Normal Fish In A Tiny Pond / Anime & Manga

• In 3×3 Eyes, Chuui looks threatening and unstoppable only because Yakumo lacks any power or Majuu. For people like Parvati, he's a minor nuisance.
• Angel Densetsu presents an inversion with Ogisu who questions whether he's lost his edge. Eventually, he realizes that he's just ended up in a school with a bunch of absurdly powerful fighters and accepts his place in the pecking order.
• The main character in The Alchemist Who Survived Now Dreams of a Quiet City Life was a modestly above average alchemist before going into suspended animation who was barely getting by because alchemist was a fairly common career and she didn't have the business contacts needed to make it big. But between her suspended animation lasting generations and the disaster she went into suspended animation to escape making it impossible to create more alchemists in that region, when she wakes up she's literally the only alchemist around, which makes her a priceless resource for those trying to clear the local dungeons and rebuild the ruined city.
• Bakuman。:
  • This happens with Mashiro's uncle, Nobuhiro "Taro Kawaguchi" Mashiro. When he's first introduced, his drawings are fairly cartoon-like, bordering on Stylistic Suck, and he is said to have been ignorant of several manga drawing techniques. However, Kaya's father reveals that Nobuhiro was quite good at art compared to his classmates.
    Mr. Miyoshi: [Nobuhiro] always had good ideas in his head, and got good grades in art class. He was especially talented at drawing.
    Takagi: Whaaat!? Taro Kawaguchi was good at drawing?! No way!
    Mr. Miyoshi: He was better than the rest of us — a big fish in a small pond.
    Mashiro: Yeah, my uncle told me he realized how bad he was only after he decided to become a professional manga artist.
  • Ishizawa is a far cry from Mashiro's talent as an artist, although he'd like to believe the opposite is true. However, when they're both in college, it is revealed that Ishizawa has a series in Chara Kira Magazine, around the same time Mashiro and Takagi's first series was canceled, and is looked up to by the members of the manga club.
• A common problem in Beastars. No matter how little a carnivore puts into their physical strength and how strong most herbivores get, the divide in strength is undisputable. This is pointed out most with the protagonist Legoshi, a gray wolf (which are pretty middle of the pack among carnivores), stronger than some predators like weasels, who are still strong enough to accidently rip a herbivore's arm clean off, but not quite as strong as bears and tigers. It regularly causes problems with his relationships with his herbivore friends and love interest the rabbit Haru. All this is in spite of not eating meat, which limits his physical strength.
• Blame! has Basic Safeguard exterminators. In the movie the basic exterminators are considered very dangerous robots, that keep the human population completely terrified, while in the Manga they are in fact low-level Mooks.
• In Bloom Into You, Touko Nanami is easily the most talented actor on the student council, which, at her request, revives an old student council tradition of putting on a stage show for the school culture festival. After the play, Touko is scouted by a theater troupe that her student council's assistant adviser and a friend of Touko's late older sister belongs to, and realizes that compared to the other members, she's just a newbie. Touko actually doesn't mind, since she'd long felt pressure to live up to her seemingly perfect sister's example. In fact, she's relieved that her colleagues don't put her on a pedestal.
• Bleach: Xcution (with the exception of Tsukishima with his Story-Breaker Power) are Boisterous Weaklings compared to Arrancars, Menos Grande, Sternritters and the captains and lieutenants of the Gotei 13. Against normal humans and ordinary Hollows, however, they're unbelievably powerful. Five captains and lieutenants of the Gotei 13 were Willfully Weak at the time and Curb-Stomped them. The funniest part of all of this is that they wanted to destroy the Gotei 13, so it'd be a miracle if they didn't die in their first step in Soul Society had they managed to come there!
• Invoked by Mephisto in Blue Exorcist: up to this point, Rin has been facing small fry and had one major victory against the Impure King (by using the power of another demon to purify the decay). In order to make sure he understands that he's still in the kiddy pool, Mephisto resumes the "sparring" match Rin was having with Amaimon, the weakest of the 8 Kings of Hell, only this time Amaimon burns out his human shell to show his demonic powers.
• Discussed in A Centaur's Life during the marathon; while protagonist Hime can run 100m in about 9 seconds (as fast as or faster than our own current world record holder, Usain Bolt), when she tries actually racing she's left lagging massively behind the other competitors. This is because, as the title suggests, Hime is a centaur, so while she can leave all her bipedal friends eating the dust of her hooves, compared to professional runners of her own race she's a slowpoke. Later, Hime finds herself stranded in a medieval fantasy world. Except, her centaur strength, atomic-age education, and partly-horse appearance give her the skills she needs to masquerade as an angel from the heavens and take command of an entire kingdom of ordinary humans.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Touma himself acknowledges that his Imagine Breaker is useless if there are no superpowered beings around. In Academy City or the Magic Side, he's practically unbeatable. Faced with average street thugs or gunmen, and he's just a regular guy who can street fight.
