Basic Trope: A wooden practice sword is just as effective, or even more effective, than the real thing.
- Straight:
- Alice gets into a duel against Bob. While he has a katana, she only has a bokken, but after an roughly even fight, Alice manages to win.
- Alice and Bob, who are armed with a bokken and a katana respectively, fend off a swarm of monsters. Bob struggles a lot more than Alice throughout the entire fight.
- Exaggerated: A full team of Mooks with swords, bows and spears goes after Alice. She effortlessly takes them out with a wooden knife.
- Downplayed: Alice struggles slightly more than Bob throughout the duel, but manages to fight him to a draw in the end.
- Justified:
- Alice has much greater skill and experience than Bob, offsetting any disadvantage in weapons.
- Neither duelist wants to kill the other, so Alice has the advantage due to having a weapon that's easier to use non-lethally.
- The monsters have a supernatural weakness to wood, but are otherwise resistant to most weapons.
- The monsters are wearing armor that offers good protection against blades, but is very vulnerable to blunt weapons.
- Inverted: Wooden swords are ineffective, but real swords are even more ineffective.
- Subverted: Bob initially flinched when Alice pulled out a wooden sword, but that was only because he mistook it for a big club. He corners her easily when the duel actually begins.
- Double Subverted: Alice was only pretending to be losing. She makes quick work of him once his guard is down.
- Parodied:
- Bob pulls a comically oversized BFS on Alice, who simply taps his shoulder with a sword shaped stick, causing him to explode.
- Soldiers train with steel weapons and go to war with wooden ones because they're much deadlier.
- Zig-Zagged: Practice swords are completely ineffective in some fights, but completely outclass real weapons in others.
- Averted:
- Practice weapons are only ever used for their intended purpose: training.
- No weapons, whether practice ones or real ones, appear in the work.
- Enforced: The author wanted to show how skilled Alice is by having her win against a real weapon with a "fake" one.
- Lampshaded: "How did you survive? You didn't even have a real weapon!"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: "As long as you keep your skills honed, even a practice sword can make for a viable weapon".
- Conversed: "And this is the part where they make the protagonist fight with a practice sword just to show off how cool they are".
- Implied: Word gets around town that Alice just won a sword duel against Bob. However, when Bob appears on screen a minute later, he has no cuts on his body, but a lot of bruises.
- Deconstructed: Every time Alice has bested an opponent while using a practice sword, it's because said opponent is very unskilled. Against an actually competent opponent, she's in real trouble.
- Reconstructed: ???
- Played for Laughs: ???
- Played for Drama: Bob attacks Alice due to a misunderstanding. She needs to take him down non-fatally so she can explain things to him, so she reaches for a wooden sword and gets into a tense but roughly even fight with him.
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