Mugging the Monster

"ha ha ha That's not a knife... that's a knife." RRRIIIPPP!!!

"They had the heavy, stolid look of those thugs whose appearance in any narrative means that it's time for the hero to be menaced a bit, although not too much, because it's also obvious that they're going to be horribly surprised."

— Mort

So, Fingers McStealy is lurking in an alleyway waiting for a victim. Ah, here comes someone, and that fetching hat and coat look expensive. He's smiling too, so maybe he just came into money? Ooo, he even has something shiny under his coat. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Basically this is when some random crook, and occasionally a pretty stupid one at that, has the misfortune of targeting someone much more powerful than he assumed. When the Super Hero/monster/alien assassin/robot/sorcerer from the future/other world/space appears, the criminal acts as a disposable victim they can demonstrate their powers on for the benefit of the audience. Alternatively, The Hero is held up while going about their business. If they have a Secret Identity, then it can lead to a Bruce Wayne Held Hostage scenario, but if the criminal attacked them in costume or the hero is just some badass Walking the Earth, then it typically just serves as an introduction. Bonus points if the would-be victim looks particularly vulnerable.

When an assailant targets a crowd of people not knowing that Everyone Is Armed, you get this trope with strength of numbers replacing individual dangerousness.

Tends to make a good Establishing Character Moment, depending on how (and how easily) the crooks are dealt with. It can be particularly useful for more heroic or sympathetic characters, as it enables them to demonstrate how effective they are in a fight without being the ones to start it, as well as criminals and bullies being an easily and quickly established Acceptable Target. Occasionally this can lead to them recruiting a sidekick or other allies. Can be deeply satisfying. When the person looks vulnerable due to chronological endowment, it's likely a mighty old person.

When a Video Game character does this without the game acknowledging how hopelessly outmatched they are, it's often due to Suicidal Overconfidence. See also Dude, Where's My Respect? when this keeps happening with no signs of anyone figuring out the pattern. Compare Colliding Criminal Conspiracies and Unintentionally Notorious Crime. Supertrope of Robbing the Mob Bank.

Please note: the trope need not include actual mugging (though it is a popular method). As long as the provocateurs intentionally and excessively antagonize someone much more powerful than they are without knowing beforehand what they are screwing with, and get fixed accordingly, then it fits.

Compare:

• Assassin Outclassin': When it's a Professional Killer who gets owned by their intended target.
• Bullying a Dragon: Messing with a powerful entity that you know can destroy you.
  • A Mugging The Monster situation can evolve into this if the attacker is not instantly demolished, yet doesn't have the sense to back down and retreat after finding out what they're up against should the opportunity present itself.
  • Mugging The Monster and Bullying a Dragon can exist simultaneously if the obviously dangerous-looking individual is hiding something that makes them even more dangerous.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Showing defiance to something you know is about to kill you.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: If they immediately stomp you into a pancake.
• Fearless Fool: The character routinely gets into these situations because he's just too dumb to know better.
• Mook Horror Show: The bad guys are on the receiving end of a heroic character in a horrifying way, an inversion of a Slasher Movie.
• Paper Tiger: An inversion (although even the Paper Tiger can be dangerous if pushed hard enough).
• Shooting Superman: Attacking a target who can just shrug it off.
• Underestimating Badassery: A character's combat skills are underestimated.

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
  • The DCU
  • Marvel Universe
• Films — Live-Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games
• Webcomics
• Western Animation
• Real Life

Other examples:

Advertising

• One of those bewilderingly insane Arinamin V commercials starring Arnold Schwarzenegger has two punks come up to Arnold — who is cleverly disguised as a nerd — and start harassing him and his lady friend. Arnold nips off to chug a bottle of Arinamin, and one "Daijo BUI!!" later, well, just look. Could even count as Bullying a Dragon, since according to the simple formula provided here, Arnold Schwarzenegger + Nerd Glasses = still Arnold Schwarzenegger.
• A Ford Icon commercial has a guy in a bear mascot costume standing outside of an air conditioner store when four punks walk up and start harassing him, like kicking him in the butt or generally mocking him. He then puts one of his paws on the "leader" of the group, and another of them slaps the head of the costume off... revealing a real bear. They quickly lose any sense of mirth at this revelation, and three of the four run in terror, leaving the "leader" staring down the bear. Has to be seen to be believed.
• This Anti-Road Rage PSA. A man in a pickup truck gets cut off by an SUV. He promptly chases it down, blocks it, and starts menacing the driver. The driver gets out... and is revealed to be Heavyweight Boxing Champion Evander Holyfield. Don't give in to Road Rage, kids. You might end up on the wrong side of a boxing legend.
• Messin' with Sasquatch: Many commercials have humans pretending to offer Sasquatch something, only to yank it away for fun. Cue him pulverising them.

Audio Plays

• Big Finish Doctor Who:
  • A villainous twist on the trope in "The Sky Man" sees a group of desperate, sick, and starving farmers trying to rob the Master, because they believe him to have food and medical supplies, and think that he is just a harmless, elderly hermit. Their assessment is, of course, completely wrong.
    Farmer: How're you gonna stop us, old man? Look at you. Standing there in nothing but your bare 'ands. What you gonna do to us, 'ey? Tear us limb from limb?
    The Master: [sinisterly] ...Now, that's an invitation I cannot possibly refuse.
  • The story then cuts to the nearby village, where the Master's "companion"/Unwitting Pawn Cole talks with a local woman. She pauses the conversation when she says that she thinks she can hear faint screaming in the distance. Cole says that It's Probably Nothing.
• In the French MP3 saga Reflets d'Acide, a bunch of thieves attempt to ambush a beautiful young woman on the road. The woman turns out to actually be the Evil Black Dragon Alia-Aenor in human form, who mercilessly kills them.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Tormented Pariah shows a group of village hooligans tormenting a helpless victim. When the card is flipped, the art shows the moon rising and the victim turning into a snarling werewolf.
    Hey lads, the moon's rising. All the better to watch him beg for mercy. Just look at him, groveling on all fours! What a pathetic — uh-oh.
  • "The Witch of the Woods" opens with a Falkenrath vampire, a member of a bloodline who embraces savagery and can take on monstrous forms, leading an angry village mob on a chase after having killed their village elder. As night falls, he stops to let them catch up and, as he shifts into his bestial shape, gloats about how this has been fun, but they were never a threat to him and they should have heeded the old warnings about not hunting at night. The hunters just laugh and, as the full moon rises and they start growing fangs and fur, remark that those warnings only apply to humans. The vampire is only left with a short while to contemplate the complexities of supernatural food chains before the werewolf pack tears him to pieces.

Comedy

• In one of his stand-up shows, Dara Ó Briain recounts a story told to him by a member of the audience once when he asked whether anyone had ever managed to foil a crime. In this story, two men had attempted to steal the audience member's car and attempted to lock themselves in it when cornered — upon which the audience member punched in the car window, dragged one of the thieves out, forced him into the house, tied him to a chair, and threatened him with a carving knife. The other car thief was subsequently forced to summon the police in order to rescue his friend. Needless to say, Dara was a little taken aback by the story.
• Sebastian Maniscalco once gave a hypothetical situation about the "poor bastard" who breaks into one of his friend's house, unaware that the owner is not only ex-military, but keeps a compound bow for such situations.
• In his "Road Rage" TV Special, Ben Bailey relates an incident that took place during Cash Cab. In a traffic jam, an electrician stuck behind his cab tried to have an altercation with him, and clearly did not expect the big, intimidating, pissed-off Ben Bailey to step out to meet him. And then have the production crew — 8 big guys, one of whom was a NYC police detective — step out of their vehicle nearby to back him up.
• Richard Pryor once talked about an incident where he was the mugger. In his younger years, while he was MC'ing at a strip club owned by The Mafia, he found one of the dancers crying. She told him the club owners weren't going to pay her. He decided to help her by scaring the owners, but unfortunately for him, didn't understand what the Mafia even was. ("My father was the baddest motherfucker I'd ever seen!") When he burst into their office waving a cap pistol and demanding the money, they all laughed themselves silly, not even realizing he was serious.
• Redd Foxx once told a joke about getting mugged by a guy who threatened him by claiming to know Karate:
  Mugger: "This here's a stickup! I got a black belt!"
  Foxx: *pulls a gun* "Well, they gonna need it to lower your ass in the ground!"

Comic Strips

• Dilbert: In this strip, two bullies decide to beat Dilbert up for wearing glasses with a camera. Little do they know, he's made a few "modifications".
• Of all character combinations, this happens in the Doctor Who Magazine Twelfth Doctor comic strips when the Delgado Master goes up against Twelve. He's clearly unprepared to come up against a later Doctor who is much more battlescarred, much more ruthless, and much less tolerant of his usual schtick of trying to gain godlike power, killing people for lulz, and using silly foreign-language aliases.
• The Far Side:
  • "Why... yes... thank... you... I... would... like... a... knuckle... sandwich."
  • Another comic depicts a pet store with a piranha in a fishbowl and a cat sulking nearby with two wooden forelegs, implicitly the aftermath of attempting to catch the piranha.
• Garfield:
  • Garfield attacks a chicken that he thinks is helpless in this strip.
  • In another strip, he sees a tiny dog's head sticking out of a doghouse and smacks the dog on the nose. At which point the dog stands up revealing that his body is so big the dog house is resting on his shoulders.
  Garfield: Talk about your unpleasant surprises.
• Jump Start: Jojo intended to use a small, nerdy-looking kid as a living practice dummy for a martial arts demo during a summer camp talent show. Said kid turned out to be a viral sensation as a wrestling prodigy.
  Benny: Tap out, Jojo! Tap out!
• In one Knights of the Dinner Table story, Bob takes the Untouchable Trio's tendency to mistreat hirelings to a new low, declaring his intent to slap them around until they are psychologically broken and desperate for their master's approval. B.A. sets him up with an NPC hireling named "Skinny Stiltskin". When Bob pushes Skinny to the point of fighting back, B.A. describes him as a hulking brute who easily beats the tar out of Bob's character. When Bob protests, B.A. points out that Bob never asked for a description but merely assumed that Skinny's physique fit his name — in fact, he was exactly the opposite, like Little John from the Robin Hood stories. This case is thus an example of Mugging the Monster for Bob, but would be Bullying a Dragon in-universe for Bob's character.
• Scary Gary has an almost literal example, when a robber attempts to steal money from the convenience store Gary was working at. Gary politely explains to him why that would be a bad idea.
  Gary: Sir, I'm a vampire. If you rob me, I'll just laugh maniacally, drain all the blood from your body and then feed you to my flesh-hungry henchman.
• In U.S. Acres, you wouldn't think Sheldon, an egg that refused to hatch, would be dangerous. But...