  • The Misaka clones are an inversion. They were designed to fight Accelerator, to push him to the impossible Level 6. Their fights with him, no matter how many of them there were or what tricks they tried, generally lasted a few minutes until Accelerator got bored and instantly killed them. But Accelerator is the strongest esper in Academy City and one of the strongest individuals in the world. Against anyone else, the Sisters are basically Super Soldiers. They have advanced combat training backed up by very real combat experience, along with the electromaster power that is perfect for manipulating machines. Individual Sisters repeatedly prove to be excellent combatants, and teams of them can outmatch elite black-ops hit squads.
• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: David Martinez's physiology gives him greater tolerance to cybernetic implants than the average person, letting him use a military grade Sandevistan with minimal side effects. He believes this makes him one in a million, and he quickly gains reputation as an edgerunner and attracts unwanted attention from Arasaka for their cyberskeleton project thanks to his heightened tolerance. However, he isn't unique. He was just one of multiple prospects on Arasaka's list. And even his high tolerance is just that: tolerance. Eventually, his heavy augmenting catches up with him and he teeters on the edge of cyberpsychosis even before he ends up installing the cyberskeleton. And when he squares up with Adam Smasher, an actual one in a million, Adam beats David down without breaking a sweat and tears the cyberskeleton to pieces, all while mocking David for thinking he was "special". And just as a nail in the coffin, Adam Smasher casually makes use of his own Sandevistan, and when questioned dismisses it as "a rudimentary implant".
• Death Note: Among Shinigami, Ryuk is actually mid- to low-ranked. However, he's still a being that can kill any human by writing their name in the Death Note, no matter how manipulative or intelligent they are, including the protagonist Light, whom he eventually kills out of boredom.
• DEVILMAN crybaby: Implied with Satan. While far and away the most powerful being on earth to the point where not even Akira can defeat him in combat and dies trying, he's still outclassed completely when the Powers That Be show up. While he never gets his rematch with God and the angels due to having crossed the Despair Event Horizon, their ability to destroy and recreate the earth is far beyond anything he displays. Furthermore, given how he looks identical to said angels apart from lacking their Holy Halo, Satan probably wasn't even a fallen paragon, just one single malcontent out of negligible importance among countless thousands of Heaven's denizens.
• In The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, Ryoko Asakura is one of the best students at North High, but she finds herself unable to answer a math question that her peers at Koyoen Academy are studying at the same time, since the latter is a prep school that covers more material.
• Dragon Ball: A persistent theme in the franchise is characters discovering they're in this trope and then ascending past it by pushing beyond their limits.
  • Goku is this for his entire childhood and teenage years; he's strong enough to resist bullets and it takes three arcs for him to encounter villains who can actually kill him in General Blue, a powerful psychic, and Tao Pai-Pai, who was just straight-up more powerful. His first serious opponent is Piccolo Daimao, an embodiment of evil, making them both the strongest beings on the planet. But as it turns out, this is because they're from alien species that are naturally much, much stronger than humans. By the standards of their own species, Goku was weak for a Saiyan and Piccolo average for a Namekian, while both were weak compared to the average intergalactic warrior (though in Piccolo's case, he is technically still half of who he really is at this point and is actually a Super Namekian, having large amounts of combat potential). But this is only temporary, as within two years they are both far stronger than anyone of their kind has EVER been.
  • Raditz is as weak as a Saibaman, but on Earth, he easily pulls off a Bullet Catch against a shotgun-wielding farmer and is powerful enough to curb-stomp both Goku and Piccolo, the two strongest beings on the planet, simultaneously, forcing Goku to pull off a Heroic Sacrifice to take him down. In fact, when they discover that Vegeta and Nappa consider Raditz a pathetic weakling compared to them, the Z-Fighters are in disbelief.
  • This gets a humorous nod in the Buu Saga when Babidi's minion Pui-Pui has the environment of his room changed to resemble his home planet, thinking the heroes will be crushed by its gravity, which is 10 times greater than Earth's. Unfortunately for the poor sod, Vegeta also comes from a 10G planet, and everyone in the room regularly trains in conditions of far more than that: Vegeta trains in 500x gravity, and Goku had been training at 100x a decade prior.
  • A filler episode of the anime has Krillin, Tien, Yamcha, and Chiaotzu train at Kami's Lookout against magic simulations of a pair of Saiyans called Brocco and Pumpkin (Shorty and Scarface in the English dub). In Kami's own words, they are among the weakest of their kind, but still strong enough to easily beat those who at that time were the four strongest humans.
