Situations in Anime and Manga where characters may become immensely powerful without any proportionate training regimen.
Works with their own pages:
- Played with in the manga Aisaretaino: Izaki bears a lingering grudge against Hakamada because Hakamada excels at everything he turns his hand to without even trying, while Izaki himself works hard for little apparent return. Eventually, however, he discovers that Hakamada feels inferior to him because his accomplishments, obtained without real effort, feel empty, and he admires Izaki's stubborn drive to succeed. (On the other hand, Hakamada is a wealthy author who wrote a bestselling novel in three days, while Izaki is a salaryman, so we can't really call it a subversion of the trope.)
- Averted in All Rounder Meguru: while talent is an important element, not only it takes many hours of rigorous training to assimilate techniques, it's made clear that the biggest difference between a normal amateur and both professional MMA fighters and amateurs planning to go pro is physical strength that can be obtained only through hard training-and that goes for any martial art
- Meguru has a talent for analyzing his opponents' techniques, strengths and weaknesses and get the right timing to put them at disadvantage and easily learning techniques used on him, but before he could use his talent he had to go through a very long, repetitive and hard training to learn the basics and through many painful spars with Maki to learn the clinch. He also needs more work than average to keep his physical strength, and that is why, in spite of being a lightweight (up to 65 kg) coming from karate, his usual trainer is Nabe, a middleweight (up to 77 kg) wrestler who works him to the bone.
- Momoko is a genius judoka who quickly learns ju-jitsu, but would always skip reinforcement training. Because of that, every time she takes part in a tournament she always loses in the semifinals or finals due being too tired.
- Mitsuya is well known for his talent, even having been a candidate for the Olympic games and was expected to win the All Japan Amateur Shooto Tournament-but due his exceptional talent he failed to take things seriously, and that cost him both his chance for the Olympic games and the qualification for the national tournament, in the latter case losing (barely) to Meguru in the finals of the Kansai tournament. He has learned from his defeat, and at the Kanto Open Tournament he mops the floor with Yudai (noted to be almost Meguru's better in grappling and his overall equal).
- Angelic Layer outright states that experience doesn't matter in the Angelic games, and that the deus' love for their Angels is far more important than the Angels' parameters and strengths. At the start of the Manga, The Protagonist Misaki knows nothing about Angels, but quickly becomes the champion of the Kanto regional tournament while suffering almost no losses, defeating many much more experienced Dei in the process. It's made worse that Misaki is almost seen in a Training Montage (aside from the dance session near the start of the manga), making it seem like she is putting 0 effort to win.
- Played with and ultimately averted in Assassination Classroom. Class 3E's hard work does pay off at the very end with every student making the top fifty spots in the school, but the weakest student in the class (Terasaka) stays the weakest academically and Karma, who is naturally gifted, stays at the top. It's in comparison to the rest of the school that they gained, not so much in comparison to each other.
- Karma managed to place thirteenth in the entire school for the first term's finals without even studying... but this is treated as failure since everyone knew he could have done better if he tried, having been fourth place on the midterms. It's only when he studies that he can claim the top spot in the school.
- The four class slackers decide to place top of a subject in the midterms... in the elective of home ec; which is then subverted as it's revealed they would have had to have studied past testing trends to score so well on such a subjective course and thus worked just as hard as their classmates. The other top scorers are all noted as having natural talent in their preferred subjects on top of their studying.
- Class A has an advantage due to being more naturally gifted in the style of study promoted by the school and having special cram sessions. During the second finals, A Class trains too hard and end up burning out by the latter half of the tests since they can't sustain their energy anymore.
- Played straighter in regards to assassination techniques. No matter how hard he tries, Karma is simply not the natural assassin Nagisa is; for all his raw strength and brains Karma cannot master the elements of surprise and the speed Nagisa has at his disposal. Nagisa not acknowledging his natural talent actually acts as a minor Berserk Button for Karma in the class civil war.
- Black Clover:
- Played With. Despite being born without any magic, Asta has trained diligently for years, giving him an incredibly muscular body and great strength. However, in the first chapter it's established that, despite his musculature, he still can't compare to skilled mages. Then, he manifests his grimoire - later revealed to have been passed down by his mother, who sealed a Devil with abilities obtained through The Power of Hate inside of it - which gives him an anti-magic sword that he can wield because of his lack of magic and strength from years of training. So while his abilities are certainly greatly aided by his hard work, if he wasn't specifically who he is, he would never have achieved anything through just hard work.
- Played 100% straight with The Rival, Yuno. Descended from Spade Kingdom royalty, gifted with a four leaf clover, naturally talented with two magic types, empowered by the wind spirit and not shown to train nearly as hard as Asta. When first applying to join the Magic Knights, he was selected by every squad, even the famously anti-male Blue Rose. On joining the Golden Dawn, widely recognized as the greatest squad, he quickly rises through the ranks and eventually becomes the Captain.
- This is discussed regarding the kingdom's aristocracy. It's stated that the biggest factor to learn spells is natural talent. Nobility rarely train as a result and look down on it as something people who are not born into power do. However, it's also stated that dedicated training, battle experience, and intense determination in a crisis are important factors in manifesting power. This explains how the Black Bulls, who are mostly commoners who have been through many tough battles and trained hard, effectively face off against other, mostly noble Magic Knights in the Royal Knights Exam. And it's because Noelle has natural talent and worked hard as a Black Bull that she learns her spell Valkyrie Armor to save her siblings.
- Bleach:
- Ichigo goes through Training from Hell lots of times, but that hasn't stopped him from conquering a curriculum lasting approximately hundreds of years in the matter of weeks, days or hours. Which is why he has to lose that power in order to keep the story going, because if enemies are even stronger than that state, then the rest of the cast would be even more superfluous than they already are.
- It's stated by Aizen that Shinigami have a specific limit to how powerful they can get which is determined long before they even start trying to get stronger, and it's implied that this applies to Hollows as well. This trope was even discussed by Grimmjow's minions who, after eating thousands of Hollows to try to advance to the highest Hollow stage, noted that their growth had just completely stopped at some point. This was part of Aizen's motivation to create the Hougyoku, which can alter both Shinigami and Hollows to erase those predetermined limits, either by turning them into Shinigami/Hollow hybrids or, in his own case, by transcending both types of power.
