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Unskilled, but Strong
(aka: Strong But Unskilled)

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Unskilled, but Strong (trope)
"He can shatter anything with a single punch, but look at that awful technique!"

"This is the dreaded Damien? He moves like an amateur! Wait... that fire could easily win him most fights, he can regenerate, and he's supposed to have super strength... he's never needed skill before! His fighting style is totally dependent on his powers!"
Elliot, El Goonish Shive

A character who is Unskilled, but Strong lacks the refined technique of formal training but compensates in various ways through raw power. They may eat anti-tank missiles the way a glutton goes through an all-you-can-eat buffet. They may be so strong they kick tanks around like footballs or have the firepower to crush the US, China, and Russia in a conventional conflict. They may make a Bugatti Veyron look slow or waltz through a point-blank crossfire of Gatling guns with ease that makes an Agent envious. They may have really won the Superpower Lottery and have all of the above at their disposal. However it is, they are so very naturally talented they don't need skill. They tend to have the attitude that if brute force doesn't work, it's just because they didn't use enough of it, as well as that they will charge head-on, believing that their raw power alone will overwhelm anything that gets in their way.

When seen in a protagonist (triple that for The Big Guy), their lack of skill is typically only because it's the first episode and they've only just discovered their powers. The initial stages of the series, if not the series as a whole, will then focus on improving the protagonist's innate talents. It also gives the series a justification for why a complete newbie to whatever power they've uncovered is able to fight with or against people who have more experience, or why they can come along in training relatively quickly. One common type of this is the Super Prototype that the Ordinary High-School Student is Falling into the Cockpit of.

In an antagonist (triple that for The Brute), an Unskilled, but Strong character is commonly either the very first foe the protagonist faces or one of the last. In the former case, they're a Starter Villain and may be fond of Badass Boasts but prove all talk in the face of the much more skilled protagonist. In the latter, they provide a hurdle against which the protagonist must disprove the theory that Hard Work Hardly Works.

Compare Skilled, but Naive, Strong and Skilled, and Glass Cannon. Contrast Weak, but Skilled and Powerful, but Incompetent. Often pursues a Bigger Stick. Can also overlap with Brilliant, but Lazy, or Incompletely Trained (or both). Also can overlap with Crippling Overspecialization if it's on brute force. This character is often the Goliath in David Versus Goliath. Characters with explicitly superhuman abilities can have this cured with Boxing Lessons for Superman. If they never get formal training, they may instead be Taught by Experience. If they barely or never improve at all, or even outright refuse to do any kind of training or get worse in their overall combat effectiveness, then this will result in Apathy Killed the Cat. In Arrogant God vs. Raging Monster, the second tends to be this. In games, this character is probably a Vanilla Unit if they're playable.