• In Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, Ledo is an ordinary soldier among his peers, piloting a mass-produced Real Robot. Until he finds himself stranded on a long forgotten, far less advanced Earth. It's no surprise every time he fights the local hostiles with his mecha, it ends up being a Curb-Stomp Battle.
• In Gate, the JSDF's weaponry consisting mostly of Cold War era technology, is not particularly advanced, but the medieval inhabitants beyond the Gate are powerless to resist them, despite having a The Roman Empire-like level of technology and access to flying troops. The first thing that gives the technologically-advanced forces trouble is a giant-ass red dragon who can outmaneuver fighter jets and ends up having to be killed by essentially a magic-powered coilgun.
• In Girls und Panzer, Miho Nishizumi, the main character, comes from a family that has long been in the practice of tankery, and feels inferior to her mother and her sister. When she transfers to Oarai, a school that had no tank program until it started it up the year it arrived in an attempt to avoid being closed down permanently, she's immediately sought after to join the tankery group, and soon becomes the commander. Erika, a former schoolmate of Miho's, comments that it must be a weak school if Miho became its commander, referencing this trope.
• Goblin Slayer: The titular hero is presented as an unparalleled goblin exterminator to the point he attained Silver Ranking due to killing them by the thousands since he trained and prepared himself his whole life for this single purpose. With that said, when it comes to fighting anything else other than goblins he is hilariously inept, since he suffers a bad case of Crippling Overspecialization. This trope equally applies to the goblins he fights since they represent a very terrifying threat for villagers and rookie adventurers, and yet they are cannon fodder compared to the larger threats faced by high level adventurers — which speaks something truly bleak about this setting. It's for this reason that the Goblin Slayer isn't taken seriously as an adventurer, since he is perceived as nothing more than pest control in their eyes. However, this belief only applies to rookies to minimally experienced adventurers; true veterans of the frontier are just as aware of how heinous the goblins are, the problem is that the pay for clearing out a goblin nest or rescuing a woman from one is completely disproportionate to the risk involved. As such, the other silver-ranked adventurers instead see Goblin Slayer as straight up crazy for doing nothing but goblin quests.
• This concept is the only reason the first arc of High School D×D appears to have any stakes at all. Raynare fancies herself a schemer with a plan to endear herself to the leader of the Fallen Angels, when the truth is she's a Stupid Evil bully leading a low-level scout squad and if Rias hadn't held her team back to let Issei reclaim his pride any one of them could have torn her apart.
• The anime of Inuyasha has the Noh-Mask, a malicious youkai, who is striding through the city in modern times, seeking the fragments of the holy jewel. He makes catastrophic damages, and kills several humans. No one can stop him until Inuyasha comes and fights him. If the Noh-Mask had not already had a jewel splinter, it would have been only slightly stronger than the lower youkais, who Naraku used as mooks.
• Isekai Quartet: The series makes it clear, for some of its gags, that part of the reason why the cast of Overlord (2012) below is so overpowered in their own series comes to that the world they've been transported to has very low power levels in comparison to their own. Placed around the characters from the other series featured however, and they find themselves encountering fair matches like Tanya, characters that can handle their strength like Naofumi, and some that have the means to counter them like, of all people, Aqua. And then there's Reinhard.
• It is discussed with Wiene from Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?. Because she's a benevolent monster, Bell and his party take her to the surface. However, they do not know what to do with her then, because other people would not accept her. Liliruca finally suggests simply taking her into the wild, because there she would have nothing to fear from the other monsters. The monsters get stronger the deeper they go into the dungeon, and the monsters on the surface are so weak that even ordinary people can handle them. While Wiene would be quite a weakling on the middle dungeon levels compared to the other monsters, she is absolutely invincible on the surface.
• The title character of Jaco the Galactic Patrolman is way stronger than any human, easily lifting weights of multiple tonnes, casually jumping at enormous heights and running at incredible speeds, and killing a giant ship-sinking shark with one punch underwater, but flat-out admits that the aliens who have sent one of their own to attack Earth are way stronger, and that he can kill the invader only if he's still a child. As this is a Stealth Prequel of Dragon Ball and the invader is Goku, this shouldn't surprise anyone.
• Koga from Kengan Omega is a gifted martial artist who is able to single-handedly take down entire dojos in his local area, and grows dissatisfied with how weak his opponents are. After finding the Kengan Association, however, he realizes that he'd barely qualify as the bottom of the barrel among that circle, much less stand beside the top-level fighters.
