Summon Bigger Fish

If you can't stop the apocalypse, might as well use it.

"Sometimes the best way to deal with a madman is to send in another madman..."

— Angry Joe, Kickassia

There is Always a Bigger Fish, but sometimes they aren't willing to pop up out of nowhere and get you out of the current mess. That's where this trope comes in. Summon Bigger Fish is when you get another monster/god/whatever to fight the current one, and hope that once the smoke is cleared the one you called will leave you alone or at least be weakened enough by the fight to be taken out with less insane tactics. Sadly, the odds of this making things worse is 50/50 — Evil Is Not a Toy, after all — but then again, once you've crossed the Godzilla Threshold, anything is a viable option.

Remember, this has to be a conscious use of getting another monster. If it appears by accident, or by the monster's own choice, put that example in Always a Bigger Fish instead.

Named for a Running Gag in Darths & Droids.

Compare Mons, Awakening the Sleeping Giant, Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?, Give Chase with Angry Natives, Let's You and Him Fight, Enemy Mine, and Genghis Gambit. See also the Godzilla Threshold for examples of when Summoning Bigger Fish is pretty much the only option left.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Used in Attack on Titan by Armin during the Battle of Trost, after the discovery of a Rogue Titan attacking other Titans. They lure it towards the horde of Titans laying siege to the armory, and hope it'll take care of the problem for them. Once the Rogue Titan is revealed to actually be Eren, his Lovecraftian Superpower becomes a significant tactic when all else fails.
• Digimon Adventure had Tai force Greymon to evolve to defeat an opponent Greymon, resulting in SkullGreymon. Said SkullGreymon proceeds to kill the Greymon and run wild, blowing stuff up and curbstomping the other partner Digimon's attempts to restrain it.
  • In Digimon Tamers, Takato orders Guilmon, both enraged by the murder of Leomon, to digivolve to the Mega form in order to revenge-kill Beelzemon. The result is Megidramon, whose very existence threatens to cause the Digital World to collapse... and Beelzemon thrashes him anyway. Then Guilmon gets a second wind, slide digivolves into Gallantmon, and wins.
  • The fight between Marcus and Thomas in Digimon Data Squad, when Thomas betrays DATS, has their partners ShineGreymon and MirageGaogamon roughly equal in strength, and so an attempt by Marcus to invoke the more powerful Burst Mode is influenced by his rage at Thomas' betrayal; this results in ShineGreymon Ruin Mode, who runs wild before reverting to a DigiEgg; Thomas and MirageGaogamon are forced to retreat.
  • Digimon Fusion Taiki has access to DigiMemories which allow him to summon powerful digimon to use their special abilities, like Leviamon and DarkDramon.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Vegeta's still powerful enough to kill Goku, Krillin, Gohan and Yajirobe even after all the unGodly punishment he took in the climactic battle of the Saiyan saga. In a desperate gambit, Goku tells Gohan to look at the Power Ball in the sky, which transforms him into a raging, uncontrollable giant were-ape (oozaru). Initially, having lost all reason, Oozaru Gohan presents just as much of a threat to the heroes as Vegeta does, but Goku is able to telepathically communicate with him, and sics him on Vegeta.
  • In Dragon Ball Super, Fusion Zamasu becomes an Eldritch Abomination and starts merging with the fabric of the universe, leaving Goku, Vegeta, and Trunks powerless to stop him. Goku resorts to using the button he was given to summon the Omni-King, who proceeds to delete the entire universe (and possibly all 12 of that timeline) to kill him for good.
• In Hellsing we have the enslaved vampire Alucard who works for the Hellsing organisation by hunting vampires. Vampires are overwhelmingly bloodthirsty, superpowered monsters that laugh off human efforts to fight back. Alucard is no exception - if anything, he's worse, and he'd say so himself. In OVA III, he gleefully shreds a small army of innocent police officers because they were ordered by their corrupt bosses to attack him. The only thing that differentiates him from what Hellsing fights is that he's bound to serve Integra, his master, and he's perfectly happy to kill other vampires. Integra says herself in the OVA dub that the best weapon against a vampire is a second, more powerful vampire, and there are none on earth greater than Alucard. There is practically nothing that can stop him, with very few exceptions.
• In Higurashi: When They Cry the heroes eventually need to call the Banken, a military group, for assistance against the weaker Yamainu.
• In Jujutsu Kaisen, Megumi Fushiguro is able to exploit a quirk in how his Ten Shadows Technique works to summon the strongest Shikigami in an emergency. The way the technique is meant to work is by having the sorcerer perform a ritual to summon an uncontrollable version of a Shikigami, then defeat it in single combat, subduing it and earning its loyalty so it may be summoned and controlled in combat. While nothing stops other sorcerers from assisting the summoner, this will invalidate the ritual, so the summoner won't gain control over the Shikigami. During the Shibuya Incident, Fushiguro finds himself cornered by an enemy while severely injured. As a last resort, he decides to initiate the ritual to summon and subdue Mahoroga, the strongest Shikigami which has never been successfully tamed before. While Fushiguro knows that he has no chance of actually winning, he hopes that Mahoroga will at least be able to take down that enemy alongside him. As an added bonus, while Mahoroga proceeds to inflict a One-Hit Kill onto Fushiguro immediately after being summoned, the ritual puts those who die during it into a state of suspended animation until either the Shikigami or every sorcerer involved is defeated, meaning that he's able to be transported to Ieiri, who has Healing Hands and can save his life.
• In My Hero Academia, during the Meta Liberation Army arc, the League of Villains are effectively blackmailed by the titular army into fighting them in order to rescue their broker Giran, meaning that they as a party of 6 will have to fight an entire town's worth of soldiers, otherwise the top Pro Heroes will get tipped to their whereabouts. However, Shigaraki had spent an entire month trying to tame Gigantomachia with very little progress and the Quirk-boosted gargantuan hell-bent on killing him, being able to track him down no matter where he goes with only three hours of grace time for both due to sleep. Shigaraki agrees to the MLA's challenge, but plans to fight it out until Gigantomachia tries to find him and lands smack-dab into the MLA's crossfire, planning to leave him to slaughter everyone and take him down while he's exhausted in a final attempt to tame him.
• A definite example in Naruto is Manda, the giant snake. Orochimaru and Kabuto summon him to fight Jiraiya and Tsunade, but these summons have a tendency to be rather unreliable, and Manda is by far the worst; once demanding 100 human sacrifices to pay for his service. Considering Orochimaru lost his arms and was incapable of using jutsu, they were desperately hoping he didn't betray them. Ultimately, Sasuke summons Manda and mind-controls him to act as a shield against Deidara's ultimate jutsu. Manda is killed by the resulting explosion, effectively preventing any betrayal.
• It doesn't seem that way in Neon Genesis Evangelion until it turns out that the Evas are clones of the First Angel and "mother" of them all, Adam.
• The World Government in One Piece get it in their heads that the only way to compete with the power held by the big wig pirates in the new world is to enlist the Seven Warlords of the Sea, who are essentially government sanctioned pirates, to fight for their side. So essentially, they're privateers. If you'll recall many of the most famous pirates started out as privateers and then were retconned into pirates by the governments withdrawing support. In One Piece, that happened backwards.
• In the Pokémon: The Original Series episode "Ghost of Maiden's Peak", when Ash attempts to fight a Gastly using his Squirtle and Bulbasaur. The Gastly summons an illusion of Blastoise and Venusaur, and then goes so far as to combine them into Venustoise, turning his already bigger fishes into one sort of... biggerer fish. It's explained that the pre-evolved forms fear their fully evolved forms to an extent due to some kind of instinct. So making them bigger and more badass is going to cause them to panic.
• Slayers:
  • Lina calls on power from Shabranigdo, the God of Evil, to defeat lesser monsters. Twice Lina calls on power from the Lord of Nightmares, the creator of the Slayers multiverse. This is the Giga Slave spell, which, if miscast or if control is lost, could unmake the world. She's just that badass.
  • A variation also occurs. Hellmaster Phibrizzo wants to destroy the entire world and plunge everything into oblivion, and plans to do this by forcing Lina to cast the Giga Slave, which can (as stated above) obliterate the world if the caster loses control. The Giga Slave works by summoning the Lord of Nightmares directly into the caster's body. However, when Lina loses control of the spell, the Lord of Nightmares possesses her and decides to give Phibrizzo the oblivion he desires by erasing him from existence, much to his brief agony.
• Quent in Wolf's Rain fights wolves with Blue... Who's a wolf. Well, half-wolf half-dog, but she looks exactly like one. To be fair, he also uses a shotgun.

Card Games

• The Jurassic Park card game allows you to summon a Tyrannosaurus to scare off the smaller predators, the venom-spitting Dilophosaurus and pack-hunting Velociraptor. Or even another Tyrannosaurus. But then you have to fight off the T. rex as well, after it scares the others off.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • This is the backstory for the Planeswalker Kiora. Her homeland, Zendikar, was torn apart by the Eldrazi. Her plan? Travel around the Multiverse to learn how to summon some eldritch abominations of her own to defeat them! She ultimately assembled a team of the most powerful living Planeswalkers who proceeded to do just that, which amounts to pretty much the same thing.
  • Reef Worm is an almost literal example. When it dies, it summons a bigger monster, which summons an even bigger monster when it dies, which in turns summons a downright enormous monster when it dies.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: In the Hidden Arsenal storyline, as the situation with the Evilswarm gets increasingly worse, some summoners try to call on the goddess Sophia... they succeed, but it turns out Sophia is a Jerkass God who has deliberately made the world crapsack, and thinks it'd be a good idea to just murder everyone else and start over.

