Normal Fish In A Tiny Pond / Fan Works

• In A Special Kind of Magic, Naofumi is indicated to be an average sorcerer in the MCU, but this still puts him above all the other heroes by a lot, due to all the weird things that happen in the MCU.
• The Rise of the Enclave sees the Farsight Enclaves from Warhammer 40,000 get transported into the Mass Effect universe. By the standards of 40k, the Farsight Enclaves are one of the weakest factions in the galaxy, being a small splinter group of the Tau Empire (arguably the least powerful of the major factions). However, in the ME universe, the Farsight Enclaves quickly become one of the galaxy's major players with their technology and warships being far beyond anything the Citadel Council has.
• This is hilariously shown in Dragon Ball Z Abridged's "Cell vs" shorts. Various characters such as Yusuke Urameshi and Ash Ketchum show up to try their hand in the Cell Games. The results are predictable. Mostly.
• In My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic, Dementia, Mysterious and Rep-Stallion have lost to Starfleet several times. So, they travel to Equestria. Since the story is a Hate Fic, the Equestrians are portrayed as too weak to fight back and get enslaved, making Equestria the tiny pond.
  • Fall of Starfleet, Rebirth of Friendship inverts this. The villainous trio are now the normal fish in a huge pond, and the Equestrians stop them with ease.
• Stormwolf Adventures has the vampires. They think they are the supreme race and are used to nobody being able to fight back against them. Then they meet the Jedi, who can and do cut them down en masse, and the demons, who are far more dangerous monsters.
• At the end of Thousand Shinji, Shinji unleashes four Chaos Space Marines against NERV special forces. While normal for Warhammer 40,000, a Space Marine against normal humans is downright overkill.
• A Gamer In South Blue: The Grand Line may be on the same planet as the four Blues, but the power difference is easily enough to count for this trope.
  • "Oaken Fist" Kowalik journeyed through the Grand Line twice in his life. Both trips were disasters, so he invoked this trope by using the powers and the strength that he gained to make a living in the South Blue instead.
  • Protagonist Jack also counts, as his Gamer powers have allowed him access to some techniques that only Grand Line elites can learn, like the Six Powers and Life Return.
• The Mission Stays the Same: Captain Gallardi starts off as an Elite Mook with a slightly better than average gun, and Maeteris is young for an Eldar Farseer. Once they arrive in the Mass Effect universe, though, Gallardi's lasgun can punch through most armor and shielding with little difficulty, and Maeteris' abilities allow her not only to see upcoming danger, but destroy multiple squads of enemies by herself.
• Platinum Pirate: Prior to coming to the Grand Line, Lucas was under the impression that he was reasonably fit and in good shape for someone his age. But watching fighters like Sabo crush boulders and cause Magnitude-like effects with their bare hands thanks to their physical training quickly revises Lucas's opinion of himself. After meeting up with the Revolutionaries, Lucas starts training himself to defend himself a little better.
• In A Song of Ice and Fires That Weren't All My fault, Harry Dresden is this in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. Dresden is, in his world, a supernatural middle-weight. While he's got a lot of raw power for a human wizard, he's half a century or more from his magical prime, there's a lot that he doesn't know, his magical stamina is likewise a work in progress, and in his world, human wizards are hindered by the Laws of Magic and are nowhere near the top of the tree for raw power (doing their best work when they have time to prepare). However, he's now in a Low Fantasy world where his abilities make him a fully fledged Person of Mass Destruction - and that's before his powers as the Winter Knight re-emerge. Consequently, the only thing that has a prayer of taking him on anywhere close to evenly is a full grown dragon - which, understandably, are in rather short supply when the story begins (though that changes as time goes on).
• Inverted in Sleeping with the Girls as the protagonist finds himself suddenly far more fragile in other universes due to them involving over-the-top Slap Stick violence with everyone trying to give him a Megaton Punch and him just being a normal human. This trope is also played straight, though, as the protagonist comes from our world, which has no magic. Thusly, when he goes to other worlds that do have magic, he isn't hurt by magical attacks at all. He can still be hurt or killed by magical side effects, such as the heat of a fireball causing his clothes to burn or to boil water he's drinking.
• Darth Vulcan in The Rise of Darth Vulcan finds himself transported to the world of Equestria and sets himself up as a Villain in order to survive long enough to find a way to remove the Alicorn Amulet and return home. Due to him being a closet-geek-turned-bully that had plenty of experience playing Strategy Games, reading over the Villains' Handbook for the Do's and Don'ts of being an Evil Overlord, and general savviness; he easily runs entire circles around the Princesses, Element Bearers, and the Royal Guard who before were used to dealing with posturing villains like Discord and Queen Chrysalis that were easily defeated. And he does all this without incurring any fatalities on either side due to his adherence to Thou Shall Not Kill as a cardinal rule to his mayhem, with his only confirmed kills being other Villains and their minions. When he makes his big escape from Canterlot after being captured as the city slowly threatens to fall off the mountain, he just leaves them to their fate so he could escape, and is called out as a monster by Princess Cadence. The trope kicks into full-gear as Darth Vulcan stops to explain to Cadence that his own world is filled with lying, cruel, and despicable people that do far worse things than he has done, things which by all accounts would make Ted the closest thing to a saint in his world.
  Darth Vulcan: I'm a monster? There's a thousand monsters, from least to greatest, where I come from. I'M NOT EVEN ON THE LIST!
