the conflict and ensuing resolution in the series is driven by them.
  • While drunkenly reminiscing about the tournament where he lost to Daniel, Johnny's car is t-boned by an SUV with Daniel's daughter inside, and then his car is towed to Daniel's auto dealership. Then Sam happens to show up.
  • The confrontation that kicks off much of the series involves Johnny being present when Kyler (Sam's friend and then love-interest) is beating up Miguel (his neighbor) and ends up intervening. This leads to Daniel confronting Johnny for beating up his daughter's boyfriend.
  • Immediately after Johnny meets Carmen's new boyfriend, he happens to be in the same bar as the guy, while he loudly boasts about how he's just going to dump her after he sleeps with her. The San Fernando Valley just isn't that small.
  • While at the beach club with the LaRussos, Robby realizes that his old crew is at the same club, stealing wallets on the same day.
  • Justified in some cases (there's not much to do at home and the kids are very social, so of course they'd constantly go out — the mall is a common hangout for kids, mutual friends invite them to parties, they go to school together, they're rushed to the local hospital, and so on).
  • The mother of all of these happens in Season 3. Daniel heads to Japan to try and save his dealership's contract with Doyona, but the deal falls through and he heads to Okinawa to see Mr. Miyagi's old village. That he almost instantly runs into his former love interest isn't implausible (she runs a dance school that's holding a public performance). But it turns out that she's still in touch with the girl who's life he saved in The Karate Kid Part II, who happens to be a highly placed executive in the same company he needed to make a deal with. This is sort of handwaved as being a sort of cosmic karma.
  • As of Season 3, it is revealed that all three of the main teenage characters from the original film had children in the same year, as Daniel, Johnny and Ali all have 17-year-old kids.
  • Robby Keene's life is practically defined by this.
    • In season 1, Robby swallows his pride and decides to go see Johnny, just in time to see him giving Miguel his old gi. Seeing his father having a father-son moment with some random kid leads Robby to go off and work for Daniel to spite his father.
    • Later in the season, the discoveries that Robby is Johnny's son (for Daniel) and is getting trained by Daniel (for Johnny) happen because Robby is in Daniel's home dojo waiting for him.
    • In season 3 episode 8, Robby happens to encounter Sam play-fighting with Miguel when he goes to Miyagi-Do just looking for a place to crash. This is the final straw that leads to Robby choosing to join Cobra Kai.
  • In Season 4, the decision is made for the All-Valley to finally separate the B=boys and girls into separate divisions and make it so the dojo with the most points in all the various competitions wins the Grand Championship. This happens almost immediately after the Miyagi-Do/Eagle Fang merger falls apart. All three groups note how perfect or poorly the timing is as Miyagi-Do lacks a legitimate boys' Ace and Eagle Fang has no girls at all. If this information had come to light even a little bit sooner, it likely would've galvanized the two dojos to stay together if for no other reason than necessity.
  • In Season 5's finale, Johnny, Mike Barnes and Chozen drunkenly decide to go charge into Silver's home to attack him at almost the same exact time that Miyagi-Fang + Tory enact their plan to break into the Cobra Kai flagship to obtain incriminating evidence to take down Silver. The timing is important as if the kids decided to do it earlier, Silver and Sensei Kim would've immediately noticed due to security cameras and would've had them taken out (and there would've been no one home for the three adults to actually attack). If they decided to do it later, Silver and Sensei Kim would've had no reason to leave during said attack and all three adults would've ended up dead. The timing is so perfect that even Silver believes that it's an intentional attack on two fronts.
• Cool Shades:
  • In the first season, Johnny puts a pair on before driving away in his sports car. It doesn't make him as cool as he thinks he is.
  • In "Back in Black", both Johnny and Miguel wear a pair while in his new car. Stopping at a red light, they draw the attention of a mother-daughter pair in the next car over. Johnny warns Miguel to play it cool before they drive off.
• Cool Old Lady: Miguel's grandma Rosa is all on-board with him becoming a fighter and beating up bullies. She's also a bit of a Deadpan Snarker (in her own language) and likes to smoke pot.
• Continuity Snarl: In season 2 episode 8, Sam's birthday is established to be October 14, 2002, as shown when Daniel goes through a scrapbook and we see a card that says "Sam's first birthday," dated October 14, 2003. That would make her 14 in the first episode of season 1. Yet in episode 6, when Daniel tries to get Sam to spar with him, the dialogue establishes Sam to be 16 ("eight years ago, I was 8," Sam says), which would put her birthday in 2001. The 2001 date also happens to make more sense since if Sam were 15 in season 1, she'd be too young to drive a car without a learner's permit (she agrees to take Yasmine to school in episode 2 after Yasmine totals her car in the hit-and-run on Johnny's Firebird, she drives Miguel on their first date, etc.).
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • Daniel comes off this way when he uses his influence to increase the rent on the strip mall where the Cobra Kai dojo is located in the hopes of driving Johnny out of business. He at least has the decency to realize that he's becoming unbalanced after Amanda calls him out on it, although this does nothing to help the people hurt by his actions. (It's worth mentioning that because of laws passed in the 1960s, when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, just becoming a car dealer in Southern California requires, at minimum, shades of this through territorial exclusivity.)
  • Tom Cole, Daniel's business rival, takes advantage of Daniel's reputation suffering in the aftermath of the school brawl to convince Doyona to cut ties with Daniel.
  • Terry Silver was already one in The Karate Kid Part III where he bribed prosecutors and juries, illegally dumped chloride sludge, and schemed to humiliate Daniel and Mr. Miyagi as revenge for their humiliation of Kreese. Season 4 sees him up to his old tricks again as Kreese calls on him to help train his Cobra Kais for the All-Valley and counter Daniel's alliance with Johnny.
• Cranky Landlord: Armand Zarkarian, the owner of the strip mall where Cobra Kai sets up their dojo, is even worse than most examples of this trope. While he couldn't care less if his tenants' businesses are safe or law-abiding, he seizes even the most half-assed excuses to raise their rent. And he betrays Johnny by granting the lease for the Cobra Kai dojo to Kreese.
• Crazy Homeless People: Johnny makes an ill-advised decision to recruit Lynn, a shiftless homeless woman, to help advertise his dojo. While she is not actually violent, she clearly lacks the focus to hold Johnny's Cobra Kai sign for any length of time. By Season 3, she thinks Johnny is stalking her, and maybe even has a crush on her.
• Crime of Self-Defense:
  • Johnny beats up the bullies who were assaulting Miguel and attacked Johnny when he interfered. When the cops arrive, they arrest him since all they saw was an adult beating up some teenagers. Later, Daniel, not knowing the full story, gives Johnny crap about his actions.
  • Amanda is livid about Sam getting suspended for her part in the school brawl, seeing as Tory was the aggressor in the matter and Sam was only fighting back.
• Cross-Referenced Titles:
  • The first season finale is "Mercy", the second season premiere "Mercy part II", and the second season finale is titled "No Mercy".
  • Episodes 2 and 3 of season 4 are titled after a proverb from Mr. Miyagi from the first movie: "First Learn Stand" and "Then Learn Fly".
• Cultural Rebel: Played for Laughs, Daniel invites Kyler over for dinner. He prepares authentic Japanese sashimi. Kyler, who is of east Asian descent, says he's not fond of fish... but he loves fish sticks. Half the joke was the casual ignorance of rejecting a meal offered by a gracious host and the other half was that he prefers standard American food rather than Asian cuisine because of his ancestry (Daniel asks where his parents are from, he says they're from Irvine, or so he thinks).
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Season 1:
    • Befitting the twisted equivalent of Mr. Miyagi that he becomes, Johnny handily mows down every gang of jerkasses who incurs his wrath. At least until the police arrive.
    • When Miguel finally puts his training to use against Kyler and his cohorts in the lunchroom, he utterly demolishes all four at the same time.
    • Tom Cole's boba tea stood no chance against Daniel's reverse crescent kick.
    • Bert unfortunately gets on the receiving end of this against a much larger opponent.
    • Miguel and Robby easily breeze through their opponents in the All-Valley prior to the semis.
  • Season 2:
    • When Robby is jumped by his former thief gang in Season 2, Daniel easily takes down all three of them.
    • Sam and Robby take down the Cobra Kais at the mall rather convincingly, with Hawk being the only real challenge.
    • Mikey stood absolutely no chance against Miguel and Tory in the Coyote Creek Challenge, and is taken out rather quickly.
    • Graham had absolutely no chance when it came down to facing off Johnny after the latter calls him out for his shitty treatment of Carmen.
    • Stingray, the show's comic relief, shows what he is really capable of by brutally defeating nameless Miyagi-Do students in the school fight with little to no effort.
  • Season 3:
    • Daniel and Johnny vs. an entire chop shop. They never stood much of a chance.
    • In juvie, Shawn and his two thugs take Robby down and then kick him viciously. It takes advice from Kreese for Robby to "strike first" for this to be an even match.
    • Cobra Kai vs Miyagi-Do at Golf n' Stuff. Goes the complete opposite direction of their last encounter. Miyagi-Do starts this fight (though CK obviously antagonized them), and Cobra Kai wholly wipes them out, ending with Hawk breaking Demetri's arm while Sam watches.
    • Kreese's combat trials featuring Mitch vs. Kyler (the former suffering from The Worf Effect), Tory vs. Sarah (the basketball player Kreese recruits), and Hawk giving a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Brucks.
    • Kreese going up against Armand’s imposing nephews when Armand himself tries to evict him. While it’s off-screen, the results aren’t pretty, on the nephews’ side.
    • Hawk pits himself against Stiven in the LaRusso House Fight. Guess who wins?
    • Robby trying to pick a fight with Johnny after the latter pins down Kreese (albeit temporarily). Johnny still manages to beat his son without even trying.
  • Season 4:
    • Robby vs. the rest of the Cobra Kais. Even against Tory, the former Miyagi-Do student quickly proves why he is leagues ahead of them when not one can land a clean hit.
    • Daniel vs. the hockey players. As usual, the Miyagi-Do sensei demolishes the meatheads in quick succession, something Johnny is impressed by.
    • Terry gives not one, but two, both against highly trained karatekas. First, against Robby, who can’t land a hit on him. Another against Johnny Lawrence, something Kreese couldn’t even do in the previous seasons.
    • Tory takes down Piper rather quickly during a weakness lesson at the Cobra Kai dojo.
    • Kenny manages to convincingly teach Anthony LaRusso and his Gang of Bullies a lesson, first by having them split up in the library, and then taking all of them down one by one.
    • The All-Valley has several of these. First, the major fighters against the nameless extras, particularly in the qualifying rounds (Miguel vs. Post, Demetri vs. Robson). Then, Eli gives an absolutely embarrassing one to Kyler, shutting him out 3-0 in quick succession. Tory breezes through Devon rather easily (though this might be mitigated given the ref advantage from Silver), it takes Sam adopting Johnny’s style to give one to Piper, and Robby delivers an absolutely brutal one to Kenny when Kreese gives him a pep talk. Sam and Tory easily demolish their semifinals’ opponents prior to their epic fight, and the same goes with Robby against Demetri despite the latter making him work a little.
  • Season 5:
    • Miguel doesn't have a problem taking down a member of the wrong Hector Salazar's gang.
    • Johnny and Robby against the scammers. At this point, we all know too well who's going to easily come out on top.
    • Chozen makes it look all too easy on, as Terry Silver claims, the valley's "best senseis."
    • Kenny had absolutely no chance against Hawk during the waterpark fight, whom he dares to take on.
    • Terry Silver gives an absolutely brutal one to Daniel LaRusso in their fight at Stingray's apartment.
    • Kreese against a gang of prison inmates proves that a bunch of thugs are no match for a karate-trained veteran.
    • Stingray gives a brutal one against teenage karate students like in Season 2, the difference being that it was against Cobra Kai rather than Miyagi-Do this time around.
    • Miguel's performance in the flagship dojo fight can be summed up as "What if Miguel fought in the Season 3 house fight if he didn't have the back injury?". He manages to take down three Cobra Kais in succession to save Robby. Even Kenny's speed combined with an initial sneak attack couldn't connect with Miguel who easily blocked it and all his moments fighting Miguel ended with him being kicked to the ground.