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  • All For Luz:
    • Luz being a wielder of All For One is one of the strongest Quirk users in the Human Realm but she isn't a refined fighter, only having had her first Quirk for about a month and never really had the time to formally train with her 10 initial Quirks due to the Superhuman Registration Act. So her fighting style basically boils down to "mash together a bunch of powerful Quirks, blast the enemy until they're defeated". That said, the incredibly clever and out-of-the-box ways she can learn to combine her stolen Quirks show that its still a very, very bad thing for most of her enemy Quirk users to fight against her, as they also lack skill and experience, too.
    • King is a powerful young Titan that can go toe-to-toe with Eda and Toshiko but hasn't had much opportunity to hone his magical abilities, due to now being at apoint that he's too strong for most opponents to fight against. He's hoping that having Toshiko as his sparring partner they can avert this for both of them.
  • In Amazing Fantasy, most of the goons Mysterio outfits with Marvel Universe equipment are dangerous enough to take on the average Pro Hero because of how advanced it is. But Peter notes that many of them, like most of the Rocket Racer Gang, aren't seasoned fighters, which lets him overwhelm them by picking several of them off before using his superior skill to divide and conquer.
  • Anderson Quest, a crossover between Hellsing Ultimate Abridged and Bloodborne:
    • Anderson notes this about the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst. The Bloody Crow has been so used to being the top dog that he never bothered to learn how to properly fight. This proves to be his undoing against Anderson, a peer opponent. This later turns out to have been invoked; the lack of training was supposed to be an insurance policy in the hope that the previous strongest and most experienced Church Hunter could use skill to close the gap if things went wrong. It wasn't enough.
    • Averted with the Amygdala. Despite being even more powerful than its Lesser brethren, it also knows how to use its advantages to the fullest. That makes it a nightmare for Anderson to fight.
  • Many close combat Sekirei such as Musubi, and to a lesser extent Haihane, in Anything Goes Game Changer have far more power than actual ability. Part of why Sekirei regularly lose to the Nerima Wrecking Crew, besides Underestimating Badassery, is that the human martial artists are incredibly skilled on top of being outright superhuman physically.
  • In Avengers: Infinite Wars, this is a good description of Pietro's use of a lightsaber in the Battle of Kamino; he obviously doesn't have the Force or any real training in lightsaber combat, but his sheer speed allows him to hold his own against Grievous and a Sith Acolyte, forcing Grievous to retreat.
  • Avenger of Steel:
    • Jessica Jones has considerable raw strength, but little in the way of actual hand-to-hand combat experience, with most of her fights relying on her just hitting her opponents really hard, which puts her at a disadvantage when facing the rare foe who can match her strength and knows how to fight.
    • It is noted that Raven has a great deal of raw power, but most of her training has focused on suppressing that power rather than using it.
  • In Back From the Future, Luke Skywalker's lightsaber form is rough and unpolished even by padawan standards, but he's so strong in the Force and opens himself so completely to it each time he uses his lightsaber that he can defeat even Ventress despite her having far more training.
  • When it comes to piloting in The Black Emperor, C.C. comes off as this compared to Kallen. While her immortal body is faster, stronger, more durable, and has better reflexes than Kallen, she lacks the redhead's raw talent for piloting Knightmare Frames.
  • Penny Polendina is an example of this in BlazBlue Alternative: Remnant when it comes to fighting hand-to-hand. She's shown to have immense strength and speed, easily overpowering the likes of Yang and moving so fast she seems like a green and orange blur, but she has very little in the way of actual unarmed combat skills. When fighting Mercury in Chapter 66, her opponent struggled not to laugh at how all her punches and kicks were easily telegraphed in spite of her overwhelming strength and speed.
  • Discussed in Bleeding Out: Ron has far less training and skill than Monkey Fist, but since he has achieved a level of basic competence, and he's channeling absolutely vast amounts of the Mystic Monkey Power at the time, it doesn't do Monkey Fist any good.
  • Blood and Spirit (The Legend of Zelda): Sheik notes that Link lacks skill, but has potential, and describes him as "all impulse and reaction instead of thought and action." She even asks Link how he managed to beat Demise in the first place with how he fights.
  • The Boys Avenging: This is Deconstructed with Homelander. While he has had some combat training in his youth, it's entirely subpar with his fighting style being akin to a dirty brawler, and being the World's Strongest Man of his Earth, he's relied on superior strength alone to win fights for years. Suffice it to say, when going up against the much stronger and more skilled Marvel heroes and villains in Chapters 3 and 4, Homelander gets his ass brutally kicked twice, either having to run away in fear or outright beg for mercy and having his already fragile ego severely bruised. Chapter 5 also has him nearly getting mauled to death by a vengeful Hughie, who's now bonded with a Venom symbiote, as his powerset does very little to save him even if he was at tip-top shape. It really says something that the only Earth-616 individuals he's been able to put up a real threat to so far are the Runaways, who are mainly young adults, teenagers, and pre-teens, and he still fails to kill a single one of them.
  • The Bridge (MLP):
    • When Garble and his friends experience Greed Growth and turn into full-grown dragons, Anguirus easily defeats them while noting that though they are not as strong as him, they could probably give him trouble if they actually knew how to fight.
    • King Sombra has great strength and durability on par with Xenilla's, but he treated physical combat as beneath him and preferred to just kill his enemies at a distance with his magic, so once Xenilla can get into melee range, he has the advantage. However, Sombra is quite handy with a scythe.
    • Grand King Ghidorah is one of the most powerful beings in the universe, with strength outclassing Godzilla. Since he's used to just toying with and killing beings who don't stand a chance against him, he's never needed to learn how to fight. Once he faces beings on par with him, he fares badly.
    • In the spinoff The Bridge: Sound of Thunder, Godzilla Junior's evil Mirror Universe counterpart is stronger than him and can use the Red Spiral Ray (which is more powerful than the Atomic Breath) at will. However, according to the author, this is because he focused on maximizing his power by regularly attacking nuclear power plants and other sources of radiation to absorb, while the main Godzilla instead relied on sunlight to empower him and learned how to fight. The evil Godzilla does not have as much experience in applying his powers and typically fights like a savage. Once Raiga is powered up into her Super Mode and able to match him in power, she is able to completely outmatch him in melee combat.
    • The spinoff The Bridge: Humanity's Stand featured a fight of Godzilla Junior and Zilla vs Gojira, the creature from Godzilla (2014). Gojira is much stronger and tougher than Junior and Zilla, but Junior notes that he doesn't seem to be used to fighting beings who approach him in power. Gojira's skills may have decayed since he's been in hibernation for literally millions of years.
  • Ciaphas Cain: The Last Cup managed to plausibly do this to Abaddon the Despoiler. Sure, he's over 10,000 years old, but he'd spent most of that time in the Eye of Terror planning his Black Crusades and comparatively little of that time on the battlefield, and even most of his time on a battlefield had him engaging from a distance rather than melee combat. Cain, on the other hand, had spent virtually his entire adult life fighting wars or in transit to the next one, and as such had far more practical recent combat experience than the Chaos Warmaster. This allowed him and Jurgen to fight Abaddon and win. It is also mentioned that if Cain hadn't goaded Abaddon into fighting at his level (No armor, no psyker tricks, just weapon against weapon), the sheer difference in raw power would have allowed Abaddon to instantly crush Cain like a bug.
  • Child of the Storm tends to punish characters that try to rely solely on their raw power. This is aptly demonstrated by Harry and his friends in chapter 60. After a Plot-Relevant Age-Up, they're on par with the Avengers for raw power, now being two Physical Gods (one also being an Omega Class Psychic), a One-Man Army, a Super-Soldier, and a Flash. They flatten a bunch of Elite Mooks, but when they face HYDRA's Destroyer (which also shapeshifts) as controlled by Zemo, they're nearly all killed in ten seconds flat. While they do win that fight, they're all exhausted and badly injured afterwards. In the sequel, Harry notes that with the training he's undergone and experience he's gained, in a rematch with his current powers (Person of Mass Destruction class) he'd be able to destroy it relatively easily, all by himself.
    • Harry himself is a Zig-Zagged example. He starts out as a Squishy Wizard and a Guile Hero, relying on his wits to get out of trouble. As he starts to win the Superpower Lottery and gets some training in his powers and close combat, he goes through Elite Mooks like a hot knife through butter, even once his Berserk Button is pressed and strategy goes out the window — but as the above example shows, against equals/superiors, he's in trouble. In the sequel, he gets serious training and becomes a far more pragmatic and effective fighter, even if the fight is just part of a plan.
    • Gravemoss, who's described as being an incredibly powerful Evil Sorcerer, but gets defeated by Strange in a duel while the latter is performing Astral Projection to elsewhere on the battlefield while dueling. Of course, it should be noted that Strange is both precognitive and incredibly experienced (he's had 500,000 years to refine his technique), and that thanks to the corruption of the Darkhold, Gravemoss is losing focus and control.
    • The Beast, aka Dudley Dursley is pretty much entirely reliant on his Healing Factor, Super-Strength, and being Nigh-Invulnerable to get through fights. It works... up to a point. However, against real heavyweights such as Maddie, Harry, and Thor, he simply doesn't have the experience or brains to even things up. Even when Harry has half his powers switched off in their first fight, he only takes a single hit because the Beast sucker-punched him. The rest of that fight and the rematch — which, since Dudley's now a vampire, ends with Harry dismembering him — is very one-sided.
      "Anyway, Dudley got in a few good hits before I realized that, broke a few bones, that sort of thing. And the main reason I beat him up so easily afterwards is that his fighting style is pretty much entirely based on being way more powerful than his opponent, being able to soak up anything they could throw at him, and being absolutely vicious."
  • The Lions in Code Geass: Paladins of Voltron are more advanced than any Knightmare that Britannia had developed. However, with the exception of Kallen and Suzaku, the Paladins are still rookie pilots, which allows more skilled Knightmare pilots such as the Knights of Round to be able to fight them to a standstill.
  • Code Prime:
    • Suzaku, for now — he has a highly advanced Knightmare frame and incredible sync rate, but that will only go so far against opponents (e.g. the Autobots) who have been fighting for longer than he has been alive. He grows out of this to Strong and Skilled as he both gains experience and gets even an better Knightmare frame made from Cybertronian technology.
    • Charles zi Britannia, despite possessing powerful Knightmare frame specifically designed to counter his mentor, Megatron, he's still end up being completely decimated when said former mentor comes violently knocking on Pendragon due to the Decepticons' leader already honed his fighting skills from the millenias of Kaon gladiatorial ring and Cybertronian civil war experiences while Charles himself is primarily a Non-Action Big Bad.
    • Nemesis Prime, a.k.a. V.V. now as a Cyborg, has some of finest Decepticon mad science installed in him and is a physical match for Optimus, or at least close to it, but not only does Optimus have far more battle experience in general, V.V. himself has far less experience than even other human pilots, alongside a bad case of emotional immaturity and instability not helped by the process of being converted to Nemesis Prime. As such, no only does Optimus trounce his counterpart when they come to blows, even other Autobots and Black Knights on paper weaker than Nemesis give him a good fight.
  • Coeur Al'Aran:
    • The Eternal Crown: Salem may be the single most powerful being on the planet, with only Ozma to rival her, but thousands of years of resting on her laurels and using her immortality as a crutch means that she kind of sucks as a fighter and even as a mage. In the final battle she throws around massive displays of magic which are more than enough to overpower normal human opponents, but when faced with newly-lucid Ozma, who's almost as powerful but also the World's Best Warrior and The Archmage, he can easily defeat her (just not kill her).
    • White Sheep: Jaune Arc has so much Aura that not only can he fight for over an hour without tiring, but even getting hit head-on by another student's attack barely bruises him. Unfortunately, if he's not using his Grimm powers, that's all he can do; he has no skill whatsoever with his sword and shield. After an hour-long spar against his partner Weiss, Jaune "wins" due to her collapsing from exhaustion (and running out of Dust) but he never managed to land or block a single attack.
  • When the Madrigals do battle with Stoick's party in The Dragon and the Butterfly, they are able to overwhelm them with their various gifts. Unfortunately for them, none of the Madrigals are fighters and are one-trick ponies when it comes to using their abilities defensively, while the Vikings are all stronger and have more fighting experience, so all they have to do is tough it out until the Madrigals exhaust themselves.
  • Destiny is a Hazy Thing: While highly skilled for their rank, the Circle of Six have power far outstripping their skill. Shino, Yakumo, Ino, and Chouji all have chakra roughly on par with a Jounin. Hinata, who's been doing the training longer, has comparable chakra to a Kage. And Naruto, who's done it the longest, has almost as much chakra as a Bijuu.
  • Dragon Caught in Amber: As she's a magical creature with an innate attunement to her Wind, Yara is an exceptionally strong magic-user with a powerful innate feel for spellcasting, enough so as to be a once-a-generation prodigy by human standards. However, due to her youth and instinct-based approach, her theoretical knowledge of magic is essentially nonexistent, and the majority of her training thus ends up revolving around getting her to understand what her magic actually is and does and how to properly harness and use it.
  • A Drop of Poison:
    • Naruto's poor chakra control and massive reserves show through when he and his clones can cross entire countries in a couple of hours via Kawarimi (Substitution) to locations up to 8 kilometers away and can switch with air, the former considered impossible and the latter insanely difficult. Naruto spends months working his way down on both how many clones he makes and how far he travels with Kawarimi.
    • Naruto works with Gaara to improve the latter's skills, and he discovers that Gaara's hand-to-hand fighting skills are just awful. Gaara's sand control is so overwhelmingly powerful that he's never had to fight up close, so he hasn't properly practiced it, leaving his technique very mechanical and predictable. They don't have time for the level of training he would need to truly fix the problem, but they do come up with some workarounds to let him enhance his taijutsu with sand, enough that close range isn't such a glaring weakness.
  • Dueling Zero: When Marauding Captain fights Sky Striker Ace - Roze, he notes that she is stronger and faster than him and her sword is tougher than his, meaning after a few clashes, his swords are on the verge of breaking. He then notices that due to her youth and inexperience, she fights like an amateur and telegraphs her moves, allowing him to dodge and parry all her attacks. Roze never had anyone to challenge her besides Sky Striker Ace - Raye, so she was used to just killing enemies with one attack.
  • Enter the Dragon sees Harry Potter turned into an immense and absurdly overpowered dragon, while still only a young boy. Despite being a fast learner, he's still young, naive, and untrained in any kind of combat, but he's unstoppable nonetheless.
    Bane's eyes threatened to burst from their sockets as the Great Wyrm barreled into the fray with all the grace and power of a living landslip, that is to say with no grace at all and with absurdly overwhelming power.
  • Eleutherophobia: It's mentioned that Tom might have a natural talent for morphing, but he doesn't think he's that good at it because he hasn't has as much practice as the Animorphs.
  • Equestria Girls: Friendship Souls:
    • Blueblood is counted amongst the Gotei 13 thanks to possessing a legitimately powerful Bankai and high spiritual potential, but it's noted that his lack of experience compared to the other Captains and his arrogance keeps him from training and bringing out his full potential, which is why he's considered the weakest of them. Sure enough, Rarity, despite being far weaker in terms of power, defeats him through carefully observing his actions throughout the fight and using "unconventional" techniques to catch him off-guard before he can use his Bankai.
    • Sweet Cider, being this world's Kenpachi, is this as well. She lacks Bankai or any real skill in Kido, but her raw physical power puts her in league with the likes of Celestia and Hurricane in terms of destructive power and she's technically the physically strongest of all the Captains (barring Captain-Commander Scorpan). On the topic of Sweet Cider, her Shikai is this as well. It doesn't have any fancy powers. It just absorbs her Spirit Energy and lets it out hard. And she only gets stronger when she regains access to her Fullbring and unlocks her true Shikai.
    • Captain Thunderhooves' Shikai is a massive club that becomes stronger with each successive swing, but in return, each swing becomes increasingly unwieldy. This allows him to snowball into a ridiculously powerful combatant who can take out numerous foes with even near-misses, but collateral damage is all but assured and it's not a safe ability to use with allies present.
    • Both Lament's Resurreccion and Luna's fully-released Bankai turn them into this. They gain incredible power alongside massive boosts in physical ability, but in return, their minds drown in soul-rending regret and predatory rage respectively and they can't do much to "plan" outside of "kill the targets in front of me with extreme prejudice".
    • Guto calls out Adagio as this when she makes her move after becoming an Arrancar to claim a place among the Espada and indirectly acknowledging very begrudgingly that her power in her sealed state is a close match and perhaps slightly superior to his own, stating that she might have the power but she lacks the experience. Adagio noticeably doesn't refute that assessment which is why she chooses to be tested by Tirek himself for her placement, and she also notes she'll need both to step up her training and come up with some killer finishing moves for when the two of them inevitably clash after she's named the new Sixth Espada over him. In fact, she would have been comfortable with starting as the Seventh Espada to avoid pissing Guto off over taking his rank, but Tirek refused to rank her any lower.
  • In Everqueen, that's what Malcador thinks of the Emperor when he sees Isha healing Chaos corruption and comparing it to his method of burning it away through brute force.
  • In the Facing the Future Series, this applies to Vlad Plasmius; while he's powerful and a skilled manipulator, he's not used to knock-down-drag-out fights like Danny is. This gives him a serious disadvantage when on the other end of a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown at the hands of powerful characters like Clockwork and Dark Danny.
  • Fairy May Cry:
    • Leviathia/Sheeree of Devil Hand has the rare magic, Magic Drain, a form of Power Copying that lets her mimic and magic she sees. This eventually gives her an arsenal comprised of several of Fairy Tails most powerful members' magics, including the likes of Erza and Mirajane and can use all of them at once to overwhelm her opponents, even defeating the likes of Erza. However, several people note that her proficiency with each magic she copies is greatly lacking compared to its original user, and using so many at once rapidly tires her out, letting her old friend Wendy (who has been training under Modeus) easily gain the upper hand in their rematch. It's also mentioned that the reason she was able to take down so many members of Fairy Tail before was largely due to their reluctance to harm a twelve-year-old-girl.
    • Then there's Adrian/Beelzebub, who like Sheeree is still a child despite being one of Devil Hands Seven Deadly Sins. His 'magic' is a Take Over with a thing called the Wendigo, a savage Extreme Omnivore with outright Horror Hunger, and acts more like a curse since he has very limited control when using it, which possessed him and made him eat his own family when he first encountered it. The Wendigo has zero finesse and basically fights like a wild animal but it's sheer speed, power, toughness and ability to consume magic itself is such that it put experienced Take Over wizards like Mirajane and Elfman decisively on the losing side of a fight.
    • Satan of the same Dark Guild is The Brute through and through, and his magic reflects this, focusing entirely on raw power and flames rather than any clever tactics like his fellow Sins. Given how his magic makes him bigger and stronger with each hit he takes, this suits him fine, overpowering the likes of Natsu, Gajeel, and Panther-Lily at the same time, with Gajeel having to resort to Victory by Endurance to drain his power.
    • The sequel has Racer, who has traded in his old Time Master powers for proper Super-Speed, enough to lay a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on an opponent before they can even react. The process also reduced him to a borderline mindless savage however, and Samuel proves that careful timing can eliminate the advantage his speed provides as he attacks in a fairly predictable manner. This then becomes subverted when he activates his One-Winged Angel, which not only increases his power but gives him his mind back, allowing him to utterly trounce his opponents who were unprepared. In the end, it took Mirajane with the help of the Thunder Legion to finally take him down by neutralizing his speed advantage and inadvertently hitting his Trauma Button.
  • Mordred in Fate/Magnus Bellum immensely strong and her Noble Phantasms can cause serious damage (it's even noted that her Clarent Blood Arthur would have left Siegfried severely wounded had he not been given an added defense) and she can be quite clever in battle (such as throwing trees at Arash to distract him so she can get close to him), but she lacks any real skill in swordsmanship. This becomes a notable problem when she fights more masterful swordsmen like Siegfried and Arthur or more skilled fighters like Chiron and Arash.
  • Fates Collide:
    • Bazett Fraga McRemitz criticizes Yang Xiao Long for being this. Yang is incredibly strong, but relies mostly on her strength, Aura, and Semblance and does not adapt to her opponent's tactics. Yang loses a fight to Bazett, who is even stronger than Yang and is an expert martial artist.
    • Mordred also lacks technique and relies on her strength. She flounders against the highly skilled and similarly strong Medusa and only manages to win by catching her by surprise with her Deliberate Injury Gambit.
    • Jaune Alter handles a sword like a child throwing a tantrum, but he is strong enough to crack stone and beat people unconscious. Even the relatively inexperienced original Jaune Arc is a better fighter than him, and since he has a similar level of strength, Arc gets the advantage, causing Alter to have a Villainous Breakdown.
    • Nero is unskilled in swordsmanship and relies on her incredible strength and Golden Theater draining her opponents' strength to beat them. Cinder Fall and Amakusa lecture her on her lack of skill, and despite the Golden Theater weakening them, are able to overwhelm her with their superior sword technique.
    • Ren Alter is incredibly strong, but fights like a savage and relies on his Healing Factor to tank attacks. His opponents defeat him with relative ease and call him a joke.
  • The Final Sword: Rebora. Clumsy enough to struggle to walk, and exhausts a lot of energy for her strongest attacks... but they can clear a citadel and even a city from enemies at once.
  • Penny is like this in The Games We Play. From a pure stats perspective, she is an absolute monster even for elite Huntsmen, but her lack of skill and experience enable then-much weaker Jaune to barely keep ahead of her long enough to achieve his goal.
