Weaksauce Weakness - Television Tropes & Idioms

Vampires, the badass creatures of the night who always want to suck your blood. But you're fine as long as you stay in the sunlight, have some garlic, stay inside your house and refuse to let them in, or even wield a simple cross. In some media, silver works too, along with other religious symbols. Then there's the older, more obscure, and even more restrictive weaknesses such as inability to cross running water, or OCD causing the need to count piles of beans or other small objects, and even the need to be invited to enter houses
- If Blade is to be believed, UV lights will do it, too. Of course, in the Blade comics, he once killed a vampire by blowing its head off and leaving it to starve.
- Sometimes the holy symbol needs to be of the vampire's religion; sometimes it needs to be of the wielder's religion, and sometimes it needs to be a cross no matter what.
  - In the Doctor Who episode "The Curse of Fenric," it was actually psychic energy that affected vampires. So, it was the person's belief in the cross that pushed them back as opposed to the actual object. So, if you believed in something else quite strongly (like the symbol of the Soviet Union in one case), you could use that instead. The Doctor's companion Ace holds the lead vampire at bay using her faith in the Doctor. The Doctor recites the names of his companions under his breath. That's what he bases his strong faith on.
  - This same idea is used in Stephen King's vampire novel Salem's Lot, where the local priest is able to hold the Big Bad boss vampire at bay with his cross, until he begins to doubt his faith, after which the boss vamp casually reaches out and snaps the cross to pieces.
  - In the graphic novel Vamps, the vampire's weakness to holy symbols is based purely on the wielder's belief in it. At one point, a Latino gang member pulls a cross on one of them, and it does nothing, but at another point, a crazy hobo manages to keep them at bay with a Volkswagen hub-cap.
- Similarly, in Thunderstruck, religious symbols harm vampires because, when made and/or wielded by a person of faith, they are imbued with a piece of that person's life essence, essentially causing the vampire to "overdose" on life force (which is what they're actually consuming when they drink one's blood). This leads to some confusing issues: for instance, the cross set up in a church may be harmless to the vampire if the churchgoers there are only paying lip service to the religion, but a katana forged by a traditional Japanese swordsmith is as dangerous as any holy symbol, due to the smith's intense devotion to the art and the various traditions involved.
- This is actually awesomely explained in Richard Matheson's short story I Am Legend (not the Will Smith movie): Robert Neville discovers that the aversion to garlic is an allergic reaction with the bacterium that causes the "vampirism" in them, that crosses' effectiveness are purely psychological based on the person's religious belief beforehand (meaning the Star of David would work on Jewish vampires), and that the rays of the sun react violently against the bacterium, which is why vampires are strongly averse to it (though they were starting to develop cures for it towards the end of the story.), and staking pretty much worked no matter where you stabbed them, due to the fact that the bacterium needed to be within an enclosed environment within the body, and that bullets didn't affect it because they went in quickly (and out quickly) whereas stabbing them with something would force the flesh to remain open, causing a reaction with the bacterium that resulted in rapid putrefaction of the flesh, which due to some of the vampires being dead beforehand, would result in becoming ash.
  - Only a wooden stake, though, or something similarly rough/porous. Metal blades (and probably polished, sufficiently flat wooden blades) are too smooth to allow enough air in to cause much of a problem.
- In the comic strip Yamara, formerly published in Dragon Magazine, vampires were all unique. The common weaknesses of sunlight, holy symbols, garlic, etc, were just the most common weaknesses. The vampire villainess Persephone had none of the traditional weaknesses. But in life, she had always avoided doing her own laundry, so in undeath she was cursed to flee from laundry products, lest underneath their power she wither and perish. So baskets of dirty clothes, bottles of detergent, clothespins, lines of laundry hanging up, all these made her shrivel, weaken, and could have destroyed her. (As Persephone's friend the Drow Priestess said, "My goddess, you must feel pathetic.")
  - Except when they went to Dark Sun, where it wasn't such a Weaksauce Weakness after all.
  Persephone: "How can laundry products possibly defeat me ... on a world with no clothes?"
- The vampires in Blood Rayne are vulnerable to water. Not even holy water, or even running water, Rayne gets owies from stepping in a gutter. A fire alarm sprinkler system can wipe out a building full of them.
  - The vampires in RIFTS and the Legacy Of Kain series share this weakness. The weapon of choice for savvy RIFTS vampire hunters is a man-portable sprinkler system/garden hose.
  - Vampires from Grendel are hurt by water, but apparently aren't killed by it unless they're totally submerged. When they're rounded up and locked in internment facilities, the guards turn on the sprinklers as a riot-dispersal tactic.
- In Discworld, one family of vampires decides to work up an immunity to such things. Their grandfather chides them for this as it is unfair to their enemies.
  - One of the things the daddy vampire does is show his children religious symbols from all over the world, teaching them that they're just geometric shapes and nothing to be worried about. Near the end of the story the vampires freak out and start seeing the shapes of all the religious shapes they've been taught everywhere, even in patterns on the walls.
- Remilia Scarlet and Flandre Scarlet of Touhou are vampires with most of the strengths and essentially none of the weaknesses. (Direct sunlight weakens them, but does no overt harm, while their powers hit zenith at the full moon.) This is kept from being a Game Breaker by the fact that everyone has flying, insane damage resistance, and superstrength, so vampirism largely just means "drinks blood" or eats suspiscously red cake. They have to add in extra superpowers to make them threatening.
- Here's a coupon for tropers wishing to try one of the thirteen plus flavors of weak sauce weaknesses found in Vampire: The Masquereade! There's the standard ones that apply to all clans: sun and fire can potentially incinerate, wooden steaks cause a coma, etc. However, every clan and sub-clan had an extra defining weakness handed down from Cain or some other magical malarkey. A few choice ones are: Nosferatu - so ugly they can't pass for human, Malkavian - become incurably insane, Gangrel - slowly have animal parts replace their features, and Giovanni - their bite is every bit as painful as it should be. Then there's a few clans that got off near scot free: Lasombra - cast no reflection, Tremere - technically none, but their elders put them all under indirect Mind Control, and in practice Toreador and Ventrue. The former are supposed to suffer OCD when seeing anything "beautiful", but an inattentive GM can forget to have them roll to resist this periodically; while the latter can only feed from one kind of mortal, which depending on the restriction can be anything from a non-issue to un-life threatening.
- "Vampires are pussies!"
- The vampires in From Dusk Till Dawn have many of these same weaknesses, combined with being Made Of Plasticine. But there's so many of them...
The Fair Folk are terrific, in inspiring terror, beings of legend and myth. They can be beaten by a stick of iron, a horseshoe, a length of rowan wood, wearing clothes inside-out, or a stick of bread.
- Changeling: The Lost has the concept of "frailties", little weaknesses that certain fae (and overly-powerful changelings) are prey to. Some of them are the classic faerie weaknesses, others can be as odd as "must drink alcohol instead of water" or "cannot cross lines of ants". The only universal weakness is iron, which isn't as dangerous as you think because pure iron is rare... and steel does nothing.
- Mercedes Lackey has fun playing with the iron weakness; in her SERRAted Edge book series, the good elves not only use their skills as race car mechanics to work up a tolerance to iron, but also gladly use the metal to shield themselves from enemy elf attacks. It's also noted that elf magic goes haywire in the presence of iron.
  - Not only that, but the good elves have noticed that iron makes their magic go haywire in extremely predictable and repeatable ways, so they have incorporated it into their defenses and can use it to, for example, negate their enemies' magic while delivering their own with deadly accuracy.
- It makes a lot more sense when you consider the symbolic property of a lot of these things: Both iron and bread are cultural (as opposed to natural) artifacts (bread especially is a very common symbol of civilization) and since The Fair Folk are usually seen as representations of wild or unpdredictable Nature...
  - That may be only part of it. Many traditions allow the Fae to use weapons and implements of smelted copper or bronze (a copper/tin alloy). This may be a later inclusion resulting from the conquering of Bronze Age cultures by emerging Iron Age ones, due to knowledge of ironworking giving the latter much superior weapons and armour.
While the werewolf weakness to silver is a relatively new invention, earlier legends provide such weaknesses as having an iron bar thrown over their head, drawing three drops of blood, or having their name announced one to three times.
Many of the oldest portrayals of Satan, the ostensible antagonist to God, has him easily outwitted by peasants and driven away by holy symbols.
- He is also afraid of a scapular (look it up.)
Basilisks. Okay, they can kill you if you look directly at them, or hear their voice, or if you touch them, but guess what? They can be killed instantly by the crowing of a rooster, and their powers don't work on weasels.
- Which is great if you're a farmer or a weasel herder, but it's not like a whole lot of people have easy access to live poultry when the doom snake is breaking down their door...