Fan Works

• In Cras Vivere Para Bellum, Izuku and Katsuki get kidnapped by human traffickers. Unfortunately for the latter, Izuku just so happens to be the reincarnation of John Wick.
• In Hermione Granger, Demonologist, Hermione Granger summons her first demon at age eight, being a bright, lonely little girl who wants some friends. By the time she hits Hogwarts, she's got quite a few demonic friends. Her Slytherin housemates try to bully her, and she puts up with it for a while. Eventually, they push her too far...and Hilarity Ensues.
  Hermione: I have other friends! And I think it's time you met them!
• In His honor the mayor, Drew Lipsky, two thugs try to threaten Drakken and later Ron. They know who they're dealing with due to the cartoon being a Very Loosely Based on a True Story Show Within a Show, but are Entertainingly Wrong about which parts are made up and which are real.
• In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Garlic Jr. and his henchmen try to take over the Lookout while Mr. Popo is running it. After refusing to "clean that up", Garlic Jr. tries to monologue to Popo about who he is, which results in the latter "assimilating" him and his minions.
• Child of the Storm:
  • A handsy, tipsy middle-aged Roxxon executive gropes a pretty blonde teenager (Carol Danvers), ignoring the anger of her new friend (Harry Potter a.k.a. Harry Thorson), who happens to be a) a demigod (even if The Call Put Me on Hold), b) a young wizard. It really becomes this, though, when he tries to brush off a young, glasses-wearing black man who intervenes seeking an apology from him, and calls said young man an "interfering N-Word Privileges son-of-a-bitch." Said young man is Crown Prince T'Challa of Wakanda, a.k.a. the Black Panther. It does not take a genius to figure out what happens next.
  • In the sequel, Harry's childhood bullies end up picking a fight with him when he has a look around the old estate. Harry is by this point a Person of Mass Destruction with borderline Super Soldier level physical abilities, with general combat training from a number of Avengers and specifically in aikido from Sean Cassidy a.k.a. Banshee. Unsurprisingly, Carol is left idly wondering where to get some popcorn.
• 3 Slytherin Marauders: Anyone who picks a fight with Tom.
• Advice and Trust: When Asuka joins Shinji's class, a horde of boys chases her. When she says she wants to date nobody, two boys refuse to accept her answer and try to get hard. It turns out that fragile, little girl punches hard.
  Shinji: Maybe that will finally get them to stop chasing me like I'm a prize to be won. [...] How come I'm the one with the pack after them? You were ten times as popular as I was, a week after you arrived, miss incredibly-hot-exotic-foreign-transfer-student. I know Touji and Kensuke were making crazy amounts of cash-selling beauty shots of you almost right away. Why haven't I had to chase away a pack of boys drooling after you?
  Asuka: Because I already had them properly terrified and respectful after I mashed the first two flat when they tried to ask me out the week I got here and refused to take "no" for an answer, [...] Putting a couple of them on the ground with a few punches when they got rough taught the others to keep off. You're just too polite and sweet to girls to scare them off, my darling baka.
• In A.A. Pessimal's Discworld fanfic The Price of Flight, the Ankh-Morpork City Watch set up a sting to catch predators who are targeting young girls. In the targeted part of town, a confused and lost young girl who has lost her way by night is wandering, confused, friendless and alone. She is clearly a recent immigrant with no local connections. The Watch are covertly observing to see who responds and what their motivations are. When the suspects strike, they discover the frail twelve-year-old girl is actually a Banshee. And this is the start of their woes.^note Fortunately, the Banshee is a Watch Cadet under the supervision of werewolf Angua and vampire Sally, and knows there are limits.
• In Miraculous: The Phoenix Rises, local Dean Bitterman and Hate Sink Brad Roy is ordered to fire Dr. Cho by the Big Bad. However, he decided to try and have his way with her in exchange for a last chance. As it turns out, she came prepared... with a 9mm. Not that anyone minded.
• Downplayed in Risk It All. Ren's powers make him more than a match for the average person, but the fact that he lacks Super Toughness means that any guy with a gun can kill him. He's terrified when a man pulls a gun on him to mug him and rather than be Batman he begins meekly forking over his cash, only collecting himself after the man had started walking away. That's when he breaks the man's arm and takes his money back.
• In Afraid of the Darkness, Lucius Malfoy attempts to bully a Muggle hitman into doing his dirty work, unaware that Jackie Estacado is not an ordinary Muggle nor someone he should be messing with.
• In the Frasier story Dark Horse of the Moons, three Seattle muggers try to shake down Daphne Moon and her brother Tim. Big mistake. A girl growing up in Collyhurst, Manchester, with eight brothers, soon learns how to fight. And when one of her brothers is an off-duty Royal Marine taking a leave in Seattle... Niles Crane gibbers as he watches mayhem ensue.
• In Deadpan Love, some small crook tries to mug a pair of scrawny kids kissing on a bench. At hearing his threats, the two start laughing... the guy was unlucky enough to stumble across Raven and Beast Boy during their first date.
• A gang of thugs tries to mug The Doctor. The Third Doctor. He proceeds to Pressure Point them into unconsciousness.
• In Exodus of Stars, batarians attempt to capture a Star Covenant transport with boarding teams smuggled aboard, as well as an ambush by three warships. Not only does the ship crew get wind of the boarders and easily take them out, but there is also the fact that the batarians have no idea about the armament of a Carrack class transport.
• The Hill of Swords. Louise summons a version of Emiya Shirou who's well along the path to becoming Archer. Then, of course, Guiche challenges him to a duel.
• Last Child of Krypton: When Shinji was younger, some bullies harassed him, ignoring that the scrawny, shy kid could tear steel with his bare hands.
• In Mass Foundations: Redemption in the Stars, a batarian thug tries to rob the Courier, who has just arrived in the Mass Effect, but is still armed and wearing Power Armor, albeit those are vastly outdated. In the end, he doesn't even need them.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In the Ponies of Olympus series, Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo at one point go to Storm Alley to visit Dash's old mentor Amber Spark, and are harassed by some thugs who want to have some "fun" with them. Since both mares in question are Action Girls, they easily kick ass.
  • Played interestingly in Princess Celestia Gets Mugged: while wandering around Canterlot in her civilian guise Sunny Skies, Princess Celestia is ambushed, mugged, and subsequently kidnapped and held to ransom. Despite being able to escape at any time, Celestia plays along with it out of amusement.
  • In Progress, two stallions flirt with the incognito Luna and try to get her Unsuspectingly Soused. When she catches on, arse-kicking ensues.
  • Interesting variation where the mugging goes both ways in Shepard's R&R. Pinkie Pie shoots a party cannon at Grunt, the diplomats think they're under attack, and Luna restrains them before they could respond. Luna and Shepard almost come to blows while demanding the other to back down. Shepard doesn't realize he's confronting an actual Physical God who could kill him with a thought, while Luna doesn't realize that she's threatening a galactic legend whose death would draw the wrath of all the other races, and her promises "to send him to the moon" are very ineffectual against someone whose people willingly live on moons.
  • At one point in The Rise of Darth Vulcan, the titular Villain Protagonist visits the port town of Port Royal to recruit some pirates for an expedition, and a stallion tries to mug him at swordpoint. Both Ted and his Number Two, Artful Dodger, lampshade the stupidity of this, as even though the former has ditched his armor to travel incognito, he still towers over the pony, and for that matter the outfit he is wearing apparently still makes him look like a Ringwraith. The mugger is lucky to get away with just being knocked out.
  • A Reaper attempts to indoctrinate Celestia in Why No One Messes with Celestia, ignoring her demands that it release her subjects and leave, citing her species' "inferiority". Celestia responds by shooting it with a beam of molten plasma, the center of which is theorized to be millions of degrees centigrade.
  • In You Call That a Costume?, while lost downtown, Personality Swapped Rarity and Applejack encounter a mugger who wants the jewels Applejack is wearing. Unfortunately, he makes a big mistake when he calls Rarity "Toots".
  • In one chapter of New Beginnings, a mugger interrupted Page and a disguised Princess Luna on their date. Subverted; their guards took him out before they did.
• Flash Thompson essentially does a non-violent version of this in "Exposure" when he plans to use a field trip to Stark Tower to ‘expose’ Peter’s false claims that he has an internship with Stark Enterprises. Since Peter genuinely does work at Stark Enterprises (even if some of his ‘internship’ is his activities as Spider-Man), not only does Flash get the humiliating experience of learning that Peter is working for Tony Stark, but also gets publicly called out by Happy Hogan when people overhear Flash talking about ‘exposing Penis’ and assume that means he’s going to expose himself rather than insulting Peter.
• Of Love and Bunnies:
  • A mugger tries to take Kimberly's purse. He is promptly decked by Tommy. This has a lot of ramifications on the plot, since the mugger was one of their old classmates, and it gets to the point that the world believes that Tommy was the original Black Ranger. They eventually have to send in TJ to ensure that the mugger changes his story.
  • Later on in the story, a Troobian ship attacks a "Ranger Kegger". Attended by every Power Ranger on Earth (pre-SPD). Many of whom that still have their powers and/or various other miscellaneous skills. All of whom are still very, very adept at beating the hell out of foot soldiers. Things do not go well for the Troobians.
• In Respect, a trio of bullies goes after their favorite target, timid crybaby artist Yayoi Kise, not knowing that she's just made a contract with Kyubey specifically to get them to stop... needless to say, it doesn't end well.
• In Unfamiliar, a bunch of muggers attack a young noble and her scruffy, grumpy, hood-wearing servant wandering down a blind alley after dusk. They become aware of their grievous error in judgement shortly before the servant messily kills and eats them. It's a crossover with [PROTOTYPE]; said servant is Alex Mercer.
• The Yellow Wings learned the hard way that Cid and Ensei are way out of their league in The Tainted Grimoire.
• From the Star Trek (2009) fic That Was A Good Fight, a shapeshifting alien salt-vampire thingy attacks the crew of the Enterprise and mocks Kirk after knocking out Spock, assuming him to be just another pathetic human: "What a feast. Your Doctor, your Commander, now you. This whole ship will sustain me. You aren't going to cry? I want to taste your tears." But what the creature doesn't know is that Kirk has been struggling against his new Superpowered Evil Side courtesy of Khan's blood. Now one must pity the poor ensign who has to clean up what remains of the alien out of the floor tiles.
• In Time Braid, this is invoked by Hinata when she and Sakura propose to go undercover as missing-nin and infiltrate Akatsuki. Hinata quotes the standard chestnut along the lines of "meet interesting new people, and kill them"; when Sakura chastises her for violence of outlook, she points out that, being two thirteen-year-old girls travelling alone, one carrying the Byakugan, all sorts of people are bound to attack them whom the world would be better off without anyway. Later, dialogue notes that "eventually, the attacks stopped".