Comic Books

• When he's not being used as a villain, this is the major role played by Marvel Comics character Galactus — the Fantastic Four have summoned him to defeat cosmic villains like the Sphinx, his rogue herald Terrax, Ego the Living Planet, Hyperstorm, and Abraxas, and various space-based franchises have used the character for this as well.
• Similarly, DC Comics often shows lesser superheroes calling on The Spectre when mystical evils get way out of hand. In most modern versions of the Justice Society of America, this is essentially the Spectre's role on the team.
• The final issue of Aliens: Life and Death has the luckless human characters targeted by a very angry, heavily armed Engineer who their weapons can't hurt, so what do they do? Well, as one of their number is now host to a fetal Queen alien, they entice the full-grown Alien Queen into protecting its offspring by ripping said Engineer apart...
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy and her slayers are depowered and must fight against the US Army. When all hope seems lost, Buffy summons the goddesses they had previously given their power to in an (ultimately vain) attempt to hide. The goal is two-fold: to have the ginormous goddesses attack the army, and to get their powers back. The plan backfires, however, as not only do the slayers not get their power back, but the goddesses attack both groups indiscriminately. Buffy is finally able to defeat the goddesses after gaining Superman-like powers.
• In the wake of Civil War, in which they were targeted by a bunch of unusually sadistic "cape killers", the Runaways tried to make an alliance with The Kingpin in hopes of keeping the various superhero factions off their backs. It didn't last very long.
• Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things: What do you do when a Corrupt Politician has killed everyone who stood in between him and power? Courtney summons Tommy Rawhide back from the dead to give him a taste of his own medicine.
• In one episode of De Rode Ridder ("The Red Knight"), fairy of light Galaxa does away with prince of darkness Bahaal by summoning what is hinted to be Satan himself. (Yes, De Rode Ridder is that much of a Fantasy Kitchen Sink.)
• Umar is the sister of Dormammu, the Lord of the Dark Dimension. When she confronted Doctor Strange, he, on advice of the Ancient One (his mentor) freed the demon Zom to oppose her. Now, Umar is... pretty bad-ass. She and her brother are the only survivors of the race of energy beings, the Faltine, mainly because they destroyed all the others. She rules the bad half of the Dark Dimension, which is why she is pretty ornery most of the time. She once bedded The Incredible Hulk and... exhausted him to the point where he turned back to Bruce Banner and couldn't Hulk out again. She cracked the world in half rather than traveling around it to get to the Ancient One, the Sorceror Supreme and therefore the most powerful magician in the world, and defeated him soundly. That's how bad-ass she is. When she clapped eyes on the unleashed Zom - who automatically homes in on the most powerful magic-user in the vicinity - she fled like a startled deer, declaring she wouldn't leave the Dark Dimension ever again. Of course, Zom was in turn just as scared of the Living Tribunal, but the latter wasn't summoned, so he doesn't count.
• Doctor Who (Titan): The crossover between the Thirteenth Doctor and Tenth Doctor features two separate, but concurrent, alien attacks. While the Weeping Angels chase down the Tenth Doctor, the Autons are working on their own scheme to take over the Earth. So the Doctors find the head of the Auton hivemind, the Nestene Consciousness, distract it, and wait for the Angel chasing them down to show up and teleport it away. It works.
• To destroy the Avatar that lives under the Pentagon when Flex Mentallo's Reality Warper powers proved to be insufficient, Doom Patrol member Dorothy Spinner summoned the Candlemaker, a far worse Eldritch Abomination to destroy it.
• During Final Crisis, with the vast majority of the human and metahuman population under Darkseid's control, the remnants of Checkmate made a deal with the sentient A.I.s that it had captured over the years - the A.I. would be allowed to roam free in exchange for delivering the "Go" code that would activate over 11 million latent OMACs around the world. Michael Holt then allowed all the O.M.A.C.s to go about their business of neutralizing or killing every metahuman they encountered.
• Boxer decides the only course of action in the Godzilla ongoing IDW comic when Hedorah, Monster X, Space Godzilla, and Gigan attack Earth is to release the trapped Kaiju from Monster Island and free Godzilla from an experimental cage (though he frees himself first).
• In Godzilla: Rage Across Time, when the Mongols invade Japan supported by Gigan and Megalon, a samurai and a ninja are sent to retrieve an artifact from a temple that will let them summon the giant monster, Orochi. Who promptly gets completely annihilated by Godzilla. So the humans go ahead and lure Godzilla over to the Mongols.
• Green Lantern:
  • In Blackest Night, when faced with a Black Lantern version of The Spectre, the heroes come up with the really desperate plan to sic Parallax on him (using Hal Jordan as his host once again).
  • Earlier, the Green Lanterns on Oa are overwhelmed by a Black Lantern swarm, so Guy Gardner decides to release a Red Lantern from the Oan prison and throw it at them. This works for about three panels before the Alpha Lanterns kill the Red Lantern for "escaping". And then the red ring goes after Guy.
  • At the climax of Wrath of the First Lantern, the only way the heroes manage to defeat Valthoom is by Hal Jordan becoming a Black Lantern and summoning Nekron.
• In Hellblazer's All His Engines, John Constantine is charged with killing several demons. He succeeds by feeding them to an Aztec god.
  • Similarly, an early arc has a cult succeed in summoning a truly ancient dragon-god by creating a lesser fear-deity. In this case, the dragon-god summons itself to eat the lesser god.
  • John really likes this strategy. In the Dangerous Habits story arc, he's already pissed off the First of the Fallen, who's waiting for him to die of cancer, so John summons two other Lords of Hell and sells his soul to BOTH of them without the other knowing. Which leads to an early CMOA for Johnny, as he gets to flip off all three of them and walk away smiling.
  • In fact, this trope goes all the way back to his 'origin' at Newcastle. To exorcise one demon from the girl Astra, he and his friends summoned another, who ended up claiming Astra and bringing her to hell.
• Irredeemable: With Plutonian — formerly the world's greatest hero — having gone bad and unleashed a wave of destruction on the planet, the Godzilla Threshold is crossed fast and various factions resort to this trope repeatedly as one of the many ways of trying to stop Plutonian from destroying everything. Each Bigger Fish summoned is more effective then the last:
  • First, the US government summons Orian, an ultra-powerful demon and probably the most feared supervillain in the setting, with the vain hope that he'll kill Plutonian and be easier to deal with afterwards; it almost works, but Qubit has to kill Orian before the job is done, having realized that Orian was planning to summon an army of fellow demons to conquer Earth the instant Plutonian was dead, since there are hardly any other superhumans capable of defeating him.
  • Second, Hornet turns out to have done this posthumously. Years ago, wanting to be Crazy-Prepared for the worst, he made a deal with the Vespan Empire that he would give them the coordinates of several easy-to-conquer worlds in the exchange for them coming to detain Plutonian if he ever turned bad. He called in that favor just before Plutonian killed him, and the Vespans arrive about halfway through to take him into captivity. Unfortunately, one thing leads to another, Plutonian doesn't stay captured, and the Vespans don't really care enough to step in a second time after they already fulfilled their end of the bargain.
  • Third and finally, the governments of the world and the Paradigm resort to releasing the Eleos, a pair of incredibly powerful angelic Reality Warper beings and Plutonian's parents that had been sealed behind a field of energy for years. This works perfectly, as the Eleos are totally benevolent and more then strong enough to defeat Tony then trap him in a place where he can't escape or hurt anyone. The catch is that the Eleos were deliberately not escaping prior to this because the energy field containing them was also containing a shitload of radiation, enough to render Earth lifeless in a matter of days, forcing the Paradigm to find a way to undo the cost of their ace in the hole.
• Used in the Legion of Super-Heroes V3 comics. The Time Trapper is, among other things, the Anthropomorphic Personification of the theory that the universe only goes 'round once. There's another villain, the Infinite Man, who is the embodiment of the theory that the universe runs on an infinite loop. Brainiac 5 brought in the latter to defeat the former.
• Pinkie Pie takes care of the giant spiders in issue #2 of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW) by bringing in Jim the troll.
• In Nick Fury's files regarding Marvel's Secret War, he plans for a worst case scenario of open attack on Latveria that includes using Jessica Drew to control The Sentry and dropping the Hulk and the Punisher on either side of Latveria and seeing who reached the middle first.
• During DC's Our Worlds at War storyline, in order help defeat the forces of Imperiex, Doomsday is released from the can Superman had sealed him in.
• In an issue of Rat-Man our hero was confronted by a robot made specifically to kill superheroes. What did Rat-Man do? He opened a book, an act that summoned Chuck Norris. The robot was promptly destroyed.
• In Scott Pilgrim, when Roxy and Mr. Chau both want to kill Scott, he lures Mr. Chau to Roxy and tricks them into fighting each other. The ploy ultimately fails and Scott is forced to defeat Roxy. Fortunately, Mr. Chau drops his grudge against Scott afterwards.
• Secret Warps: In part 5, Mephichtzarrko-neg summons Doomactego the Stranger Planet to kill the warped heroes. Then reality warps even further, and everyone's too confused by their backstories to fight any more.
• Secret Wars (2015): During Secret Wars 2099, the grandson of Baron Mordo uses Alchemax's virtual unreality device to summon The Dweller in Darkness, which manages to subdue the Hulk and the Silver Surfer, by zapping them with their fears. So the Sub-Mariner just rushes off to get Giganto, the Thing Without Fear. It beats the Dweller up long enough for The Avengers and The Defenders to break Alchemax's portal.
• Space: Punisher ends with Frank facing the people ultimately responsible for his family's death: six renegade Watchers. How does he deal with them? Via a pursuing pissed-off Hulk (an earlier villain was using a supersonic device to drive the Hulk furious and homing in on the source of the sound to make it stop).
• In The Umbrella Academy, The Rumor's solution to a giant berserker Abraham Lincoln statue: A giant John Wilkes Booth statue, complete with a stone derringer. Afterwards, the Booth statue is seen escaping, with the police chasing after him.

Comic Strips

• In Footrot Flats, a mean local boy keeps threatening and goading Rangi into having his like-minded dog fight the protagonist Dog. He backs down when Rangi suggests his dog fight the local stray cat Horse instead.
• In FoxTrot, Paige is writing a fairy tale where she is a self-insert. Her character comes across a trapped troll that suspiciously looks like Jason, and is faced with the choice of freeing it or hoping a boar would come along and eat it. The last panel is Paige asking if they make "boar whistles" that work, presumably, like dog whistles.
• In The Wizard of Id, the wizard uses this to deal with a bandit literally with a summoned big fish.

Fan Works

• All Guardsmen Party: At one point, the Guardsmen end up luring a Chaos-possessed servitor-Titan into combat with a hungry and pissed off Knarloc. It...doesn't quite work as planned.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Godzilla crossover, The Bridge:
  • This pops up in chapter 5. Garble and his gang undergo greed-growth, rapidly forming into full-sized dragons busy leveling a campground and trying to devour its occupants. Cue Rainbow Dash accidentally causing the currently pony-transformed Anguirus to revert to his true form... which is taller, bulkier, and far stronger than the drake pack.
  • This is later done intentionally with both Mothra and Godzilla, respectfully, in two consecutive fights with flocks of gyaos, giving them power surges in order to transform them back into their true giant forms in order to fight off the gyaos.
  • Later on, when Commander Tempest invades Canterlot while most of the heroes are away, Princess Celestia's answer to her fleet is to let Xenilla give a "strong retort".
• Hellsister Trilogy: In the second arc, virtually all heroes of five different universes are battling Darkseid's forces on Apokolips. Darkseid, who has been summoning more and more powerful villains to slow the heroes down, resurrects Trigon. In response, Kid Eternity brings Jim Corrigan back to life. Cue The Spectre materializing and killing Trigon with a single blow.
• Lodestar: How is Scion finished off in the end? By a device Magneto made that summoned Galactus to consume what was left of Magneto's own world, with him trapped on it.
• Luminosity has Bella do this to establish her as a Guile Heroine. James is going to kill her, but has enough flair for the dramatic to leave her alive long enough to talk. She convinces him to take her to the Volturi, who rule vampires and don't like being disturbed. Aro reads his mind, and decides that he's misbehaved and Bella is interesting, so James gets the chop.
• Mendacity: Bon Bon's solution to Chrysalis is to rouse a buggane, a feared magic-eating monster, and to lure it towards the queen.
• The MLP Loops: Possibly accidental version; it's hard to tell, since all the main characters are bored trolls. In one loop, Twilight convinces Ma Hoofield to swear a Pinkie Promise not to attack the McColts. She breaks it without a second thought... and then Pinkie Pie, Chaos Goddess of Parties, appears.
  Twilight gulped. "You broke a Pinkie Promise."
  "I did what now—Oh! That!" Ma grinned. "Sure did!"
  The surrounding areas got very quiet, as if in anticipation of a storm. Twilight reflected for a moment on if she did the right thing, setting Pinkie on them like that, quickly reached the conclusion that nope, she did not, and hid under the nearest tree trunk.
  And then Pinkie popped out of the cake. "Did somepony break a Pinkie Promise? NOPONY breaks a Pinkie Promise!"
  Yep, thought Twilight. Definitely not doing that again.
• Nobody Dies: Rei gets ADAM off her case by tricking him into waking up and pissing off Cthulhu. ADAM still wins, but Cthulhu put up one hell of a fight.
• In The Parselmouth of Gryffindor, Barty Crouch Jr. invokes Fiendfyre — a sentient, indestructible, nigh-incontrollable Fire Elemental — in trying to destroy the nigh-invulnerable Dementors of Azkaban.
• The Pony POV Series has this pop up in the Dark World timeline. How does Apple Bloom's spirit manage to break Discord's control over Applejack? By getting one of the only four beings in existence stronger than Discord to help. While the Father of Alicorns doesn't simply overpower Discord's control, he's still wise enough to help Apple Bloom convince Applejack to change.
• Protectors of the Plot Continuum:
  • One mission involved a Sue who claimed to be the avatar of the goddess Sekhmet. The agents' solution was to invoke the actual goddess, who promptly obliterate her.
  • One mission into a Super Smash Bros./Criminal Minds crossover ended with one of the agents participating baiting Yveltal, the Destruction Pokémon, into wiping out an army of Suvian soldiers.
  • Another agent enlisted the aid of the Puppet to deal with a psychotic Freddy Fazbear replacement.
  • Another crossover mission, this time between Pirates of the Caribbean and The Little Mermaid, had one agent attempt to kill a literal, villainous God Mode Stu. Who nearly killed him in response... and unknowingly enraged said agent's poker buddy so much that she promptly convinced Davy Jones to sic the Kraken upon the Stu and his goons, with predictable results.
• In Rarity Learns To Mind Her Own Business ("Darlings! Help me!"), Rarity is tormented by 'the eyes' (who are at least an metaphor for a Hate Fic writer) who continually traps her in such stories, and she's the only one aware of it. In the sequel, Another Set of Eyes, Pinkie Pie and the rest of the Mane Six realize what's happening, but also that they can't stop the writer themselves. Solution? Pinkie gets the help from another set of eyes beyond the fourth wall, resulting in what amounts to a Divine Conflict between the two both trying to outwrite the other. The heroic eyes ultimately win by virtue of simply being a better writer.
• The Secret Collocation of Alex Mack deals with a character being possessed by an angry god, by waking up a building-sized magical feline that even gods get concerned about.
• In the Jackie Chan Adventures and Teen Titans (2003) fic A Shadow of the Titans:
  • When Jade is sent to break Machete out of prison, only for it to turn into a fight with Raven and Starfire, Jade lets Cinderblock out of his cell in order to keep the Titan girls busy.
  • Jade ends up on the receiving end a few chapters later. After aging herself into an adult and gaining a massive power boost as a result, Jade becomes too tough for the Titans to handle. So, they call in Green Lantern John Stewart to deal with her, Needless to say, she reverses her condition the first chance she gets.
• In the finale of Tealove's Steamy Adventure, the heroes are menaced by a giant, mobile pear tree. They can't take it in a fight, so they ask Fluttershy to summon a flock of fruit bats, who eat the pears. Which somehow kills the tree.
• Z To A features a low-key version of this when Doctor Strange and Loki end up in a magic duel; with most of the team content to watch the fight, Peter reminds them of their priority by asking Wanda to step in, the Scarlet Witch ordering the "Asgardian" and the "Eldritch" to stand down or "learn what Chaos stands for".
• The Unity Saga contains an example, when Thrawn advises the Alliance (or, at that point, New Republic) forces to engage a third (& very hostile) party. He then orders them all to withdraw, at which point a Borg fleet, at his behest, decimates the third party.
• Pony POV Series: In the Shining Armor Arc, this is how Shining is able to defeat the insanely-powerful General-Admiral Makarov: he leads the Blank Wolf to Makarov and lets it erase him from existence.
• Stormwolf Adventures: In the second fight between Finn and Lightning Dawn, the former is losing until he tricks him into being attacked by a Krayt Dragon. Lightning beats the monster, but can't beat Finn afterwards.
• Vow of Nudity:
  • After Walburt and Haara defeat a trio of spiders, Haara notes they were behaving oddly by rushing out into the open, not to mention straying so close to the mines in the first place. Cue the Giant Subterranean Lizard that was chasing them...
  • Invoked by Fiora in her backstory, when she's cornered by axebeaks in the savannah and scares them off by conjuring the scent of an ankheg, a native burrowing predator who pops out of the ground without warning to swallow its prey.
• The World is Filled with Monsters: This is Lord Greymoor's plan for defeating the Nightmare — he summons a powerful wendigo to attempt to fight it off. It fails.
• In the Miraculous Ladybug/Worm crossover Miraculous Escalation, Khepri's response to Gold Morning is to Akumatize the Simurgh...who brings the rest of the Endbringers along to assist in the fight against Scion.