  - Plus, there's always the Harry Potter "solution" to the roosters: the owner of the basilisk just had all of the nearby roosters strangled.
- There are stories of men killing a basilisk by wearing mirrors sewn into clothing.

Tobor, the Eighth Man, recharged his powers with an inhalant stored in small, thin, white tubes that he carried in a cigarette case. When the bad guys allowed him "one last smoke" before executing him, this was great; when he was having a fight where kids could see him, he worried about setting a bad example by appearing to smoke.
In One Piece, protagonist Monkey D. Luffy has "infinitely stretchy limbs" and (if he really, REALLY tries) is strong enough to smash a city with one punch. His weakness? The magical source of his powers also curses him to be completely unable to swim. Which is kind of a problem, seeing as how he's a pirate.
- The inability to swim is an established weakness for all devil fruit users. Which makes you really wonder why so many of them take up piracy...
- Fun scene: At one point, Luffy falls into the ocean and starts to drown. Nami, Chopper and Brook promptly leap into the water to save him, apparently forgetting Chopper and Brook are BOTH devil fruit users...
- Any body of deep water (freshwater does it too, though they can shower without getting paralyzed) causes them to weaken to the point where they can't move. Some powers (like Chopper's transformations) are completely canceled, while others (like Luffy's rubber body) are left alone but can't be used because he can't move. In one early arc, Luffy's stuck underwater and he survives because someone grabs his head and stretches his neck until it's above water until they can break him free of the block of concrete keeping him underwater.
  - According to [Wordof God] the water doesn't even need to be deep: if a Devil Fruit user is more than half submerged in any kind of water, they become paralyzed.
- Water is actually a much greater weakness to Sir Crocodile, as he is a man who can turn into sand; if water strikes him, the sand "sticks together", and he is rendered unable to turn into sand at all, thus leaving him fully open to attack. He has a natural defense in that his sand powers extend to causing alarmingly fast dehydration with direct skin contact. In addition, he has the good sense to not only do his villainous business on a relatively large island, but on a desert island.
  - British sailors in the 19th century hated eating fish or any food from the ocean for that matter, preferring weevily biscuits and gruesome salt pork or beef to fresh fish. Sailors hate the the sea, pilots hate the wind, and retailers hate customers — Weaksauce Weakness in its truest form.
The specialists, the Paper Sisters in Read Or Dream can telekinetically manipulate paper... unless it's wet. This was not a weakness for Yomiko, who is shown on camera manipulating paper while underwater.
Super Dimension Fortress Macross has an alien attack force made up of gigantic Scary Dogmatic Aliens who are a proud warrior race do a mass Mook Face Turn because of... singing. And souvenirs. In fairness, it does make sense in the story (at least as much as War Of The Worlds Martian's being vulnerable to Earth's diseases) and is perhaps one of the best logical conclusions to a typical alien's Planet Of Hats treatment. The aliens have no culture to speak of other than fighting, so when exposed to humans and their culture in the form of songs and interacting with the other gender after sending a team of spies to the SDF-1, typical Zentradi start feeling emotions, questioning their purpose, and becoming similar to humans. Because of this, their entire fleet gets deemed "contaminated" by the unexposed Zentradi and programmed for destruction. In the face of this Enemy Civil War, they wisely choose to ally with the humans. Still, it doesn't quite wash away the faint air of ridiculousness when Minmei's singing becomes an offensive weapon to unbalance the unexposed Zentradi in their attack.
- Those who consider Minmei The Scrappy half-jokingly argue the Zentradei were distracted by her singing because it was so bad.
  - Taken to even greater extremes in Macross 7 where the enemies, the spirit draining Protodevilins only weakness is actually the energy produced by music, which produces a spiritual energy to pure for them to absorb and regenrates the lost energy in those drained by them.
In Rosario To Vampire, vampires are considered the high end of the monster scale, but the fact that you can pretty much take a vampire down with a glass of water kinda puts a dampener on that idea.
The titular hero(ine) of Ranma ½ can be incapacitated by the mere sight of a cute little kitten. However, those who attempt this should note to apply said weakness quickly and forcefully — prolonged, intense exposure has a tendency to backfire. Thanks to his Gender Bender curse, cold water can also count as a weakness. Technically. Ranma's female form has less strength and reach than his male form (though the anime is explict that Ranma's speed is boosted in this form, so it's more of a trade), but s/he can still pull off all of his/her normal attacks. Based on a character with an identical curse, it's also possible that being in female form weakens his Ki Attacks.
My name is Yutaka Takenouchi, and I have only one weakness... I am VERY susceptible to motion sickness!
Natsu from Fairy Tail is Made Of Iron, he can breath fire and cause massive property damage simply by punching someone, but he too suffers from the ignominious suspectibility to motion sickness. At least once it was actually exploited to defeat him in battle.
Apparently, Chad's main weakness is cute and cuddly things, as he wants to hug them to no end. If it'll be used by an opponent in the future, we don't know. But just imagining a 2m tall guy with two demon arms stopping the fight to hug and cuddle a puppy is hilarious.
- Don't forget Aaroniero, who can't use his shapeshifting when in sunlight.
  - He also had a big glass jar for a head. Really jurts him if it gets damaged. At all.
Fullmetal Alchemist: In the manga and second anime, Pride is capable of projecting tentacle-like shadows from his body, making him extremely powerfull. However, he can only use these while casting a shadow himself. In pitch darkness or extremely bright light, he cannot form shadows. This means that Ed and company battle him both by depriving him of a light source and, failing that, by using flashbangs to destroy his tendrils. Granted, he is still near immortal even while unable to attack; besides, who could repeatedly kill that precious little (evil) child-body of his? In this way he is both the most powerful homunculus and the one who can be rendered most helpless.

What is every superhero and supervillain's weakness, no matter how powerful they are? An eraser!
- Rimshot
In Invincible, The Green Ghost (a pastiche of Green Lantern) gets his powers by swallowing an artifact. When he wants to get out of costume he has to, err, regurgitate it.
Almost every Green Lantern from the Silver Age onward had yellow as his main weakness. Any criminal could waltz past him by wearing a yellow suit and stealing only gold, and shoot yellow painted bullets from gold plated guns.
- Interestingly enough, this old weakness was referenced by the Kyle Rayner version of Green Lantern as being the unfortunate consequence of a programming bug- which, given the nature of real-world programming bugs, makes perfect sense. It turned out he was wrong, but hey — it was a pretty good guess.
  - It was, however, a literal bug. Of sorts.
- More recently, Frank Miller parodied the hell out of this in All-Star Batman and Robin. Before confronting Green Lantern, Batman and Robin paint an entire house, and everything in it, yellow. Then they put on yellow costumes. Then they paint their exposed faces yellow. When GL comes over, Batman goes so far as to offer him a nice refreshing glass of lemonade, while Robin eats some lemon ice cream. Hal was not amused. Readers were.
- The original Green Lantern was almost as bad — his weakness was wood(Referenced on The Big Bang Theory after a dismissive mention of the yellow weakness. The response? 'So either way he can be defeated with a number 2 pencil?'). Since so few people knew it as later Green Lanterns became famous, however, he in many cases seemed more powerful than the new Green Lanterns because, for example, the Sinestro Corps power rings couldn't even make him flinch.
  - This was parodied in the Justice League Golden Age Affectionate Parody episode "Legends", with his stand-in version "Green Guardsman", who had a weakness to aluminum. Either way, you've got a superhero who could appear on the news after having been beaten to death with a baseball bat — and considering that one of his foes was the Sportsmaster, who did wield a baseball bat... it's pretty darned weaksauce.
  - It didn't hurt that wood, while very common when Alan Scott first hit the scene, had become rarer in civilization by the time the Silver Age hit. Villains in The DCU tend to decorate in metal, plastic, and Zee Rust by then, which means even less to block that strange ring with.
  - The Elseworlds story Superman/Batman Generations handwaves the odd Green Lantern weaknesses by having the Guardians explain that all weaknesses are mentally-imposed. Alan was weak to wood because a thug surprised him with a baseball bat and he assumed the ring didn't work against wood, while Hal was told that the rings were ineffective against yellow and thus added the weakness himself. Kyle, who gets his ring without hearing the explanation, lacks any weaknesses. (This is not, to be clear, how it actually works in continuity.)
- One Green Lantern story subverts this, however. A yellow robot attacks the Justice League. GL responds by picking up mud from a nearby swamp and dropping it over the robot's body, completely coating it. With the yellow hidden, he quite easily rips it open.