• Done repeatedly in Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple: Tsukuba and Daimonji are powerful for a high school Karate club, but in Kisara's gang they're a mook and a perspective mook respectively and easily outclassed by the Technique Trio, Shiratori, and especially Kisara herself. As for Kisara's gang it's one of various sub-gangs of Ragnarok and not even the strongest (that being implied to be the Valkyries), though Kisara, as one of the Eight Fists, is one of the strongest... And completely outclassed by the leader Odin, who, among ki-using martial artists, only rates as a Disciple and (at least at the start) not really that strong. And then there's Experts and the various ranks of Masters...
  • One key moment is Kenichi's misadventure with Furukawa, a knife-wielding member of Kisara's gang: during the first encounter Kenichi was scared off, but when they met again after Kenichi received basic training from the weapon expert of Ryozanpaku he couldn't help but give him advice on the correct hold.
• The Legend of Zelda (Akira Himekawa): In the adaptation of The Minish Cap, the chicken-sized Cuccoos are enough of a threat to the tiny Minish that Librari is considered a hero for being able to take down one of them.
• Ginta from MÄR is a relatively normal boy in his home universe. However, when he comes to MÄR, he's considered super-strong because of the difference in gravity and atmospheric oxygen concentration. Which does not explain his ability to punch through stone barriers though, unless MÄR is also a world of cardboard.
• Kanna from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. By dragon standards she's just a young child, but on Earth she's one of the strongest beings in the world. The sheer scope of the power difference between the two worlds comes up when she and Tohru are "roughhousing" (in a manner that wouldn't look out of place in Dragon Ball Z) and they tell Kobayashi that they were fighting at a human level (that is, at the level of the average human from their world).
• My Hero Academia: As a child, Bakugo's powerful Quirk won him constant praise and made him a big-headed bully to those whom he saw as weaker, particularly the Quirkless Izuku Midoriya. He also stood out among his peers at what he called a "crappy public school," as the only one with a shot at getting into UA. Upon arriving at UA he's still acknowledged as being very powerful, but everybody in his class also has very strong (or at least useful) Quirks, and his bad attitude makes him mocked rather than feared. Meanwhile Izuku has acquired a Quirk of his own, and everybody likes him due to his kind, heroic personality.
• Naruto:
  • Naruto and Sasuke had pretty much established themselves as pretty strong genin... until Haku showed up, seemingly killed Zabuza with a flick of the wrist, and disappeared without a second notice. When they try to fight him again, Haku reveals he had been holding back (and holds back through the entire fight). The only challenge he gets is from Naruto's first use of Kurama's chakra. And even then, it's only because Haku doesn't go in for the kill he's taking a beating. This becomes even more apparent when Orochimaru and the other major villages are introduced, and it takes a LOT of training from Naruto to catch up to Gaara or Neji in Part I and surpass the latter. By the tail end of Part II, though, Naruto and Sasuke are quite clearly among the strongest ninja in the world.
  • Likewise, Sakura is praised for her chakra control; but as she learns during the Chuunin Exam, most of the participants have roughly as good (if not better) control and are far superior to her in every other aspect.
  • Jiraiya, and to an extent the other Sannin, (Orochimaru and Tsunade) are large fish in a normal pond, being incredibly strong ninja in their own right, but they only managed to get into a draw against someone like Hanzo in their prime (this was back when they were a team), and then there are those like Nagato (who easily annihilated Hanzo). Jiraiya's final thoughts are to compare himself to a frog in a well that has made it to the ocean (referencing a Japanese proverb similar to this trope). Granted, being ninja, power isn't always the thing. Nagato mentions that had Jiraiya been aware of his capabilities, he would've most likely lost, implying only the element of surprise allowed him to beat Jiraiya despite having more abilities.
• One Piece:
  • This comes up several times, where characters are hyped up as the strongest in wherever the story is taking place in at the time, only to be Worfed by a more worldly, and therefore more powerful, fighter. Zoro had this happen to himself in his "epic duel" with Mihawk at the Baratie; despite being the most infamous swordsman and bounty hunter in the East Blue, Mihawk makes short work of him.
    Mihawk: You may have a reputation, but you're still just a bunny. [...] You're a little frog, croaking in your puddle. Time you learned how big the world is.
  • This was called back to after Zoro trained under Mihawk during the timeskip. His first "serious opponent", a Drunken Master octopus swordsman, bragged about being the strongest swordsman in Fishman Island. Zoro kept calling him a frog until the swordsman was sufficiently incensed, at which point Zoro stated he was bragging like a frog in a well, unaware of the world.
  • Mihawk's presence in the story itself, when he effortlessly defeats not only Zoro, but Don Krieg, one of the strongest pirates in East Blue, also references this. By the time the protagonists head for the Grand Line, they are the strongest pirate crew in East Blue. But East Blue is by far the weakest of the seas both in terms of its pirates and marines, and so opposition only increased from here.
