Mugging The Monster / Literature

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Discworld

• The Discworld novels tend to feature (a) supernatural or at least surprisingly skilled protagonists, (b) comical misunderstandings, and (c) a high crime rate. In other words, Mugging the Monster is almost certain to happen — or rather, humorously fail to happen — at some point.
  • In Guards! Guards! , a crook tries to rob what turns out to be a fire-breathing dragon. It doesn't go well.
  • This trope is also part of why Carrot Ironfoundersson had an uneventful 500-mile journey from the Copperhead Mountains to Ankh-Morpork.
    People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind a rock then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else."
    • Implied to also be the reason why one of Unseen University's otherwise-inviolable annual traditions — that of students venturing out into the city and giving any red-haired men with whom they cross paths "a good thrumping" — was hastily revised with the addendum "except of course for Captain Carrot Ironfounderson of the Watch".
  • In Reaper Man, a gang tries to rob Windle Poons, who is not only an elderly wizard but one who has recently come back from the dead as a zombie.
  • In Maskerade, some muggers target a pair of frail old ladies, one of whom is Granny Weatherwax.
    • Subverted in that she isn't the one to dispatch said muggers (though she was about to) — that honor goes to the Ghost. But since Granny Weatherwax is a good witch, she has to do something about those nasty wounds they sustained, even if all she has is a very dull needle for sewing them up...
    • And before we leave the subject of Granny, the trolls and dwarfs in the mountains where she lives avert this trope... by warning their little ones of, respectively, She Who Must Be Avoided and Go Around The Other Side Of The Mountain.
  • In Feet of Clay, a group of crooks tries to rob The Bucket, the local pub for coppers. They bust in only to find it dim, full of armoured, grouchy off-duty police offers who don't take kindly to having their boozing interrupted. And then, to top it off, they take Angua hostage, presuming that she wouldn't be as dangerous as Carrot or Vimes. No-one told them that she's a werewolf. The audience calmly ignored them (apart from a few who made quips to the effect of "Don't play with your food."). Cue them, still not getting it, taking her outside. Then there's a clatter of armour, a rising growl, a lot of screaming and some scrabbling noises. All while Vimes is awkwardly asking Carrot how his and Angua's relationship is going.
    • Some jewel thieves later make the same mistake about Angua in Jingo — they end up confessing to any crime suggested (even in cases where they have to guess what was stolen or lie about their gender) while begging to be let out of the vault.
  • And in Men at Arms, members of the Assassins' Guild gather in their courtyard to threaten the Watchmen, or possibly kill them "for trespassing" if Vimes won't back off and leave. Then they realize that one of the Watchmen is Detritus... and their elegantly-crafted stilettos and sophisticated poisons will do diddly-squat to a troll, whose skin is solid stone and impervious to anything short of a really enthusiastically-wielded pickaxe and whose bloodstream is already a soup of heavy metals that're nastier than the poisons..
  • In The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, a Genre Savvy highwayman robbing the coach Keith, Maurice, and the rats are on goes through a sort of checklist to see if there are wizards, witches, trolls, werewolves, or vampires on the coach (all of which have been the subject of this trope in previous books). Too bad he didn't check for Talking Animals...
  • It happens twice in Lords and Ladies; first, Casanunda, the "World's Second Greatest Lover" (he tries harder), attacks a coach full of wizards. After a display of octarine fire control, the dwarf joins them, whereupon they are attacked by a band of highwaymen — the leader of which assumes that wizards can't use magic on civilians. As it turns out, that's less of a rule, more of a guideline. He is turned into a pumpkin for his trouble, retaining his hat in accordance with the Universal Laws of Humor.
  • In Carpe Jugulum, a highwayman tries to rob the visiting Count and his family of vampires, and that doesn't end well. Then his ghost tries to rob Death. Death is more amused than anything, complimenting the man on his (relative) vitality in trying to stick to his guns post-mortem.
  • This is tried in The Fifth Elephant, and while the thieves are prepared for trouble, they're not prepared enough, both because they underestimated Vimes, and seriously underestimated Badass Bureaucrat Inigo.
  • A few valkyries get mugged by the people they came to pick up. Although that group was Cohen the Barbarian and his horde of elderly (read: with a lifetime's experience of surviving in the most dangerous profession in existence) barbarians.
  • The New Firm in The Truth end up on (almost) both sides of this trope — they're subject to a (legally sanctioned) mugging attempt by a member of the Thieves' Guild, which does not go well for the thief, and later walk into Biers during business hours and openly try to intimidate a Werewolf into working for them — this would normally be suicidal but thanks to Mr Tulip's almost inhuman ability to intimidate people without trying they manage to walk out alive (but without the werewolf).
  • In the original past of Night Watch some thieves tried to rob John Keel; he made short work of them. In the modified past, Carcer claims that some thieves tried to attack him — "at least, they had some money with them". He was among the thieves who attacked Keel and killed him.
  • Andy Shank and company trying to beat up Nutt in Unseen Academicals. As an orc, Nutt is much stronger than his size would suggest and could probably dismember them without trying if he wasn't so pacifistic. Andy later tries again, despite knowing how strong Nutt is, and Nutt effortlessly disables him, before cheerfully explaining in minute detail the exact force required to tear someone's head off.
  • Ponder Stibbons reminisces about how his wizardly aptitudes first manifested, when he was a geeky kid and some bullies began beating him up. Nothing like bruises and humiliation to motivate one to start throwing fire around.
  • There's also a variation in Jingo, where the (relatively) good guys Colon and Nobby try to mug some Klatchians in an alleyway to get their clothes in order to go undercover, but the Klatchians get the better of them and they lose their own clothes instead.
  • Happens between the Summoning Dark and Vimes in Thud!. A subversion, as Vimes unconsciously drives the ancient hate monster from his mind... and it departs with the words, "I salute you." Not only that, in later books, it apparently comes back to visit when he's pursuing justice in the dark, and it's more or less tame!