- The yellow weakness was especially weaksauce in the Silver Age because of the fact that every other villain seemed to emit some kind of "infra-yellow radiation", contain a "yellow compound", be surrounded by "invisible yellow" or have some other completely ridiculous piece of pseudoscience in place to stop Green Lantern destroying them in five seconds flat.
  - For those curious: "infra-yellow", in a sane world, translates as orange.
- And then there's the Blue Lanterns, who are incredibly powerful even by Green Lantern standards, but can't use anything but the bare minimum of their powers unless a Green Lantern is in the vicinity.
- The all-multiverse champion of weaksauce yellow weaknesses is the Bizarro Universe Green Lantern, Yellow Lantern. As the name implies, he has a power ring that's like Green Lantern's, only yellow. Exactly like Green Lantern's. Including the part where it's powerless to affect anything yellow. That makes it powerless all the time.
One version of Ocean Master, Aquaman's arch nemesis, gets his powers from a magical trident he traded his soul for, and when he isn't holding it he feels intense pain. Even the Joker says that this is a pretty Weaksauce Weakness.
Power Girl went through a single-issue Dork Age where she could be hurt by any "natural, unprocessed material", including the proverbial sticks and stones. This for a character who's on par with Superman. The negative reaction from readers caused it to never appear again. It was just that weak.
- During her JLE days she was also allergic to diet soda, causing fits of anger.
Empowered is a self-admitted Fan Service exploration of this. The main character is a curvy babe who derives her powers from an extremely skintight suit, that's laughably easy to rip and weakens her powers when damaged. Her tendency to end up naked (or nearly so) makes her the laughing stock of the local superhero community. Her tendency to get Bound And Gagged while doing so makes her living Fetish Fuel.
- The suit's ability to be torn seems to fluctuate with Empowered's confidence level. Since she has zero self-confidence anyway and the regular humiliations related to her crappy suit only compound them, it is very rare that she has the confidence to use her powers properly. But when she does, she's a one-woman army.
- Emp doesn't get the distinction of the weakest-sauce weakness, either... That honor goes to The Lash, a supervillain with a debilitating phobia of fabric stores due to childhood trauma. (He likens it to being put in a sensory deprivation tank.) Also, while not a weakness per se, on two separate occasions a supervillain has shown themselves to be unable to tie a knot, which is a vital career skill in this setting.
The Daxamites in the DC Universe are almost exactly like Kryptonians when under a yellow sun. However, exposure to lead is fatal to them, even in trace amounts. A notable instance of this example was when one of Superman's recurrent enemies/reluctant allies, Paragon, took out three Daxamites with a machine gun.
Martian Manhunter has a ridiculous amount of powers, yet he had weakness to fire, making it quite easy to disable him. The first attempt to remove this weakness accidentally unlocked his superpowered evil side.
- Elaborate explanations have been concocted over the years to explain why he is vulnerable to fire, but these seem needless. In Real Life, Mars is danged cold. Why wouldn't he be vulnerable to extreme heat?
Prism, a member of the X-Men villain group the Marauders, is a truly pitiful example that combines this trope with What Kind Of Lame Power Is Heart Anyway. His mutant ability is that he is made of a crystal that can absorb and redirect light energy (like a prism) and is no more durable than glass. Yes, he is made of glass. His weaknesses include any sort of impact. Two of his four deaths (yes, he has died often) involve being thrown into a wall and being shattered by bullets.
The greater the power, the weaker the sauce! Marvel's latest and most prominent Superman pastiche is the Sentry, a "golden guardian of good" who's pretty much as powerful as he lets himself be. But if you so much as remind him of his little Dark Side problem, he'll fly off to Saturn and cry. Or revert to human form. Or, if he's really unlucky, let the Void out — and suddenly things will look a whole lot better for the bad guys.
This was once parodied in the British comic, the Beano, in which the character Calamity James is rescued by a superhero and offers him a Jelly Baby by way of thanks. Guess what the hero's one weakness is!
Mr. Mxyzptlk is so powerful that he has no natural weaknesses. To make his fights with Superman more challenging, he gives himself one. Which one does he choose? Saying his own name backwards.
- Used hilariously in the animated series, with an entire episode consisting of Superman using clever and creative ways of exploiting Mr. Mxyzptlk's "weakness", often without having to use any sort of super powers at all.
Venom. Weaknesses? Fire and loud noise. At one point, he's defeated with nothing more than a lighter. This, of course, varies Depending On The Writer. Carnage shares some of the same weaknesses.
- Fan-favorite (yet sadly not used, ever) Toxin, Carnage's "child" however doesn't, what it does have is being very child like, (one point it refused to help it's host because he yelled at it)
Marvel's Inhumans, genetic superhumans who have advanced technology and a civilization predating regular humans' by millenia, are done in by... pollution and germs.
Dr. Doom, Deadpool, and Thanos all have a weakness to squirrels - considering that Squirrel Girl has hammered all of them at one time or another.
- One could argue that Deadpool's biggest weakness is, of course, his own brain.
  - But it's also, next to his mouth, his greatest strength. One word: Macarena.
The Darkness, phenomenal cosmic/demonic power. But can’t operate under a 60 Watt light bulb.
DC Comics also had Firestorm, whose weakness is organic materials. Like, all of them. He can't affect them with his power, or he'll suffer painful consequences. So...he could be foiled by a stick. Or a leather wallet.
- True, but he could still in theory turn all the air (which isn't organic) around his stick-wielding opponent into iron or something. He doesn't do this, though, because his power is really hard to use.
  - A recent version of Firestorm gets his behind beaten ... not because of his inabillity to manipulate the surrounding enviorment. Batman praises this, which means you know it's skilled. Anywho, Firestorm got beaten because he published a scientific paper on how his own powers worked. And Lex Luthor read it. Oh noes indeed. Oh yeah, he needs to merge with someone to be Firestorm and if the merge happens too long, his own powers -eat- his partner. Nom nom nom.
- In one of his appearances on Super Friends, he was rendered helpless after being sprayed with plant food. Even their version of Aquaman wasn't as lame.
Although it's since been removed, Eclipso - DC's god of darkness - could be dispelled from his human host by a camera flash.

The aliens in Signs. It's hard to feel threatened (retrospectively) by creatures which will dissolve in an April shower or corrode in a particularly humid breeze.
- In Shyamalan's earlier film, Unbreakable, he also used water as a weakness for the main character. In that case, though, it wasn't that he was vulnerable to water, but rather he was just as susceptible to drowning as a normal person. If he drank something too quickly he would choke and if he was submerged he would succumb to drowning just like everyone else.
  - Well, and it was theorized that the dense bone and muscle that made him unbreakable also made him unfloatable (or the character simply couldn't swim).
- He probably got the idea from Invasion of the Saucer Men, whose aliens were melted by light. There is nothing lamer.
  - The monsters of Pitch Black had a similar weakness to light. Though this actually worked, as most of the movie was during a solar eclipse and they broke their flashlights.
  - Same thing in Attack Of The The Eye Creatures. Although, in this case, it was more because They Just Didnt Care.
  - Also The Mole People; the lost colony of ancient Sumerians living Beneath The Earth had adapted to their lightless conditions to the point where our heroes could kill them with a flashlight.
- In the movie version of The Day Of The Triffids, the titular monsters were melted by sea water. Nearly as lame. (In the original novel, ironically, flame-throwers are among the most effective anti-Triffid weapons.)
The Tenctonese in Alien Nation (the movie as well as the series) are harmed by salt water. Seawater is like acid to them. And they live mostly on the Californian coast.
The aliens in The War Of The Worlds were killed by a common disease. The aliens were so advanced and germophobic that they wiped out all microbial life on their native planet. Which of course meant they had nothing to develop immunities to when they invaded Earth.
In the Disney Channel movie Up, Up, and Away, the weakness of the superhero family is aluminum foil.
In SYNGENOR, the titular creatures were created to be the perfect soldiers for a war with the Middle East. They don't need to eat or sleep, are immune to most weaponry, and reproduce every twenty-four hours. Their only weakness? Water is like acid to them. It's somewhat hard to be afraid of a super soldier that can be defeated with a super soaker. Or, if worst came to worst, by peeing on them.
- Of course, water is in rather short supply in most of the Middle East. Still, it's pretty stupid to design a soldier who is only usable in particularly dry environments.
- According to the Something Awful review, at least, they were in practice also vulnerable to, well, just about anything else. Including bullets and fire.
