A character isn't just talented, they're too talented – so skilled that their abilities actually make them look inept. They're seen as mediocre or even utterly incompetent, simply because their brilliance defies comprehension.
How can this happen? Maybe the character refuses to do things the standard way, and thus is perceived as incompetent, even if their way gives better results. Maybe they're subjected to an exam, but end up with a failing grade because their genius-level knowledge doesn't fit into the standardized answer key. Or maybe any attempts at measuring their skills fail, because the in-universe ranking systems, skill tests, power meters, etc. aren't built to handle their might. Power meters either fail to give any readings or outright explode, which onlookers blame on "shoddy equipment".
This does not include every case where the character's skill is underestimated because e.g. they're having a bad day, or are being tested on the wrong criteria, etc. This is when the character's sheer level of skill is the direct cause of them being underestimated.
This is distinct from a character deliberately suppressing or hiding their power level to seem weak; this represents the case where the character has a poor reputation, despite not actively trying to do so. Sometimes, it may lead to Underestimating Badassery. See also Obfuscating Stupidity and Obfuscating Disability, when the character wants people to think this. Compare and contrast Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass and Let's Get Dangerous!, when the character genuinely is a ditz but is also a badass.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Baki the Grappler: Baki is easily one of the most powerful people on the planet, and is recognized as such in the underground world of fighting. However, in New Grappler Baki (chapters 13—14), he is subjected to a standard school fitness test and nearly flunks it, as he fails to do it the standard way:
- In the 100m dash, he takes off by using the full force of his muscles and promptly falls over because the ground of the school stadium isn't built to withstand such impact and breaks under him.
- In the softball throw, he gets the worst mark in the class, because he tosses the ball sky-high instead of away from himself, so it falls down fairly close to him.
- In the long jump, he leaps over the entire sandbox, so the teacher cannot measure his distance exactly.
- In the chin-up test, he does fifteen chin-ups so fast that nobody even notices him doing it. When asked to repeat, he ends up breaking the bar with his sheer power, much to the teacher's fury.
- Subverted in the end, however, as the teacher passes him after seeing Baki beat an 800m run world record.
- Cipher Academy: Ensa Kasuri is quite smart and is the fastest-moving student in the class, to the point of solving complex jigsaw puzzles at Super-Speed. She is so fast that she completes assignments before anyone notices her working, so the rest of the class thinks she is incompetent and sluggish. It doesn't help that, most of the time, she is unmotivated and unwilling to draw attention to herself.
- Trigun at one point shows Vash at target practice. Hundreds of bullets later, the target only has one hole (in a nonlethal spot), leading another gunslinger to mock him and hit the target several times in the chest. The gunslinger only later realizes that Vash didn't miss once; every bullet went through that same hole.
Comic Strips
- The 1940s Superman newspaper strip did this as a tongue-in-cheek explanation for why Superman never intervened in World War II: Clark Kent tried to join the Army, but failed the physical because his X-ray vision went off at the wrong moment and caused him to read an eye-chart in another room.
Fan Fiction
- In Fourth Floor
, a Marvel Cinematic Universe Alternate Universe fic, Steve is a student at the local wizard college, trying to follow in his mother's footsteps but failing to produce any magic, despite his knowledge of theory. When his drawings start coming to life, he at first attributes it to a fluke or to living at the Night Light, until Phillips takes notice and tells Steve he should look into visual magic and transfer schools because the magic infused in his drawings is incredibly powerful. As he explains it, trying to get Steve to do traditional spells (which are more like coding in this universe) is like "trying to make a double bass play high C".
- The Rigel Black Chronicles: At the first Hogwarts staff meeting of the year, when the teachers discuss students who are having problems, it becomes apparent that Rigel Black is polite, cooperative, and excellent at theory, but seems to be entirely unable to cast spells. Professor Snape, as Rigel's head of House, investigates the situation, and discovers that Rigel has a very poorly matched wand because it was the only one in the shop that didn't cause devastation when Rigel picked it up. Rigel is actually immensely powerful, even capable of extensive wandless magic, but can only use such an unreactive wand when under intense emotional stress.
