Glass Cannon / Live-Action TV

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• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has most of the Inhumans, at least the ones relevant to the series. Most of them only gain one power, and while that power tends to be very useful, they generally lack anything else to protect them. In particular, the series' lead Daisy Johnson has a power that is comparable to The Incredible Hulk in terms of damage she can dish out, but excessive use of it can injure her and beyond that she's a rather short woman who, while exceptionally combat trained and more resilient than most, can still be overpowered and outmatched by stronger combatants or numbers. As a result of this, the Inhumans that avoid this status, such as Hive and Lash (who both have a very wide array of powers that include super-fast healing factors and/or invulnerability), are treated as pants-shittingly terrifying as a result, while Joey, whose power to control matter makes him both bullet proof (bullets just melt) and useful in combat situations, is a Story-Breaker Power who got Put on a Bus to avoid him being able to solve most problems.
• In Andromeda, the two Deep Stand-off Attack Ship classes: Righteous Fist of Heaven and Siege Perilous. Both are, essentially, artillery ships. They are armed significantly better than a Glorious Heritage-class cruiser like Andromeda Ascendant, but they lack any fighters and their defenses have been reduced to make room for more offensive missile tubes. They are to appear on the battlefield, launch a Macross Missile Massacre (60 missile tubes on the Fist and 180 on the Siege), and then disappear back into slipstream before the enemy has a chance to retaliate. There were hundreds of Righteous Fist of Heaven-class ships in the Commonwealth Space Navy, but they were in the process of replacing them with the newer Siege Perilous class when the Nietzscheans rebelled. Only three of the latter were completed (Balance of Judgment and Wrath of Achilles), and one was destroyed in drydock. 300 years later, the restored Commonwealth built an upgraded version and named it Resolution of Hector.
• Babylon 5 has the Centauri warships. Their firepower is high enough that they usually destroy their targets with one or two shots, and their rate of fire is high enough that a single Centauri battlecruiser overwhelmed the station's Interceptors faster than multiple EarthForce warships would be able to in other occasions, but once you manage to hit them they go down quickly.
• Game of Thrones: While riding her dragons, Daenerys is a person of mass destruction, capable of sinking an entire fleet of ships by herself and managing to deal a massive blow against a good third of the Lannister army during the Battle of the Goldroad. Having said that, outside of her immunity to fire, Daenerys is still as vulnerable as any normal human being to blades and arrows. When she lands with Drogon on the ground to remove a scorpion bolt from him, she is practically defenceless to Jaime's do-or-die charge and she likely would have been run through if Drogon hadn't interposed himself between them. In the end, after Daenerys undergoes a Face–Heel Turn and burns a surrendered King's Landing, Jon Snow fails to dissuade her from further destruction and, agonized, reluctantly kills her with a single stab from his dagger to stop her.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kuuga's Pegasus Form grants Kuuga enhanced senses at the cost of overlording his brain if he uses it too much. This form grants him the Pegasus Bowgun, which shoots out a powerful air of arrow, but needs to be reloaded. It has the weakest defense out of Kuuga's base five forms.
  • Kamen Rider Blade: Garren's base Ace Form is specific tailored for its gunslinger-oriented design and with Rouze Cards combos, Sakuya can attack much harder and defeat Undead with little difficulty from its strong attacks. However, its defense is the worst out of the four riders, and needs to constantly be on the offensive at close and long range. Tachibana's health in the beginning also attributes to his form's weak defense in the beginning.
  • Kiva's Bassaha Form can one shot opponents with its Bassaha Magum, has sharp vision for firing accuracy, is good for aquatic combat, and can create water on dry land. However, its physically weaker than Kiva's base, Dogga, and Garulu forms and Kiva has a tough time tanking attacks or tiring out while in Bassaha Form.
  • In Kamen Rider Gaim, Ryugen's main Budou Arms is stats wise nearly identical to Gaim's Orange Arms, but has little armor and defense. To compensate for its lack of close combat, Ryugen can overpower his opponents with its long range abilities and strong Dragon blasts.
  • Drive's Type Deadheat is much stonger than his three main basic forms in all categories but is risky to use from going berserk and damages Shinnosuke physical if he battles in it for too long due to exposure from the Dead Zone.