• Curb Stomp Cushion:
  • Season 1:
    • Miguel decides to stand up against Kyler and his gang after his friends bail, he does this despite being in a confined space and outnumbered 4 to 1. He does manage to get in one clean kick, about the only thing he had practice on, and his friends admit that despite being stupid it took guts to even try.
    • Robby fighting Trey and Cruz outside LaRusso Auto. He managed to put up an impressive fight against his former partners in crime, but he has only been training in karate for a few weeks and is only saved from a security camera capturing Trey and Cruz.
  • Season 2:
    • Tory's sparring match against Miguel. Miguel was easily able to subdue her, but a few surprise attacks and unexpected take-downs from Tory were enough to impress Johnny and Kreese.
    • This happens in the bar fight with the OG Cobra Kais against some bar hooligans combined with Surprisingly Realistic Outcome. Johnny was able to effortlessly take out the majority of the thugs and while the OG Cobras Still Got It, they are still out of practice for a few decades and had to rely on outnumbering some of them. Even Johnny was hit with this as the instigator of the fight gets up and chokeholds him.
  • Season 3:
    • Robby and Shawn are on both the receiving and giving end of this. In the first fight, Robby being defense only had him thoroughly trounced by Shawn and his gang but he still managed to defend himself quite well initially. In their second fight, Robby was on the verge of winning against Shawn before being separated by guards. Despite Robby's karate skills, Shawn was strong and tough enough to give Robby a lot of trouble.
    • In the first half of the house fight, the Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang alliance were being severely beaten by Cobra Kai, Miguel's back injury making it harder for him to fight. However, Sam and surprisingly Mitch were the only ones winning their fights with Sam taking down Paul and Mitch defeating Mikey.
  • Season 4:
    • Daniel effortlessly took out five hockey players in succession, but the last one was able to briefly tackle Daniel and pin him up against a glass window.
    • Johnny showed off some impressive Miyagi-Do techniques combined with his inherent offensive Eagle Fang karate against Terry Silver, but ultimately still suffered a loss brutal enough that even Kreese was appalled by this.
    • Demetri in the semi-finals against Robby Keene. Despite not scoring a single point, Demetri's impressive performance during the last round was enough to briefly make Robby struggle, managing to successfully throw Robby to the ground.
  • Season 5:
    • Daniel's first fight against Silver ended in him thoroughly beaten, but he still manages to put up an impressive fight and even having a small Heroic Second Wind. Unfortunately, even that was not enough to defeat Silver.
    • Kyler of all people in the flagship dojo fight briefly has one. Even after a "Reason You Suck" Speech from Hawk, Kyler manages to pin Hawk's head to the table and knock him to the ground before getting defeated.
• Curse Cut Short:
  • In one of the teaser trailers, when Miguel asks Johnny if there is any particular way he wants him to wash some windows, the response from Johnny is:
    Johnny: No, I don't give a sh-
  • Daniel, when he spies the defaced billboard.
    Daniel: MOTHERF-
• Cutaway Gag: When Miguel is being nursed by his mother and grandmother in episode 4:
  Carmen: (about Johnny) Mama, this man is a bad influence.
  Miguel: He is not! You don't know him!
  Carmen: I know he's a loser.
  Miguel: He is not a loser! If you knew him, you'd see — he's a great man!
  (Cut to Johnny's squalid apartment, with him passed out on the floor next to a spilled can of Coors Banquet.)
  • Happens twice in "Nature Versus Nurture"
    • At the end of a flashback, Kreese offers Betsy a lift. Immediately cut to a gas pump with the words "LIFT" written on it as Johnny and Daniel gas up Daniel's Audi.
    • Kreese holds his cigar cutter against Tory's skeezy landlord's finger. Right after the man yields, we cut to Miguel slicing a hot dog diagonally.
• Cyberbullying: In Season 1, it's Yasmine's go-to tactic for making fun of Aisha's size (for example, posting: "the buffet table is under attack"), and later Sam after Kyler begins spreading rumors about her.

D

• Dare to Be Badass: Johnny literally tells his students "All that matters is that you become badass!"
• Dark Action Girl: Tory Nichols is a skilled fighter from her first appearance, and by the end of Season 3, she's proven herself as one of Kreese's top pupils.
• Dark Reprise: The song "Cruel Summer" gets this treatment for the Season 2 teaser trailers, and plays out the Season 2 finale.
• Darker and Edgier: The original films didn't shy away from some intense violence, but were more subdued inspirational movies that could appeal to all ages. This series is a lot more cynical and regularly features harsh language, graphic violence, alcohol and drug use, dysfunctional families, mental illness and sexuality, which ups the target audience a few years.
• Date Rape Averted: In Season 1 Episode 3, Daniel busts down the door when he finds Kyler taking Sam into a classroom at the Halloween dance. He tries to warn Sam that Kyler is bad news, but Sam doesn't heed his warning and dismissively shoots him down for not keeping to his promise of not openly humiliating her, then furiously storms off. Daniel had read Kyler's texts to Sam in which he promised to have "something BIG" to show her at the school dance, and between that and what Johnny has told him about how Kyler and his gang were picking on teens half his size, it's very likely Kyler might've been trying to get Sam alone so he could pressure her into having sex with him, and rape her if she refused. Kyler's language with Brucks in the next scene where Brucks says "You had her in the palm of your dick" and they mention the bracelet trick having worked on another girl, and the fact Kyler does try to grope Sam in a darkened movie theater in the very next episode, supports this.
• Dating What Daddy Hates:
  • Invoked In-Universe after Louie suggests that Daniel engage in a little Twerp Sweating with Kyler to keep him in line. Anoush objects that doing so will result in this trope:
    Anoush: Exactly. You're going to drive Sam right into this guy's arms. Trust me, I date girls with Daddy Issues, they're the worst... (lower) and the best.
  • The series skirts this trope again when Sam gets together with Miguel, with the latter being painfully aware that her father isn't going to smile on her dating Cobra Kai's prize student. Luckily for her (we guess), Miguel becomes a jerkass and ruins their relationship before the issue can come to a head with Daniel... though Sam's inability to be open with her dad about her boyfriend is the core of their initial relationship troubles. Thankfully mitigated when she and Miguel get back together in Season 3, and Daniel catches them kissing in the Miyagi-Do dojo. Sam stands her ground and convinces her dad to talk to Miguel.
• Deadly Prank:
  • Louie thinks it will be hilarious to haze Robby and tell him to move a car on the showroom floor closer to the window. They give him the car keys and wait for hilarity to ensue. Robby has no idea what he is supposed to do and almost runs over a group of customers.
  • Later, Louie decides to get back at Johnny for the dick on the billboard by torching Johnny's car. As Johnny points out, the fire could have easily spread and burned down the apartment complex. Not to mention that Louie brought along a couple of biker thugs who attacked Johnny when he caught them in the act.
• Deadly Sparring: This type of sparring is encouraged within the titular Thug Dojo as part of their "strike first, strike hard" philosophy. As Cobra Kai believes in showing no mercy to their opponents or expecting any from them, their sparring sessions are often just as brutal as a real street fight. This means that unsuspecting potential students trying out for the dojo can find themselves on the receiving end of a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown as Brucks did at Hawk's hands.
• Decon-Recon Switch: The series takes a more realistic look at the original Karate Kid's moments and ideas for good and bad. For all the negative consequences and dismissal that Johnny and Daniel experience through the revival of Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do throughout the valley, they still manage to have a positive effect on the lives of the future generation, using karate to teach lost and weak-willed people to stand up for themselves and gain genuine strength both physically and mentally.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype:
  • The series looks at the typical bully character in 80s teen movies (of which Johnny is considered one of the archetypal examples) and explores both what would have created such a person, and what would happen to them in the future. It's shown that Johnny was once a sweet kid, but with a miserable home life, where his stepfather alternated between criticizing and ignoring him. John Kreese was even more abusive (emotionally and physically), but at least gave Johnny attention and encouragement, causing Johnny to embrace his aggressive and violent worldview.^note Interestingly, William Zabka apparently developed the basics of this backstory to guide his performance in the original film. All of this caused him to peak in high school, leaving him with an attitude that doesn't work in the adult world, and an endless nostalgia for his youth. He ends up a miserable, alcoholic manchild in his 50's with neither a stable career nor family life. And even when he tries to use his karate skills to build a stable life, his toxic conditioning continues to cause problems. As shown with how his students turn out by the end of Season 1.
  • Follow along on this one. A waiter gets easily bullied, but stands up to them and even beats them in a fight to win the heart of a young lady. He joins the war effort to try and help people and makes a camaraderie with his brothers in the army. He joins a special force but they get all captured after he chooses not to blow up a location with his fellow soldier still within the blast radius, only for said soldier to be killed in front of him instead. He's forced to fight to the death with his captain who mocks his inability to discard his humanity and reveals that his girlfriend died in a tragic car accident right before the mission. He ends up defeating the captain using some pragmatic action, and sends him to his death for his troubles. He earns the undying loyalty of one of his other friends in the army. Sounds like a solid, if trope filled, army story for a hero right? That's the life of John Kreese and Terry Silver.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: As expected for a series who focuses on someone who was a bully in the 80s. So far in the series, Johnny has shown a dislike for immigrants, opposition to women fighting (while claiming the US Army doesn't allow them), disregard for medical problems like asthma or physical defects people are born with, and a general dislike towards the current "pansy-ass generation" he lives in.
• Dented Iron: Kreese is much older now and surprisingly spry for his age, but no longer has the physical edge he once had. It's implied his knuckles never properly healed after his encounter with Miyagi in Part II.
• Designated Girl Fight:
  • In Season 2, Tory and Sam develop an animosity towards each other, mainly from Tory feeling jealous of Sam's privilege and that Miguel still has feelings for her. It culminates in the season finale, where Tory publicly calls her out to a brawl after seeing Sam and Miguel kiss.
  • This happens again in the Season 3 finale fight at the LaRussos' house. Unlike the school fight, the two girls each have to fight through several other male fighters before they face off against each other.
  • When Kreese brings in new recruits midway through season 3 to fill out Cobra Kai ranks, Tory fights against the only girl scouted.
  • Enforced in Season 4, where the committee decides to segregate the competition by gender, so that the girls can only fight girls, resulting in two All-Valley Champions, a male and a female.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Johnny reopens the Cobra Kai dojo without having any clue about OSHA regulations, business insurance, advertising, or "handshake" deals. All of those things come back to bite him on one level or another, and it all ends with Johnny losing the dojo to Kreese at the end of Season 2.
  • A dojo is a business that has to pay rent and other expenses; it cannot survive with one paying customer. Johnny almost tanks his new business because he takes an "if you build it, they will come" approach and fails to advertise. He compensates for a lack of business in the meantime by subletting the dojo to a yoga class for a few hours a week.
  • At the Halloween Dance, Miguel lands a powerful kick against Kyler... which puts him down for about five seconds before he recovers and he and his friends gang up on Miguel and give him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Miguel's still in the very early stages of his training and only knows one move, so he's definitely not ready to take on four more experienced and bigger opponents.
  • When Johnny has Miguel learn how to use his legs by pushing him into a pool with his hands bound and Miguel takes a while to get back to the surface, Johnny says to himself that he probably should have asked Miguel if he knew how to swim first.
  • Daniel attempts to get Cobra Kai closed down by getting the strip mall's owner to hike up the rent. Unfortunately he is so focused on stopping Johnny that he does not consider how this will affect the mall's other businesses, who will now have a much harder time getting by and likely end up closing down.
  • Not knowing any way to teach karate other than to copy exactly what he was taught, Johnny passes down Kreese's teachings to the letter. He fails to realize the inherent flaws in Cobra Kai's philosophy until it is too late, and inadvertently turns his students into the exact same kind of bullies he and his friends were at their age.