• The Thessalonica Legacy: Ramirez's Valkyrie is a Light 'Mech, bottom of the totem pole, and not even the best of that bottom-dweller pack. Without any other 'Mechs in Equestria to compete with, though, it is the absolute sovereign of the battlefield.
• In the Ranma ½ fanfic, Akane's Terrible Day, in response to suggestions that Akane is weak, the author points out that while nowhere near Ranma's league, Akane is far stronger than most "normal" people in the setting.
• Harry Potter appears to be this in The Wizard in the Shadows, until it is quite spectacularly established that he is crazy powerful even by Potterverse standards.
• The Nations in Hetalia: Axis Powers come across as rather powerful beings when compared to humans in some fics, although among themselves they think each other as somewhat normal.
• Milo from Harry Potter and the Natural 20 isn't a particularly powerful Wizard by D&D standards, but he can pull things that the Potterverse can't, which sorta makes up for what the Potterverse wizards can do but not him. On the other and substantially more frightening side of the equation, there's the witch who got sent over, strongly implied to be Bellatrix Lestrange, who is not bound by The Rules of Milo's world and stomps his old party with ease.
• Enforced in one Naruto fic. After the Fourth Shinobi War, Naruto is given a mission to beat the chuunin exam "like a rented mule. Like it owed him money. Like he wanted revenge." After all, when it comes to ringers, it's hard to beat an S-Rank genin.
• Tatsuki in After The Fairy Tale Ends. She's one of the strongest students at the shinigami academy and is receiving hakuda training from Soifon and Yoruichi. However, despite what she thinks, she can't take Ichigo (sneaked into the academy by his friends) in a strictly hand-to-hand fight. As Ichigo put it, "Come back when you've got a captain's haori. Matter of fact, come back when you've got a captain's haori and two friends that also have captain's haoris. No, better make that ''three'' friends, because by the time you're at that level it will take at least ''four'' captains to hold me back."
• In Gray Morality, Sakuya Izayoi is summoned to be Louise's familiar. While Sakuya is rather powerful in Gensokyo, several characters like her mistress Remilia Scarlet are magnitudes greater than her, and most inhabitants can survive a knife to the gut. She's practically invincible in Halkeginia, especially since she's no longer restricted by the spell card battle rules.
• Mass Effect: Clash of Civilizations: Many of the technologies that the UNSC take for granted, such as artificial gravity, slipspace, and crystal computational devices, are utterly amazing to the Citadel Races, largely because they did this without any Element Zero, which was thought to be essential for the first two technologies, at least. That being said, the UNSC has no knowledge of Biotics, Mass Effect weapons, and many other advances the Citadel takes for granted.
• The Light of Remnant establishes that the heroes and villains of RWBY may be among the most powerful fighters in Remnant, but most of them are small-fry compared to the main heroes and villains of the Kingdom Hearts universe. In one scene, Mercury kicks Sora in the head, and is shocked when it doesn't snap his neck or even knock him unconscious. Sora remarks that his kick is strong, but nothing compared to a kick from Larxene.
• In Black Flames Dance in the Wind: Rise of Naruto, Naruto is S-rank by graduation. However, the weakest of his major enemies are also S-rank. At one point, Shizaru beat Naruto so badly that when Yugito brought him to the hospital, the medics mistook him for a mangled corpse.
• Naruto in Just A Boy in a Ninja Mask ends up in the Sailor Moon world. Despite being the dead last in all aspects and rather short compared to his old classmates, in Japan he's smart enough to skip two grades on top of being taller along with far stronger and faster than any of his peers.
• The Boys: Real Justice;
  • In their world, the Seven are the top heroes and are renowned for their (non-existent) bravery and courage. But their mediocrity becomes apparent when faced with villains from a world with more experience with superhumans.
  • The Boys are also this while in Gotham City, as the criminals of Gotham had been fighting against Badass Normal heroes leagues above them for years. As a result, the Boys' operations against them are easily foiled and they are seriously hurt in the process. This eventually leads to their arrest once their luck runs out.
  • Stan Edgar is a powerful and influential businessman on his Earth, but the resources of Vought pale compared to the Justice League's power, wealth, and omnipresence. Unlike Homelander, he has enough foresight to see he doesn't hold a candle to the Justice League and decides to skip town.
• In The Watchman, Warren thinks that because he has magic orbs that allow him to fight a Slayer evenly, he's invincible. Unfortunately for him, Warren seriously pissed off Xander who's become The Sentry. Xander makes an example of Warren by ripping off his head, vaporizing the body, then dropping his severed head off at a local demon bar as a warning.
• In Emergence, Team RWBY are decent fighters in their native Remnant, able to handle the average mook with ease, but still outclassed by graduated Huntsmen and those who can fight them equally. On Earth, they're virtually Goddesses of War - one character is told that should they go berserk, he has to go for the anti-tank weapons, because our standard bullets sting at best.
• Before The Dawn opens with a human Bella being abducted by the vampire Joham, who keeps her prisoner for two months as part of an attempt to breed human/vampire hybrids. Once Bella is turned by her newborn son, she manages to escape and get help from the Cullens, who join her when she returns to confront Joham and claim her son. With more vampires present, it's clear that Joham might be a terrifying monster to his human victims but he's nothing special compared to other vampires, Bella literally tearing him apart with her newborn strength, Edward and Jasper easily forcing him into submission and other vampires dismissing him as nothing during a subsequent meeting.