• In Zero vs Kira the Britannian soldiers who unknowingly capture Kira in a world-breaching experiment Gone Horribly Right. "Damn uppity Eleven, you think you're somebody because you can speak English and wear a suit." Light Yagami asks if he may at least know the names of his executioners. Later there's the instance where some Britannian thugs pick a fight with Suzaku. Suzaku, naturally, wipes the floor with them.
• At the beginning of Fate/Stay Night: Ultimate Master, Lancer attacks Ben Tennyson while looking for souls to feed on. He is suitably surprised when what he assumed to be a harmless teenager turns into a hulking armored being with heat vision.
• In First Try Series, Sakura, who is still an Academy student, tries to pick a fight with Naruto, who was almost Chunin, and learns the hard way that he didn't drop out. Her mother Barako tries to destroy Tetsuo's reputation and get an old secretary fired, not knowing they are Danzo's grandson and Danzo himself.
• Forms part of the backstory in Red Fire, Red Planet. Norigom, a Nausicaan just conscripted onto the IKS mupwI's command crew from Rura Penthe, apparently decided his first order of business should be getting laid for probably the first time since the Klingon-Gorn War. And what better target for his affections than the 147 cm, 43 kilo Orion he thought was probably ship's "entertainment"?
  "Norigom came to half an hour later with four cracked ribs, two broken metatarsals and a nose that was somewhat flatter than it had been when he'd entered the room."
• In Kitsune no Ken: Fist of the Fox, Mizuki's gang's first encounter with Naruto results in this. After initially meeting him at Ino's family store and dismissing him as a weakling, gang members Dosu, Zaku and Kin happen upon Naruto later in the evening and decide it'll be a good idea to make a game out of beating him up. Only problem is, Naruto happens to be one of the infamous Nine Terrors, people who could destroy cities with ease in the back-story; the end result is that the entire gang winds up with broken bones and their motorcycles smashed to pieces. Much later, it veers into Bullying a Dragon territory when Mizuki takes more of his gang to confront Naruto, Naruto beats up several of them single-handedly and then reveals who he is...and Mizuki decides to take him on anyway, with not-too-surprising results.
• Shadowchasers (Cyber Commander): A flashback reveals that this is how Vincent and Albert Schumer first met the illithiid crime boss Luis DaPen, by trying to shake him down for money when he was alone in Satellite. Unlike most examples of this Trope, it ended well for them; while he could have easily killed them, he instead offered them jobs as his bodyguards, eventually earning their Undying Loyalty.
• Webwork: Jade, now a Jorogumo but disguised as a human via glamour, is mistaken by a mugger for a hooker and is threatened at knifepoint for some "fun" in an alley. She proceeds to slam his head against the alley wall repeatedly, barely noticing as she does so.
• Karakura Thugs is built on this trope. A group of thugs annoyed at Ichigo not being a proper delinquent decide to beat up his friends instead. Almost all of whom have superpowers of some kind, and even the one they attacked that didn't had stun guns and Molotov cocktails instead.
• At one point in Life in Reverse a few crooks had the bad luck to choose to threaten an incognito Loki.
• A mugger tries to hold up Tony and Steve in The Problem with Secret Identities. Tony immediately kicks the gun out of his hand and breaks his nose without thinking about it, to the surprise of even the Cap who doesn't have a chance to react.
• Tales from the Barman:
  • A couple robbers try to hold up Xander's bar. They're so little threat to everyone present that most don't even look up from their drinks.
  • Later, a couple of mafia enforcers try to shake Xander down for protection money. One of Xander's regulars is Illyria.
• In What Happens in Vegas, Dumbledore kidnaps Willow Potter so she can "fulfill her obligation to defeat Voldemort". Willow's wife, Raven, objects. Violently.
• There are a few Five Nights at Freddy's crossovers where the security guard is not gonna let Freddy and gang do what they please;
  • Pyro's Night At Freddy's: Pyro gets the job, and in his own Obliviously Evil way, makes one thing clear; He's not trapped with killer animatronics, the animatronics are trapped with him.
  • New Night Guard: This time, it's Heavy, and he's a lot less oblivious.
  • Dante's Night At Freddy's: Five haunted animatronics. One half-demon demon hunter. Six hours of senseless carnage...for the robots.
  • A Catgirl At Freddy's, a Fenspace crossover. A more accurate title might be "A Catgirl Armed With A Double-Barrelled Shotgun At Freddy's Who Has Her Even More Heavily Armed Boyfriend Waiting Outside". Ultimately subverted because Everybody Lives, the animatronics weren't actually serious about hurting anyone in the first place, and there's a solar system-wide APB out on the Purple Guy.
• The Bridge: Aria Blaze detects someone emitting a great deal of hatred and rage and approaches in order to feed. It turns out to be Kaizer Ghidorah. Even with the power boost she gets from feeding on him, all she can do is run.
• Tends to be a Running Gag in the Italian remake of Battle Fantasia Project:
  • Seeing that the Yakuza of Tokyo had been recently eradicated, a group of South American criminals tried to fill the vacuum and get rid of the chief of the police by taking in hostage a group of middle school students from Mitakihara that included Mami Tomoe. But they're not that lucky: committing a violent crime in Tokyo means dealing with Sailor Venus...
  • It's mentioned that a criminal tried to rob a bank in San Francisco and had to deal with what is implied to be a retired Harry Callahan. The criminal got his hand shot off, and his panicked moves made him bleed out before the ambulance arrived.
  • How did Mami became known as Mami the Invincible? Well, a few days after her break-up with Kyoko, five magical girls from another town tried to take over Mitakihara and the nearby town, and mocked Mami on her loneliness. Mami blew up one, shot another with the Tiro Finale, tied up and shot in the Soul Gems two others, and let the fifth one go to spread her legend, periodically visiting her to fake having decided to finish the job but having forgotten something she needs to properly kill her.
• A random Muggle in The Eyes Have It throws a can of paint at Sakura's group, thinking them "fancy-shmancy samurai". Sakura compares to seeing a drunk kicking a sleeping bear.
• The crossover of Vandread Halo gives the Spartan II to the all-female Space Pirates. Though the Master Chief clearly shows to be more of a Gentle Giant than he seems, the women still can't stand what would happen if they tried to pick on him. Fortunately aside that, they are savvy enough to avoid this trope.
  • Rabat was...not so lucky.
• In the second arc of Halkegenia Online Zero Hour, the Red Japanese Army tries to attack the SAO Returnees School. A school where most of the students had just spent two years fighting for their lives, taking 38% casualties in the process, and are not going to put up with that again. To make it worse, one of their team leaders, Nanbou 'The Heartbreaker', decides to indulge in his hobby of traumatizing young girls via rape, and happens to pick the girl who is secretly the serial killer who is running around massacring the local yakuzas as his next victim.
• A Running Gag in Ranma ½ stories is to have some thug from out of Nerima pick a fight with Ranma or another member of the Nerima Wrecking Crew, all of whom can shatter walls without even trying thanks to their martial arts training. Then there's the story where an idiot decided to do worse to Nabiki...
  "You... You don't know who Ranma Saotome is...?"
  "Heard his name a few times. Nothing special."
  "Nothing special...*cue hysterical laughter* You're a dead man Jiro. A fucking dead man!"
  *Ranma showed up soon after, and, believing death was too good for him, made sure he experienced what he did to Nabiki a hundred times*
• A sort of Running Gag in Venus Flash, as Sailor Venus and the Dark Kingdom are an Outside-Context Problem to Panther Claw, and nobody could imagine what Honey can now do with the Airborn Element Fixing Device. Then there's the banchou of Minako's school picking a fight with her...
• In For want of a Nail, (NSFW) protagonist/supersoldier turned professional comedian Jason Thorn makes a joke about a mugger accidentally picking Supergirl for a victim, backing off with "Oh... excuse me, I thought you were someone else...". In the audience, Wonder Woman confides to a friend "Someone actually used that line once...".
• In Cycles Upon Cycles, a group of mostly Batarian mercenaries try to attack a Terran colony with plans to enslave the inhabitants and sell off their technology. Unfortunately for them, the Koprulu sector is such a hostile place that Terrans always set up their military first before allowing civilians on a new colony.
• In Not In Kansas:
  • Vampire Slayer Kendra tries to kill Supergirl with a sword, thinking her a demon. Kara finds the idea kinda funny.
  • Earlier some members of the NID try to kidnap Kara. After taking out three of them, she catches the fourth by standing in front of the getaway van.
• In Father Goose and the Black Knight, Detectives Benson and Stabler interrogate Xander in the Cleveland headquarters over a number of girls who've been raped and tortured. What they don't know is every girl there (all twenty six of them) is a Slayer who adores Xander. Faith openly tells them that they're only leaving the building alive because Xander told the girls not to hurt them.
• The Secret Return of Alex Mack:
  • At eight-year-old Shar's new school, naturally there are boys who give her a hard time when she cries at things that remind her of her murdered parents. Alex lets the school staff know about the problem, pointing out that it's possible she'll flip out and scratch them up with her nails or something. The real danger isn't her nails, though, it's her epic-level pyrokinesis; if Shar truly lost control, they'd be lucky to identify the bodies. Of anyone in the entire school.
  • Clare Tobias tries to take Alex hostage so she can get away after her cover is blown, not realising that Alex could turn silvery in an instant and be immune to anything she can do, zap her unconscious, or telekinetically pinch her carotid artery shut. Alex does have to get a bit creative because she's undercover too, but her power set just has so many options for taking someone down...
• In Thousand Shinji, thugs and men in black often attack Shinji, Asuka and Rei, thinking that they're helpless children. Usually, when their assailants discover their intended victims are NOT defenseless, it's too late to run away.
• In Unbiased the Sound Four try to deliver Orochimaru's offer to Sasuke, only to get the wrong hospital room. Things only become truly problematic when Tayuya asks who the "big-titted whore" is; Tsunade is not amused.
• Quicken: Right after she dug her way out of her own grave, Emma was attacked by four thugs who intended to rape her. She was a berserker with a self-regenerative power. They thought that she was a helpless teenager. She killed them all.
• In Becoming More a local Jerk Jock gropes one of the girls at school and learns the hard way she just became a Slayer when she picks him up one handed and throws him across the hall. Later becomes Bullying a Dragon when he and his friends try to rape and murder her.
• Three examples in Mortal Kombat vs Marvel Universe in regards to the Cage family:
  • When Norman Osborn kidnaps Cassie and her sister, Ravenna, in revenge for their parents beating the crap out of him, he expects Johnny to surrender Cage Incorporated in exchange for their release. He, nor the Hand's gang, Madame Masque or the Purple Man did not know about Cassie and Ravenna being mutant telepaths. Cue the asskicking and skullcracking
  • S.H.I.E.L.D. raids a home in upstate New York, as they suspect that Jessica Jones is hiding there. Nope, it's Cassie, who mows down the Capekillers and several heroes. It takes Iron Man to stop her.
  • Johnny Cage vs a group of muggers. Guess what happens next.