  • In Season 3, Amanda pulls the same move Daniel did above to finally get rid of Kreese after going to the police failed. Apparently, she doesn't consider what would happen if this move didn't work... which is pissing off the most psychotic person in the Valley. She learns her lesson very fast as Kreese makes short work of Armand and his nephews, then sends a cobra to clear out the dealership.
  • In Season 4 we follow up on the ending shot of Season 3 where Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang combine their dojos. We see that Daniel and Johnny gave zero thought into how to actually merge their dojos and lessons properly and it causes issues almost immediately. Unsurprisingly the merger falls apart halfway through the season, though this was more due to the pressure of Terry Silver showing up and the inherent jealousy that both men had towards the other taking in their top student.
  • In the Season 5 finale Mike Barnes, Chozen and Johnny decide in their infinite, drunken wisdom to storm Silver's residence to kick his ass. Despite Daniel telling them how monumentally stupid the idea is they go through with it anyway. Even Silver can't completely believe they would do something so stupid, which basically gives him carte blanche to KILL them all but legally with his DA connections. If not for the extreme coincidence that Miyagi Fang decided to storm Cobra Kai to retrieve video footage, which forced Silver and Sensei Kim to vacate sooner to intervene, all three would've ended up dead.
• Diner Brawl:
  • Season 1 features a cafeteria variation, when Kyler and his posse decide to engage in their usual shenanigans in the school lunchroom after Sam confronts him about his sexual harassment. This time, they all get hit with a Curb-Stomp Battle courtesy of Miguel, wanting payback for their earlier altercations with him.
  • Season 2 has a fight in the mall food court, where Robby and Sam fend off Hawk and his gang to protect Demetri. They also demonstrate successful use of the wheel technique.
  • Season 3 shows that Kreese's girlfriend Betsy fell for him after he beat up her abusive jock boyfriend David and his buddies who picked on him while he was working as a diner busboy.
• Disappeared Dad:
  • Johnny wasn't much of a presence in Robby's life, right from the moment he was born. He's trying to make up for it now, but Robby feels it's too little, too late.
  • Daniel mentions losing his father when he was eight.
  • Miguel's dad apparently was a bad man, so Carmen left him (with Miguel in tow) before Miguel was old enough to know him.
  • Johnny grew up with an asshole stepfather, and later mentions never having known his real father. It seems this is largely why he never felt equipped to be a father for Robby.
• Disaster Dominoes: Season 2 is a hotbed of this, but Moon takes it to an extreme. She invites both dojos to her house in an attempt to smooth out the bad blood brewing between the sides. She becomes an Unwitting Instigator of Doom in the process (also see that entry here).
• Disc-One Final Boss:
  • Kyler is the first real villain of the series: his bullying is what initially drives Miguel. But halfway through the season, he's soundly defeated and ceases to be a threat. The rest of Season 1 is a battle between Johnny and Daniel's opposing philosophies, where both characters are sympathetic. In Season 2, John Kreese later emerges after Cobra Kai's victory in the All-Valley and becomes the new Big Bad after he takes over the dojo from Johnny.
  • And as of the Season 4 finale, Kreese might as well serve as this, given Terry Silver's betrayal of him and completely taking over the dojo, becoming the series' new Big Bad for the rest of the season.
• Disco Dan: Johnny still drives a sports car from The '80s, listens only to "hair metal" bands, and even prints flyers for his dojo in the same style as the original Cobra Kai. He also shows a distressing ignorance of social media and uses a seriously outdated flip-phone for a cell phone. Not to mention his social views... When he does finally get a smartphone in Season 2, he still ends up perplexed when he meets a woman with a smart watch, something that he had no clue even existed.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Kyler and his gang attack Miguel simply because Miguel accidentally ruined their plan to buy alcohol with fake I.D.s.
  • In response to Johnny vandalizing his billboard, Daniel manipulates Johnny's landlord into doubling the rent on the strip mall property where Cobra Kai is located, affecting not only Johnny but all of the mall's tenants. Amanda calls him out on this.
  • During a timeout in the tournament, Hawk attacks Robby while the latter's back is turned and injures his shoulder simply because Robby made a crack about Hawk's haircut. Hawk is immediately disqualified.
  • Hawk's response to a bad Yelp review from Demetri is to attempt a five on one beating in the mall, then again in the school fight.
  • Tory's response to seeing Sam drunkenly and mistakenly kiss Miguel is to pick a fight in school which rapidly engages the rest of the Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do students, including a prolonged beating for both girls and nearly disfiguring Sam with her spiked wristband (which destroys her blouse and catches her arm instead).
  • In the Season 3 finale, both Johnny and Daniel come after Kreese for him sending Cobra Kai to break into Daniel's house to assault their star pupils. So he attempts to murder both of them in return. Only Johnny and Daniel's defense stopped them from getting stabbed by a sai and broken glass respectively.
• Distaff Counterpart:
  • In "Back in Black", when Johnny and Miguel drive to Cobra Kai, while listening to song with the similar name of the episode title by AC/DC, another car with a mother-daughter pair stops beside them and looks like the respective counterparts to Johnny and Miguel, with Johnny warning Miguel to play it cool.
  Johnny: Don't look. Play it cool.
  • In "Glory of Love", Johnny meets an attractive redhead at a bar who basically seems like a female version of himself. She intentionally bumps into him as a way of introducing herself (a move that Johnny suggested to Miguel earlier), and they both long for the simpler days of yesteryear. But Johnny cuts their date short without even getting her number when he learns that Carmen's boyfriend plans on pulling a pump-and-dump on Carmen.
• Distant Sequel: The series is set 34 years after the events of the first film in the original trilogy.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Daniel and Johnny's conversation early in season 4 about splitting up their dojos, with all of their talk about "telling the kids", plays strongly like a couple planning to tell their children about their divorce.
  • Silver's taunting of Daniel in the convenience store near the Cobra Kai dojo gains a deeply disturbing undertone once Silver tells Daniel "You know you liked it." He's talking about his training Daniel in brutal methods in 1985 (and to be fair Daniel did come to him and ask for training), but given Silver's general demeanor, it comes across very similarly to a rapist taunting their victim.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • Miguel and Aisha end up violently humiliating Kyler and Yasmine, respectively, after being bullied by them for most of the first season.
  • This also happens with Kenny, who is goes to Cobra Kai to learn how to stand up to Anthony LaRusso's incessant bullying. While Anthony does eventually feel bad about it and genuinely try to make amends, by then it's too little too late: cue beating from the now-hopped-up-on-Cobra-Kai Kenny.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Hawk does not like being called by his old name, even (or especially) by his old friend Demetri. He returns to being Eli by the end of season 4.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!:
  • Even when he's down and out, Johnny would sooner die on the street than accept money from his dickish stepfather.
  • Aisha wants none of Sam's sympathy after she was beaten at the All Valley tournament, although they still managed to reconcile with one another.
• Double Entendre: A rare non-vulgar example occurs in the opening minutes of Episode 2, when we see Daniel going about his day set to Dean Martin's "Ain't That a Kick in the Head". The song functions as a reference to both his famous Crane Kick and to his unpleasant surprise when he spots the reopened Cobra Kai dojo.
• Downer Beginning: The series begins by showing a day in the Humiliation Conga that Johnny's middle years have become.
• Downer Ending:
  • Season 1 ends with Cobra Kai winning the tournament (and defeating Daniel's protege Robby) in an underhanded manner, leaving Johnny appalled at the bullies he has unwittingly created. Worse still, John Kreese reappears to congratulate Johnny for his "accomplishment" and hint at his own malevolent intentions for karate in the valley.
  • The ending of Season 2 is incredibly bleak. Failures to deescalate tensions between Cobra Kai and Miyagi-do schools led to an all-out school brawl that destroys the reputations of Johnny and Daniel, have Miguel and Sam hospitalized with the former possibly paralyzed for life, and Kreese takes over Cobra Kai.
  • Season 3 is lighter than the first two (see Bittersweet Ending above) but it still ends with Johnny and Daniel's failure to help Robby pushing him straight into the arms of Kreese.
  • Season 4's ending is nearly as bad as Season 2. Cobra Kai wins the tournament thanks to Terry paying off the referee to call the matches in their favor, making Tory's hard-fought battle a hollow victory. Terry also plans to franchise Cobra Kai and successfully manipulates Stingray into getting Kreese wrongfully arrested so he has complete control. Samantha is crushed by her loss, even though she should have won fair and square, and Miyagi-do has lost for the second year in a row, leaving Daniel back at square one. Anthony's attempt to bury the hatchet with Kenny is met with a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, as Kenny has fully embraced Cobra Kai. Eagle Fang loses the tournament after Miguel's back injury halts his match and he ultimately decides to leave the dojo and find his estranged father in Mexico City. Johnny blames himself for unintentionally disillusioning Miguel and now their relationship is in question.
• Do Wrong, Right:
  • One of the premises on which the Cobra Kai karate style is built. Johnny attempts to mitigate it by emphasizing that, if you're going to attack someone, do so to the person's face rather than behind their back.
  • When Robby storms out of the dealership after being the victim of Louie's prank, he almost punches Daniel when the latter runs after him. Daniel defuses the situation by teaching Robby how to punch.
    Daniel: If you're going to punch your boss, you gotta make a tight fist.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Played with. The series initially focuses on Johnny's POV, which uses a heavy dose of Self-Serving Memory to present himself as the protagonist of the original films, and Daniel as the bully (which argument had been made by internet videos for some time). Later on, we're given more of Daniel's memories and perspective, ultimately making the point that their rivalry was never simple, and that both had reason to feel justified in their anger.
• Dramatic Drop:
  • Daniel is drinking a cup of coffee in his kitchen when he looks out of the window and sees Johnny standing in his backyard, obviously pissed off. The shock causes him to drop the cup, which shatters on the kitchen floor.
  • In Sam's nightmare at the start of Season 3 episode 7, she is shown practicing at Miyagi-Do alone, and drops her water bottle upon seeing Tory appear in the backyard.
• Dramatically Missing the Point:
  • Season 1: Even though he quit the dojo decades ago as a result of his experiences in the films, Johnny failed to learn that Cobra Kai is inherently flawed by virtue of its aggressive and dogmatic ruthlessness, instead believing it was only this way because Kreese was a colossal asshole. He finally gets it once his students become the same kind of bullies that he used to be, despite him attempting to prevent this.
  • Season 2: Daniel preaches many of the philosophies of Miyagi-Do Karate, mainly in terms of teamwork and self-defense, but he never learned (let alone taught) one of the most important facets: how to deescalate a situation or walk away from a fight. This has been a problem for Daniel ever since the opening act of the first movie. He'll often poke the bear without stopping to consider the consequences — this got the hell beaten out of him more than once in the first movie, and it has trapped him in an Escalating War with Cobra Kai in the series. Unfortunately for all involved, Daniel's students end up following his example. Instead of using karate to find balance, they actively pick fights with the Cobra Kai students even when the latter want to stop fighting, and this leads to tragedy in the season finale.
  • Season 3: Amanda always does her best to come off as the voice of reason, and generally does so to good results by tempering Daniel's worst traits. However she fails to consider just how insane things have gotten in this war. She attempts to go to the police only to be shown that they won't take it seriously without a ton of witnesses (like the school brawl). She tries to play dirty herself only to underestimate just how far Kreese is willing to go to get what he wants. For her and a more "normal" setting, Kreese is an Outside-Context Problem that can't be solved by normal means. Her attempts indirectly escalate the war to an even worse degree than it already had been, to the point she's forced to relent and understand that Daniel really does have to fight back with his dojo (though she still sees fit to snark about it when she can).
  • Season 4: Johnny realizes that Miguel hasn't been in the best of moods, but chalks it up to Miguel having some mild issues with Sam. Unfortunately he doesn't notice the actual reason is that Miguel is having growing disillusionment with his relationship with Johnny, on top of all the other stress in his life. So when Miguel injures himself in the semis he tries to push Miguel harder to get back and fight, coming off as only caring about Miguel as far as he can help him win this war. This leads Miguel to pulling a Screw This, I'm Outta Here and not only forfeiting his match, but outright leaving the country to find his father and come to terms with who he is. Johnny realizes he screwed up and now has to go chase him down in Season 5.