• In A Thin Veneer, the Minbari have to face 2293-era Starfleet and Klingon warships. The Minbari soon find themselves outclassed hard.
• Gets even worse in Shielded Under the Raptor's Wings, a fanfic with the same premise but a different interpretation of ST canon, as the Romulans gets involved too... And their older fusion-powered warships prove almost as formidable as their newer antimatter-powered ships (derived from Klingon designs) and the Klingon and Federation ships, while not having the logistic constraint caused by needing antimatter.
• Venus Flash, a crossover between the manga versions of Sailor Moon and Cutey Honey, portrays accurately the difference in power between the members of the revived Panther Claw and Sailor Venus (who is still having troubles with her full power of the first story arc and thus is far weaker than how she would be when she finally showed up in the manga) and the Dark Kingdom, as best shown when Honey threw a nytroglicerine bottle on a strong youma's face and barely harmed it (in the manga a nytroglicerine spit had killed a Panther Claw kaijin), but surprisingly averts it with Honey herself: while her physical abilities are still far behind what the Dark Kingdom's youma have, her having modified the Airborne Element Fixing Device (the device that grants her transformation powers by rearranging atoms from air and her own body) to work with everything is a Story-Breaker Power, as she can disintegrate the enemy and turn them into food (or whatever she wants. She prefers food because her powers are recharged by eating). Sailor Venus herself was pretty scared when she saw her doing it the first time...
• In Opening Dangerous Gates, an "average" shinigami or arrancar from the Bleach universe is many times more powerful than all but the most top tier characters of Fairy Tail.
• Mass Effect: Human Revolution: Marcus is young and weak for a roegadyn, which means he is still stronger and tougher than most other races. In his introductory chapter, he grabs a knife by the blade with his bare hand and isn't even cut.
• Happens in the remake of Battle Fantasia Project: as soon as the Veil is deactivated, the various different magical groups get exposed to each other, with some finding themselves badly outmatched:
  • Upon remembering of his encounter with Altrouge Brunestud, Phobos, a powerful mage in his own right and a capable Chessmaster, cries out in terror, reveals to Kandrakar the plan that would have allowed him to sneakily take over, and returns to his cell (to be fair, once he doesn't have a whole planet supplying him with magic Phobos isn't particularly dangerous in combat even for W.I.T.C.H.'s standards, and it's implied the only reason he was still around was that he reincarnates with all his memories every time he's killed and did not let himself get caught alive until the current generation of Guardians managed to get the drop on him);
  • Enhance is explicitly the weakest of the Dead Apostle Ancestors, and to fight the others he has to rely on them being Squishy Wizards. Trhvmn Ortenrosse is a stronger Dead Apostle Ancestor, but isn't comparable in power to the top 10 (his strongest point being he's not a Squishy Wizard like most other Dead Apostle Ancestors). When they find themselves together fighting against a Nightmare Factory branch, they casually tear through their forces without even trying. Then the Nightmare Factory tries his Heroic BSoD-inducing nightmares... At which point Ortenrosse takes offence they tried to scare those who cause nightmares to the scariest things on the planet, and wipes them out. Remember, neither of them is even close to be the strongest or scariest of the Dead Apostle Ancestors.
    • It's worth pointing out that when the bullet above says that most Dead Apostle Ancestors are Squishy Wizards it says it for Dead Apostle Ancestors standards: every single Dead Apostle Ancestor is hellishly difficult to damage for anyone who is not in their league thanks to their enormous magical power, and even then they have an absolutely ludicrous Healing Factor (whenever they're wounded, their Curse of Restauration turns the body back in time to just before they were wounded. The strongest the Dead Apostle or similar vampiric creature is, the greater the damage they can heal this way). The reason Enhance and Ortenrosse make the others look Squishy is that they were very physically strong to begin with before being turned, what with the former being former military and the latter being from the Greece of the Heroic Age (when everyone had an Heroic Build and knew how to use it).
  • The opening fight of the story has a powerful Nightmare Factory group facing off against Nanoha Takamachi, Fate Testarossa, Cure Black, Cure White and Shiny Luminous, and get annihilated. At the same time, Minako Aino muses that Sailor Moon at her first outing could have fought a dozen of the Mooks and won, and that she alone would have probably wiped them out.
• In Harmony Theory, while Rainbow Dash and the other members of the Mane Six are pretty powerful, they are still within the normal abilities of their races. Then Dash finds herself 1000 years in the future (eventually followed by the others), where ambient magic has been reduced and much knowledge has been lost, making the inhabitants a lot weaker. For instance, Pegasi have forgotten how to walk on clouds, control the weather, can't fly very fast, and are not strong enough to fly while carrying another pony. Earth Ponies have lost a lot of their strength and speed and their connection with the earth and plant life. Unicorns have relatively weak telekinesis and can't manipulate a lot of objects at once or with fine control. The inhabitants tend to see the ponies of the past as Super Soldiers. Also, the inhabitants are Made of Plasticine compared to the ponies of the past. When Rarity gets shot in the head, the impact of the bullet only knocks her unconscious, while everyone is shocked that it didn't make her head explode.