Literature
- In Am I Actually the Strongest?, protagonist Haruto is reincarnated into another world by a goddess and given a New Life in Another World Bonus in the form of an unheard-of power level of 1002. When his parents take him to have said power level measured, the equipment can only measure the last two digits and flags it up as a paltry "02", prompting his parents to abandon him in the woods. Fortunately he gets adopted by another, much more loving family soon afterwards.
- In the Black Jewels series, the current incarnation of Witch, Jaenelle Angelline, is by far the most powerful Blood to have ever lived. Because of the enormity of her power, she is unable to perform the most basic Craft tasks, like finding her shoes. Her biological family thought she was completely inept. The problem is that she cannot 'tone down' her powers enough to navigate basic tasks.
- In The Footfalls of Chess Horses, Tyupa is a twelve-year-old who develops his own non-Euclidean geometry. His attempts to explain it at school result in him being dubbed stupid, contrary, and unruly, and barely passing the class. Finally, he meets with Professor Rekordarsky who recognizes his talent and gets him transferred to an elite school with a focus on maths and physics, where Tyupa's gifts can finally blossom to the fullest.
- Night Watch Discworld: When Lord Vetinari was schooled at the Assassin's Guild, he failed Stealth... because the teacher never saw him attend class.
- Callum Wells, the Paranoid Mage, spent decades without any visible sign of magic, and since he's apparently a Mage Born of Muggles, this resulted in him having no idea that magic even exists. Even once the magical world notices him, he looks almost exactly like a "mundane". Eventually he learns that he has been subconsciously channelling his magic into himself all these years instead of exerting influence on the world around him, and since his magical aspect is space, this resulted in enhancements like him having a good head for architecture and being able to see through magical glamours, instead of anything visible. His spatial affinity actually makes him an extraordinarily dangerous assassin, and by the end of the series he's treated as an archmage by the other characters, despite having only spent a few years learning magic, and the fact that he still entirely lacks the "bubble" of magic that surrounds any typical mage.
- Ramona Quimby: In "Ramona the Brave", Mrs. Griggs assigns her students to look at some pictures and label each one as "for" or "not for" a hypothetical dog named Pal. Ramona writes, "This is for Pal" under a picture of a sofa, causing Griggs to think she did badly, as she was meant to write, "This is not for Pal" due to the issue of dog hair. In actuality, Ramona knew all about the hair issue; she just thought it could be mitigated if Pal's owners put a towel on the sofa.
- Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town: Lloyd is the weakest person in his village which is right next to the final dungeon. He is ridiculously overpowered compared to everyone else in the capitol but still thinks he's weak. He fails the entrance exams to the military academy because he's so fast and strong, no one can see him perform the physical tests. His magic knowledge is based off of an ancient magic that very few people in the capitol would recognize, so the examiners think he just wrote down gibberish.
- The Trumpet of the Swan: When a teacher gives the students a math problem meant to calculate how much formula a baby drank by judging how much was left in the bottle, a student seemingly does it wrong. However, the student then points out that a baby usually spills its formula, so it would have drank a bit less than the supposed right answer.
- TSUKIMICHI -Moonlit Fantasy-: When Makoto's power level is first measured at an adventurer's guild, it comes out with a reading of one, something that shouldn't be possible (it's basically the equivalent of a newborn baby). This has lead others to think that Makoto is some spoiled rich kid that's being carried by his powerful retainers, Mio and Tomoe (who each have a measure power level well above a thousand, leagues above the average adventurer). In reality, not only is Makoto far stronger than either of them, but his power is later shown to be comparable to a god, it's just that the measurement method (a scroll that reads one's mana level) just couldn't measure his true power. It's also later revealed that the number given by the test is ultimately meaningless, as it's more an arbitrary number based on certain factors rather than a true measure of strength, and it was designed that way by the guild master themself.
Live-Action TV
- Glee: Brittany for the first four seasons of the show is depicted as a childlike Dumb Blonde with a 0.0 GPA who Can Count to Potato (though she had moments of surprising insight). Then, she aces the SATs near the end of Season 4, is tested by MIT, and is declared to be a mathematical genius whose creative logic simply cannot be measured by regular tests, getting her early admission to MIT. She attributes this shift to being in the glee club.