- Averting this is a key part of A Certain Magical Index. Anyone can become a powerful esper if they work hard and focus on the ability improvement curriculum. Mikoto Misaka, one of the heroines, started out as a level 1 and rose to level 5 (the highest level) through patience and determination, and is often held up in the series as an example of what you can do if you work at it. Except that's all a lie. Using the supercomputer Tree Diagram, the city's leadership knows who will respond best to the ability improvement. They focused their efforts on those children, while ignoring the majority of the city as not worth the investment of time and resources.
- Choujin Sensen: According to FEE, this is how Tomobiki justifies his action in not enrolling in college, finding a full-time job, or confessing to the girl he likes.
- This is why Liz Ricarro from IGPX: Immortal Grand Prix gets angry with Takeshi. She trains herself so much whereas he rarely does anything and yet, they're just as good at being mech pilots. It can easily seen where Liz first beats him handily in kung fu, what she has been practicing for years, in the first episode. That is until Takeshi practices kendo, where he easily beats her in the second season.
- Then partly defied in the same season when Takeshi talks to the Insufferable Genius Max about everyone working together.
- In Eyeshield 21, Unsui and Agon, twin brothers, couldn't be further apart in ability. Unsui puts himself through Training from Hell (at one point shown doing one handed push-ups with their team's center sitting on his back) and is only "a great player". Agon doesn't practice at all, and is "a once-in-a-century prodigy." He's also the only one of the Shinryuuji Nagas who has any luck with the ladies (being that they go to an all-boys school). Sure, he's got The Gift, but he's also stone-cold evil. Ever since his team's loss to Deimon, he has been working out with increasing fervor and desperation; He doesn't want to become the trash he sees everyone else as. Subverted twice, though, when Hiruma deliberately (and successfully) sets Yukimitsu (who is 0 percent talent and 100 percent hard work) against him, and when Hiruma himself (a physically average player) outruns Agon because he improved his 40-yard dash by 0.1 seconds through the training Agon disdains.
- Leonard Apollo learned this the hard way during his time in the NFL, as well.
- And then there's the Yuuhi Guts. Even the manager keeps a training regiment so brutal it would bring most other schools' players to tears, but they only score one touchdown against Deimon in the fall tournament.
- It's worth nothing that the actual players (i.e. the ones that trained hard and ended up scoring the only touchdown) were only in the game for the last few minutes. The school had opted to use star players from other sports (Yuuhi being a renowned sports school where football was the only thing they didn't excel at), and they played terribly, having never practiced football itself and generally having no teamwork whatsoever. Had the actual football players been in the entire time, well, they probably still would've lost (Deimon was still the better team and trained every bit as hard as the Guts, after all), but it would've been a much closer game.
- A lot of the characters avert this too, though. And almost all of the "I'm just that good!" types wind up getting owned by Deimon, who are the results of canny planning, hell-training, and tenacity. Pretty much everyone on the Deimon team worked hard for their abilities in some way or another, and the closest it has to a "he's just that good" is the quarterback's planning skill.
- One of the only moments in the series that makes Agon seem like less of a Jerkass is due to this trope. Habashira Rui has to sub in for Shin when he's injured in the final game against America. Everyone, Habashira included, knows that he's not good enough to take on America. But he does it anyway, and Agon removes his wig and glasses, taking the game 100% seriously for perhaps the first time, purely out of respect for Habashira and to remind Unsui what he should be striving for.
- Shin averts this trope, however. Hiruma explicitly defines him as "the opposite of Agon, a monster who achieved his strength through hard work."
- Another subversion is Monta vs the "genius" catchers such as Ikkyu and Taka. The fact that he spent years chasing after and catching baseballs allows him to follow the ball more closely than anyone else, a skill that allows him to beat his much more naturally-talented rivals.
- Played With in Fairy Tail when Natsu faces the Vanish Brothers. They say that the time spent training his fire magic should make him a Squishy Wizard and they should surpassed him in speed and strength from all their years of physical training. Nope! Not only does he have magic that they don't, his brand of magic requires him to train his physical body as well, and since he's been using it since childhood, he's both stronger and faster than them despite being younger too.
- A fair amount of what's going on in-universe in Food Wars! is playing with the perception of this trope. The Totsuki Institute (as presented at the beginning of the storyline) is dedicated to both accepting only the exceptional as students and only graduating the most determined to master cuisine to the extent human lifespan permits. There is a very wide range of talent among new students, and while the school apparently does provide both all the necessary instruction and opportunities to develop the needed additional skills for a real-world career (such as ensuring students within their first year learn what it's like to prepare fifty or more servings of a meal under time constraints) it also devalues students who "only" learn and do everything demanded of them. (Likewise, it's a fairly open secret that students out on internships who do all the work asked of them timely and without error and nothing more fail. Totsuki produces future stars of the hospitality industry and critical team members, not just competent employees.) Between all the stress students who weren't as prepared going in suffer trying to keep up and the daily struggle to stay enrolled, the apparent ease those students who came in with semiprofessional skills display performing in group activities, the lack of visibility of all the self-training and experimentation those same students are putting in on their own to develop themselves further (and class work is basic enough in comparison it isn't obvious to their peers they really do learn there) and considerable pandering to the desire of the press and outside community to believe in The Gift, it's no wonder that most of the student body fails to appreciate their own improvements and pays at least lip service to this trope to explain why they just can't ever be like those special people.
- This gets contrasted later when somebody tries introducing the (extremely popular among the remaining student body) idea that all the "untouchable" students merely have exceptionally developed skills which can be learned and replicated, and that classwork should now consist of learning to cook their recipes. (This is not presented as an improvement, introducing Crippling Overspecialization and possible dependence on a school-managed supply line and career management services as cornerstones to the new educational philosophy. It's now student attempts to do anything beyond minimal involvement in class lessons which are being shut down.)
- There are also some characters who genuinely do have The Gift, but this is never presented as a guarantee. For example, Akira's has a sense of smell that allowed him to pick out not only the type of spice, but the quality and the efforts done to adulterate it, through a sealed bag from several meters away. On top of this, he is also shown to have a borderline genius-level intellect. However, neither of these were good for anything except trolling scummy spice vendors until he came to Japan and recieved education and training that allowed him to let his innate abilities shine.
- In Fruits Basket, several of the characters have at least some martial arts training. However Kyo has probably trained longer and harder then any of the other characters and still can't beat his rival Yuki. Even worse Yuki is never seen actually training and it is implied that he holds back when he and Kyo fight. Meanwhile Kyo loves martial arts, has been training from a young age, and even spent four months training in the mountains in an attempt to beat Yuki, yet still can't due to the curse. When shown fighting other people however, Kyo is shown to be a skilled fighter.
