"Get off my ship. You're a dead duck here. You're powerless. We know about you, and we don't want to play. Maybe there are others like you around. Maybe you've caused a lot of suffering, a lot of history, but that's all over. We'll be on guard now, ready for you, so ship out! Come on! Haul it!"
Not every villain has power of their own. Some are Emotion Eaters or run on the power of imagination. They may also cause, or take advantage of, a Hate Plague. As such, they tend to draw their strength from their victims.
However, this has a tendency to backfire on such villains, as once the hero or heroine realizes this, they are able to stem the flow of power, and take control of the situation.
This is a common way of defeating an Enemy Without. Could lead to Heroic Suicide if the character has to die to cut off the villain's power.
May overlap with Sheathe Your Sword, when the way to defeat an enemy is to stop fighting them altogether.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Films — Animation
- Rise of the Guardians: Pitch Black gets his power from fear, so once the kids are no longer afraid of him, he's powerless.
Films — Live-Action
- Dragonheart: A peasant uprising slays the king, and leaves his only son and heir, Prince Einon, mortally wounded. A reclusive dragon agrees to save the prince's life by donating a piece of his heart, which restores the prince to health, and also leaves him deathless, so long as the dragon lives. When Einon turns out to be a cruel and malicious ruler, Knight Errant Bowen partners with the dragon to end Einon's rule. However, no matter how many times Bowen defeats him or leaves him to an unsurvivable fate, Einon cannot die, and returns for more. The dragon beseeches Bowen to slay him instead, as Einon's heart will fail when the dragon's heart stops beating.
- Girl vs. Monster: The Big Bad, Deimata, is powered by fear, same as all monsters. Skylar overcomes her fear of Deimata, but still isn't able to defeat her. She eventually realizes that her parents are powering Deimata with their fear for her safety and encourages them to trust her and not be afraid. When they do, she's finally able to defeat Deimata and put her back in containment.
- Labyrinth: During their final confrontation, Jareth all but reveals to Sarah that he has been doing everything at HER behest. "You asked me to take the child. He was taken. You cowered before me. I was frightening. I'm growing tired of living up to your expectations." This leads to her epiphany, wherein she realizes and loudly declares "You have no power over me!" Jareth's world is shattered, and Sarah and her baby brother are returned home.
- The Muppets' Wizard of Oz: At one point, the characters must cross a bridge guarded by two trolls who resemble Statler and Waldorf. Their taunts make people fall off the bridge, but Dorothy realises that if they ignore their words, they won't fall.
- Pumpkinhead: The people who summon Pumpkinhead to enact revenge on their behalf tend to be horrified by how far the demon takes it. Unfortunately for them, Pumpkinhead can only be stopped if its summoner dies. Even worse, the summoner's body becomes Pumpkinhead's replacement.
Literature
- Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest: The final challenge of the Frost Caverns in volumes 8 and 9 is for the dungeon-delvers to battle Doppelgangers of themselves, which are meant to mirror their character flaws to them and encourage them to overcome them—lest the god Ehit use those flaws against them. The duplicates are powered up by the flaws and weakened by overcoming them. Most of the characters figure this out and find ways to address the flaws, breaking the duplicates' power. However, Hajime instead uses the duplicate to spot small flaws and inefficiencies in his fighting style and thereby destroys it by simply becoming a better fighter on the fly (justified by the fact the duplicate was based on a magical scan from when he entered the dungeon and has Creative Sterility), while Kouki fails utterly to overcome his Fatal Flaw, gets possessed by the duplicate and turned Ax-Crazy, and has to be beaten into submission by Hajime.
- Harry Potter: In the last book of the series Harry discovers he is one of Voldemort's Horcruxes. When Voldemort tried to kill him as a baby, a piece of Voldemort's own soul was bound to Harry. Harry realizes that this means Voldemort can never truly die as long as Harry still lives. Fortunately, the circumstances of Voldemort's resurrection allowed Harry to survive his Heroic Sacrifice while the piece of Voldemort's soul inside him was destroyed.
Live-Action TV
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Original Series:
- In "The Cage", Pike realizes that the Talosians cannot read strong, violent thoughts, and also that they rely on him to supply the imaginations they use to fuel the illusions they attempt to trap him in, so he sits in his cell, stewing in hatred and anger until the Keeper gets careless and Pike seizes him.
- In "And the Children Shall Lead", the evil entity called Gorgan gets its power from the fact that the children believe it has power. When that belief is taken away, Gorgan dies rather messily.
- In "Day of the Dove", an entity that feeds on hate and violence invades the Enterprise, setting Kirk and Klingon Captain Kang and their crews against each other. Realizing that they're being manipulated, Kirk and Kang refuse to fight each other, Kang even giving Kirk a good-natured (for a Klingon) slap on the back that almost has the Captain reeling, but they manage to drive out the entity by refusing to feed it with their hatred.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "Gambit", Picard realizes that an ancient Vulcan weapon that a terrorist group has been trying to reconstruct was discarded by the ancient Vulcans because the weapon relied on the aggressive emotions of the victim to power it, and the Vulcans had no use for it when they embraced a path of total logic. He orders his security team to empty their minds of any aggressive thoughts, including Lt. Worf, who manages to do so, rendering the weapon utterly harmless against them.