Brittany: My entire life, people have always told me that I was stupid. And after a while I started to believe them. And it wasn't until I walked in this room and I joined this club that I really started believing in myself. And as soon as I did that, as soon as I started believing that maybe I was smart after all, I think the whole world did, too.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "The Quality of Life", the Enterprise crew meet a scientist who has invented a new type of repair robot called an Exocomp. When one of the Exocomps seems to exhibit self-preservation instincts (by fleeing a conduit just before it explodes), Data believes they may have developed sapience. He tries to test it by sending the Exocomp into a conduit which is broadcasting a signal that will make the Exocomp think the conduit is going to explode. It seems at first that the Exocomp has failed the test, as it doesn't try to flee the conduit, but it later turns out that the Exocomp realised that there was no real danger and simply deactivated the overload signal.
Mythology & Religion
- A traditional Chinese tale tells of three physician brothers – the most famous treats only life-threatening illnesses, offering dramatic cures that win him great renown. His second brother skillfully treats ailments as they arise. The youngest brother, who focuses on preventing disease through healthy living, is known only within his village. Ironically, this most skilled doctor is the least renowned, since his preventative success leaves no dramatic illnesses to cure and gain recognition.
Video Games
- Elden Ring: Thops is a student sorcerer you find slumming it in some ruins, having gotten himself locked out of Raya Lucaria Academy by accident. He insists he's "a bluntstone," with no real magical skill or talent, but if you help him get back inside the academy, you'll be able to obtain a powerful defensive spell, Thops' Barrier, off his corpse. Its description implies he was only ever called an idiot because his fellow sorcerers dismissed his revolutionary magical theories as nonsense - and that the fruits of his study would ultimately form the foundations of an entirely new branch of magical research.
Webcomics
- El Goonish Shive: Tedd Verres was thought to be magically impaired, despite his parents both being wizards, due to his inability to gain spells and his parents' magic analysis wand not registering any magic in him as a baby. He later learns he is in fact a very powerful wizard, but of a rare variety that can't gain spells. He is actually a seer, one who can literally see how magic works and create wands that other wizards can learn spells from. The magic analysis wand didn't work around him because the noise it made scared baby Tedd so much he accidentally resisted its power (and keeps doing so to this day), something only a really strong wizard could do.
- One-Punch Man: It's the Running Gag of the series that Saitama is the most powerful hero in the world, but very few people know him as such. There's at least one case where it happens due to his sheer power: In a bonus chapter, the genius inventor Child Emperor uses a helmet that measures power levels. It fails to give a reading for Saitama (since Saitama's power is way above what it can measure), which Child Emperor interprets as Saitama being too weak to be properly graded.
- The Perry Bible Fellowship: In "Bee" a boy receives laser eye surgery because his abnormally sharp eyesight allows him to spot a bee on the letter chart (and is too dumb to either notice that's not what the doctor is asking about, or explain).
Western Animation
- Rather infamously, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius tried to do this in "Men at Work", where Jimmy takes a Burger Fool job and uses his smarts to calculate every sale personally; his dimwitted manager Skeet interprets this as him being too dumb/lazy to use the cash register ("No human brain can add three things at the same time, dude") and puts him on mop duty. The vast majority of teenage and adult viewers side with Skeet on this, pointing out that a cash register and its receipts are any business's first line of defense against an employee Stealing from the Till and provide the necessary records for taxes and inventory.
Real Life
- Albert Einstein told his biographer, "my parents were worried because I started to talk comparatively late, and they consulted a doctor because of it." It turned out that his reluctant speech came from the same cause as his difficulty paying attention in elementary school classrooms— the young boy had such advanced cognitive abilities that he was spending his time thinking about more complex concepts than his Kindergarten teachers were testing. His inattentiveness appeared similar to a learning disability.
- The barometer question is variously attributed, although not to Niels Bohr as some versions would have it, but starts with a physics exam question intended to elicit the answer of using a barometer to measure the difference in air pressure at two altitudes to determine the height of a building. A student is marked as failing when they provide a different but technically correct method, then is able to give a satisfactory answer involving another principle of physics, and finally provides several other solutions that differ from the expected procedure. The furthest one from physics is to offer the maintenance person in charge of the building the expensive barometer in exchange for information about the building's height. The story is used by various teachers and texts to illustrate that not only is there often more than one correct solution, but that creativity (even genius) can be quashed by rigid adherence to rote and regurgitation.