  • Yet another one in Hogfather where Susan Sto Helit stops for a drink in a bar popular among various kinds of supernatural monsters. A drunken bogeyman mistakes her for a human girl slumming among monsters for a thrill and makes increasingly scornful and lewd comments to her, despite the warnings of the bartender, who knows that Susan is only mostly human. It's not shown exactly what happens, but Susan then turns around and the bogeyman shoots off his chair. Then he hides under the beds of the children Susan is caring for as a governess. Children who Susan has taken to defending from monsters. With an iron poker. Perhaps the bartender should have told him whose granddaughter he was messing with.
  • Susan's father got subjected to this trope first in Mort. Lampshaded by the author: Three men had appeared behind him... They had the heavy, stolid look of those thugs whose appearance in any narrative means that it's time for the hero to be menaced a bit, although not too much, because it's also obvious that they're going to be horribly surprised. They threaten to kill him. Mort is Death's apprentice. It goes about as well as you imagine.
  • In Going Postal Moist von Lipwig is discussing a special mail coach to Genua. The danger of bandits is brought up, and one of the brothers operating the coaches points out that there aren't any bandits on that road any more, which is good. The other isn't so sure, since they never found out what wiped them out. This is the road through Überwald, no less. (They were probably literally mugging the monster, since Uberwald has vampires, werewolves, and, as of two books after Going Postal, orcs.)
  • In The Last Hero, a pair of bandits come across an old woman among the Hub's snow, sitting at a fire, knitting, and stuck in the snow next to her is the largest sword they've ever seen.
    Intelligent robbers would have started to count up the incongruities here.
    These, however, were the other kind, the kind for whom evolution was invented.
    • We learn that sword belonged to another man with very big feet... whose corpse is lying behind a nearby rock. And so we meet Vena the Raven-Haired, the Discworld counterpart to Xena: Warrior Princess, now an elderly granny who knits chainmail.
  • In Raising Steam some highwaymen target what they think is just a plain black coach. Sadly for them it contains Lord Vetinari himself (his coat of arms being a black shield upon a black background). His Lordship, one of the best students the Assassin's Guild ever turned out, noted by a pair of professional thugs to "move like a snake" even when surprised, appreciated the opportunity to stretch his legs during his otherwise tediously boring journey.
  • Discussed in Monstrous Regiment: the Lightning Bruiser vampire Maladict (actually Maladicta) wears a sword so that people won't mistake him, a slim Pretty Boy (actually a slender girl) for an easy target... because she doesn't know how to use it and would "probably settle for just ripping their heads off."
  • In Witches Abroad, a pair of very dangerous people (who are actually polymorphed snakes) go after a character whose primary attribute appears to be her utter soppiness and appears to have a kinship with some kind of small, furry animal. Unfortunately for them, her actual primary attribute is that she's a Discworld witch who also knows kung fu. "And the trouble with small furry animals in a corner is that, just occasionally, one of them’s a mongoose.”
  • In the same book, there's a bit of Conversational Troping near the start when Jason Ogg is very worried about his mam and Granny Weatherwax going abroad, where all the horrible monsters who attack travellers he's read about in the almanac can be found ... because it says in the almanac that some of them are nearly extinct already.

• David Eddings
  • Eddings subverted this early in The Elenium. Some street thugs decide to mug that guy on the warhorse who just rode into town. Sparhawk tells them he's not interested in playing, as he throws back his cape to reveal armor and broadsword. The thugs decide to go elsewhere.
  • The heir of a Pelosian noble tries to show off to his friends by harassing travelers for a fee to pass through his father's land, even though they're on the king's road. Said travelers are fully armored Church Knights who point out that he's endangering both life and soul in doing so. The heir is too proud to admit he doesn't know about Church Knights until his very unamused father arrives to bawl him out.
  • And then played it straight (but as a non-mugging example) in the sequel, The Tamuli. A character makes a not-quite-audible, but clearly offensive remark about Ehlana, Sparhawk's queen and also his wife. Another character calls for a moment of silence in memory of the loud-mouthed oaf who made the comment; the oaf doesn't get the hint until he's told just exactly who Sparhawk is.
  • In Polgara the Sorceress, the title character is riding alone through a forest when two bandits attempt to rob/rape her. She calmly states that she is glad that she finally found some food and disguises herself and her horse as monsters with an illusion, sending the pair running.
• Mercedes Lackey's works:
  • In Children of the Night, a shapeshifting souleater vampire who leaves a group and comes back sated is said by the group's leader to have been "trolling for rapists" in the form of an attractive young woman. The doubting member of the group, who is repulsed and uncomfortable about basically murdering random people but needs to feed, thinks this sounds like a good idea, and so he wanders Central Park until a junkie attacks him and is killed.
  • In Brightly Burning, Lavan's Firestarting gift manifests for the first time when he is cornered and about to be beaten by school bullies; the resulting fire kills everyone but himself. Unfortunately, Lan comes out of this so traumatized that his sanity is basically being held together by his Companion; when she dies, he triggers another firestorm on a much larger scale, saving Valdemar but killing himself.
  • In The Last of the Season, what could be more helpless than a cute six-year-old girl holding a teddy bear?
• 1632: Doesn't it sound like nice recreation for overworked sixteenth-century mercenaries to Rape, Pillage, and Burn around this one small peaceful town, in which everybody just happens to own and know how to use twentieth century firearms?
• Animorphs:
  • In The Visitor, a young man attempts to persuade Rachel to get into his car. When the creep doesn't take no for an answer, she scares the living daylights out of him by morphing halfway into an elephant. Considering that she could have completed the morph and stomped him flat, the jerk got off easy.
  • Marco also does it in The Predator...he begins morphing gorilla and pounds a couple bullies in an alleyway, even though it's quite dangerous morphing like that in public.
  • In Elfangor's Secret, during a time travel mission, the group lands in the 1930's where a racist harasses Cassie for being black. She responds by saying she can turn white, as in morph into a polar bear to scare him into submission.
• In the first chapter of Artemis Fowl, a man tries to pickpocket Butler. Due to Butler being massive and strong, said pickpocket gets his fingers broken without Butler even looking down.
• Has bittersweet results for Lale in The Assassins of Tamurin. The sweet — she kills the guy. The bitter — the subsequent "My God, What Have I Done?"
• In The Bad Seed, Leroy Jessup thinks it's fun to tease Rhoda Penmark. He learns better...too late.