• Subverted in The Illusive Emperor. Miranda Lawson thinks that John Shepard must be the only competent member of his class to receive every single award at graduation. When she sees John duel another student, she realizes that all of the graduates are highly skilled; John's just that good.
  • Britannian biotics in general are considerably more powerful and far more dangerous than Terran Systems Alliance ones due to the Turians culling 90% of TSA biotics. Because they can afford the losses, Britannian biotics are encouraged to experiment with their powers rather than sticking to the standard attacks other biotics use, resulting the creation of Flash Step, Teleportation, and the strongest can perform biotic artillery strikes.
• Lampshaded in A Different First Crewmember when Shanks (who is not yet a Yonkou) can use his observation haki over the entirety of the East Blue specifically because it's so weak that no one else's haki causes interference.
• Inverted in Nanosuits And Soul Magic. On Crysis Earth, Alcatraz was the most powerful soldier Mankind had. On Remnant, even basic Grimm mooks and Squishy Wizards like Velvet give him a run for his money.
  • Although in some ways played straight and zig-zagged, as he is stated to still be leagues above the average soldier on Remnant, and he is highly skilled and versatile, so while in some ways he is weak compared to the average Hunter, in other ways he exceeds them (can turn invisible and walk silently, has far better senses and reflexes, has a supercomputer for a brain, is still able to run faster than many Hunters, can tell when someone is lying), and it is balanced out by Aura only protecting people if they consciously raise it and keep it active (meaning he can defeat even the strongest Hunter if he manages to sneak up on them). This is shown when he is able to spot an assassin, calculate the trajectory of the assassin's bullet, and knock the bullet off course within the span of four seconds, then is the only one besides Ruby able to keep up with him, and is able to tell the assassin is playing dead by reading his biometrics.
• In Zero no Tsukaima: Saito the Onmyoji Saito is only a newly-accredited Onmyoji. However, due to a number of different factors, he's able to go toe-to-toe with some of the most powerful and skilled Halkaginian mages.
• Downplayed in Supernova (One Piece) where Luffy is a large fish in a tiny pond. In the Grand Line, his logia powers and skill with Rokushiki make him a highly dangerous fighter, but in the East Blue no one can even attack him without hurting themselves ever since he became a sun man.
• Zig-zagged in Memoirs of a Reality Jumper. Alex isn't anywhere near as strong as a pony, but notably has far better senses. Whereas a playful punch is actually rather painful to him and he's only as strong as Apple Bloom (a very young foal), he can tell his roof has been fixed before Rainbow Dash or Applejack can even see his house and when Twilight thinks he smells "a little sweaty", Alex absolutely reeks to his own nose..
• An odd variation comes up in Clockwork and a Teacup where the Self-Insert replacing Sakura is an incredibly potent chakra sensor due to being from a universe without it. Not only is her sensor ability passive (considerably rarer than active), but her range covers over a mile with near perfect details and she can recognize roughly 90% of the village by chakra alone.
• This is a Fandom-Specific Plot for The Rising of the Shield Hero crossovers, where Naofumi is replaced by someone who in his home universe was far stronger and more competent as a hero but had competition while he's far more formidable in Melromarc. Brought to the (il)logical extreme with The Hero Melromarc Needs and Deserves, as Cancer Deathmask, in addition to be a Sociopathic Hero at best, can move at the speed of light and cause enormous destruction with a punch among his many powers.
• The German booklet series Maddrax has the hydrites. They are physically weaker than humans, and also not so resistant. However, they can have progeny along with humans, which are called mendrites. Mendrites are stronger in their physical abilities than hydrites. And while, according to the standards of hydrites, they are really strong and tenacious, they are on average strong and resistant according to the standards of humans.
• Luffy and Makino in Stallion of the Line end up this way to varying degrees. Both have some level of skill in the main variations of Haki along with Rokushiki while still sailing in the East Blue. Even though Makino only has enough Haki to coat her hands and only for a few seconds, and is nowhere near as skilled with Rokushiki as Luffy (or any of CP9), she's still pretty much unstoppable in the East Blue while being a decent fighter in Paradise. Luffy, on the other hand, is far more skilled with Armament Haki and Conqueror's haki (though he has little skill with Observation) on top of using all of the Rokushiki techniques with ease. All of that, on top of being a sorta reincarnation of Ranma Saotome (and thus knowing all his techniques), makes Luffy incredibly dangerous even in Paradise, though he has to actually work for his victories.
• Fates Collide: Before Jaune Arc came along, Okita Souji was considered the weakest Saber in Chaldea Academy. She's still a master swordswoman who overwhelms Blake Belladonna in combat.
• Service with a Smile:
  • Huntsmen in training like Russel, Velvet, and even Pyrrha seem superhuman to civilians but veteran hunters would have no problem taking them down. Pyrrha herself notes that while she can take on an entire team in school, a veteran would easily bend her over their knee.
  • Alexander Sterling is a fairly important business man in Vale, especially in the coffee industry, but to someone like Jacques Schnee, he's no more important or influential than someone selling hot dogs out of a cart. This becomes a major problem for Stirling when he unwittingly insults the Schnee name.
  • Sterling's bodyguard/thug is pretty tough compared to a normal civilian, but is helpless before Velvet, Huntress in training.
• In canon, Gow gave Zuko a difficult fight until the latter broke out his firebending. In Avatar: Flare of Redemption, he's shown to be completely outclassed by an actual earthbender soldier with real combat experience.