• Mass Effect character Harkin decides to cop a feel of the cute redhead that came in with Nihlus in Wild Effect. After he ignores her warnings that she'll give him a five second head-start, Ranma dislocates every bone in his hand.
  • In the chapter before that, Ranma overpowered a Krogan and the gang that came with him, single-handed, in girl form!
• Nabiki Tendo decides to extort the woman she believes to be yet another fiance in Hell Is a Martial Artist, who goes along with it out of amusement. Unfortunately for her, said woman is Hild, and Nabiki's decision that breaking their deal would earn her more money in the long run costs the girl her soul.
  • Later a Youma possessing Gos tries to take over the planet only to run afoul of the Sailor Scouts (who he knew about) and worse, Sailor Moon's martial arts instructor: Ranma Saotome aka the teen Hild has basically adopted.
• Oh, do the four love this trope in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. It comes into play every time someone attacks them, and they make quite a bit of money this way, thanks to the Blameless Victim Revenge Law — if you're attacked for no reason and you win, you legally get to keep anything you want off the attackers. And since the four never once initiate an attack or do anything to encourage one besides walking around.... They call it “fishing.”
  • Don't fuck with Nine Thousands! And it's a damn good thing the four are Actual Pacifists.
  • Though the city muggers, at least, figure out what's going on after two nights of “fishing.” But the outworlders don't, or can't believe the four are that powerful... despite them being nicknamed the Awesome Foursome after less than two days of mostly just wandering around as tourists.
• In An Open and Frank Discussion by Adrian Tullberg, Civil War-era Iron Man and his various allies encounter a super-powered visitor to their world from another dimension and try to force her to abide the Superhuman Registration Act or face imprisonment in the Negative Zone. Unfortunately for them, the super-powered visitor in question turns out to be Wonder Woman, who proves capable of not only handing each of them their asses, but also of offering an intellectual deconstruction of the numerous constitutional failings of the Registration Act once she's done so.
• In The Vain Rose's Garden, Casanova Wannabe Toshiyuki Aoshima tries first coercing then intimidating Belldandy into sleeping with him. She responds by picking him up and throwing him into a dumpster.
• Instead of the Straw Hats, in Nine Minutes the Foxy Pirates try to attack a small group of Revolutionaries. The reaction of each Revolutionary when they (individually) hear this is an amused, "That's adorable." A later chapter implies only Porsche survived.
• In Life During Wartime, a canon sidestory to Neon Metathesis Evangelion, two thugs try to mug Kaworu, Kensuke and Mana at night, thinking them easy prey. However, Mana has been fully trained by the JSSDF in close quarter combat, and unlike the other sort of training she has received, that one has always come easily to her. The thugs have no chance.
• In Harry by Proxy, some gang members think a member of some rival gang came on their street and decide to give him a lesson. The guy is actually Jeffrey Woods, knife wielder extraordinaire and clinical psychopath. Bloodbath ensues.
• Nick Fury in Vacation means Chaos tries to intimidate Xander Harris into not telling the Avengers about the Watchers Council, even threatening to have him arrested for treason. Xander pretends to be an idiot for a while (such as thinking Nick Fury is Kingsley Shacklebolt) before informing him that he (Xander) is a member of the board and thus has the right to tell anyone he pleases about the Slayer and the Council.
• In A.A. Pessimal's Discworld and The Big Bang Theory crossover The Many Worlds Interpretation, visiting Discworlder Johanna Smith-Rhodes twice encounters the criminal underworld of Los Angeles. In Ankh-Morpork, she has to go easy on Thieves as a mark of professional courtesy to fellow Guild professionals going about their everyday work. In Los Angeles, however, she reasons that all Thieves are unlicenced and professional courtesy no longer applies. Two groups of would-be robbers discover what a trained, professional Assassin is capable of when she isn't even annoyed. Then her Guild colleague Ruth N'Kweze crosses over and meets members of a typical street gang whilst walking two dogs late at night. The dogs are what are called Rhodesian Ridgebacks on both worlds. It isn't Ruth who declines a fight and backs off. A whole LA street gang collectively thinks better of it.
• After Harry busts a drug ring in Adapt and Transform some of the remaining criminals involved hunt him down and take his boyfriend Eggsy hostage, figuring he's an easier target and unaware that he's secretly an almost fully trained auror.
• A random Muggle tries to slip Gia a date rape drug in My Copy, having no idea she's an Opposite-Sex Clone of Batroc the Leaper. Worse is that she's accompanied by Opposite Sex Clones of Trickshot, Forge, and Rhino. The would-be rapist has to have several ribs and a shoulder replaced.
• Sometime after Louise summons Celestia is a familiar in Celestia Takes a Vacation, her older sister Eleanor comes to the academy and starts immediately antagonizing Celestia, comparing her to a common work horse. After a short magical duel, Eleanor is reduced to a talking bunny.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Supergirl story The Vampire of Steel:
  • Subverted. Two vampires ambush a seemingly ordinary bystander at night. Said bystander is Zol-Am, a Kryptonian who can kill them in the twinkling of an eye. But he gets cocky and although he rams his arm straight through the chest of one of them, the second bit his neck and left him dry.
  • Played straight shortly after when two vampires assault him. Two heat beams rather they were two bodies littering the ground.
• In Dragon Age: Inquisition fanfic Walking in Circles, we have a non-violent example in which a pickpocket tries to mug Solas and Evelyn, he ends up losing his own purse instead.
• In one of the oneshots in Mysteries of the Seas, Nami tries to rob a ship that pulls up on the cruise ship she's on. Unfortunately for her, the two crew members of said ship are Monet and a post-Time Skip Nico Robin, both of whom have Armaments and Observation Haki and the latter of whom left a copy on-board. Luckily for her, they're willing to recruit her instead as neither as any skill at navigation.
• In the Saint Seiya/The Rising of the Shield Hero crossover The Hero Melromarc Needs and Deserves, Malty tries on Naofumi's replacement the False Rape Accusation she successfully pulled off in canon. Problem is, she's doing it with Cancer Deathmask, who's more than powerful enough to annihilate everything on the planet and has a sketchy morality as a hero-and he takes offense at the set-up.
  It was a minor miracle that Deathmask's punch simply knocked Motoyasu out, or that he didn't massacre everyone.
  • According to the side stories, she got lucky: Deathmask had a plan that would have given her a very painful death and allowed him to all but take over the country but blew it off in a fit of rage when he realized the entire situation and forgot to even kill her, but many of the other Gold Saints would have just killed her on the spot or got creative. Particularly bad for her and everyone involved would have been Aries Mu, who would have simply teleported home after stealing the holy weapons (it's not stated if he would have returned with reinforcements to save the planet anyway), and Pisces Aphrodite, who would have killed her in such a way to push her father and accomplice to torture himself to death at his request.
• Several examples found in X-Men: The Early Years:
  • A thief attempts to snatch the purse of Jean "incredibly powerful psychic with an incredibly short fuse" Grey. It doesn't end well for him. But at least Hank didn't lock him down in a basement and re-engineer him his genes, so yay?
  • A high-school bully called Bruno picks on Bobby until Bobby gets fed up and retaliates. Later on, Bruno can be seen screaming Bobby is an “agent of Satan”.
• In the RWBY fanfic Emergence, a group of ISIS militants capture a young blonde woman, and force her to read their message at knife point. The person in question is Yang Xiao Long, who proceeds to rip the fanatics apart.
• A Man of Iron: During the riot in King's Landing during A Crack of Thunder, a group of men attempt to rape Sansa, as per canon. However, since by this point Sansa has become the Night's Queen... well, let's just say that the guy who's killed via Neck Snap gets off easy compared to how his friends go out.
• In the Firefly fanfic Forward, during the "Mosaic" story arc, a group of thugs manage to board Serenity and capture most of the crew. While most of the crew put up a good fight, the only one they capture without a struggle is River, because she'd had a mental breakdown earlier in the story and had to be sedated. The thugs dismiss River as a non-threat because she's a small teenage girl, and when she wakes up from the drugs, most of the ensuing carnage is only heard over the radio, mixed in with the horrified screams of the men she's slaughtering.
• In Conversations with a Cryptid, Izuku's childhood bullies and several villains who kidnap him for personal revenge. To be fair, it's pretty reasonable for them to not figure out that the timid quirkless kid was actually the son of All for One, who's quite the Knight Templar Parent..
• In My Huntsman Academia, Junior tries to cop a feel of a new waitress he hired at his club. That waitress happened to be Pyrrha Nikos, four-time Mistral Tournament champion and "The Invincible Girl" who has never lost a match. Later on, he's so tired of Huntsmen burning down his bar that he decides to pick a fight with all of Team MNVW in hopes of holding them for ransom, only to be blindsided when almost all of his remaining goons are wiped out by a single Glenn Smash from Izuku, the current holder of One For All.
• In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku accidentally butts heads with a huge, muscular man wearing a plague mask over a rare doll. The man challenges Izuku to a contest of strength, first punching a cushioned receiver and then to an old-fashioned arm wrestling match, to settle who gets it even though Izuku was more than willing to just let him have it. Being Kryptonian, Izuku crushes the man handily without even meaning to, even tossing him into the air and dislocating the man's shoulder.
• In From Muddy Waters, Izuku is so wary of using his Quirk that he's initially mistaken for being Quirkless, leading some of his middle school classmates to try to bully him. He quickly shuts them up with one of his strength enhancing Quirks.
• Mastermind: Strategist for Hire: The Blue Dogs gang hold Izuku/Mastermind at gunpoint to get out of paying for plans to rob Okane Bank, with Tanaka, the leader, calling him a pipsqueak. Immediately after the meeting, Mastermind sells plans on how to murder them to their enemies.
• Service with a Smile:
  • An indirect example. The thugs who put Jaune in the hospital and trash his business inadvertently put themselves in the crosshairs of the hormonal Huntsmen and Huntresses in training, and the even less-morally restrained criminal underground, that love Jaune and/or his diner.
  • Another indirect example occurs when Alexander Sterling calls the ones smearing his business practice liars without first finding out who it is, thinking it's Jaune Arc. Instead it's Weiss Schnee and he's just directly insulted the Schnee family who own the largest Mega-Corp in Remnant.
  • Alexander Sterling tries to have his bodyguard remove Velvet when she refuses to let him see Jaune. Velvet easily places the larger man in a submission hold with the implied threat of breaking his shoulder if he resists.
• Because he's out of the loop, V.V. in Six Paths of Rebellion goes to kidnap Nunnally much like canon. Unfortunately for him, her blindness and inability to walk have both been cured months prior and Nunnally has turned into quite the athlete, and her Ninja Maid is present as well. On top of this, both Sayoko and Nunnally have been given the Rinnegan by C.C., leaving V.V. confronting two outright superhumans while in the body of a ten year old boy. Nunnally makes him suffer immensely before allowing C.C. to kill him.