• Dramedy: The series is a 30-minute comedy with dramatic and dark moments sprinkled throughout.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Johnny ends up becoming this as he gains more students. In a contrast to Kreese in the first film, who is shown with a largely trained group of students, Johnny is shown treating brand new recruits with high levels of aggression and verbal harassment. It's not entirely clear if he does it on purpose to weed out those with weak dedication or because that's the only way he knows.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Johnny has spent the better part of the last 20 years drinking heavily due to general depression over how crappy his life has turned out.
  • After Miguel gets injured in the school brawl at the end of season 2, Johnny spends the next two weeks going on a drunken bender and getting into fights at bars.
• Drunk Driver: Johnny is no stranger to driving while intoxicated, and he does it again when he hits rock bottom in the first episode. In a Karma Houdini twist, though, the only damage his car ever incurs in the series is mostly not his fault.
• Dude Magnet: Samantha LaRusso attracts three guys in the first season (Kyler, Miguel, Robby). Lampshaded by her dad when he happens to walk in on her having a sparring-turned-makeout session with Miguel in the Miyagi-do.

E-F

• Eagleland:
  • Johnny shows shades of a mild Type B, being a crude and boorish Jerk with a Heart of Gold while taking pride in referring to his karate as "American". A Deleted Scene would have highlighted this in which he dismisses Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as "Brazilian crap" and claims his karate is inherently superior because it's American when trying to (unsuccessfully) get students from a BJJ academy to join Cobra Kai.
  • Kreese is a straighter example of a Type B, insulting a shopkeeper for speaking Spanish while going "America, love it or leave it."
• Easily Forgiven: Played with, for a number of characters.
  • Hawk is a dramatic example, as after months of bullying the Miyagi-do students in very violent ways, he finally realizes they've gone too far and turns to their side. Demetri (who'd taken the worst of his bullying) forgives him immediately, because he just wants his best friend back. However, the rest of the dojo takes more time and effort before he's accepted. It's not until the Cobra Kais take revenge for his "betrayal" that he's treated as being fully redeemed.
  • Shannon Keene. She is forgiven incredibly quickly for abandoning Robby in Season 2, and everyone is supportive of her after she goes to rehab. Granted, Shannon is much better afterwards, but her past misdeeds aren't brought up again by anyone, while other characters like Johnny still have to answer for their past actions.
• Emerging from the Shadows: John Kreese shows up like this at Cobra Kai, alive and well.
• Erotic Dream: Johnny has one of these about Carmen in Season 2, where the two are shown kissing passionately and sparring in his dojo (with her coming out on top), all set to the tune of "Here I Go Again" by Whitesnake. This prompts Johnny to act on his feelings for Carmen in real life and later ask her out.
• Escalating War: The feud between Johnny and Daniel (and by extension, Cobra Kai and Miyagi-do) escalates throughout the show. Amanda is one of the few people to call both men out on it. Unfortunately, by the time the two sensei are prepared to bury the hatchet, the rivalry has infected their students. . . a bunch of teenagers prone to poor impulse control and taking such things way too seriously, with tragic results.
• Eskimos Aren't Real: In season 3, Johnny calls his new karate dojo Eagle Fang, because he wanted to name it after an animal that kills snakes and believes that mongooses aren't real.
• "Eureka!" Moment: In the first episode, Daniel was no doubt trying to be kind when he tells Johnny "Hey, look, I don't blame you for what happened back in the day, all right? I know that wasn't you - it was Cobra Kai. We're all better off without it, am I right?" But that ends up giving Johnny the best idea he's had since high school, and their feud is set into motion.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even Kreese has his limits despite being such a psychopath. He's sympathetic to Tory's plight of having to care for an ill mother, and he has zero tolerance for any attempts to harass a girl, both coming from his upbringing in his past. So he intimidates Tory's sleazy landlord into backing down by threat of cutting off his fingers to manipulate her into returning to Cobra Kai.
• Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Well, "Karate Fighting". In the first season, it's shown that karate has been a niche activity in the valley for sometime now, as the All-Valley Tournament has been struggling with a decline in popularity. However, Johnny's revival of Cobra Kai and Miguel's victory at the All-Valley Tournament (and the new blue tournament mats) seemed to have started to revive public interest in community's favorite forgotten pastime again. From Season 2 through 4, all major dojos began to accumulate more and more students until practically every major character is a trained karateka to some degree. By Season 5, Terry Silver has expanded Cobra Kai into a valley-wide franchise, insuring that karate is only going to expand even further. Piper in Season 4 even lampshades that the reason she joined Cobra Kai was because karate was essentially the new trend everyone was getting into now.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • While Johnny himself did some vicious things in the first film, he finds himself genuinely disturbed when Aisha revealed she's a victim of cyber-bullying. It's more because the bullies are hiding behind anonymous email accounts, though. Back in his day, you teased someone to their face, and bullying was more honorable. More seriously, he finally gets to see the ramifications of spouting an aggressive "no mercy" attitude when he sees what jerks his students have become.
  • Consistent with his portrayal in the first film, Johnny prefers fair fights and at the original tournament hesitated when Kreese ordered him to sweep Daniel's leg. When he sees his students resort to cheap shots, he scolds them for it, but is too shocked at how they were applying his "no mercy" attitude to properly rein them in.
• Evil Counterpart: By season 4, the majority of the main characters in the Miyagi-Do / Eagle Fang alliance has an equivalent character in Cobra Kai.
  • Terry Silver to Daniel LaRusso: Trained karate masters who are also rich influential businessmen (with the former being the latter's former Evil Mentor).
  • John Kreese to Johnny Lawrence: Two Johns who are the co-senseis to their wealthier counterparts (with the former also being the latter's former Evil Mentor).
  • Tory Nichols to Samantha LaRusso: The Action Girls, both of whom have a history with Miguel and Robby. Which leads to...
  • Robby Keene to Miguel Diaz: The top male student, both of whom have a history with Sam, Tory, and Johnny (Robby being the son that Johnny failed, Miguel being the son-figure that Johnny is succeeding).
  • Kyler to the Binary Brothers (both of them being his bully victims):
    • To Eli/Hawk. The Brute and The Berserker. While both were The Bully, especially toward Demetri, Hawk is a bully trying to mask his insecurity as a former bullied victim, whereas Kyler is a bully just For the Evulz. Hawk eventually reforms and defects from Cobra Kai, whereas Kyler is still a bully and remains loyal.
    • To Demetri. When it comes to embodying their dojos' philosophies, both might as well be the best as it. Kyler exemplifies an Attack! Attack! Attack! merciless personality even before joining Cobra Kai (without much Freudian Excuse whatsoever), making him easily the dojo's most ruthless student, whereas Demetri exemplifies an Awesome by Analysis personality of utilizing defensive techniques and only fighting when needed to, making him easily the dojo's most pragmatic student.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Johnny sees Cobra Kai through a Nostalgia Filter, he left after Kreese assaulted him in the parking lot after the tournament but still viewed Cobra Kai itself as a place where he felt powerful, had friends and gained confidence. He wants to disassociate the dojo from Kreese, but is blinded to the fact that their philosophy and training style is inseparable from the Thug Dojo it became.
• Evil Old Folks:
  • Kreese. The man is now in his 70s, yet he's still just as ruthless as he was from the original The Karate Kid trilogy. Silver is even worse, considering his actions in Season 5.
  • Sid Weinberg to a lesser extent. He's mainly a Jerkass to Johnny, but even he has his Pet the Dog moments. Then again, his "little incident with his secretary" might say otherwise about his moral boundaries.
• Evil Versus Evil: Season 5 has Kreese enacting a plan from behind bars to get revenge on Terry Silver for sending him to prison, but Kreese himself is still a nasty piece of work who has purely selfish motivations. When Daniel gets beaten to a pulp by Silver as a result of one of Kreese's plans backfiring, Kreese describes this as a "consolation prize" to Daniel's face.
• Evil Virtues: Despite what Cobra Kai ends up doing to its students in the long run, Cobra Kai is impressively inclusive, loyal, and helps its students gain confidence. The group doesn't care about race, gender, social status or economic class, if you're willing to work hard, learn to fight, and never complain, they'll accept you as one of their own. That's probably why they're so effective at forging Undying Loyalty, to their own detriment, in the end.
• Eviler than Thou:
  • In Season 4 Terry Silver eventually becomes this to John Kreese. While one could say it's Kreese fault that him constantly pushing Vietnam flashbacks on Silver has the latter undergoing Sanity Slippage, it gets to the point where Silver become morally worse. His Curb-Stomp Battle toward Johnny was bad to the point where Kreese draws the line, he bribes the referee for Cobra Kai's advantage behind everyone's back, and he ultimately makes a successful Batman Gambit in giving Stingray a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown just to have Kreese framed and arrested, so that he can take full control of Cobra Kai right after Kreese starts softening up. Season 5 has Silver committing unbelievable actions never seen in Kreese (i.e., burning down Mike Barnes's furniture store, getting into Daniel's marriage) and takes his plan in expanding Cobra Kai to global levels; something Kreese himself originally never committed to back in 1980.
  • A tragic example at the season finale of Season 4 leading up to 5, considering how Kenny Payne is on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Anthony LaRusso after the latter and his Gang of Bullies basically made Kenny's middle school life a living hell. While Anthony is nothing more than a Peer-Pressured Bully who simply makes crude remarks and does cruel pranks (i.e., mocking Kenny's dancing, catfishing Anthony by pretending to be Lia on Dungeon Lord and luring him into Balboa Park in cosplay, stealing Kenny's Cobra Kai swag and luring him into the hallway in his underwear), Kenny is The Heavy that leads his own gang of Cobra Kais in performing physical acts of violence that are potentially seen as life-threatening (i.e., giving Anthony a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, knocking Anthony into the lazy river, giving Anthony a brutal swirly in a diarrhea-filled toiler). This also applies with their own Gang of Bullies and the threat they pose to their victims: Anthony's gang, while all middle schoolers, are capable of physical combat but are not trained in a formal martial art; Kenny's gang on the other hand are all established high schoolers who are practitioners of Tang Soo Do that competed in the All-Valley.
• Expository Hairstyle Change:
  • After joining Cobra Kai, Eli flips the script, shaves the sides of his head and styles the middle into a blue mohawk, taking on the nickname Hawk. Hawk dyes it red partway into Season 2 to signify his increased aggression and brutality (even changing the color of his tattoo's mohawk to complement it). Hawk has his mohawk forcefully shaved off by Cobra Kai in an act of revenge. This kills his confidence for the majority of the season and returns him most of the way to his Shrinking Violet persona. He eventually gets over it after Moon gives him back his confidence with a passionate kiss that reaches its peak by defeating Kyler and Robby en route to the All-Valley Boys' championship. Season 5 has him re-grow his mohawk and puts Hawk back into the confident persona he had early on in the show (albeit this time with more humility.
  • At Coyote Creek, Raymond chooses to flip the script, braiding his beard and taking on the new name Stingray.
  • Robby is introduced with longer hair and keeps it throughout his entire tenure as Miyagi-Do's star male pupil. Then after he kicks Miguel off the balcony, he cuts his hair short as a means to escape the police, and eventually styles it upward while in juvie; he keeps it during his tenure as Cobra Kai's star male pupil, and as he finally goes back to Miyagi-Do.
  • Miguel's hair takes on a pompadour during his "bad boy" phase. He wears his hair in a far messier style and loose in Season 4, reflecting his deteriorating mental state over the course of the season.
  • When Sam is trying to fit in with the popular clique in season 1, she wears her hair loose and also pays a lot of attention to it. In season 2, she pulls her hair back more often, both because she's training again and because she's more humble now that she's not focused on being one of the popular kids. In season 3, while she's dealing with PTSD, her hair is very messy, as if she hasn't been taking much care of it, but once she gets through her fear of Tory and reconnects with Miguel, she resumes taking more care in styling her hair.