- Played straight in Fullmetal Alchemist. Edward gets to be a State Alchemist (a coveted position in Amestris) because of his natural talent moreso than how much work he puts into it.
- Dante, Big Bad of Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), delivers a well deserved sledgehammer to Equivalent Exchange and mentions this trope during her Breaking Speech:Dante: Consider the state alchemy exam that you passed with flying colors. How many others took the test that day? Spent months, years preparing, some working much harder than you. Yet you were the only one who passed. Where was their reward? Is it their fault they lacked your natural talent?
- At the same time, each version of the story has a complicated relationship with this trope. While naturally gifted, it is that the amount of work Ed and Al put into learning alchemy was extremely high regardless. Even then, their natural gifts are part of what makes them able to perform Human Transmutation alongside their hard work, as it's noted in universe that even experienced adults have trouble with it even if it wasn't taboo. Their meeting with the Gate of Truth gave them a boost in their abilities that were already there, allowing them even greater understanding and potential with alchemy then they had before. The Homunculi take notice of the Elrics not just because of their hard work, but because of both their natural talent and the fact that they had seen the Gate.
- Dante, Big Bad of Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), delivers a well deserved sledgehammer to Equivalent Exchange and mentions this trope during her Breaking Speech:
- In Future GPX Cyber Formula, Naoki Shinjyo works hard to win races and two F3 championships to get to Cyber Formula racing. Yet he gets constantly beaten by Hayato, a 14-year-old rookie with no experience in motor racing and it leads him to blame others for his failures in racing. It takes Miki to straighten him up and realize that his obsession of training hard and being the best clouds his ability as a racer. By then, Shinjyo regains his love for racing.
- Likewise, Kisaragi in GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class is also hardworking and doesn't seem to be very skilled, unlike the more Cloud Cuckoo Lander-ish Nodamiki. Unlike Hidamari Sketch, though, whether she's that bad compared to Nodamiki has not been demonstrated.
- Ironically, this utterly defied in Hideaki Anno's first work, GunBuster. The main character Noriko is of the belief that talent is all you need to be good at mecha piloting. However, her teacher shows her that the woman she looked up to works very hard to get were she is. In fact, one of the series' mottos is "Hard work and guts!"
- Averted in the boxing anime Hajime no Ippo, as hard work usually does pay off. The Main character Ippo does have immense punching power by nature, his friend/rival Miyata is called a genius for his talent, and his Jerkass Big Brother Mentor Takamura is easily the best boxer in the whole series... but all of them still train very hard to get better and so do most other boxers. Kamogawa once said to Takamura "Not everyone who works hard is rewarded. However, all those who succeed have worked hard!"
- Played straight on the third episode of Hell Girl during Season 3. An Idol Singer is loved and worshiped for her beauty and natural singing talent. However, during her youth, the Idol Singer used to bully another inspiring singer who was working very hard. The flashback also showed that the Idol Singer didn't even practice and got by on her looks, taking Fanservice pictures. The bullied girl tries to blackmail her by exposing the fan service photos; she demands the Idol Singer give her a break in the music business. But the Idol Singer tells her that she never could sing well. A scene earlier proves this when she sung and sounded off key. The once bullied girl cries about how she worked very hard all her life. But the Idol Singer responds by saying: "Hard work is the last resort of those without talent." This makes the bullied girl call Hell Girl. And even though the Idol Singer paid her 3 million yen and wrote an apology song for the bullying, the bullied girl still sends her to hell, while the Idol Singer was singing the apology song live on stage during a concert. The revenge is empty however, as the Idol Singer went on to become a music legend, while the bullied girl is forever broken, being in her shadow.
- Subverted by Hell Teacher Nube: both Nube and Izuna are exceptionally gifted with immense supernatural abilities, but Nube endured arduous training for years and years to reach his level of skill, a fact that he always uses to berate Izuna when she tries to find a shortcut.
- In Hidamari Sketch, While Yuno is known to be hardworking, her skills will probably never be as good as those of her Ditzy Genius neighbour Miyako.
- Averted in High School D×D, where even the author has gone on record stating this is a series where hard work does pay off. This is exemplified at the end of Volume 2/anime Season 1, when Issei's 11th-Hour Superpower expires before he can land more than one good hit on his foe. He goes on to win the fight thanks to everything he learned during his earlier Training from Hell, with a dash of Crazy-Prepared. Even his biggest Mid-Season Upgrade, being resurrected in a body grown from two deities, is less of a raw power boost than finally being able to go all-out without tearing himself apart.
- Holyland, which reads more or less like the author's love letter to martial arts and street fighting, presents most fighters' skill as a mixture of training, fighting experience and inborn 'talent', and makes it clear that ultimately it's those with talent who rise to the top if they get the other two; training and experience can only compensate so much. Protagonist Yuu Kamishiro is noted to have talent and combines it with working himself to the bone and hard-earned experience to win over people who have martial arts backgrounds, despite lacking formal training and experience until his mid-teens (which would be a death sentence to most people's ability to compete). Some people, like Masaki, are noted to have all three, and serve as mentors or major street bumps during the story.
- Subverted in Hunter × Hunter. While natural talent grant you significant edge over untalented individuals, one still must train extremely hard to get results. Chief of the Hunter Association Netero stated that human potential is limitless and we know that nen can prevent aging. So, theoretically, a talentless person will require much more time to catch up, but eventually will catch up.
- Shirogane from Kaguya-sama: Love Is War averts or subverts this, depending on how one looks at it. In his own estimation, he has zero natural talent, and the only reason he holds the #1 spot in academia is because of the constant effort put into studying. It's been shown that he's from below average to downright atrocious when it comes to some mundane activities, including ones that any other individual wouldn't have had trouble performing reasonably well at without prior training (aside from, weirdly enough, juggling). It also takes tremendous amount of work, along with a skilled instructor to bring his skills in those areas to about normal level. On the other hand, he is quick-witted and can come up with plans on the spot, holds multiple national certifications in different fields, manages to keep in balance his domestic routine, three part-time jobs and rather demanding studying sessions at the same time, eventually gets accepted into extremely selective Stanford University (at an accelerated rate at that), and most importantly, always succeeds exponentially in self-improvement (becoming average at something may not sound extraordinary, but when you start below figurative "zero", it's a whole other story). All of that suggests he might be a very special human being.