  • Speaking of Don Krieg, he was really fearsome for the East Blue (though his bounty comes mostly from having the largest pirate armada in said sea), but next to nothing in the Grand Line, as he had to turn tail and return to East Blue after Mihawk decimated his entire fleet on the seventh day. He even had the audacity of calling himself "the strongest man on Earth", while said title rightfully belongs to Whitebeard (before his death, and later Kaido).
  • Luffy himself runs up against this obstacle in both powers and experience. The majority of his opponents in the East Blue were overall less familiar with Devil Fruit users and so Luffy tended to win more easily compared to many of his later opponents on the Grand Line. On the Grand Line itself, Devil Fruits themselves tend to be more frequent and varied, making Luffy's own Gomu Gomu Fruit look more mundane and weak (at least until Luffy trains it more).
  • Pretty much the New Fishman Pirates in their entirety. They take over Fishman Island (and even that requires them to beef up on Energy Steroids), but the Straw Hats easily defeat them. It's telling that the Arc Villain was defeated by the aforementioned Zoro with one slash. Underwater^note Fishmen have their strength increased ten times while underwater. Before Luffy even had the chance to fight the guy himself. Once that happened, it was fairly obvious how the rest of the arc was going to go for the antagonists.
  • Arlong was one of the elite members of Fisher Tiger's crew, but not necessarily all that powerful compared to the rest of the Grand Line (and even some of his former crew), especially when he loses to Vice-Admiral Borsalino (future Marine Admiral Kizaru). However, when he arrived in East Blue, he was able to conquer multiple islands unopposed. As it turns out, he was deliberately invoking this trope; Arlong flat-out knew he had no chance of making his ambitions a reality in the Grand Line, so he ran off and tried to achieve them in East Blue instead. Because of this, it's implied he got weaker due to the lack of sufficient opposition, as the moment his crew and him were faced with such opposition for the first time in years, they went down hard.
  • Bellamy the Hyena had the largest bounty in the area he had made base at, and was all too happy to gloat about it and taunt and rough up the Straw Hats because they didn't want any trouble. When he sees Luffy's newest bounty come in, he panics a little before convincing himself the bounty's a fake. When Luffy picks a fight, seething with pure fury over Bellamy roughing up their new friend Montblanc Cricket and ransacking his house, Bellamy accepts and goes through a long charge up with his Devil Fruit that makes him so fast he can't be seen...then Luffy sends him through the docks in one strike.
  • Many Logia users can see the first half of the Grand Line as their very large "tiny pond", as any person or crew who survives in the latter half is going to be trained in Haki, Ki Attacks which nullify the advantage of becoming one's element and allows them to sustain damage.
    • Downplayed with “God” Eneru. He is much stronger than anybody on the Sky Islands, and he has an almost unbeatable Devil Fruit power, even explicitly referred to as possessing virtual invincibility. In fact, Luffy only defeats him because his rubber body cannot conduct electricity, and his Haki allows him to predict his opponents' moves. The general consensus is that he is one of the strongest characters in the series. However, Luffy comments that while Eneru may be a Physical God in the sky, on the Blue Sea there are so many strong guys that Eneru would look like a weakling if he ever went down there, since Haki is so prevalent on the open sea.
    • Captain Smoker qualified before the Time Skip. While he was certainly badass, he was also a Logia user stationed in the weakest sea then later in the first half of the Grand Line. Neither sea has many (or any for the East Blue) people even capable of touching him, let alone fighting him. However, when "The World's Most Wanted Man" Dragon the Revolutionary came to town, he made Smoker quake in his boots without even doing anything to him.
    • When New World pirate Pekoms, whose Devil Fruit power is a lowly turtle Zoan ^note With rare exceptions like mythical beasts, Zoans are generally regarded as the weakest Devil Fruit users, and herbivorous Zoans are the weakest of all curb stomps swamp Logia Caribou, he gives the advice that Logias who rely exclusively on their Devil Fruit will die quickly in the New World.
    • The above is driven home later on with the Arc Villain Caesar Clown, a Logia-type who has control over all types of chemical gas, including poisonous ones. Pre-time skip, he would have been one of the most dangerous opponents the Straw Hats faced period, but with Luffy coming out of two years of training (not to mention bringing an Acquired Poison Immunity and Haki to the table), he looks like an utter chump once forced into a straight fight.