- Star Trek: The Original Series:
Video Games
- At the end of Planescape: Torment, the Nameless One meets the Transcendent One — a godlike being that has been haunting him for the entire game, because TTO is actually TNO's own mortality, stripped from him by Ravel millennia ago and left alone to grow more intelligent and powerful ever since. In a twist, while The Nameless One's existence is necessary for The Transcendent One's, his repeated deaths are actually not making it stronger — on the contrary, their separation are a detriment to both as The Nameless One's mind grows weaker with every death and The Transcendent One's body frays a little bit more. Realising this provides you with an argument if you want to reunite The Nameless One with his mortality.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: During Noah and Co's fight with Consul K, after they've managed to deplete his health, he impowers himself with the life force of the nearby Colony Four fighters, as well as stealing from their Flame Clock. This tips Noah off that the true purpose of the Flame Clock is to power the Consul and that they need to break it if they want to stand a chance.
Webcomics
- Homestuck: In the world of Sburb, The Queens' Rings turn the wearer into a Shapeshifter Mashup with all the powers of the creatures the players used as prototypes. Aradia prototyped a frog, a creature utterly taboo to the Black Queen's realm, so the Black Queen would refuse to use her Ring at all.
- Housepets!: Played with. Tarot, the avatar for the goddess Dragon, knew Dragon's power was slave to the rules of her Cosmic Chess Game, which required Tarot's cooperation to function. it was Dragon who was too short-sighted to see how disastrous mistreating that power-supplier would be. Tarot put up with so much during her career with Dragon, the goddess never thought for a moment Tarot would turn against her, or even disliked her; But as soon as Tarot and King have time to talk without being spied on by their respective gods, the two agree to put their weapons down and cease combat entirely, which takes away that power and ends The Game.
Western Animation
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Hearth's Warming Eve", some ponies from ancient times are dealing with Windigoes — demons that cause blizzards. Eventually, it's revealed that the Windigoes feed on hatred, so the ponies need to put away their prejudice for the other types of ponies in order to survive.
- The Real Ghostbusters: In both encounters with the Boogeyman, the demon's nature of feeding on the fear of his victims is turned against him. In his first episode, the Carter kids decide that they aren't going to be afraid of him anymore, casting out such insults as his head is too big and he looks stupid. This allows the Ghostbusters to get past him and temporarily seal him in his own dimension. In his second appearance, a near-fatal fall off of the World Trade Center has Egon in a state of primal fear, though he refuses to admit it. This allows the Boogeyman to free himself from his dimension, as Egon was one of the Boogeyman's former victims. But when the Boogeyman decides to go after the Junior Ghostbusters, Egon goes into Papa Wolf mode, his anger and outrage overpowering his fear. He is thus able to free himself and his fellow Ghostbusters from the restraints that the Boogeyman had put them in, and whip up a plan to convert the Boogeyman from demon to ghost so that they could trap him in the Containment Unit once and for all.
- Samurai Jack:
- Aku brings to life a manifestation of Jack's anger and aggression, referred to as Mad Jack. Jack does battle with this being in one episode, until seeing himself reflected in a pool of water and realizes the ugly truth- that he's the source of Mad Jack's strength. He embraces a form of inner tranquility to depower Mad Jack, even as the Enemy Without is charging at him with his sword. He vanishes before he reaches Jack.
- In Season 5, Mad Jack returns, angrily demanding a monk return his sword to him. Jack recognizes that Mad Jack is the worst part of himself and utterly renounces him. This causes the gods to deem that Jack is once again worthy and restore him to his proper form, along with his sword.
- The Simpsons: In the "Treehouse of Horror VI" segment "Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores", giant advertising mascots run amok in Springfield. Lisa goes to an advertising executive for assistance on how to stop them and he suggests that, being attention whores, they get their power from people looking at them. This turns out to be the right idea when Lisa and Paul Anka convinces the townspeople to just not look at them, leading to them quickly dying off.
- Wander over Yonder: In "The Troll", a troll attacks the fortress of Baaaaa-halla. As the Baaaaa-hallans attack, Wander just curls up by the fireplace. Sylvia at first thinks he's just being lazy, but as it turns out, the troll is an Emotion Eater; it taunts the Baaaaa-hallans, and their angry reactions make him bigger and stronger. When he gets to Wander and starts taunting him, Wander does nothing... and the troll starts shrinking. Sylvia sees this and realizes what Wander is doing, and convinces the Baaaaa-hallans to also ignore the troll until it shrinks down to a few inches small.
- W.I.T.C.H.: In "P is for Protectors", Taranee, the Guardian of Fire, fights Ember, one of the Knights of Destruction. As Ember is a creature of lava, Taranee's fire blasts only serve to power her up. Once Taranee clears her head, she switches to a new strategy and absorbs the heat from Ember to defeat her.