  • God Slaying Blade Works:
    • Shirou Emiya comments that the god Hades is similar to Gilgamesh in that he's a ruler and not an experienced warrior. Shirou notes that Hades is so strong that he would be able to crush him like a bug if he could get his hands on him, but they're facing each other in a sword fight where Shirou has the advantage and beats him.
    • The narration points this out about Tiamat. She was one of the most powerful goddesses, and even in her weakened form, she is no pushover. However, she lacks combat experience, which allows opponents to outmaneuver and trick her.
  • In The Great Sage, Naruto is even stronger and more unskilled than canon. He has over ten times as much chakra as Kakashi and enough physical strength to crater the ground with a stomp. He also has absolutely no skill at taijutsu and has to rely on his durability because his defense is full of holes.
  • Hail to the King (Qwapdo): A dead man is reborn in the body of King Sombra. He gains Sombra's raw power but lacks the means to use it properly. This causes him problems multiple times. When he tries to dismantle a crystal wall, thinking that is what is scaring all the crystal ponies, he blows it up, raining large crystals down on the city and making it seem like he was trying to attack them. When Not!Sombra is confronted by Shining Armor, he is easily subdued by a well-trained soldier. And when he tries to escape, he has no problem blowing up a prison wall and destroying a collar, but he can't use his power to escape from Shining's and Cadence's shield, which requires certain skill.
  • Harmony Theory:
    • After watching Rainbow Dash fight, Astrid concludes she is this, since she is stronger, faster, and tougher than the average pony, but misses several opportunities at killing blows. However, Gamma says Rainbow is actually very skilled; it's just that she avoids killing.
    • Nightmare Umbra has the fighting and flying skills of an amateur and has horrible aim, allowing the heroes to outmaneuver her and get several hits in. Still, she is no pushover since her stamina is unlimited, she's almost impossible to hurt, and she can rip out a chunk of the ground the size of a mountain and throw it so fast that it creates a slipstream that can sweep you up even if you dodge the rock itself.
    • Charisma is a highly skilled fighter, but when it comes to flying and Weather Manipulation, she's inexperienced. In her final battle, she gains a massive power boost that grants her strength, speed, and durability on par with Rainbow Dash, as well as telekinesis and control over the weather. Rainbow Dash notices she's flapping her wings in an inefficient way and making mistakes like flying against the wind instead of with it. Add in Charisma's inexperience with her new powers and Rainbow manages to get the advantage.
  • The human protagonist in Humans Don't Make Good Pets is a Lightning Bruiser strong enough to use crates several times his size as battering rams, tough enough that anti-tank rifles might break bones but not skin, and fast enough that trained soldiers can barely track him with their eyes as he leaps several meters at a time. But by his own admission, his fighting style amounts to wildly flailing with his weapons, possessing exactly zero training in combat. More than once, a skilled fighter manages to hold him off for some time before his natural physical superiority wins the fight.
  • Though normally Strong and Skilled when it comes to magic in I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, Harry Potter admits that healing is one area where he's always just thrown a lot of magic and intent at the problem until it's gone.
  • The Immortal Game: During their final duel, Twilight notes that Titan seems to have only the most basic level of blade training, and figures he never bothered to learn more complex techniques due to having just so much more sheer power than anybody else. Since Twilight, by this point, has become an alicorn herself and has advanced skills in bladecasting, she's more than an even match for him.
  • In Incarnation of Legends, Oryou has no need for martial technique when she can crush nearly anything in a flurry of punches with her absurd strength. The only reason why a temporarily leveled-up Araki is able to survive against her is because of his martial skill, and when she stops holding back she quickly makes a crater in his face.
  • The Infinite Loops: In the WinxVerse parts, Valtor has immense magical power (easily the strongest of the non-Loopers of his universe after Bloom started Looping) and knows a large number of spells. However, he has apparently missed a few basic lessons and considers physical combat beneath him, resulting in him being on the wrong end of a magical Curb-Stomp Battle against the Trix (who weren't Looping at the time) and the "Valtor Sucks at Meelee" Running Gag. Even when the Gag was subverted, it was shown he wasn't skilled, he just had a demon form with enormous strength and the durability to match.
  • Infinity Crisis:
    • In Hand and Foot sees Shredder bring back Tokka and Rahzar to help the Foot's campaign against the Hand, the Turtles noting that these two are even dumber than Bebop and Rocksteady but make up for it by being more vicious.
    • A Darker Shade of Red observes that this is the main weakness of Brandon Breyer; he might be a Physical God, but with no experience facing opponents who can match him, he's swiftly defeated by the Earth-167 Superman.
  • Kabbalah: The Passive Conqueror: Circe notes that Natsumi's power levels and spells are comparable to her own, but since Natsumi is a child with no combat experience or practice while Circe is a veteran witch, Circe shuts her down easily.
  • In the Jackie Chan Adventures and W.I.T.C.H. crossover fanfic Kage (part of Project Dark Jade), Elyon is said to fit this, as her brother only taught her how to tap into her full raw power, not how to control it. To be fair though, all the previous bearers of her power are said to have at least a little trouble with it (the fact that they react to her emotions, with anger making them both more powerful and harder to control doesn't help much).
    • Because she flipped out and nearly killed Jade early on, she's started getting trained in properly using them by the Oracle, so the trope is in the process of being subverted.
  • In Kimberly T's Gargoyles series, Thailog (Goliath's evil clone) reflects at one point that he's only bothered to learn the basics of hand-to-hand combat, as he prefers firearms and more subtle manipulations. That said, considering that he's the size of Goliath with all of the raw power of his 'father', Thailog is generally strong enough that he doesn't typically need more than the basics when it comes down to a fight between him and his enemies.
  • Steven Stone criticizes many of Ash's Pokémon for this in Legend, as they favor too much of their raw power in order to overwhelm an opponent but lack the sufficient training to back up their power. He is particularly concerned about Ash's Metagross, as the Stones have been guarding the colony he originally came from and is insists on training him when the time comes.
  • Magical Pony Lyrical Twilight: Celestia has more raw power than even Luna with the Tome of the Night Sky but less combat finesse. Particularly visible in the flashback to the Celestia vs Nightmare Moon fight where Celestia was nearly tapped out using her power statically whereas her foe had hardly broken a sweat despite staying mobile and using various multi-front attacks.
  • In Mass Effect: Human Revolution, Adam Jensen is this in a way. Adam's more of a brawler, relying instead on methodical Awesomeness by Analysis to dissect an opponent's style before committing, but has no formal melee weapons training. On Caleston, he needs to think outside the box to defeat Leon and was a dead man walking against Caim. On Ilium, Toombs nearly beat him. On Noveria, Jules's skill prevents him from getting the time needed to plan a counter. The Warrior calls him out on his overreliance on his augs in chapter 31, calling back to the boss fights against the Tyrants where that failed him.
  • In Mastering Thy Self, Cardin rejects the idea of being tutored by a more tactically-inclined student because he feels independence is "his right for being stronger than the rest".
  • In Medicated, King Andrias points out to Anne in their Final Battle that, despite having her Calamity powers her whole life, she was never once trained on how to use them.
  • In Metagaming?, Harry Potter quickly notes that everyone and everything on Azeroth is highly magical, with average Sentinels having roughly the same magical presence as a young dragon on his home world. As a result, magic has largely evolved to specialize in overwhelming power with little finesse. Harry notes that a warlock's shadowbolt is little more than a mass of shadow magic sloppily thrown at the enemy.
    • In the following chapter, he learns this applies to craftsmen too. A novice alchemist can toss common weeds into a pot of boiling water and create a potion that will regenerate limbs within an hour, but none of them acknowledge that there's anything magical happening.
  • A Monster and a Saint: After she arrives in Hell, Sera rapidly becomes this - she has absolutely no knowledge of how to fight, and is in the throes of a psychological breakdown for quite some time. However, she's Nigh-Invulnerable and effectively can't be hurt by anything that isn't powered by another angel, or an angelic steel weapon, and both of these things are in very short supply in Hell, meaning that her lack of finesse tends to end up not mattering when people try to threaten her.
  • In the The More Things Change Series, Ron's Mystical Monkey Power gives him ninja-like moves, but he mostly uses it for Super-Strength.
  • In The Mortal Son Lucian is this in spades. Being the son of the Emperor of Mankind he has an absolutely ludicrous amount of psychic potential beyond that of any other mortal being, but he has very limited control over it. Best demonstrated when, after he finally is allowed to practically exercise his powers, an attempt at producing a simple Warp-lightning bolt leads to a blast of energy several times more powerful than a nuclear bomb.
  • My Abominable Monster Classmates Can't Be This Cute!: Yang, Ruby, and Weiss all qualify compared to canon. They're all far stronger but rely more on their physical ability. Yang and Ruby don't even know what their Semblances are while Weiss hasn't unlocked hers due to not having her Aura unlocked yet.
  • My Ideal Academia: Momo Yaoyorozu comments that she basically has a superior version of Shirou Emiya's ability. Shirou can only make bladed weapons while she can make anything, including firearms and bombs. She says if they fought each other she would easily win, but Aizawa disagrees. She doesn't know how to fight and has no battlefield experience, while Shirou clearly does, so Aizawa says Shirou would win. Sure enough, when they face each other in a training exercise, Momo tries to keep him at bay with a machine gun (with rubber bullets) and flashbang grenades, but he easily parries them and gets into melee range. She then makes a taser and a spear, but he effortlessly dodges or parries her with a wooden sword while lecturing her on the flaws in her technique before knocking her out. Momo later asks Shirou to train her and he agrees.
  • The Inane One from The Night Unfurls is like this, thick with power but less intelligence. A target so large that it is impossible for three hunters to miss any of their hits, but it can simply tank them like they're nothing. Its raw strength is demonstrated via its surge of power that launches the three back, incapacitating two of them in the process.
  • Nihilus Filius Et Sacerdos: Albaz in his human form is so strong he can break the ground and trying to block a blow from him results in the blocker getting sent flying. He can also control fire. However, he has little combat experience and doesn't know how to use a sword. When Daemon Targeryen challenges him to a spar with swords, Albaz gets humiliated over and over again. Albaz only beats Daemon once. Every other time, Daemon adjusts to his strength by not trying to block him and dancing around all of Albaz's clumsy sword swings before hitting him. After that, Albaz asks Ecclesia to give him sword lessons so he can grow out of this.
  • The Olympian God of Destruction: Beerus admits that the Olympians and Titans have strength and speed that rivals his own, but they lack knowledge of martial arts, giving him the advantage. The one punch that Atlas manages to land nearly knocks Beerus out cold before he recovers and humiliates him. Zeus fares a little bit better due to practicing his shapeshifting and teleportation, but Beerus still wins.
  • In Pages of Harmony, Fluttershy has a case of this when Kindness is extracted from her. She has had no training in any sort of combat, with only experience of the false memories from Twilight's Mind Rape techniques to guide her, she is still able to show quite a bit of strength, in part thanks to the magic and injections Twilight used to keep her alive. She becomes so strong that she tears her former pets to pieces and engages in a battle with Twilight, but her wild punches and Unstoppable Rage are what do her in, having no real strategy and Twilight managing to use her magic just right to properly beat her.
  • In the Gargoyles fic "The Path Unfolding", the time-displaced Adam Gargan — later revealed to be Goliath and Elisa's son from the future — mocks Demona about her combat skills as she just powers through everything, even though she's over a thousand years old and has had more than enough time to learn at least one combat style if she wanted to.
  • In Peace Day Never Came #24 we see a Courser in action. Despite his natural advantages, he has little grasp of tactics.
  • Pony POV Series:
    • Discord is stated to be possibly the fifth most powerful being in creation due to exploiting Cannibalism Superpower and eating two of his family members for power, but because of his near unlimited power, he never bothered learning hand to hand combat. While he's very creative and skilled with his Reality Warper powers, his hand-to-hand combat abilities are lacking. This resulted in the Paradise Estate Ponies managing to defeat him, as their Spike (an adult dragon and judging by how he acted, a Genius Bruiser) could overpower him in melee combat.
    • In the Dark World, after Fluttercruel is given the bulk of Discord's power and transforms into a draconequus, she's left just as powerful as her father. But due to her inexperience and Villainous Breakdown, she's far from able to use them at full efficiency, leading to her defeat.
    • It's noted that Dark World Spike is one of the few Dragons who's not this trope. He's a full-grown dragon but has spent the last thousand years reading...well, everything from fighting manuals to acupuncture. This makes him a very dangerous dragon because he's not only got brute strength, but the skill and knowledge to use it.
    • In the Finale Arc, Flutternice is so unbelievably strong that trying to block her attacks results in her opponents getting sent flying, she's armed with weapons that erase whatever they cut from existence, and she can regenerate. However, her attacks are so sloppy and predictable that Starlight and Zecora effortlessly avoid them and then incapacitate her with Pressure Point strikes. Zecora even points out she fights like an amateur.
  • The (Questionable) Burdens of Leadership of a Troll Emperor:
    • Karasuba is actually a rank amateur with a sword who only beats Warmaster Setsuna due to her overwhelming power. Once Naruto has her Brought Down to Normal for their spars, it takes Karasuba decades to overcome Setsuna who's honed her skill over centuries.
    • Xanna as well has no actual fighting ability since, unlike Naruto, she's never been mortal. Even telepathically copying Naruto's skills doesn't allow her to match him because she has no real fighting instinct and can't improvise as he can.
  • The Red Dragon's Saber: Raynare mentions to herself that she and her Fallen Angel comrades never trained due to believing they are the ultimate beings, and that only higher-ranked Angels could ever be a threat to them. Thus Artoria, who is very Strong and Skilled, can easily avoid their attacks and smack them around.
  • Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness: When she comes to Earth from Heaven in Acts V and VI, Arial Kuyumaya is still technically dead and thus does not have the limitations of a living body; thus, there is no limit to how much ice she can produce at once. However, she's a poor fighter; in Act VI chapter 8, she catches Mizore by surprise and beats her in a fight, but come chapter 17, Mizore's superior fighting skills and technique ultimately allow Mizore to come out on top.
  • A Samurai In Hell: While Vaggie is a formidable fighter, she has faced few genuine opponents, meaning Jack can slap her around, even without his sword.
  • The Secret Return of Alex Mack: Jo Baker gets exposed to GC-161 and comes after Alex with no finesse, but with car-throwing Super-Strength, and Super-Toughness to the point of being Immune to Bullets. Terawatt beats her by blinding her and then pouring antidote in her mouth. Eventually she has enough of a Heel–Face Turn to get some actual training from the SRI, but her style remains very direct and simple, relying on her ability to get up in someone's face, ignoring whatever they can throw at her, and bring the pain.
  • Atomic Samurai and Silver Fang both notice in Serious Saitama that for all his power, Saitama has no skill at all. If physical strength was the same, any S-rank hero (except Tatsumaki) could utterly thrash him, but Saitama is so overwhelmingly strong that his lack of skill doesn't matter.
  • In the Arrow/The Vampire Diaries crossover "Sharper Points", even after being turned into a vampire and gaining enhanced strength along with a Healing Factor, Felicity Smoak has minimal combat skills. As a result, she's in trouble when fighting an opponent who can match her physically, but she's still strong enough that she's more than a match for most regular humans who might try to fight her; at one point the Huntress shoots her in the neck with a plastic crossbow bolt and Felicity is just unable to talk until she can pull it out and let herself heal.
  • King Cold in Frieza: A Simple Act of Mercy is even stronger than either of his sons but also an even worse fighter. The Z Fighters hold their own, and even badly injure him until Goku and Trunks arrive, despite having a combined power level of only a tiny fraction of Cold's own. Piccolo infers that Cold likely never trained at all (Frieza himself admits to having only the bare basics of training) as he telegraphs all of his attacks "a mile in advance". If even a single attack lands, the one struck will most likely die but Cold struggles to land a blow on anyone the entire fight.
  • In "Star Wars: Legends Never Die", when Luke Skywalker of another reality faces Kylo Ren during the Battle of Starkiller Base, he observes that while Kylo Ren is stronger in the Force than he is the younger man lacks sufficient training in the finer details of the Force, only able to use the Dark Side to destroy but caught off-guard when facing an opponent who can fight him with something other than brute force.
  • In ''Street Fighting Heroes’’ this screws over most of Izuku and Ryoya’s opponents, especially Bakugo and Todoroki in their matches. Ryoya explicitly points out that while the other two have very strong Quirks, they have no idea how to actually fight without them, or if their opponent gets in close with hand to hand combat, resulting in many a Curb-Stomp Battle., Subverted with All Might, who adopts Boxing Battler style during his fight with M. Bison, stating that no true hero is a one-trick pony, and fights the latter on even footing.
  • Smoker to an extent in Supernova (One Piece) due to the nature of his devil fruit as both a logia and one that isn't inherently destructive. Luffy points out that basically no one in the East Blue can even touch him and since it isn't destructive, Smoker can use it all he wants but it comes with the drawback that it's all he uses, leaving his other skills atrophied. Contrast Strong and Skilled Luffy who's both skilled with his devil fruit and knows Rokushiki.
  • Naruto in Thief of Konoha has so much power and so little control that he once accidentally used Substitution and ripped an entire tree out of the ground to switch with.
  • In To Undo it All, Ichigo is still rather crude in his fighting even after ten years of fighting in wars, often utilizing his defensive techniques and Healing Factor to tank hits, but is so powerful that he kills Aizen in a single attack. The only two people who can give him a decent fight are Unohana and Yamamoto when they use bankai and the former only can if he sticks to shikai. Ichigo is explicitly stated as having more power than either but Unohana's Healing Factor and Yamamoto's raw skill let them keep pace with him.
  • Teen Titans Tokyo: Nabiki Tendo's Were Dragon curse gives her Super-Strength, Wolverine Claws and a Breath Weapon, at the bare minimum, but she herself notes that this can't make up for her complete lack of training in any martial arts prior to being cursed. Which is a problem when she gets volunteered into a fledgling superhero team...
  • Legendary Pokemon in Traveler are overwhelmingly powerful to the point of basically being gods. For example, Zapdos' mere presence caused a storm over forty miles in diameter (and growing) with hurricane-level winds. However, if another Pokemon can reach their level of power (Such as Infernus with Moltres' Fire Sphere) they can easily defeat any Legendary.
  • Triptych Continuum: In the Continuum, a pony's magical strength is purely a function of their genetics, but training is necessary to develop fine control and learn specific spells. This can lead to characters like her or like Zephyr Breeze from Anchor Foal II, who were born with vast power but never learnt to use it in a way more complex than throw raw force around and hope that the results are something you like.
  • In Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Supergirl crossover The Vampire of Steel, Supergirl is obviously massively more powerful than Buffy, but Buffy knows how to fight vampires. When Supergirl has to fight a vampire Kryptonian who is actually more powerful than her, she struggles. Buffy has to enter her mind via a spell to add Supergirl's powers to her own fighting skills and take the vampire down.
  • The Vasto of White:
    • While Shirou is a master swordsman by human standards, he admits his skills are nothing compared to Shinigami who have been honing their craft for centuries. In his fight with Ukitake, Shirou admits the only reason why he won was that he was stronger and faster and Ukitake was handicapped by his illness.
    • In a spar, Nelliel completely schools Ichigo in hand-to-hand combat, but Ichigo is so strong that any blow he manages to land bruises her even though she has Hierro.
  • Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse: During his duel with Gasparde, Ranma's mental analysis of his Candy-Candy Logia opponent is that his foe, whilst strong enough that he's one of the first equal physical threats Ranma has faced since arriving in the Grand Line, either lacks imagination or hasn't practiced much with his powers, since he doesn't really do anything more creative than just sprout spikes and rely on his Healing Factor. He reiterates this assessment when discussing the duel later.
  • With Strings Attached.
    • All of the four, because they're Actual Pacifists, they have no intention of getting more skilled with the combat aspects of their magic, though they love figuring out new things to do with it.
    • A bigger issue in The Keys Stand Alone, because now they're in a situation where their lack of combat experience really stands out. Several times baddies ambush them in some way, and only luck and cheating and aspects of their overwhelming power let them escape. They still don't want to learn to fight or kill, though. Even when they discover they're in an MMORPG and none of the deaths in the game are real.
      John: Who's to say if we start in here we'll stop once we get out? I do not want to learn to kill. I refuse.
  • With This Ring:
    • It's all too easy for Orange Lanterns to become this trope, by losing their focus and becoming obsessed with short-term desires. In that state, they have high power output due to their intense avarice, but they can easily be outmaneouvred by a more level-headed opponent.
    • The epitome is Larfleeze, who spent billions of years in a cave with the Orange Light Fountain, and ended up completely and utterly saturated in orange light. He comes across as a gibbering lunatic every time he talks, obsessed with "My shinies!" and "You can't have it! It's mine!" but he's powerful enough that he's defeated and assimilated (or just plain eaten) anyone who has ever tried to rob his cave, becoming The Dreaded to the entire planet of Okaara and a good deal of the star systems nearby. Paul captures and disables him in his sleep, to be both rehabilitated if possible, and studied in order to better treat other cases of orange light overload.
  • XCOM: Second Contact: For all their raw power, the Ogres have no finesse, which allows Wrex to beat them by fighting smart.
  • In their first spar in A Young Girl's Padawan Record, Anakin and Tanya both utilize levitation to add an extra dimension to their attacks. Anakin can move himself far faster than Tanya can, but is largely unable to maneuver beyond launching himself in straight lines, in contrast to Tanya who isn't as fast but can freely maneuver through the air.

