Basic Trope: The higher someone is in a hierarchy, the stronger they are.
- Straight:
- Lieutenant Alice is a badass. Colonel Bob is an even bigger badass. But General Carol is the biggest badass in the army.
- Tropecorp is a retail company whose activities have nothing to do with fighting. Despite this, the employees have basic fighting skills, the managers are badasses that could give special forces soldiers a run for their money and the company president is a One-Man Army.
- Exaggerated: Lieutenant Alice is a One-Woman Army, Colonel Bob is the World's Best Warrior and General Carol is a Person of Mass Destruction.
- Downplayed:
- The General is more badass than lower ranking officers, but only by a slight margin.
- The company president is a veteran boxer, but he's nothing special in the grand scheme of things.
- Justified:
- Higher ranking officers put more work into their training after being promoted to prove they deserve the position.
- Asskicking Leads to Leadership
- Tropecorp gives its employees combat training due to the high rate of crimes targeting the company. Since the managers are tasked with imparting this training, they have to be even more skilled at fighting, while the company president is a special forces Retired Badass.
- Inverted:
- The General is a wimp who can't put up a fight, and lower ranking officers can hold their own but are nothing exceptional. However, the regular grunts are the biggest badasses around.
- The managers at Tropecorp are about as good at fighting as the average Joe, and the company president is a wimp even compared to them, but the regular employees are expert martial artists.
- Weak Boss, Strong Underlings
- Hyper-Competent Sidekick
- PFC Clay is an Almighty Janitor, a lowly ranked young soldier that's bizarrely stronger than everyone else in the army.
- Subverted: Lieutenant Alice appears as a boss fight after the player clears a level full of regular soldiers, but turns out to be a Zero-Effort Boss.
- Double Subverted: That was her first phase. Her second phase turns out to be very difficult.
- Parodied: A group of friends make up a hierarchy amongst themselves in just five minutes. The one they made the leader, who was previously a wimp, magically gains Super-Strength and Super-Toughness. When they disband five years later, the former leader turns back into a wimp.
- Zig-Zagged: Lieutenant Alice is a badass. But Colonel Bob is a poser who goes down like a chump when fought. However, General Carol turns out to be an even bigger badass than Lieutenant Alice.
- Averted:
- Hierarchy is not presented as indicative of badassery.
- There are no hierarchies.
- Enforced: The game needs a sense of progression and challenge, so the player faces higher ranking bosses as they get further into the story, and those bosses get a lot tougher.
- Lampshaded: "How come this manager is yet again a martial arts expert?"
- Invoked: A law is passed that makes it so Asskicking Leads to Leadership in the army.
- Exploited: Carol becomes a Frontline General, and turns out to be more helpful in the battlefield than she ever was just devising strategies and giving orders from her headquarters.
- Defied: A law is passed that requires high ranking officers to earn their positions through skills relevant to logistics, strategy and tactics, regardless of how good their direct combat skills are.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: ???
- Deconstructed: ???
- Reconstructed: ???
- Played for Laughs: ???
- Played for Drama: The heroes are liberating a town that has been occupied by the forces of the Evil Overlord. However, things start looking bad when one of the overlord's lieutenants shows up, as the heroes are outclassed at this point in the story.
Back to Rank Scales with Asskicking.
