History WeaksauceWeakness / Literature

* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'': The Wights are weak to fire and their entire body is quickly burned like pitch but even ignite more easily, closer to diesel-soaked cloth when they come in contact with it, even glowing embers can ignite them after a few seconds. The White Walkers are little better: they melt away in seconds when pierced with obsidian.

* Tofu from ''Literature/SuperMinion'' has trouble with electricity. Any time he recieves an electric shock, it causes the NanoMachines in the area to self-destruct, causing sections of his flesh to disintegrate.

* ''Literature/CaptainUnderpants'' loses his powers when he's subjected to spray starch. [[spoiler:Actually, he doesn't, but he ''thinks'' he does, in an invocation of the [[PlaceboEffect Nocebo Effect]].]]

* In ''Literature/WinterWarriors'', the BigBad sends nine nearly invincible demonic warriors after the heroes. They have super-strength, inhuman stamina and fighting skill, can track humans by scent, and are immune to edged weapons. In fact, they're only vulnerable to two things -- namely, wood and water. [[HilarityEnsues Cue lots of impalement on sprung branches and getting pushed off bridges to a humiliating and watery grave]].

* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'': The Wights are weak to fire and their entire body is quickly burned like pitch but even ignite more easily, closer to diesel soaked cloth when they come in contact with it, even glowing embers can ignite them after a few seconds. The White Walkers are little better. They melt away in seconds when pierced with obsidian

* The main weakness of vampires in Creator/PeterWatts' ''Literature/{{Blindsight}}''-verse is '''geometry'''. If right angles take up too much of their visual field, they have massive, frequently fatal seizures. Right angles are very rare in nature, but once humanity developed architecture the vampires went extinct until later humans reconstructed them and developed "anti-Euclidean" drugs to counter the special vampire weakness (and keep the vampires dependent).

* In "Rawhide Rex", a short story from Creator/CliveBarker's ''Books of Blood'', the titular creature is nearly immortal and capable of paralyzing his enemies with a gaze. What does him in is his pathological fear of menstruating women. To him, the idea is unnatural and smacks of castration. So strong is his fear, he was able to be entombed in a pit for 400 years simply by being buried with a few primitive statues depicting a menstruating woman. Having one of these shown to him makes him seize up in fear, allowing the villagers to lynch him to death.

* In ''Literature/CodexAlera'', all of the various crafters' fury-granted ElementalPowers can be countered by their opposing element (i.e. dripping water on a [[PlayingWithFire firecrafter]] prevents use of fire furies, putting a [[GreenThumb woodcrafter]] in a metal cage nullifies wood furies, etc). [[BlowYouAway Windcrafters]] have greater difficulty using their wind furies closer to earth, and being covered or surrounded by earth renders their furies impotent. However, they also have another weakness: salt, when it comes into contact with their furies, causes them great pain and disrupts them. As a result, anyone expecting to fight a windcrafter carries bags of salt with them to disrupt their BulletTime, flight, and other powers. Salt-tipped arrows are a specialist weapon against hostile wind furies, and a salt-tipped arrow is [[spoiler:what Bernard uses to critically injure High Lord Kalarus]] in ''Cursor's Fury'' by [[spoiler:disrupting his wind furies in mid-flight, causing him to take a nasty plummet into a forest and introducing him to Newton's laws in a most painful and crippling manner]].

* In ''Literature/TheCrewOfTheCopperColoredCupids'', the Salamandyrs are deathly afraid of lavender, even trace amounts of which cause them to turn from humanoid FrogMen back into normal, harmless, tiny salamanders.

** Much of the plot of ''Literature/CarpeJugulum'' concerns a group of "modern" vampires attempting to subvert this trope by developing resistances to the traditional vampire weaknesses. [[spoiler:They ultimately fail to do so.]] Discworld vampires play this trope in a weird, AllMythsAreTrue way. ALL weaknesses you might have ever heard of apply to SOME vampire, but you may have to do trial and error to find out which ones apply to the particular one who's trying to eat you right now. There are also a few with psychological problems that compel them to do things that directly address their particular weakness (such as the vampire flash photographer who works for The Truth, who has a weakness to bright light, and the one who worked at such jobs as pencil maker, garlic stacker, and whole-sale holy water clerk).

* The [[ShapeShifting Vir]] [[OurDragonsAreDifferent Requis]] AKA Weredragons of Daniel Arenson's ''Literature/DragonsOfRequiem'' universe have a weakness to a common plant. Some have trained themselves (or through so much exposure have developed) to resist its effects, but to the average Vir Requis even being touched by its leaves is so painful they'll instantly revert to their human forms and/or be unable to shift into dragon form. It's no wonder human armies coat their arrow tips in the plant's extract, and when a particular Vir Requis king conquers the known world he has the plant burned to extinction.