    Films — Animated 
  • Elsa from Frozen has shown to have ice powers that are capable of quickly subduing (or even murdering) other people, make a Snowlem with ease, and can even alter the weather from summer to winter in an instant. However, she demonstrates very little control over her ability due to her past trauma to the point that she inadvertently created an Endless Winter after her power gets outed and even struck other people in their heart by sheer accident. It is all the more telling of her lack of skills when two Mooks are able to outmaneuver her and almost manage to kill her, she only manages to survive just by unleashing even more of her ice powers and because Hans interferes.
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Judge Claude Frollo can slice through stone gargoyles with a sword and was able to briefly wrestle with Quasimodo over a dagger but displays little finesse.
  • The Incredibles:
    • Jack-Jack's "molecular self-manipulation" gives him a wide variety of superpowers according to Edna, but since he's a baby, he doesn't use his abilities with any strategy or finesse. Several times in the second film he randomly teleports into the air and falls to the ground, although it's Played for Laughs because Bob always catches him. The exact power level of his abilities has not yet been determined and his "victories" against the villains are more due to the element of surprise of a baby with changing superpowers than any skill on Jack-Jack's part.
    • The DEVTech Supers introduced in the sequel aren't experienced in using their powers or adapting to changing situations in a fight.
  • Kung Fu Panda 3 has its villain, Kai. His psychical prowess and stolen chi allow him to easily steamroll opponents constantly, but his lack of skill undermines his other trump card: the jombies. Jade zombies of masters whose chi he has stolen, their tactics are astoundingly simplistic and easily countered by the unexpected because Kai does not have the skill to get them to do anything more complicated than attack or capture.
  • The Lion King: When Nala sees Pumbaa as an easy snack and chases him, Simba saves Pumbaa by fighting Nala head-on. Keep in mind that Nala has pretty much hunted and run hard to chase any remaining prey in the Pride Lands, while Simba has spent his days lazing in the jungle and snacking with his buddies Timon and Pumbaa. Even so, Simba takes on Nala in what is most likely his first fight ever and nearly wins, only losing when Nala gets to pin him down.
  • In The Powerpuff Girls Movie, the girls are, upon their creation, obviously capable of furnishing their bedroom and making sandwiches. But they're not sure — or are oblivious — exactly as to what their powers entail, so their game of tag trashes the city. It's only after they become pariahs in the eyes of Townsville and when Mojo Jojo threatens the Professor do the girls realize what their powers are for and how to use them.
  • Big Jack Horner from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a massive crime lord with the strength to back it up. Pair that with his near-limitless arsenal of magic weapons, and he's unstoppable...or he would be if he knew how to use any of his weapons beyond "point killy end at thing you want dead." Until near the end of the film, he's more of a danger to his Mooks than anyone else.
  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse's main villain, The Spot, has the incredibly versatile ability to make and manipulate portals to anywhere. At the start of the movie, he's a bumbling goofball and little more than a nuisance to Miles Morales despite his powers, ending their first encounter by tripping and literally kicking his own butt through one of his holes. Much of his character arc involves realizing his potential and going beyond being a mere villain of the week, and by the end of the movie, he's become a trans-dimensional superbeing and multiversal threat with a chip on his shoulder.
  • Superman vs. the Elite: The movie, in adapting Action Comics #775, shows this to be the case for the titular Elite. All four of them are very powerful metahumans, but they're too used to just throwing their power around and wiping out their enemies. This in contrast to Superman, who, while refusing to kill, is Strong and Skilled. As Linkara points out in his review of the movie's comic, the Elite are powerful, but sloppy. When Bekulistan launches an attack on the London Underground, they have no idea what to do to save the people. Later, when Atomic Skull breaks out of jail, they're outmatched. Both scenes have Superman come in and act as The Strategist for them, to suggest more creative tactics for them. Needless to say, they really didn't know what they were doing when they challenged Superman to a death match.
  • Wreck-It Ralph: Ralph's punches don't have much finesse, but they make up for it with the sheer power his name states.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Assassin's Creed (2016): Ojeda surely doesn't have the fighting skills of an Assassin, but still knows how to put a fight with aid of his raw physical strength and warrior training.
  • Back to the Future 1: George McFly has less skill and experience fighting than a street punk, but he throws a haymaker that knocks out the much larger Biff Tannen with a single blow.
  • Mongo in Blazing Saddles is a bit slow, but can take out a horse in one punch.
  • In a sense, this is true of Nuke LaLoosh, the hotshot pitching prospect from Bull Durham with "a million-dollar arm and a ten-cent head" (as in, he has a blazing fastball but not the focus or discipline to use it properly).
  • Conan the Barbarian (1982) is at the beginning, getting knocked over easily, but after some fights and training becomes a Master Swordsman.
  • In The Crow (2024), Eric doesn’t seem to have any specific combat training, but his invulnerability enables him to tank damage while taking out numerous enemies.
  • DC Extended Universe:
    • Man of Steel: In a sense. Superman does not have the years of combat experience of the other Kryptonians, but he has lived on Earth his entire life and had a far greater amount of time to develop and control his own powers. Hence, while they are better fighters than he is, they are objectively weaker in Earth conditions. That said, he is also more creative about applying his powers and quicker on the draw with them. However, by the final battle, Zod successfully acclimated to Earth, thus matching Superman's strength, while Superman was able to learn and adapt against Kryptonian combat.
    • Director Zack Snyder commented that Superman should look like "a brawler" in fight scenes instead of a boxer or other kind of trained fighter, because (before meeting Zod) he's never actually been in a situation in which that could possibly matter.
    • Justice League (2017): Barry Allen nervously points out he has zero combat experience. Prior to the movie, his only fights have been against ordinary criminals who are like statues to him that he can just knock over with his Super-Speed.
    • SHAZAM! (2019): Billy Batson initially had this problem when he first became Shazam. He's a Flying Brick with lightning powers, but lacks the knowledge of how to use his powers. So in his first fight with Dr. Sivana, he gets thrashed easily due to never fighting an equally powerful opponent before, forcing him to escape. Fortunately, he later got better and can go toe-to-toe with Sivana during the Final Battle.
    • Wonder Woman 1984: Played with. While Barbara gets all of Diana's powers through the Dreamstone, she lacks the years of Amazon combat training that Diana went through as a child and is shown repeatedly struggling with her new strength. Initially, this wasn't a problem for Barbara since Diana was Brought Down to Normal. But when Diana is back at full power for their final fight, Barbara is toast!
  • Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore demonstrates the power of Credence Barebone, AKA Aurelius Dumbledore, the son of Aberforth Dumbledore, and manipulated by Grindlewald to perceive Albus Dumbledore as a personal enemy. When the two finally clash, Credence's raw power as an Obscurial puts Dumbledore on the defensive more than once, but Dumbledore's own natural talent and training allow him to eventually subdue his opponent.
  • Fearless (2006) sets up Hercules O'Brien like this, but in fact, it's subverted. O'Brien may not have Yuanjia's fancy moves, but his western-style wrestling utilizes his massive upper-body strength in a very effective way.
  • The Green Hornet is too much of a Dirty Coward to do any fighting anyway, and he has had no training whatsoever, but he can hold his own remarkably in a fight and throw surprisingly good punches.
  • Happy Gilmore is a golfer whose golf skills aren't much to talk about (especially his putting, which is atrocious). But... he has the longest drive of any golfer on the green, and that gets him on the golf circuit and lets him at least complete tournaments. That said, the movie is careful to show that Happy is finishing very, very, low in the rankings in those initial tournaments. While his drive makes him a sensation, and his tough guy, blue-collar style gets him fans who would have never watched golf otherwise, Happy never even comes close to winning a tournament based purely on his drive. His skills do gradually improve somewhat just from the sheer amount of practice he gets, going constantly from one tournament to another, but it's not until Happy goes back to his mentor Chubbs and gets Chubbs to help him with his putting and focus that Happy can actually compete with the better golfers.
  • Humphrey Bogart's The Harder They Fall (1956) has him serving as the hypeman for a boxer who can't box. He's big, strong, and looks quite impressive, but in actuality, his punching technique is for shit and he has a glass jaw.
  • In Jumanji: The Next Level, Eddie is an old man who is slow to pick up on things, has no idea how video games or their associated tropes work, and has no sense of tact or subtlety. Fortunately for him, he is in the body of Dr. Smolder Bravestone, an avatar who is inhumanely strong and fast enough to punch men through walls and accomplish physical challanges no problem.
  • The Indominus Rex from Jurassic World. She's an engineered apex predator who has brawn and brain, but she has trouble remembering all her perks. It takes a moment before she figures out she can pin Rexie with her arms since being born in captivity with no sibling aside from the one she killed, she does not have that many wild instincts.
  • A Knight's Tale: Count Adhemar's manservant notes to Lady Jocelyn that "Sir Ulrich von Liechtenstein" (main character William Thatcher) jousts with "rudimentary style, nonexistent technique, but he's fearless." Adhemar goes on to explain to Jocelyn that while the visor slit of a knight's helmet is small, splinters can penetrate, and most knights raise their heads at the last second, losing sight of their target but protecting their eyes. "Ulrich" doesn't (chances are that William doesn't know to do so). Jocelyn is impressed, because he keeps his eyes on the target. Later, after his first joust against William himself, a winded Adhemar remarks:
    "No style whatsoever. But neither has an anvil."
  • Logan has X-24 as an example of this; a clone of Logan in his prime with a still-active healing factor, X-24 brutally tears through every opponent he faces, but he is never shown to be capable of speech or gives any sense that he is capable of tactical planning. Word of God affirms that if he and Logan had fought while Logan was healthy, Logan would have won far more easily, and X-24 only does so much damage because Logan was already dying of his accumulated past injuries.
  • In Major League Pedro Cerrano and Rick Vaughn both start out as this. Cerrano is a batter with incredible power but who can’t hit curveballs; Vaughn is a pitcher with a fastball that can reach 98mph but has almost zero control over it. They get better over the course of the movie.
  • Fezzik from The Princess Bride just happens to be "the biggest and the strongest", and is almost apologetic about the fact that he doesn't even need to exercise to be able to defeat anybody in a fight. However, during his fight with the Man in Black, he realizes that years of exclusively fighting groups have left his one-on-one game very rusty.
  • In Rampage (2018), while George is a physically powerful albino gorilla even before he was mutated by CRISPIR into a giant, he still has no real idea how to actually fight, requiring aid from Davis Okoye to properly coordinate his efforts against "Ralph" and "Lizzie" (a wolf and a crocodile mutated by the same process)
  • The title character of Rocky was initially portrayed as this. He wasn't a very good boxer, but what he was good at was hitting people and being able to take a punch. Deconstructed in that he only narrowly wins his second fight with Apollo Creed, at a time when Rocky admits that Apollo was past his peak, the Strong and Skilled Clubber Lang tears him to pieces, and Rocky needs to learn speed and proper technique to beat Clubber.
  • In Soldier, Todd loses in a straight-up fight against the genetically engineered soldiers due to their enhanced strength, speed, and durability. Todd takes advantage of the fact they lack his years of training and battlefield experience to defeat them later.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Sonic generally uses his speed to get through trouble, and since he's too fast no one can keep up with him or catch him. When Robotnik is able to match him in speed with his own skill, he briefly freaks out as that's the first time it's happened. And from then on, he has to rely on strategy, and eventually assistance from Tom, to defeat him.
  • Spider-Man 3: The New Goblin aka Harry Osborn has all the same enhanced strength and gadget upgrades the original one had which allows him to take Peter by surprise. However, his lack of experience as a villain means that in their second fight, Peter pummels him with relative ease.
  • In Superman (2025), Ultraman is at least potentially stronger than Superman, but as a near-mindless clone of the Man of Steel he requires instructions from Lex Luthor to actually fight his enemy; once Superman has Krypto destroy Luthor's cameras, Ultraman is basically helpless against Superman as he has no clue how to fight for themselves.
  • In Talvisota, the Soviet army invading Finland is overwhelmingly powerful, but instead of pressing its advantage it just kind of flails, once even stopping its own breakthrough by accidentally shelling its advance. Conversely, the defending Finns aren't Weak, but Skilled but just weak and fail their counterattacks just as badly.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze: Tokka and Rahzar are Made of Iron and have Super-Strength, and the Turtles don't stand a chance against them in a straight-up fight... but they have the minds of infants and are essentially nothing but Dumb Muscle to the Shredder.
  • The machines from Terminator, as they are programmed to kill people, not fight them. Against humans, they use simple crushing blows with their forearms and toss them around (or simply use firearms), and this is usually enough because they physically outclass humans in every regard anyway (one of those clumsy swings can shatter bone). Against other Terminators, they encounter problems because they are not programmed to fight something on equal footing. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron directed both actors to lock up for several seconds during the first fight scene in the galleria because neither Terminator is sure what to do when grappling with another machine; later in the film during the fight in the steel mill, the T-800 tries to use the same tactics it would have used against humans which leads to it getting curbstomped, while the T-1000 is left to basically pummel the other machine while it struggles to find the T-800's power core, and then it gets surprised when the T-800 uses a backup power source to come back.
  • Underworld:
    • Underworld (2003): Michael Corvin may be the strongest hybrid monster in that universe, second only to his future daughter. However, he lacks any real combat training; when he battled Viktor during the climax of the first film, he initially had the upper hand, but Viktor's centuries of combat experience ultimately turned the tables. While not nearly as strong, Selene isn't exactly a wuss herself. However, she is his foil in the form of Weak, but Skilled. Her centuries of training have made her practically invincible.
    • Underworld: Awakening: Michael's and Selene's daughter Eve is a young girl with no training whatsoever. She's also a hybrid of vampire, werewolf, and immortal who can tear a full-grown werewolf in half.
  • The Young Rebel: The titular rebel is borderline illiterate, due to having only 3 years of schooling experience, but a tough, dedicated learner when it comes to kung fu, helped by his Unstoppable Rage and extremely violent and volatile outbursts of temper.