• Boldores And Boomsticks:
  • Team Rocket thugs have broken into a Pokémon nursery to steal the eggs, but their Drowzee misses the young girl currently on watch. That was their first mistake. Their second was assuming a rich-looking girl with no Pokémon of her own would be easy to cow. Weiss Schnee draws her sword and disabuses them of that notion rapidly.
  • They do this again in a later chapter, when Cassidy and Butch, a couple of higher-level agents, threaten all of RWBY. One starts to monologue about how his new Poké Ball can steal Pokémon from their trainers — and Ruby simply shoots it out of his hand. Then they pull out a pair of high-level Pokémon, who themselves assume it's going to be a simple matter to intimidate the girls. Yang proceeds to gleefully wipe the floor with them.
  • Faba tries to threaten Watts with his Raichu only to end up with the doctor's revolver to his head.
• In Security, Clint Barton's home wasn't actually off the books and was attacked by HYDRA while he was away. Unfortunately for them, Laura Barton's maiden name is Laura Howlett.
• Atonement: Impasse's force field has protected him so long, he thinks he's immune to consequences. It's why he won't listen to warnings that harming Amy meant pissing off her father Marquis. He's Killed Mid-Sentence:
  Impasse: That's right, terms. You want the bitch alive, you'll negotiate. So first—
• In Worm/DC Universe crossover Echoes of Yesterday, Sophia Hess isn't amused when all of sudden a stranger shows up and breaks Taylor Hebert out of the locker where Sophia had shoved her into, so she tries to harass the newcomer. One Neck Lift combined with glowing red eyes later, Sophia and her bully squad consider the virtues of keeping quiet and stay away from Kara.
• Avatar: Legend of Diamond Tiara: Poor Starlight and Ahuizotl. Both of them find out Silver Spoon's true nature much too late.
• Wrong Road to the Right Place: The Dodger tries to use an Explosive Leash on Laurel. She promptly grabs him and holds him close enough that he can't blow her up without killing himself as well. Oliver and security arrive shortly after and subdue him.
  Oliver: Who are you, and what have you done to Laurel?
  The Dodger: The better question is what's she done to me? Unbelievable. A vigilante spoiled my first attempt in Starling and now this. Your police should hang up their caps in shame.
• Hellsing Ultimate Abridged:
  • Zorin Blitz leads the vampire attack on the Hellsing manor, dismissing the Wild Geese mercenary guards and Seras, a recently-turned vampire police officer, as minimal threats, even calling Seras "a stupid, big-tittied police girl." Then, after killing most of the Wild Geese, including their leader Pip, and cutting off one of Seras' arms and blinding her, Seras drinks Pip's blood, and turns into a terrifying blur of vampiric violence who kills Zorin and her entire unit single-handedly.
  • Alucard decided to play this trope for shits and giggles if his Twitter is anything to go by.
    TheCrimsonFuckr: Sometimes I take the form of an 8-year-old and get in windowless vans with strangers. If they're legit, I get candy and PlayStation. If not, I get to eat a child molester. Win-win!
    Although for some reason, they always have the faintest aftertaste of communion wafers.
• In Lelouch of the Apotheosis, V.V. decides to keep Lelouch in line by kidnapping Nunnally, doing so himself because they seem to have Mao on their side given how flawless their security is. In reality, Nunnally has a Geass that lets her see everything within a mile of her which recently hit rampancy, which also lets her see an individual's future. When she notices she can't see a young boy's future, Nunnally realizes he's an immortal like C.C. and kills him herself. Both Charles and Marianne laugh themselves sick at the fact V.V. was killed by little Nunnally, especially since he could have avoided his fate if he'd investigated properly.
• In Idunn's Apple Pie, the Red Skull discovers that Captain America has a wife and son, and decides to take Revenge by Proxy on them. As it turns out, though, his informant (Loki) deliberately neglected a very important fact. Specifically, that the woman who Captain America married was Loki's daughter Hela, the Asgardian Queen of the Dead. By the time Steve and SHIELD arrive on the scene, the HYDRA troops are all dead or unconscious, both Hela and Bucky (her and Steve's son) are totally unhurt, and the Red Skull has had his arms and legs cut off and been stuffed into a trash can.
• In the first chapter of A Peaceful Afterlife, a demon tries to mug Yoshikage Kira, who retains his Stand's powers. Kira turns his money into a bomb and annihilates the thug.
• Zim the Warlord: Irken Reversion: After Zim starts interning at Membrane Labs, some thugs corner him on the streets at gunpoint and try to force him to help them rob the facility. Zim responds by cutting off the hands holding their guns; three of them end up dead, while the fourth is taken prisoner in Zim's base and subjected to a Fate Worse than Death.
  Zim: You all really thought you were the monsters here?
• Before the events of Sons of Liberty, Todd pickpocket from a stranger in New York, and end up taking an ID saying 'SHIELD, Colonel Nick Fury, Director'. Thankfully for his sake, Fury took back the ID and left the terrified teen. When he meets Todd and the Brotherhood, he states that he did so since he was impressed at his ability and that taking him to the cops would have brought trouble to both of them.
• In Wilhuff Tarkin, Hero of the Rebellion, the encounter between Tarkin and the coalition of Tusken tribes has three examples:
  • The Tusken were ready to attack the moisture farms around Anchorhead, and only knew of the settlers, and couldn't know that the Grand Moff of the Outer Rim was there to snap his niece out of her depression. All in all, they were lucky he found Orbital Bombardment excessive and instead came up with a plan to decimate them while also breaking the coalition and leave the survivors traumatized.
  • Tarkin's plan initially goes well... Then the main Tusken's chief pulls out a lightsaber, as he's actually the Tusken-born Jedi Master A'sharad Hett. Tarkin quickly comes up with a way to deal with him, but it's implied that if plan b had failed he would have gone for the orbital bombardment route, and same if he had known about that surprise in the first place.
  • Had Tarkin not intervened first, the Tusken would have been faced with Obi-Wan Kenobi, who would have made short work of the chief and chased away the rest. In fact a later chapter reveals he was already walking to their camp, and only Tarkin having a speeder and thus arriving first kept him from doing the job himself.
• With This Ring:
  • Happens with a twist when the attackers aren't thugs, but rookie Green Lanterns, basically interstellar police officers. However, they were supposed to be continuing basic training, not freaking out at the appearance of an Orange Lantern and attacking him on sight. If they had checked their databases, they would have known, not only that he had an appointment, but also that he has Enlightenment Super Powers and has bonded with the universal embodiment of avarice, resulting in his soul being largely made of orange light — meaning that even five on one, it only takes seconds before they're chained up and he's holding all their power rings.
  • There's a more straightforward example when Paul is strolling incognito through Gotham and doesn't bother to cross the street to avoid three teenagers. One of them confronts him and starts mouthing off, then shoving him — to absolutely no effect — and then notices his glowing orange eyes. And ability to teleport. No hard feelings, though; Paul just smiles at them, suggests that they all keep things peaceful, and hands them a pizza he was keeping in subspace, which terrifies them more than ever.
• In the Grounded Lightning some thugs in Ba-Sing-Se decide to try and rape a cute girl. As their target is Azula, they're quickly burned to death.
• Point Me at the Skyrim: While making their way back to Helgen, Victoria Dallon and Sevitus are ambushed by a group of bandits. Victoria gives them the option to turn back and run. They don't take it. Cue epic beat down with Victoria not even having to lift a single finger.
• In Ere we go, Pluz Ultra!, a trio of random thugs attempt to mug Toshinori Yagi. Luckily for them, he's out of time for the day and can't transform into All-Might. Unluckily for them, Izuku is nearby and smashes them himself.
  • Later, a pair of criminals try to murder Inko. When they refuse her insistence that they politely leave (and fix the door they broke), she presses a little red button that causes nine minigun turrets to pop out of various locations. Inko then warns them that they're merely the least lethal security measure her home has.
• In the Invader Zim fandom, a common plot for anti-Gaz fanfics is for her to attack a supernatural being or other creature for annoying her, who then shows her its true power by doing something either painful or humiliating to her. For example, in Misery Loves Company, she shoves and yells at a woman in a cemetery, who turns out to be a witch far more powerful than her. She ends up kidnapping Gaz, making her run through a gauntlet of humiliating booby traps, and wiping her memories to adopt her as her new child.
• In The Wizard of Gotham, Vernon Dursley tries to attack the intruder who barged into his family's house. Said intruder happens to be Batman. You can guess how it goes.
• Bakery "Enemies": A robber attacks a bakery that happens to be staffed by Marinette (Ladybug) and Adrien (Cat Noir). They take him down in about two minutes.
• A Darker Path: Sophia ignores Taylor's Implied Death Threat and decides to "show her her place". Taylor quickly proves both willing and able to follow through with her new "Path to Ending" power, using Combat Clairvoyance to brutally kill Sophia without taking even slight damage in return.
• Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse:
  • Our heroes the Kamikaze Pirates actually fall afoul of this in chapter 18, when they pull a Black-Tie Infiltration of the birthday party of an island governor who has recently beem promoted to the rank of Navy Commodore, having come to believe that the Navy are largely made up of corrupt, ineffectual weaklings. It turns out that the man they are intent on robbing, one Baron Sukumvit, is actually a proud scion of a family that has been hunting Grand Line beasts and Zoan-using pirate captains for fun for generations, and he earned his rank the old-fashioned way. Ranma's only forewarning is when the Baron reacts to Ranma's declaration of being a pirate captain with the attitude of a kid getting a much-anticipated present before the Baron delivers a brutal Curb-Stomp Battle that Ranma narrowly escapes from.
  • In chapter 20, a young boy named Anaguma smuggles himself onto the Kamikaze Pirates' ship in hopes of taking one down for a bounty, as he thought they looked like the weakest crew gathered for the Dead End Race. The Kamikazes, at this point, include over half a dozen different Badass Normals, an Animorphism-using Empowered Badass Normal in Shampoo, and Miriam. A giant shark woman who is literally big enough to pick Anaguma up by the scruff of his neck between forefinger and thumb. Upon seeing her face to face, Anaguma immediately starts begging her not to eat him. And that's after Shampoo nonchalantly dodges Anaguma's attempt to shoot him and hauls him onto the deck like a bag of potatoes.
• It's Always The Quiet Ones: Suffice to say, Marietta and her fellow bully would never have picked on Luna if they knew she could summon Eldritch Abominations from the deep with her mother's family spell.
• Vigilantes' Dawn: Barton Mathis tries to kidnap Laurel Lance like he did in canon. Unfortunately for him, in this AU Laurel is the one who went on the Gambit with Oliver instead of Sara, and thus the one who ended up in the League of Assassins before deserting to rejoin Oliver. All Mathis gets for his troubles is a broken nose and a quick trip back to Iron Heights.