In the Dead Gentlemen Productions (of The Gamers fame) running Demon Hunters series, Duamerthrax the Indestructible is a walking brick that is, well, all but indestructible. He's an "earthwalker", a demon said to have been kicked out of hell for being too mean. Unlike other monsters and demons in the mythos, he's not susceptible to ordinary injury. He can literally eat the round of a large-caliber revolver jammed in his mouth ("Mmm! Nice 'n' leady!") casually regrows limbs after being dismembered, and generally shrugs off what few injuries he even takes while making terrible puns. So what's the convenient balance? We're told that every earthwalker has a weakness to some substance, "a plant, metal, anything". Duamerthrax's turns out to be mint. Being shot repeatedly at close range with numerous handguns does little more than inconvenience him, but the breath of someone having just used breath spray causes him intense pain, water-guns full of mouthwash can inflict serious harm and mint dental floss can do even worse things.
Mars Attacks!. The Martians' weakness is hearing the song "Indian Love Call" by Slim Whitman, which causes their heads to explode.
- One unanswered question is whether any other Slim Whitman song would have had the same effect.
  - They probably would've had the same luck with any song involving yodeling, since it was at that moment in the song that the head trauma occurred.
The Tomatoes in Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes had the same weakness, in the form of a song called "Puberty Love".
Imhotep in The Mummy Trilogy will immediately be chased away when a cat is in his presence. Naturally, the heroes only used this to their advantage once instead of surrounding themselves with as many cats as they could gather and easily trouncing him.
- The cats wouldn't have stopped his army of mooks in the first and second film. And one of the characters mention that it would stop working once he fully regenerated.
  - It's not so much that the cat does anything, but that Ihmotep is a superstitious Egyptian. He is afraid of cats due to their religious significance and hasn't realized they can't actually do anything to him.
  - It is a major Fridge Logic moment why they didn't use cats. Believe it or not, in Real Life an invading army conquered Egypt by using Egypt's superstitions about cats.
- Probably because, according to Diodorus Siculus, "Whoever kills a cat in Egypt is condemned to death, whether he committed this crime deliberately or not. The people gather and kill him. An unfortunate Roman, who accidentally killed a cat, could not be saved, either by King Ptolemy of Egypt or by the fear which Rome inspired"
From 1966 superhero parody Rat Pfink A Boo Boo: "Remember, Boo Boo, we have only one weakness... bullets."
Like the Dalek example given below, in the 1987 movie Robocop, the killer robot ED-209 chasing the titular character was taken out of play simply by trying to chase Robo Cop down stairs too narrow for its massive feet.
In an Homage to The Wizard Of Oz, Death in Six String Samurai is killed when squirted with water.
Derek Zoolander can't turn left until his Big Damn Heroes moment. (Though continuity nitpicks will note that he does turn left (relative to himself, though not the camera) while in disguise while trying to retrieve Maury's computer.)
The most literal Weaksauce Weakness must be in The Spiderwick Chronicles. Tomato sauce is corrosive to goblins. (Was this taken from the book?)
- No it wasn't, and considering all the magical elements in the book pertaining to controlling fairies was based in folklore, the tomato sauce was the one change in the adaptation that didn't really work.
The Blue Meanies are repelled by positivity in any form. This doesn't work out so badly, though, since their entire arsenal is built around the proliferation of depression and despair, but it does still leave them vulnerable to music.
Bolt, of the movie of the same name, thought his super-weakness was styrofoam.
- That said, he didn't actually have any powers to begin with.
Mystery Men, Invisible Boy's weakness was anybody looking at him while he was invisible. (Machines, like motion detectors couldn't see him.)
The Super Cop in Super Fuzz has super speed, super strength, invulnerability, telekinesis and so on, but he completely loses his powers when he sees the color red (probably a nod to GL and his vulnerability to yellow): a red traffic light, a red flower, a red ribbon, and he's harmless.
The Psychlo homeworld of Battlefield Earth can be blown to (relatively) tiny bits with a nuclear explosion. You'd think that is substantial enough to bypass the Weaksauce bit, but remember that this is a PLANET. It'd be like a human exploding in a smear of gore after stubbing their toe.
- In the Nostalgia Critic's review, the Psychlo planet is destroyed when someone lit up a cigarrte.

The Darklords of the Lone Wolf gamebooks are (were, as of Book 12) crippled by clean air and can only unleash their full strength in toxic habitats; making them the polar opposite of Captain Planet. Half the reason they waged a centuries long campaign ruining Magnamund (the other half being that they are Always Chaotic Evil embodiments of evil) is (was) to make the world a paradise for themselves. It should be noted that even in their weakened state they can still put up a good fight with their mastery of Black Magic and immunity to conventional weapons.

The Wicked Witch of the West from the The Wizard Of Oz was done in by a pail of water. This was explained in the book (but not in the movie) as due to her "dried up by years of evil" but no indication was ever given that water would kill her. The book does mention that the Witch would never go near Dorothy when she bathed because she hated water.
- This makes said Witch giving Dorothy a bucket of water to do chores with a rather stupid move. Though the fact that the movie is made All Just A Dream allows for a convenient Hand Wave.
- Spoofed in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, where evil wizards can be melted — but only with soap and lemon juice added. The good witch Morwen, on the other hand, explicitly does not melt. It is later theorized that this might be because the wizards never shower while Morwen is something of a neat-freak. Eventually, the heroes refined this into a one word spell with the same effect. One very memorable word, too: Arglefraster!
- The book Wicked explores it to its entirety, explaining that since birth the water hurt her, so she had to clean herself with oil and find creative solutions for things which normally involve using water. When she cries, it's like acid flowing down her face.
  - Meanwhile, The Musical Wicked openly mocks the entire idea of water melting the Witch. Elphaba uses this urban legend about herself to fake her own death at Dorothy's hands.
  - It seems though that it can only hurt her if she is immersed in it. There is a part in the book where she is drinking coffee, and is described as being very careful to get it nowhere other than down her throat. Weakness to water could be the result of the unexplored concept of being "a daughter of the dragon". Its also implied that if Elphaba had ever come into the fullness of her powers, water would cease to be a true threat to her (at one point she instinctively freezes a lake, allowing her to cross it unharmed).
- Another Oz-related Weaksauce: the Nome King was an extremely powerful, nigh-invicible subterranean fairy who had armies of nomes... all of them, including him, could be weakened to the point of being killed by eggs. This doesn't look as bad as it seems at first, because there's only one chicken in Oz.
- In Cheshire Crossing (a webcomic by the creators of Casey And Andy), the Wicked Witch of the West explains that all witches are vulnerable to water (while in Oz, at least) — she was keeping the water on hand should Glinda the Good Witch launch a surprise attack. (In a later scene, the bucket is labeled "In case of Glinda".) She just never expected her enemy to bully a little girl into doing the deed.
- And in Magicians & Munchkins, she simply took this disadvantage to get a few additional levels in magic.
The Martians, in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, are killed en masse rather early in the book by a human-induced plague of chicken pox.
- Which is in itself taken from War of the Worlds.
- It's also a Shout Out to American history.
The Boggart in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban seems to be almost an incarnation of this trope. A Boggart will materialize in the form of a person's worst fear (though exactly what that means is debatable). The way to repel one is to forcibly imagine the fearsome thing as something ridiculous, and then laugh at it.
- Depending on the victim, this is easier said than done. One notable example is Molly Weasley's worst fear: seeing the dead bodies of her children, a fear that comes true in Deathly Hallows with the death of Fred. It's hard to see how that could be imagined as something ridiculous.
  - Strictly she feared losing the people she loved in Voldemort War 2, which was understandable given what the last two wizarding wars had done to the wizarding community in general and more specifically to her. She lost both her brothers, who died in service to the Order. Still, it is a hard fear to subvert — turn it into one of the twins practical jokes perhaps? That's why Lupin advised his students not to face a boggart alone.
  - Well, the Boggart's other Weaksauce Weakness is its inability to think. Remember the "half a slug" incident?
- Voldemort's inability to understand Love, and The Power Of Love, proves to be his ultimate undoing.
Eddings' The Redemption Of Althalus featured both one protagonistic and one antagonistic Five Man Band, both with similar power arrays. The villains included the evil mind-leech Koman, with telepathy and mind-warping abilities... who was defeated when Althalus thought about random numbers.
- Fractions of numbers, even.
The Auditors in Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch. There are very logical and clearly worked out reasons why chocolate kills them in Thief of Time, due to some peculiar circumstances. In SoDIII, though. it just does.
- Non-incarnated Auditors can be killed by getting them to say "I", "me", or otherwise admit individuality. Since it's widely known that (a) only living things have individuality, (b) all living things die after some amount of time and (c) any living thing's lifespan is practically no time at all compared to the universe's, any Auditor who admits individuality instantly dies. By the perspective of the rest of them, this isn't much of a loss, since there are more Auditors than there is anything else in the universe and, by definition, any given one of them is supposed to lack any defining characteristics.