  • When Silver is re-introduced, his hair (while still long) is unkempt, and he is revealed to have completely moved on from Cobra Kai and been living a mindful, peaceful life after years long of therapy and self-rebuild. Then when Kreese comes back to his life, pushes his PTSD buttons via Vietnam War flashbacks, and successfully convinces him to re-join Cobra Kai, he reverts back to the diabolical mastermind he was in Part III, signified with the return of his iconic ponytail.
• Expy Coexistence:
  • Picturegrams, a social media website that Sam uses in season 1, is a stand-in for Instagram — which is strange, considering that Instagram is owned by Facebook, which appears without the Bland-Name Product treatment. In Season 2, the writers decided to just forgo using fictional social media sites, and Instagram is both mentioned by name and shown being used (Sam, Miguel and Aisha have Instagram feeds), as are Facebook (which is how Daniel has been cyberstalking Ali) and Yelp (Demetri's negative review of Cobra Kai leads Hawk to go after him at the mall with a couple of thugs).
  • In Season 3, some crucial events involve — directly or not — a brand named Doyona, obviously an expy of Toyota. This was presumably done to avoid bad press with any real Japanese car brand, even though Daniel is shown selling Toyota cars at his dealerships.
• Excrement Statement:
  • When Johnny is having an extended Heroic BSoD from learning his son is training under Daniel, one of the things he does is drunkenly urinate on the car Daniel gave him as a peace offering.
  • It wasn't dog crap in front of the LaRusso Auto Group billboard Johnny spray-paints a penis on while drunk.
• Face/Heel Double-Turn: Sympathy swings back and forth like a pendulum in this series.
  • In the original film, Daniel was an up-and-coming underdog to contrast Johnny as The Bully. 34 years later, the script has flipped, and Johnny is now the underdog trying to put his life back together while Daniel has succumbed to Revenge Before Reason in opposing him. However, as the series goes on, Johnny's students take his teachings to their logical conclusion and become bullies themselves while Daniel regains his inner balance and turns his students to a better path.
  • At the beginning of the series, Miguel is an innocent bullying victim while Robby is a troubled delinquent. As a result of their mentors' teachings, Miguel ends the first season as a bully himself while Robby has started to walk down a better path. However, Season 2 sees Robby succumb to Revenge Before Reason regarding his resentment of his father and Miguel, leading him to break Miguel's spine in the season finale, while Miguel realizes he went too far with the Cobra Kai mindset and begins showing mercy to others.
  • In Season 3, Hawk loses faith in Kreese and defects from Cobra Kai to join the Miyagi-do/Eagle Fang alliance at around the same time that Robby joins Cobra Kai and becomes Kreese's new top student. In fact, Kreese allowing Robby and Kyler to join was one of the factors that contributed to Hawk's decision.
  • In Season 4, Anthony starts out as a bully to Kenny, forcing him to turn to Cobra Kai to learn to defend himself. At the end of the season, Anthony, having seen the error of his ways, makes an honest attempt to apologise, only for Kenny to needlessly beat the crap out of him and promise to make him suffer even more when they get back to school.
  • A downplayed example with Sam and Tory in Season 4. Tory decides to turn over a new leaf and work on redeeming herself, while Sam starts to succumb to Revenge Before Reason in continuing to provoke her. However, given the extent of Tory's actions, Sam's reluctance to let go of their rivalry is understandable, and both competitors fight fair when they meet at the All Valley, so it's more adding shades of grey to a previously black and white conflict than an outright exchange of sympathies.
  • In Season 5, Tory defects to the Miyagi-Fang alliance just in time for the Final Battle, while in the same sequence of events Mitch betrays them for Cobra Kai. Lampshaded by Kyler, who points out that both sides now have a traitor, so it cancels out.
• Fake Shemp: Whenever a flashback that wasn't filmed for the movies shows one of the adult characters, they are always filmed from behind or below the neck. The exception is Johnny's mom because she was never seen before the series began, while his stepfather was filmed with an obscured Body Double, and Ed Asner providing his lines (as it would be difficult for him to look like he was in his forties).
  • Averted for the 1984 All-Valley tournament, as during the original shoot, John G. Avildsen shot hours of tournament footage from multiple angles. The Cobra Kai production team incorporated a lot of this footage into the show via flashbacks. One of them includes William Zabka's mother, who was in the stands in different angles that went unseen until 2018, and there are at least three new angles of Daniel giving Johnny the Crane Kick from the same take that was used in the finished Karate Kid.
• Fatal Flaws: As of the second season, these become key plot points for each of the core characters; see the respective character sheets of the Cobra Kai and Miyagi-do sensei and students for more.
• Fighting Back Is Wrong: The first students of the reactivated titular dojo are all bullied kids looking for a method to defend themselves, and Johnny wants them to develop inner strength and not have it become a Thug Dojo like it happened when he was a student and Kreese was the sensei... but because the only way Johnny knows how to teach is based on Kreese's methods, most (if not all) of his students become raging bullies anyway who "fight back" against their own bullies in a severely escalated fashion. Overall, the show's stance leans towards "fighting back is okay if it is in self-defense, you have exhausted every other alternative solution to your problem, and you stop once the threat has ended".
• Final Battle: Being a martial-arts tv show, each season ends with this.
  • Season 1: The All-Valley tournament, particularly the final matchup between Cobra Kai's Miguel Diaz (coached by Johnny Lawrence) and Miyagi-Do's Robby Keene (coached by Daniel LaRusso). While Miguel does win the fight for Cobra Kai (and the All-Valley in general), this is actually a Downer Ending, as Miguel completely succumbs to his vicious tendencies, much to Johnny's dismay.
  • Season 2: The massive West Valley High School brawl between Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do. While Miyagi-Do does technically win the battle (given that their core fighters — Robby, Sam, Demetri, Chris, Nathaniel beat their Cobra Kai counterparts — Miguel, Tory, Hawk, Mitch, Bert), this also concludes with a massive Downer Ending, on both sides. Sam and Miguel end up in the hospital (the latter on death's door), Robby is on the run from the law, Daniel's and Johnny's PR plummets (the former having to shut down Miyagi-Do), and Kreese completely taking over Cobra Kai and turning it into the Thug Dojo that he always envisioned.
  • Season 3: The LaRusso house fight pitting Daniel's Miyagi-Do and Johnny's Eagle Fang against Kreese's Cobra Kai, followed by Daniel and Johnny themselves taking on Kreese (and a fully-corrupted Robby Keene) at the Cobra Kai dojo. The latter fight is also mixed with a flashback of Kreese's battle against Captain Turner during the Vietnam War.
  • Season 4: Once again, the season concludes with All-Valley tournament but this time, with two separate final fights in each gender division. First, Eli finally overcomes Robby in an outstanding Sudden Death Overtime match to win the tournament in the Boys' Division. For the girls, Sam once again goes against Tory, with the latter ultimately coming out on top. However, this is ultimately another Downer Ending (though subverted with Daniel recruiting Chozen against Cobra Kai in the finale), as the latter fight results in Cobra Kai winning the Grand Championship, followed by the revelation that Terry Silver briber the ref en route to Tory's victory and ultimate ambition to expand the dojo starting with the betrayal and arrest of Kreese.
  • Season 5, another two-pronged Final Battle. Johnny, Chozen and Mike Barnes go storm Silver's abode in a fit of drunken rage while every other relevant named character ends up at the flagship Cobra Kai dojo at some point. The first three only barely escape with their lives as Silver refuses to stay and confirm the kills, while at the latter the protagonists last just long enough to upload a video showing Silver admitting to bribing the ref back in Season 4 which leads to everyone quitting Cobra Kai out of disgust. Daniel and Silver have one final bout with Daniel delivering a mighty Curb-Stomp Battle and finishing the fight with the Crane Kick.
• Fire/Water Juxtaposition: At Valley Fest, Daniel intends to display the power of Miyagi-Do Karate by breaking a sheet of ice like he did in the second movie as a finale for his demonstration. When Cobra Kai does their demonstration, they top it off by having Johnny punch through four bricks while they're on fire. Appropriately, the episode is titled "Fire and Ice".
• Foreign Culture Fetish:
  • Daniel has a large appreciation and closeness to Japanese culture, which seems to stem both from his closeness to Mr. Miyagi and the latter's death.
  • Terry Silver surprisingly takes this to the extreme, with his new mansion in Season 5 consisting of expensive alcohol and accessories from Japan, in addition to sharing stories of his experience (with a good amount of knowledge) from the same country, as well as incorporating Korean language in his lessons. While studying under Kim Sun-Yung (as well as maintaining contact with Kim Da-Eun) certainly helps, it's also rather ironic, considering he displayed even more racist stereotypes to Mr. Miyagi than Kreese.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Kyler gets handsy and tries to grope Sam in a darkened movie theater, Sam crisply and effortlessly breaks his grip and punches him hard enough to knock him back into his chair. This is the first sign she's Still Got It after learning karate from her dad as a child. She later proves it on her date with Miguel by performing a flawless leg throw takedown, and then throughout Season 2.
  • Demetri wears a fair amount of blue-based clothing during season 1, foreshadowing his eventual joining Miyagi-Do.
  • In Season 1 Episode 7, a family dinner shows that Daniel's cousin Louie is making business pitches to other people using the LaRusso name, which Daniel doesn't appreciate and tells him not to drag his name into these things. In the next episode, Louie later brings some biker friends to trash Johnny's car late at night (because of Johnny earlier vandalizing the LaRusso billboard), talking as though he was acting under Daniel's order. This only incites Johnny to confront Daniel directly as his home, despite Daniel having no knowledge of what Louie was doing.
  • In the same episode, Johnny's impassioned speech to convince the tournament committee to lift the ban on Cobra Kai's participation unwittingly echoes many of Terry Silver's lines in The Karate Kid Part III. Like in that film, John Kreese turns out to be Faking the Dead, and emerges in the season finale.
  • Demetri reveals that he's considering rejoining Cobra Kai, because while he doesn't like the idea of getting hit in the face, he does like the "strength in numbers mentality of joining a gang." By the end of Season 2, the conflict between Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do has essentially escalated into an all-out gang war.
  • In Season 2, Kreese tells the students that a move relies on making the enemy think you're retreating, "and that's when you strike the hardest" - right after Johnny finds out he's homeless and officially makes him a co-sensei.
  • During the Coyote Creek exercise in "Lull", Hawk kicks Miguel into a tree, with the latter hitting it back-first. However, he can still stand and fight back. Three episodes later, Robby kicks Miguel off a school balcony, whose back smashes onto a metal railing. This renders Miguel comatose and leaves him with spinal injuries.
  • Demetri gives eyes to Yasmine in the first episodes and tries to talk her up at a party in the first season. After their respective ordeals they start dating in Season 3.
  • In "Now You're Gonna Pay", when Johnny arrives at Sid's house to ask him money to pay for Miguel's surgery, the camera is totally focused on the sculpture he steals (to sell and get the money) after Sid kicks him out.
  • At the start of the school fight, when Sam and Tory are circling each other before the punches begin flying, Robby ends up on the side behind Tory, and Hawk ends up on the side behind Sam. By the end of season 3, Robby and Tory are on the same side as Robby joins Cobra Kai, and Hawk and Sam are now on the same side due to Hawk joining the Eagle Fang / Miyagi-Do alliance.
  • Before getting into an argument with Kreese, Silver is reading Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, a book about a sovereign being given power in exchange for security and peace. Silver gets Cobra Kai on his side with new, fancy uniforms, a car rental for Tory and Robby, faux subordination for Kreese and plans to expand Cobra Kai to new areas. By the end of the season, he takes over the entire thing. He was planning on stabbing Kreese in the back the entire time.
  • Way back in Season 1 on Miguel and Sam's first date, Johnny makes it a point that Miguel should "Strike First" and kiss Sam on the first date, only for Sam to be the one to "Strike First" and kiss Miguel instead. A bit of a funny way to show that Sam is generally more proactive and might eventually fit Johnny's teaching more than Daniel's. Sure enough in Season 4 she ends up taking to Eagle Fang far more than Miyagi-Do.