- Invoked, but ultimately averted in Kaleido Star. When she first joined the Kaleido Stage, the smug, arrogant May Wong believed she could charm her idols Leon and Layla and become a star without even trying. Cue Break the Haughty when Leon deliberately drops her during an act as a test of strength, badly injuring her in the process, and when Layla tells her that while her performances are technically good, they're completely soulless and not actually focused on entertaining the audience, thus meaning she'll have to start from scratch.
- The issues with this are often pointed out in Kengan Ashura. Many characters in the tournament are established as Born Winners to a degree; even the ones who aren't outright superhumanly gifted mutants (most notably Wakatsuki, who has impossibly dense muscle, and Raian, who has an honest-to-goodness Super Mode) are still often noted to have been talented from a young age. The question of whether hard work can trump natural talent, and how much it matters when they are combined, is brought up many times in the series, most notably with Suekichi Kaneda. Kaneda is anything but a born winner: he was a shrimp of a kid from a humble background with countless health issues growing up, but devoted himself to his training to an ungodly degree, even mastering shogi on the side to incorporate its predictive psychology into a fighting style built around Awesomeness by Analysis, and is determined enough to continue fighting through massive injury, to the point of downing large amounts of painkillers before one bout. But ultimately, he washes out in the first round, due to going up against Kaolan, a champion heavyweight boxer who's five inches taller and forty pounds of muscle heavier. He does earn Kaolan's respect, but Kaolan has worked no less hard than him and had a much better start. However, this is ultimately averted entirely by the final champion of the tournament: Kuroki Gensai, the World's Best Warrior, is nothing more than a very skilled karateka, with all his gifts being shown to come from conditioning, training, and decades of experience.
- Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple plays around with his trope in many ways but the most prominent is the aversion with Kenichi himself. He's The Protagonist but he doesn't have The Gift. Hard work always trumps untrained talent and between two hard workers, the one who works harder has the advantage. The entire story is a message in that you need to work hard to keep up in the world of martial arts.
- Kenichi is repeatedly said to be completely average and talentless, and his only strength is training hard. Although the people he beats up on a regular basis also probably train hard as well and probably have been doing so for more than a few months, they still don't train as hard as Kenichi. He trains under numerous different masters, working 7 days a week and often dying from the training, only to be brought back with medicine and first-aid. So while Kenichi might not have trained as long as his opponents, he has trained hundreds of times harder. That's why he defeat Karate club bullies and Ragnarok thugs. Yomi is a different matter. His opponents there are all expert martial artists, raised by masters every bit as strong as his own, with techniques just as brutal, which means he loses some of his "hard work" advantage.
- When Takeda begins his own Training from Hell under the underground boxing master, his abilities surge massively in a very short amount of time, putting him very nearly in Kenichi/Yomi tier within a much shorter time than Kenichi himself needed. He even began to unravel and utilize Kenichi's recently-learned perfect defense within a single sparring match. So apparently when a person who is already exceptionally talented (as Kenichi's masters have all noticed) starts that sort of training, the results are dramatic and much faster. So it's subverted in that for the prodigies, hard work really works.
- It's zigzagged with Berserker, a boy who has never had any training, but is so naturally talented that he has never lost a single fight. Then Tanimoto manages to defeat him, and afterward states that this entire trope is a lie:"One part talent may equal a hundred parts of hard work, but what if it's one thousand parts hard work? What about ten thousand? In the world of martial arts, hard work will always trump natural talent."
- Natsu, who like Takeda is very naturally talented even manages to quickly boost his skill level by consistently fighting opponents who are just a little bit better than he is. Part of his resumed Training from Hell by his own master who is the brother of one of Kenichi's masters.
- Everyone in Yomi works hard but here are prodigies among Yomi's ranks and Kenichi's masters point out that being a prodigy doesn't mean anything without training yourself to back it up and that they can't simply rely on their innate talents.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is an extreme version. The title character literally did not train at all, instead skipping right to fighting monsters for an hour or two after school each day. Within a week she's stronger than someone else around her age who had been training his entire life, and by the end of the first season (at most a couple months) she's become A (elite) rank. When there are more seasons, much Rank Inflation ensues though there's at least a considerable Time Skip between the second and third seasons.
- The second season and its supplementary manga explains all this by... turning Nanoha into a complete aversion of this. Her exponential increase in strength? It's revealed that thanks to Raising Heart, she's able to train every single waking moment of her life, displaying astonishing multi-tasking skills by running virtual reality training programs directly into her mind while she eats, goes to school, and does her other activities. This is in addition to her waking up early and going to bed late to practice her magic in the real world, and Raising Heart going on Pressure Mode to act like a magical training weight that forces Nanoha's magical growth by draining her mana when she's not active.
- The third season then subverts it. Apparently all that built up stress and exhaustion caught up to her years later, nearly killing her on a routine mission.
- Additionally, said manga shows that while Chrono (said "someone else her age") isn't as powerful, his combat experience actually allows him to be able to defeat both Nanoha and Fate.
- Teana is a complete aversion. Unlike the other Forwards, she doesn't have the advantage of winning the Superpower Lottery or being a Super-Soldier, but she manages to become the only one of them to reach S Rank (half a rank below Nanoha) through hard work alone.
- This is Jill Stola's personal philosophy in ViVid Strike!, and is one of the things that Nove disagrees with her on. The irony being that Jill earned her skill while Nove is a genetically enhanced combat cyborg. Then again, Nove is close friends with — and was originally defeated by — Teana, so she knows first hand that this trope doesn't always apply.
- The second season and its supplementary manga explains all this by... turning Nanoha into a complete aversion of this. Her exponential increase in strength? It's revealed that thanks to Raising Heart, she's able to train every single waking moment of her life, displaying astonishing multi-tasking skills by running virtual reality training programs directly into her mind while she eats, goes to school, and does her other activities. This is in addition to her waking up early and going to bed late to practice her magic in the real world, and Raising Heart going on Pressure Mode to act like a magical training weight that forces Nanoha's magical growth by draining her mana when she's not active.
