This is it.
The Hero is storming through the
Big Bad's secret base, avoiding all detection by guards. He finally reaches the room where the big bad is when he notices some stairs in the room's entrance. What will he do? Seamlessly jump over it in a dramatic pose, of course! They don't care that they were meant to be stepped on. Apparently stepladders are for dummies.
This is often featured in action films, specially when the Hero is in a hot chase, or
has a limited time to enter/exit the place, or even just for dramatic effect. Sometimes it works, others, well... they end up as
Narm
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In Soul Eater, Maka does this when storming through the Kishin's "tomb"
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, one of the Mooninites swoops down upon Yugi and Kaiba "like a ninja." Mario Bros noises are then added to the scene of him jumping up the side of a building.
Film
- Judge Dredd in The Movie
- In Erik the Viking, the title character, needing to borrow his girlfriend's invisibility cloak, scales the wall to her quarters using a pair of knives. Her first question upon his entering is why he didn't just use the stairs that were right next to the wall he climbed.
Literature
- Dave Duncan's book The Reaver Road when Omar goes to rescue the woman to be sacrificed.
Video Games
- God Hand is a definite example in that Gene never climbs ladders: He simply jumps up and lands at the top of the ladder.
- In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, Layle will walk up to ladders, poles, and other climbable things, and then use his gravity powers to vault himself straight to the top (or bottom). Makes one wonder why he even bothers.
- The ladder climbing animation in Mega Man 1 was slightly bugged, resulting in a glitch where Mega Man simply falls up very quickly under certain conditions, and is one of the ways to save time in speed runs.
- While you technically can and do use ladders, very often in the Assassin's Creed series simply running up the wall next to a ladder is faster than climbing it.
Western Animation
- In the mid-season finale of the forth season of The Venture Bros., Brock is about to charge into a the lab of an evil (non sanctioned) scientist. he uses a rope arrow, despite being told that there is a ladder next to him, because, well "where's the fun in that?".