• Dekiru: The Fusion Hero!:
  • Subverted with Katsuki Bakugo, whose ego, while big, is much more manageable than it is in canon due to his friendship with Izuku having never fallen apart. While Katsuki still thinks very highly of his Quirk, he's perfectly aware that he still has far to go and strives to be the very best he can be.
  • Played straight with Shoto Todoroki. While his Quirk is still the most powerful in Class 1-A in regards to raw power, it lacks the natural versatility that his classmates' Quirks have making it unsuited to certain aspects of hero work. Then there's Izuku's Human Fusion technique, which takes said versatility, dials it Up to Eleven, and then combines that with the raw power of One for All. Needless to say, those fusions blow anything Shoto can do completely out of the water, much to his frustration.
• Man off the Moon: Emiya is mediocre for a Heroic Spirit, but that still leaves him physically unrivalled amongst the mortals of the galaxy, and even as very narrow and specialised his grasp of magic is, it still is an Outside-Context Problem.
• Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!: Izuku Midoriya, being a Composite Character with Superman, one of the most overpowered characters ever created in fiction, tends to induce this among his classmates in UA.
  • Subverted with Katsuki Bakugou; thanks to being Childhood Friends with Izuku and thus living in his shadow all their lives, he is perfectly aware of how far he still needs to go as a hero. So, while his ego is still sizable, it's mostly under control when he finally starts at UA.
  • Played straight with Shouto Todoroki. As the son of the Number Two hero and having been bred specifically to have a Quirk that would allow him to surpass All Might, Shouto's ego has swelled significantly, much to his detriment. When he enters UA, that ego receives repeated beatings due to his classmates having high-level superpowers as well, with at least two explicitly more powerful than him^note One being Izuku, other being Fumikage Tokiyama, who is bound to a Fifth Dimension Reality Warper. This is especially prevalent with Izuku, who outstrips Shouto without even trying. As a result, this causes him to act recklessly in numerous instances to prove himself better than Izuku and reassert his superiority.
• RWBY: Epic of Remnant: Angra Mainyu is considered one of the weakest Servants, but on Remnant, he is very powerful by their standards. What helps Angra is that the Grimm actively supercharge his powers, making him a Man of Kryptonite to them.
• My Heroes Reborn: Downplayed with Izuku after he awakens Past-Life Memories and abilities as "Black Leg" Sanji. Since this is a theoretical Sanji from post-One Piece canon, in the Grand Line he was a "one step below uber-tier" combatant. Powerful, but not the most powerful. In My Hero Academia, the only thing stopping him from curb-stomping everyone short of All Might and All For One is Sanji's personality flaws (specifically, his Wouldn't Hit a Girl tendencies) and Plot Armor.
• In crossover fanfiction Point Me at the Skyrim:
  • Victoria, while a powerful cape, isn't even close to being the strongest one from her universe. To the inhabitants of Skyrim, her powers come across as incredible mastery of multi-casting without the use of hands, nor any apparent exhaustion.
  • The reverse is also true, with Victoria finding Skyrim's magic an ability to be freely learned and even taught in to be beyond comprehension, since she comes from a world where superpowers are given randomly by Eldritch Abominations.
• In Hellsister Trilogy, Supergirl is getting sick of getting nearly killed every week and expresses the desire to become a normal girl again, how she used to be back in her Kryptonian hometown. Superman argues that they can't retire so easy like that because, even though they were average kids on Krypton, "No one on Earth can do what we can". Hence, other heroes will keep asking them for help every time some cosmic horror drops by Earth.
• The Fifth Act: Cloud saw himself as strong but relatively normal (though part of that is Selective Obliviousness as he's one of the strongest people in the world). In the new timeline, Cloud is considered the World's Best Warrior and could take on Sephiroth and win easily.
• In Justice League: Thunderer, Thor states that this is the reason he and Loki took Baldur on a hunting trip to Earth. Since creatures and animals on Earth are far weaker than the rest of the Nine Realms, it would be easier for Baldur to hunt them, as he was rather frail by Asgardian standards in their youth.
• In Abyssal Plain, The Undersiders and Breakthrough are powerful cape teams, but far from the most powerful in their superhero setting. In the Abyss, their super-powers and experienced teamwork allow them to fight small armies of Others (Boogeymen) as they retreat to perceived safety, while the Others are left battered and fighting amongst each other.
• Wilhuff Tarkin, Hero of the Rebellion:
  • Owen Lars is actually rather well off for a moisture farmer and on his way to being considered rich, but only for Tatooine. Notably, his family is considered well off because they have enough water to spare for showers if they wished rather than rely on sonic showers.
  • Jabba the Hutt basically rules Tatooine but when he tries to "collect taxes" from a relief effort, Grand Moff Tarkin has his men stripped naked and hung out to die in the desert suns to teach the Hutt a lesson.
• The Scattering: Battlestar Galactica (2003) is generally regarded as low-end for starfaring, combat-heavy scifi, but they are still so far ahead of 1980s Earth that an expendable troop lander can fill this trope. Said lander is bigger than a seafaring frigate, better-armored than a battleship and capable of achieving orbit under its own power, all of which make it practically a miracle ship from the enemy's perspective.
• Along Came a Spider: Trifa is a decent fighter and armed with a knife, but against a huntsman, she's completely outclassed. Jaune manages to easily defeat her without causing a ruckus while in his pajamas and armed only with a box of cereal.