• Played straight and inverted in Below, all in the same chapter. A water nymph who uses lies and misdirection to rob adventurers tries her charms against a thief whose own talent for dishonesty is legendary, who also knows enough lore to figure out what she is. Then he mugs her.
• Beware of Chicken: At the Dueling Peaks tournament, Lu Ban and his Shrouded Mountain lackeys throw their weight around, confident in the knowledge that if it came to a fight a single Shrouded Mountain elder could very possibly beat every cultivator in the Azure Hills at once. And then they discover that one of the people they've been bullying is under the protection of the Cloudy Sword sect, one of the foremost sects in the Empire and at least as far above the Shrouded Mountain as the Shrouded Mountain is above the sects of the Azure Hills.
• In Tanya Huff's Blood Debt, an unfortunate car thief makes off with a van, moments before sundown... unaware that there's a vampire asleep in the back.
• Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell has a group of street thugs gang up on Saul. He then breaks their fingers, takes their wallets, and comes up with seventy dollars.
• In Carrie, young Carrie White is a girl who has been abused her whole life by bullies and her mother, who also starts to develop Psychic Powers. Things come to a head when a prank played on her on prom night causes her to snap, and the entire town of Chamberlain pays the price.
• The Cats of Ulthar: An old couple really, really hate cats, and kill any cat they can get their hands on; it is implied that they go about it viciously. One day a caravan of mysterious strangers arrives, and a couple days later the old couple lays hands on the treasured kitten of a young orphan in the caravan. Oops. He places a curse on the old couple when he gets the bad news and the next night, they [the old couple] find every cat in town approaching their cottage with a strange fixity of purpose; the next anyone ever sees of the old couple is "two cleanly-picked skeletons".
• In Robert Newman's novel The Case of the Baker Street Irregular, a thug tries to rob a blind fiddler. It doesn't go well. "I may be blind, but I can still take you or any three like you." As you may have guessed from the book's title, the fiddler was Sherlock Holmes in disguise.
• In the Michael Connelly book The Closers, a pair of homeless men attempt to mug Harry Bosch. One of them sees the look in Harry's eyes and wisely thinks better of it.
• Ramou Lazarian of Christopher Stasheff's A Company of Stars is an ace martial artist who loves fighting, but needs the other guy to start it ... so when he's confronted, he presents himself as a nice-guy pushover in order to invite the opening punch.
  • Subverted in one instance, however, where Ramou takes apart a street gang that decided he was a good mugging victim ... only to get knocked on the head from behind and robbed by one he didn't see.
• Curse Of The Wolf Girl has a couple of rather yobbish Alpha Bitches relentlessly bully Agrivex, a young fire-demon currently pretending to be human to attend college, which surprisingly works out all right for them since 'Vex is a sweet natured girl who really doesn't understand nastiness or is prepared to hurt people. Then they try it on 'Vex's friend Kalix. Kalix is a werewolf with anger issues. This works out substantially less well for them.
• In Jack Vance's The Demon Princes cycle, there's a brief description of the time a thirteen-year-old Kirth Gersen — who is being trained for his eventual Roaring Rampage of Revenge — and his grandfather — who is doing the training — are attacked by a mugger. Gersen breaks a number of the man's bones, ending with his neck, while grandfather watches.
• In The Dinosaur Lords, a group of thugs tries to beat up Karyl — who's disguising himself as a mute street performer at the time — to chase him out of their city, not knowing that for one, he's one of the best fighters in the Empire, and two, his cane hides a sword. Suffice to say, it ends with a lot of blood, and none of it Karyl's.
• Dragaera
  • In Jhereg, young Vlad turned out to be the Monster when accosted by a drunken old Dragaeran sailor. The belligerent Easterner-hater took a header off a cliff, as Vlad scored his first confirmed homicide.
  • Later, while on the run from the Jhereg, he gets his money robbing bandits. The beginning of Iorich suggests that this is usually a consequence of their failed attempts to rob him.
  • In The Viscount of Adrilankha, Piro and company attempt to rob a merchant wagon that turns out to contain his dad and Pel, who'd set the whole thing up with the express intent of getting attacked.
• The Dresden Files
  • After the events of the 12th book, short, blond, cute little Sergeant Murphy has not only battled several monsters along side her wizard best friend Harry Dresden, but just came back from helping him wipe out an entire race of vampires and was on her way to pick up her best friend for a date only to find him dead. Anyone who tries to go against her after her Heroic BSoD, from abusive husbands not appreciating her interference to a bunch of Fomorians muscling in on Chicago territory and slave-trafficking to vampires wanting to blackmail her, very quickly learns why she's still alive after hanging out with one of the most dangerous wizards on the planet for so long.
  • A humorously-inverted example has a bunch of wannabe dark wizards try to challenge Harry Dresden to a magical duel.^note This is also a case of Bullying a Dragon, considering they barely had enough power between them to cast a curse strong enough to notice, while Harry can throw around enough fire that him burning down buildings has become a Running Gag. They are rather taken aback when he pulls out his trusty .44 revolver.
    "'I'm a-fixin' to defend myself', I drawled, Texas-style."
  • Irwin Pounder is a quiet child who would love to do nothing more than read some books. He is also in the five-foot range when in grade school and very strong looking. He is also the scion of a human woman and a bigfoot. During his elementary school years, he is tormented by a pair of brothers, also part-human scions of an unknown kind with predator instincts. The brothers are guarded by a powerful and dangerous dark elf. Harry convinces Irwin to stand up for himself because sometimes fighting is the best option, especially if it means stopping the boys from growing bored and attacking weaker kids who don't have his healing abilities. When Irwin does stand up and effortlessly beats back the bullies, saying they would find something else to do with their energy, the bodyguard asks Harry why shouldn't he kill Harry for his interference, as he had previously threatened, Harry replies he helped teach the bullies this lesson: Sometimes there is prey that is too dangerous to take on and should be avoided and retreat is the wiser course of action. The bodyguard accepts this with mild amusement and notes it is a lesson better learned in youth.
  • Trick-or-treating is the result of the wizard Magical Society exploiting this: Halloween night is a Liminal Time when immortals go out to hunt, so one of the early Merlins of the White Council popularized the holiday so that supernatural nasties couldn't be sure whether any given costumed weirdo was a squishy Muggle or a being who could fight back.