• One-Punch Man:
  • This is Suiryu's problem and the source of his pride. He's legitimately strong and would fit into the lower ranks of S-Class perfectly, but he's limited his worldview to what he sees in the tournament ring. Fighting only people much weaker than him has blinded him to just how many monsters and heroes out there are stronger than him. He finally understands this once he fights the Dragon-level Gouketsu and realizes that for all his strength, he can't make the monster even blink (for context, "Dragon" threats are among the most powerful monsters in the world and only surpassed by "God"-level ones. Even monsters on the rank below it, "Demon", are dangerous enough that even a low-ranked S-Class Hero can lose).
  • Done repeatedly with the various classes of the Hero Association, as promotion in the class above is obtained by surpassing the results of the current number one... Who for their own reasons remains in the class willingly:
    • #1 C-class Hero Mumen Rider is brave, effective, and generous, and has long earned a promotion in the B-class, but refuses the promotion because he knows he's not cut for the kind of opponents B-class Heroes are expected to face.
    • Fubuki and her posse are the top-ranked B-class heroes, and she thinks she's being extremely generous in deigning to invite Saitama into her group. Then when she goes to see him, she sees him hanging out with S-Classes who defer to him (like Genos) and has a small moment of panic. In fact, Fubuki herself is well aware of this. She's strong enough that she could easily be an A-Rank hero, but she believes she isn't strong enough to beat the top-ranked A-Class Hero, Sweet Mask (who himself is strong enough to be S-Class), and her Pride won't let her be second-best, so she stays at B-Class.
    • Sweet Mask himself stays in the A-Rank even though he could be S-Class because he considers himself to be a Threshold Guardian of sorts for other Heroes hoping to become S-Class, as he does not want them to make the S-Class look bad.
  • While she can't possibly be promoted, Tatsumaki, who is treated by the association as the strongest member of the S-class, fits the trope as well: her telekinetic powers are immense, to the point that when an alien warship tried to bombard the area she was in she casually stopped all their projectiles and sent them back much faster, but even she is outclassed by the #1 S-Class hero Blast, Garou at his apex, and especially Saitama.
  • The S-class itself is the result of this trope: when the Hero Association was founded, they only had C, B, and A-classes; but then a number of heroes proved themselves vastly superior to even the A-class, despite doing things at their own pace and not caring about recognition like the heroes in the other classes, who even with team-ups among themselves could not be as strong as them. Seeing their sheer power and skills, each of them comparable to a military division, and thinking it'd harder to secure talent otherwise, the Hero Association created the S-class just for them.
• Overlord (2012):
  • This applies to Momonga upon his arrival to the New World. In YGGDRASIL, the MMO he was transported from, Momonga was one of hundreds if not thousands of players to reach the level 100 cap, and his current build was designed more for roleplaying than for PvP purposes (although he does have more than twice the standard maximum amount of spells thanks to a Prestige Class). Once he shows up in the New World, he finds the level cap is much lower, to the point where Momonga can get by disguised as a warrior because his strength stat is so high, even managing to hug someone to death with one arm. His wide suite of instant-death spells, normally too weak to be effective against players, turn out to be incredibly overpowered for the New World as well, which is what gave him the idea to do reconnaissance as a warrior to draw less attention.
  • The trope gets more complicated when it's revealed Momonga was in control of a top ten guild from YGGDRASIL, which has possession of the most World-Class Items. In fact, Momonga renames himself to the guild's name because it was so famous in YGGDRASIL that ANYONE who played it should immediately recognize it. Momonga was also an excellent strategist who led his guild on several Defeating the Undefeatable quests without suffering a single loss, and regularly defeated much stronger opponents in PvP because of his intricate knowledge of game mechanics... plus a few hundred dollars in cash items. Momonga, however, never rests on his laurels and spends much of the series trying to expand his power base in preparation for future foes. Of course, as the story goes on, it becomes obvious nothing short of the most powerful god-like denizens of this world, other YGGDRASIL players, or his own NPCs suddenly going rogue on him would ever be worth actually using those various advantages on.
  • The Light Novel goes into further detail via Power Levels, showing that even Nazarick's guardians and lesser NPCs are about one-and-a-half times the level of most heroes and legendary adventurers.
  • Magic is divided into ten tiers. Most New World humans cannot learn anything higher than 3rd-tier magic due to their low level cap. The 4th-tier is very rare and the expectation for the hand-picked students of Fluder Paradyne, and 5th-tier being the domain of legendary heroes. The only living person even known to cast 6th-tier magic is Paradyne himself, with 7th-tier magic requiring city-wide rituals and 10th-tier magic being entirely hypothetical. For the serious Yggdrasil PvPer such as Momonga, magic below the 8th-tier was broadly considered too weak for any real combat. Momonga can cheerfully cast spells of 10th-tier and above, and many times he obliterates the opposition by overestimating them and breaking out the big guns.