Films — Animation

• A Bug's Life: The creatures feared the most by the bugs are birds which, despite being tiny and harmless to humans, are enormous and terrifying predators from the perspective of even the Big Bad, Hopper. The realization of this leads to an attempt to invoke this trope crossed with Scarecrow Solution, which almost works until P.T. Flea burns down the decoy, not knowing what it was for, setting off a climactic confrontation where the ants and circus bugs drive the grasshoppers away for good. The trope is then played as straight as can be when Hopper tries to abduct Flik, who escapes with Atta's help and then lures him towards the nest of the very same bird that attacked the protagonists earlier. Thinking the bird is another of the ants' tricks, Hopper finds out only too late that it's the real deal... and it has chicks to feed, too.
• In The Black Cauldron, the Horned King (Big Bad of the movie) attempts to use the power of the evil spirit trapped in the eponymous Cauldron to rise an Army of the Undead. Despite his gigantic magical powers, the Horned King is apparently unable to do that by himself and needs the Cauldron for it. This eventually backfires against the King: the spirit at first seems content with the Horned King's payment for the service — throwing a corpse in the cauldron —, but when a Heroic Sacrifice causes the spirit in the Black Cauldron to lose his powers forever, the spirit blames the Horned King for it and destroys him as his last move before becoming forever inert.
• Cinderella: During the climax, when Lucifer the cat battles the mice as they try to free Cinderella, she gets her bird friends to fetch Bruno the dog to chase Lucifer away.
• In Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show, this ends up being the case when it comes to Eddy going to see his brother. His brother is an absolute sadist who takes being a Big Brother Bully to a degree where it's basically torture, and he was hoping his brother would protect him from the rest of the kids. However, since Everyone Has Standards, after seeing what Eddy had to put up with, and after the Eds end up taking Eddy's Brother down, the kids all gain a newfound respect for the Eds (except for Jonny, who wasn't around to see, and ends up making a Face–Heel Turn right before the film's end).
• In Justice League Dark: Apokolips War, Darkseid is an almighty god of tyranny who has already subjugated the world and beaten and degraded all who could feasibly beat him. How to beat someone like that? Constantine breaks Raven's chakra to unleash Trigon, the local Satanic Archetype. Cue Trigon whooping Darkseid's ass in Superman's body, briefly getting imprisoned by the Omega Beams after Clark rejects him, and then Trigon mopping the floor with Darkseid's ass again.
• The Joker's scheme in The LEGO Batman Movie. He would trick Batman into sending him to the Phantom Zone, so he could recruit several villains to take over Gotham. Said villains include the Wicked Witch of the West, Agent Smith, Lord Voldemort, the Eye of Sauron, King Kong, the Daleks, and several others.
• Essentially the plot of Monsters vs. Aliens. When an alien robot starts rampaging through the United States, General W.R. Monger convinces the president to enlist a band of monsters Monger's collected over the years (including our heroine, 49-foot 11-inch woman Susan Murphy) to fight the alien menace.
• Sing 2: When Jimmy Crystal (a Corrupt Corporate Executive) threatens Moon and his cast and has his entire security staff searching for them, Johnny calls his father (the leader of a hardened criminal gang) for protection. During the final performance, the three of them easily handle Crystal's entire security staff.
• Toy Story 3: The film begins with Andy playing with his toys, having Woody foil a Bank Robbery from One-eyed Bart, played by Mr. Potato Head. Bart tries to stop Woody from foiling his plan by summoning his attack dog with a built-in force field, played by Slinky Dog. Woody counterattacks by summoning his force field dog-eating dinosaur, played by Rex.
• At the end of Watership Down, the protagonist rabbits release a dog and lure it into the Efrafan army (all of whom run away, except for Woundwort, whose body is never found).

Films — Live-Action

• Boa vs. Python: Send a giant snake to kill a giant snake. At least the boa is trained to accept human commands, so there's that.
• The Chronicles of Riddick (2004): The Necromongers, a strange cult of Omnicidal Maniacs, is threatening the Galaxy. What do the good guys do in response? Track down convicted killer Richard B. Riddick in the hopes that he'll take care of them. It works because of a prophecy that foretold the Grand Marshall would be killed by a Furyan, and Riddick is the last one there is.
  Aereon: In normal times, evil would be fought by good. But in times like these, well, it should be fought by another kind of evil.
• Clash of the Titans (1981) has Perseus using Medusa's head to defeat the kraken.
• Constantine (2005): The title character summons Lucifer to defeat Mammon and Gabriel. This doubles as a form of The Only One Allowed to Defeat You; Lucifer ultimately intervenes because he's going to be the one to destroy the world, not his son.
• Demolition Man:
  • The future San Angeles view the release of John Spartan like this. To them, he's just as much a criminal as Simon Phoenix, and his worldview and behavior is just as alien.
    "Send a maniac to catch a maniac."
  • Simon Phoenix, in turn, was summoned by Dr. Cocteau to kill Edgar Friendly.
• Dune (2021): After the Sardaukar stab her, Liet-Kynes pounds on the sand to draw the sandworm she called with her thumper in faster, so it will eat her attackers as well as her.
• When the heroes teleport the giant rock monster onto the enemy starship in Galaxy Quest.
• Quite a few of the Godzilla films had plots based on this trope.
  • Ebirah, Horror of the Deep had the humans wake Godzilla from his nap and lead him to Ebirah and Red Bamboo.
  • Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah did it twice: the humans release Godzilla to deal with King Ghidorah, then Mecha-King Ghidorah to deal with Godzilla.
  • Godzilla: Final Wars uses this trope as its basic plot. Long story short-humans release Godzilla from imprisonment so he can fight the other giant monsters so that the humans can stop the evil Xilliens from destroying the world. To be more specific, Godzilla didn't care about fighting the aliens, he was just chasing after the Gotengo, a flying submarine/battleship that he fought before getting buried in a glacier; the humans knew he would follow it so they just lured him into where the other monsters were, since that would cause him to break off his pursuit of the ship long enough to thrash them.
  • Godzilla (2014): Dr. Serizawa knows that humanity needs Godzilla to stop the MUTOs. Sort of coincidental but the male Muto, who is significantly smaller than Godzilla, calls to the female for the purpose of mating, who happens to be almost as large as Godzilla.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Monarch's main goal is to exploit this trope because kaiju/titans are essentially unkillable, except when fighting each other. Naturally, the protagonists attempt this multiple times against the main kaiju threat, King Ghidorah, first by luring Rodan towards him (which doesn't end well for Rodan), and then rejuvenating an injured Godzilla with the aid of a nuclear blast and leading him to Ghidorah, setting up the final confrontation which sees Godzilla emerge victorious.
• John Wick is described as this by his former boss... to his son, who has now drawn Wick's ire.
  Viggo: John wasn't exactly the Boogeyman. He was the one you send to kill the fuckin' Boogeyman.
• In Jurassic World, once the Velociraptors aren't enough to take the Indominus rex down, Claire sics the Tyrannosaurus rex at her. However, she isn't enough either, and has to work with the lead raptor to actually get the better of the I. rex. And they conclude the battle by literally summoning a bigger fish, dragging the I. rex close enough to the Mosasaurus pond.
• Justice League (2017): The Justice League can't even hurt Steppenwolf and constantly have to retreat. They finally turn to their last resort — use their captured Mother Box to resurrect and upgrade Superman, let him crush Steppenwolf. It works.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King has the capital city of Gondor under attack by a Badass Army of evil orcs and trolls. Fortunately for the good guys, Aragorn gets the Cavalry of the Dead to come to the rescue.
• In Men in Black II, J is chased by the Big Bad into the subway tunnels — and leads her straight to Jeffrey, the giant space slug that had been terrorizing a subway train at the beginning of the film. Jeffrey promptly swallows her whole. Temporarily.
• In The Mummy Returns, the Scorpion King awakens and plan to use the army of Anubis to destroy the world. A cult resurrect Imhotep because as Rick puts it, "Imhotep's the only guy tough enough to take him down". The army also works on a You Kill It, You Bought It mentality. Imhotep would use the army to conquer the world, presumably with them as his aides. Ultimately fails when Anubis depowers Imhotep just before the showdown with the Scorpion King.
• In Napoleon Dynamite, Napoleon sees a fellow student being bullied and tells him "Pedro (who is running for class president) offers you his protection." The guy thinks Napoleon's just trying to nab his vote, but sure enough, when the bully returns to steal his bike, Pedro's "cholo" cousins come to save him.
• The tactic is employed in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, when the sea goddess Calypso is freed from her prison in hopes that she'll take out the East India Trading Company and Davy Jones. It doesn't really work as hoped: Calypso is so angry that she lashes out at everyone, creating a maelstrom that threatens to destroy all combatants.
• A Quiet Place Part II: Emmett intentionally attracts the aliens they've spent the whole film avoiding to save Regan from a group of feral humans.
• Prometheus: The surviving Engineer is defeated by a giant proto-facehugger set loose on it by the last survivor (Elizabeth Shaw).
• Serenity: Mal and his crew provoke a horde of Reavers to take on the Alliance. Then it turns around and bites them in the ass when Wash is killed by the same Reavers, and the entire crew is badly wounded in the subsequent battle, only saved by River declaring You Shall Not Pass!. Though in the end the Alliance win, making this more of a "Summon smaller fish" or "Summon distraction" — and given that the Alliance created the Reavers to begin with, Mal makes the case that the Alliance has to clean up its own mess.
  The Operative: There's a lot of innocent people dying up there.
  Mal: You have no idea how true that it is.
• Spiders II: Breeding Ground: Being stuck onboard a ship where everybody is trying to kill her and her boyfriend, Alex decides to sabotage the power so that the spiders will all be released and eat the crew.
• Backfires horribly in Stargate: The Ark of Truth. Merrick, on the orders of the IOA, plans to unleash replicators on the Ori ships, wait for the replicators to destroy the Ori, and then deactivate the replicators. Sam and Cam think this is a terrible idea; they're right.
• Thor: Ragnarok: The heroes can't hurt Hela, let alone try and stop her. Instead, Thor and Valkyrie buy time for the civilians to evacuate while Loki awakens Surtur, a being powerful enough to destroy Asgard — Hela with it.
• In Transformers: Age of Extinction, with Lockdown coming after them, along with the human villains and an army of drones controlled by Galvatron, and their numbers reduced to just five, Optimus declares the Autobots "need a new army". He gets the Dinobots.
• Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell: The protagonist tries this by wishing for the aid of the Archangel Michael. It only partly works. Michael has a sword that can kill the Djinn, but only the summoner can actually kill the Djinn and can only use the sword once they become worthy. Michael spends most of the film with her running. Still, his healing powers are useful and Michael is actually able to fight the Djinn head on.
• In X-Men: Apocalypse, the titular Big Bad spends his time on-screen curb-stomping whoever is not on his side. Then Jean Grey unleashes the Phoenix and obliterates him, prompting him to admire her as she rips him to pieces.

Literature

By Author

• Jim Butcher:
  • The Dresden Files:
    • Dead Beat: At the end, Harry is facing down a bunch of necromancers and an army of zombies. His solution? Animate himself a tyrannosaurus zombie and stomp the bad guys flat of course! Bonus points because, even though there are strict rules forbidding the spirit of his solution, they only apply when such spells are cast on humans.
    • Small Favor: Done subtly. While doing a favor for Queen Mab, Summer Fae act accordingly and are trying to stop Harry, even if it means killing him. Harry realizes they are tracking him by a gift he was given from Titania. After confounding them by using the tracking against them, Harry brings it with him when he and his allies go face the Big Bad of the book and the reason for Mab's favor. Being so far out of the way, and then using fire magic, which was once touched by Summer so it works as a summon on its own, the Summer Fae know his location. This ends up drawing the attention of Titania's strongest assassin, who has killed three mages even stronger than Harry at some point in his life, to this tiny island in the middle of Lake Michigan. By some contrived coincidence when Harry is hiding from one of the island's foes, the assassin arrives looking for Harry. The assassin then kills the enemy for attacking him, and then the assassin turns to where Harry is hiding.
    • In Cold Days, Harry is in an even worse bind as Queen Ladies Lily and Maeve are trying to unleash several Eldritch Abominations from their prison. To finally stop them, he summons Queen Mab who stops them with one sentence by using the giant magic circle they are all stuck in. Even better when you think about the fact that he was forced to call Maeve's Mom to come deal with her.
    • Sometimes a swarm of smaller fish is just as effective. In the short story "Heorot", Harry, Gard, and Mouse use illusion magic and a Perception Filter to pass by a pack of malks (vicious feline faeries) on their way to a grendelkin's lair. When the grendelkin proves too much for the three to handle, Harry sends Mouse back to lure the malks to the lair, then uses another illusion to convince the little beasts to attack the grendelkin. While the monsters are tearing each other apart, our heroes rescue the fair maiden and make their escape, then send the cavern crashing down on the whole lot.
  • Codex Alera: In the final book, Tavi has to find a way to deal with the insanely dangerous Vord Queen, while at the same time she's putting a lot of effort into dealing with him. He just plain old can't face her head-on. So he flies up to the summit of Garados and deliberately irritates the Great Fury, and this in turn pisses off Garados' "wife" and equal, the eternal storm Fury Thana. Chaos ensues. But hey, it did work in the end.
• David Eddings:
  • In The Tamuli, the good guys have to resort to this tactic a couple of times:
    • When the villains take control of the Trolls with a fake version of the Troll-Gods, Sparhawk and friends respond by freeing the Troll-Gods from their prison in Bhelliom, and the Troll-Gods take back their followers with extreme prejudice.
    • After Sparhawk and friends counter a few more of the villains' plans, one of the bad guys panics and summons what they believe is the biggest possible fish: Klael, the spirit of evil and destruction. Unfortunately for them, it turns out that Klael is only an Equally-sized Fish to Bhelliom. They also find that Klael doesn't take kindly to being controlled by anyone.
  • The Belgariad and sequels contain a number of examples, all involving demons. Demon-summoning is a routine activity for the tribe of men called the Morindim. Their wizards settle disputes between tribes by summoning demons and making them fight each other. The demons hate being summoned and never stop trying to break free so they can kill the wizard who has summoned them. So if your demon loses then you get eaten by the opposing demon and even if your demon wins, you then need to banish it quickly before it turns on you and eats you as well. This is all seen by the main characters as being fairly bonkers. When faced with a demon your main options are: to summon a bigger demon that you hope you can control in order to fight the first one; or to summon a God in order to banish the demon. The latter option requires one to be on pretty good terms with a God, which is not an option for the bad guys since their God was killed at the climax of the first series.
    • In Belgarath the Sorcerer, Belgarath and his companions encounter a gathering of Morindim shamen, all of whom have summoned their tribal demons. Belgarath responds by summoning a Demon Lord, whose power lets him control - and banish - all the other demons at once.
    • In King of the Murgos, Polgara counters a Grolim priestess's summoned demon by asking for help from her Master, the God Aldur.
    • In Demon Lord of Karanda, an enterprising Grolim is trying to overawe some Karands by "summoning" an illusion of a demon. Belgarath creates a much larger and more frightening illusory demon, which sends the gathered Karands running in terror and allows Garion and company to capture the Grolim, who has some important information.