    Live Action TV 
  • Ancient Detective: Zhao Wohuan is a self-trained martial artist who comes from a storyteller background. His style involves wielding an oversized sword and announcing his attacks. While he has raw strength and potential are noted by the experienced martial artist, he fails to keep up with those with formal training until he gets an instruction manual for a proper technique.
  • Arrowverse:
    • Laurel Lance in Arrow is this when she becomes the new Black Canary. She gets beaten up easily for how unskilled she is, but she makes up with much force.
    • In The Flash (2014), the titular character himself. Barry Allen gained powerful superspeed and healing abilities normally story-breaker powers. However, criminals will get the jump on him because he's an ordinary person unused to fighting crime so he often gets blindsided by sneak attacks, dirty tricks, and traps. He's a foil to Oliver Queen who despite being a Badass Normal is ruthless and experienced enough to go toe-to-toe with him.
    • Supergirl: Kara heavily relies on her superpowers to win any fight. So when a guy nearly as strong fights her for the first time, she loses badly. After another Curb-Stomp Battle at the hands of her Aunt Astra in Episode 2, she asks her adoptive sister Alex to continue their hand-to-hand combat training until she's just as good as Alex is. Later episodes show continued improvement in hand-to-hand combat, and when she fights the escaped prisoner in "Livewire" she's begun incorporating her powers other than pure strength. By "Hostile Takeover" she can go toe-to-toe with Alex while powered down.
  • Bakuage Sentai Boonboomger: Mira Shifuto/Bun Pink's instincts and more unconventional methods allow her to keep up with her more experienced teammates in combat.
  • Howard Hamlin from Better Call Saul is not the most ingenious attorney but he is good at big gestures of charity that make HHM look good. He despises trickery, treachery, chicanery or skullduggery and would rather tackle problems head on. This is furthest exemplified when he beat Jimmy in a boxing match.
  • Superman Substitute Homelander in The Boys is the World's Strongest Man who never had to formally learn combat or push himself as a result of being so much more powerful than everyone else, normally just one-shotting foes with his Eye Beams. As a result, the few characters experienced in combat and durable enough to avoid getting killed instantly by him (namely Captain America knockoff Soldier Boy and Wonder Woman Wannabe Queen Maeve) are able to take advantage of this and fight him to a draw.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel have quite a few examples:
    • "The Judge" from Buffy Season 2. A Nigh-Invulnerable demon who One Hit Kills from range. So used to curb-stomping entire armies and never having to worry about dodging or fighting beyond "point and kill it", that when Buffy uses a rocket launcher, he doesn't even know to dodge.
    • Glorificus/Glory, a powerful yet bratty Physical God that could tear apart buildings with her bare hands, but when Buffy used a weapon that could hurt her she was swiftly trashed.
    • In the sixth season of Buffy, the otherwise physically unremarkable Warren Mears temporarily became this thanks to some Applied Phlebotinum. In a fight with Buffy the far more skilled Slayer got in several punches and kicks to every blow Warren landed on her — but while he shrugged off her hits almost at once Buffy felt every one of his and was visibly tiring before she was able to destroy the source of his power.
    • Caleb from Season 7, as well as the Turok-Han (prior to the finale-induced Villain Decay). Punch-for-Punch, Buffy is noticeably outclassed by both, serving as a potent reminder about the overconfidence the Slayer Strength may bring.
    • Angel's son Connor also fits the bill. In contrast to Buffy and Angel's more technical approach to fighting, Connor is shown relying more on brute force, hitting hard and fast, and beating his opponents into submission. On one occasion, he actually lost to Angel when the latter had amnesia and was mentally a teenager fighting purely on instinct.
    • Marcus Hamilton of Angel Season 5 has little more going for him than vast Super-Strength, to the extent that he easily beats Illyria of all people to a bloody pulp; though, in all fairness, Illyria was not at full strength at the time. When Angel drinks his blood and gets a power boost from it during their fight, said boost, along with his fighting skills, let him take Hamilton down in less than a minute.
  • Despite being one of the most iconic monsters or aliens (if not the most iconic), the Daleks from Doctor Who are not the sharpest tools in the shed compared to many of the threats that the Doctor has faced. However, when they have weapons strong enough to bust through nearly any resistance their foes may put up, and enough defenses to No-Sell nearly any enemy attack, they don't often feel the need to think and strategize, as merely blasting the enemy into oblivion is often enough to do the job. In contrast to several examples of this trope, the Daleks never grow out of this mindset and their solution to every defeat they have faced is simply to increase the strength of their weaponry and armor from what it was previously. Also in contrast to said examples, simply enacting this approach has enabled them to remain a relevant and competent threat over their decades-long history on the show.
  • In Grimm, various Wesen have this problem; even main character Monroe, whose species is a blutbhad (essentially the inspiration for the Big Bad Wolf), tends to just lash out when he's attacked rather than show any real training, although this is justified as he's trained to repress his more brutal instincts and he's generally strong enough to back Nick up with most threats. A more specific example of this featured in "The Other Side", when Nick and Hank discovered that Pierce Higgins, normally a Genio Innocuo (a turtle-like Wesen known for its intellect), had been genetically altered by his mother in the womb to have greater strength, only for Pierce to develop a Jekyll & Hyde dynamic as he transforms into a lion-like Lowen who lashes out like a feral animal at anything that might threaten Pierce, even those Pierce considers his friends because they might beat him in quizzes or exams.
  • This is Mikey's problem at the beginning of Hardball. He has great strength and can serve a handball with more force than anyone else in the school, but has no finesse and almost zero control of his serves.
  • Seasons 1 and 2 of Heroes has Peter Petrelli and Hiro Nakamura, the former a huge catalogue of power but wildly inept in use of them (at least until his power gets seriously downgraded and he starts using his head), the latter a manchild "master of time and space".
  • Though lacking in the finer points of both diplomacy and military strategy, King Aegon II from House of the Dragon knows how to endear himself to the peasants and his army through grand gestures of generosity and bravery to ensure their devotion. Something that his stuffy brother and grandfather know nothing about.
  • Kamen Rider:
    • Kamen Rider BLACK: Shadow Moon/Nobuhiko, who the titular rider is the Good Counterpart and adopted sibling ofnote , spends the majority of his time in a cocoon, whereas Black spends the majority of his time fighting. Presumably, the length of time Shadow Moon spent in the cocoon resulted in him being as powerful as he was when he emerged, since when the two fight for the first time, it's very evenly matched; it's only because Kotaro hesitates when he goes to strike Shadow Moon down that Shadow Moon is able to kill Black the first time they fight.
    • Kamen Rider Fourze protagonist Gentaro Kisaragi starts off like this, having no fighting skills when he straps on the belt and starts fighting Zodiarts. This puts him at a disadvantage when he comes up against more skilled opponents, like the Unicorn Zodiarts (a member of the school's fencing club) and Kamen Rider Meteor (a practitioner of Jeet Kun Do). Eventually, he takes a level in badass thanks to some training from his homeroom teacher Haruka Uesugi, who's a talented kickboxer.
    • Kamen Rider Gaim:
      • Micchy, after he completes his Face–Heel Turn and becomes the second Zangetsu Shin, using his supposedly dead brother Takatora's Transformation Trinket. The heroes think the "white Armored Rider" has betrayed them until Oren observes that his fighting style isn't nearly as skillful and realizes that someone else must be using the suit. When Takatora comes back and fights Micchy using the original Zangetsu suit, his superior fighting skills allow him to outmatch Micchy despite Zangetsu Shin being much more powerful.
      • Sid/Kamen Rider Sigurd also applies as well. As one of the New Generation Riders, he's much stronger than most of the Armored Riders in terms of power. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for skill, as once Kouta upgrades to match Sid, Kouta nearly kills him after absolutely trouncing him.
    • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid and Kamen Rider Zero-One, both written by Yuya Takahashi, use this as a recurring trait of major villains. Both shows feature a number of villains who possess something that would be considered a Story-Breaker Power in the hands of someone who could use it to its full potential, such as Power Copying, freezing time, or immortality, only to be defeated due to overreliance on their broken power leaving them with a lack of basic combat skills.
    • Kamen Rider Saber begins the show with a natural gift for using the powers of Wonder Ride Books, being a novelist and avid reader who's intimately familiar with all of their stories. However, he's also the only Rider not to be a trained swordsman, meaning he makes remarkably little use of the sword for which he's named. The other Riders call him out on this when they're put into a Let's You and Him Fight scenario at the start of the second quarter, which Saber agrees with and starts putting in the work to become a real swordsman. He eventually graduates to Strong and Skilled by applying his observational skills to copying, improving upon, or exploiting the flaws in the fighting styles of other swordslingers.
    • Kamen Rider Gotchard, like Saber, has an instinctive aptitude for using the powers of Chemies, but begins the show with essentially no combat skills of his own. This poses a major issue for him when he goes up against the first Kamen Rider Dread, a No-Nonsense Nemesis who not only can match his skill with Chemies, but can fully capitalize on Gotchard's poor martial arts skills. With no time to learn how to overcome Dread through skill, Gotchard has to resort to a powerup that lets him win through brute force, but he seemingly takes the lesson to heart and develops enough of a skill base afterward to keep this from happening again. Unlike Saber, by the end of the series, Gotchard remains visibly less skillful in pure physical combat than his peers, but has closed the gap enough that his skill with Chemies more than makes up for his lingering flaws.
  • Merlin, especially in the earlier seasons. He has trouble enchanting a lance, but get him angry enough and he will blow you to bits with lightning. He's since gotten better.
  • The Mick: Played for laughs when Jimmy starts to get beaten up by members of a high school girls soccer team, taking some fancy kicks, knees and other blows. Jimmy isn't a particularly tough guy, but he's still a full-grown man and a former jock, so when he finally starts defending himself (while apologizing profusely), he does so with full-strength haymakers and body slams, allowing him to hold his own for some time before he's overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
  • On My Babysitter's a Vampire three of the main characters are vampires, one is a magic user, and one is a seer yet none of them has much of any fighting skill or even knowledge on how to use their abilities more effectively. Needless to say, fight scenes on this show are really poor.
  • Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide: Ned challenges Loomer to a weightlifting contest. Ned spends most of the episode thinking there's no way he can win. His PE teacher points out that while Ned isn't stronger than Loomer, weightlifting is as much about technique as muscle. Indeed, Ned (who had been practicing) was able to lift his weight with great difficulty, while Loomer (who had assumed he would win without even trying) tipped over trying to lift his.
  • The Evil Queen / Regina from Once Upon a Time (2011) is the Manipulative Bastard version of this. She's not very smart, and completely Genre Blind. But she has tools to make up for that — in the fairy tale realm her army and her magic, in the real world she can cower everyone with her status as mayor. With her hate driving her, she uses these to plow through any obstacle in her path.
  • Smallville had this with Clark Kent in the first eight seasons. This was beautifully demonstrated in the third season opener where Clark was infected with red kryptonite and turned evil. To stop him, Jonathan Kent acquired temporary Kryptonian superpowers and was clearly the superior fighter due to experience. Furthermore, in the sixth season opener where he took on General Zod, a trained soldier with years of combat experience, he ended up getting his ass kicked and had to rely on trickery to win. In the final two seasons, Clark picked up fighting skills and is able to hold his own against skilled fighters even without his powers.
  • In one episode of Stargate SG-1, O'Neill tries to teach Teal'c how to box. While he fails to grasp the principles of moving and blocking, he still easily wins after O'Neill's first punch does nothing to him and his own first punch knocks his opponent to the ground.
  • In True Blood, vampires are Stronger with Age. An older vampire will always be stronger and faster than a younger one. However, Tara was able to defeat the older Jessica because Tara had been an MMA fighter as a human, while Jessica had no such training.
  • Alex Russo of Wizards of Waverly Place is heavily implied especially in the movie to have the most innate natural talent for magic of the siblings but is so lazy that she hasn’t bothered to learn a lot of spells but can easily come up with spells on the fly.