- Medaka from Medaka Box is about the epitome of this trope. Her abilities just literally come to her be it semi-naturally or through her ability Power Copying, which not only allows her to acquire other peoples' powers just fighting or coming into contact with them (and later just by hearing some details about the ability) but allows her to master their ability even if the original holder hasn't done so themselves and create derivatives of them to suit her own needs albeit ones that didn't take the original purpose of the ability into account. This later comes to a head as she is considered an opponent that even an introduced
God-Mode Sue can't beat. Before the series' Genre Shift it wasn't really touched upon, but since becoming a battle manga, she's become somewhat of a Deconstruction of overpowered main characters. She does however state in the beginning that those with talent (like herself) do work to get where they are, but the work put in varies like any other person.- It's also played with in regards to the Supporting Protagonist Zenkichi. Despite being The Team Normal of the cast, he's able to keep up with other Superpowered characters through hard work and determination. Yet in a later arc, other characters explicitly stated to be normal easily upstage him in a Treasure Hunt.
- In Muhyo and Roji, during Muhyo's days at the academy, Enchu works hard to become an Executor while Yoichi and Muhyo slack off. However, Muhyo soon realizes his talent, and despite Enchu pulling all-nighters when he and Muhyo are considered for Executor, Muhyo is chosen.
- It's later revealed that there was more to the decision than aptitude; Page said the committee was concerned by Enchu's preoccupation with his ill mother (her death greatly contributed to his Start of Darkness, and was part of Teeki's plan), and chose Muhyo because he, in refusing the position, was thinking of others.
- Subverted in Mx0. Kuzumi is thought to be an incredibly gifted wizard with a gold card. In reality he has no magic, and his innate skill is so low that he failed the entrance exam. Everything he does he does through careful lying and a lot of hard work. The series ends (aggravatingly abruptly, due to cancellation) with him temporarily transferring to another school with a special tutor who is going to push him up to gold card level through raw hard work.
- In My Hero Academia, this gets played straight before being subverted. Protagonist Izuku Midoriya hoped to become a hero like his idol, All Might, even though he's Quirkless. But the day he meets All Might, the hero flat out tells Izuku that being a superhero is impossible without a Quirk because it's simply too dangerous of a job. But after being chosen as the successor of One For All and entering U.A., he works his butt off more than anyone else to catch up to his classmates who have had their powers their entire lives. His efforts pay off, becoming one of the best fighters in his class, giving him excellent grades, as well as a newfound respect from his peers that he never had when he was Quirkless.
- Also notably subverted with the "Big Three", the three students recognized as the most capable that U.A. has to offer. All of them are shown to have relatively Difficult, but Awesome Quirks that they had to work especially hard at to get to the level that they had achieved by the present day. Mirio Togata in particular was stated to have been dead last in his class until his work under Sir Nighteye gave him the experience needed to learn how to make more effective use of his Quirk and become the nigh-untouchable powerhouse that he's introduced as.
- Training in My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! might give a person more control over their magic, but any actual increase in power is negligible at best considering that Catarina spent seven years honing her skills under a personal tutor (something which is noted to be out of the ordinary) and all it did was let her raise the dirt around her by several more centimeters. Indeed, in the Verge of Destruction Spin-Off, this fact is one of Sienna's major hangups and the primary reason why she initially hates Maria.
- Naruto: The series shills the initial Aesop that hard work will trump natural talent any time. As the series progresses however, that... isn't always perfectly represented.
- Rock Lee seems like the poster child for this trope.
- He has little natural talent whatsoever and trains and trains and trains to prove he can be a powerful ninja without ninjustu or genjustsu. He has a good showing at first, easily defeating the two leads, but then proceeds to lose almost every other fight he gets into. However, those losses tend to come from extremely powerful enemies and Lee has impressive showings for those fights. His fight with Gaara, for example, had Gaara's teammates spend the entire match panicking at how badly Lee was manhandling him. Also, it is indisputable that Lee has come a long way from where he was in the academy, where even his beloved and supportive Guy sensei admitted he was pathetic. So, hard work may not have made him the best around, but without it he'd be useless.
- It should be noted that Lee is hardly talentless. Sure, his talent with the more traditional ninja arts is non-existent. However, it's also said by Kakashi there is no way hard work alone can get you to open five of the Eight Gates at age 13. Lee's case is really a person whose talent is not discovered by lesser teachers and he later runs into a teacher that recognizes his real talent and applied the appropriate training method for that talent. Naruto (and possibly his earlier reincarnations) is more or less the same thing. Basically, hard work is important, but to get to the very top or close to it, you need both talent and hard work.
- Sasuke was born with The Gift, specifically one that lets him instantly copy any technique and, with sufficient training and aptitude, execute it flawlessly, in addition to already exceptional skills. Now, quite a few times he is said to train seriously, notably in his Fire Release jutsus and Chuunin exam training, but much of it happens offscreen, and he gets several powerups in a row thanks to Superpowerful Genetics mixed with The Power of Hate. He does receive his Mangekyo after a grueling battle with Itachi, and it requires battles with several powerful opponents for him to master it. However, this trope becomes more notable after he receives Itachi's eyes from Tobi, whereupon he starts receiving incredible power-ups without any work put in. Much like Naruto, he tends to ping-pong as the plot demands. As best as we know, the two characters on the opposite ends of the scale are Indra and Ashura, the sons of the Sage of the Six Paths who both achieved similar levels of power, Indra through Superpowerful Genetics, and Ashura through Training from Hell and The Power of Friendship.
- The titular character ping-pongs between both ends. On the one hand, he starts the series as a talentless loser whose only saving grace is insane amounts of stamina. On the other hand, we learn that his parents were both highly-skilled ninja and the Kyuubi implanted in him makes incredibly strong, and is the reason for his incredible stamina in the first place. However, learning to control the Kyuubi's chakra was a long, dangerous process and the Sage of Six Paths has pointed out that incredible parents don't always pass down their talent. However, in earlier chapters Tsunade said that Naruto's ninjutsu style is like his mother's (we never really saw Kushina fight) and its been noted a few times that he also inherited her strong chakra genes to make it even possible for him to control the Kyuubi chakra.note Naruto will frequently undergo Training from Hell which would seem like an aversion, but he often gains extraordinary power from it that no one else could or would get and in some cases he uses his aforementioned incredible stamina to take shortcuts that wouldn't be available to use for other people. Finally, he's The Chosen One who is destined to succeed through hard work, as paradoxical as that sounds. At the end, he and Sasuke only succeed due to a literal Deus ex Machina in the form of the Sage Of Six Paths inexplicably showing up and giving both of them a power up due to them being the reincarnations of his sons.