  • Notice the reactions from Cobra Kai's top four students (Robby, Tory, Kyler, Kenny) when Terry Silver makes his grand re-introduction as Cobra Kai's co-sensei. Kyler and Kenny are smiling admirably when Kreese introduces another sensei to help them prepare for the All-Valley, whereas Robby and Tory look at each other with curiosity and uncertainty, perhaps regarding Silver himself. By the end of the Season 4 and throughout Season 5, Kenny and Kyler gleefully go along with Silver as part of his campaign in taking over the valley with a franchise of dojos, whereas Robby and Tory eventually become disillusioned with Cobra Kai due to Silver's corrupting influence.
  • "Match Point" has Bert compare Terry Silver to Highlander. In response, Nathaniel corrects Bert by calling Terry "The" Highlander, because there can only be one. By season 4's finale, Nathaniel is unintentionally proven correct when Terry frames Kreese for aggravated assault and attempted murder, leaving Terry as the sole leader of Cobra Kai.
  • A good chunk of Mitch's appearances in Season 5 are signs that he's going to betray all the Miyagi-Fangs to rejoin Cobra Kai. Bert, Nate, and Chris find Mitch hanging near a Cobra Kai tabling event eating Jack Links Jerky provided by said dojo. During the Pizza Party at the LaRusso's, Mitch complains that the Miyagi-Fangs don't have enough students, to which Bert brushes him off. At the Sekai-Taikai qualifier in Terry's flagship dojo, Mitch is openly envious that the dojo has a smoothie bar, followed by expressing admiration to a trio of female Cobra Kai students (to Bert's displeasure).
  • In the Season 5 finale, half the teen group shows up considerably late despite time being of the utmost essence, with Mitch mentioning that he had to get ready, though others note that it's the middle of the night and it was unnecessary. We find out later that Mitch had already pulled a Face–Heel Turn and rejoined Cobra Kai at an earlier date, which means that the earlier tardiness for him "getting ready" was likely him calling in to let Cobra Kai know about Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang's plan.
• Formally-Named Pet: On her first date with Miguel, Sam wins a stuffed octopus while playing Ice Ball, and names him "Señor Octopus". She makes the octopus their relationship mascot, even bringing an octopus-themed card when she visits Miguel in the hospital.
• Four-Philosophy Ensemble: LaRusso Auto Group has Daniel (Optimist), Amanda (Realist), Louie (Cynic), Anoush (Apathetic) and Robby (Conflicted).
• Four-Temperament Ensemble:
  • In "Take a Right," the scene where sanguine Johnny and his buddies (choleric Bobby, melancholic Jimmy, and phlegmatic Tommy) are unwinding at a bar with some beer gives off this vibe.
  • LaRusso Auto Group has Daniel (sanguine, the charismatic face of the company), Amanda (melancholic, driven and focused in her work), Louie (choleric, a rude and obnoxious prankster) and Anoush (phlegmatic, quieter than Louie but still fun-loving and friendly).
  • Miguel's friend group in Season 1 has Miguel (sanguine, a confident Nice Guy who knows how to stand up for himself), Hawk (choleric, a brash and arrogant Berserker), Demetri (melancholic, a cynical, sarcastic, introverted nerd) and Aisha (phlegmatic, quiet and reserved but empathetic to Miguel's emotional problems).
• Freudian Excuse: Martin Kove's condition for signing onto the series was to expand on Kreese's past so that he wasn't just a one-note cartoon villain. In Season 3, the horrors he and Terry Silver experienced in Vietnam are explored via flashback sequences. The pair of them suffered traumatic ordeals as POW's, which is Truth in Television.
• Freudian Trio:
  • The "nerd trio", Miguel, Hawk and Demetri. Hawk is the Id, having a cocky attitude, poor impulse control and always acting on his emotions. Demetri is the Superego, a nerdy intellectual who acts based on logic and has very little emotional intelligence. Miguel is the Ego, being more socially adept than Demetri and more rational than Hawk.
  • The three main female karate students, Sam, Tory and Aisha. Tory is the Id, a Hard-Drinking Party Girl who has no qualms stealing from the beach club and reacts violently to any perceived slights. Sam is the Ego, a Nice Girl with a rigid sense of right and wrong and a temperamental streak. Aisha is the Superego, a calm and reserved Book Smart nerd.
  • In Season 3, the three dojos' philosophies line up with this. Kreese's Cobra Kai is the Id, focused on strength and dominance without mercy and having a "take what's yours" attitude to the world. Daniel's Miyagi-Do is the Superego, focused on inner peace, balance and respect. Johnny's Eagle Fang is the Ego, having an aggressive fighting style balanced with a strong sense of honor.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Miguel and Eli are both downtrodden losers at the beginning of the series. Miguel turns into the toughest kid in school, and dabbles with bullying, while Hawk graduates to becoming an outright psychopath.
• Funny Background Event:
  • Before the fight at the strip mall, Kyler shoves Johnny, who drops the slice of pizza he had just bought from the mini-mart. While Johnny teaches Kyler's gang a lesson, Homeless Lynn can be seen eating the pizza he dropped.
  • After inviting Johnny in for breakfast, Daniel and Amanda excuse themselves to argue over how best to placate their guest and get him out of their hair. Back at the table behind them, Johnny can be seen furiously and forcefully salting the hell out of his food.

G

• Game-Breaking Injury: Robby's shoulder after Hawk dislocates it with an illegal attack. Unlike Daniel in the first movie, Robby does not overcome his injury to win the final match.
• Gang of Bullies:
  • Kyler and his gang consisting of Brucks, Rory, AJ, in addition to Yasmine and her clique.
  • Daniel's unethical cousin Louie appears to have a couple of violence-prone henchmen on call. Louie eventually distances himself from them after Johnny beats them to a pulp and Daniel fires him in the process.
  • At the end of Season 1, Miguel and his fellow Cobra Kai students have become a gang of their own. Not to be outdone, the end of Season 2 has Daniel's Miyagi-Do students fully willing to engage in a Mob War with their Cobra Kai rivals.
  • Cobra Kai effectively becomes this in Season 3, with Kreese as the sole sensei of the dojo. Made even more glaring with Hawk and Tory at their absolute more psychotic, Kyler himself joining the dojo, and Robby eventually taking over as the dojo's star student. It gets so bad to the point where Hawk defects at the season finale. Season 4 continues this on with Silver joining in as co-sensei (despite their star students Robby and Tory being fleshed out as Graying Morality characters), and becomes a full-on Army of Bullies when Silver completely takes over Cobra Kai and begins his dojo expansion.
  • Shawn Payne does have his own gang of juvenile delinquents as they hassle Robby prior to the epic fight mid-season.
  • Season 4 shows Anthony LaRusso running with such a group bullying Kenny (though it's really Zack Thompson calling the shots). Season 5 reverses this with Kenny leading his own group of Cobra Kais (Kyler, Big Red, Edwin, Dieter) bullying Anthony, as well as hassling the Miyagi-Fangs.
• Gaslighting: Kreese is the patron saint of this. It's not his ability in a fight or his willingness to cross lines that makes him dangerous. It's this. He will find your weakness and exploit it for all it's worth, while laying on just enough truth and charm to keep the pace in his favor.
• Gendered Insult: Thanks to Johnny's influence, Cobra Kai's students have no problem using the word "pussy" (or derogatorily addressing males with terminology that refer to the opposite sex) towards their detractors. Many antagonistic characters who aren't Cobra Kais are also fond of using them to verbally put down others.
• Generation Xerox: Miguel, Sam, and Robby's arc in the first season follows pretty closely to Daniel, Ali and Johnny's arc in the first movie. And it doesn't end there.
• The Ghost:
  • Ali never appears in the flesh during the first season. However, she is constantly brought up, be it in Johnny's memories, by Counselor Blatt during the dance and near the end of the season when Daniel fills Johnny in on what became of her. Johnny even makes an attempt to reconnect with her. At the end of Season 2, she sends a friend request on Facebook, and finally makes a reappearance in Season 3 after a Facebook correspondence with Johnny.
  • Terry Silver gets some appearances in archive footage and is mentioned a few times in the first two seasons. Then in season 3, we see him in flashbacks to Kreese's time in Vietnam, and in season 4, he shows up in person.
  • Mr. Miyagi, of course. Although he passed away some time ago, his influence remains strong over the LaRusso family.
• Give Geeks a Chance: In season 1, the "nerd" clique of Miguel, Demetri and Hawk, have the hots for the hot rich girls clique of Sam, Yasmine, and Moon respectively. Fast forward to Season 5, Miguel is dating Sam (despite numerous ups and downs), Demetri is dating Yasmine, and Hawk is dating Moon (despite also numerous ups and downs).
• Given Name Reveal: In season 4, the surnames of Demetri (Alexopoulos), Kyler (Park) and Piper (Elswith) are revealed, Kyler's by Kreese, Piper's by Silver, and Demetri's by the announcer (Daryl).
• Gone Horribly Right: Johnny successfully teaches a bunch of bullied teenagers to stand up for themselves and fight back against their tormentors. He fails to anticipate the aftereffects, that teaching a bunch of angry kids a martial arts philosophy based on ruthlessness, aggression, and being merciless would lead to inevitable escalation. Sure enough, they all end up becoming the very types of people he was training them to defend against. And just to further drive this trope home, John Kreese himself shows up at the end to congratulate Johnny on Cobra Kai's revival.
• Glory Days:
  • Johnny is still wistful for the days when he was the toughest kid in town and the big man on campus. His life in adulthood has been a string of failures.
  • Daniel is a successful businessman and has a great family, but he seems to have trouble moving on from his past (implied to be a result of Mr. Miyagi's death), still viewing his victory as All-Valley Champion with the same gravitas of having won a world title. He built his career on his identity as the Karate Guy, has his trophies prominently displayed at home, and likes to show off that he still has the skills that made him two-time All Valley Champion.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: Downplays the Western convention. In tournament, the Miyagi-Do fighters wear white gis, while the Cobra Kai fighters wear black gis. In the dojos, both sides wear white gis.
• Good Feels Good: Robby initially starts working for Daniel only to spite Johnny, but he ends up respecting Daniel enough to become his karate protege and even protect his business from his former delinquent friends.
• Graceful Ladies Like Purple: Sam's wardrobe has a fair number of purple/maroon/red and blue patterned clothes. These highlight how Sam is part of the bridge between those dojos along with Miguel. She wears those colors whenever things are happening between her and Miguel, blue being the color of Miyagi-Do and red being the color of Cobra Kai/Eagle Fang. Their relationship is literally the glue between the dojos, and so her wardrobe colors are the mixture of these two colors.
• Graceful Loser:
  • Robby loses the final match — but his mentor Daniel takes it much better than Kreese took Johnny's original loss.
  • Even though Hawk loses against Kenny in the Season 5 Sekai Taikai qualifier by unfair and unethical means, the former accepts it as it is — explicitly shown when Kyler calls him out on it in the Final Battle.
• Grave-Marking Scene: Episode 5 shows Daniel visiting Mr. Miyagi's grave, apologizing for having not visited in over a month and pruning the bonsai tree left by the tombstone, strongly implying that Daniel makes these trips regularly.
• Graying Morality:
  • The series aims for something much closer to Grey-and-Gray Morality than the Black-and-White Morality from the original film. Johnny retains some of his Jerkass traits and gives his students the same Cobra Kai training he had, but he's doing it so that they'll become more confident, assertive, and able to fight back against anyone who bullies them. Daniel is understandably wary of the rebirth of Cobra Kai, but he grabs the Jerkass Ball and goes out of his way to antagonize Johnny even though Johnny's plan doesn't involve getting back at Daniel at all and couldn't care less about his former rival. By the end of the first season, the series reconstructs the black and white morality from the first film. While Daniel's teachings turn Robby into a better person who's willing to let go of his anger towards his father, Johnny's only end up leading his students onto the very path that ruined his youth. However, he does realize what he has done. A large sign of this is the return of the morally black Kreese.