    Manhua 
  • Zui Wu Dao: Wu Di doesn't know a lot of the standard techniques available to martial artists but can last longer against opponents that incredibly outclass him because a lifetime of training without being able to use vigour has given him a very durable body, not to mention that the same training left him with enough vigour that when it was unlocked he was almost already at the Martial Artists Realm.

    Multiple Media 
  • BIONICLE: Sidorak, King of the Visorak hordes, is a mediocre fighter, and so relies more on his considerable strength when in combat. However, he relies on it to the point of it being a crutch that, should he face someone who is as strong or stronger than him, he really has no idea how to defend himself. This is why Keetongu was able to kill him so easily.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Obadiah Stane from Iron Man 1. His Iron Monger armor is a bipedal tank, but he is dependent on his engineers to help him keep up with Tony.
    • In Captain America: The First Avenger, The Red Skull is a genius tactician and scientist, and strong and fast enough to trade blows with Captain America, but his hand-to-hand combat skills are a bit lacking.
    • Wilson Fisk in Daredevil (2015) is huge, and a Lightning Bruiser who totally destroys every opponent he engages personally. It becomes apparent in his fights with Matt Murdock however that his skills are comparatively basic, and he actually fares slightly worse than some of his own henchmen did. It's downplayed because he does have some actual technique of punches, throws, and charges, but they are visibly overshadowed by Matt, who is an extremely skilled martial artist.
    • Wanda Maximoff (Scarlet Witch) in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War has very general control over her psychic abilities, being able to Mind Rape others, direct energy blasts, and levitate herself and objects. Unfortunately, her powers at their strongest are downright destructive and if she's not being utterly reckless with them, she's lacking the finesse to be able to keep them under her control. Casualties/collateral damage can be expected to happen in either case. Her lack of combat experience doesn't do her any favors, either. WandaVision gives her her full-on Reality Warper powers but she comes to realize that she has no knowledge of magic in an academic sense and Agatha Harkness, who has nowhere near her raw power, gets the better of her with a simple piece of magic that Agatha says any witch should know.
    • Also from Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man. He's a teenager without any training, and it shows with him repeatedly giving his opponents openings, but having the sheer strength and speed to fight evenly with Bucky and the Falcon, two professional soldiers — albeit that they're holding back because he's a kid.
    • Spider-Man: Homecoming: Eugene "Flash" Thompson is the academic decathlon version of this, being faster at hitting the bell than his peers but not being able to answer questions correctly.
    • In The Defenders (2017), Jessica Jones and Luke Cage may lack Matt Murdock and Danny Rand's amazing fighting techniques, but they make up for it with their Super-Strength, and in Luke's case, unbreakable skin. They still have a good degree of basic street-fighting skills, however, especially Luke.
    • In Luke Cage (2016), it's revealed that Luke is, in fact, a former marine with refined fighting skills, but after gaining superpowers, he has to focus on holding back so much (since his normal punch could easily kill someone) that he can't be bothered with finesse.
    • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Ego the Living Planet is a Celestial, one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the power to manipulate matter as he sees fit and capable of effortlessly destroying a fleet of drone-ships in his introductory scene. Having said that the moment he fights an opponent just as powerful as he is like his son Star-Lord channeling his Celestial powers, he gets completely thrashed due to never learning how to fight properly, as he could always overwhelm his opponents with sheer power alone.
    • And of course, the Hulk. He has no combat style or real skill, but is so strong and Nigh-Invulnerable that he doesn't need any. The unfortunate end of this is shown in Avengers: Infinity War where he fights Thanos, who is not only strong enough and tough enough to take on the Hulk but a skilled fighter to boot. Thanos quickly and effortlessly defeats the Hulk. He even toys with him, like a professional boxer would a rookie. It also flips around with Bruce Banner when he puts on Tony's Hulkbuster armour later. He helped design it with Tony, sure, but he has none of Tony's skill or experience in using Iron Man suits and it shows.
    • The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: The Flag-Smashers all took an enhanced Super Serum that makes them even stronger than Bucky Barnes, allowing them to surprise and overwhelm him the first time they fought. However, they don't have any fighting skills, so even normal characters like Sam Wilson and Zemo can beat them if they fight dirty. The military-trained Barnes wipes the floor with them in a rematch, and once the combat veteran John Walker takes the serum, he annihilates them.
    • Spider-Man: No Way Home: The multiversal villains all have a case of this. They are all super strong with gadgets and powers that put them into a league of their own, but all of them come from worlds without competition and were defeated in only a few battles so their skill levels haven't improved much. Tellingly they are all detained within the first half, thanks to the superior technology of Stark and the magical power of Doctor Strange, while the second deals with trying to cure them before sending them back. With the Green Goblin being a perfect example like the Hulk, he doesn't have skill but is tough to beat. However, still like the Hulk, he was effortlessly defeated by Spidey in the same as Thanos beat him with the former experience with him nearly killing him.
    • Ms. Marvel (2022): Kamala has no fighting experience, but can manipulate her Hard Light to stimulate Super-Strength.
    • Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: After Shuri ingests the synthesized heart-shaped herb, she obtains the enhanced physiology of the Black Panther, but is still a scientist with little combat experience. During their fight in the climax, Namor gains the upper hand over Shuri, even in his weakened state, and Shuri ultimately defeats him through weapons and technology.
    • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 introduces Adam Warlock, a Nigh-Invulnerable Flying Brick who was bred specifically to kill the Guardians. However, he Really Was Born Yesterday, and as a result he has no real strategy or finesse with how he fights, allowing the considerably-weaker Guardians to get the upper hand on him in every encounter. The first post-credits scene seems to show him growing out of this now that he's become a member of the Guardians.
    Professional Wrestling 
  • This is a standard Stock Character in Professional Wrestling. Bigger wrestlers often get through matches on pure strength alone and exhibit few of the technical wrestling skills that smaller wrestlers possess. Bigger men have been traditionally trained to work this way, making this an Invoked Trope within the industry. In David Versus Goliath match-ups, the smaller wrestler will typically win against a giant by surviving the larger wrestler's offense until the smaller wrestler can use technique to overcome the larger one.

    Sports 
  • In the City vs Country Cricket matches of the olden days, the country teams (mainly farmers) had more power but less refined technique than their city opponents. The term agricultural shot or cow shot, meaning a full-blooded swing that will probably result in the batsman either hitting the ball out of the ground or getting out, is a relic of this.
  • Quite common in the lowest levels of combat sports, where just being strong can overcome glaring deficiencies in skill and experience. Once you start getting into the higher levels, however, athletes need at least some skill to be competitive.
    • Bob Sapp, a 300+ lb former NFL player, transitioned into kickboxing with very little training and earned surprising success in his early career, including two wins over the great Ernesto Hoost. His style relied on simply rushing at his opponents, using his size to corner and overwhelm them with wild barrages of full-power punches. His MMA style also relied on his size and strength to ragdoll his opponents. Once his glaring weaknesses became obvious, he essentially became a joke.
    • Sam Shewmaker, a farm boy with virtually no boxing training, managed to make waves in the nascent Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship with a knockout over the more experienced Eric Pringle by virtue of his uncanny power (and maybe a little luck).
  • The defining shtick of retired boxer Eric "Butterbean" Esch. A rolly-polly big man whose boxing style seemed to consist solely of haymakers. But also packing a veritable Megaton Punch, often dropping his opponents like sacks of rocks when his punches connected.
  • Mike Tyson was a notable subversion. While he hit incredibly hard and that was what most fans and early opponents fixated on, he was also much faster, more skillful, and more capable with his defense than many fighters who utilize an offensive style. This combination was extremely effective, leading to Tyson absolutely dominating the heavyweight boxing championship during his prime.
  • The third world chess champion, Jose Raul Capablanca, was such a prodigy that, during the beginning of his career, he never bothered to study any opening theory or do any serious preparation for any of his games, yet he kept winning just by his natural talent. Averted later on when he actually did study and improve his opening knowledge, although he still had a reputation as a lazy player — in fact, many people think the reason that he eventually lost the championship to Alexander Alekhine was that the latter took the match much more seriously: Alekhine prepared intensely for each game, whereas Capablanca spent each night at the bar drinking and partying, confident that he didn't need to study.
  • Before Butterbean, the boxing world saw the career of "Two-Ton" Tony Galento. Galento was a Fat Slob whose idea of "training" was to inhale large amounts of pasta and drink copious amounts of beer or ride in the back of a car smoking a cigar while his sparring partners ran alongside him. While Galento's technique was lacking, he made up for it by being Made of Iron and able to soak up punches all day long and having Stout Strength that turned his blows into Megaton Punches. It worked well enough for him that he won 79 of his 112 professional fights and even knocked down legend Joe Louis in their match, but then Louis proceeded to utterly demolish him, delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Galento so severe that the referee ordered the fight stopped.
  • During his career, Earnie Shavers was noted to be a poor fighter from a technical standpoint. A consequence of picking up boxing fairly late into his 20s. But as anyone who fought him can attest, Earnie didn't need to be technical. As he packed legendary knockout power. With the likes of Ali, George Foreman and more noting they were never hit harder than when they fought Shavers.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In a sense, Azathoth from Arkham Horror. He's the hardest Eldritch Abomination to awaken and has no way to directly hinder your progress. The problem is that, with preparation and luck, you can defeat a Great Old One after it has been summoned. If Azathoth awakens, however, he immediately ends the game. And the entire world as well.
  • This is the mechanical hat of Beasts — much of the game's crossover-facilitation is owed to the fact that the powers of the Begotten are mechanically simple and partially based around assembling a "family" from other supernatural beings with more specialized abilities.
  • In Blood Bowl, this trope shows up a lot. Big Guy units like minotaurs and ogres have Str 5 which is essentially higher-end superhuman (Str 4 units are things like vampires, flesh golems and Chaos Warriors, while no human outside of heroes and those who lucked out on the level rolls have more than 3). But Big Guys are usually only capable of taking skills from the strength skill list unless they come from a race capable of having mutations or fluke out and roll a double when choosing a new skill. Also, some of the big inhuman races have lots of strength and high armor, so they can take a hit and win most shoving matches but these races typically lack any starting skills especially skills that influence ball-handling.
  • Barbarians fit this role in Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, compared to Fighters. Although they don't get as many feats (and, most pertinently, don't get the Greater Weapon Specialisation/Focus feats which make Fighters better with their weapons) they get superhuman stat bonuses from their Rage ability.
    • This is also kind of the relationship Sorcerers (this trope) have with Wizards (Weak, but Skilled). It's hard to beat a Sorcerer for long-range magical firepower, and they start out a bit stronger than Wizards statistically as well - whereas Wizards are infamously frail at low levels and need time to grow in power. However, Wizards have the widest selection of spells and magical abilities of any caster in the entire game, making them incredibly potent generalist and utility spellcasters. We see more of this relationship in 5E: Sorcerers have automatic proficiency with Constitution saves (which Concentration is based on, very handy), and they can use the Metamagic feature to overcharge their spells, granting bonus damage, longer range or duration, choosing an additional target, reduced chance of Friendly Fire, making it harder for the target to resist the effects, etc. Whereas Wizards gain an incredibly vast repertoire of spells - a 20th level Wizard will know 5 cantrips and 44 spells, while a 20th level Sorcerer will know 6 cantrips and just 15 spells (and that is assuming the Wizard just gains spells from leveling up without once transcribing a spell in their entire career), and if they manage to learn every spell on the Wizard spell list then they will have 135 unique spells that the Sorcerer cannot learnnote . And their School of Magic choice will grant them special magical abilities as well. This makes sense from a story perspective as well, as Sorcerers hone an innate magical potential they have (often stemming from inhuman or supernatural bloodlines, curses or some other fluke of birth) whereas Wizards are scholars, ordinary people who learn their magic from books, scrolls and other pieces of arcane lore.
  • Magic: The Gathering:
  • The old Marvel Super-Heroes role-playing game actually quantified this. A "Fighting" score of Remarkable (30) generally indicated guys like Spider-Man and the Hulk, who had super-strength and clearly knew how to throw a punch but had no real training. Guys like Thor and the Thing, who also had that natural ability but combined it with serious training (or, in Thor's case, literally centuries of combat experience), had higher scores.
  • In Mutants & Masterminds, buying attack bonus (how good you are at hitting) and attack damage is independent (meaning you can buy one but not the other), as is dodging vs. soaking. Furthermore, rules allow you to permanently lower your maximum in one of those scores to raise the maximum in its opposite. This allows you to create characters that can hit and dodge very well but can't deal damage or take a punch. On the opposite side, you can make these, who can soak tank shells and crush said tank with a single punch but couldn't hit the broad side of a barn or dodge anything. Unfortunately, certain skills and feats, like Power Attack and Impervious, completely broke down this balance.
  • Smash Up: The King Rex minion has the highest strength of any minion in the starting game, but is the only minion to have no special ability.
  • The Orks in both Warhammer fantasy and Warhammer 40k don't really train, rather they just get into a scrap with their kin to pass the time, there is also the fact that orks have a Might Makes Right policy that means the "elite units" are simply bigger and stronger than their underlings. Don't expect any fighting technique more sophisticated than smashing their opponent into a bloody pulp
  • The best Normal Monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh! are usually this trope. By raw stats, a Normal Monster will usually be the most powerful usable Monster of its level, but their lack of useful effects means that strategies with them tend to devolve into Attack! Attack! Attack! Look no further than one of the franchise's most iconic characters Blue-Eyes White Dragon (no special effects, but with the highest ATK of any Normal Monster at 3000), and it goes even further with Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon (still no special effects, but with the highest ATK of any non-Effect Fusion Monster at 4500). This gets taken further by the subgroup of Effect Monsters with even higher stats but horribly detrimental effects (hence the 'usable' signifier above). Skill Drain decks exploit this trope; since Skill Drain removes the skills of all Monsters on the field, the traditional Effect-heavy Monsters lose all their power, while cards like Giant Kozaky and Fusilier Dragon have their detrimental effects knocked off. This then turns "Weak, but Skilled vs. Unskilled But Strong" into simply "Weak vs. Strong."