• Duumvirate: A flashback in Billy & Howard features this. Three goons decide to pick on Billy's friend. Billy goes nuts (and more than a little racist) and brutalizes all three.
• In Elantris, the titular city has become a dumping ground for people who suffer a magical disease that reduces them to a zombie-like state; though many Elantrians find ways to maintain their intelligence and humanity, the gang led by Shaor have degenerated into near-mindless berserkers. When Hrathen has faked the disease and gets thrown into the city, Shaor's men almost immediately mug him for his food. Because Hrathen is a Derethi priest and has received extensive hand-to-hand combat training as part of his vocation, the ensuing Curb-Stomp Battle is not in the gang's favor. The protagonists who were going to help Hrathen can only watch in shock, and wryly observe that Derethi priests can take care of themselves.
• The Elminster Series:
  • Elminster in Myth Drannor:
    Brigand: (stopping a lone rider) Get down or die.
    Elminster: (knocking down three men with a spell) I believe a more traditional greeting consists of the words "well met".
  • At the beginning of Elminster's Daughter, a thief named Narnra Shalace again tries to rob Elminster. He easily fends her off and is about to knock her out when a weird magical interaction reveals that she's his daughter.
• Subverted in Lawrence Watt-Evans' Ethshar novel The Misenchanted Sword. The protagonist has a magical sword that won't let him die till he's killed 98 more people, and he wanders back alleys looking for trouble, acting like an old man, a big purse of gold on his hip, expecting this trope. He doesn't run into anyone. Doubly subverted when he later runs into some thugs robbing an elderly lady. Also played straight with said elderly lady.
• In Warren Fahy's Fragment, scientists decide to test the resilience of the native life on Henders Island by introducing invasive species like the mongoose, which had a well-established reputation as 'island conquerors'. The mongoose they sent in lasted all of 2 minutes.
• In a related variant, the house of Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. is occasionally broken into, as it's situated in a bad neighborhood. Only out-of-town criminals do so lightly, however, due to the resident Dead Man's vast telekinetic powers and nasty sense of humor.
• In Good Omens members of The Mafia would routinely comment on how Aziraphale has such a lovely bookstore... and then would never be seen or heard from again...
• In K.B. Spangler's novel Greek Key (from the A Girl and Her Fed continuity), the protagonist, Hope Blackwell, is followed by spies and mooks so often she feels bad for them when they decide to actually come after her. She is quoted in the novel as having "won more gold medals in judo than anyone else alive".
• The Hammer (2022): Upon arriving in Lucentias Castle, Tiny is immediately confronted by muggers looking to take the purse of a seemingly defenseless commoner boy. Tiny, who has already crushed entire gangs with his bare hands, responds by mugging them back and using their wallet to buy himself some gear.
• In the Harry Potter series:
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire opens up with a heroic version. Elderly Muggle Frank Bryce confronts some intruders in the old Riddle mansion expecting to oppose common vandals or burglars. He quickly proves to be punching way above his weight class when he encounters actual sorcerers, who do him in with little effort.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry is told by Neville Longbottom "They only sent one Death Eater to take care of my grandmother. Big mistake. He's still in the hospital and Gran's on the run."
• In the backstory to Heretical Edge a group of werewolves and a wendingo decided to attack a girl scout troop. Led by Sariel Moon, formerly known as Artemis. Sariel slaughtered all the attackers, as might be expected from the retired divine protector of young girls.
  • A group of various werecritters decided to have some fun butchering Bystanders. Unfortunately for them, the first target they picked happened to be Michael. As in, the inspiration for the Archangel Michael. The minute he decided he had better things to do than mess around with them, they died in seconds.
• The Heroes of Olympus: Similarly to the Carrie example above, Akhlys, goddess of misery, underestimated exactly how much misery an exhausted, pissed-off, liquid-surrounded son of Poseidon at the end of his rope could inflict on her. She taunted him one too many times, and he turned her poison against her, choked her with tears and saliva, and even gave a few jabs of his own.
• In The History of the Galaxy, when the Terran Alliance fleet attacks the largely agrarian Lost Colony Dabog, they figure they can just roll over the farmers with their tanks and troopers. What they don't realize is that when the colonists first landed, the planet was a Death World, with swamps and dangerous dinosaur-like lizards. The settlers had to improvise and use every ounce of their ingenuity to adapt. They developed walking machines after being inspired by the lizards' leg joints. This allowed them to clear land for farming and cities and to fight off the lizards. By the time the Terrans arrive, much of that is ancient history, though, and only a single servomachine, the Aquila, remains in operation, and only as a museum exhibit. The Terran ground forces are shocked when the Aquila makes mincemeat of their mighty army and forces them to withdraw into orbit. After that it becomes a scramble on who can develop better servomachines, the Terrans or the Colonials.
• Played with in The Holmes-Dracula File by Fred Saberhagen. The novel starts when an old man who is later revealed to be Count Dracula is mugged and abducted, with the narrator commenting that the trope would have been played straight if the mugger hadn't used a wooden club for the Tap on the Head. The mugger and his employers get away with it at first, despite not knowing who they caught, because the old man has forgotten who he is, but after he escapes and recovers his memories, it does not end well for them.
• Honor Harrington:
  • In The Short Victorious War, a Havenite battlecruiser squadron is expecting to smash up a small Manticoran patrol. Instead they drop out of hyper right on top of the dreadnought HMS Bellerophon, which, after her crew gets over their surprise, blows them all to smithereens in one broadside. It was a complete fluke: the Bellerophon was on its way back to base and just passing through.
  • Invoked in Honor Among Enemies, which sees Honor placed in command of a squadron of Q-ships to hunt Space Pirates. Their standard tactic is to act like an ordinary freighter and hope some schmuck decides they look tasty.
  • In Cauldron of Ghosts, a street gang tries to hijack a truck driven by Thandi Palane and escorted by Victor Cachat. The only reason a few of the attackers survive is that Thandi aims for their knees.
• In I Want My Hat Back the Bear's hat is stolen by a rabbit. So the bear eats him.
  • In This Is Not My Hat, another hat theft is committed, this time by a tiny fish. The hat's rightful owner is a much bigger fish.