  • Comes back in Season 2, with Johnny trying to become an Internal Reformist and fix his mistakes that led to the new Cobra Kai again becoming a Thug Dojo. Miguel takes his lessons to heart, and both he and Johnny start acting as better men. Meanwhile, Daniel's well-intentioned resurrection of the Miyagi-Do Dojo is largely benevolent... but tainted by his It's Personal issues with Cobra Kai being reflected by his students. This results in a Rival Dojos situation where, while Cobra Kai is the primary provocateur, Miyagi-Do is heightening the tensions between the two, thanks to innocent misunderstandings, Alcohol-Induced Stupidity, and some messy Love Triangle shenanigans. This culminates in a massive school brawl between the two groups of students, with the biggest casualty being Miguel, who while demonstrating he Took a Level in Kindness from Johnny's reform attempts offered Robby mercy, only for an enraged Robby to accidentally kick him over a stairwell and into a 10-foot drop onto a metal railing with his back, possibly crippling him.
  • Season 3 is closer to being The Good, the Bad, and the Evil, with Cobra Kai now firmly under John Kreese's control, who undoes everything Johnny attempted to do, openly promotes the Bully Brutality behavior of his students, and expels anyone he considers too weak to be a part of his Thug Dojo. Daniel is still building up Miyagi-Do with several new students while Johnny tries to atone for his mistakes by quitting karate altogether before Miguel convinces him to starts his own, third Dojo that Johnny intends to be tougher than Daniel's without reaching the excesses of Kreese's. By the end of the season, Johnny and Daniel have properly made up and joined forces against Kreese, who has recruited Robby to his side. Nevertheless, there are still shades of graying morality. Several episodes flesh out Kreese's Vietnam War backstory and show firsthand how Kreese's wartime experiences motivated him to follow a Social Darwinist creed. Likewise, Chozen explains that Miyagi-Do was initially designed for killing one's enemies, a direct parallel to how Kreese and Silver trained in Tang Soo Do, Cobra Kai's parent style, as preparation for the Vietnam War. This also reveals that Miyagi wasn't entirely truthful to Daniel about Miyagi-Do's violent origins. While Daniel believes Miyagi had good intentions, this deception gives Miyagi a slightly more ambiguous character.
  • Season 4, despite seeming to continue Season 3's arc, ends up going back towards graying everyone out moreso than ever. Robby, despite being Cobra Kai's new Ace, is far more level-headed than ever and does his best to look out for Shawn's brother Kenny. He realizes at the very end that he still ended up corrupting him and reconciles with Johnny. Tory, despite being the primary instigator of a lot of issues since her debut, starts shifting to being a better person once Amanda puts in a lot of effort to help her out. By the Final Battle with Sam, she refuses to cheat and is apologetic to Sam for an accidental elbow strike she gave her, in stark contrast to the past where she took great delight in trying to maim Sam. Daniel and Johnny's egos and jealousy get the better of them throughout the Season which costs them both dearly. Kenny goes from a nice, outgoing kid to a psychotic Cobra Kai thug ready to beat the shit out of anyone who crosses him. Anthony goes from a complete douche from all his previous appearances, including Season 4, to finally beginning to become a better person at the very end. Even Kreese starts taking measures to walk back his worst tendencies, protecting Johnny from a beatdown and allowing Tory to fight in the finals without cheating. The only one who ends up staying out of the gray is Terry Silver, who slowly reverts back into his sociopathic persona before framing Kreese and taking over Cobra Kai in the end, while also bribing the ref so Tory could win the tournament.
  • Season 5 goes back hard into Black-and-White Morality the most since the first movie. Cobra Kai is made explicitly evil with little to no redeeming factors beyond the perks you get for joining, while all the protagonists have completed most of their Character Development over the last 4 seasons and are much kinder, calmer people (when their Berserk Button isn't pressed, at least). The nuance instead comes from all the lingering issues that started back when characters were back in the gray. Tory may be in Cobra Kai, but she's blatantly The Mole for Kreese and makes it clear in private moments that she wants nothing to do with them. Kenny is so far gone that he barely resembles the nice, outgoing kid he was back in early Season 4. Mitch flips over to Cobra Kai in a Face–Heel Turn but he had very little to no sympathetic qualities to begin with, and his friends didn't seem to like him very much either. The only character who would even mildly qualify is Devon, who joins Cobra Kai midway through the season, seemingly to play up Ambition Is Evil, but she doesn't really do anything intentionally mean-spirited up until the final battle... in which she immediately turns against Cobra Kai about 5-10 minutes into it anyway.
• Groin Attack: A rare girl-on-girl example: Aisha introduces Yasmine to Melvin.

H

• Hands-On Approach:
  • In Season 1, Miguel tries to show off his karate skills on his date with Sam, which she cutely calls him out on, then does a flawless leg throw takedown on him. Once he's on the ground, of course, the date still reaches the conclusion he was hoping for.
  • In Season 3, Sam teaches Miguel the drum technique after he notices the hand-drum. He then counters by performing a takedown on her. Then she pulls him in for a kiss, and they lock lips before Daniel walks in and catches them.
• Happy Ending Override: The original movie ended on a note implying that Johnny and Daniel managed to reconcile their differences, with Johnny being the one to hand Daniel the trophy after he lost. This series showed that the two never truly made peace with one another, with underlying resentment still being present over the past 34 years.
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • Although anyone theoretically can redeem themselves for their past behavior, but they have to want to redeem themselves for it to stick. Johnny, for all his faults and baggage, sincerely tries to improve his life and make a positive impact on his students, making him much more sympathetic than in the original Karate Kid. However, Kreese, no matter how traumatic his backstory or how difficult his life since, appears not to learn from his past mistakes and remains as destructive and unpleasant now as he was three decades ago. Johnny means well when he decides to give Kreese a second chance, but this ultimately turns out to be a terrible mistake, as Kreese takes advantage of his goodwill to steal his dojo.
  • Everyone is the hero of their own story, focusing too much on your own struggles and bemoaning how you are being treated may be ignoring the personal struggles others are going through. Johnny and Daniel constantly blame each other for various conflicts while having blinders on how much they are antagonizing each other and making things worse through their own choices. Daniel remembers Johnny and his gang bullying him at every opportunity, Johnny remembers Daniel flirting with his (ex) girlfriend and sucker punching him when things got heated and both struggle to admit they may have made things worse through their actions. This trickles down to all of the kids where everyone felt bullied and betrayed at some point and end up making the worst possible choices.
• Healing Hands: Amusingly subverted through a Bait-and-Switch gag. When Robby's shoulder is injured by Hawk, Daniel prepares to do Miyagi's famous pain-suppression technique... but he's no Magical Asian, and quickly decides to call in a real medic instead.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Johnny makes more than one attempt to leave behind his grudge with Daniel and/or patch things up with his biological son. It never works. Though by the end of the first season, they're at least able to tell that Johnny is trying to be serious.

• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Happens more than once, with the theme of impressionable kids being caught between opposing philosophies.
  • Robby starts out as an aimless, thieving juvenile delinquent, until Danny takes him under his wing and teaches him Miyagi-do. He starts to genuinely change, becomes committed to Daniel and his philosophy, but then comes the big school fight, resulting in him nearly killing Miguel and ending up in jail. The personal and emotional fallout of all that results in him falling under Kreese's sway, and rejecting both Daniel and his father. After spending Season 4 as an Anti-Villain, he's back on face by the end, as he realizes he's failed to prevent Kenny from going down a dark path and tearfully reconciles with his father.
  • Miguel, by contrast, starts out as an entirely sweet, kind and caring kid who's just trying to escape being bullied. His experiences with Cobra Kai make him more aggressive, belligerent and violent. But his relationship with Johnny pulls him back from the worst excesses, and he pulls back from his angrier persona.
  • Kreese reintroduces himself into Johnny's life as the same smug, domineering jerk he always was, but Johnny soon figures out that he's actually a sad, broken down old man, much like Johnny was on the road to becoming, and decides to give him a second chance. Kreese backs him up for several episodes, but soon proves that he's still much the same as he used to be.
  • Hawk is a more dramatic example, starting out bullied, frighted and meek, he fully embraces the Cobra Kai lifestyle to the point of becoming one of the worst and most aggressive bullies, and one of Kreese's most devoted followers. At the end of Season 3, Kreese's actions finally go too far, and he switches sides to fight with his former friends.
• Heel–Face Turn: Very common, with the idea that anyone can redeem themselves being a Central Theme of the series.
  • When Moon befriends the Cobra Kai, she ends up apologizing to Aisha for the earlier cyberbullying — and insisting that Yasmine should apologize, too. When Yasmine refuses and is subsequently humiliated, Moon stays with the Cobra Kai and cheers for Eli/Hawk in the tournament. She later proves that she's genuinely changed when she breaks up with Hawk after he attacks Demetri.
  • Slightly downplayed with Yasmine. While she still has a bitchy attitude throughout Season 3, she's far less malicious compared to her pre-wedgie personality, stopping her cyberbullying, distancing herself from Kyler, and actually able to empathize with Demetri when the latter is picked on. She becomes even nicer in Season 4, going out of her way to interrupt an expensive holiday in Australia so she can surprise Demetri by showing up for prom. Season 5 has her become a legitimately good friend to Sam, offering her advice in navigating her relationship with Miguel (in stark contrast to going along with Kyler slut-shaming Sam after she refused his sexual advances).
  • A good number of Cobra Kais (particularly Chris and Nate) defect to Miyagi-Do after Daniel comes into the dojo and successfully convinces them after revealing the vandalism done to his dojo.
  • At the Season 2 finale, Johnny cut ties with Cobra Kai as soon as he finds out that Kreese has successfully taken over the dojo behind his back. Miguel eventually follows suit to help Johnny form his own dojo after the former recovers from his life-threatening injuries.
  • Mitch becomes less of a bully after Kreese kicks him out of Cobra Kai and the former joining Eagle Fang. However, it's viciously subverted when he rejoins Cobra Kai under Terry Silver over a petty nickname and worthless luxuries.
  • Throughout Season 3, Hawk eventually becomes disillusioned with Cobra Kai's change in culture under Kreese and (with some persuasion from Johnny and Miguel) defects from the dojo midway through the LaRusso House Fight.
  • Also, Chozen had an off-screen one. He was able to salvage his relationship with Sato and find peace within himself to the point that he was willing to teach Daniel new Miyagi-Do techniques that Mr. Miyagi was unwilling to teach him. When Daniel recruits Chozen to stop Terry Silver in the Season 4 finale, Chozen willingly accepts and becomes Daniel's main ally (and co-sensei) in Season 5.
  • Subverted very heavily with Kreese throughout Season 4. Kreese eventually has his standards and draws the line when Silver viciously abuses Johnny at the old dojo, and even allows Tory to fight her own way despite Silver pressuring her to fight dirty. However, Season 5 shows that Kreese hasn't changed much in prison — still expressing bitterness toward Daniel and eventually breaking out of prison in a brutal fashion despite opening up about his internal struggles to his therapist and tangentially aligning with Johnny and Daniel in taking down Silver.
  • Robby eventually sees the harsh brutal nature of Cobra Kai after witnessing Kenny become a far worse bully then he imagined, and switches back to Miyagi-Do throughout Season 5 — even mending his relationships with his father, Daniel, and Miguel.
  • Mike Barnes is revealed to have completely changed for the better after Daniel initially interrogates him (believing he is still aligned with Silver). As a matter of fact, Barnes just so happened to reform far better than Daniel's other rivals — genuinely wanting to apologize to him instead of trolling (unlike Chozen) or still expressing resentment (unlike Johnny).
  • Tory also defects from Cobra Kai under Silver after finding out her victory was all for naught thanks to Silver's bribery, and the constant abuse she receives under Kim Da-Eun.
  • Stingray also joins the Miyagi-Fangs as well — mainly due to Silver beating him badly, using him as a pawn to usurp the dojo from Kreese, and buying all the luxuries as a means to shut him up.
  • Devon mainly joined Cobra Kai for pragmatic reasons of continuing her karate training after Eagle Fang initially shuts down and Topanga Karate is taken over by Silver. However, she eventually rejoins the Miyagi-Fangs in the Final Battle after witnessing Kim Da-Eun continuously abuse Tory.
