Fork Fencing

Getting the last meatball?
Serious Business.

"A fight to the death... this spoon shall be our only weapon!"

— Nine the Phantom, BlazBlue: Central Fiction

Among the many kinds of Improbable Weapon User, the weapon of choice for someone who devotes their life to food may be the tools everyone uses to eat with.

A character who uses a common eating utensil - like a fork, a table knife, or even a spoon - to fight off their enemies may be the mark of a Supreme Chef who's been pushed a little too far, or a Lethal Chef who is as lethal outside of the kitchen as they are inside of it. It may as well be part of the fighting style of the Chef of Iron, whose armaments may also include various cutlery, the Frying Pan of Doom and even food itself. Alternately, if chaos breaks out at the dinner table, a diner may have to get creative with what they have on hand, turning their utensils into an Improvised Weapon.

Normally played for laughs (especially if there's Sword Sparks), but if the chips are down, things can get pretty ugly: this can lead to sickeningly devastating effect in the hands of someone skilled/determined enough.

While large forks have certainly been used as polearms - Wikipedia has an article on military forks - this trope is about characters who use dinner forks, butter knives, and the like as personal weaponry.

Subtrope of Improvised Weapon. Compare Frying Pan of Doom, which is about cookware being used as a weapon. Might occur in a Fight for the Last Bite.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Slayers, the Trope Namer. The first episode of Slayers NEXT has Gourry and Lina literally fork-fencing at super speed over the last bits of food on the table. Neither of them end up getting it, as a fight breaks out in the tavern and their table is knocked over. Lina's response? Well... This is justified two-fold: First, both of them are notorious Big Eaters. Second, the party has a tradition where the person who eats the least has to pick up the tab.
• Fighting over food is common for media from Japan, where meals are traditionally served in communal plates. For example, in Trigun Vash and Wolfwood fight over an enormous plate of spaghetti during the course of an argument.
• Sebastian uses silverware as weaponry in Black Butler. Then again, he is a Battle Butler (and a demon), so he can do some pretty wicked things with tableware. By which we of course mean using them as throwing knives and taking on an angel by holding them as Wolverine Claws.
• While Kenshiro of Fist of the North Star doesn't use any forks, his incarnation in Fist of the Blue Sky uses a whole bunch of them to take out a bunch of evil gangsters who were viciously mistreating his sworn brother. And in the anime adaptation of the manga, he uses Kenshiro's famous Kiai for the Hokuto Hyakuretsu Ken ("AHHHHTATATATATATATATATATATATA!") from the previous series while he's throwing those forks. Or in the French Gag Dub, the infamous "Hokuto de cuisine".
• Noir: Kirika Yuumura is a master with Improvised Weapons and has killed people with forks, including Chloe with the same silver dessert fork that Kirika gave her as a present earlier in the series.
• Reborn! (2004) The Vongola IV used a fork as his main weapon.
• In Darker than Black, second season, Hei uses a knife to pin the hand of a government official to the table, preventing him from setting off a bomb. A bit squickier than you'd think, since he jams it in sideways, rather than lengthwise as you'd expect.
• CLAMP in Wonderland 2 has a scene between Fuma the anti-Christ and Kamui, the Christ figure, duking it out over a stolen waffle... with spatulas!
• Ranma ½:
  • In the martial arts dining story arc in the manga, Sōun and Genma duel with forks.
  • In an episode of the anime, Shampoo uses forks as projectiles, catching Ukyō in a Knife Outline.
• In the first episode of Chrono Crusade, Rosette attacks the Elder with silverware when he sneaks a peak up her dress. The dub even adds a line of her threatening to "kill you with this spoon!!"
• Miharu Shimizu, the Psycho Lesbian of Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts attacks the lead character with throwing forks for daring to lust after the target of her affections.
• One Piece has the Straw Hat Pirates' chef, Sanji,only fighting with his legs and feet because he saves his hands for cooking. He also believes that kitchen knives should only be used on food. The one time he broke this rule was when he fought with kitchen knives, though Sanji let that slide because his opponent was wearing armor made out of ramen. You do the math.
• While not technically real kitchenware, Toriko's Fork and Knife counts.
• In the Dragon Ball Z movie Battle of Gods, Beerus fends off all of the heroes very nonchalantly with a pair of chopsticks. Originally he would actually have used a fork (or spoon), but the film's animation director thought it would have been too difficult to fight like that and changed it to chopsticks.
• In part six of The Garden of Sinners, when Shiki goes undercover at Reien Academy and has to leave her signature knife behind, it takes her a whole of one scheduled meal to spirit away a table-knife. Given how this is the Breather Episode, however, she barely gets to actually used it for the rest of the episode.
• The Digimon Xros Wars manga has a number of Shortmon brandishing giant dinner forks in preparation for battle. Any actual fighting that they do is off-panel, though.
• In Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple, Shigure is told not to use bladed weapons against a group of attackers for obvious reasons. So she slices apart their weapons with a wooden rice spoon.