• The first Jack Reacher novel Killing Ground essentially uses a slow-burning version of this, as the criminal conspiracy behind events decides to pin a murder they're responsible for on some random drifter who wandered into town that morning, whom no one will care about or miss and who'll easily be silenced in prison before the matter even comes to court. Unfortunately for them, they discover a bit too late that said random drifter is in fact Reacher, a former military police investigator and all-round built-like-a-brick-shithouse badass, who is not only perfectly capable of clearing his own name but of going after the people who set him up...
• Jack Ryan:
  • In Rainbow Six, three Spanish terrorists attempt to hijack a plane. A plane that has a former SEAL, former SAS major, and former Army Special Forces on board. The end result: three unconscious Spanish terrorists.
  • In Without Remorse, that same former SEAL is much younger and going about his Roaring Rampage of Revenge for his murdered Love Interest. He is staggering down the street disguised as a wino when a cop grabs him by the shoulder, thinking he might be the serial crook-killer they're looking for. Said cop finds himself pinned face down on the concrete before he can figure out what happened.
  • In an earlier scene in the same novel, a mugger is assaulting a woman when Kelly happens along and intervenes. In an excess of drug-fueled bravado, the mugger turns on him, only to find himself stone cold dead in a matter of seconds. Ironically, this good deed is what gives the cops a clue about Kelly's identity and modus operandi.
• In one of the Judge Dredd novels, bad things happen whenever Dredd tries to take a bath including one incident when some thieves attempted to burgle his apartment. Needless to say they ended up serving long sentences.
• "The Last Defender of Camelot" by Roger Zelazny begins with a trio of muggers picking on a harmless-looking old man who turns out to be the last surviving Knight of the Round Table — and not just any knight, but Sir Lancelot du Lac, who never lost a fight in his entire life.
• The Lord of the Rings
  • Averted when the hobbits are returning home to the Shire, and stop back at the Prancing Pony Inn in Bree. Fellow travellers complain that the roads have become extremely dangerous and bandit-ridden, which confuses the hobbits, who have not been molested in the slightest. Well, no, you wouldn't be, explain the innkeeper — the hobbits are all armed and armored. No robber in his right mind is going to pick on the group that's attired for war.
  • Played straight a bit later when the four hobbits return to the Shire and the sheriff tries to arrest them in the name of Lotho Sackville-Baggins. The four hobbits, who have just returned from fighting the armies of Sauron, find this hysterical. Frodo informs the sheriff that he's on his way to see Lotho anyway, and the sheriff is welcome to tag along if he wants.
  • Shelob has incapacitated one hobbit, but there's still one very much awake and in fight-or-flight. Should be easy pickings, right? Nope! Said still-conscious hobbit becomes the first person ever to wound Shelob.
• In The Lycanthrope Club, the Alpha Bitch cheerleader and her two cohorts choose the exact wrong moment to get grabby with the student who's...well, guess. Subverted in that, while they do wind up becoming werewolves as well, everyone ends up perfectly fine as friends, and at least one of the beta bitches is pretty enthused by the situation.
• The mugger in The Man Who Controlled Metal pulls this to a tee. It doesn't end well for him of course; but to add to his humilation he... -Well, let's just hope he was wearing brown pants.
• In Maximum Ride, Max takes a stand to protect a girl being threatened by several bigger boys, one of whom is carrying a gun. Max is a genetically engineered hybrid with superhuman strength and agility and has been trained for some time how to use it. The boys basically tell her to bugger off. Cue the buttkicking. Turns out to be a minor example as she gets winged (literally), but the kids don't know what hit them.
• Montparnasse tries mugging Jean Valjean in Les Misérables. Valjean defeats him easily, gives him a lecture on the dangers of idleness, and then gives him his money. Interestingly, Gavroche then proceeds to steal the money from Montparnasse and gets away with it, proving that when you're sneaky enough, robbing the monster sometimes works.
• The Clark Ashton Smith short story "Monsters in the Night" has a monster (a werewolf) mug another monster: a Terminator-esque robot.
• Mass Effect: Revelation: Early on, a panicky new member of the Blue Suns tries pointing a gun at Skar, who is a krogan battlemaster. Your average krogan is much stronger than a human, nigh-immune to bullets, and can heal ridiculously fast, and a battlemaster is a krogan even tougher and nastier than an average krogan. Skar tries telling the kid to stop what he's doing before he dies. The kid does not, turning it into an example of Bullying the Dragon. For added insanity, when the kid gets himself killed, all his buddies decide to try and avenge him, leading to a small slaughter.
• Never Die Twice: When a group of adventuring merchants try to cheat Tye the Necromancer, by demanding a "finder's fee" for his new grimoire on top of the price that he has already agreed and paid, he politely gives each of them a chance to recant (with just one accepting), then kills the remainder instantly with an uttered spell.
  Tye: When you meet someone with a coach pulled by dead horses to overcharge him a book made from human skin, it's not business. It's natural selection.
• Happens twice in Brent Weeks's The Nightangel Trilogy: first when Azoth's gang try to ambush Durzo Blint, the most accomplished wetboy (magical assassin) ever, and again in the third book when the next generation of child gangers try to ambush Kylar, who has taken Durzo's place.
• In A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny, a few chaps threatened to carve up a scrawny "pretty boy". Then Jack got "funny light" in the eyes, pulled out of his pocket a big knife gleaming with starlight — indoors — and grinned...
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy has a variation; when Louise Kavanagh and her sister first arrive on Earth, various criminals try to rob or steal from the naïve offworlders only to be discretely eliminated by the agents sent to make sure she gets to her destination without any trouble.
• Night Watch (Series): In the second Day Watch storyline, a werewolf tries to attack a passerby in a park without a hunting license. He's stopped in mid-leap by a spell and is horrified to discover that the passerby is an Other. For him, the scary part isn't that most Others tend to be more powerful than werewolves but the fact that this guy might report him to Night Watch, and hunting without a license is punishable by death.
• Either inverted or played straight in Oleg Divov's Night Watcher: a vampire decides to stalk a drunken cop, whom the readers already know to be a Badass Normal and The Big Guy. The cop mistakes the fruity vampire for a gay stalker and decides to teach him a lesson before he causes any trouble, preemptively attacking, beating him up and dragging him off to the station. Mind you, the vampire was mostly taken by surprise, and might have turned the tables later, if not for this cop encountering his colleague Captain Kotov along the way; Kotov quickly realizes what's going on and finishes the vampire off.