Films — Animation

• In A Bug's Life, near the end, Hopper attempts to antagonize a bird that he believed to be "another one of Flik's bird tricks". He realized his mistake when he discovers the bird is actually real.
• Superman/Batman: Apocalypse features a naked Kara Zor-El wandering confused into an alley just after arriving on Earth and being spotted by three workers. One decides to play Lothario and gets his ass kicked. The second tries to help his friend. The third wisely proclaims he's not with the other two and offers her his coat.
• Batman and Harley Quinn: Harley has been keeping a low profile by working at "Superbabes", a diner with waitresses dressed in sexed-up versions of superheroine/villainess costumes, wearing a skimpy version of her own outfit. A customer decides to cop a feel, and finds out the hard way that she's the real Harley Quinn.

Gamebooks

• In Appointment with F.E.A.R., the main character (who is a superhero) is approached by criminals who want to mug him/her. If you fight them, you out yourself and have to give up your career as a superhero, which leads to a bad ending (albeit one that's quite a bit less dark than the other bad endings); only by letting them mug you can you continue playing.
• In the Lone Wolf series, when in "civilized" parts of the world rather than evil fortresses or the wilderness, various rogues trying to mug the hero is a common type of fight encounter. It rarely ends well for them. In later books, some of those fights aren't even played out — there is just an off-hand mention of Lone Wolf leaving a few dead brigands behind.

Music

• The premise of the song "Earth's Fire Breathing Daughter" by Leslie Fish. The titular sort-of-demigoddess entity buys a house in California with her coven and start enacting pagan rites. Neighbors complain and send the police after them on false drug charges. She triggers an earthquake and mudslide that kills the entire police force and destroys all the surrounding houses, while of course leaving hers entirely intact. (They deserve it.)
• Joe Bethancourt's "I'll See Your Six" recounts just such a situation. In this case, the "monster" was a young lady who's not only carrying a broadsword, but knew how to use it, and was wearing chain armor. (See Real Life section for details - yes, it happened.)
• Mercedes Lackey wrote a song called "Threes" about the trope, then reworked it and used it in the novel "Oathbound".
• In the Big L song "Lifestylez Ov Da Poor and Dangerous", he boasts that "once a burglar broke into my house, and I robbed him!".
• Jim Croce's "Leroy Brown" and "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" had the titular tough guys taken down by tougher guys than them.
  • Leroy was so badass he could have any woman he wanted, and their boyfriends were too scared of Leroy to stop him; until he kissed a girl named Doris and her husband beat Leroy to a pulp.
  • Jim was a pool hustler who also intimidated everyone by being very large. When he hustles a country boy nicknamed "Slim", Slim tracks down Jim, and the song becomes "You Don't Mess Around with Slim".
• In Voltaire's "Mechanical Girl", a tinker builds the titular mechanical girl in memory of his deceased daughter. When he presents his masterpiece to the king, the king has the tinker thrown into the castle moat and takes the mechanical girl to be his queen. All goes well until he kisses her on the cheek that night... whereupon the mechanical girl transforms into a Humongous Mecha with a Hyperspace Arsenal, obliterates the kingdom, and goes back to live happily ever after with her father.
  "So you see, the moral of the story is: Never take a child away from a loving parent. Especially not ones who make children who shoot rockets from their eyes."
• In the early Insane Clown Posse (when they were still called "Inner City Posse") song "Gangsta Codes", Violent J, almost immediately after obtaining a pistol, goes to rob a cafe, only to find out that the owners are packing AK-47s and shotguns. He runs immediately.

Music Videos

• The music video for Skrillex's "First of the Year (Equinox)" is about a pedophile choosing the absolute worst victim possible.

Myths & Religion

• Older Than Feudalism: This happened to Odysseus a few times in The Odyssey.
• Theseus basically started his heroic career by dealing with a series of robbers on his way to Athens.
• Contrast with Oedipus, who was much the same, only it was people who cut him off in traffic instead of robbers.
• In Roman mythology, the son of the Etruscan king of Rome took it into his head to rape a respectable Roman woman. Rome soon became a republic.
• Greek Mythology:
  • Hm, who is this impossibly beautiful woman surrounded by several almost as beautiful women, in the middle of the forest, bathing? Oh who cares, let's peep on them some more. It's not like they're an impossibly powerful goddess and her followers who could turn me into a stag and set my own hounds on me because she's incredibly protective of her chastity...
  • Dionysus was seized by pirates, who took him for a young nobleman and planned to either ransom him or sell him as a slave. However, one of the crewmen recognized him as a god and begged his companions to set him free. Unfortunately for them, they refused to listen and soon found their oars bound by ivy and themselves attacked by panthers and lions. To save themselves, they jumped out of the ship and were changed into dolphins. The only one spared was Acoetes, the one man who argued for freeing Dionysus. When they got back to shore, Acoetes become one of Dionysus' priests.
  • The unkillable bronze giant Talos had the habit of throwing rocks at all ships coming close to Crete, as he couldn't tell seafarers from invaders. Then one day he started his act with the Argos... And the witch Medea, that was on board with her husband Jason and his Argonauts, killed him with a look (either by hypnotizing him so he'd pull the pin keeping his Ichor in or causing him so much pain he pulled the pin and killed himself rather than getting looked at anymore).
• Geirrod, a Norse robber-king, nearly rode down a lone wanderer on the road to his castle. When the same wanderer came to the castle asking for food and drink, Geirrod allowed him entry as per custom, but demanded he sing for his supper; displeased by the traveler's song lambasting cruel leaders and thieves, he ordered the man burned to death. Unfortunately for Geirrod, Odin the All-Father is fireproof, and very unforgiving of false hospitality: he turned the bandit-king and his vassals into wild beasts, and raised Geirrod's good-hearted brother to the throne.