Card Games

• An obscure card game, Let's Kill!, has one of these as a murder weapon. "You really have to put your back into it."

Comedy

• Ed Byrne once joked that banning things like nail clippers on planes was unnecessary, since he was certain that another individual armed with a pair of tweezers could probably take it back, commenting "There's a duel I'd like to see".

Comic Books

• Near the climax of Watchmen, Veidt uses a fork to pin Rorschach's sleeve to a table. Rorschach pulls it free and tries to attack him with it, only for Veidt to block it without turning his head.
• WildStorm's Friday the 13th has a scene where Jason kills a guy by stabbing him in the face with a two-pronged grilling fork.
• In The Smurfs comic book adaptation of "The Clockwork Smurf", both Clockworks fight each other with silverware — the fake Clockwork with a fork and knife, and the real Clockwork with a spoon.

Comic Strips

• In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin magnificently won a fork duel with a greenish, seemingly gelatinous glob of something that was supposed to be food, before the thing cheated and used a spoon to run him off by lobbing pieces of itself at him. In his further defense, he was the one who said they should call out for pizza to begin with.

Films — Animation

• There are two sequences in Kung Fu Panda where chopsticks are used as weapons. The second scene is important for Po's character growth as it shows that he has trained hard enough not just to be a kung fu master in his own right but also not to eat when he's stressed.
• In the final scene of Corpse Bride, the hero uses a serving fork as an Improvised Weapon.

Films — Live-Action

• In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the heroes use cutlery when they run out of cannon ammunition. Hilarity Ensues when an enemy pirate gets stabbed in the fake eye with a fork.
• The Blue Raja from Mystery Men is an expert fork- and spoon-thrower (but, for no adequately explained reason, refuses to have any truck with knives).
• In the Brandon Lee vehicle Rapid Fire, Lee's character beats a couple of corrupt FBI agents who are planning on killing him to unconsciousness and death... with a kitchen.
• In Richie Rich, Cadbury is attacked by a knife-wielding bad guy. He tries to grab something to defend himself, fumbles with an armful of metal implements, and ends up with... a spatula.
• In The Mask of Zorro, Don Diego challenges Alejandro to a duel...with a spoon. In reality, he's demonstrating that the next "weapon" he'll teach Alejandro to use is class.
• During the training montage in Power Rangers (2017), Kim and Trini have a humorous bout over the last piece of a donut.
• In Surf Ninjas, Adam is using his Game Gear to dictate how a series of fights inside a restaurant should go (he's psychic with it; long story). When the mysterious eye-patched Zatch is about to engage with a mook, Adam has Zatch pull out a pair of chopsticks because they're worth the most points of his options; Zatch swiftly counters the mook's attack on him with a thrust of the sticks up against his nose, then flings him over his shoulder into a folding screen.

Literature

• Vimes' butler Wilikins in Discworld. In Night Watch, Vetinari, an Assassins' Guild student at the time, effortlessly catches thrown fruit on his fork. Without looking up from his book.
• At the end of The Stepsister Scheme, Tali - AKA 'Sleeping Beauty' - fights a TROLL using a knife-and-fork set. The twist being that she just grabbed that silverware off the table of a powerful member of The Fair Folk, and as such, they're magical enough to penetrate the troll's defenses. End result: The troll goes down with a table-knife in his throat.
• Cal Leandros starts stabbing his friend Robin with a fork, repeatedly, after a case of amnesia.
• A Confederacy of Dunces features a fight between Ignatius J. Reilly and Clyde, his boss at Paradise Vendors (pushing around a hot dog cart), in which Clyde uses the long, two-pronged fork he uses to prepare the hot dogs and Ignatius uses the plastic sword that is part of his pirate costume. Yes.
• Perry Dawsey in Scott Sigler's novel Infected. "Fork you, buddy."
• In The Fork, The Witch, and the Worm, Murtagh finds himself in a fight without a weapon. He enchants a fork with a spell to prevent it from breaking, uses it to defeat sword-wielding mercenaries, and then presents it to a young girl so that she can keep it to defend herself when needed. (She names it "Mister Stabby.")
• A character gets slashed to death with a razor sharp fork in Dreamspawn.
• Mahiro and his mom utilize forks in Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! to keep Nyarko, Cuuko, and Hasta in check if they start acting up too much. Keep in mind that the former two are ordinary humans and the latter three are Eldritch Abominations from the Cthulhu Mythos.
• Tyrion Lannister uses this early in the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire to annoy a particularly humourless member of the Night's Watch. When the knight leaves in a huff, Tyrion claims his share of dinner.