• For Earth And Her Colonies: By Halo standards, a UNSC light frigate is utterly expendable, needing a numerical advantage to even have a chance against an equivalent Covenant subcapital starship. Compared to the World War II-level capabilities of KanColle shipgirls and their abyssal foes, her MAC is powerful enough - albeit with substantial charging time - to One-Hit Kill a Re-class, she's physically strong enough to shove Nagato aside, can fly on her own power, and enough food for a normal destroyer shipgirl only replenishes one Archer. Not one Archer pod, one missile.
• In The Weaver Option Lelith Hesperax chose to master the sword because in the ancient Aeldari Empire her psychic potential was considered unimpressive. After her race began its decline into excess, the general psychic strength of the Aeldari lessened with each generation until Lelith could be considered "exceptional". In essence, she's a normal fish whose pond shrank around her.
• Inverted in A New World on her Shoulders with Ciel. She's revealed in Chapter 2-5 to have a lot of self-worth issues about how she Can't Catch Up to her teammates and she states that this is part of the issue. Had she been put on any other team, she'd have fit in great and would be able to make strong contributions to the group effort, but she ended up on the team with a grade skipping prodigy, someone who has one of the most powerful Semblances in the world, and the first ever mechanical life-form capable of generating Aura.
• The Endbringers in Worm are unstoppable monsters that cannot be defeated and can only be pushed back by the strongest heroes on their world. In A Different Kind of Justice, while they are a threat and kill many heroes and civilians, they are defeated and killed by the Justice League, who have contended with their kind so often that such monsters are practically a dime-a-dozen. Taylor is outright shocked and disbelieving until she's shown proof of this.
• Glorious Shotgun Princess:
  • While Exalted are not quite the ordinary people, they are still the starting level player characters in the native game. When Shepard manages to catch a Solar Exaltation, she immediately stands on a power level defying understanding in the Mass Effect setting. The only thing that stymies her is the inability to get off the planet she's stuck on after her Exaltation, as she keeps accidentally destroying the ships that Cerberus agents show up in while attempting to capture her. Surviving in the frozen wasteland with ammonia for atmosphere was a non-issue, and once she gets off the planet, her powers quickly start turning the plot of Mass Effect 2 upside down.
  • However, she eventually starts encountering other Exalted beings. Most of whom either were mentored in their new powers and nature or survived long enough to surpass Shepard's limited experience, requiring her to get actual training in Solar fighting arts to keep up. Among those that can counter her are the Reapers themselves, who can threaten her one on one due to being Exalted themselves - they are rogue Alchemicals.
• Boldores and Boomsticks: Happens on both sides of the crossover:
  • Yang is the most skilled human Aura-user Riley has seen, despite only being a second-year student.
  • Absol is considered to be as skilled with Aura use as veteran Huntsmen, even though she hasn't used any particularly powerful moves.
• Fate: Kill: As a teenage girl, Selka is considered one of the weakest members of the Heiwa tribe, whose hat is Super-Strength. Outside her tribe, she is one of the strongest people in the world, able to break stone and send people flying. Only people like Shirou, Leone, and Bulat can rival her.
• Ruby in Light, Darkness and Paradox is just a huntress-in-training in her original world, but when she arrives in the Paradox world, most of the people around her are notably weaker than her. An exception is the Queen Harpy Lucretia, who effortlessly defeats Ruby and her friends.
• Fate DxD AU: Ritsuka Fujimaru constantly looks down on himself as a weakling and an amateur magus. This is because the only people he had to compare were Servants, who are vastly superior to humans. When he lands in the DxD world, he becomes almost unstoppable due to his fighting experience and the magecraft he does know. It helps that he has Class Cards that let him emulate Servant abilities, but even without them, he can hold his own.
• Kimi No Na Iowa takes the basic KanColle conceit of warships incarnate as human(oid)s and subjects it to Surprisingly Realistic Outcomes, with this as the result - guerillas and other conventional forces resisting the abyssal invasion are straight up not having a good time. The lowliest abyssal unit, PT Imps, are based on PT boats, which aren't powerful enough to face even the weakest true warship in a direct engagement. Compared with an American in Vietnam or a Russian in Afghanistan, however, that makes them Immune to Bullets and universally in possession of heavy weapons that will tear a tree in two, to say nothing of an ordinary man. Yet they are still so numerous as to have more in common with sailors than the ships on which they serve. The next step up the abyssals have, destroyers, are each an artillery battery unto themselves, and things only get worse for the Puny Earthlings from there. The same also applies to the shipgirls opposing them; Missouri casually remarks at one point that no amount of fancy grappling skill can let a wannabe sexual predator prevail when even a destroyer has orders of magnitude the strength of any human.
• There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton:
  • The Milky Way's local powers like the Kree and Nova Corps are pretty powerful by Earthly standards...but the Milky Way is actually a bit of a cosmic backwater. The Diamond Authority is reportedly bashing the Kree hard, for example, and even the Galra are hard-pressed to deal with Gem forces, let alone Yellow Diamond. The epilogue of Close Encounters of the Gem Kind has Moonstone note that the Kree and Novans are both in denial over how powerful the Gem Empire is, since they both like to think of themselves as the top dog in the universe. They're apparently almost entirely unaware of the even more expansive Galra, and Moonstone notes that they're going to be rather shocked when they eventually find out about how they're not even the biggest force in the local cluster.