- It's also worth mentioning Shikamaru. For most of the series, he is the definition of Brilliant, but Lazy. During the Chunin Exams, he is the only participant to pass and be promoted to Chunin even though he was by far the laziest participant and passed entirely due to impressing the proctors with his raw natural ability. In spite of his slacker tendencies, he ends up being the one of the youngest jonin of his generation. He also becomes co-general of his own division during the war. It could be said that he only grows strong after he starts working hard. But considering the effort he puts in compared to everyone else, it's obvious that his success is mostly due to his genius intellect.
- Then we have Might Guy to provide the ultimate subversion: as a child, he was so talentless he failed the academy entrance exam the first time around and couldn't use ninjutsu or genjutsu, but by the time we meet him, his training has enabled him to use ninjutsu and made him one of Konoha's top shinobi. When he uses the Eight Gates he becomes capable of warping space with a kick. Hard Work is what made Guy strong enough to knock around Uchiha Madara, the guy who Curbstomped all five living Kage at the same time like a ragdoll. Along with Minato, Gaara, Kakashi, and Lee, who helped nerf him. Still, it's enough for Madara to declare him the greatest taijutsu master he has ever faced, and give him more respect than the entire Shinobi Alliance. In fact, Guy is one of only two people Madara ever considered a worthy opponent.
- Also zig-zagged with Naruto's son, Boruto, who is talented at chakra control. However, his laziness causes him to fall behind other genin of his generation and causes him to resort to cheating with pre-loaded jutsus. In the final battle, the one jutsu he worked hard on, the Vanishing Rasengan, manages to save the heroes from the villain (who is also lazy). Of course, Naruto's massive chakra was still necessary to finish the villain off.
- Rock Lee seems like the poster child for this trope.
- Negi of Negima! Magister Negi Magi manages to pick up martial arts pretty much over a weekend. He also manages to master incredibly advanced magical techniques in very little time. It's partially justified in that he uses a Year Inside, Hour Outside mechanism to cram whole extra months of Training from Hell in. Even so, in the space of a month or so, he puts together a Black Magic technique, the complexity of which surprises the person who created the Black Magic to begin with. Said person is an immortal vampire who previously spent years on it.
- Jack Rakan might be an aversion. Unlike Negi, who was very powerful but didn't seem to put any effort into gaining that power, Jack Rakan spent almost whole his life fighting, he almost died many times but as time passed he became more and more powerful all thanks to decades of hard work. Even Negi refers to Rakan as "The Ultimate Hard Worker".
- In a possible subversion, Rakan is generally still acknowledged to be a lot stronger. The general opinion of the matter is that Negi's greatest strength lies in how proficient he is in making new techniques. At one point, it's mentioned that people would just love to stick him behind a desk somewhere and have him make new spells.
- And for a completely played dead straight example, Nagi at the age of fifteen fought evenly with Rakan (forty years of combat experience) and presumably won their fight by a tiny margin. And Nagi is a lot less intelligent than Negi is and probably didn't do nearly the same type of training.
- The aversion is underlined by Fate Averruncus when Negi manages to defeat him after learning Dark Magic — Fate is surprised by that Negi could ever beat him in a fight, and is unable to improve himself because he never needed to train in his whole life. He only survives his fight against Rakan by using an artifact that breaks the game even more than Rakan himself, because it MAKES the game. Rakan manages to come back anyway for a brief period.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion. Asuka is sent over the edge when Shinji's sync ratio got higher than hers even when she trained as a pilot for years. Then we found out why: it's revealed that Asuka figuratively "walling off" her heart from everyone (to avoid being hurt again) also caused her to shut out Eva-02 in all her attempts to synchronize with its resident soul, which just so happens to be that of her dead mother, thus she was essentially piloting an Eva all wrong. The fact that she managed the highest sync ratio for any period of time is impressive, and Asuka is still a better pilot than Shinji in terms of self-discipline and practical skill anyway. The main problem being that the series is Neon Genesis Evangelion, where everything will always go wrong (unless you're in a Lighter and Softer spin-off).
- In One Piece, Sanji was initially supposed to be a Super-Soldier like his siblings, but interference from his mother resulted in his not receiving the physical enhancements that they did, leaving him effectively as an ordinary child and constantly derided by them as a weak failure. By the time he meets with them again in the present day, his training under Red Leg Zeff and his experiences as a pirate have left him as more than a match for any member of his blood family without having to make any use of their enhancements, training, or technology.
- One-Punch Man plays with this.
- Exaggerated to parodic levels with Saitama's Super-Strength and Super-Toughness coming from, according to himself, from doing one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups, one hundred squats, and a ten kilometre run every day for three years, which is all anyone needs to do in order to be able to punch holes in buildings and win every fight with a single punch. Everyone treats this as exactly as stupid as it sounds. There are implications that Saitama's incredible strength may be some supernatural ability that was somehow unlocked by obsessively training to be a hero. Although the true nature of his power remains a mystery.
- For anyone not named Saitama, this gets ping-ponged everywhere. Some of the most powerful S-Class Heroes achieved their rank through honing their swordsmanship (Atomic Samurai), martial arts (Bang), physical training (Superalloy Darkshine and Flashy Flash), while others used methods like technology (Metal Knight, Genos, Child Emperor) to close the gap. The strongest shown S-Class Hero (Tatsumaki) was born with her incredibly powerful esper abilities, but it's not entirely clear how much of it is purely innate and how much was honed through training (though she's still leagues stronger than Fubuki and Psykos, both of whom were explicitly born with weaker abilities and trained much harder than her to maximize them, but still can't match her for sheer power). Monsters that were once humans could have transformed from becoming so obsessed in a particular field they transformed, or they short-cutted with monster cells.
- Garō plays with this harder than anyone. He has trained and much of his power comes from his sheer mastery of martial arts and incorporating new techniques from others while fighting them. On the other hand, the reason he's gained so much power so quickly is that he seems to possess an innate Came Back Strong Adaptive Ability that makes him stronger the more damage he takes fighting strong opponents.
- This actually gets lampshaded and defied when Flashy Flash (who proudly claims he achieved his abilities by training harder than anyone else in his village) fights two strong ninja from the village that used monsterization as a shortcut to greater power over training further. While incredibly fast and powerful while transformed, they still hadn't fully mastered their new abilities and are ultimately cut down by Flash, who notes that if they had trained themselves to that level of power, they would have stood a chance of defeating him.