Live-Action TV

• In Malcolm in the Middle, Malcom and Reese duel with their forks over the last piece of meat in one opening. Then it falls on the floor. Then the two just scramble to the floor wrestling over it.
• Angel:
  • In the episode "Just Rewards", Angel kills the villain's butler with a spoon. By throwing it at him so hard it lodges in his forehead. Spike is appropriately incredulous.
    Spike: A spoon?! That's just— [Butler pulls spoon out, looks murderous] Well, okay, that's more— [Butler falls over, dead] Disappointing, really.
  • In "Harm's Way", Harmony and another vampire both grab chopsticks in a fight in the cafeteria. Harmony eventually stakes the other vamp with her chopsticks.
• The Drew Carey Show: Drew Carey was at one point coming to blows with someone, and took up a fork, claiming that it would be a deadly weapon in his hand, since, with it, he would "never miss." For you see, he is fat.
• An interesting version occurs in the first episode of The Aquabats! Super Show!, in which the Aquabats use giant forks to battle giant ants. Why forks? Who knows? (But then, who cares?)
• In the Supernatural episode "What Is And What Should Never Be" (S02, Ep20), Dean needs a silver knife to kill a djinn and steals one of mother's silver dinner knives.
• In the Doctor Who episode "Robot of Sherwood", the Doctor responds to a challenge from Robin Hood with the following Badass Boast:
  Doctor: I have no sword. I need no sword. For I am the Doctor. And this... is my spoon!
• One time on Mr. Belvedere, Mr. Belvedere and Wesley were facing each other in a cook-off, and after a round of taunting each other, they started fencing with wooden spoons.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Deja Q": After Q is made mortal and stuck aboard the Enterprise, Guinan calmly stabs him in the hand with a fork to see if he's telling the truth. He screams in pain, proving that he's being honest (for once).

Music Videos

• "Weird Al" Yankovic parodied Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (featuring two gang leaders in a knife fight) with "Eat It". The leaders were instead fighting over a chicken, and armed... well, one had a fork, the other a spoon. What's even better is that the spoon and fork are propped as switchblades.

Podcasts

• When the party in The Fallen Gods gets shrunk down in episode 4, the only weapons they can wield are forks and knives.

Pro Wrestling

• "The Madman from the Sudan" Abdullah the Butcher used a fork as his weapon of choice for decades.
• Full Impact Pro's first champion, Ring of Honor and TNA alum Homicide is known for going on indiscriminate rampages with forks.
• AJ Styles once beat Tommy Dreamer in an "I Quit" match by trying to attack his eye with a fork.
• Self proclaimed CZW savior Matt Tremont uses a fork as his weapon of choice, specifically, a carving fork.
• Madison Eagles boasted to have strategies to defeat everyone who had wrestled for SHINE and everyone who could conceivably by the time of her debut. Her "strategy" for Amazing Kong? Use a fork!(apparently effective enough to make her apply it to the whole roster)

Video Games

• Kingdom of Loathing features utensils of various stripe as weapons, including "foons" (think the opposite of "spork") and a silver shrimp fork. While these generally exist to serve a trained Chef-Mage as a wand equivalent, they're entirely functional for dealing purely material damage. And while it's possible if not easy to find properly balanced throwing knives, you're more likely to end up with the fork or spoon variant of that missile. (There's this club which either hires ninja as waiters or has an awful lot of ninja infiltrators among its waitstaff, so perhaps knives are too... obvious?)
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater:
  • There's an escape sequence where a fork is available to the player. Attacking any normally captureable animals with it causes Snake to eat them instantly, instead of killing them normally.
  • You also get an unloaded Single Action Army, which you can get ammo for the moment you step out of the prison. Though the SAA makes a loud bang and can't be silenced, making the fork almost a weapon of choice.
• Fear & Hunger: Termina: If Henryk ends up Moonscorched, the resulting "Gentleman" attacks wielding both a dining knife and fork.
• In Final Fantasy IX, Quina's weapon of choice is a giant fork spork. Their special ability is "Eat," which allows them to copy enemy abilities, and they're utterly fascinated with food.
• In Rule of Rose, your starting weapon is a dessert fork. It's about as effective as it sounds.
• In Improbable Island, four of the weapons available to new players are bits of cutlery, from the humble Spork to the half-decent Kitchen Knife.
• In Dwarf Fortress because of their tiny contact area and the way the game processes bodily damage they're a great weapon. The drawback is the're forks and therefore has the reach of a dwarfs arm. Just don't let a tantruming dwarf get his hands on one...
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Morrowind, Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion, and The Elder Scrolls Online have "The Fork of Horripilation"^note "Horrpilitaion" means "to have goose bumps/goose pimples/goose flesh". It's a pitifully weak weapon which drains your own Magicka when you use it. Naturally, it's involved in a quest for Sheogorath, and you can trade it in for a much better weapon once you've completed it.
  • Skyrim includes a downplayed example in the form of rare, Easter Egg versions of the common fork and cutlery knife that can be picked up and used as the worst two weapons in the game. They're mostly semi-functional joke weapons but you can enchant them to make them a bit more lethal.
• If the two weren't in production at about the same time, one would wonder from one of Sonic Unleashed's unlockable cutscenes if the Sonic Team staff was composed of Kung Fu Panda fans.
• In Pro Wrestling, one of the Amazon's signature moves is stabbing the opponent in the face with a fork.
• Among the great many household items you can turn into weapons in Project Zomboid is flatware: forks, spoons, and butter knives. Since they generally break on the first use, and they can only hit within grappling range, it's pretty much suicide to bring these to a zombie fight. For stabbing, at least move up to the carving knife, but expect that to break pretty fast too.
• In Splatoon's Salmon Run mode, Smallfry wield little plastic spoons, in keeping with the Salmonids' theming around cookware and looking delicious.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner. In the Cheat Commandoes Thanksgiving special, Blue Lazer Commander uses this to differentiate between his two cronies by jabbing a fork into one crony's eye.

