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Never Bring A Knife To A Fist Fight
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"Samurai robots beat guns, no question. So it's just me and a shovel."
Knives are scary. A single glimmer from its profile has been known to launch a thousand screams of horror. They're eminently deadly, dangerously easy to use... and utter liabilities in a fistfight. In a Wire Fu movie, you should Never Bring A Knife To A Fist Fight, because Good Old Fisticuffs is king. Knives, guns, and any weapon that would give the wielder an advantage in a fight, especially if they're blood-spilling and are used against an unarmed opponent, have the reverse effect. They make it likelier that they'll never land a hit ( Clothing Damage or minor cuts across the cheek or torso notwithstanding), and eventually get disarmed or forced to throw away their weapon.
Much like all products of the Inverse Law Of Utility And Lethality, this applies equally to Heroes and Villains, though villains are usually likelier to pack heat or hidden knives. If someone does get stabbed, shot, skewered, or otherwise hit with the blood-spilling weapon, it was Only A Flesh Wound. Often goes hand in hand with finding out that just like weapons, Armor Is Useless. One way to exploit this trope is to make an immobilizing Knife Outline, as the likelihood of fatally skewering someone becomes zero.
Oddly enough, a dramatic death where someone gets skewered or shot aren't subversions, since they rely on the unlikelihood of such weapons actually killing for their dramatic punch; plus, the person shot usually lasts long enough to deliver an inspiring Final Speech and turn out to be Not Quite Dead afterwards. Instantly fatal stabbings or headshots are subversions, though.
Unusually, some martial arts actually teach this. A person using a blade will focus only on using the blade, and will rarely do much more than try to stab or cut. A good fighter can use this to their advantage by placing themselves either too close or too far away from the blade's wielder for it to be used properly, because the user will more than likely try to employ the weapon anyway. For example, if you grapple a man with a knife, he'll likely keep trying to stab you rather than doing to smart thing and trying to push you to the floor. Thus, this is actually a rather strange case of truth in television.
Note: This only applies to humans. In Speculative Fiction, you can skewer and dismember as many golems, undead, Mecha Mooks or what have you as you damn well please.
See also: Guns Are Worthless, Armor Is Useless, Fistficuffs Fight, Knife Outline, Could Have Been Messy, and Only A Flesh Wound.
A subtrope of the Inverse Law Of Utility And Lethality.
Examples:
- The Charlies Angels movies have this in full effect; any villain going at them with any kind of weapon to bear rarely even nicks them. The second movie Scotch Tapes this, by saying that the Angels don't use guns.
- Quite possibly the point of everything Jackie Chan stars in. Then again, his action sequences are so impressive it hardly jars.
- This was actually subverted in Rumble in the Bronx. Jackie pwns the gangbangers in an extensive hand-to-hand combat scene, then one of them pulls a revolver on him, forcing him to grovel and be humiliated (in context, he was in a narrow alley several dozen feet away, preventing him from dodging or ambushing/disarming the guy like he usually does).
- Depending on if he's fighting Faceless Goons or recurring villains, Wolverine can go from messily skewering everything that moves to barely managing to nick the bad guy's costume.
- Big Bad Shredder of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had claws as part of his costume, yet he never really does much shredding with them.
- Exhibited quite a bit in Avatar The Last Airbender, probably to escape the Media Watchdogs. The show presents numerous swords, spears and other weaponary implements of various intricate, traditional designs, but as of yet, no one has been struck by any of them. One particular sequence had Bad Ass Normal Sokka basically just standing with his back hunched carrying a big knife doing absolutely nothing while his bender teammates took on the opposing guards. However, this may have been justified in that one instance; they were trying to avoid seriously injuring them, so he couldn't just run up to one and shank him in the gut.
- Subverted in the Devil May Cry series: Although the second fight with Vergil in DMC3 starts with him using the Beowulf gauntlets and greaves, he pulls out his Yamato katana after he finds that having the hand-to-hand weapon isn't stopping Dante from kicking his ass. Beowulf (acquired after victory in said fight) and the Ifrit gauntlets in DMC1 are the strongest weapons damage-wise, but Dante never uses them in cutscenes, sticking to his sword(s).
- That both Dante and Vergil exhibit the most extreme forms of Hollywood Healing, and thus can and are skewered by all manner of unpleasant edged objects without any lasting harm, may have something to do with this.
- Subverted in just about every beat-em-up video game ever made. Most of the time it's fist-against-fist combat, but when an enemy shows up with a weapon, that enemy will, nine times out of ten, be much stronger than his companions. Bosses, likewise, are usually always armed. By the same token, disarming a foe and stealing their weapon will give you a massive advantage... until the thing falls apart.