** Spirits from the Nevernever can be sent back instantly, and their earthly bodies turned to goop, if you trap them in a magic circle — which can be as simple as drawing a chalk circle on the ground and touching it with a drop of your blood. Giant scorpion? Goop. Mob of inhuman assassins? Goop. Ice spiders? Pure goop! The problem, of course, is getting these beings to actually ''stand still'' long enough to draw and empower the circle.

* ''Literature/{{Dune}}'': Leto II, the ''Literature/GodEmperorOfDune'' who lived a few millennia, was vulnerable to [[spoiler:water due to his sandtrout symbiosis, which was how he [[HeroicSacrifice set himself up to be killed]]]].
* The weakness from ''Literature/TheWonderfulWizardOfOz'' is spoofed in the ''Literature/EnchantedForestChronicles'', where evil wizards can be melted with water -- but only with soap and lemon juice added. The good witch Morwen, on the other hand, explicitly does not melt. It is later theorized that this might be because the wizards never shower while Morwen is something of a neat-freak. Eventually, the heroes refined this into a one word spell with the same effect. One very memorable word, too: [[spoiler: Argelfraster]]!
* In one Literature/ChooseYourOwnAdventure book, ''The Enchanted Kingdom,'' your character visits a mystical land populated by fairies. You find out that they have the standard folklore aversion to iron, but when some ghouls break your sword, you find out the ghouls are weakened by the presence of ''plastic'' when you pull out the only blade you have left, your Swiss army knife.

** The kids in "How To Kill A Monster" have to figure out exactly how to do that. Falling three stories doesn't stop him nor does poisoning a pie. Luckily, there's a DeusExMachina way out. [[spoiler:The monster dies after they confirm they're humans, as he's allergic.]]
** In "Attack of the Mutant", there's a subversion of the trope that's invoked to then play the trope straight. Specifically, the young male protagonist is facing an enemy supervillain who has the ability to change into anyone and anything. The boy knows in advance that if the supervillain were to change into a liquid, he'd get ''[[ShapeshifterModeLock stuck]]'' that way and be defeated, which is the ''supervillain's'' Weaksauce Weakness. Since the villain is under the impression that the boy is a superhero, the boy pretends that ''his'' Weaksauce Weakness is that he's vulnerable to acid. So the supervillain changes into a wave of acid, and after the boy hastily jumps out of the way, the supervillain gets stuck in his liquid-acid form, thus ensuring his defeat.

* In the ''VideoGame/DiabloTheSinWar'' trilogy, Diablo, the Lord of Terror and one of the three most powerful evil things in existence, is defeated by a reflective surface. Diablo appears as things you fear, and if it's bad enough to scare Diablo, it's pretty bad.

* The Martians, in Creator/RayBradbury's ''Literature/TheMartianChronicles'', are killed ''en masse'' rather early in the book by a human-induced plague of chicken pox. It's a [[ShoutOut knowing reference]] to both American history and ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds''. One character muses how wrong this seems: "in the name of all that's holy, it has to be chicken pox, a child's disease, a disease that doesn't even kill ''children'' on Earth! It's not right and it's not fair. It's like saying the Greeks died of mumps, or the proud Romans died on their beautiful hills of athlete's foot!"

* The White Queen of ''LightNovel/TheUnexploredSummonBloodSign'' is an [[CompleteImmortality immortal]] RealityWarper who can NoSell anything... except [[spoiler:the main character Kyousuke, who she's madly in love with. Just being hugged by him can cause her to miss an attack]]. This is parodied at one point in the seventh volume, where she's the subject of an EnemyScan: it states that she is resistant to all elements and abnormal status effects, but also that she can't mitigate her special weakness to [[spoiler:Kyousuke]] in any way.
* The aliens in ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds'' were killed by [[spoiler:a common disease. The aliens were so advanced and germophobic that they wiped out all microbial life on their native planet. This meant they had no means of developing immunities when they invaded Earth]].

* ''Literature/TheWitchOfKnightcharm'': A rookie witch named Janet at an evil WizardingSchool is able to use magic which turns her intangible. That would be pretty good, but to use her spell, she has to first chalk a circle around herself and then ring a bell, while almost all the other students can cast their magic without needing to first prepare the environment. This nerfs Janet, since her opponents are almost certain to launch their attacks before Janet can cast her own magic.

* In the ''[[VideoGame/{{Diablo}} Sin War]]'' trilogy, Diablo, the Lord of Terror and one of the three most powerful evil things in existence, is defeated by a reflective surface. Diablo appears as things you fear, and if it's bad enough to scare Diablo, it's pretty bad.