- Averted and then played straight in the case of Kirino in Oreimo. She has been able to be a highly successful student athlete by practicing really hard, despite the lack of talent. However, after she starts being trained as a professional athlete, it all falls apart as she clearly couldn't catch up to those who also have real talent.
- The Pet Girl of Sakurasou has a lot of this, because of the composition of the main trio: Sorata, who is neither very focused nor skilled; Nanami, who is very hardworking but probably not outstanding, and Mashiro, an Idiot Savant:
- Sorata tells Nanami in Episode 15 that he hopes she succeeds at her audition because he's been watching her study hard ever since they were first year high school students, and hopes that it pays off at some point. Especially since both of them failed at their resepctive auditions the first time around.
- Played straight in the end of Episode 20 and the whole Episode 21: it starts with Nanami failing her audition; goes on with Sorata's game failing the last review due to another rhythm game which was more simple, traditional and more appealing to the market; afterwards, all of the main cast fail at getting enough signatures to prevent the destruction of Sakura Hall; finally, to add insult to injury, the game company that rejected Sorata ended up sending a work offer to Shiina as character designer thanks to the pictures she gave to Sorata.
- Ping Pong: Sakuma puts in ten times the effort of all the other major characters combined to excel at table tennis, but his astigmatism and lack of natural talent prevents him from ever surpassing them. His crappy attitude doesn't help matters, and gives Smile reason to utterly crush him when they face off.
- In Pokémon Journeys: The Series, things are thrown over their heads after a consistency in previous sagas of Pokémon: The Series:
- Ash's fresh team of newbies is able to perfectly defeat past characters who may have had prior hard training and seniority over them: from Gym Leaders to Leon, the strongest Champion of the world.
- His Lucario in particular is able to master many new moves at the drop of a hat (even Steel Beam, which is impossible to learn without a move tutor) and is able to master its Mega Evolution on the first go rather than Korrina, who needed a whole character arc to earn and use it for her own Lucario (who kept on losing every shown encounter it had since then).
- His barely-trained Dragonite is even able to solo Korrina's Mienshao and Mega Lucario by itself, to add to Korrina's losing track record.
- The most glaring example is Dracovish, who had just recently revived and managed to beat Iris's Dragonite in one move.
- Unlike every other trainer who must weaken a wild Pokémon to have better chances at catching them, Goh completely laughs at the notion and just needs to fling a Poké Ball and call it a day to catch any Pokémon he sees in less than 10 seconds. No one, not even Ash, says anything about Goh's unnaturally good luck, despite how it is looked down upon to just throw a ball without doing much.
- Ash's fresh team of newbies is able to perfectly defeat past characters who may have had prior hard training and seniority over them: from Gym Leaders to Leon, the strongest Champion of the world.
- The titular character of Ranma ½ possesses a Charles Atlas Superpower that, sometimes, allows him this particular luxury. Although he has to train long and hard to attain blinding speed, (the Kachuu Tenshin Amaguriken and Parlay du Fois Gras training methods,) or learn a particularly devastating technique, (the Hiryuu Shouten Ha and Mouko Takabisha,) "long and hard" for him means "a few days of experimentation", regardless of the decades it might have taken the techniques' original creators. Particularly noticeable in the case of the Umisenken, which he learned from watching it once, and practiced and mastered literally overnight, then used it to defeat the opponent who had trained in the opposite style Yamasenken his entire life.
- It does help that the "Musabetsu Kakutō Saotome Ryū" (The Saotome School Of Combat Pragmatism) is actually absurdly simple — accent on absurd. Its sole method of training is Training from Hell — By Experience. As in, survive stupid suicidal acts repeatedly. For example, Genma taught him how to fall from buildings without killing himself by throwing him off cliffs. He survived over a decade of this. Starting at age two. Result: The martial arts equivalent of The Pretender. If there's something he doesn't know how to do with his body already, he can come up with a suicidal training aid and fill the gap in a day or so.
- Averted in the manga version of Sailor Moon: Makoto/Sailor Jupiter is the one who is supernaturally strong and Minako/Sailor Venus merely trains a lot, and the one time they fought due to Makoto being Brainwashed and Crazy Minako knocked her out with a single vicious kick.
- Averted again in the final arc when Sailor Moon has to face her Brainwashed and Crazy friends, as the one that proves the most dangerous is Sailor Venus, the best trained one. Then seemingly played straight when Sailor Moon finds her resolve and kills everyone with one attack...except the manga side stories show that the workaholic Sailor Venus has been training her, it just hadn't been shown in the main story.
- In Saki, a variation comes into play with Kaori, a complete beginner at mahjong whom her friend, the Tsuruga team president, recruited to the team so that they would have enough people to go to the tournament. Kaori manages to come out on top in her match with her uncanny Beginner's Luck, which disrupts the playstyle of Mako, her opponent from the protagonists' team, who plays with Photographic Memory of her time in her grandfather's mahjong parlor and cannot counter Kaori's playstyle due to never having seen an amateur at play before. When the Tsuruga girls prepare to go to the individuals, Kaori is forbidden from practicing, under the reasoning that if she lost her beginner's luck, she could not possibly improve enough in that short time to compensate. Kaori ultimately ends up getting eliminated before long, though.
- In a more individual case on the flip side of this trope, Maho, who can imitate anyone's "special ability" for a single turn each day, nevertheless has many bad habits, such as revealing that she has no yaku, or trying to pick up a tile when doing so would get her penalized, despite having practiced for a year, and she's referred to as an "eternal beginner."
- In Servant × Service, for all his youth Creature of Habit Jouji has been challenging Brilliant, but Lazy Yutaka. For all these years Jouji won for not a single time.
- Ren of Shaman King suffers from this. His entire life has basically been one long Training from Hell, and yet no matter how hard he pushes himself, Yoh always kicks his butt with what seems to be little to no effort, the whole while spouting off his own philosophy of not pushing himself too hard to do something he can't do (which would have been the thing required to defeat Ren in that particular battle) until for no apparent reason, he is suddenly granted the ability to do that critical thing (or more commonly, the strategy that every experienced Shaman watching thought was total suicide turns out to work).
- It's worth remembering that prior to the story's beginning Yoh was given Training from Hell by his grandfather and later his fiancée, but said training didn't give him any hidden power for him to conceal or help him get over his slacker tendencies. Hell, he's practically the messiah of slackers!