Roleplay

• In Darwin's Soldiers, some punks tried to pick a fight with Aimee. She looks completely harmless, as she is missing both arms and has them replaced with prosthetic limbs. They found out the hard way (IE death) that not only is she a skilled fighter, her artificial arms give her enough strength to crush the barrel of a pistol with almost no effort.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: Most people with the Gift of magic innately inspire distrust and dislike, doubly so with the Blatant Gift flaw. Coupled with the secretive nature of Magical Society, this means that even an Archmage who visits a mundane town needs to make special arrangements not to be treated like garbage or barred outright.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Metallic dragons intentionally invoke this trope. One of their favorite tricks in combating evil is to use their Shapeshifting ability (many metallics have this upon birth) to turn into something that seems weak. When some evil idiot takes the bait, they don't have very long to live. It's actually a part of their mythology: one story involves an apparently harmless old man who would entertain travelers with his seven trained canaries. Then a band of ogres, led by an ogre mage, started down the road to kill or rob all the folks on it... and found that the old man was the metallic dragon god Bahamut, and those canaries were all great wyrm gold dragons in disguise.
  • Al-Qadim has a tale about "why dragons so rarely appear over the place". A big red from the North flew in, only to immediately get himself into troubles with the local populace. Eventually, he was reduced to telling his woes to the next creature he met. The "child" heard the story, gently told the dragon those people did in fact go easy on him because he doesn't know better and there's folk whom they obey without question — and helped the poor battered, hungry, and tired lizard, returning him to his sweet home. On an intercontinental guided whirlwind. The moral, of course, is "try not to annoy genies or, just in case, anyone."
  • Forgotten Realms: On top of "usual" dangers (such as archmages going about their private business in magical disguise or creatures that would send townpeople into a screaming run if they didn't resort to mimicry), there are many people who are well aware of their world's trends and hold a lot of power while not caring at all to advertise it.
    If you accost a barefoot laborer digging in the mud of a turnip field and stained glass golems suddenly lurch out of nearby sheds or the columns of a barn come to life, and gemstones float out of the man's pockets to circle his head and spit lightning at you — well, you've found one of those fabled jewelers of Irl...
  • There's also a possibility of Urban Encounters with Muggers all being multiple levels below the party.
• Exalted:
  • Unfortunately for the various monsters, hostile beings, and generally unsavory types across Creation, conditions and circumstances can result in this being an easy mistake to make. There are charms that allow the titular Exalts to disguise themselves in impossible ways and others which let them keep their weapons and armor hidden in Elsewhere, ready to be used at a moment's notice with only a minor expenditure of essence. As a result, attackers might not discover that the short, cute, small-framed teenaged girl they are trying to mug/capture to sell as a slave/etc., is actually a someone who can beat up gods, wields a ginormous golden sword, and is perfectly capable of reducing them to paste — or, if they're an Infernal and/or feeling like indulging in a little overkill, a smoking crater in the ground — until it's too late. If said muggers are lucky and possessed of a moderate amount of sense, the Exalt will just flare their Caste Mark or Anima Banner and scare them off. Jury is still out as to whether or not it's more satisfying than simply beating the stuffing out of them. Or flashing your caste mark and kill them while they are too busy soiling themselves...
  • This happens in a pre-chapter comic in one of the sourcebooks; a sea god and his giant talking dog/fish steed come across a shipwreck survivor and discuss whether or not to keep him as a Sex Slave, only for it to turn out the survivor was Cathak Drogath, a Dragon-Blooded. The last panel shows the fishdog with a new black eye and issuing the latest of several apologies, with the Drogath standing on his back and the sea god nowhere in sight.
• GURPS: The 4th edition of GURPS Magic introduces the chapter on fire magic with a story about a wizard in a modern setting having a knife put on her throat in a mugging. Unfortunately for the mugger, she can breathe fire.
• In Nomine: An angel or demon's abilities remain the same regardless of what their earthly Vessel happens to look like — which means that 9-year-old girl on the playground you just tried to abduct could actually be a 700-year-old Malakite warrior angel who considers you practice. At best. This becomes even more so with Kyriotates and Shedim, who possess ordinary mortals, using their celestial abilities through a host. So that 90-year-old grandpa who really was so sweet and helpless five minutes ago is now anything but when a Shedite of Death is in the driver's seat...
• Old World of Darkness:
  • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, most Garou look like normal human beings while in homid form and normal wolves in lupus form; however, an attacker will get a nasty surprise when their would-be victim transforms into an eight-foot-tall clawed killing machine. Variants of this apply to all fera save perhaps the Kitsune (werefoxes), who find it more effective to just start tossing spells.
  • In Spiritual Successor Werewolf: The Forsaken, this is significantly more inevitable due to shifting being significantly less voluntary. After a drop or two on the morality meter, a simple insult can be enough to turn a player character into a spree-murdering rage beast without the player having any control over the scene.
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade, it's very satisfying to, after your Ventrue businessman has been stopped in transit by robbers with shotguns, take their blast in the chest, get up without any visible effect, and rip them into shreds. This is noted to be one of the main reasons why Ventrue take Fortitude.^note One of the Vampire: The Masquerade books listed this as being the result of a botched roll while hunting for blood. The character ends up setting upon someone who is too much to handle (either another supernatural being or an inordinately prepared mortal), and a beating takes place instead of a meal.
  • This is bound to happen in the New World of Darkness games: it's a Crapsack World with half a dozen flavours of human-looking supernatural. Special mention goes to the Prometheans: soulless reanimated corpses, trying to learn how to be human, but who are inhumanly powerful and spread a Hate Plague against themselves wherever they go. Most of their alchemical Refinements require prolonged study; the inevitable Dragon-bullying they face is why any Promethean can instantly adopt the Refinement of Tin and say to hell with you all.
• Shadowrun:
  • Considering how ultra-antagonistic gangs are in-universe, random encounters for new players is pretty much all about this. The Halloweeners are this trope invoked for even the squishiest of mage or decker.
  • Subverted in Kaloon's Walled City. The place is so vicious that literal monsters like Insect Spirits actually do get successfully mugged if they make the mistake of going there.
• In any of the Star Wars RPGs, a Jedi can look like anything. Keep that in mind when the off-world stranger you're harassing in a bar says, "You really don't want to do this." It only gets more fun if the hapless dopes tick off a disguised Sith instead.
• In Traveller, Vargr hardly ever raid Zhodani. The reason why is that when they do, they know that the Zhodani will take years tracking down the perps. Then when they do this, their retribution will be sure, whether it takes the form of Death from Above or the more frightening form of kidnapping Vargr and brainwashing them.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In the RPG Dark Heresy, this is actually the PCs' job. And it has the expected results until you figure out that flipping off a Daemon is a Bad Plan and maybe you should try shooting the guy that just summoned it in the head. From over there. Waaay over there.
  • A more human example, the fluff sometimes makes notes of many former Imperial Guardsmen settling down on planets they conquered. This led to some robbers finding out the hard way that a bar called The 127th is named after a certain platoon, that the grumpy old men are veterans of battles against unimaginable horrors, and that the lasgun above the bar is not a replica.
  • The Tau Empire saw these Imperial worlds right next to their territory, annexed them without much difficulty and figured that the Imperium must be comparable to their own domain in scope and size. That is, until they got hit with the Damocles Gulf Crusade, realized that the Imperium of Man is several orders of magnitude larger and more powerful and the Crusade was but a mere fraction of their strength, and that the only reason the Tau is still alive is because The Imperium is too busy fighting wars with everyone else in the galaxy. The arrival of Hive Fleet Behemoth forced the Imperium into a peace treaty with the Tau and letting them go as buffer states, but ever since that the Tau must tread lightly lest the Imperium sends a larger Crusade that might actually wipe them.

Theatre

• In Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore, the sailor Richard Dauntless introduces himself with a song about how his own ship (a revenue sloop) attacks what they think is a French merchantman, but turns out to be a frigate (i.e., a warship far better armed than a sloop) with some accurate gunners on board. In charming rhyme, he explains how their captain decides to spare the poor Frenchies by running away very, very fast.

Urban Legends

• Speaking of pirates, as late as 1630, there were two recorded villages in England that had the skin of a captured raider nailed to their church door. At least one of those villages wouldn't actually count as this trope, since a few years ago someone decided to run some tests on a fragment that had survived around one of the nail and found that it was actually de-haired calf skin. It was probably nailed to the door and the rumour spread around as a form of psychological warfare against potential raiders.
• There is also a famous story under Aikikai (practitioners of Aikido) that one of Osensei's original students was nearly robbed in the Paris subway... emphasis on the "nearly." Imagine a seventy-something year old Japanese sitting alone in the subway, when three would-be muggers showed up with knives, demanding his money. Then imagine the old frail man simply snapping their wrists in precise, efficent motions.
• The U.S. military holds very large areas of desert in the southwest that are used for training exercises. The areas are bigger than they really need, so some parts are used rarely. Meth labs sometimes move in and fight small-scale gang wars... until they accidentally fire on real soldiers, and then they learn about things like indirect mortar fire and air support.
• One story that's made the rounds on the internet is as follows; a group of Ku Klux Klansmen in Texas heard that some Pagans were holding a ritual out in the woods somewhere and decided to go and harass them. Finding the spot where the other vehicles were parked, they donned their hoods, assembled a cross, and strode off into the woods, confident that they'd scare any remaining pants off the fluffybunny Pagans. To their surprise, they ended up staring down the business end of at least two spears, a couple of swords, assorted knives, and more than one firearm. They'd crashed an Asatru ^note Norse Reconstructionist blot, and didn't realize that not all Pagans are pacifists. From somewhere behind the hardware, a voice called out: "If that cross goes up, you're getting nailed to it. I've got my hammer ^note as in warhammer right here..."
  The Klansmen left in a bit of a hurry, it's said.
  • The Ku Klux Klan ended up at the receiving end of something much more unexpected in 1933, when they tried to run Italian immigrants out of from Vineland (New Jersey). Until then, Italian immigrants in the US had taken discrimination and lynching with little resistance, because they were outnumbered by a too much large margin. This time, however, the Klan took on 20% of Vineland's population, and the Italians ran the Klan out. The Klan's influence in Vineland disappeared overnight.
  • When the Klan went to Robeson County, NC, and tried conclusion with the Lumbee Indians' tribal lacrosse team, something similar happened. In most of the languages of the Eastern Woodlands tribes, the word for lacrosse translates as "younger brother of war".
• There is a story popular in the SCA about a female member who was walking home from an event in Central Park in the 1980s. She hadn't taken off her armor, just wrapped a cloak around herself and put her helmet in her bag. She was accosted by a disreputable sort wielding a switchblade and making threats. She said "A six-inch knife?", opened her cloak, and drew her sword. "I'll see your six and raise you thirty-five."
  • Another SCA story; A group wanted to hold fight practice with functional replica weaponry. This required a few permits and a change of venue from their regular park. There was one available, but the police warned them that the local motorcycle gang considered it their turf and may not take too kindly to strangers. Seeing no other options, the SCA risked it. Sure enough, the motorcycle club showed up and started hassling the re-creationists. Seems that the battle pikes and other implements that were useful for removing mounted knights from their horses worked just as well for taking riders off their hogs.
• An obsessive stalker (the genders change with every telling) sets their sights on a target they're supposedly in love with. They ignore every warning they receive, work tirelessly around every obstacle, be it well-meaning friend or family member, police officer trying to do their job, even rumors about the object of their affection. All the while the stalker dreams of taking them and torturing them — all out of love, of course. Then, after overcoming everything in their way, the stalker finally has the one they desire most alone and in front of them. Then, something goes wrong. Instead of being afraid, the victim is smiling. As it turns out, they're an even worse monster than the stalker and by getting them alone, the stalker has ensured that no one will be able to hear them scream. The stalker is never seen again.
• An often-repeated and likely-apocryphal tale from the Vietnam War involves a US Navy frigate, usually said to be the USS Barbey or USS Bronsten (the former is unlikely, as it wasn't commissioned until 1972), patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast during the war. NVA shore batteries and patrol boats sometimes attacked US ships near the coast, which invariably resulted in a curb-stomp battle at sea but still posed a threat to unwary US warships, so the frigate was on high alert. At some point during the night, the frigate's surface-search radar picks up a large contact closing in on them. Lookouts soon confirm a silhouette in the darkness. The frigate has been ordered to operate under radio silence, so a signal light is used to hail the unidentified ship with Morse Code: "UNIDENTIFIED VESSEL, THIS IS USS BARBEY. IDENTIFY YOURSELF." There is no response. The frigate repeats her message, again no response. Finally, the frigate signals a warning: "UNIDENTIFIED VESSEL, THIS IS USS BARBEY. IDENTIFY YOURSELF IMMEDIATELY OR WE WILL OPEN FIRE." By now, the "scope-dopes" can tell that the radar signature is REALLY big, and the lookouts are saying the same thing. After a pregnant pause, the other ship finally replies: "USS BARBEY, THIS IS USS NEW JERSEY. YOU MAY FIRE WHEN READY."
  • There are innumerable versions of this, usually jokes on neighboring countries. The most popular tends to be a battleship or carrier from a country of the teller's choice vs. a mysterious intruder off the teller's own coast. The carrier declares its credentials, lists its wide variety of fire- and airpower, and demands the intruder move aside before it is run down. The response: "This is a lighthouse. Your move." So many versions of this were told about the US Navy that the Navy's website used to have a page debunking it.