In Artemis Fowl, fairy magic can be completely stopped by animal fat. That's right, magic that can make you invisible, hypnotize people, heal nearly anything, and in some cases travel through time can be stopped by lard. Praise the lard!
- That's the Power of Lard!
The Haunter in the Dark, the titular monster in a story by HP Lovecraft, is an avatar of the god Nyarlatothep. It's a huge winged and tentacled mass of darkness with a three-lobed burning eye, whose touch will burn the flesh from your bones. However, it's extremely vulnerable to light. Even little light will hurt it, and strong light will banish it. So you can temporarily defeat an avatar of an ancient and evil god with a flashlight!. Temporarily. As soon as the lights are out, it can come back, just as nasty as before.
In Worldwar, the invading reptilian aliens called 'The Race' had an immense weakness to ... ginger. Not only was it an incredibly addictive narcotic, but it also made the females produce sexual pheromones outside of the normal fertility cycles, turning exposed members of The Race into crackheaded sex fiends. When the humans attacked Race-occupied Australia, they used missles armed with warheads packed with powdered ginger.
In L.J. Smith's Night of the Solstice series the Fair Folk-like race known as the Quislai have many advantages, such as immortality, invulnerability, extreme beauty, the ability to throw lightning bolts, the power to travel to places quickly using secret pathways through space, and freedom from nearly all physical limitations. They can't be imprisoned by normal means, as doors and windows will unlock themselves for Quislai, and they can travel through dimensional gateways between worlds without preparation while everyone else requires a special magical amulet to use them. However, the one thing that can restrain them is a thornbranch tangled in the hair. Unfortunately, most Quislai seem too ditzy to think of cutting their hair short or at least avoiding rosebushes.
From The Bible: "And the Lord was with Judah, and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." No, really. The Lord is helpless against iron.
- Not really. Judah was just really intimidated by iron chariots.
The Death World creatures of Fragment are averse to salt water and avoid it (it's toxic to them for some reason), which is presumably what's kept them confined to Henders Isle. This is discovered accidentally by a lucky fool who blunders into a saltwater pool while fleeing the orgy of death chasing him, and is later adapted as a defensive measure against Henders creatures.
The main weakness of vampires in Peter Watts's Blindsight-verse is geometry. Consequently, they became extinct after humanity developed Euclidean architecture until later humans reconstructed them and developed antiEuclidean to counter the special vampire weakness (and keep the vampires in check).
In the Simon's Quest volume of the Worlds of Power series, Dracula's vengeful spirit can be driven off by bad jokes.

Doctor Who is renowned for ending its episodes either by Reversing The Polarity or exploiting the latest Monster Of The Week's Weaksause Weakness. The most famous example is the Cybermen and their allergy to gold, which eventually lead to Silver Nemesis and the hilarious scene of Cybermen being stopped by gold coins and a slingshot. At the time a popular joke was that in their next appearance, just saying the word "gold" to one would kill it. This was quietly ignored in more recent episodes, since those Cybermen came from an Alternate History (though a Continuity Nod was made in a tie-in website which stated that said Alternate History Cybermen did initially have an "allergy" to gold, but it was eliminated by R&D).
- "Image of the Fendahl" had the monsters defeated by rock salt.
- Originally, a Dalek could be defeated by a flight of stairs, obscuring its rather obvious eyestalk, or simply pushing it over. Over time, they became far more credible foes. Their third appearance showed them no longer being limited to ground level. The "can't climb stairs" thing was done away with in 1988's "Remembrance of the Daleks" (much to the Doctor's horror). In the new series, they can not only hover but swoop around like crazy, remove foreign substances from their eyestalk lens (much to Wilfred's chagrin), and incinerate humans on touch.
  - Which lead to a "Crowning Moment Of Awesome" in their first appearance in the new series. ELEVATE.
- The Slitheen, due to their bodies consisting mostly of calcium, messily explode if acetic acid comes into contact with their skin, no matter how little. Cue the squirt guns filled with vinegar.
- "The Fires Of Pompeii" has the Doctor fighting seven-foot rock beasts with a water pistol... and winning.
- "Blink" has creatures that can, when no one's looking, move faster than Jack Harkness confronted with a twelve-step program. When seen, however, they can't move. The episode plays this up for High Octane Nightmare Fuel, as you have to blink sometime...
  - On the other hand, their biggest weakness is being tricked to look at each other.
- When an episode of Extras featured the filming of a mock Doctor Who episode, this very trend was parodied with a giant slug who was vulnerable to table salt - which he conveniently kept on his desk, just within reach of the Doctor.
  - Actually, in Colin Baker's first serial, The Twin Dilemma, the Doctor really does fight a giant slug.
- The real Weaksauce Weakness of the Daleks is the Doctor himself. His knack for improvising Deus Ex Machina solutions and general unpredictability really freaks out the Daleks. Doesn't matter if it's four or four million Daleks. The Doctor, with a bit of help, will eventually kill them all. Again and again and again.
Sylar of Heroes could be reduced to a writhing, quivering lump with the use of a tuning fork after acquiring Dale's super hearing (though Dale was the same way).
- Similarly Elle possesses powerful electrical powers, but because of them can be incapacitated by a bucket of water, which shorts the circuit and fries her with her own powers.
The classic Star Trek episode "Day of the Dove" features an Energy Being which feeds on negative emotions, and so causes total chaos on the Enterprise by provoking conflict in order to feed on it. Kirk eventually figures out that the alien can be driven off by peace.
In Smallville, Aquaman's guest appearance explained that he needed to be constantly wet or otherwise have a glass of water or he looses his immense strength and begins to wither. Considering he has had plenty of his own superpowered problems, this is especially glaring.
- In the show, Kryptonite is so common that Clark would almost be better off powerless. Especially problematic in the earlier years when his "monsters of the week" got their powers FROM kryptonite.
On All That, the character Superdude... is lactose-intolerant. Even throwing milk on him will send him to the ground, disabled. So of course, the bulk of his rogues' gallery is dairy-related: Butter Boy, Yo-Girl, Cow-Boy, the Dairy Godfather, & his Arch Nemesis Milkman. His one foe without quick access to lactose, the Evil Superdude, gets a Nice Job Breaking It Hero moment when confused bystanders use a pitcher of milk to tell the two apart.
In the '80s series V, aliens are vulnerable to certain inoffensive bacteria that live in human digestive tract. It backfires later on.
The alien "Gua" in First Wave turn out to be badly affected by salt. It affects them roughly like heroin affects humans. One episode featured renegade Gua hiding out in a derelict building snorting packets of McDonald's salt. Of course, this is the same series where the hero fought the alien invasion using the lost diaries of Nostradamus, so...
In an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, the crew deals with a hostile silicon based lifeform that draws its energy from light. They subdue it by turning the ship's interior lighting off.
Sportacus, the superhero of Lazytown becomes helpless if he eats things with SUGAR, like candy. However it may be that he's actually weak to chemicals added to sugar, as he can eat (and in fact gets stronger) from eating FRUITS, which contain natural sugars.
Turned on its head by The Gentlemen who die instantly upon hearing a human voice. Because of this they just steal everyone's voice making them essentially invincible.

In HeavyGear the advanced Black Mamba Gear - one of the more powerful designs in either of the two superowers' armies - had exceptionally weak rear armour. The result is that Black Mambas could be (and routinely were in gameplay) easily defeated by lightweight Cheetah scout Gears. While the fluff text initially ingored this, the game's designers eventually acknolwedged and lampshaded this weakenss by having Mamba pilots clamouring for a solution to the "glassback" problem.
Just about every race in Warhammer 40,000 has this issue with at least one unit, usually being the same weakness of the army, such as:
- Space Marines: Vanguard - incredibly expensive, leading to low numbers
- Chaos Marines: Spawn - random and uncontrollable
- Eldar: Harlequins - tissue paper armor
  - Wraithguard and Wraithlord - Wraithsight, a 1/6 chance of being "blind" and unable to do anything; every single turn.
- Orks: Nob Bikers - mediocre Leadership
  - 5th edition has made Nob Bikers nearly unstoppable. A great example of this trope today would be the Tankbustaz. Solid unit, not a bad price for 'em, and they give the Orks some much-needed anti-armor capability. Shame about the 'Glory Hogs' special rule that cripples them almost beyond recovery.
- IG: Basilisk - very restrictive minimum range
  - Also Ogryn, assault troops who have muscle but lack the armor and armor-ignoring weapons that rule 40k close combat. Further, they now cost more than the most elite assault troops in the game, but still completely lack the necessary equipment for their stated role - along with a dramatically lower Leadership score. Stormtroopers also suffer from grossly inefficient pricing, being inferior to basic Space Marines in every way but actually being more expensive to field.