Web Comics

• In Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire, Buck's uncle Frakkus is skilled with the Hoffmanite Throwing Fork.
  Frakkus: Don't make me use the spoon.
• Still with Phil Foglio, Girl Genius:
  • It is cranked up, as can be expected of Sparks, with Gil's Hand-cranked Runcible Gun — a gun that shoots sporks.
  • Castle Heterodyne's Axe-Crazy kitchen takes this even more seriously.
  • Much later, Tarvek points out that giving a fork to a prisoner, even one shackled to the bed, is a bad idea, as he uses it both to pick the manacle and to threaten his goaler.
    Tarvek: Plus, Gil wouldn't leave me shackled... and if he did — he'd never let me have a fork. So much more versatile that a knife.
• Jane Crocker of Homestuck uses a spoon capable of morphing into a fork as her weapon of choice.
• Referenced in Questionable Content with the Indonesian Fighting Spoon, which can scoop out a man's lungs in the blink of an eye. Note that while that turns out to be just another one of Faye's jokes, the Malaysian Battle Spatula IS real...
• In El Goonish Shive, during the fight with the first Goo, Elliot spots a plastic fork on the ground and throws it at the Goo like a throwing knife while calling his attack in Japanese. It merely enters and exits the Goo with little visible effect and the Goo snickers at him before resuming its rampage.
• In S.S.D.D. Tessa finds a fork while exploring Cyberspace (specifically during the text adventure), which proves a surprisingly effective virtual weapon. Relatively speaking.
• Pixie and Brutus: Pixie thinks a jack-o-lantern ate Randal when she sees his tail sticking out of its mouth (not helped by Randal deciding to prank her) and she runs away. A few minutes later, she returns with a fork to stab the pumpkin monster into submission as she demands it release Randal.

Web Original

• The pilot episode of Cause of Death has the battle continue into the kitchen, where the slob grabs a knife. The killer grabs a granola bar. And owns.

Western Animation

• Blue Eye Samurai. Downplayed in "A Fixed Number of Paths" when Mizu says she can beat Taigen with any weapon, so they fight with chopsticks. However such is their mutual antagonism they quickly resort to beating each other up.
• At the beginning of an episode of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002), Prince Adam balked at learning table etiquette, leading Orko to challenge him to a flatware duel. Randor is not impressed.
• Phineas and Ferb: Perry the Platypus and rogue OWCA agent Dennis the Rabbit briefly fought using a spatula and a barbecue fork.
• In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer wins a knife fight against a mobster using a pair of table forks. Giving us the truly groanworthy quote:
  Mark Hamill: H-Homer... Use the for...
  Homer Simpson: The Force?
  Mark Hamill: The forks! Use the forks!
• Tom and Jerry once did battle using knives from a fancy banquet table.
  • The short "High Steaks" has them fencing with barbecue forks.
• In the Trollhunters episode "Recipe for Disaster", Jim and Barbara has Strickler over for dinner. Jim has just found out that Strickler was working for Gunmar, but he cannot confront him directly because Barbara has no idea about anything involving him being the trollhunter. When Barbara walks out into the kitchen, they then fight using forks and knifes before Jim puts on his armor and Strickler takes on his true form.

Real Life

• Very much Truth in Television, particularly for heavy kitchen cutlery like cleavers and steak knives.

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