  • In short: Imagine starting a New Game Plus with an epic-level Dungeons & Dragons character, gear, loot, levels and all (DnD being a strong influence on the world's mechanics).
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Ash's Charizard is, for most of Kanto, the Orange Islands and the first part of Johto, the strongest Pokémon on Ash's team. Then they come across Charicific Valley, which houses the strongest Charizard on the planet. Charizard learns the hard way that he isn't nearly top-class within his own species, and decides to stay in the valley to train. He then averts it increasingly during every following appearance, growing visibly larger and more powerful and, by the time of the Battle Frontier season, he can throw down with legendary Pokémon.
  • The original head writer's personal notes and bible of the series, Pocket Monsters: The Animation, has this in play. Pallet Town, Masara Town in Japanese, is named after Masara Oak, the most skilled trainer to ever have come out of Pallet Town. The town was renamed in his honor, he had a statue placed for him in the center of town, and his grandsons became the town's mayor, postmaster, and famous Professor/local eccentric scientist. His ranking out of ten thousand: 921. The conflict between the higher executives' vision and the vision of Shudo, said head writer, never did get to a point of addressing if Ash or Gary ever ranked higher than 921, and if such the town would have been renamed Ashburg or Garyville.
    • Although it's notable Pocket Monsters: The Animation breaches heavily into alternate continuity, as well as being far more cynical than the anime, basically to the point of deconstruction. Among massive changes are Pallet Town's visible poverty and criminal problems, Gym Leaders losing their license after any 4 consecutive losses to challengers, and Gym Leaders bribing challengers to not lose (greatly contradicting how Misty's sisters basically gave up badges without any worry), Brock's father not appearing, and his siblings having various fathers, Ash never getting a Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle. So it's doubtful how canonical to the anime concepts in the Pocket Monsters: The Animation light novels are, if at all, especially seeing Takeshi Shudo himself used Charmander/Charmeleon/Charizard in multiple episodes and movies he directly wrote. So the revelation of the strongest trainer to ever come out of Pallet Town being quite weak in the grand scale just seems to be another part of the light novel being more cynical and deconstructive toward the anime and the franchise.
• Rurouni Kenshin: Saito points this out in regards to Sanosuke, stating that while his abilities may make him one of the strongest fighters in Tokyo, he doesn't match up to either him or Kenshin (who are some of the strongest fighters in Japan due to their experiences in the Bakumatsu). It's eventually subverted, as Sanosuke becomes strong enough to hold his own even if he's not quite as powerful.
• Hawk from The Seven Deadly Sins is a creature from purgatory. He is not particularly strong, but very resilient. Two holy knights cannot injure him with their attacks. When Meliodas and Ban get into purgatory much later in the story, they meet Hawk's brother. His species is very weak compared to the other creatures of Purgatory.
  • The first saga of the series featured monstrous looking demons that were either red or gray. It was an uphill battle for the heroes to defeat even one of them. When the gate to purgatory is opened later, the heroes quickly realize that these two demon species are absolute weaklings compared to the other demons.
• In the first Slayers feature film, Lina and Naga keep running into people claiming to be the Xth Strongest Man on Mipross Island. Since Lina and Naga aren't from Mipross Island, they keep taking them out with casual ease, with the most notable incident being when Lina takes advantage of the fact that the 8th, 7th and 5th Strongest Men on Mipross Island are standing next to each other to take them all out with a single fireball.
• In So I'm a Spider, So What?, the reincarnators aside from Kumoko are all born with thousands of skill points to spend, where most children in the world are born with none. Rather than another perk given to them by Evil God D, this is the result of the System having exhausted the souls trapped on this planet. The reincarnators have "fresh" souls with plenty of energy for the System to mold into new skills. And the reason why Kumoko has so few? Because while she is a "fresh" soul too, her soul is that of a simple spider with her "memories" being implanted by Evil God D that gave her sapience. They grow much faster than natives in ability, but again, this is only because the natives have already been wrung dry. Anything or anyone old enough to have survived to the present is far beyond Shun, The Hero, and anyone out there with a similarly "fresh" soul that has trained harder also completely outclasses him.
  • Initially, Kumoko has to fight against a giant snake that turns out to be her most powerful enemy to date, to the point that she only manages to defeat him with a combination of strategy and luck. When Kumoko accidentally falls into the second-lowest layer of Great Elro Labyrinth, it turns out that the same snake is treated like a normal Mob.