By Work

• In Alien in a Small Town, Nuada has Paul and Indira cornered, and Paul desperately prays for help. It's left ambiguous whether or not it's literally an answered prayer, but that's when the Great Striped Hoon shows up and proceeds to eat Nuada, and gets killed by Indira before it can eat her and Paul.
• Below: When the party is beset by a large force of goblins, Gareth hopes using a polymorphosis wand on them will bring about this result. His first shot forces the goblins to deal with a huge beetle among their ranks. But a subsequent shot at a poorly-chosen target puts a much more dangerous creature between the party and the goblins.
• A Chorus of Dragons: When The Misery is being grappled by a kraken that its crew can't fight off, Teraeth gets Kihirin to sing in order to awaken the Old Man, an immense dragon that Teraeth figures, correctly, will eat the kraken, after which they can figure out how to deal with a hungry dragon in a poor mood.
• Cthulhu Mythos: In one story, the protagonists are investigating a series of unusual events, the cause of which turns out to be an avatar of Nyarlathotep. They find some notes left by a professor with experience in the mythos that came to the place before them and was killed. The notes contain instructions on how to perform a ritual to summon the Great Old One Cthugha, so that the two beings (who apparently don't like each other) will fight, resulting in both being banished. The notes also suggest that as soon as the ritual is complete, everybody should get at least several miles away from the site.
• Invoking this can be a property of the Cursed Blade in The Death Gate Cycle. Normally it's a Morph Weapon that will turn itself into any weapon (or creature) that can defeat the enemy its wielder faces. Sometimes, however, the enemy is more powerful than the Blade, in which case it will summon something capable of defeating it rather than become it. This rarely ends well for any involved parties.
• Discworld:
  • In Guards! Guards!, after Wonse loses control of the dragon he summoned, Vimes encounters him planning to summon another one to fight it. (He's about 90% insane by then.)
  • Going Postal: Vetinari uses Moist von Lipwig to work against Reacher Gilt, setting a swindler to beat another swindler. In this case, his insurance is that Good Feels Good and by the time it's over Moist will have reformed sufficiently to no longer be a problem. Vetinari being Vetinari, of course, he hedged his bets a bit by setting a golem to watch over Moist to ensure that he's neither threatened by assassins (who don't really have anything in their arsenal capable of inconveniencing a golem) nor tempted to run (since Mr. Pump can magically track him across a continent and eventually run him down to drag him back).
  • Making Money: Referred to when Moist explains that the mongooses were bred in the postboxes, to keep down the snakes; who were introduced to reduce the number of toads; which were put there to keep down the snails. The snails had gotten in on their own accord to eat the glue on the stamps. He admits that they "were a bit too creative in our thinking".
  • And Nanny Ogg uses this to good effect in Lords and Ladies when she invokes Oberon, the Spear Counterpart to the Queen of Elves.
• The Elric Saga: Elric of Melnibonë makes occasional use of this in his various adventures when he finds himself in over his own head and has the time and opportunity to enact the relevant summonings. Since most of the entities he calls upon are simply honoring their relevant pacts with him and/or the royal line of Melnibonë of their own free will (or what passes for it in some of the more alien cases), this help can be extremely useful with usually little risk of backfiring.
• Esther Diamond: Attempted in the climax of the first book. The evil magician whose been kidnapping magicians assistants has summoned a demon, and one of the assistants tries to sicc the tiger that was kidnapped with her on the demon. It's a game effort that fails because 1) Alice the Tiger isn’t actually the bigger fish in this scenario and 2) Alice seems to realize this and refuses to attack.
• The main premise of Forgotten Gods. The characters ask The Fair Folk for help, and it goes horribly right.
• In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hermione Granger does this by bringing Dolores Umbridge into part of the Forbidden Forest where the centaurs live. She hopes to trigger Umbridge's hatred of "half-breeds", which will enrage the centaurs and get them to take care of Umbridge for her. It sort of works. When the centaurs are about to turn on Harry and Hermione, Grawp appears, looking for Hagrid, and gets into a fight with the centaurs, allowing Harry and Hermione to escape.
• Used several times in Journey to the West. When a demon is too much even for Wukong, he turns to the forces of Heaven, who take the threat down.
  • Wukong himself becomes the bigger fish after he has to leave the team during a fallout and they can't beat an Arc Villain themselves.
• Used twice in The Heritage of Shannara.
  • Druid: Being hunted by a gigantic cyborg spider? Drop it down a pit. Right on top of the even bigger and grumpier Eldritch Abomination.
  • Talismans: Being attacked by several smaller, but still huge and tough, magical cyborg spiders? Lure them into the Mist Marsh, where they can piss off the huger and tougher tentacled horrors within.
• Hollow Kingdom (2019): When S.T. receives word that The Weavers are approaching the University of Washington campus that's being used as a safe zone, he realizes that a bunch of birds and house pets stand no chance against spider-like zombies. His solution is to lure the zoo's three Malaysian tiger brothers to them so they'll fight.
• InCryptid: In Calculated Risks, Sarah telepathically convinces a train-sized flying millipede to come down to the ground and eat a bunch of zombified Johrlac that are chasing her and Annie.
• A Memoir by Lady Trent: Towards the end of A Natural History of Dragons, Isabella goads Khirzoff's men into shooting at her as a way to exploit the dragons' hostile reaction to gunfire. She had just seen a dragon flying by in the near distance, and the sound of the firearms discharging was enough to provoke it into attacking and give her a chance to escape.
• Midnight Never Come has the protagonists deal with the dark faerie version of Queen Elizabeth by summoning the Wild Hunt, actually the faerie kings of England that Invidiana had displaced. It's something of a distraction for the Plan A, but it's a big enough threat that she has to go meet it.
• In the novelization of Revenge of the Sith, when hiding in the caverns of Utapau from a pair of seeker droids, Obi-Wan uses the Force to suggest to a nearby Huge Slimy Cave-Monster that the droids are actually delicious snacks. It obligingly eats one and chases the other away.
• Shiver: Near the end, the protagonists determine that lycanthropy may be curable through elevating the victim's internal body heat to extreme levels, comparable to a massive fever. They attempt to do this by injecting two victims with bacterial meningitis. Results? Mixed. One character is cured, the other dies from the meningitis.
• One of the Silver John stories has a warlock trying to control John by using Sympathetic Magic on a picture of him. John tries to distract him with a silver quarter, but it lands in the center of the spell. The end result is that the spell summons the embodiment of the heroic myth of George Washington (it locked onto the face on the coin), which instantly figures out the warlock's a bastard and beats him into the dirt before leaving.
• A variant happened in The Spiderwick Chronicles. The strategy wasn't to summon a bigger fish but to get the Big Bad to turn into a smaller fish so it could be eaten by the regular fish.
• In Star Trek: Immortal Coil, the Enterprise and a space station owned by the immortal Flint come under attack by rogue androids after a sophisticated prototype android (long story...). Luckily for Picard and company, Flint has spent the last century or so collecting other artificial life-forms and A.I.s, including Richard Daystrom's M-5 computer. Data plugs the M-5 into the station's weapons array, and turns it loose to engage in its primary objective - survival. It mops the floor with the android fleet.
  Data: Under the circumstances, it seemed like our best chance to stop the androids.
  McAdams: Yeah, not to mention our best chance to get killed in the process. You know that M-5 is crazy, don't you?
  Data: Crazy is an imprecise term. It is... single-minded.
• In one of the Stranger In Black stories, a clay golem has gone berserk and a magician summons three other-plane beings (who appear as a young man, a middle-aged man and an elderly man) to take it away. Averted because for some unexplained reason, they silently refuse (although with an air of "sorry we can't do that") and instead drag the magician (screaming hysterically) who summoned them away into the portal he created and back to their own plane.
• In Stanisław Lem's The Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon, a robot king accidentally makes a robot dragon; he gets his battle computer to get rid of it—which, of course, it does by making larger and larger robot dragons. Eventually the computer tries to turn itself into an electrosaur and rule the planet, but the king hits it with his slippers and it accidentally turns itself into electrosauce. So Yeah.
• In F. Paul Wilson's short story "Tenants", the old man in the cabin claims that there are crickets, toads, snakes and snapping turtles living under his floor. The crickets' chirping had been keeping him awake, so he let some toads loose to eat them. Then the toads croaked all night, etc.
• In The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign, Kyousuke is up against the White Queen. He summons the Black Maw, the only entity that can rival the Queen in power (because it's another facet of her). The Black Maw normally devours its own summoner when summoned, but in this case it fights the White Queen due to a mutual example of Clingy Jealous Girl. Because of the way summoning works in this setting, the Black Maw is slightly stronger due to being summoned second, and it manages to win (but is severely injured in the process). Kyousuke then manages to dismiss it before it can eat him.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Thousand Sons: In Ahriman: Unchanged, Ctesias is attacked by Czetherrtihor, a Chaos Titan possessed and empowered by nine greater daemons of Tzeentch. He responds by summoning Doombreed, the mightiest Daemon Prince of Khorne, who makes short work of the Titan.
  • Eisenhorn: A running theme is how the need to do this is what ultimately corrupts so many inquisitors. They start out idealistic puritans, but the more they fight Chaos, the more situations they encounter where using its own weapons against it appears necessary. In Eisenhorn's case, the final crossing of the line comes when he summons a powerful daemonhost to destroy a Chaos titan.
• Watership Down: At the end, the protagonist rabbits release a dog and lure it into the Efrafan army (all of whom run away, except for Woundwort, whose body is never found).
• Welkin Weasels: In Welkin Weasels: Gaslight Geezers, Maudlin accidentally acquires a magical ocarina which summons a demon if played and can't be thrown away or destroyed, but can only be passed on to another owner. Naturally, he decides to simply not play it. However, he and Scruff are later attacked by the dreaded manless horsehead (the ghostly head of a riderless horse) and use the ocarina to summon the demon to fight it while they run. Later, when they're captured and enslaved at an ironworks, Scruff manages to trick the overseer into taking and playing the ocarina, summoning the demon, which eats the guards (who are mink, and therefore larger and better prey than the weasel slaves, who escape).
• In the Wizard of Rondo, after the protagonists have learned that Eldritch Abomination the Strix is really the Blue Queen, Tye summons the real Strix. It is not amused.

Live-Action TV

• Arrow: In Season 2, Moira finds herself once again being threatened by Malcolm Merlyn. What does she do? Well, after researching a verbal slip-up on his part, she gets help from the one person who scares everyone who knows of his existence — Ra's Al-Ghul, who, for bonus points, happens to want Malcolm's head for his actions in the previous season.
• Babylon 5: When the Vorlons aim to destroy a planet with a population of six billion, Captain Sheridan, who knows too well that his fleet cannot take them on and win due to severe firepower and technological disadvantages, summons a fleet of ships belonging to the other "First Ones", who then proceed to destroy the Vorlon planet killer.
• Played by the villain Crustaceans in the final episodes of Beetleborgs. In response to the Beetleborgs finally acquiring the giant Roboborg, the Crustaceans respond by creating the equally giant Boron.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In "The Dark Age", Jenny is possessed by a body-hopping demon called Eyghon, who can't be forcibly exorcised without killing her. To get around this, the Scoobies trick Eyghon into jumping into Angel, a vampire. In the Buffyverse, vampires are effectively corpses possessed by demons; the demon already inhabiting Angel's body makes short work of Eyghon.
  • This is the whole idea of creating the Slayer. Fight super-strong vampires and demons by creating a good guy who is even stronger.
• Constantine (2014) shows what happens when the fish is too bigger. Drunk on his own ego, John decided to exorcise a little girl by summoning a bigger demon to kill the one possessing her. Said demon was Nergal. In the end, the girl was dead, damned to hell, and the event haunts everyone who was involved.
  • Constantine did not learn his lesson. In one episode, John is cornered by monsters, so he invites a powerful demon to possess him. Once the demon scares off the monsters, his friends have to find a way to exorcise it.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Second Doctor finds himself forced to summon the Time Lords at the end of "The War Games", since he's incapable of solving everything on his own. They appear, sort everything out without much fuss... and then mind-wipe his companions and execute him for being a renegade with a stolen TARDIS.
  • In "Ghost Light", the Seventh Doctor tries this and gets in really bad trouble. The enemy at this point is a rather stupid Human Alien with a few hypnotised human minions. The Doctor unleashes a Sufficiently Advanced Omnicidal Maniac.
  • The Twelfth Doctor threatens to do this to Ashildr in "Face the Raven" in order to scare her into sparing Clara.
    The Doctor: I'll show you and all your funny little friends to the whole laughing world. I'll bring UNIT, I'll bring the Zygons. Give me a minute, I'll bring the Daleks and the Cybermen.
  • When being stalked by super-intelligent space oil that can venture through time and space, the Doctor resolves to use "the deadliest fire in the universe" and travels in the middle of the Dalek-Movellan war. Unfortunately, even this isn't enough.
  • The Thirteenth Doctor deals with a new batch of Daleks by summoning the Dalek Death Squad, knowing they would prioritize exterminating 'impure' Dalek variants over killing humans.
• The Flash (2014): How do the heroes deal with Gorilla Grodd when he invades Central City with a gorilla army in Season 3? Recruiting Grodd's rival Solovar, who challenges Grodd to a one on one fight for Gorilla City's leadership, which ends with Grodd defeated and handed over to human custody.
• On Justified Harlan crime lord Boyd Crowder is threatened by a group of local corrupt businessmen who want him to work for them. If he refuses, they will use their political connections to have him arrested and thrown in jail. Boyd instead calls Detroit mob boss Theo Tonin and asks his help in neutralizing the threat. Tonin obliges him and the businessmen soon find that all their political contacts refuse to talk to them. However, Boyd now owes Tonin a bid favour and if he does not deliver, Tonin will have him killed. Boyd considers calling in someone bigger to deal with Tonin but the only group with more power is the US government.
• In Season 4 of Peaky Blinders Alfie's comment of 'big fucks small' inspires Tommy to use this against Luca Changretta.
• Primeval has what has to be one of the most epic uses of this trope: Lester is chased by a future predator. He can't defeat it, so he manages to make his way back to the main room of the ARC and tells Leek, who's commanding it, that since he won't beg for his life, Leek may as well just kill him now. Unknown to Leek, Lester opened the door to the cage holding a giant freaking mammoth. Said mammoth does not like the future predator. Said mammoth kills the future predator with extreme prejudice.
• In one Saturday Night Live sketch Ben Stiller and Tim Meadows play small-town politicians in a series of dueling campaign ads on the topic of "the bat problem" (bat attacks on the citizenry.) The competing candidates advocate such solutions as soldier monkeys, erupting a volcano under the bat cave, and getting larger and more aggressive bats to eat the bats.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World: Near the end of episode 2, our heroes find themselves surrounded by a rather large troop of furious ape-men. Meanwhile, Malone and Veronica notice a nearby Tyrannosaurus feasting on its prey and, knowing the ape-men outnumber them, decide to lure the theropod to the scene. The plan works, and the Rex and the ape-men become so busy fighting each other to notice our heroes, who immediately escape.
• An inversion occurs in Star Trek: Voyager when the Borg ask for Janeway's help in eliminating Species 8472 but it's complicated. The Borg were just going to assimilate Voyager and its crew until Janeway convinced them to ally instead in return for safe passage through their space. She felt that Species 8472 gave them leverage. Because 8472 was kicking Borg ass bigtime, it may have been Summon Smaller Fish.
• Supernatural:
  • In the Season 7 premiere, the Winchesters and Bobby summon Death to deal with God Castiel. Cas merely snaps Death free of their binding spell, defusing the situation. The potential danger of doing this is beautifully lampshaded by Crowley:
    You really believe you can handle that kind of horsepower? You're delusional! They'll both mash us like peas.
  • And that itself was preceded by Castiel spending Season 6 trying to become the bigger fish to the Archangel Raphael by absorbing the souls of all the monsters in Purgatory, effectively making him God. In the Season 6 finale, he succeeds and kills Raphael with the snap of his fingers.
  • Earlier still, the episode "The Devil You Know". A Hellhound has corned Dean, Sam, and Crowley. Crowley teleports out, and comes back with a bigger hellhound and sets it on the one opposing them.
  • In Season 11, Lucifer offers to be the bigger fish to The Darkness a.k.a Amara, who he defeated before God created the universe, if Sam will allow Lucifer to use him as his vessel once again. After Sam refuses, Castiel takes him up on the offer and allows Lucifer to possess him. Then it's averted when it turns out that Lucifer was lying about having taken on Amara by himself in the past. Defeating her the first time took God and the four archangels working together to pull off. So while Lucifer is a pretty damn big fish, he's not nearly big enough to handle Amara on his own.
  • In one of the final episodes of Season 15, Castiel conjures the Shadow so that it will kill Billie.