- Necrons: Warriors - no upgrades
- Tyranids: Biovore - it's not a Carnifex
- Tau: Crisis Battlesuits - poor in combat
  - The Tau in general are effectively useless in close combat without Kroot allies.
- ...and so on.
Most of the monsters in ''Lucha Libre Hero'' take extra damage from lucha combat manuevers. And since the P Cs are by default technico luchadors, there's a lot of these showing up in the fight scenes. But then, the sourcebook was inspired by Mexican lucha films, and "every problem can be solved with a good wrestling hold" was standard in those films.
In GURPS the disadvantage Supersensitive makes having any other sort of sentient creature with 20 meters a serious weakness. With Combat Paralysis your greatest weakness is being put in any sort of danger. Naturally such disadvantages are not recommended for Player Characters.
D20 Modern has a table of random weaknesses... including some really stupid ones, such as: Clowns, the number 8, math, and books written by willam blake.

Razputin in Psychonauts cannot touch water because of a family curse (or just a bad case of hydrophobia).
The biggest weakness of Metal Man from Megaman 2 is his own weapon (which kills him in 1 hit!). Granted, Megaman can't take advantage of it during their first fight, but the token Boss Rush is a different story.
- Given the fact that the elemental weaknesses in that game are bizarrely messed up, and the fact that Megaman has 8 Metal Blades for every one bar of weapon energy (8 X 32 = 256 Metal Blades!), even enemies that aren't weak against Metal Blades tend to get pummeled by Metal Blades. That's not even saying anything about the multi-directional nature of the weapon, all of which basically adds up to the best Mega Man weapon ever devised. Later games in the series fixed that by making the weapons increasingly useless.
- Interestingly, most of the Robot Masters' weapons were like this; it only stopped come Megaman 7, where not only would attacking them with their own weapons not do anything, it would actually power them up in some cases. (or at the least, make them laugh at you for trying something so illogical)
  - Freeze Man even breaks the Fourth Wall by staring at the player and freezing the game if you try to hit him with a Freeze Cracker.
- The final bosses of Megaman 2, and Megaman 7 can only be damaged with the most useless and most difficult-to-hit-with weapons(the Bubble Lead and the Wired Coil, respectively).
- The final form of Wily in Megaman 3 can be one-shotted with a proper application of Top Spin, a glitchy and hard to aim attack that often damaged you and would drain the entire bar if mistimed.
- In Megaman X 1 and 2, the final boss forms of Sigma were weak against the Rolling Shield (a hard to aim attack that generally did less damage than a charged shot) and the Strike Chain (a pathetically short ranged attack).
- Let's not forget Megaman's severe intolerance to pointy things coming from the ground.
- Arguably, any boss weak to any of the series' more questionable moves would qualify - such as Mega Man 5 boss Wave Man, who was essentially vulnerable to being kicked.
Don't even get us into how this applies to multiple-typed Pokemon.
- Poor Shedinja. Its ability, Wonder Guard, is great (invulnerable to all move types but the ones it's weak against). But its typing (Bug/Ghost) gives it 5 weaknesses, including types that only an idiot would build a team without. That means it's only good against AI opponents that you know don't have those type moves (or any of the environment moves that will take it out too). Good luck leveling the poor guy without Exp Share.
  - That's not even the kicker. Shedinja has only one Hitpoint. This means that any attack that manages to connect will instantly knock it out. Moreover, while it's invulnerable to direct damage moves, status ailments could affect it normally. Shedinja could simply be confused, and it would effectively commit suicide.
  - Coincidentally in the very same game, the near-almighty Kyogre would be generated most of the time with no powers that could hit Shedinja, letting the tiny bug cut him to Death Of A Thousand Cuts.
  - Interestingly enough, in the various Pokemon battle game categories, Shedinja is an extremely viable option in the Legendary/Uber arena, in that most of the commonly used Legendary pokemon have no moves that can penetrate Wonder Guard, and if you can take out the 1 or 2(at most) pokemon that could beat Shedinja, you've practically assured yourself a victory.
  - To make matters slightly worse for Shedinja, even Pokemon who aren't Rock, Fire, Dark, Ghost, or Flying have access to moves of these types. Astonish, Rollout, Pursuit and Bite are astonishingly common if you look for them. (Anything with a decently sized mouth learns Bite, anything round learns Rollout eventually, and anything that looks like anything might end up with Astonish or Pursuit.)
- There's also Paras and Parasect, who in the first generation had three 4x weaknesses. One of their new abilities in the fourth generation gives Parasect what is essentially a 5x weakness to Fire. Parasect also gets a 100% accuracy sleep move, which is potentially the most powerful status-inducing move in the game, so the Weaksauce Weakness was likely added to keep it from being a Game Breaker.
  - That and Parasect's speed, which is abysmal.
- Gyarados is a Water/Flying type. Hope your opponent's Pokemon aren't too shocking.
  - And the electric type is half-composed of cute little rodents. So you have things like one foot tall squirrels and mice taking down a 21 foot long sea monster, known for destroying entire towns in fits of rage by the way, in one hit. And a grinning sphere, too, but those are actually dangerous.
- Several moves and other things introduced in the fourth generation of the games can cause examples of this trope. One of the most hilarious: a Grass-type move called Grass Knot that is said to work by tripping the opponent, and does more damage the heavier the opponent is. The result of this is that the heaviest Pokémon in existence, the Ground-type Groudon, can often be tripped to death in one hit by something as small as a Pichu.
Somewhat in keeping with the game's theme, the Big Bad of Spore, the Grox, is weak against... Life! They can only survive on barren planets; creating a life-sustaining world literally kills them (although their spaceships can still bomb you from orbit).
Laharl in Disgaea, being a young demon who makes a big deal out of being evil, is violently allergic to women with sexy bodies and expressions of optimism or hope. In one battle he has to fight a bunch of half-naked succubi and nekomata with his stats halved; another time Flonne nearly kills him by yelling "eternal love!" (her favourite words).
In Elite Beat Agents, an alien species known as the "Rhombulans" come to Earth and ban music because they're scared of it. Then the agents come and get everybody in the world to dance to Hoobastank and the Rolling Stones.
- To be fair, anyone who wouldn't instinctively dance to a worldwide concert of Jumpin' Jack Flash probably has no soul.
Sonic in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise is extremely weak to water. Not only can he not swim, he also moves at an extremely slow pace when under. In the anime Sonic X he can't even move while underwater, and he can't move while on ice. There was an entire episode of Sonic Underground and Sonic X devoted to Sonic's aquaphobia. Also, in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Sonic wears a life vest whenever he participates in a swimming event.
The final boss of Final Fantasy Tactics, St. Ajora, is incredibly weak to the Oracle spells of Drain and Osmose, the two easiest spells to acquire for the class, and the AI even actively hones in on characters using it by outright killing them if able, or depleting all their magic if not. However, even a single Chemist is enough to counter these effects, and you can merely have the rest of the party wail on the final boss without it even bothering them for an easy victory.
- It should be noted that due to the mechanics of Drain it kills any unit in the game in 4 hits. However, this is not very useful against most of the units in the game since you can probably 1-3 shot them. However, using it against Zodiac bosses, and especially the last boss, is quite effective since 4 shotting them is probably about the best you can do anyway.
All three final bosses of the Mother series are established as ridiculously powerful, perhaps even immortal, up until the final fight. Giegue/Giygas from Mother is forced to retreat because of the emotions of song, Giegue/Giygas from Mother 2 dies from the prayers of a little girl combined with the hope of everybody on Earth alongside the player, and Claus/Masked Man from Mother 3 dies by killing himself due to brotherly love. Although, admittedly, their weaknesses were the entire point of the fights themselves.
- Then again, you have to admit that having a final boss die as a direct result of the player wanting it to is a pretty awesome approach.
In Baldurs Gate II, the extremely powerful liches rely entirely on magic in combat. There is a relatively low-level spell that allows you to polymorph into a 100% magic-immune and thus undamageable-by-liches creature: The Terrifying Mustard Jelly. Game Breaker ensues.
- Also, all healing spells have reverse effects on undeads. The mid-level spell that heals someone back to max HP? It reduces any undead to one HP. Including an epic dracolich.
Cole from inFamous has the standard "electric super" Weaksauce Weakness of water... but also has one in chain-link fences. The metallic mesh absorbs his shots and dissipates them harmlessly. He has to go around to shoot whatever is on the other side — since every last chain link fence in the game is capped with razor wire and can't be climbed. Penny Arcade didn't let this go without comment.
In Prototype, Alex Mercer and the Infected have a Weaksauce Weakness in water. Their biomass is too dense to float. Alex and Hunters will just jump back out of any body of water they falls into after a brief pause. The Infected not so much. However, it takes place on Manhattan Island, so besides the surrounding water that makes it an island, there's not a lot of water to use. Makes the quarantine easier to keep, though.