Visual Novels

• Ikemen Sengoku: This turns out to be an important part of Hideyoshi's backstory; when he was living as a vagabond and desperate for money, he attempted to rob a rich young man passing by. Said man happened to be Nobunaga Oda, who promptly kicked his ass and gave him a lecture on wasting his life instead of trying to better himself that inspired Hideyoshi to turn his life around and work his way up to become Nobunaga's right-hand man.
• In Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai! S, a poor robber tries to hold up a restaurant. Who's currently in the restaurant? Among others, Momoyo, Tsubame, Yoshitsune, Benkei, Shakaido, Tesshin, Lu, Hume & Claudio. Basically, all the absolutely strongest fighters in the game. Oh, and the girl he took hostage, Seiso, just sent him flying out the door with a light shove too. Poor bastard then gets run over by her robot bike.
• In Spirit Hunter: NG, Maruhashi picks a fight with the protagonist Akira at the start of the game, bolstered by his connection to the Amanome family. He's unaware that a) Akira has years of experience as an underground street fighter, and b) Akira is best friends with Seiji Amanome, aka Maruhashi's superior. He quickly goes down, and later on, apologizes profusely to Akira for his mistake.
• Tsukihime: Nvrnsqr Chaos believes Shiki Tohno to be an ordinary high school age boy with a knife, and torments him a bit, finding pleasure in the kid pathetically struggling against the inevitable before he eats him. What Nvrnsqr doesn't know is that Shiki is probably the only person on the planet who can bypass his regeneration mechanism, and is thus among the few capable of killing him. Which is exactly what Shiki proceeds to do.

Web Animation

• ASDF Movie 4, to the mugger's confusion.
• ATTACK on MIKA:This chapter has an example where the "monster" actually wants to help. Hideo demands an unsuspecting Jin to take him to the hospital for "tripping" him. When Jin turns to help him, Hideo sees the latter's scary face and changes his mind, running like hell.
• In the third episode of Bro Trip 40,000, a spinoff of If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, a Commissar attempts to execute an unruly Ogryn in the usual manner. Said "Ogryn" is actually Son of the Emperor Corvus Corax, who simply shrugs off the explosive bullet. And the firing squad. And the BFG. Corax doesn't kill the Commissar because he's a Death Seeker who doesn't care enough about his own life. But he does care about the people suffering under the planet's soul-crushing system, and easily persuades them to rise up in arms. The Commissar who orders his execution is the first casualty of the revolution — by his own firing squad, no less.
• DEATH BATTLE!: Most of these fights occur with the loser seriously underestimating their opponent. They paid the price with their lives.
  • Barry Allen vs. Quicksilver starts off with Quicksliver gloating about his racing prowess and punches the Flash in the attempt to cheat. Once over the pacfic ocean, Barry proves that he was holding back the entire time and gives him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. It ends with Quicksliver accidentally dying by being impaled on a Japanese statue.
  • Carnage vs. Lucy starts off with Lucy (as Nyu) waiting for a train... whose passengers have been slaughtered by Carnage. As soon as the doors open, Carnage immediately lunges at the innocent-looking horned girl. He bites off more than he can chew when she stops him midair and tears him to pieces with her vectors (which didn't stick at all) and when she later hits him with a nuclear bomb-level attack (which did).
  • Aang vs. Edward Elric has Edward falsely accusing Aang of calling him short and tries to kill him for it. He pays the price when Aang goes into the Avatar State and obliterates him with an attack of all four elements.
  • After getting his ice cream destroyed when Sailor Galaxia blew up the Earth while he was on it, Beerus confronts her. Her response? Insult him by poking his eyes. He quickly teaches her he was not to be messed with by turning her into Ludicrous Gibs and having her pieces be sucked into a black hole.
  • Venom vs. Crona has Venom encounter Crona and Ragnarok entering the church while he was praying and thinking Crona would be easy prey, attack them. Unfortunately for them, Crona's sound-based weapon ensured Venom's demise (although the first attempt was shrugged off due to Venom being a distance away and had a Healing Factor, the next attempt succeeded with Venom being pinned down unable to escape a close-up max power attack from Crona's soundwave attack).
  • The Incredible Hulk vs. Broly starts off with Hulk going out of his way to deliberately provoke a meditating Broly for no reason other than simple bull-headed bravado. When the fighting starts, Broly quickly closes the power gap between them and rips his head off. It evolves into Bullying a Dragon when the Hulk continues to attack and goad Broly despite this, who later proceeds to overwhelm and obliterate him so thoroughly that even his Resurrective Immortality couldn’t bring him back.
  • During their match up, Homelander provokes Omni-Man via breaking into his home and killing his wife, assuming that he could just intimidate Omni-Man into obeying his demands to leave. Omni-Man, however, is barely phased by Homelander's threats and quickly shows the Number One Supe just how outclassed he in one of the shortest fights of the show's history, which results in a very nasty death for Homelander, who only realizes how royally he screwed up seconds before Omni-Man ends him. The hosts point this out in the post-fight analysis, comparing the fight to a bully picking a fight with a trained soldier.
  • After pulling a Kill Steal on him, Michael Myers attempts to make Jason Voorhees his next victim. As he quickly learns, however, Jason is borderline unkillable and has zero problems matching Michael in both strength and speed. In the end, Jason winds up making Michael his own victim.
• Gossip City: Two bullies forcibly pull up Amane's long-sleeved shirt only to reveal tattooed arms. Much to their dismay, Amane herself tells them that she is the daughter of a Yakuza boss.
• In the prologue for a 1 Minute Melee, Dio Brando, the loser of a previous melee, tries to suck the blood of the first person to get near his beaten body. Unfortunately for him, that first person is none other than Kenshiro, who counters The World and dropkicks Dio out of the scene.
• RWBY: In the very first episode, some thugs are robbing a store that main character Ruby Rose just happens to be in. When one of them brings her attention away from her headphones and magazine by trying to get her to put her hands up, she responds by throwing the offending man across the room and attacking the entire group.

  Ruby: Are you... robbing me?
  Thug: Yes!
  Ruby: Ohhhh... [smiles]

• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers:
  • Mario proceed to piss off Gabe Newell in R64: Mario The Waiter even though he could get in trouble very easily (he burnt down the entire diner and then tried denying it). Not surprisingly, he gets sent to a place with Gabe's face on it and has Big Smoke attack him for it.
  • The series's direct Spinoff, Sunset Paradise, proves that just because she's currently part of the spin-off, it doesn't mean that Meggy Spletzer lost any badassness, if the shark that stole her catch and got subsequently hung up by its tail and the Spud Gang having to fight her off when they previously could breeze though everyone else has anything to say.

Web Original

• In Aim High, bullies of Fairview High are not aware that the guy that they pick on is a government spy and assassin.
• In Dead West, this sometimes happens. Nice examples include a bunch of thugs attacking a group of arictocrat doctors-in-training on a charity night (they were making rounds in the worst part of Paris, treating everyone who needed their services). Most of the group were harmless enough, but on that particular night the Porcelain Doctor, a Hungarian amateur, and a firegun enthusiast engineer student decided to tag along (and the former two had bodyguards nearby). The incident ended with the "Soft" members of the team patching up their attackers, but we never get a full recount of the action. Usually, some idiots try to harrass the Porcelain Doctor, since he is a bit effeminate, and doesn't look really menancing (he is very short for an aristocrat, but average for a commoner, and has a very slim build). The wanna-be-muggers sometimes are able to get off with a warning, but several times it ends badly for them, as Niall has a pretty short fuse, and he is armed with a sword-cane and Psychic Powers.
• In The Fire Never Dies, three deputized Klansmen accuse a black sailor of espionage, beat him up, and throw him into jail. On his own, Seaman Carl Johnson was no threat to them. However, they did not reckon with his CO, one Ernest J. King, who was infamous (both IOTL and ITTL) for his temper, as well as being A Father to His Men. Cue King showing up at the police station the next morning with his ship's entire Marine complement, demanding Johnson's release.
• In the first chapter of Ra, four muggers attempt to kill Laura Ferno, a drunk but very talented mage. Only about two and a half of them survive.
• Not Always Right:
  • Rude customers periodically find out that the employees they are harassing are not to be messed with.
  • Still others apply for jobs and then discover that the employee they were rude to earlier is from human resources... or the manager.
  • A naval lieutenant decides to throw his weight around in a civilian restaurant and makes the mistake of antagonizing another diner... who happens to be a Rear Admiral stationed at the same base.
    "Well, I’m HIS superior, and as soon as I'm out of here, I’ll make sure he lights your a** up."
  • Similarly, lousy employees often discover that they've been acting like a Jerkass in front of a secret shopper or an upper-level manager.
• The trio of bullies that torment Taylor in Worm would probably reconsider what they're doing if they knew that she was secretly a supervillain with a reputation for ruthlessness. Well, two of them would.

Web Videos

• In Break Quest Club, the party gets ambushed in their first ever adventure by bandits. Naturally, they're not remotely prepared for the adventurers to stomp them. It later turns out that Magnus and Freya, their escorted merchants, were actually skilled at magic and trained with a crossbow respectively, and went around as a Bonnie and Clyde style duo, meaning the bandits couldn't have picked a worse target if they tried.
• In the short video "Angela" by DeniseVlogs, a hitchhiker named Richard convinces a woman named Angela to drive him to his destination, but eventually his comments make her uncomfortable and she demands he leaves. He then pulls a gun on her and tries to force her to get into the trunk of her own car — but upon opening the trunk of her car, he finds there is already a dead body in there, immediately after which Angela shoots him in the neck.
• Played with in "Silent Night," another video by DeniseVlogs. When the three burglars chloroform a woman to steal from her house, a man knocks them out and ties them up, threatening them with a gun when they wake up. Initially, the burglars (and the audience) think he's the woman's husband, but he explains that this isn't his house, and they weren't his present they were stealing. He's actually a sadistic serial killer who intended to kill two children, cut up their bodies, and wrap the parts in presents for the parents to find in the morning, but when the burglars came in, he had to kill both parents. Now the people he was intending to scar for life are all dead, so to "fill the void", he intends to kill the burglars. This all gets subverted when the cops arrive, get welcomed in by the woman the "serial killer" supposedly killed, and arrest the burglars. Turns out this man was actually the police chief, and he just wanted to terrify the burglars before they were arrested. This gets subverted again when the police chief and his wife go upstairs and kill a pair of people they'd kidnapped beforehand.
• Gordon Freeman in Freeman's Mind never goes out of his way to attack other humans (aliens are different; that's community service and stress relief) and just wants to escape Black Mesa, but the army still tries to kill him as part of an ill-conceived cover-up. At which point they learn that he's carrying a massive arsenal, is wearing an impenetrable suit of armor, and is totally capable of murdering any soldier not killed by the others' stupidity first.
• In Sword Art Online Abridged a player-killer guild lures Kirito into a trap without realizing his level. One of them does pick up on a worrying sign, but is ignored.
  Um boss? A thought occurs. This guy thought he was going up against Laughing Coffin but he still just brought himself and a...small child. We sure we wanna mess with this guy?
• During the Oingo and Boingo mini-arc of Vaguely Recalling JoJo, Oingo kicks Broly in the face because something about Broly's face ticked him off. Unfortunately, this bites Oingo in the ass, as Broly plans on killing Oingo and Boingo.

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