Music

• The children's song "The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly", wherein the woman in question keeps swallowing bigger and bigger animals to catch the one she swallowed before. Ultimately, she swallows a horse. She dies, of course.
• The song "Better Metal Snake" by Fake Band Dethklok tells the story of a fantasy themed kingdom that was conquered by an invading kingdom using a giant mechanical snake in battle. The overthrown king then declares his intent to build a better metal snake in order to defeat the first one and take his kingdom back.

Myths & Religion

• In Egyptian Mythology, Set - God of Chaos, usurper of his brother Osiris' throne, Arch-Enemy of his nephew Horus and all-around bad guy - was nevertheless the one charged with protecting Ra's sun-barge from the serpent Apophis. Some argue that this is The Artifact of Set previously being a positive chaotic figure embodying destruction and renewal like that of a desert storm.
• One Indian folktale was about a king whose palace was constantly infested by mice. The king then orders his servants to send in cats to get rid of the mice, but then the king gets fed up with the cats, and first tries to get rid of the cats with dogs, then tigers, and finally an elephant. When the king becomes annoyed with the elephant, the servants get rid of it with yes, a mouse. Made into a Looney Tunes short.
• In Assyrian and Babylonian mythology Pazuzu was an evil wind demon who brought drought and storms. However, pregnant mothers often invoked him with amulets to ward off his enemy and, in some versions, wife, Lamashtu, who killed children in childbirth and kidnapped newborns.
• According to traditional Arthurian legend, the British King Vortigern, fighting a war with the Picts, invited the Saxons into Britain to deal with them. The Saxons, led by Hengist and Horsa, betrayed Vortigern, forming the Kingdom of Kent, and beginning the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.

Podcasts

• Zig Zagged in the Red Panda Adventures episode "The Callaghan Mob". Amateur gangsters hassling Kit Baxter's neighborhood are getting away with it because they're too disorganized for the police to deal with in more than dribs and drabs. Further, the Red Panda and Flying Squirrel can't watch the neighborhood all the time and will likely get pulled away by their own bigger fish. The Panda's solution is to gather his agents and, with the help of the police and his ownership of the newspaper, fake a gang taking over that area; one that has no problem defending its territory and making the risk not worth the reward for the amateurs and run them off, creating the result of the trope without ever actually using it.
• Ain't Slayed Nobody: Occurs no less than three times towards the end of the first season:
  • Sparky attempted to do this by summoning a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath and stuffing his assistant Kate's mind into it. Johnny later finishes the ritual and sics Kate on Colin Brock's cult, to her delight.
  • Ellie attempts to solicit Nyarlathotep's help to defeat Colin Brock... which backfires on her when she narrowly loses their duel.
  • In the final episode, when the nascent Great Old One Mgepgathg manifests an avatar that's too much for even Kate to handle, Kate calls out to her mother for help. Cue Shub-Niggurath ripping a hole in space-time, squashing Mgepgathg like a bug, and wiping Olvido off the map — killing everyone except for Johnny, Kate, Paws the wolf, and Eric the camel.

Tabletop Games

• Happened in the BattleTech Expanded Universe. The mercenary Northwind Highlanders are contracted to raid a world held by Clan Smoke Jaguar, perhaps the most brutal and bloodthirsty of the Clans. Instead of the inferior second-line opponents they were told they'd be facing, their Drop Ships are shot down by an entire front-line force of Jaguars. The Guile Hero protagonist's plan is to masquerade as Jaguars and go besmirch the honor of the Nova Cats, a clan of mystical but no less impressive warriors, to attack and destroy the Jaguars on the planet and free the trapped Highlanders. It works stunningly, as the Highlanders escape and all the Jaguars are destroyed.
• Call of Cthulhu supplement Terror From The Stars. The "Field Manual of the Theron Marks Society" says that when facing extremely powerful monsters, "The only hope in this situation is to summon another deity or monster with a natural hatred for whatever it is that is attacking."
• Changeling: The Lost features a Goblin Contract known as "Call the Hunt." Unless you're a Loyalist (or truly, truly desperate), use of this Contract is considered a very bad idea.
  • To further elaborate: most Goblin Contracts have some kind of drawback to go with their main effect. In the case of Call the Hunt, the main effect is that drawback.
  • On a successful roll, the Wild Hunt arrives within ten minutes, giving you a chance to run for it. On an exceptional success, it arrives within three seconds. And on a dramatic failure, they know who called them, and may show up specifically to go after you.
  • In the second edition, particularly powerful fetches have a power called "Call the Huntsman" that, when used, attracts the attention of any nearby Huntsmen. It also has the potential to summon something much worse than a Huntsman: one of the True Fae.
• In the storyline of the Deadlands CCG Doomtown, the Big Bad was eventually defeated by waking up the manitou who brought Abraham Lincoln back as one of the Harrowed. Lincoln's willpower had long since beaten it down, but shooting him with an enchanted gun firing the same bullet that killed him before finally pissed it off enough to rise again.
• In Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Summon Magic is all about throwing things like dragons, dinosaurs, elemental spirits, and angels onto the battlefield. At its pinnacle is the Gate spell, which can call up creatures much more powerful than the caster, some of which can cast Gate themselves.
    • An interesting case is summoning a Bebilith. It's a demon who is best summarized as "a demon who hunts and kills smaller demons". There is even one specific spell which summons an uncontrolled Bebilith that will attack whatever is next to him, but will go for other demons first at all times.
  • In First Edition AD&D Pit Fiends are powerful Devils whose abilities include unlimited use of the Gate spell, which can summon up more Pit Fiends.
    • This became a plot point in the Forgotten Realms setting, where the mythic Elven city of Cormanthor/Myth Drannor was destroyed and became a demon-infested ruin due to the accidental release of three powerful demons who proceeded to summon whole armies of their kin.
  • The players can do this in the 5th Edition adventure Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus. By the machinations of the archdevil Zariel, the holy city of Elturel has been chained in Avernus. In order to free the city, the players must break the chains that are drawing the city into the River Styx. One way of doing this is to petition for the aid of Tiamat. Being a dragon goddess, she can break the chains easily, and is so overpowered both in universe and meta wise, that the Big Bad Zariel focuses on the player characters, because she knows she has no way of winning against Tiamat.
• Mutants & Masterminds has a summoning power. A drawback you can take for it makes everything you summon hostile toward you. You might summon a bigger fish to deal with your foes, only to have to summon another when the first turns on you.
• Pathfinder: The Chaotic Evil umbral dragons, which prey on ghosts and specters, are sometimes used to contain and limit plagues of spectral undead. The priests of the death goddess Pharasma bribed one into moving into the ghost-haunted Spellscar for this purpose, while the players in the Hell's Rebels adventure path meet a Chaotic Neutral umbral dragon who, if befriended, can later aid them when their home city becomes subjected to a citywide mass haunting by flying over it and feeding on the specters and apparitions.
• In Sentinels of the Multiverse, the characters the Naturalist and Akash'thriya both have cards in which they release the Kraken in the card art. If they're in a jam and have the right card combination, the players can literally do this by purposely drawing the Kraken from its home deck.
  • During the OblivAeon event, Unity constructs a giant T-Rex bot to help fight OblivAeon. It gets destroyed but it's still pretty awesome.
• A similar version of this could happen in older versions of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, as the old Realms of Chaos books (Slaves to Darkness and Lost and the Damned) included rules for releasing daemons bound into weapons. The daemon released would be a bog-standard example of the type, with the standard equipment. It was possible to get a daemon weapon containing a Bloodthirster of Khorne, whose standard equipment at the time included... an axe containing a Bloodthirster of Khorne. In terms of balanced points battles, it was a game-breaker, with the number of Greater Daemons you fielded (in addition to your army) limited only by the number of turns you were playing, and the number of Bloodthirster models you owned...
  • This currently possible again in the Storm of Magic expansion with scrolls of binding that allow you call in any monster from the earlier rulebooks, including greater daemons, as well some monsters created for the expansion. These monsters are "biggest fish" available, including stronger version of the greater daemons, a supersized giant, a giant mammoth, and super versions of the dragons, some of which can be made lord level wizards. This is more balanced than old means of bringing out bound daemons since the controlling player has to pay for the monsters in point cost like they do everything else.
  • A variation of this trope occurs in the Warhammer 40,000 background: with Hive Fleet Leviathan rapidly closing in, the higher-ups of the Imperium decided to divert the swarm into an Ork-held star system as a last-ditch delaying effort. As of the current lore, they're still going at it (Tyranids replenish their forces by eating corpses, while Orks reproduce asexually and the fighting is drawing in more Orks like a magnet), but Imperial generals (rightly) fear that whoever wins will have become much stronger, and will be coming after them next...
  • The recently introduced Khorne Daemonkin army lets players collect tokens by wiping out enemy units (or having your own wiped out, it doesn't matter which). The player can then spend these tokens to summon more units, up to and including the mighty Bloodthirster of Khorne.

Theater

• In the Jurassic World Live Show, the heroes think Blue ran off on them, but she returns shortly after having summoned Rexy to fight the bad guy.

Toys

• Kongu did this in BIONICLE, during the Pit story. He used his Mask of Summoning to summon a giant Eldritch Abomination-style Rahi to kill a 300-foot Matoran-eating Eel. It was an interesting battle. This is Kongu's mask power, to summon monsters ... the only problem is he doesn't get to control the monster ... nor can he choose what monster arrives. This ends up biting him and the other Toa in the ass later on, as the Rahi and the Eel team up with each other and the mutated Gadunka during the Mêlée à Trois at the end of that arc.