• Heel Realization:
  • Miguel seems to realize how the philosophy of Cobra Kai has wrecked his relationship with Sam, and was distraught when he tried to find her after the tournament only to learn that she was long gone.
  • Johnny gets his own Heel Realization in turn. As the tournament progresses, he becomes more and more concerned about the growing ruthlessness and unsportsmanlike behavior from his students. When Miguel defeats Robby by exploiting an injury, winning the tournament for Cobra Kai, Johnny is nowhere near as happy as he was when he got the Cobra Kai unbanned from the tournament in the first place. Kreese's sudden return where he congratulates Johnny certainly won't help him or Miguel.
  • Season 2 has Johnny trying to teach the kids this lesson, but is ultimately thwarted by Kreese.
  • Several Cobra Kai, most notably Chris, realize this after Hawk takes things too far and trashes the Miyagi-Do dojo and steals Miyagi's medal of honor. They leave the class and join Miyagi-Do.
  • In Season 3, we see this in real-time with Hawk. After Kyler is laying more of a beating nearby on Miguel, he starts looking around at the carnage. His former friends are getting the absolute shit kicked out of them by guys he never tolerated before, and outright hated in some cases. He sees Demetri getting put in the same armbar he himself used earlier to break his arm and with that, plus the words of Johnny and Miguel fresh on his mind, finally sees what he has become.
  • Season 4 ends with Robby realizing what hate and Cobra Kai did to him and, through him, to Kenny. He seems to realize he's become someone he doesn't like anymore. He rips off his gi mid-fight, choosing to fight for himself instead.
  • In the tournament in Season 4, Tory decides to fight fair in defiance of the usual Cobra Kai mentality, and is disgusted to discover that her victory over Sam in the final was the result of Terry Silver bribing the referee.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Robby starts working for Daniel hoping to deliberately cause this for his father Johnny. He ultimately succeeds... but only after Daniel has taken the boy under his wing and become a father figure to him. When the truth is inadvertently revealed, both Daniel and Johnny feel betrayed.
  • Johnny as he contemplates Cobra Kai's hollow victory at the All Valley Tournament. Sure they won, but his relationship with Robby is no better than it was before Robby became Daniel's student; meanwhile he made his own students into the same sort of bullies he was and is clearly dismayed at having proven himself basically almost no better than Kreese (though while Kreese intended this, Johnny most certainly did not.) Kreese returning to congratulate his efforts only makes things worse.
  • The end of the second season has both Johnny and Daniel suffering from this after the brutal injury that Miguel received at the hands of Robby. They just stand next to each other in the elevator, not even having enough energy to accuse or snipe at each other.
• Hero, Rival, Baddie Team-Up: In Season 5, with former rivals Daniel and Johnny now on the same side, they form a brief Enemy Mine with previous Big Bad Kreese to take down Terry Silver, who had betrayed Kreese by framing him and having him sent to prison so he could usurp Cobra Kai from him. However, once the pair have all the information they need from Kreese, they decide to let him rot in prison rather than continue their alliance any further.
• He's Back!:
  • Johnny is resurrecting the Cobra Kai karate school. The trailer even lampshades it by overlaying "Back in the Game" by Airbourne over a montage of scenes.
  • Following a visit to Mr. Miyagi's grave, Daniel cleans out the dojo, and is back in his karate gi and head band performing familiar katas, complete with Theme Music Power-Up (specifically the victory music when he won the tournament).
  • Kreese now plans to seize the opportunity of Johnny's success to return the Cobra Kai to what it used to be rather than what Johnny wants it to become instead.
  • After the events of the first season finale, Sam goes into the family dojo by herself and, remembering the time she spent with her dad, does a kick flip with renewed excitement, showing she is interested in returning to her karate training.
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • Miguel and the other kids Johnny trains initially just want to be able to defend themselves against the people bullying them. They end up becoming ruthless bullies themselves in the process.
  • Daniel is intensely upset with the restoration of Cobra Kai, only seeing that name associated with the bullies who tormented him. He pulls some business contacts to get the rent raised at the strip mall where Cobra Kai has set up, hoping to drive them out of business with the inflation. He proudly tells this to Amanda, who chastises him over such petty, immature and immoral behavior and not thinking of the people beyond Johnny he was hurting.
    • In the Season 3 finale, Daniel fights Kreese, who was shown to be a murdering psychopath, due to him sending the Cobra Kais after his daughter, his Miyagi-Do students, Miguel and his Eagle Fang Karate friends, at his home. Daniel uses his newly obtained skills from Chozen, and when he does, the look on Daniel's face, the approving nod from Johnny, and the music conveys a sense that he's was about to straight up murder Kreese, making him just like Kreese. However, Sam and Miguel arriving brings Daniel back from crossing that line.
• History Repeats:
  • A bullied teen who gets gang-beaten until his lowly handyman neighbor intervenes, revealing himself to be a karate master. Miguel makes a handy stand-in for Daniel, Sam for Ali, Kyler's gang for Johnny's OG Cobra Kai crew, but Johnny isn't exactly Mr. Miyagi.
  • In season 3, a Lawrence finds his girl flirting with another boy, gets territorial, and tries to start a fight with said boy, who is a relative newcomer to the Valley. Robby is his dad, Sam is Ali, and Miguel is Daniel.
  • A former martial artist reignites a rivalry with his arch nemesis, who now happens to be an influential businessman. While the initial feud was over a girl, the conflict between Daniel and Johnny differs from the one between Miyagi and Sato as it is a lot less about honor and more about who was in the right in the first movie. And like Sato does with Miyagi, Daniel at one point is willing to use his corporate ties/influence to hurt Johnny even if a bunch of innocent people end up getting screwed over, too.
  • A Miyagi-Do fighter doing surprisingly well in the tournament, only to be gimped by an illegal attack and having his cruel nemesis exploit the injury in the final bout. Difference is, Hawk takes the "out of commission" approach against Johnny's wishes, the Miyagi-Do fighter is Johnny's own son, and Robby doesn't recover from it to beat Miguel.
  • Robby sees Kenny become cruel and hateful afther he teaches him how to fight, the same thing his father saw happen to Hawk and Miguel after he started teaching them Cobra Kai.
• Hollywood Restraining Order:
  • Stingray's written out of the show in season 3, having gotten a restraining order forbidding him from going within 500 feet of minors after he assaulted several Miyagi-Dos during the school brawl.
  • Kreese takes out a restraining order against Amanda in season 3 after she slaps him.
• Honor Before Reason: Robby and Miguel are on both sides of this trope, but in different seasons. At the tournament, Robby chose to continue fighting with a dislocated shoulder, which Miguel exploits. At the school brawl the following season, Miguel chooses to help Robby up and ends up being kicked over the top floor railing.
• Hopeless with Tech: Johnny's knowledge of technology appears to have not progressed past the 1980s. He's got no idea how to use a computer and has minimal knowledge of the internet. Even after he improves a little on that, the last episode of season 4 shows he does not know Uber, despite the service being extremely popular.
• Hope Spot:
  • The ninth episode of season 1 looked like both Johnny and Daniel were going to reconcile, only to discover Robby.
  • Season 2, ninth episode has them reconciling again, agreeing that they don't have to be friends, but they can stop being enemies. Then Daniel finds Robby and Sam sleeping off her inebriation at Johnny's.
  • In the Season 2 finale, Robby and Johnny are finally on good terms for the first time in the entire series, and Johnny was trying to be a dad to Robby for the first time in years and then....well....we all know what happened.
  • In the season 3 finale, Ali chats up both Johnny and Daniel, talking them into reconciliation. They may not like each other, but are willing to make an alliance of convenience against Kreese.
• Horrible Judge of Character:
  • Sam has a poor track record at the start of the series. Her closest friends are the worst kind of mean girls. Of the three guys she's attracted to, Kyler is an insufferable bully who torments kids half his size and only is interested in getting into her pants. Miguel transforms into a complete Jerkass but it takes him trying to start a fight with Robby to fully realize it. She seems to get somewhere with Robby, but he betrays her trust by withholding from her crucial information that would change her opinion of Miguel, and then later he cripples Miguel in the school brawl. Then she goes back to Miguel, with more long-term success now that Miguel has ridded himself of the worser Cobra Kai traits.
  • Miguel falls into this a bit over season 2, not noticing Hawk turning into a bully under Kreese's teachings, or how deep Tory's petty grudge against Sam goes, until it's too late.
  • Johnny is all too inclined to give Kreese a second chance, despite warnings from Daniel (who got tricked into training with Terry Silver as part of Silver's scheme to get revenge for Kreese) and from Johnny's old Cobra Kai friends (who had stable home lives, meaning they weren't as dependent on Kreese as Johnny was) not to trust him.
• Hospital Visit Hesitation: Tory refuses to visit her boyfriend Miguel in the hospital during Season 3, out of a combination of guilt for causing the brawl at the school that put him there in the first place and lingering resentment towards him for cheating on her with his ex-girlfriend Sam.
• Hourglass Plot:
  • Basically the beginning of Cobra Kai. In the original ''Karate Kid'' film, Daniel starts out living in the lower-income Reseda apartments with a working class single mother, whereas Johnny is seemingly living the life as a rich kid (with both of his parents) in the Encino Hills. Fast forward to Cobra Kai, and Johnny is now living as a single, lower-class estranged parent in the Reseda apartments, whereas Daniel is now a happily married man living in the Encino Hills, who also happens to own a car company.
  • At the start of season 1, Robby is jealous of Miguel because of his close relationship with Johnny. By the end, Robby lets go of his anger at him, but Miguel hates Robby now because he thinks he's going to lose Sam to him. Then in Season 3, it comes full circle, for Robby now hates Miguel for stealing Sam from him while Robby was doing time in juvie, and Miguel hates Robby for paralyzing him and the burden that put on his family.
  • At the start of season 1, Kyler is a bully that Hawk and Miguel have to quietly avoid out of fear. By the end of the season, Miguel and Hawk are the bullies and Kyler leaves the party rather than attract their notice. When Kyler returns in season 3, he is the one who is afraid of Hawk after Hawk intimidates him by beating Brucks to a bloody pulp during Kreese's tryouts.
  • A brutal but very well executed and nuanced one occurs in Season 2 in relation to Season 1, cementing the show's Graying Morality ethos: this time, it's Daniel who inadvertently passes on his flaws to his students, with Robby injuring Miguel by being too ruthless and wrathful towards his rival, who Took a Level in Kindness that Robby exploited, all caused by Sam partaking in Alcohol-Induced Stupidity which aggravates a Love Triangle, resulting in Johnny again being reduced to a jobless, broken man without a dojo, in a reversal of his Season 1 arc.
  • In Season 3 Episode 8, much like Season 1 Episode 9, a jealous boyfriend sees Sam flirting with another boy, takes a swing at the other boy, only for Sam to be caught in the middle. This time around, though, Sam is not as innocent as she was in the season 1 instance, since she did cheat on Robby with Miguel at Moon's party before this (as opposed to Miguel who only jumped to conclusions when he saw Robby having dinner with the LaRussos). And instead of being mistakenly hit by Miguel when he's aiming for Robby, Sam intentionally puts herself between the two and shoves Robby away as he tries to punch Miguel.
• Hufflepuff House: There are karate dojos other than Cobra Kai, Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang in the valley. The only one that receives even minor characterization is Topanga Karate, whose student Xander makes a good showing in the 2018 All Valley Karate Tournament. The others exist only for characters from the three important dojos to demonstrate their skills and blow through effortlessly on their way to matches that matter.
• Humiliation Conga: Up until he reopens the Cobra Kai dojo (and for a good while after), Johnny's existence is nothing but one aggravation after another, until he's pretty much a Jerkass Woobie.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • When Aisha tries to join Cobra Kai, Johnny initially refuses her because girls are too emotional and interrupt you when you're speaking. She tries to retort—"QUIET!"
  • Despite spending most of the time teaching kids how to stand up to bullies, Johnny still finds some of the pranks he'd done in the past, such as swirlies, to be funny.