- The Player Character is certainly not the slightest bit inconvenienced by falling into even deep water (such as around the aircraft carrier stage) and only the fact that the game does not allow controlling the direction of his out-of-water jumps prevents him from leaving the quarantine area. The game does mention the infection can't cross large bodies of water, but not why or how. It seems plausible this refers to the possibility of an airborne infection spread rather than infected people swimming (or water-jumping) across. In any case, the cause can't be the density of biomass since Alex is light enough to glide.
  - How can he glide, but is visibly simultaneously too dense to float in water? It's ~~magic~~ biotechnology, they don't have to explain it.
Using Provoke on Defender X in Final Fantasy X will force him to use an attack that halves the target's current HP for the remainder of the fight (unless the Provoker switches out of battle). Therefore, the fight becomes a Foregone Victory.
- Many other bosses have some exploitable weakness (some more obscure than others), making a "level one" run easier than you might expect.
Okami monsters can have some pretty weaksauce weaknesses:
- The "Bloom" technique, that causes flowers to sprout from trees, will also open bud-based enemies and reveal their weak point.
- Umbrella-weilding and flying enemies are weak to "Galestorm" which most of the time isn't any more powerful than a moderate breeze.
- The Tengu can be calmed down from going berzerk by causing it to rain.
- The Big Bad is weak to sunlight, but then again, he is a god of Darkness.
The Bonus Bosses of Mana Khemia Alchemists Of Alrevis are very powerful, to say the least. However, they all share a common monster trait that renders them vulnerable to a certain character's normal physical attack. Said character is one of the highest physical attackers of the game (plus, he also has a skill that increases his attack power even more), and abusing the weakness will quickly increase the Limit Break meter, allowing faster access to the uber-powerful Finishing Bursts. This is a saving grace, however, since one Boss Battle has you fighting three Bonus Bosses at once.
In Devil Survivor, the Nigh-Indestructible enemy is only harmed by Devil's Fuge AKA Mistletoe, which the only thing made of said plant you can get your hands on is a cellphone strap that is only made in the image of mistletoe. Makes up for it by being That One Boss of the game, but still a rather undignified weakness - but justified, due to the boss's background origin and the characters noteing that he is a demon.
An odd case in Tales Of Phantasia, which isn't a conventional weakness, but more of a developers oversight. The Bonus Boss of the Bonus Dungeon, Pluto, only has physical attacks, and one ridiculously long charging special attack, all of which have insane amounts of damage behind them,but must be used at close range. The first skill the main character ever learns is a long range, one SP cost move called Demon Fang', which instantly pushes pluto back and flinches him. Hence, a Bonus Boss battle where the heroes stay on oneside and nuke the poor guy and the lead constantly pelts him with Demon Fangs, while the boss sits on the other side of the screen defenseless.
In Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, there's an optional battle with the spirit of Richter Belmont. A hero from past games, he's one of the most powerful vampire hunters ever to walk the Earth. So what's the best weapon to use on him? Why, cream pies, of course!
- To elaborate a little: Richter is weak against the Darkness element. One of the few sub-weapons you can get your hands on with this element is - for some reason - a cream pie. Which means the easiest way to beat him is to keep throwing pies in his face. Really.
It seems that human(ish) enemies in the Resident Evil series are more vulnerable to melee attacks than they are to heavy firepower and ordnance. Krauser from part 4 is weak against Leon's knife, and in part 5, the first two fights with Wesker can be considerably shortened by clobbering him with as many QTE combos as possible.
In Resident Evil 4, the Plagas that hatch out of the various Ganados are either Demonic Spiders or Goddamned Bats, depending on your opinion. However, once "popped", they can be killed instantly with a single flash grenade... yes, that's right, the otherwise useless blue grenade you've probably been selling off for upgrades and beefier guns.
In Diablo II, a Paladin using the skill Blessed Hammer (commonly known as Hammerdins) are capable of throwing dozens of high-damage hammers at a time, even into the highest difficulties. Their weakness? Walls. Since the hammers arc in a circular pattern, it can be extremely difficult to defeat certain monsters who are positioned in a difficult spot. There's a reason why the most effective equipment for a Hammerdin has an item that provides the Teleport spell: because there's quite a few mandatory sections of the game that are best served teleporting around, avoiding enemies, grabbing the one item you need, and getting the hell out of there.
Ormagoddenfrom Brutal Legend was killed by being doused with mud. Given that he's red-hot and flaming, getting hit with something cold could very well make him explode.
Penny Arcade Adventures features a literal example: the special-attack weapon "Double-Mild Weaksauce" is such a wimpy hotsauce that it actually makes enemies wimpier and more vulnerable when you shoot it at them.
Although not a flaw of the units themselves, ground units in X-Com Apocalypse can only travel on roads and if the road square they are on is destroyed so are they. Especially galling with the Assault Tank which is pictured as having huge caterpillar treads but still can't go off-road.

Toothgnip the goat in Goats gets his Kavorka Man powers from "The Panties of Potency". This had nothing to do with the artist having trouble drawing Toothgnip standing on all fours, honest!
Parodied in this strip of The Order Of The Stick, where, since Haley always has her sandwiches without pickles, Crystal thinks they're toxic to her. They're not.
Mr. Mighty of Everyday Heroes is bullet-proof and has "the strength of seventy men", but has trouble with paperwork.
In one Bob The Angry Flower strip, Bob thinks that a superhero has the Weaksauce Weakness of bacon. He turns out to be totally wrong, but we never find out what the weakness actually is.
- Another one has Bob running a hot peanuts stand, recognizing a customer and his friends as a band of supervillains, and instantly and correctly deducing that they are actually buying ammunition for an attack on Anaphylactic Man's fortress. (He sells it to them anyway.)
- Yet another has Bob defeating an evil skeleton with the obscure knowledge that skeletons have a fatal weakness to raisins. Yeah, it's that kind of comic.
This episode of Dinosaur Comics claims to have been inspired by this trope. More specifically, it's about the dangers of peanut allergies, orange juice, and the water that takes up 70% of the earth's surface.
Tales Of The Questor subverts this with the fey. General belief is that they are vulnerable to "Cold iron" but this proves to be false. Research into why the iron did not work reveals that the ancient documents that the information was obtained from were actually misprinted versions found in an ancient garbage dump and that the symbol for cold and the symbol for north are very similar. Turns out the weakness is not cold iron but "north seeking iron" (lodestone), they are vulnerable to strong magnetic fields. Unfortunately only the weakest fey have this vulnerability, the strong ones shrug it off.
Bob And George, Tomahawk Man is lethally allergic to Plant Shield, something Megaman considers to be the crummiest power in the series. However, what really takes the cake is Ran Mark II, a monstrosity so intimidating it makes Bob virtually shit his pants. However, he is vulnerable to one of the most common substances in the Bob And George setting: Ran Mk I corpses.
In Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes, Klik, a sentient metallic being able to fly, morph into just about anything, and absorb genetic information from flesh-based life-forms, is corroded when coming into contact with blood.
In Sequential Art, the little black shadow creatures are dependent on their leader when they try to conquer the Earth. When he is killed, they just mill around the house, helping out or watching soap operas. Keep in mind that the leader, like the rest of them, was small enough to be placed in a drinking glass and thrown out a window. Also, apparently Kat's evil former teacher's life is somehow linked to the ruler she waves at her students while yelling at them. When Kat breaks it in a fit of anger, the teacher has a heart attack and dies. And There Was Much Rejoicing.

In the Whateley Universe, The Fair Folk (and mutants who are turning into Fae) are vulnerable to cold iron. Wrought iron benches, cast iron skillets, and so on. But Fey is also vulnerable to synthetic fabrics which give her a burning rash. She could be incapacitated by rayon lingerie!
- Or The Seventies.
- Phase subverts this trope by getting a fake weakness put on his powers testing results. Dark chocolate, administered orally. So now she can have enemies try to stop her by bringing her delicious desserts.

This trope appears as a pastiche in Bolt. The titular dog believes he has superpowers because he never leaves the set of a TV show. When he is accidentally shipped across the country his powers "mysteriously" vanish, and he blames the Styrofoam packing peanuts he was shipped with.
Robot Chicken once spoofed Sailor Moon's lengthy and "transparent" Transformation Sequence with a male youma "saluting" Sailor Moon.
- Similarly the transformations always end in the same pose. Fan Fic and H-Doujin writers take full advantage of this predictable moment.