• Old Kingdom: In Abhorsen, a trio of powerful Greater Dead in the Sixth Precinct of Death decide to attack someone they presume to be an inexperienced necromancer. The "necromancer's" apparent misuse of the bell Saraneth the Binder on the hordes of Lesser Dead surrounding them instead of any of them only confirms their initial impression. They learn their mistake when Lirael, the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, uses the distraction she set up to cast a Charter spell revealing the name of one of the Greater Dead and promptly banishes Lathal the Abomination beyond the Ninth Gate. After that, the other two are more sensible and run as far and fast as they can.
• Happens somewhat early on in Jack Higgins's On Dangerous Ground when a Neo-Nazi thug grabs a woman. She responds by kissing him, turning out to be a distraction ploy for her to grab her flick knife tucked up her skirt, which she later uses to cut his face. It is revealed later on that she is a former member of a loyalist paramilitary force in Northern Ireland.
• The One Who Eats Monsters: A trio of drug dealers try to roofie and rape one of Ryn's new friends. Ryn is an elder deva who was banished from civilization because the gods were scared of her, and is the single most powerful being on the continent, if not the world. The would-be rapists get off extremely easy: two of them are hospitalized, and the third is exposed to Ryn's eyes, which cause him to go from cocky to screaming his head off instantaneously.
• Out of the Dark: The aliens eventually decide to test out their new bioweapon which they plan to use to exterminate humanity on the residents of a small Romanian village. Pity the residents turn out to be "children of the night"...
• In the Stephen King short story "Popsy", Sheridan, who has been abducting and selling children to pay off his gambling debts, kidnaps a young boy from a shopping mall. Unfortunately for him, the boy is a vampire and manages to break his restraints and turn the tables on his kidnapper just in time for his powerful and terrifying grandfather, the eponymous Popsy, to come pick him up. The two vampires exsanguinate Sheridan.
• The Power of Five: Early in Raven's Gate, someone tries to mug Mrs. Deverill, Matt's new foster parent. She's an Eldritch Abomination. She mind rapes him into committing suicide with his knife. One inch at a time.
• Quarters:
  • Three thugs in Shkoder harass Vree, who's an Imperial assassin (unbeknownst to them). She easily beats them all up, and were she not reminded not to pull her blades at least the first would have died.
  • Bannon, Vree's brother who's an assassin as well, gets into much the same situation with a brutish man and his four sons who pick a fight. He takes down all five in a trice, with multiple broken limbs and two of them having to be carried out, and has them completely convinced that they will die if he sees them again.
• This happens with newly-crowned King Eugenides in Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief. Sejanus, the leader among Gen's attendants, conspires to make Gen's life miserable in any number of small ways, from pranks to endless hassle, for months. It makes Gen the butt of a lot of jokes, because what kind of king can't even control his own attendants? By the time Sejanus is done tying his own noose with the rope Gen oh-so-kindly let him have, he's got a life sentence, his brother is exiled, and their noble house, one of the Crown's biggest threats, is all but destroyed.
  • It also happens in the same book with a trio of assassins. They expect to have an easy time murdering a single, sickly, crippled man with no serious combat training. They do nearly get him, but not before he disarms one, stabs him and another to death with the stolen blade, then kills the third by throwing it.
• Ranger's Apprentice: On a long sea voyage, Slagor decides to get grabby with a recently captured female slave. His fellow captain Erak makes him knock it off, which confuses Slagor, until Erak alerts him to the fact that her companion, while also a slave, has armed himself with a carving knife and is skilled enough to throw it right between Slagor's eyes if pushed. Which would obligate Erak to execute him and lose a valuable slave.
  Erak: So leave her alone.
• Repairman Jack
  • Happens to Jack about once every book, starting in the first installment where he does it on purpose to draw out the mugger who stole a MacGuffin from his client.
  • A later novel reveals that Jack goes out and gets himself mugged in the park each year, to raise money for the Little League in the form of his would-be muggers' wallets and jewelry.
• The Riddle Master Trilogy: Those thieves in Harpist in the Wind really didn't know what they were getting into when they tried to steal Morgon and Raederle's horses. Especially once it turns out that Yrth was there too, which rounds out the trio of the three most powerful people in the realm.
• Happens on a species level in many science-fiction stories, a noteworthy one being Harry Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken". Aliens, who note that humans are so primitive they don't even have antigravity or FTL (which is so easy to discover that on some planets hunter-gatherers have stumbled onto it) figure it will be a routine invasion. So they march out of their landing ships, arrange themselves in rows, and raise their blackpowder muskets. On 21st century Earth. It is a very short invasion.
• Saintess Summons Skeletons: A typical [Saint] has very little combat capability, unless one of her summoned heroes has chosen to hang around and protect her (which they often don't, since being summoned from another world is a horrifying and excruciating experience). So it's perhaps understandable that a group of muggers thought Sofia would be an easy mark despite her being somewhat higher level than them. Too bad she's not a regular [Saint] but a [Saintomancer], with a very different skill selection including an assortment of powerful combat spells, and moreover, a completely loyal and monstrously powerful skeleton hero, who beheads the would-be assailants without Sofia needing to lift a finger.
  I can't believe they would be dumb enough to attack me. Did none of them have [Identify]? Or did they believe they could kill a level 100? Well, I won't say no to four free skeletons.
• Invoked in the Sabina Kane series. Sabina, a vampire, mentions having gotten a few meals by going to bad parts of town and waiting for some schmuck to try to mug her (or rape her, in one case).
• The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel: The Warlock has a couple street thugs attempt to mug Mars Ultor.
• In Septimus Heap, Rupert Gringe shouts at Simon Heap when the latter is attacking the Dragon Boat Rupert is on, taunting him to fight "like a man". Only being thrown into the water by Nicko Heap saves him from being incinerated by Simon's subsequent ThunderFlash.