  • Horde Prime's claim of being "Emperor of the Known Universe" is put in perspective in Eternity in Promise, when Allura hears of him and declares that he was just filling a gap in one of the spaces left by the Galra's universal overextension.
  • Jane Shepard is a highly skilled warrior with advanced weaponry and a powerful biotic, skills that let her quickly rise the ranks of the bounty hunting guilds in Knowhere, and even let her catch a Cybertronian bounty, much to everyone's surprise, but Verdona makes it clear to her that while she might be the "greatest warrior of all time" in her own reality, she's in a very different universe now, one where beings like Saiyans, Asgardians, etc. are running around.
• In The Silmarillion fanfic Captain Tinkerbell, Maglor was a mere High Elf in the First Age, a middleweight with few martial deeds to his name. During World War I (during which he meets the man who creates him, J. R. R. Tolkien), he's a borderline Implacable Man. For example, the man next to him was blown up by a shell and Maglor kept walking, he's not affected by Deadly Gas, doesn't get trench foot, and was only laid up in the infirmary for a month after being bayoneted.
• In the one-shot fanfic Luea vs Equestria Girls, Luea walks into the human world of My Little Pony: Equestria Girls and gets transformed into her human form upon arrival. Unlike when this happened with Twilight Sparkle, however, Luea does not lose her magic in human form and instead gains increased physical stats and stronger magic. Luea then one-hit-KO's the defenseless Twilight with a roundhouse kick. When said kick proves so hard that Sunset Shimmer feels it, she skips the high school drama, transforms into her demonic form, and zombifies Canterlot High's entire student body which Luea then disintegrates completely by snapping her fingers. Luea then reverts to her normal form (from using up all her human form's energy), dodges the fireball Sunset throws at her, one-shots Sunset, destroys the Element of Magic, burns down Canterlot High, and forces Sunset to unwatch the entire Equestria Girls franchise by rewinding its footage out of her eyes.
• The Wizarding World is seen as powerful by earthly standards, having mastered the magical arts to such finesse while hiding themselves away from the Muggles due to The Statute of Secrecy, with only a small number of Wizards being able to master the art of Wandless Magic. However once Equestria comes into the equation in If Wishes Were Ponies, the Ponies showcase that not only do they have a more comprehensive understanding of Magic, and that the Unicorns can also cast spells without using Wands, but that they can also cast and create some advanced forms of magic such as Teleportation, Weather Manipulation, and by sheer accident: re-souling ghosts.
  • Speaking of ghosts, Myrtle Warrens undergoes a cultural case of this, having spent the better part of fifty years as an incorporeal unfeeling ghost spying on burgeoning couples and developing an inclination to various fetishes and kinks that she was privvy to. After she was revived by the Cutie Mark Crusaders and given acne treatment, Myrtle attracted so much attention that many of the male students couldn't help but be enamored by her, enough that Fred and George Weasley both started up betting pools to determine not only when she would finally get laid but which couples would end up breaking up because of her equal-opportunity flirting. When Myrtle went to spend the Winter Hols in Equestria with her new friends, she quickly learned that while her antics had been considered very lecherous in Hogwarts, her tastes were considered tame in Equestria; with the various antics displayed by the residents of Ponyville causing Myrtle to be the one to blush in profound embarrassment.
• Tenten is considered the most lackluster member of the Konoha 11, but when she gets transported to Westeros in the crossover Of Steel and Chakra, she's pretty much able to demolish canon all by her lonesome. It should be noted that that Tenten was deliberately chosen because of this trope, the author stating that a competently trained shinobi could take down anyone from Westeros in a fair and not-so-fair fights. It also serves to highlight the sheer power difference between a Shonen manga and a setting like A Song of Ice and Fire that relies on relatively more realistic physical capabilities.
• Knight of Salem: The fic starts with Salem losing her immortality and Grimm powers, leaving her as a normal human. A normal human from a time where every single person alive had enough magic to make them godlike to modern humans. Despite Salem being centuries out of practice and rather average even at her peak, in the modern world she is able to outmatch literally everyone she meets. Most people assume she's insane because she walks around like she owns the world and doesn't care who she offends. Jaune spends most of his time trying to keep her from getting annoyed so that she doesn't nuke whatever city they're in.
• Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse: Played with. Ranma Saotome and his close circle are actually pretty impressive specimens in their own right, so when transported to the East Blue, their domination is quite natural. However, there are much nastier pirates, marines and other threats in the other parts of the world, especially the Grand Line.
• Fear the Superhero: Karasuba has spent her life, bored with being the strongest Sekirei, with no knowledge of anything else. Once she learns of the moonlit world, she discards her plans for omnicide and desires to travel the world with Shirou, killing the strongest things they can.
• Justice: While Nami and Usopp are the physically weakest of the Straw Hat pirates, that still leaves them as members of one of the strongest crews in a World of Badass. As such, they are leagues above the average person in the DCAU, and can actually go toe-to-toe with more basic metahumans.
• A Light Against The Darkness, a crossover between RWBY and Warhammer 40,000, sees the world of Remnant, where humanity is under constant siege from murderous monsters, visited by an Imperial fleet. And even among the Imperials, all of whom are familiar with dealing with threats to humanity, none feel quite as at home as the Cadians on board, who have spent all their lives perfecting the art of defending humanity from murderous monsters.