    Visual Novels 
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has Akane Owari. As much as she loves fighting, she hasn't been trained in any particular style, relying on her overwhelming strength to win. When she meets someone who can match her in power or can outmaneuver her, she's a sitting duck. This was shown in her spar with Nekomaru, where one good hit to the liver took her out. Also, she's said to be this in her gymnastics competitions. Because she doesn't have the patience to practice a routine, she often just improvises one. The reason she's the Ultimate Gymnast is that even though she makes it up as she goes, her strength is such that she still regularly places well. This gets deconstructed when Akane tries to beat up Monokuma. While she may be strong, none of her attacks even land. And when Monokuma tries to take her out, it takes a Heroic Sacrifice on the part of Nekomaru to get Akane out of danger, resulting in him being rebuilt as a robot(since he wasn't the one Monokuma intended to kill). Akane feels incredible guilt about Nekomaru's sacrifice for the rest of the game, especially after Nekomaru is later murdered.
  • Majikoi! Love Me Seriously!:
    • Gakuto works out constantly to the point where he can easily lift a car, break down a wall and take on groups of up to 70 thugs on his own through sheer muscle power. The only problem is he only works on his muscles while his female friends all practice martial arts, meaning that while he's physically one of the strongest, his lack of combat ability compared to them makes him come off as mediocre. Naturally, he is the game's biggest Butt-Monkey.
    • Tatsuko Itagaki has the sheer power to be a One-Man Army but lacks the technique or the drive to hold her own against similarly powerful martial artists.
    • Shouichi Kazama is obscenely talented at everything he tries and has naturally strong legs. Both of these give him the potential to be an excellent fighter but his ridiculously small attention span prevents him from ever pursuing it seriously.
  • Nasuverse:
    • Fate Series: All Servants are supposed to have superhuman combat skills except for The Berserker class, whose gimmick is that they lose their fighting skills in exchange for massive power boosts and madness. Berserker in Fate/stay night is so fast and so strong that actual fighting techniques are nearly worthless against him, as all the fancy parries and stances in the world won't help against someone who strikes faster than you can react and shatters your weapon with a single blow. And that's before you consider the fact that he's nearly immune to normal attacks, has twelve lives, and becomes immune to any attack after it kills him.
    • Gilgamesh is canonically the most powerful Servant in the franchise due to his insane Noble Phantasm, but his solution to practically everything is 'kill at range with extreme prejudice before it can touch me'. He's only ever engaged in a melee twice; the first time was when he wanted to simply toy with a foe too badly injured to put up a good fight, and the second time was when that same foe managed to circumvent his Noble Phantasm and force him into melee, a situation that leads to him put on the defensive and humiliated. This is, for the most part, a consequence of his ability: his main power is to create portals to a pocket dimension which contains an infinite amount of treasures and especially rare and powerful magic swords. As each and every sword has a unique shape, weight, and feel to it, it's impossible for Gilgamesh to get used to any of them by simply pulling them out through a portal. Even if he does practice with one sword, switching to another will feel extremely unfamiliar and cause his swordsmanship to drop to its original level. As Shirou puts it, Gilgamesh is an owner, not a wielder. Therefore, Gilgamesh either takes to creating a lot of portals at once to shred his enemies with a Storm of Blades or just equips a really tough suit of magical armor to make up for his lack of skill in melee. The one sword he does choose to wield (though only against a Worthy Opponent) is an Oddly Shaped Sword that, while capable of forming extremely powerful energy attacks, is shaped in such a way that it doesn't seem good at all for melee combat. This is reflected in Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star, as whereas every other Servant uses some sort of weapon that they're clearly skilled with in melee, Gilgamesh's attack strategy is to rapidly summon and cycle between different weapons that he pulls from the Gate of Babylon for each strike, finishing with his trademark Storm of Blades or Enkidu chains. Though his attacks are powerful, his melee strikes are quite slow, reflecting his lack of skill and the fact he has to pull weapons from the Gate of Babylon before using them.
    • This is also the case of Gilgamesh's Caster form, despite him being Older and Wiser. He has pretty much no real magical training, but he has the magical energies of a part-god and the many items of the Gate of Babylon, which means he effectively functions like a masterful Caster even though he isn't actually any good at magic.
    • Dark Sakura has more raw mana than Illya, Rin, and Shirou combined thanks to her direct link with the Holy Grail after consuming most of the Servants in the route and she is so absurdly powerful she can defeat most Servants by herself even the aforementioned Gilgamesh. However, Sakura has had no training in magecraft due to Zouken only using her as the vessel for his Holy Grail; as such, her main strategy in combat is to overpower her opponents with sheer force and rapidly heal any damage she receives. This ends up coming back to haunt her once Rin faces her with the completed Jewel Sword Zelretch that gives her comparative strength to Sakura whose strategy ends up devolving into trying to overwhelm her with shadows, which doesn't work.
    • Fate/Zero: Servant Berserker averts this trope, as his ability Eternal Arms Mastership lets him retain his fighting skills despite being mad. And since he's Sir Lancelot, the most skilled knight of the Round Table, this renders him an utter terror in melee.
    • Fate/Apocrypha:
      • Mordred, despite being a Knight of the Round Table, doesn't really have sword skills; she simply rushes in and hits her opponent with both her sword and anything within reach until they stop moving. Since she is strong enough to break rock with her bare hands and incredibly tough and fast, it mostly works out for her, but she ends up suffering a broken arm when she tries to fight Chiron.
      • Sieg when using Siegfried's power is this, as he himself lacks any real technique of his own and is mostly reliant of Siegfried's Nigh-Invulnerability, high stats, and ingrained combat skills and instinct to see him through a fight. Notably, Mordred could outperform him in a sword fight once she got a Command Seal boost to overcome his Nigh-Invulnerability. Eventually, he becomes more accustomed to Siegfried's power and realizes due to special circumstances he can spam Siegfried's incredibly powerful Sword Beam which he uses to fight the Strong and Skilled Karna, who can't break through his defenses and repeated Balmung blasts and is forced to sacrifice his Armor of Invincibility in order to unleash an attack that will one-shot Sieg if it connects in order to avoid giving him a Victory by Endurance.
    • Fate/Grand Order:
      • The Saber version of Elizabeth Bathory is unskilled in swordsmanship and mostly just flails her sword around or charges swordfirst at the enemy. She mostly wins through strength and bravery. The Caster version of her is overflowing with magical energy, allowing her to perform powerful spells despite being untrained.
      • Anastasia has incredible magical powers, but is mostly untrained with them and requires her summmon, Viy, to help her perform her spells.
      • Passionlip's fighting style is essentially just her swinging her massive claws at a target and tearing them apart, but her sheer strength and attack power means she doesn't need finesse to rip anything but the hardest enemy to shreds.
      • Kingprotea has no fighting skills, but since she is an evergrowing giant, her strength is off the charts and she doesn't need to do much to defeat her opponents.
      • Asterios is a Berserker, but he is moderately intelligent since he rejected his feral instincts. However, he has an Alternate Self who fully embraced his feral instincts to truly become the Minotaur, a mindless killing machine. While the Minotaur is stronger than Asterios, he is easy to trick and outmaneuver since he is basically a wild animal.
      • Fairy Knight Lancelot is naturally so fast and strong that she never had to train a day in her life to be practically unbeatable all thanks to being a sentient chunk of the strongest dragon in existence. She has Eternal Arms Mastership, but it is noted that she does not benefit from it at all since she has no fighting skills to lose.
      • Kriemhild clearly has no sword training so her sword swings are wild and clumsy. She's wielding Balmung, one of the most powerful swords. Several factors like her Rank A Mana, her Rank EX Mad Enhancement, and then powering herself with two Holy Grails makes her strength and speed skyrocket so much that she nearly overwhelms her husband Siegfried, one of the strongest and most skilled swordsmen, and puts him on the defensive for most of their fight.
  • Kindred Spirits on the Roof has a variant in Matsuri Amishima, the captain of the school track team. While Matsuri is not much for technique, being the performer to her girlfriend and vice-captain Miyu's technician, she's also a faster runner than Miyu.

    Web Animation 
  • RWBY: Salem doesn't appear to have any combat skills. She uses her Grimm abilities and magic to fight while relying on her regeneration to compensate for the attacks she can't stop from striking her. However, she has so many abilities, along with inhuman speed, strength and immortality, she can do a great deal of damage to opponents; at her worst, she can simply outlast any strong and skilled fighter due to her immortality.