The titular character of Invader Zim is a member of a hyper-advanced, genetically engineered race of aliens for whom Humongous Mechas are a mundane occurence and whose sole purpose seems to be conquering the entire universe. His main weakness? Water (possibly just polluted water). And meat.
- Though, unlike the Signs aliens above, he managed to devise a solution with a few minutes of thought, after literally stumbling onto Earth. The Signs aliens had studied the Earth before attacking, and still managed to fail.
  - Which says something about the Signs aliens as Zim is otherwise a functional retard.
Captain Planet, being a paragon of clean Earth, is naturally weak against your usual forms of pollution (smog, toxic waste, etc.)... but did you know that that also counts the "pollution" of hate? Yes, if he is even around someone who has enough hatred, bigotry, and malice in their hearts, he will keel over just as badly as if he was sprayed down by a year's worth of toxic waste. In fact, Hitler nearly did him in through this, simply by glaring at him.
- It makes sense (in an in-story sorta way which doesn't make it any less Weaksauce) that hate would be a sort of pollution to him: In the Shadow Archetype Five Bad Band the villains eventually make, guess what Heart's opposite is?
- Oddly enough, he was nearly done in by crude oil in the pilot episode, despite the fact that crude oil is a natural resource that is the result of geological pressures. So it's more like his resource is loosely defined as anything icky rather than pollution or hate.
  - In the French dub of the pilot, he's not sprayed with oil, but with a random "toxic chemical". Still, that doesn't explain what kind of chemical it is, nor why Greedly has a hose of it in his cockpit. But he shouldn't have a hose of oil either...
- Captain Planet's weakness is a clear sign of Epic Fail, since he is supposed to fight pollution. He amounts to an anti-virus program that instantly cuts out on the first appearance of a virus on the computer it's meant to protect.
Namor the Sub-Mariner of Marvel Comics is similarly affected by pollution (though not by hate, which is good, since he seems to run on it), but that makes sense, as he's a water-breather.
The only thing that prevents Brother Herman from taking over the world in Yin Yang Yo is the fact the he's allergic to panda fur. As long as Master Yo, the last panda on the planet, is around, failure will be his only option.
- His brother Carl, The Evil Cockroach Wizard has been shown to be a very powerful villain capable of global domination himself, he has one glaring weakness: self-esteem. He's been defeated by insults and peer pressure, and his own low opinion of himself keeps him from going full-tilt against the heroes and his brother.
In Beast Wars, the Transformers get hit with a particularly nasty one... Energon, which they need to survive, can cause lock-ups, short-outs, and other problems if they're exposed to too high an amount of energon radiation.
- Given that the amount of raw Energon was described as potentially being enough to allow Megatron to conquer Cybertron, and when the Vok were going to destroy prehistoric Earth they were going to do it by overheating the Energon until it detonated, taking out the entire planet, that may be like complaining about humans having a weakness to water when talking about drowning at sea.
Stitch of Lilo And Stitch is unable to swim due to his extremely high molecular density, making him vulnerable to any body of water large and deep enough for him to be unable to claw his way out of before he drowns. Other than that he is one of the most powerful creatures in his continuity.
Birdman from the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons had the powers of flight, energy beams that shot from his hands, enhanced strength, and a personal force field — and drew his powers from the light of the sun. Fair enough, there are plenty of other solar-powered heroes out there (Superman, Cyclops (sometimes), Starfire). Unlike those heroes, however, Birdman apparently had no energy reserve; he became weak as a baby after being removed from sunlight for less than a minute. As it was implied that being out of the sun for an extended period of time ("extended" apparently being something like five minutes) was fatal to Birdman, it's a wonder he didn't spontaneously drop dead at night. No wonder he became a lawyer.
- And once he becomes a lawyer, he develops an entirely new Weaksauce Weakness, as he's completely worthless if he loses the Birdman insignia that he keeps on his forehead.
In an episode of Ben 10, it turns out that the leader of the Galactic Enforcers (an alien superhero team, said leader an obvious parody of Superman) has a devastating weakness to chocolate, which Ben himself points out is a lame superweakness.
- It's common enough for animals. We just metabolize theobromine much better.
The members of the Sushi Pack are rendered powerless by any kind of heat, but even worse, they feel compelled to announce this every time a villain pulls out a heat lamp.
Word Girl isn't so much defeated by a cute little kitten, but rather easily distracted by one. She also compensates for her language abilities by showing a complete lack of competence in art, poetry, and dance.
- Poetry? That consists of the application of words!
Parodied in Futurama: "The human was impervious to our most powerful magnetic fields, yet in the end he succumbed to a harmless sharpened stick!"
An episode of Martin Mystery had an alien fungus monster that had taken over a small town and replaced the inhabitants with clones. Both it and the clones could be killed with salt. As luck would have it, the small town just happened to be in northern Utah.
Mumm-Ra from Thundercats, with a weakness to his own reflection.
- The writers eventually realized this made Mumm-Ra too lame, so they had him get over it. The Thundercats had a harder time dealing with him after that. Even more so when he got an Infinity Plus One Sword of his own.
When Buttercup wanted to become a better superhero in the Powerpuff Girls episode "Super Zeroes", she became Mange, a knockoff of Darker And Edgier comic book Anti Heroes — Spawn in particular. However, when the time came for her and her sisters (both of whom also assumed their own "better superhero" identies) to go out and fight a monster destroying Townsville, Mange was the only one who stayed behind, saying it's too bright and that she only travels at night. Mange then spent the rest of the day sitting on the couch with Professor Utonium until night fell, arriving too late at the scene as the monster had already left (her sisters were also late for reasons of their own). The three girls spent the night under a tree. When the monster came back to face the girls again, Mange sits out the fight, perferring to stay under the tree's shade. This attitude led the monster to eventually call her "Little Miss Darkness who’s afraid of a little sun".
- Of course, being kids in preschool, the girls have plenty of weaknesses of their own any other time - they have been shown to be deathly afraid of "cooties", cockroaches, and broccoli. Of course, the episodes these weaknesses show up in usually involve some sort of super-powered or evil version of it, so it's not always so silly...
In Gargoyles, the titular creatures turn into immobile statues during the day, which leaves them extremely vulnerable. They try to work around this in various ways (working a deal with humans in exchange for protection, magic spells, etc.)
- Oberon's Children, like other portrayals of The Fair Folk, are all vulnerable to iron. Iron can disrupt their magic, actually hurt them, and imprison them. In his not really first appearance, Puck is forced to obey Demona after being bound with iron chains. The Weird Sisters are also coerced into doing a favor in exchange for being released from an iron chain. Later, the Trickster God Coyote is trapped in the robot Coyote's latest body which was constructed with iron from a magical cauldron. Their ruler Oberon, while not immune to iron, is powerful enough to withstand being impaled by an iron harpoon though it does cause him to wither in appearance for a short time.
In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fast Forward Sh'Okanabo's first attempt to infect Earth with his progeny is thwarted by...sunlight. Although this is handwaved as a particular, unexpected feature of Earth's, and Sh'Okanabo himself is not normally affected, dealing with his weakness is the thrust of his character arc throughout the remainder of the season.
In one episode of The Botsmaster, the Big Bad uses a special alloy to make his Mecha Mooks Nigh Invulnerable. The good guys think that they're totally screwed, until the inventor of the alloy tells them that the alloy can be dissolved by...citrus acid. In the end they use lemon juice to defeat the new Mecha Mooks.
In Kim Possible, Felix Renton's Cool Chair is one of the most advanced pieces of technology in the series. It can hover and has Combat Tentacles. But it can be hijacked by a wireless game controller.
Not exactly canon for Darkwing Duck's mythos, but when he retells his origins in 'The Secret Origin of Darkwing Duck', he describes meeting another hero whose weakness is Coo-koo Cola. She then..well, falls into their factory and adds to the Disney series's death count.
The Fairly Oddparents: All that fairy magic is neutralized when they are under a butterfly net.

Gastropods, especially slugs and snails, are composed mostly of water. So what defeats them? The anti-water: Salt.
Giraffes can easily suffer fatal neck and head injuries just from falling over. Don't believe it? Just imagine the whiplash with a neck that long...
Koalas live in such calm environments that even a not that much strong noise can scare them literally to death.
Humans drown rather easily if you immerse them in this stuff that covers 70% of their planet.
- Not to mention that water composes about 65% of their body, actually.
- Though most of them are very capable of manoeuvring in it, so it does usually take quite a bit of effort to keep them down for long enough.
- And what of people with Aquagenic Urticaria?
Tropers: Little do some know it, but the wiki they created is eating their spare time. and if you do know, knowing doesn't help a bit.
The right pattern of flashing lights can cause nausea in just about any human, people with epilepsy simply have a more severe reaction.
Humans can be killed by TIME.

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