- This is doubly true in Lugaru: The Rabbit's Foot. While weapons are just about as deadly and easy to steal as in any other beat-em-up (when in use), if somebody's dumb enough to try and run away, an auto-aimed thrown knife landing in their back is always an instant kill.
- In Full Metal Alchemist, Hawkeye prefers guns due to the fact that they allow her not to have to "feel her opponents die."
- Subverted in Raiders of the Lost Ark wherein Indiana Jones simply shoots the flamboyant swordsman challenging him.
- There is a Double Subversion in the sequel, where Indy reaches for his gun... only to realize that it has been lost earlier.
- Pucca often bests ninja, Texan RV-bots, sharks, and other foes with super weapons and katanas with nothing but her bare hands and righteous anger at her beloved being harmed.
- Exception: In the play West Side Story the violence between the Jets and the Sharks becomes more horrific as it escalates from fistcuffs to knives to a gun, leading to the violent deaths of several major characters.
- In Outlaw Star, resident ass-kickers Suzuka and Aisha seem to regularly wipe out rooms of gun-wielding foes with nothing more than a wooden sword and bare hands, respectively.
- Possibly subverted in Under Siege featuring Steven Segal, where Steve and the Big Bad eco terrorist fought very impressively with knives.
- During the alley fight in Sha Po Lang, Ma Kwan manages to beat the knife-wielding assassin Jack bloody with his steel baton, but is unable to finish him until Jack manages to strip him of his baton. When Jack attacks the unarmed Kwan, Kwan grabs his knife, twists it around, and guts Jack like a fish.
- Subversion: In Kung Fu Hustle, Coolie, Donut, and Tailor are quickly dispatched by the Harpists' hidden blades.
- . . . all of whom used weapons when they fought. The Harpists are then creamed by unarmed combatants.
- Coolie only ever used his feet, since he is a master specialising in Twelve Kicks of the Tam School, and Tailor only punched folks whilst wearing iron bracelets as a masters of Hung family Iron Wire kung fu
- Blades? The Harpists' Harp generated sound that could slice through people. Coolie, Donut, and Tailor were all using physical melee attacks. Coolie was unarmed and got sliced quickly. Tailor fell after his rings were shattered, and Donut's "super attack" with his staffs was stopped by a wall of sound. When the Harpists fought the Landlord, they were trying to use their fists (physical melee damage) rather than their harp. When they tried to use their Harp, the Landlady used her (ranged attack) Lion's Roar, which both shredded their attack and them.
- Anime example: Though Rurouni Kenshin is primarily a sword-fighting anime, this trope is used early on when a thug tries to use a dagger-type weapon (with a ring-hole at the end so it can be worn on the finger) against fist-fighter Sanosuke... only to have his own finger broken due to Sanosuke's inhuman toughness.
- Also, despite being a sword-fighting anime, the "Swords > Guns" trope was subverted early on, at the end of the second arc... An evil bureaucrat massacres the arc's entire Quirky Mini Boss Squad of noble fighter villains using an imported gatling gun, all while bragging about how technology makes ubermensch fighting skills obsolete. He only loses to Kenshin because he ran out of bullets killing everyone else (in the manga), or because the last villain managed to jam the gatling's belt feed with a throwing star (in the anime).
- Averted in the Order Of The Stick prequel "On The Origin Of PCs" where we first meet Belkar as he sits in jail charged with fatally stabbing several people in a bar brawl.
- Blunty averted in Assassins Creed, where switching to your fists in a sword fight is a quick way to an asskicking.
- Yet somewhat plays straight if you switch to the hidden blade. Countering is slightly easier (but if you screw up the counter there's no blocking, naturally) and using the counter counts as a guaranteed one hit kill, rather than possibly shoving the enemy down.
- Subverted in Survival Of The Fittest, when Ric Chee and Bobby Jacks fight with Good Old Fisticuffs. When Bobby realises that, conversely to his expectations, he is getting beaten down mercilessly (by a guy with no combat expertise whatsoever) he pulls out a knife (well, scalpel) and immediately fatally stabs Ric.
- Averted in Smallville of all places, where Lois Lane is fighting a security guard - after a period of inconclusive barehanded fighting, the guard get mad, pulls out a knife, and succeeds in stabbing her.
- Batman uses this a lot, since he often faces thugs armed with knives, but one particularly obvious example is the fight at the end of Mad Love, when a very enraged Joker attacks Batman, and seems to be giving him more trouble in a fistfight than he usually does... until he pulls out a knife, and Batman instantly knocks him off the train.
- Super Smash Bros. has an egregious subversion of this, intended or not; though Link isn't regarded as high tier, Marth and Meta Knight certainly are. Young/Toon Link has come under fire as a possible subversion of the trope too.
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