• This trope is half the primary joke of Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town. Lloyd Belladonna is the weakest man in the village of Kunlun, and knows it. But when he leaves his small mountain town and moves to the big city, it turns out that he's only weak by the standards of Kunlun. In RPG terms, he's level 60 and thinks he's weak because everyone he grew up with has already reached level 75 or higher, and now lives in a place where the previous strongest man in town was level 10. The other half of the primary joke is that he honestly doesn't understand this, and thinks that the incredible feats he's able to pull off from being so overpowered for the area are just routine tasks, to the amazement of everyone else who sees him.
• In Tenchi Muyo: War on Geminar, Kenshi Masaki says he was a weakling and idiot compared to his more famous brother Tenchi and Tenchi's Unwanted Harem...which is true given that some of them are Physical Gods. On the planet Geminar, Kenchi's strength, speed, and skills are vastly superior to most of the people there. He can casually lift a concrete slab with one hand that two workers couldn't budge.
• In Toriko, the chapter that introduced the Four Beast explained that some of the Human World's most dangerous beasts are merely the ones who were too weak to compete in the Gourmet World. The text then mentions that the Four Beast is an exception, since it came to the Human World because it preferred to eat humans.
• In The Useless Senpai and The Talented Kouhai, Tsukioka, the eponymous taleted kouhai, is a downplayed case of this. She's a talented basketball player, but Ochiai, the useless senpai, remarks that their school's team is rather weak, so Tsukioka stands out all the more easily.
• Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon has Towa. Towa is a half-demon who grew up in the modern age, in which, for unknown reasons, there are no more demons and half-demons. Stronger than a human could ever be, she had to promise Sota, her adoptive father, that she would never use her true strength against an ordinary person. But even if she is very reserved, she is still extremely strong, so she could defeat a whole group of gangsters without even having to make an effort. She has also collected a lot of sports trophies. When she travels through the magic tree into feudal times, she is no longer so impressive there. Of course, Towa is one of the strongest characters there, too, but in a world where there are many superhumanly strong persons, she is just a lot less outstanding.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! A filler episode had a guy in the arcade named Johnny Steps getting angry because Tea was handing his ass to him in a dancing game. He got aggressive because of this, and eventually challenged Yugi to a duel, with predictable results. When he complains about how easy Tea had it, being talented, she points out that the difference between them is this trope. While the guy gave up once he faced the bigger world and found out his limits, Tea was aware she had to grow, and instead of giving up, took her failures as a motivation to grow and a way to see her shortcomings.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX gradually deconstructs this with Kaiser. In Season One, Kaiser is considered the best duelist at Duel Academia, to the point that dueling him is itself considered a privilege. As a result, Kaiser had no one to challenge him as a duelist, and thus he never had any need or reason to evolve his deck or change up his strategies. He also never needed to learn how to deal with failure, and it's this point in particular that sends him spiraling off the deep end in Season Two, when he becomes a professional duelist and subsequently finds himself on a losing streak for the first time in his life. The deconstruction continues more subtly in later seasons. (Hell) Kaiser never actually loses the attitude he got in Duel Academia. Even though he becomes a more powerful duelist, it's mostly because he gets a forbidden deck, but unlike the other duelists he doesn't keep curating it but just swaps for that one and keeps it, looking not for growth but for a perfect, final duel. He got big in the new pond, and settled. This lead his deck to actively revolt against him to the point of physically hurting and almost killing him because they wanted to keep growing. On the other hand his brother Sho, who didn't have the same raw talent, but learned to challenge himself, manages to create an evolved version of that deck and surpass him.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: The Academia Pirate Captain has a deck that's practically unbeatable if his opponent is from the Xyz, Synchro, or Standard Dimensions, but essentially worthless against anyone from his own dimension. His Signature Mon is a Fusion Monster that has the effect to prevent all summons from the hand, but if there's a monster with 1000 or more ATK on the field, it's destroyed. Yuya at first attempts to make it self-destruct by raising its attack points with action cards, but is unsuccessful. He's about to lose when Sora intervenes, and is flabbergasted that his friends are having so much trouble with the Pirate Captain. Sora proceeds to Fusion Summon (which is a summon from the Extra Deck) using monsters from his hand, therefore bypassing the Captain's lockdown strategy and causing his ace to self-destruct.
• YuYu Hakusho: C- and B-class demons, for the standards of the demonic world, are simple middle class demons. But being the strongest demons that can cross the Kekkai barrier, means that they are the most dangerous threats that can be found in the human world. (Not counting Sensui.) Yusuke is shocked when he learns that Toguro was only in the B-Class.
• In Zipang, a Japanese Aegis destroyer gets sucked back in time to WW2. In our time, an Aegis destroyer is merely a small part of the war machine. In WW2, it's powerful enough even by itself that it can change the course of the war. Similar to The Final Countdown, the key moral question is whether it should.

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