Video Games

• Age of Mythology:
  • One of the Egyptian campaigns involves the Heroes trying to awaken "The Guardian" before the Big Bad's army can get there.
  • The Titans expansion pack has three campaign levels where the main characters have to survive against a Titan long enough to summon the Guardian (who is stronger than a Titan), the Nidhogg (who the Titan cannot attack), or Gaia (a Titan with a powerful special attack against Kronos).
• In Alien: Isolation, surviving humans aboard the Sevastopol station are usually hostile, armed, and travel in groups, making it a poor choice to attack them head on. Throwing a scratch-build noisemaker device in the middle of their ranks will summon the titular Xenomorph, who can tear through them like so much tissue paper. However, this leaves you in the room with a relentless hungry super-predator who can adapt to your behavior, is faster than you, and is immune to all of your low-powered weapons. If you can't sneak past them, sometimes taking on an armed mob is the smart option.
• In Baldur's Gate II, a powerful wizard can summon various massive demons like Cacofiends and Pit Fiends to face whatever the enemy is. But unless you cast Protection from Evil on your party, it will then go after you. The expansion pack takes it Up to Eleven. First, there's the Summon Elemental spell that high level druids get. It normally summons a powerful elemental, but occasionally it will instead summon an Elemental Prince who's not only more powerful than the previously mentioned Pit Fiend, it's also not hostile so you don't have to worry about it turning on you. Then there's the wizard spell Summon Solar. A Solar is the highest rank of angel who again isn't hostile to you and combines awesome physical might with powerful spellcasting ability. It doesn't matter who or what you're fighting, the Solar is going to put the hurt on them.
• This is Bayonetta' typical modus operandi when dealing with large enemies. Fighting an angel the size of an elephant? Summon a demon whose head alone is the size of an elephant. This includes the final boss, Jubileus; just as Bayonetta fits inside Jubileus' palm, Jubileus herself fits inside Queen Sheba's palm. Always a bigger fish, indeed. And she does it with her hair. Also in the battle against Father Balder she summons several demons of growing strength in a sort of summoning style Worf Effect.
• BioShock 2 has Summon Eleanor Lamb (in a big sister suit) as a plasmid.
• During the climax of Bioshock Infinite, Elizabeth has received a cryptic code from an older version of herself from an alternate timeline, and she eventually deciphers it to mean the musical notes to play to summon Songbird. A huge battle breaks out between you and scores of Vox Populi airships, and you can command Songbird to attack enemies at will.
• Peketo's ending in The Black Heart involves this. Final tries to destroy Peketo with his Eye Lasers, but he reappears, stating that all the deals with the dead he has made render him unkillable. Unable to kill him, Final insteads summons Peketo's father, whom Peketo had killed at the beginning of his story and, in the same vein as his son, has turned into a ghostly monster. Both immediately launch against each other and engage in combat, with Final noting that, since neither of them can die, he doesn't know how long will they remain fighting.
• The Augar of Ebrietas and A Call Beyond of Bloodborne allow you to (partially) summon Ebrietas, a Great One to borrow her powers.
• In Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Kain goes on a quest to find Vorador because Kain wasn't able to defeat Malek when they first fought. After describing how he fought and defeated Malek centuries ago, Vorador gives Kain a Ring of Power that can summon him. The next Malek shows up, Kain uses the ring and a rematch ensues.
• In Dead Space 2, Isaac has to get past a government security force with orders to shoot him on sight. How does he do it? By powering down the lights and door locks, leading to a massive army of necromorphs slaughtering their way through the government forces.
• Doom:
  • In the original Doom, there is a secret level in Episode 2 with this premise. In the room you start with there are half a dozen Barons of Hell. In the next room are a dozen Cacodemons. The best survival strategy involves running from room to room, allowing the monsters to mix and get caught in each other's crossfire, which will make them turn on each other as long as you aren't fool enough to draw their attention.
  • Doom II:
    • There's a special level just for this purpose. In it, you are presented with both a Cyberdemon and a Spider Mastermind, the two most powerful monsters in the entire game, at the same time. The only way you will survive this is if you provoke one into firing on the other, then take out the survivor.
    • There's also an earlier non-secret level which features a room with at least twenty Barons of Hell and a single Cyberdemon. Due to the way they are positioned, the Cyberdemon will immediately shoot at you as soon as you open the door, but since the Hell Knights are standing in the way, they'll get hit and turn on the Cyberdemon. It's very likely the Cyberdemon will win this fight, but by the time he does, he's so weakened that it won't take much to kill him.
  • In Doom (2016), the player character is effectively the bigger fish for Samuel Hayden. Hayden was concerned about the possibility of a demon invasion, so when one actually happens, he releases the Doom Slayer, despite knowing nothing about him other than the demons are all completely terrified of him. He notably cannot control the Doom Slayer, and is very angry over the fact that the Slayer keeps destroying his very expensive equipment to harvest demonic energy.
• In Dragon Age II, it's implied that one of the reasons Knight-Commander Meredith lets Mage Hawke roam free is because she recognises that someone who single-handedly managed to curb-stomp the Arishok is not to be trifled with and would be better used as a weapon to turn against Kirkwall's enemies. Unfortunately for her, she becomes Kirkwall's enemy in the end either by attempting to arrest Hawke for defending the Kirkwall mages or attempting to betray Hawke after successfully annulling the Circle.
• In Dragon Quest VI, about halfway through the game a kingdom summons a legendary demon in the hopes that it will kill their world's Crystal Dragon Satan for them. Normally, what happens is the demon is too powerful to control and ends up destroying the kingdom for their arrogance. However, if you have an insanely overpowered party (we're talking months of grinding or the use of cheat codes here), you can beat the demon in combat and gain its respect, resulting in a funny bonus ending in which the demon flies over to the final boss and curbstomps him for you. Otherwise, said demon, Nokturnus, serves as the game's Superboss, and will grant a similar favor if defeated in that capacity.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Summon Magic (under the Conjuration school of magic), Necromancy (also under Conjuration), and Command/Rally creatures or humanoids all exist as spells, powers, and/or racial abilities throughout the series which allow you to perform invoke this trope. You can use these powers to, for example, summon a lesser Daedra or an Atronach to even the odds in a fight. Or use a spell to bring a dead enemy back to life on your side, or command that nearby bear to fight on your side.
  • In the Grand Finale of (the main questline of) Oblivion, Martin Septim summons the Freaking Dragon God of Time, Akatosh, to banish Big Bad Mehrunes Dagon, who enters the Imperial City in the flesh.
  • Skyrim:
    • Shortly after the Dragonborn defeats their first Dragon and their powers manifests, the Greybeards unleash a shout that shakes all of Skyrim, calling them to High Hrothgar for training. This is because the Dragonborn is the bigger fish to the Dragons, being the only mortal capable of permanently killing them by absorbing their souls.
    • In addition to the aforementioned options for summoning bigger fish, a particular Dragon Shout gained late in the main quest allows you to summon an ally dragon of your own, Odahving. Another gained during the Dawnguard DLC main quest allows you to summon an undead dragon from the Soul Cairn, with an entirely different set of powers.
    • One quest in Skyrim has you discovering an abandoned Dwemer city that has been taken over by the Falmer, and awakening the Steam Centurions (Steampunk Mecha-Mooks built by the Dwemer as weapons of war) to drive the Falmer out.
• Eternal Darkness:
  • This trope constitutes much of the gameplay in the final level of. Naturally this leaves one of the Eldritch Abominations wandering around unopposed, so the ghost of Alex's grandfather has to subsequently bind the Bigger Fish. Then in the Real Ending we learn that essentially all three fish have swallowed themselves, because Mantorok has been invoking this trope over a span of thousands of years, simultaneously, in three different timelines.
  • A viable strategy once you get the summoning spells. Horde of Chattur'gha zombies in your way? Conjure an Ulyoth horror and let it eat them. Then kill the weakened horror.
• An attempt at invoking this fails in the Unlimited Blade Works scenario of Fate/stay night, after Archer betrays Rin and sides with Caster. Rin and Shirou attempt to recruit Berserker to send him at them, but when they arrive at Illya's castle, they find him in the heat of battle with Gilgamesh. In the end, they have no choice but to simply sit and watch as Gilgamesh claims all of Berserker's lives.
• Fate/Grand Order
  • Saber Jason's Noble Phantasm is to summon several other Argonauts, all of whom are more skilled at direct combat, to attack for him... only for Atalante to kick him into the crossfire.
  • The God-Slayers plan for fighting the Olympian gods, including the All-Powerful Zeus, was to Summon a Grand Servant strong enough to fight him.
• Final Fantasy X: In Final Fantasy games, Summoning Bigger Fish has always been the bread and butter of the very aptly named Summoner class, except in this one Summoning is Powered by a Forsaken Child and the true purpose of a Summoner going on their Quest to Create The Ultimate Bigger Fish is to create a new Sin and restart the cycle of Senseless Sacrifices.
• Fossil Fighters: When an ancient elemental dinosaur of power is called up, you not only Summon Bigger Olympus Mons, you summon the one with an Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors advantage!
• In Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich you summon your greatest enemy, the Time Master, an insane supervillain with complete control over time and space to fight Entropy, an insane supervillain who grows more powerful as things become more chaotic while she's in the process of ripping the universe apart.
• In Gems of War, it turns out that Sparkgrinder's plan to stop Carnex (his rogue mechanical construct) is to build "Mega-Carnex", an even more dangerous version. He insists it'll work as planned, this time.
• God of War (PS4): During the climactic Final Boss battle against Baldur, Freya raises the corpse of Thamur to keep Kratos and Atreus from hurting her son. After the two of them are pinned down by Thamur's ice breath, Atreus decides to fight a Giant with another Giant and calls out for help in an ancient language. Moments later, Jörmungandr comes streaking in way faster than a monster his size initially appears capable of and takes down the undead Giant.
• Done twice in the Golden Sun series.
  • An antagonistic, but not evil, example occurs for the final battle of The Lost Age, wherein the heroes are the "Big Fish". So, what Bigger Fish does the Wise One summon to stop them? Why, a three-headed dragon made from their parents, of course! The heroes win, obviously, but the intention was still there.
  • Part of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn revolves around you hunting down and activating the biggest BFG in Weyard's history so it can be used to destroy the Grave Eclipse; which has blanketed half the world in darkness, from which Demonic Spiders are appearing to kill everything.
• GrimGrimoire has this as well in the battle. After Lillet steals the Lemegeton and releases Calvaros, she gets right to work summoning Grimlet to erase him — as you learn, the two had a deal, but Grimlet was sealed away before he could collect his "fee". After holding off the worst from Calvaros for thirty minutes, Grimlet appears, takes Calvaros' soul... and then gets owned by Lillet herself shortly thereafter. What a bitch...
• One very viable tactic in Grounded when a particularly tough bug chases you: lead it to another hostile bug and hope they decide to fight each other instead. If it works out, either one will get killed so you can loot them, and the other may be weakened enough for you to take them down too. The red ants can be particularly useful for this, as wearing a certain armor makes them non-hostile and thus perfectly safe to you
• In Guild Wars Prophecies, after fighting your way through the fortress of the Mursaat, who were conquering the entire continent at that time, you (unknowingly) release the Titans which come under the control of the Lich Lord, who has been manipulating the Players for some time by then. You have to kill the Titans too of course.
• In Hyrule Warriors, Lana's Summoning Gate weapon allows her to summon scaled down versions of the game's larger boss enemies such as King Dodongo and Argorok, with her Special Attack summoning a giant Cucco. Played for laughs in the weapon style's victory animation, where Lana summons a large flock Cuccos who immediately starts chasing after her.
• Early in Iji the plan with dealing with the Tasen is to alert their much more powerful enemies about their presence. They're worse.
• The Immortal. So, you end up in a flooded dungeon. You row left, you get sucked and drowned by a whirlpool. You row right, you get chased and drowned by tentacled monster. Solution? Lure tentacled monster into a whirlpool. You get better.
• The 'Summon Baatezu' ability given to Hellfire Warlocks in Neverwinter Nights 2 works like this. A powerful Devil will fight by your side for a number of rounds, but if you keep it around too long, it might turn on you...
• Played with in inFAMOUS, the reason the ray sphere was made was because Kessler needed to make Cole strong enough to be able to stop the Beast, which Kessler himself had already failed to beat, therefore he went back in time to power his former self up until he became a "bigger fish". Zig-Zagging Trope indeed.
  • That's not even the end of it. In inFAMOUS 2, it's revealed that during the events of the first game, one of the helpful NPCs was accidentally turned into the fish that Cole was supposed to be bigger than, before he had a chance to become bigger than it!
• Injustice: Gods Among Us: The end of the game sees the rebel forces in their Darkest Hour: their plans have only served to drive Kal-el further into madness, and now the Man of Steel is going on an indiscriminate rampage of slaughter that none of the rebels have a prayer of stopping. So they bring in probably the only one capable of matching Superman head-to-head: the Superman from the other world, who proceeds to end the Regime in about twenty minutes.
• Jagged Alliance Almost literal if playing JA 2 in Sci Fi mode during the side quest to kill the Crepitus. While exploring the mines, the character of M.D. will comment that he wished that he had some giant krill eating fish to deal with the party's giant bug problem.
• League of Legends has a champion named Fizz, whose ultimate attack, "Chum the Waters", has him throw a small fish at an enemy, which brings a much bigger fish to chow down on anyone unfortunate enough to be near where the fish lands.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect 3, at one point, all the heavy artillery is destroyed before a Reaper can get blasted with it, and the heroes appear out of options for dealing with said Reaper. They use the Maw Hammers at the Krogan proving grounds to summon Kalros, the "mother of all Thresher Maws", who is very angry that a Reaper is intruding on its territory... Note that they were doing this just to distract the Reaper. They didn't count on the Thresher Maw to actually kill it!
  • Throughout the whole series, rule of thumb seems to be that if there's a problem, send Shepard to deal with it.
  • This trope is in used full-force with the Leviathan DLC, which reveals that the Leviathan entity is what killed the Leviathan of Dis Reaper. And you see a Leviathan kill a Sovereign-class Reaper firsthand!
  • Human colonies typically consist of only a small token military force on hand and rely on summoning the Alliance for protection. It helps that the Alliance keeps their fleet strategically positioned at key junctions in the Relay network so they're never more than a jump or two away.
• Metroid:
  • The titular species have this as their entire purpose. When the X Parasites were discovered to be insanely destructive and dangerous, the Chozo genetically engineered the perfect predator to get rid of them. Decades later, when Samus kills all the Metroid species, the X parasites' population explodes.
  • Across the whole series, Samus herself is the bigger fish. The Galactic Federation calls Samus after the standard galactic troopers, orbital bombardment, and even other near superhuman/alien bounty hunters have failed.
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War: See the rogue warrior sitting on top of a twenty-foot troll? Talion's has the ability to summon one beast unit and one captain no matter where he is, with a cooldown of about one minute. You can summon a graug (see page image), or a drake, or maybe you can just hire an olog.
• In any given Mons game, everyone catches and collects various creatures in hoping that their Fish (literal or metaphorical) is the Biggest. You can take this trope to its extreme by adding Olympus Mons to your collection.
• Monster Hunter:
  • Monster Hunter 3 (Tri): A relatively low-level monster known as the Qurupeco has the ability to mimic the calls of other monsters and summon them to its aid. In higher-level hunts, this usually involves monsters much nastier than it is. If they have hunters of lower ranks, sometimes a group will intentionally try and make the Qurupeco summon said bigger fish.
  • Monster Hunter: World: The otherwise harmless Noios will scream if attacked. The scream mimics the call of Diablos, the apex monster of the Wildspire Waste. They are also solitary and extremely territorial, so hearing what they think is another of their kind means a Diablos will quickly show up and brutally attack anything nearby.
• Persona 5: The protagonist defeats the Big Bad, a fifty foot tall Eldritch Abomination god covered in gold and crystal armor, by summoning an even bigger Guardian Entity demon king, which then proceeds to take out the Big Bad by shooting it in the head with a skyscraper sized ornate rifle.
• Phantasy Star Online 2 has a randomly-encountered mini-boss named Nyau, a small and cute cat-like creature wielding a sword. Nyau is very easily defeated, but after he is beaten, he always summons another boss, from the Mini-Mecha Knight Gear to the enormous Train Ghidoran.
• A popular way to train weak Pokémon is to let them face more powerful mons and then switch to an even more powerful creature who can defeat the enemy, whereupon the weaker Pokémon gets a huge Exp. boost^*Prior to Generation V, both Pokémon will get an even amount of Exp, which in a fight that requires this tactic will be substantial for the weaker Pokémon. In Generation V, the Exp. system was revamped so that a low-level Pokémon earning Exp. from a high-level Pokémon gets an increase to how much Exp. they get; this formula is applied after the division of Exp. From Generation VI onward, all participating Pokémon get the Exp. gain without division, whereupon the formula is applied to that value.
  • An in-universe version of this is the story of Yungoos. Alolans specifically imported them to deal with non-native invasive Rattata. It's played with because the Rattata, in response, developed nocturnal sleeping habits that led to the part-Dark-type Alolan regional variants. Since Yungoos are diurnal, the end result was that Alola is left with two non-native invasive species.
    • Additionally, in the Alola games, wild Pokemon will attempt to invoke this in battle when sufficiently threatened, and will often call for backup. Bagon, which can be found as early as the first island, have a chance to call for aid from a Salamence. Also, Corsola found in Alola have a chance to invoke this on themselves, as their cries of distress may attract their native predator, Mareanie, who will proceed to attack the Corsola instead of your Pokemon.
  • Happens earlier on in the series in Emerald. Both Groudon and Kyogre were unleashed and their clashing intense weather could end up destroying the world, the player is tasked with finding and capturing Rayquaza in order to nullify Groudon and Kyogre's abilities and stop the intense weather.
  • Happens again in Ruby and Sapphire remake's Delta Episode where the player is tasked with finding Rayquaza again, this time to use its Mega Evolution in order to stop an incoming meteor.
• The titular rifts of, well, Rift can sometimes be triggered by specific actions. Since all six of the elemental planes hate each other, this can be a quick way to get out of a hairy situation.
• In Scribblenauts this is the easiest way to solve combat-related puzzles. Need to get rid of an enemy soldier? Summon a warrior to fight him. Or a T-Rex. Or God. Or Cthulhu. You can also summon an Arapaima if you literally just want a bigger fish.
• In Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong, the threat of this trope can be used on the Big Bad if you know how the Fortune Engine works. True to form, you can point out you've crossed the Godzilla Threshold in the process: If you don't overload the Fortune Engine, the Big Bad kills you and turns Kowloon into her own private hellscape. If you do, every single Yama King will kill you and the Big Bad and turn Kowloon into a series of public hellscapes. Functionally, there's almost no difference to you and Kowloon since you'll die horribly either way and Kowloon is hardly going to get much worse from having several Demonic Invaders fighting each other over territory than a single one owning the whole pot. The Big Bad must either concede and retreat, or face the murderous wrath of her many siblings for keeping this plot to amass a fortune in slaves a secret from them.
• In the ending of the normal path in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters, the heroes face the finalboss, three Physical Gods merged into a single monster. After initially beating it, said villain devours the souls of a bunch of its followers and creates two clones of itself. With no other options, the main character Revya gives Gig, a Physical God who was also living inside him/her, full control the body, while Gig assuring that they'd both still be alive after he gave up control to convince Danatte to agree. Gig easily kills all three monsters, but dies since not taking control of Revya left him without a body, but Heaphness revives him in the ending anyways.
• In Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!, the Professor, Elora, and Hunter invoking this is what sets off the plot, Spyro being the bigger fish to Ripto.
• Starbound allows you to literally summon bigger fish using the admin command /spawnmonster largefish.
• StarCraft: Arcturus Mengsk used the Confederacy's own psi technology to lure the Zerg into attacking the Confederacy forces on Antiga Prime. This was seen as extreme, but forgivable as it was a military target; and the Zerg were already on Antiga Prime, and as such would have taken the planet eventually anyway. He later does it again against the Confederate capitol of Tarsonis. This time his own allies are horrified, as he's targeting an entire planet (Wings of Liberty confirms billions of people died as a result), and this planet hadn't been invaded by the Zerg yet.
• In Star Wars: The Old Republic, at one point during the Sith Inquisitor storyline on Corellia, they have the option to unleash a horde of zoo animals into Darth Thanaton's complex to wipe out his guards, while they hide behind a column and enjoy the show.
• This is what Upper Crusters in Streets of Rogue attempt to do, although the effectiveness depends on the target. The Super Cops they summon probably won't pose a significant threat to anyone with a high firearms skill and a nice gun but if you're playing a character weak at direct combat or if target of the summon is another NPC then it can easily turn out to be a Curb-Stomp Battle due to their high stats and powerful weaponry.
  • Arguably describes the plot of the game as well. The Mayor has become corrupt and nobody can stop them so a rebel force recruits the player character to take them out. Turns out that when you get there you will pretty much always be a significantly bigger fish regardless of character class, to the extent that it's quite easy to clear the entire final floor (including the final "showdown" with the Mayor) in under a minute when you know what you're doing. However, upon doing so you then become the next Mayor who is in turn destined to become corrupt and have another fresh recruit hired to take them out. In a sense this means that the entire narrative of the game is essentially an infinite loop of summoning increasing bigger fish.
• Whenever Super Robot Wars include Neon Genesis Evangelion, a strategy that can be useful against powerful enemies is to let EVA01 be destroyed. Instead of getting removed from the tactical map, it will go berserk, gain massive stat boosts, and will destroy most enemies with ease. However, it's uncontrollable and might attack your units instead (and you still need to pay its 40000 repair cost.)
  • In Super Robot Wars Alpha however, the use of a special item called Tem Ray's Circut can cheeze this, setting the Repair cost to a measly 10 Credits... while taking a hit on other stats.
• Subverted, and then paired with Nice Job Breaking It Villain, in Tales of Phantasia. Dhaos needs a Mana Seed to revive his dying homeworld but the only way he can get it is from the World Tree; which humans are bleeding dry through their use of Magitek. So he sends (what he thinks) is an even stronger army of monsters out to smash their weaponry, resulting in the biggest conflict in the world's history. However, not only do his efforts completely fail (because the humans have the Five-Man Band on their side), but it's implied that the war he kickstarted led to the version of the present where Mana is all but gone; making it impossible for him to fulfill his goal anyway.
• You can do this with the Halloween bosses in Team Fortress 2. Is there a player on the enemy team giving you a hard time while you try to fight the boss? Play as a Scout or Spy and bait one of the various goofy abominations over to him and make them his problem, since no one player has the power to tackle a Halloween threat on their own...just be sure to run away before the monsters decide to come after you next.
• The story mode of Terrordrome the Game: Rise of the Boogeymen has two instances of this:
  • Knowing that they can't beat the Cenobites by themselves, Ash Williams and Herbert West summon Pumpkinhead to fight them.
  • At the end of The Tall Man's story mode, Cenobites are unable to beat him since an another version of him will simply appear whenever he is defeated, forcing them turn to their master Leviathan for help. When confronted by Leviathan's power, The Tall Man decides to retreat from their dimension.
• The walkers in The Walking Dead are occasionally used by the protagonists to deal with whatever human villain is currently threatening them. For example, in the second season of the video game the heroes are all trapped inside a large shopping mall under the rule of a cruel and tyrannical leader by the name of Carver. When they notice that a large horde of walkers is passing through, they use the building's exterior speakers to attract them, deciding that it's better they take their chances escaping through a mob of unthinking neutral evil than having to suffer under a single, intelligent one.
• World of Tanks used to have a free-for-all mode known as Rampage (straight 10-minute deathmatch with respawning). While most players would bring medium or heavy tanks to this game mode, some players instead brought smaller tanks, specifically the French autoloaders—a tech tree known for high speed, high agility, and low armor. They would drive from spawn point to spawn point, antagonizing newly spawning enemies into chasing them with the eventual hope that the next spawn point would have enough new players to turn the chase into a fair fight while the French tank drove off to watch (and ninja the occasional kill for points).