  • Segues into Bullying a Dragon, as Simon is demonstrating the Lost Art of Flyte at this time, and Nicko has the sense to warn Rupert about the aforementioned ThunderFlash.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, a vagrant attempts to murder a man he finds sleeping in an alleyway in order to loot his body. Unfortunately for him, the sleeping man turns out to be Dayless the Conqueror returned to youth and more powerful than ever, who proceeds to spring up and butcher him like an animal while mocking him for falling into this trope.
  Dayless: "Try to slit my throat and rob me! Me! I've conquered nations, and you think a dagger from the likes of you will be my end?"
• The Silence of the Lambs: An Italian pickpocket is compelled by an unscrupulous police detective to stage a botched theft from a gentleman whose fingerprints the cop wants to collect covertly. The detective doesn't warn the soon-to-be-late filcher that the target is none other than Hannibal Lecter, with entirely predictable consequences.
• The Six Sacred Stones. The team crash land in Darkest Africa, and run into a rape gang. Zoe decides to draw their attention while Wizard sneaks out the back with the kids. Did I mention she used to be called Bloody Mary in the Irish Army? Those poor souls didn't stand a chance.
• In Skulduggery Pleasant: Death Bringer, a group of thieves try to rob everyone at the Requiem Ball. Said Ball contains all sorts of magic-users whose abilities range from wielding various elements to other fancy abilities such as Shapeshifting and 'Sensitivity' (precognition). An arse-kicking ensues.
• Snow Crash
  • A white supremacist hick picks on the super-swordsman Hiro Protagonist. Hiro waits just long enough for the hick to threaten his life so he can decapitate him with just cause.
  • One reason Hiro prefers his swords is their tendency to avert this trope; skinheads aside, most lowlife types aren't dumb enough pick fights with someone who is obviously carrying a pair of swords. And even the skinhead might not have tried it without a roomful of buddies, not that they improved his life expectancy any.
  • The Japanese businessman who picks a virtual swordfight with Hiro is another example: while the businessman isn't nearly as good as he thinks, Hiro is awesome in real life and also wrote the code for swordfighting in the virtual world.
• In the Space Wolf novel Wolfblade, while on Terra, three Space Wolves are out at a pub having a quiet dinner. Some morons try to start a brawl with them. Note, said Wolves are Astartes, about 8 or 9 feet tall, super strong and fast, and were wearing their power armor. Needless to say, the morons got their brawl.
• Spellster: Tracker, a very skilled warrior, is attacked by angry drunks unaware of this on multiple occasions. He beats them with ease of course.
• Spider-Man: The Venom Trilogy: In Spider Man The Octopus Agenda, three punks try to assault Venom. With switchblades. Yeah, that doesn't go so well for them.
• Spy School: In the seventh book, when a group of garden-variety muggers accost the group of CIA and MI6 agents (which includes Catherine, Erica and Zoe), Mike lampshades the situation between bursts of laughter, then just sits back and serenely watches the girls wipe the floor with those muggers.
• In Starship Troopers, three Mobile Infantry trainees on leave are jumped from behind by four street toughs. The protagonist knocks the guy attacking him out with a single blow, looks around, and sees that the other three toughs have been similarly dealt with.
• In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel The Siege, a Psycho for Hire Shapeshifter Meta turns into a girl and befriends a Bajoran girl and her mother. At this point a Cardassian barges in and decides to rape them all, starting with Meta. The Cardassian is ripped apart. From the inside.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Iron Fist starts with an attempt by Imperial elements to capture or kill the Wraiths; they send a cyborg to the bar where the Wraiths are enjoying themselves, have the cyborg start a fight, and then show up dressed as the local police to arrest everyone. But the Wraiths cotton on to the fact that something's not right. The roster at the time included Runt, Piggy, an expert in hand-to-hand combat, and Phanan, who promptly cut someone's throat with a laser scalpel.
  • Happens in Shatterpoint. Corrupt police think they can steal Mace Windu's things while he is in customs because he is naked and unarmed. They soon learn that a Jedi Knight does not need clothes or a lightsaber to kick ass.
• The Soldier And Death has a case where the muggers are monsters themselves. The Soldier wins a game of cards with a gang of demons by using a magic deck. The demons decide to be be Sore Losers and attack the Soldier, but lo and behold, the Soldier also has a magic sack which he uses to capture the demons and deliver a serious beatdown until they swear to go away and never bother anyone else.
• The Stormlight Archive
  • An interesting example in The Way of Kings (2010). Jasnah deliberately sets herself up for this — strolls down a dark alley, decked out in jewels, carrying no visible weapons, etc. When the muggers (and attempted rapists/murderers), do show up, Jasnah naturally destroys them. Jasnah is a Soulcaster, and that jeweled bracelet is an artifact that lets her transmute her muggers into smoke, fire, and crystal. Shallan is horrified by the moral implications of this baiting, but is also alarmed by Jasnah's unusually passionate hatred of her attackers. It's implied Jasnah may take these little excursions to dangerous parts of town because of a deeply traumatizing time she was mugged when she wasn't a "monster".
  • In the sequel, Words of Radiance, Tyn the worldly bodyguard and thief takes in Shallan, a naive con artist with a plan to impersonate a prince's fiance. Tyn takes pity on her and gives her lessons in thieving, until she discovers that Shallan really is the prince's fiance, and Tyn's bosses want her dead. Tyn immediately turns on the girl she knows is a noble out of her depth... and then Shallan summons her Shardblade and kills her. Shallan is a budding Radiant, a Magic Knight who can summon a magic sword at will.
  • Edgedancer (a novella of The Stormlight Archive): A pair of Nale's acolytes go after an old man they suspect to be a Lightweaver, expecting an easy kill. Turns out he's a Dysian Aimian, which due to being The Worm That Walks is pretty much unkillable. It ends badly for them. When Lift happens upon him later, he admits he can't even claim self-defense, because they weren't even close to being a threat.
• Super Minion:
  • Tofu is a slight young man who hangs out in the bad parts of town and sees nothing wrong with taking shortcuts through dark alleys. On several occasions, street goons attempt to mug him, and then find out the hard way that he's basically a walking Gray Goo with a taste for meat. Or if they're lucky, he'll simply warn them off by flashing his Hellion's Henchmen mask.