    Webcomics 
  • 8-Bit Theater:
    • Fighter is an absolute savant in swordplay, but it mostly comes from innate talent which he never bothered to improve upon. A personification of Sloth tries to get Fighter to realize the folly in this and rely as much on his mind as on his skill. Fighter kills Sloth with his swords because his brain told him that'd be faster.
    • Black Mage combines an incredible grasp of magical theory, including schools such as summoning and ice magic that he doesn't actually use, and an unparalleled amount of magical power coursing through his body. Unfortunately for basically everyone in the world, he is also Ax-Crazy and tends to default to using that magical power as a hammer, blasting whatever enters his line of sight without regard for collateral damage, proportionate response, or forward planning. He once used a Kamehame Hadoken that can devastate cities to kill a bee.
  • Steven in Ask White Pearl and Steven (almost!) anything has little-to-no control over his powers and is often accidentally discovering new ones. However, as the offspring of White Diamond, he's also got the powers of the single strongest member of the entire Gem race when he can use them, making him strong enough that he can easily wipe out the Crystal Gems (barring Rose) in an instant by complete accident, and was able to poof Rose herself another time, something that Pearl outright thought to be impossible unless she allowed it.
  • Breaker, protagonist of Break is described this way by her rival Aiastes, after her one strategy to beat him in a fight is to punch him with glowy hands.
  • Clown Corps Deconstructs this trope. When confronted by Binky, Ringmaster injects himself with DNA from Binky's Evil Former Friend and ex-partner Strongman, which gives him Strongman's mutant bulk and Super-Strength. The thing is, as Binky quickly points out, Strongman had years of combat training to hone his skills and a lifetime to get used to his level of strength, while Ringmaster was previously a Non-Action Big Bad with no fighting experience. As a result, Binky completely floors him without any of the difficulties he had when he fought Strongman himself. And ultimately, the fact Ringmaster decided to use a prototype mutation gun bites him in the ass when the mutation wears off mid-fight, leaving him as a Non-Action Big Bad once more who promptly gets taken down with ease.
    Binky: But you're no McBell. And you're certainly no Echo. You're just a debate team kid who wanted to be quarterback.
  • El Goonish Shive:
    • This was the Fatal Flaw of Damien, the Big Bad of the Painted Black arc. He had a Healing Factor, Super-Strength, and could generate extreme heat around him. That powerset made him practically invincible. Once he's matched up against Grace, someone who was literally genetically engineered to be a perfect counter to him, he went down almost immediately.
    • Grace herself falls into this as well, being a veritable Lightning Bruiser... which unfortunately clashes with her belief in pacifism. For a long time, she was scared to fight out of fear of accidentally hurting or killing someone. Eventually, Grace started martial arts training to learn how to control her strength.
    • Elliot's Super Gender-Bender form Cheerleadra grants him Super-Strength and flight. It's usually more than enough to go toe-to-toe with the bad guys. Once he faces opponents even stronger than Cheerleadra however, he realises he'd never really bothered learning to fight as Cheerleadra before. His martial arts are worthless in midair against the griffon Dame Tara, and Magus is as strong as him with a lifetime of combat training. He handedly loses both fights.
  • The Ensigerum monks of Errant Story over-rely on their time-manipulation magic to win fights. Their commander laments the fact that she has to spar with trainees just to train with people who remember how to fight without being much faster than their opponent.
  • Summer Mighty in Everyday Heroes. She's inherited her dad's Super-Strength along with her own Eye Beams. But because she just wants to be normal she puts very little effort into learning to control her powers. She's called on this by Mr. Sharpley — who had earlier preempted a fight between Summer and his Alpha Bitch daughter, Angela (who knew Summer was super-powered) and was less than thrilled that Summer was about to enter such a fight with so little control.
  • Evon is a Focus, someone who is capable of drawing upon a very high amount of magic, but her mentor restricted her training so he could use her as a power source, so she doesn't know very many complex spells and mostly just blasts people.
  • Allison in Kill Six Billion Demons has phenomenal power, but even a Time Skip full of training hasn't given her the ability to plan ahead more than the next, ooh, couple of minutes. It's been noted to sometimes play to her advantage, however, as Achievement In Ignorance is very much in play and some of history's most powerful combatants (like Intra the Sword Saint) were known for cultivating a deliberate lack of skill to surpass all limits.
    Allison: I've been relying on the Key to keep me safe, but now that's no guarantee. What was that mantra again? I can't even remember my training...
    Allison: Screw it! I only need one hand to punch this guy!
  • Lazer-Pony of the League of Super Redundant Heroes has Eye Beams so powerful that they can vaporize asteroids and even whole space fleets in different galaxies. Unfortunately, his effectiveness as a hero is hamstrung by his general stupidity.
  • Mob Psycho 100: Mob may not train in inventive uses of psychic techniques, like some of his adversaries, but his raw psychic power is so immeasurable that he doesn't need to be inventive most of the time.
  • Saitama from One-Punch Man might be the poster boy. He's so overwhelmingly strong that no one has any hope of defeating him. But he is otherwise entirely lacking in refined techniques of seasoned martial artists. That however is the point, as Saitama is so powerful he doesn't need to hone his skills, with him intentionally turning down training down learning any martial arts because he doesn't need technique with his level of strength. He also doesn't want to become more skilled because most of his fights are already too easy as it is, and he desperately wishes he could fight somebody able to give him a real challenge.
    • Now whether or not Saitama actually has skill is up for debate. When required, Saitama does demonstrate a level of fine precision and control with using his strength. Though it's unclear if this is the result of Saitama practicing and perfecting the use of his power, or whether this superhuman accuracy in itself is another power that Saitama possesses.
    • Of course, him not needing to use skill isn't the same as not having it — later on it becomes apparent Saitama must have a great deal of control behind his strength, such as when he managed to destroy an entire cliff-face behind Genos during their spar while leaving Genos completely unharmed.
    • This comes back to bite him when he takes on Garou, who not only has incredible martial arts skills but the speed and strength to make them count for something. At one point, although he admits Saitama is faster than him, Garou manages to get the upper hand by predicting his moves in advance. This is, notably, the first time in the entire series when someone has dodged his punches, and even Saitama is surprised. However, once Saitama gets more serious, he uses actual skill by using the environment to confuse Garou's senses and beat him, and Garou considers that even skill and tactics are useless against Saitama.
  • The Order of the Stick:
    • Xykon doesn't have the refined techniques of a wizard, and quite frankly doesn't want it. In his own words, the only two things a person needs are "Force in as great a concentration as you can manage, and style. And in a pinch, style can slide." However, you don't get to epic levels without a ton of practice. It's also worth noting that Xykon is also dangerously clever and full of nasty tricks. That behavior isn't actually a lack of skill, it's Xykon being lazy.
    • Barbarian Thog is also this. Brute force blows that hurt a LOT. But Roy defeats him with intelligence.
  • Paranatural:
    • Max is this to a degree. While he can't really hold his own in a serious fight with any Spirits just yet, upon discovering his tool, he immediately one-shots a Grudge that had been giving Isabel — the Activity Club's most skilled fighter — something of a challenge. It's later revealed that the Spirit possessing his bat is, in fact, a powerful Grudge and that he, himself, may be possessed by something even stronger. Meanwhile, Max struggles to use the Spec-Shot, a basic spectral technique.
    • Isaac is this to Isabel. His status as a medium for a powerful storm spirit gives him the raw firepower to confidently declare himself the most powerful member of the club, and his lightning generation and weather manipulation can back that up. On the other hand, Isabel has been trained all her life in the ways of spectral energy manipulation and martial arts to the point where she is a credible threat to some powerful spirits, even without a tool.
  • Theo from Sidekicks is able to hold his own and even overwhelm most villains due to the power of the Second Prana inside of him. He's been shown to be otherwise relatively weak without it and is fodder when he comes up against sufficiently powerful opponents.
  • Sleepless Domain has Pop Blitz, who is stated to be unable to effectively control her electricity-based powers. For this reason, they're forced to turn down Undine when she's looking for a new team to join, as her Making a Splash powers are a bad combination with her uncontrolled Shock and Awe.
  • In Spinnerette the titular hero's spider strength is no match for a black belt in aikido. Which makes a lot of sense. Most martial arts are specifically meant to counter opponents that are stronger than you.
  • Stand Still, Stay Silent: Mikkel's battle skills boil down to hitting things with a crowbar, and his aim isn't really that good. He, however, has Stout Strength to spare, which makes him hit quite hard.
  • An arc of Tales of the Questor features a barely trained human lux-user who is far more powerful than most of the Racconnan's most skilled wizards, but lacks the restraint to do much besides make things explode.
  • Yeon Ehwa in Tower of God is one of the most powerful Regulars in the series (per Word of God, in Season 2 she is second only to Bam, who has the potential to be literally the most powerful character in the series) but has little to no control over her impressive pyro-powers. Normally it's Played for Laughs (as with pretty much else involving her), but one rather dark scene involves her training by trying to light a candle... and literally hitting everything but the candle. It is hinted that there is a deeper reason for her lack of skill than just a lack of training.
    Yeon: Why... why can't I do it!?
  • Bob the Beholder in Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic isn't terribly bright and lacks finesse. He succeeds at his tasks in spite of this because he's... well, a beholder.

    Web Original 
  • Cobra Kai: As strong and powerful as she is, Tory's fighting style is clearly based on the short term. When faced with an opponent specializing in defense and the long run (as shown with Sam), she'll lose her patience before long.
  • Gustave and Alfred from Darwin's Soldiers are both Funny Animals (Nile crocodile and American bison, respectively) with Super-Strength. Neither of them is a trained martial artist so their fighting style consists of "beat the opponent with anything handy until they stop moving".
  • DEATH BATTLE!:
    • Discussed while explaining why Frank West would lose a fight against Leon S. Kennedy: Frank may have both the gear and the smarts to survive a Zombie Apocalypse, but what he doesn't have, as a civilian war correspondent, is the training. Leon, who served as both a police officer and an agent for the US government in his long history of being the top man for dealing with zombies, thus has the upper hand.
    • Brought up during Danny Phantom vs American Dragon: Jake Long. Unlike Jake, Danny has no actual training in martial arts, but shows both greater flight speed and durability. Unlike the other examples listed here though, Danny takes the win, as not only is he the faster and potentially more powerful in terms of raw power, Jake had no counters to Danny's powers outside of being able to hit him while he's intangible.
    • Sabrewulf's reliance on pure savagery ultimately gets him killed in his fight against Jon Talbain. While Sabrewulf never learned any proper martial arts or a way to have both his human and werewolf sides work in tandem, Jon Talbain is a kung-fu master and outright fought his own inner demons to learn self-control. Jon's proper training is cited to be the most important factor in his victory.
    • This is one of many elements that comes to bite Homelander in the ass big time during his fight with Omni-Man. Wiz sums it up best by pointing out that one is a warrior while the other is a bully. Homelander has never fought somebody on his level and thus has no experience in a proper fight or even to throw a punch effectively (something Omni-Man even mocks him for) but compensates by being so above everyone else in his universe that he doesn't need to seriously try to kill even a fellow superhero, while his opponent is from a warrior society of Superman-like entities where he's had to fight with his life on the line to stand on the top. Omni-Man toys with Homelander the entire fight, takes superficial damage at most, and disembowels him at the end of the fight.
  • Captain Hammer of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog seems to get everywhere on his super strength (born with the ability to "bench press 500 pounds") and damage resistance (which is a lot in a world where the supervillains we know of are 1: a Mad Scientist 2: a guy who can make things moist 3: a horse) and his plans are limited to "smash the device". The first time he gets hurt he runs away crying like a little girl.
    "OH GOD! Is this pain?! I think this is what pain feels like! MOMMY! SOMEONE MATERNAL!"
  • Chair from Nerdy Show's Dungeons & Doritos. Justified in that he was a chair turned into a dwarf a few weeks ago. That and his player tends to roll high.
  • Red Panda Adventures:
    • A common problem for Flying Bricks and others with Super-Toughness as one of their powers, and one that, if given the opportunity, the Red Panda and Flying Squirrel take steps to correct. The Squirrel, in particular, tells such people that being as strong as ten men aren't much good if you run into someone as strong as twenty men and don't have anything else to fall back on. John Doe, Mr. Amazing, and the Black Eagle all benefit from these lessons.
    • The Crimson Death was given Combo Platter Powers by implanting him with the powers of low-level supervillains. However, he never shows the same level of proficiency with them as the original owners. For example, the Crimson Death's first defeat was because the heroes could use infrared to detect him even when he used Invisibility. The Vapor, who had the power before him, eventually learned to make himself invisible to the infrared spectrum. In a later encounter, the Crimson Death simply uses his Playing with Fire abilities to mask his heat signature by setting everything around him ablaze.
    • Jackrabbit was trained in and given the use of super speed and is a formidable threat because of it. Take away that Super-Speed and she has little in the way of fighting skill to fall back on. Both times she's fought in the series, the Red Panda uses his hypnosis to trick her into thinking she's moving at super-speed when she's moving normally, and making himself seem super fast as a result. After that, she's easy to take down.
  • RWBY:
    • Jaune Arc lacks the years of weapons training and combat experience that the other characters have, but he is incredibly strong, able to block the strikes of Ursas with one arm. He also has a massive reserve of Aura, but he has to learn from scratch how to use it. Pyrrha starts training him and is impressed by his determination to better himself. By the end of Volume 2, he can effortlessly kill Ursae, and by the Volume 4 finale, he can stop a unique, powerful Grimm's head-on charge. He grows out of this trope by Volume 7; General Ironwood considers him good enough to graduate with the rest of his team and Team RWBY, years before any of them would normally qualify.
    • Oscar Pine is a farm boy who has never been combat trained and only ever encountered a few small Grimm in his entire life. However, once he starts training, he turns out to be a natural. His abilities develop so fast, that he can fight at Professor Lionheart's level after just one month's training. He's the only character with a development speed that's faster than Jaune's. He has inherited all of Professor Ozpin's abilities, including muscle memory. That means he starts out with immense power and ability that he doesn't initially know how to tap into, which reduces Ozpin himself down to Weak, but Skilled whenever he takes control of Oscar's body. Oscar begins mastering that power and skill from Volume 8, only a couple of months into his journey as Ozpin's successor.
    • Salem doesn't appear to have any combat skills. She relies on her Grimm abilities and magic to fight while relying on her regeneration to compensate for the attacks she can't stop from striking her. However, she has so many abilities, along with inhuman speed, strength, and Complete Immortality, that she can do a great deal of damage to opponents; at her worst, she can simply outlast any strong and skilled fighter due to her immortality making her an Invincible Villain.
  • The Salvation War: Pantheocide:
    • Yahweh is described as this when He fights with Michael. Due to being so much stronger than anyone else, he's never learned the need to finely control his power, using far more of it than necessary.
    • By virtue of using bronze-age tactics against humans, the demons can come off as this. Despite having superhuman abilities and while there's definite strategy there, any semblance of it collapses against modern weaponry, and as far as humanity is concerned the demons are just hurling themselves at their bombs and bullets waving their tridents over their heads and screaming.
  • Happens in the Game Grumps co-op play of Shovel Knight where Danny, who's far less skilled and experienced at the game than Arin is, is using the Amiibo Custom Knight which gets much earlier access to weapons and relics that are also superior to the ones you can unlock normally in the game. Danny even lampshades it by remarking that he wonders what someone who was actually good at the game could do with such a superior load-out.
  • Whateley Universe: driven home Anviliciously throughout the series, most notably in Eldritch's "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Imperious. The fact that it is a Cape Punk world in which Boxing Lessons for Superman are pretty much a necessity is repeated over and over in many different ways, starting with the first day of classes (in which Badass Normal Old Master Ito-sensei trounced five different students five different ways as a demonstration of skill over power) and reinforced at every opportunity afterwards by the titular Superhero School.
  • Wildbow:
    • In Worm, Scion has very little sense of tactics, but that doesn't matter when his powers make him one of the extremely few that are strong enough to take down Endbringers and he can No-Sell most attacks. The gap is so big that even when the whole world unites against him, he's still winning.
    • In the sequel Ward, Goddess has a set of extremely broken superpowers, such as inflicting More than Mind Control on any parahuman that sees her, extremely powerful telekinesis, a danger sense that warns her of who is about to attack her, and some other undefined powers. However, she's not the brightest person and doesn't make as great a use of these powers as she could. She's defeated by a simple trick of misdirection allowing someone to blindside her with an attack that kills her immediately.
    • In Twig, the Ghosts, a highly advanced form of human clones which are designed to act as infiltrators, are superior physically by every measure to the older and less advanced experiments used by the Academy to enforce their will, but the Ghosts are by their nature extremely inexperienced, and the fact that they're produced underground with substandard resources to devote to training means that the Academy experiments are able to easily outmaneuver them.

    Real Life 
  • A 250-pound Bodybuilder once challenged a 150-pound Jiujitsu Black Belt, with the Bodybuilder convinced that his muscles could carry him through the fight. He learned the hard way that brute force is a poor approach against a trained, experienced Martial Artist and got taken down easily.
  • Eddie Hall took up Boxing to keep up his health. While he's relatively early, and, thus, relatively unrefined, as of this writing, he's still the World's Strongest Man multiple times over who, at his lifting prime, could lift around a thousand pounds.
  • Kenneth Pollack's Arabs at War argues this to be the case for the Iraqi military under Saddam Hussein. Iraq's connections to various larger powers, combined with Hussein's militaristic policies, meant that it was one of the largest and most well-equipped armies in the world up to the Gulf War. However, its soldiers were poorly drilled and lacked loyalty, which meant that it struggled to perform maneuvers and got bogged down quickly; generals often had to micromanage their armies to ensure they could do their jobs. This was quite visible in the Iran-Iraq War, where Iran, despite being weaker in almost any objective measure, managed to hold its ground and even push back into Iraqi territory.
  • In Boxing, the 1975 Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier III fight is a classic example of the Boxer (more skilled) vs. Brawler (stronger)

 
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Video Example(s):

Alternative Title(s): Powerful But Unskilled, Strong But Unskilled, Unskilled Yet Strong

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Long drive

Tonbo continue to amaze the other golfers when she uses an unorthodox golfing stance to hit the golf ball. As a result, her first shot made it across the green a bit near the hole. Hinko calls her a "monster" because of her skills in making the golf ball go far. The others lampshade it and wonder if Tonbo can play golf like average golf players.

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