Webcomics

• Apple Valley: In an attempt to counter a giant rampaging Apple of Chaos (evil cousin to The Apple of Discord), Doctor Hubris uses a magic wish to summon Gayzilla from a sister comic by the same author. A careful read-through of the archives shows that Gayzilla did *not* exist as part of the Apple Valley continuity beforehand, but has ever since.
• College Roomies from Hell!!!: When Mike gets attacked by a large octopus, he realizes the small knife he has won't be enough to win the battle so he cuts himself, attracting a shark with the smell of his blood to attack the octopus for him.
• Darths & Droids is the Trope Namer. Ironically, this never happens with the character who is convinced he can do that. (Except in two non-canon bonus strips). In this later strip Han says he did it on purpose with the giant space wyrm, but he could be lying or delusional like Qui-Gon. Should be noted, they're played by the same person. In a short filler arc between Episodes 2 and 3, based on a Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode which was likely itself a reference to the comic, Jar-Jar does it for real.
• In 8-Bit Theater, Garland has the innate power to summon any kind of monster. Problem is, he's not very smart.
• Exterminatus Now: In a variation, the bigger fish (a greater daemon) had been summoned previously. When the Big Bad becomes an ascended daemon prince, the heroes trick him into going into the room with the bigger fish.
  Morth: I see you mortals! Ha, "mortals"! I love it! You fools, that's a dead end! You have nowhere left to run. [Harry and Rogue, who were hiding behind the door, shut it behind him.] Where are you Harry? Ho ho! The fox has gone to the ground.
  Cerberus: Then release the hounds!
  Morth: Hmm, I think I'm learning a lesson about hubris. And about the waste functions of my new anatomy.
• In Girl Genius, when the heroes are threatened by two Godzilla-sized Queens and a monster the size of a small mountain that spews other giant monsters from its mouth, Neena's solution is to call out for help from her mother, Queen Albia, who dwarfs all of them.^note (See that tiny speck dangling below the airship at the bottom of the picture? That's two people at the end of a rope.)
• Grim Tales from Down Below: Done twice. The first time wasn't so effective and the second time got copied and lost the effectiveness of his best attack. Then the monster got serious only to be beaten by The Power of Love.
• Discussed in the opening arc of Jenny and the Multiverse: Jenny thinks of using the Bisector to summon the Disciples of Light who dealt with Grallyx the first time, but this proves impractical because the Bisector is broken, and the heroes have to find another way.
• Lightning Made of Owls has Summon Bigger Cthulhu. As if one wasn't enough.
• Nodwick: Done as parody when the heroes are going to make a barbecue for the locals so they go out hunting. The first thing they catch is a rabbit, which they use as bait to start climbing the food chain until they catch a tarrasque, one of the biggest and most fearsome (and also most foul-smelling) animals in the world.
• Nukees: Gav, when in the after life and faced with a giant snake, decides to summon the god of alcohol, who has sworn to kill Gav.
• Sluggy Freelance:
  • After Bun-Bun first shows up Torg and Riff try to get rid of him by hiring a grizzly bear to be the new Team Pet, on the condition that he gets rid of Bun-Bun first. Turns out grizzly bear < mini lop.
  • In later arcs, the heroes often try to dispose of the latest threat by maneuvering the bad guy onto a collision course with Bun-Bun. Sometimes it works, sometimes Bun-Bun gets hit with The Worf Effect and other means are needed to save the day.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: In the final chapter of the first. arc, Lalli's idea to get rid of the dusklings — small, mutated zombie equivalents — that are trying to eat them is to drop a couple of explosives in a giant's hideout, then arranging for the giant to find the dusklings first when it crawls out. After that, Lalli and Emil simply wait in their hiding spot until the giant finishes eating the dusklings and leaves.
• Schlock Mercenary has Tagii use this against the Morokweng.
  Tagii: There, now we have an ally.
  Ennesby: That's not an ally! That's a Pa'anuri! Anything with an annie-plant is going to get devoured with extreme prejudice!
  * Pan-out showing the Morokweng with 5 multi-kilometer wide annie-plants.*
  Tagii: And the biggest annie plants in town belong to?
  Ennesby: I think we still get eaten if we're saved for dessert.
• The 10 Doctors: The Ninth Doctor utterly defeats the Black and White Guardian... by warping into the same time/place location with so many selves that it summons the Reapers.
• Tower of God: To dispose of Lurker, Ja Wangnan calls upon the help of the only guy who can help: an admitted religious fanatic and terrorist who proclaimed before that he'd fail everyone in the current batch of Regulars. The subversion kicks in the moment you remember that said terrorist is former main character Twenty-Fifth Bam, probably one of the nicest guys around.
• Walkyverse: This happens in It's Walky! when SEMME is attacked by the Britjas (British ninjas; don't ask). After getting fought to a stalemate, they use the Power Booster Rod (a tree branch containing absurd amounts of extradimensional energy; again, don't ask) to summon The Wanderer, a being with god-like power who is very interested in keeping dimensional travelers out of his dimension. The Britjas are travelers from another dimension. Guess what happens.

Web Original

• Gaming All-Stars (The Ultimate Crossover and Remastered): Upon encountering Falco and Donkey Kong, Booger Meister flees and commands the Great Mighty Poo to dispose of them before exiting the scene. Ironically, the GMP himself ends up becoming a victim of Always a Bigger Fish to Doshin the Giant after the latter flattens the former with his foot / a boulder. In 2, Papu-Papu summons the formidable idol god Tikimon to impede Lara Croft, Pitfall Harry, and Captain Toad to prevent them from making it out of his tribal grounds alive.
• Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG:
  583. Can't intimidate the evil wizard just by constantly summoning bigger versions of what he's just summoned.
• In Worm, when Tattletale convinces the Endbringers to help distract Zion. Played with in this case because, as powerful as the Endbringers are, Zion is FAR more powerful.