- Shinmai Ossan Boukensha, Saikyou Party ni Shinu hodo Kitaerarete Muteki ni Naru: Zig-zagged during Rick's fight with Gis. Gis is a Draconic Humanoid naturally gifted with incredible power and, as such, looks down on and mocks those who think "hard work" is enough to match him. Rick is a largely talentless, middle-aged man who started training much later in life than normal, but that training was so hellish that after two years he, too, boasts incredible power. Gis's previous fight was with Rick's friend Angelica, who had spent the month prior going through much the same Training from Hell Rick had in preparation for the fight, only to lose to Gis and fall into the Despair Event Horizon as a result. As Rick's fight with Gis progresses, it's revealed that he's actively holding back his full power. To be precise, he's holding himself back to Angelica's current level of physical strength so that she can view the fight almost as a rematch and get an idea of her true potential. Rick is handily winning until Gis unleashes his full draconic power. Once he does so he's so powerful that both Rick and Angelica acknowedge that, as she is now, after only one month of training, Angelica could never have beaten the naturally gifted Gis. Rick's response is to stop holding back as much and start using as much strength as Angelica would have after six months of training, then nine, then twelve and as he does so restricts himself largely to Angelica's own techniques. In this state he defeats Gis with ease, shows Angelica just what she has the potential to become, and subverts the idea that hard work is worthless all in one go.
- Sword Art Online is a complete aversion, which is notable because it takes place in an MMO, which would naturally fall into this. The only way to increase your skills is to work, hard. If they weren't trapped inside the game 24/7, no one would have time to get past level ten. Even though everyone desperately wants to escape from the game, they grudgingly admit that it is fair. A very in-depth review of the series pointed out that this is largely because the series was written in 2000, before World of Warcraft, when MMOs were still grindfests where you could expect to do nothing but kill monsters to advance for most levels. Then it's played straight in both the Fairy Dance (where he is explicitly cheating by carrying over his SAO stats) and Phantom Bullet arcs (where Kirito basically curb-stomps his human enemies), only to be averted again during Alicization. And then played straight again with a vengeance, as Kirito goes from a Heroic RRoD to the World's Strongest Man within seconds of his awakening and manage to curb-stomp both Vassago and Gabriel, both being Invincible Villains until then.
- Teppu is about how main character Natsuo has finally found a sport Mixed Martial Arts) where this trope doesn't hold for her, meaning she'll actually have to work to excel at it. This is exactly why she's interested in it. The manga otherwise has much the same attitude towards this trope as Holyland above: A good MMA fighter needs to have talent, training and experience. Natsuo has the talent, which is why she has the potential to be great at it. Her erstwhile rival Yuzuko has an expert coach and lots of training experience and hard work behind her, while Yuzuko's best friend Ringo adds a natural talent for the sport on top of it.
- Touch: Averted in Tatsuya's case. Although he is an amazing natural athlete, even better than Kazuya, years without exercising or practicing mean that when he eventually joins the baseball team he has to train hard to even come close to his brother's standard, let alone surpass him. Played straight, however, with Minami, who goes from not being particularly interested in gymnastics to winning a championship very quickly.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! GX,
- Judai, despite sleeping through all the few classes he bothers to attend, effortlessly beats anybody who challenges him (except for a rare few). Deconstructed in Season 3, when an Isaac Newton-like teacher tries to take revenge on him for inspiring pupils to ignore studying and try to emulate his success, and a villain convinces him that everything coming so easily for him means he isn't a true hero. It's almost like a summary of how nobody likes The Ace because nowadays, True Art Is Angsty.
- The one time he does prepare and use a coherent strategy, in his second duel against Ryo, it doesn't work. Ryo comments that it's a disappointment and tells him to go back to dueling the way he did before. (Judai takes this advice to heart and manages to end their match in a draw.)
- The best example in the series however comes from Daichi Misawa, the Ra Yellow who is originally set up in Season 1 as The Rival to Judai. While exceptionally smart, he is shown spending hours upon hours studying and formulating strategies in order to beat his foes, being so Crazy-Prepared as to make 8 different decks over the course of the series (6 elemental decks, a seventh specifically to beat Judai, and an 8th "perfect" deck he uses for the rest of the series.) With the exception of Manjoume in Season 1, however, he rarely ever wins duels on-screen, and the few times he does win are against nameless Red Shirts, and no one else cares. Be it Judai revealing a brand-new card perfect for the scenario, or the current Big Bad manipulating his will, Misawa's hard work all comes to naught against the Magic Poker Equation, and ends with him running away from the school buck naked.
- YuYu Hakusho; Case in point, Kuwabara trains hard to unlock his spiritual powers, Yusuke gets hit by a car. Yusuke trains too, sure, but he always manages to find shortcuts, leaving everyone else to get there the hard way.
- Come to that, throughout the series, Yusuke and Kuwabara mostly don't train during peaceful times. Kurama and Hiei do, and it lets them stay at roughly the same level. Hiei gets it the worst, because he doesn't seem to do anything else with his free time, while Kurama puts in enough work to stay at the top of his class in school and spends time with his human mother.
- Averted in Zatch Bell! with Zeon. He has the same lightning spells as The Hero Zatch only Zeon has also undergone Training from Hell. The end result is he kicks the crap out of Zatch so badly it takes Zatch's partner Kiyo having the Answer Talker superpower to even stand a chance. Zeon wins anyway through another aversion of the trope, his own partner Dufort has the same Answer Talker, only where Kiyo awoke it an hour ago he's been practicing it for years and naturally outclasses Kiyo by a large margin. When Zatch is about to undergo his own Training from Hell, he's told to not even bother trying to imitate Zeon's Flash Step abilities; it took Zeon years to get those down and Zatch just doesn't have the time.
- Every Zoids protagonist of note tends to drop into the cockpit without much previous combat experience, and manage to kick the backsides of more than a few expert enemies who've fought for years.
- Bit Cloud might be a deconstruction, as he spent most of his adult life as a junk merchant specializing in Zoid parts and studying tactics, and isn't treated very seriously by opponents early on because he had little fame behind him. Bit also states at the start of the series he had wanted to be a pilot so it's possible he had trained beforehand. He's certainly good at coming up with a plan.
- Van and Bit are both justified by having the Organoid helping out from the inside. Van in particular starts out relying almost entirely on Zeke, and receives proper training later on. Bit might be smarter than he looks.