  • At one point, a man robs a grocery store cashier at gunpoint. Tofu is so flabbergasted that someone would be stupid enough to try that in Fortress City, let alone in HH territory, that he's still trying to decide what to do about it when the cashier opens a Trap Door under the robber.
• Sweet & Bitter Magic: Tamsin encounters two armed men while with Wren who intend to rob and rape the pair at the very least. She easily deals with both since, though appearing to be just a teenage girl, she's actually a very powerful witch.
• Mackenzie Blaise, the Half-Demon protagonist of Tales of MU, has been the subject of quite a few of these situations. The half-ogre reconsidered after she punched a hole in the concrete wall, while the girl with stoneskin and the lizardfolk who ganged up on her both ended up in therapy.
• "The Terrible Old Man": Some burglars decide to go for an easy target: that weird old retired sea captain who lives on the edge of town, has a garden full of creepy statues, and talks to a collection of jars with little pendulums inside. It doesn't go well.
• That Is NOT a Good Idea! by Mo Willems A hungry fox sees a nice plump goose in the streets. He asks if she wants to come to dinner (with the intention, of course, of eating her). What he doesn't realize is she sees him the exact same way. The goslings make it a point to reiterate how bad an idea this proposition is. Guess which one of them is, in both senses of the term, in the soup.
• Thieves' World book 3 Shadows of Sanctuary, story "Looking for Satan". Wess, a naive young woman just arrived in Sanctuary, goes out for a walk at night. She is attacked by Bauchle Mayne (a criminal her group had run into earlier) and his accomplice. After she knees Bauchle Mayne in the groin and slashes the accomplice with a knife, the accomplice drags Bauchle Mayne away as fast as they can go.
• The first two thirds of the short story "A Toy for Juliette", written by Robert Bloch and published in the short story collection Dangerous Visions, describe the situation and disposition of a serial killer, operating from After the End, who likes to play gruesome games with the living "toys" afforded her by a time machine. The last third describes her encounter with an anonymous gentleman plucked from Victorian England. The final sentence reveals that Juliette's last "toy" was Jack the Ripper.
• The first chapter of a novel bridging a film and its sequel has a Somali pirate attempting to plunder a ship with a black pickup truck and a light green emergency-crew Hummer on deck. Oh, did we mention the films this novel was bridging were the Transformers movies? It specifically notes that one man who survived not only quit piracy, but, for the rest of his life, crossed the street whenever he encountered a pickup truck.
• In one of the Troubleshooters books, someone attempts to mug Jules Cassidy, who's short, gay, and looks like he could be in a boy band. Jules, however, is an FBI agent.
• The Undertaker: Three outlaws attempt to rob Barnaby Gold when he rides out of Fairfax in Black as Death. Barnaby is able to overpower one of them and take his gun. Although he he wins the subsequent gunfight partially by luck, this encounter is what causes him to discover his instinctive ability with firearms.
• Urban Dragon: People keep assuming that skinny, five-foot-three Arkay is going to be an easy target. Then she turns into a forty-foot dragon.
• Happens a few times to Fleming in the Vampire Files series, both in the city and when he's jumped by tramps on his parents' unoccupied farm. A Vegetarian Vampire, he doesn't actually hurt such attackers, just scares the living shit out of 'em.
• In "The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat" by Rudyard Kipling, several motorists, including a journalist, the owner of several newspapers, and the owner of a string of music halls, are caught in a village speed trap designed as a revenue source, humiliated and insulted by the local magistrate. Their pooled talents skillfully applied make the village and the magistrate subjects of public ridicule, culminating in the villagers voting, in return for free drinks, by a unanimous vote of 437 to zero, that the Earth is flat, and the fact being trumpeted about the country.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • In A Civil Campaign, some well-meaning but clueless relatives are trying to forcibly drag a child away from his unwilling mother. He barricades himself in the bathroom and makes a phone call to a person who invited him to call earlier... Cue one of the biggest Oh, Crap! moments in literature when they find out that the person on the other end of the call was the Emperor of Barrayar, who is not pleased.
  • In The Vor Game, a opportunistic merc chieftainess thinks she can outwit Gregor and Miles together in order to bring her near the Barryaran throne. She thinks she can be a better Manipulative Bastard than two of the cleverest Vor on Barrayar.
    Gregor Vorbarra: Did you think you were dealing with an amateur?
• In Watersong, a man attempts to rape Gemma, unaware that she has recently been transformed into a siren and is experiencing a Horror Hunger compulsion to kill someone and eat their heart.
• In the Whateley Universe, this happens from time to time:
  • A mugger tries to rob Jade and Jinn. They knock him unconscious, destroy his gun, and steal his wallet.
  • A pair of stick-up artists bump into Chou "Bladedancer" Lee while attempting to rob a diner.
  • During a stop-off in NYC, a third-rate punk of a "hero" is silly enough to call Jadis "She-Beast" Diabolik a "little skank". She throws him in the West River. From four blocks away.
• In the third book of The Witcher series Blood of Elves, someone hires four professional thugs to kill a "normal" person who doesn't have any bodyguards, isn't nobility and doesn't have anyone that will later come for revenge. That "normal" person turns out to be Geralt, the main character of the books and one of the (if not THE) best swordsmen alive on top of being a mutant with superhuman strength and reflexes. The "professionals" don't last for ten seconds, though Geralt acknowledges they're damned good as the fight goes on and, while none of the four live to collect the prize money, if it wasn't for immediate medical attention available Geralt most likely wouldn't have made it either.
• In Wrong Place for People, four mages from the Underside (our world) find Victor ask him to bring them to the Middle World (world of magic). He agrees. As soon as they cross over, he points them towards the nearest town and is about to head elsewhere, when they tell him they haven't let him go yet and say they want him to be their guide in this world, offering to pay. To prove their point, one of them causes the ground to swallow Victor up to his shoulders. What they don't realize is that Victor is a Dragon and has been ruling the Middle World for 23 years. Angry, he turns into his Dragon form and shows them the error of their ways. After they finally submit, he relents and doesn't kill them. He initially wants to banish them back to the Underside (it's not so much that they attacked him, it's that they attacked someone without knowing their opponent's strength), but they beg him to let them stay. So he sends them to the same town to heal and to work off the debt for the healing by doing any jobs they're asked without magic.

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