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Kamen Rider Snipe has more speed than Kamen Rider Brave and is stronger physically than Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, but has lower defenses than both due to the being the basis of the shooting game genre. He has more offensive potential due to his ranged weapons but also has moves that can hurt himself and cause collateral damage if he's not careful.
• David Haller from Legion (2017) is possibly the most powerful mutant ever, with immensely strong telekinesistic, telepathic, and Reality Warper abilities. However, he’s as vulnerable to physical damage as a regular human being is.
• In an episode of Lois & Clark, Lex Luthor creates a boxer that he believes can take on Superman. The boxer delivers a flurry of punches that stagger Superman. For a moment it looks like Superman is actually on the ropes, but then he simply flicks the boxer in the forehead and knocks him out.
• An almost literal version appears in MythBusters when the Build team tested whether an ice cannon could be a viable weapon. It isn't as good as a regular cannon and blows out if too much gunpowder is packed in or if it is use too much.
• The Outer Limits (1995) episode "The Camp" has super strong robots that are ludicrously fragile. An untrained woman can tear them to pieces.
• In robot combat events, such as Robot Wars and BattleBots, full-body spinners (robots with a chassis that rapidly spins and has blades, spikes, or hammers attached to it) tend to fall into this category: While they are able to deliver some of the strongest attacks ever seen in robot combat, any opponent who can slip through their offense or can withstand multiple blows without breaking can easily and quickly render them useless. In particular is Mauler 5150, which is infamous for getting tipped upside-down by pretty much anything that its spinning doesn't wreck first, such as with a light tap from Jabberwock.
  • Any robot with a flywheel too. They're very devastating weapons, but also very heavy too, usually taking up 20%-25% of the robot's weight allotment. Designers, forced to shed weight to ensure it's light enough to compete, often go for shedding armour first. Flywheels also tended to have enormous recoil when they struck something, causing damage to internal components. One of the best examples would be Robot Wars' Hypno-disc, which became the reason bots had to invest on heavier armor after utterly tearing apart another bot in its very first match, and would generally mangle its opponents spectacularly. But it had the problem the rest of its chassis was rather frail and easy to shove around, and a bot with enough armor could simply outlast it by tanking its strikes until it tore itself apart. Most of its losses were from having taken so much damage even after a Curb-Stomp Battle it had to battle with incomplete repairs.
  • Nightmare from Battlebots is one of the finest examples in robot combat. The details have changed over the years, but at its essence Nightmare's basically a monstrous vertical flywheel mounted on a spindly, easy-to-tip three-wheeled frame with exposed tires (although it did get wheel guards for the 2015 reboot). Whenever Nightmare fights, someone is leaving the Battlebox in pieces — usually depending on who gets the first hit.
  • Deep Six's 2019 version consists of an enormous vertical spinning bar that alone takes up over half of the robot's weight. The rest of the robot exists mainly to allow that bar to spin and move about. As a result, of its three matches fought that year, two of them ended in it eliminating itself from the fight by recoil — on its first hit.
• Star Trek:
  • The Romulan Bird-of-Prey from Star Trek: The Original Series is armed with a very powerful plasma torpedo that can one-shot a starship. However, it can't fire its weapons while its Invisibility Cloak is active, during which it can take damage from indirect-fire weapon detonations; when it's visible and can be directly targeted, a few hits will cripple it.
  • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Jem'Hadar Fighters are able to deal heavy damage, at least early on, with only a few bursts of their phased polaron beams, but a few phaser cannon shots or a single torpedo are enough to either cripple or destroy them. This is deliberate on part of the Dominion, with the Fighters being cheap-but-deadly throwaway ships with minimal and expendable crew, and no features that aren't essential to combat.
• Super Sentai:
  • Lou from Choushinsei Flashman. An Action Girl functioning as the secondary muscle of the team, Lou relies on kick attacks more often as a possible way to conserve her physical strength due to even her strongest and punch based attacks easily exhausting herself in battle.
  • Luka Millfy from Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger is not only the strongest fighter on her team, she's also the most evasive due to her lower physique and choosing to only focus on melee combat, leaving her open to attack.
  • Ian Yorkland from Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger has a preference in long-range combat with no defense, relying heavily on evasion and strong & quick fighting style until Ramirez forces him to consider his defensive options.

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