Web Videos

• In Kickassia, the resistance invoke this trope onto Spoony, convincing him to give into the Dr. Insano inside him to combat the Nostalgia Critic. Note that Linkara thought it was a stupid plan and asked if Angry Joe was high when he planned it. Also, it didn't work and indirectly caused Santa Christ's death.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: "Bully for Steve" has Stan act as Steve's bully in an attempt to toughen him up. Steve, after getting fed up with his dad, contacts Stan's former bully, Stelio Kantos, who proceeds to beat his dad up.
• Ben 10:
  • In the original series, during "Secret of the Omnitrix", Vilgax and his giant robots are set to annihilate Ben and his friends. Azmuth unlocks Ben's strongest alien form, a giant named Way Big who throws Vilgax into space like a softball.
  • From an episode of Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, after getting it handed to her pretty well by her crazy, full anodite cousin Sunny, Gwen admits she can't beat her... and promptly calls her other full anodite relative, her Grandma Verdona, who easily puts Sunny in her place.
• Constantine: City of Demons: Invoked twice. Constantine summoned the demon Nergal to prevent a girl from being sacrificed in a dark ritual, only for him to then slaughter a group of innocent people and drag the girl into hell. He later convinces the Aztec death god Mictlantecuhtli to take out a group of demons before destroying Mictlantecuhtli himself after he was weakened from the fight.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: One episode has Eustace turn into the Monster of the Week; a kangaroo monster, which was known for jumping onto things to death (and is extinct as the dinosaurs). As he's jumping all over the world with Muriel hostage, Courage's computer tells him that "the only thing that can stop a kangaroo monster, is ANOTHER kangaroo monster". Reluctantly, Courage undergoes the same transformation Eustace did (kangaroo monster bone transplant) and proceeds to fight him in Paris, France.
• Dan Vs.: In "Dan Vs. Canada", Chris saves Dan from a yeti by transforming into a bear.
• The Flamin' Thongs: After accidentally summoning the alien Kevins - who plan To Serve Man - to earth, the Thongs solve the problem by summoning another alien race who eat Kevins.
• In the first segment of Futurama: "Anthology of Interest I", a 500-foot Bender is attacking New New York City. According to Prof. Farnsworth, the only thing that could stop him would be "an even more equally big monster", and so he uses his growth ray on Zoidberg to battle him.
• Garfield and Friends:
  • A dueling version happens toward the end of an episode of U.S. Acres where Orson's attempt to read Rumpelstiltskin to Booker and Sheldon goes Off the Rails between the latter two, Wade, and Roy changing things. In-story, Wade and Roy portrayed the miller's son (who gave up his VCR instead of his firstborn) and Rumpelstiltskin, respectively. This exchange occurs just before the son can say Rumpelstiltskin's name:
    Roy: But before the duck son could say the name, a hurricane came up!
    Orson: A, a hurricane?
    Roy: Yes, a hurricane that blew the duck away so he couldn't take his VCR back.
    Wade: Uno momento!
    Orson: Guys...
    Wade: Then, a spaceship came by, and it rescued the handsome duck, and flew him back to reclaim his VCR!
    Orson: Guys, stop this.
    Roy: But the rooster was determined to get it back with the aid of his, uh, trained dinosaurs!
    Orson: Trained dinosaurs? Where did the trained dinosaurs come from?
    Roy: Same place all those ninjas came from.
    Wade: But then the Third Marine Division landed, with their Anti-Trained-Dinosaur Squadron!
    Roy: But the Mole People were too smart for the Marines!
    Orson: Guys!
    (a few minutes later)
    Wade: —Then eighty-three monsters take the VCR back!
    Roy: Then eighty-four monsters and a giant moth grab it back from the duck!
  • Done humorously in "Cinderella Cat". Garfield encounters a Fairy Godfather and is offered three wishes, but the Godfather just magically steals the things being wished for rather than creating them with his powers. Garfield finally deals with him via this trope - he wishes for the Fairy Godfather's wife to appear, and she drags the Fairy Godfather home so he won't cause any more trouble.
• Gravity Falls; in the episode "Fight Fighters", Dipper pisses Robbie off and the two agree to have a fight. Knowing he'll lose against the teen, Dipper ends up summoning a character from the titular Fighting Game to proxy for him. Things go wrong when the character takes the job seriously and tries to kill Robbie, forcing Dipper to fight.
• Hey Arnold!: One episode features Arnold and the other fourth graders having to play football against Wolfgang and the fifth graders. To combat the fact the fifth graders are much larger than them, they ask Torvald (who is a fourth grader, but has been held back three times) to play. He effortlessly plows through the fifth graders and seems pretty unstoppable...until he trips and sprains his ankle.
• In the Grand Finale of Jackie Chan Adventures, Shendu is freed to combat his son Drago, who had absorbed the powers of all of Shendu's siblings. While they are battling, Uncle sends them both into another dimension.
• In Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures, the Quests enlist the aid of an Animal Wrongs Group they had a run in a few episodes earlier, to stop Surd who happens to be brainwashing whales.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts:
  • "Explosion Berries": Kipo escapes from the Mod Frogs by using the smell of a clump of Mega Bunny fur to summon a mother Mega Bunny, and then using the ensuing battle and panic to escape.
  • "Mute-Eat-Mute World": The main characters have been captured by most of the enemy gangs they've faced so far. They seem pretty much doomed until Jamack strolls in and distracts everyone by demanding he take credit for the capture, buying time for a Mega Bunny Mother to show up, summoned by the fur he planted on various characters as he walked into the clearing. Pretty impressive for someone who had been shown just minutes earlier gibbering in terror at the mere sight of one.
• Miraculous Ladybug: In "Queen Banana", the class is trying to shoot an amateur movie and Chloé, as per the norm, has her father, the Mayor of Paris, strong-arm the producer into giving her the leading role in the film, which she turns into her Vanity Project. Only this time Adrien asks his father, the fashion mogul Gabriel Agreste, to intervene. One word from Gabriel and the students are able to film their original project without any word of protest from anyone except Chloé.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Of the "immediately bites you in the ass" variety in the episode "Twilight's Kingdom, Part 1". Discord gets sent to deal with Tirek, but it backfires when Tirek talks him into switching sides.
  • In "Non-Compete Clause", the main characters are menaced by a school of biteacudas, carnivorous fish with bat wings. The students deal with them by employing this trope in a rather literal sense, namely by having Ocellus, a shapeshifting changeling, transform into a much bigger biteacuda and chase them away.
• The Owl House: The second season finale has Belos enacting his Day of Unity to kill all branded Witches in the Boiling Isles, and Luz and her friends struggling to fight against his monsterous form when he gets branded. To stop him, King makes a pinky promise with the Collector, who had been betrayed by Belos earlier, to free him in exchange of stopping the Draining Spell so they'll have enough players to play "Owl House." Once he's free, the Collector splatters Belos in a game of "tag" and then stops the Draining Spell by moving the moon out of an eclipse.
• There were a few occasions where The Real Ghostbusters had to let the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man out of the containment unit to fight another huge ghost hand-to-hand while they figured out how to put it down for good. Though by the time of the cartoon, Stay Puft had undergone a Heel–Face Turn- the Ghostbusters kept him in the containment unit only because his sheer size meant that he couldn't be allowed to roam around loose (and also he actually liked it in there, unlike most of the evil ghosts they had locked up).
• One of the great moments in Robot Chicken: The Peanuts gang have almost all been killed off by The Great Pumpkin, and Charlie Brown, fleeing for his life, cowers at the base of the tree. The Great Pumpkin notices all the half-eaten kites and has time for an Oh, Crap!:
  Charlie Brown: Meet the kite-eating tree, you ugly son of a bitch!
• In one Samurai Jack, Jack is being chased down by the Minions of Set, Nigh-Invulnerable demons who completely outclass Jack. He wins by summoning Ra, who obliterates the Minions of Set with ease.
• In the episode "The Shrieking Madness" of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, Scooby and the gang face Char Gar Gothakon, The Terror that Hath No Name, a creation of H.P. Hatecraft. In the course of defeating the Cthulhu stand-in, they get assistance from Harlan Ellison. Seriously. (This was easily the weirdest Scooby-Doo episode ever.)
• The Simpsons:
  • "Bart the Mother" did this 4 times in a row. Bart accidentally kills a bird and nurses her eggs out of guilt. When the eggs hatch, they turn out to be of a voracious species of lizard that eats birds and leaves eggs in their nests. Bart releases them and Skinner tells him he has no idea what he has unleashed ...and later is commended for it because the lizards wiped out the pigeon population, which the town considered a plague.
    Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
    Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
    Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
    Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
    Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
    Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
    Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
  • In "D'oh-in' in the Wind", Springfielders suffer hallucinations from juice shipments which were loaded with peyote. Barney Gumble hallucinates a demonic monster, and stops it by drinking a Duff beer, summoning a pink elephant to kill it.
  • In the "Treehouse of Horror XXVII" story "BFF R.I.P.", Lisa's former Imaginary Friend Rachel turns out to be real and murdering Lisa's friends so that she can be her only friend. Homer tries to stop Rachel by summoning his childhood imaginary friend, Sergeant Sausage. Unfortunately, Rachel defeats Sergeant Sausage easily.
• In the "Super Best Friends" episode of South Park David Blaine has brought the giant stone statue of Abraham Lincoln to life and it is terrorizing Washington, D.C. The SBFs solution: build a giant stone statue of John Wilkes Booth, which sneaks up behind the Lincoln statue and shoots it in the back of the head.
• The Star Wars: The Clone Wars season 1 episode "Bombad Jedi" culminates in Jar Jar Binks (who else!) befriending a gigantic alien fish on Rodia and summoning it to take on Nute Gunray and his droid soldiers that have Padmé captive. Looks like someone on the writing team was a fan of Darths & Droids.
• Subverted in Superman: The Animated Series. In "The Main Man", Superman is captured by the Preserver who captures beings who are the last of their kind. He escapes but is still weak from being kept under a Krypton-red sunlamp, and is captured just as he breaks open another cell. The villains naturally assume this trope, and decide to throw Superman to whatever bloodthirsty creature is in there. Turns out it's a dodo, being kept under Earth-like light that restores Superman's full powers.
• Tom and Jerry: Jerry sometimes seeks protection from Tom in Spike the bulldog. Odd, since in Real Life dogs also kill mice and rats, sometimes just for fun.
• The Trap Door: In "Food for Thorp", after figuring out that the eponymous carnivorous plant likes eating the flying insects that came out of the trapdoor, Berk simply pushes it to the kitchen and waits until it's snatched and eaten them all.
• The Venture Bros.' Brock Samson engineered a situation like this when he and the Ventures were simultaneously hounded by the OSI and the Monarch, pitting the two against each other as a double use of the trope.
• Wander over Yonder: Discussed in "The Brainstorm" when Lord Hater asks what Peepers' plan is should Wander impede their attempt to conquer a planet with a picnic:
  Lord Hater: What if Wander throws a picnic, and invites the Watchdogs, and because his pie is so good they all go?
  Peepers: We'll bring giant ants.
  Lord Hater: What if he knows a giant anteater?
  Peepers: We'll bring a giant anteater eater.
  Lord Hater: What if he brings a—
  Peepers: And so on!
• Young Justice (2010): At one point, several low tier heroes are pinned down by Black Beetle, easily a Superman level threat. Arsenal responds to this by releasing Mongul. You know a guy who tried to exterminate all sentient life on Earth a week ago and was barely stopped. However, it's subverted due to Black Beetle being decidedly more powerful than Mongol, though Mongol puts up enough of a fight that the heroes are able to escape.

Real Life

• Contrary to what some tropers seem to think, this does NOT include ordinary human cooperation, military alliances, or division of labor. This only applies when summoning an entity that would normally be your enemy, hoping that it will take over your fight for you.
• When it comes to rabbits, it's theorized that the reason they scream bloody murder when seized by a predator is because it just might invoke this trope, causing a rival predator to intervene and giving the rabbit a slim chance to get away or at very least make predators too scared to hunt the rabbits.
  • Also, dinoflagellates light up when they are being eaten, in order to literally summon a bigger fish (that presumably does not eat dinoflagellates) to consume their current attacker.
  • When eaten by a turtle, the Portuguese man-of-war releases a shark-attracting chemical.
• Some deep-sea jellyfish light up when being eaten by fish as so they will attract bigger fish or squid to eat the other fish.
• An example of this Gone Horribly Wrong happened in mid-18th century Texas. In 1749, several Apache bands rode into San Antonio and announced to the Spanish colonial authorities there that they wanted to make peace, convert to Christianity, and become loyal subjects of Spanish crown; they would do this if the Spanish would come and establish a mission and a fort in their territory. This smelled fishy from the start and many Spaniards doubted the Apaches' sincerity, but eventually the padres and the optimists in the government won out and by 1757 the fort and the mission were established on the bank of the San Saba river. The Apaches had been losing their war with the Comanches, and in fact they had tricked the Spanish into building their settlement in the territory of the Comanches—who they knew would consider this an act of war—in the hope that the Spanish would deal with the Comanches. In March 1758 a huge force of Comanches came and massacred the padres on the mission while the soldiers and civilians cowered inside the fort, and in October 1759 the Spaniards' punitive expedition of 600 men encountered such a large force of Comanches that they scattered and ran almost immediately, resulting in the most humiliating defeat the Spanish had suffered in the New World.
• Large amounts of Dark Ages history in Europe can be summarised as 'Local King Hires Mercenaries', 'Local King Fails to Pay Mercenaries', 'Unpaid Mercenaries Take Over Kingdom'.
• Some insects such as caterpillars obtain protection from ants against their predators by secreting sugar to the ants.
• Some plant species can, when attacked by insect pests, send out chemical calls to summon wasps, which eat the other bugs.
• Ravens have been reported to mimic the howling of wolves when they find a deer or other large prey animal trapped in snow or underbrush. The howling attracts the attention of real wolves, who come to check out the possible intruder; instead, they find and kill the deer, and the ravens get to scavenge the carcass's remnants.
• Male water striders actually weaponize this trope as a means of sexual coercion: if a female strider won't allow a grappling male to copulate, he starts drumming his feet on the water's surface, giving away the pair's location to predators. Only by allowing him to mate can the female make him quit summoning literal fish to eat them both.
• An old treatment for late-stage syphilis back before antibiotics (which won the discoverer a Nobel Prize) was to introduce malaria-causing pathogen into a syphilitic patient. The high fever induced by malaria would kill the bacteria that caused syphilis, and the malaria could be more easily treated with quinine. While there was roughly a 15% chance the fever would also kill the patient, it was better than near-certain death from syphilis.
• This story features a corporate example: A site was using bots to register when someone commented on pictures saying "I want this on a shirt" so that they could then illegally sell merch without the permission of the artist. Since the site was nearly impossible to bring down even after an Engineered Public Confession, people started using their bots against them by commenting "I want this on a shirt" on copyrighted Disney artwork! The site was taken down soon after.
  The devil works hard, but Disney works harder.
  • A similar strategy has been suggested on generative art A.I.s accused of scraping online (human) art galleries for training content.
• This video of a battle between a crab and an octopus, albeit an accidental example. The crab in the video is fighting a hopeless battle against an octopus that wishes to eat it, until a seal suddenly shows up to eat the octopus. The reason the seal was there in the first place was because it had come to learn that there's usually food wherever the film crew happens to be shooting that night, meaning the scientists themselves inadvertently summoned help on the crab's behalf. For the crab's part, it going still before backing away slowly says it all.
• Sometimes, when being bullied, a kid would bring their older sibling in to help. This applies when the older sibling in question also bullies the kid. If nothing else, it might rid the kid of one bully.
• The first Punic war between Rome and Carthage started this way. The city of Messana had to deal with some attackers, so asked Carthage to send an army to remove them. Worried that Carthage would stay around too long, the same city asked Rome to help to remove them. The result of this war was Rome controlling Sicily, so the second fish ended up eating everyone.

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