  • Taken a bit further in the second non-canon omake bonus chapter, where the Imperial fleet decides to demonstrate their most effective way of dealing with these kinds of threat by effortlessly leveling the Land of Darkness, an entire continent filled with Grimm, with orbital strikes.
• Back at his home village, Bruno in where the dandylions play was feared and disliked because his gift made him out to be a Harbinger of Impending Doom. After moving away, the village he settled down in came to look to him with less vitriol, Bruno being able to make an honest living as a fortune-teller and patron of his own Botanica, his daughter living a relatively normal life. He was even invited to a wedding for a couple whose marriage was confirmed to be a success from one of his visions.
• Crossover fics Dimensional Gate Screwover and its sequel, RWBY: Dual Eclipse both feature this in spades:
  • In the former, several demons and angels from Disgaea found themselves transported to the world of the Monster Girl Encyclopedia, and given they favor direct combat over the latter's seduction-based materials, the Disgaea people, for the most part, easily trounce any monster-girl. While both the Order and the Demon Lord think to recruit them, their offers are declined, as the Disgaea people simply want to return home. This trope turns ugly when Asagi Kurosugi, the Evil Counterpart to Asagi Asagiri, is revealed to have teamed up with a former Demon Lord, and the pair easily run roughshod over the monster-women, their combined efforts nearly killing the new Demon Lord.
  • In the latter, central character Nelius Raoul is easily miles ahead of even the best Huntsman, but for the most part Nelius simply keeps to his own devices. That said, he took to heart multiple lessons about the prior story, and keeps up his training, expecting to run into another person from his side of the universe. This ends up coming true when he finds The Unlosing Ranger also on Remnant, whom also proves incredibly powerful.
• The Ghost Boy and the Combatants: On his Earth, Danny Phantom is a powerful superhero. When paired against beings from other worlds, namely Lord Beerus and Demitri Maximoff, it's clear there's a huge gap in power that is impossible reach on his own and he's forced to rely on quick thinking in order to try and survive.
• In This Bites!, while being tortured by Eneru, Jeremiah Cross stays Defiant to the End and gives the self-proclaimed god "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how Eneru is only powerful in Skypiea and how so many other powerful people in the Grand Line would tear him apart like the arrogant Logia-user he is.
• One minor subplot in Please Stop Eating The Hell Butterflies has Shiba Ganju infiltrate the Gotei 13 and destroy it from inside with his brand of chaos. Despite being a hellraising lunatic outside of the Shinigami's walls, inside them he has to compete with the level of chaos created by the loyal Shinigami trying to screw with Yamamoto and each other, as well as the actual villians. Yamamoto is neither fooled by Ganju's attempts, or impressed by what chaos he can drum up.
  Yamamoto: This is Seireitei. If you want to be considered an "insane badass", go back to Rukongai.
• Intercom: In the real world, Riley Andersen is a perfectly normal 12-year old girl. But when she goes inside her Mind World through lucid dreaming, she literally has the power of a god, and can bend the world around her to her will.
• The Amazing Spider-Luz in: Across the Owl-Verse!:
  • Luz notes that on Earth, her powers are hardly unique, let alone super special or powerful. On the Boiling Isles however, her presence is considerably ground-breaking, not least of which for being the first known human to arrive in the Demon Realm in a long time. Her spider-powers allow her to take on multiple skilled witches and defeat them with ease, not to mention a number of monsters that she struggled to face in canon. The fact that she is this in the Demon Realm isn't lost on the inhabitants of the Boiling Isles either, as a number of prominent witches begin to question the wisdom of merging realities on the Day of Unity if Luz represents merely an average superhuman for her world.
  • Amity becomes a variation of this thanks to learning Marvel-based magic from Doctor Strange. While she gets a beginner book of spells and some personal tutoring from him, it's clear that she still has a long way to go before she's anywhere near his level. Despite that, the amount of human magic she does learn allows her to utterly destroy Grometheus, completely shrug off her mother's own magical attempts to control her, and effectively makes her one of the most powerful witches in the Boiling Isles.
• The Soulmate Timeline has this come up with a few characters.
  • Iroha was a fairly respectable magical girl in her home city of Takarazaki, where she was considered a veteran and rather strong. Kamihama is a completely different ecosystem however, where familiars are as strong as some of the Takarazaki Witches and there are many, many more Magical Girls who make Iroha look like a rookie in comparison. Her own raw strength, noted by Mitama to be four times that of an average Magical Girl, is actually just above cannon fodder levels in Kamihama.
  • Akasuki Suzumebachi is strong enough to be incredibly scary and unstoppable to any regular human and clever enough to manipulate young and naive Magical Girls to be her marks into places where she can take control of their bodies from them. However any Magical Girl with either a combat experience and ability or a raw power advantage over her will manhandle her. She was unable to get anywhere against Mifuyu without Kyubey's help, got severely injured fighting Kyoko and only survived because Kyoko prioritized rescuing her young victims over double tapping her, and a freshly contracted Sayaka only doesn't maim her more because the building they were in started collapsing on them. Even without Sayaka sticking several swords through her, the moment Mami spotted her, Akasuki was quite aware she was dead, which very quickly became true.
• Heroes of the New World; Izuku and Yamato are powerful in their own right (Izuku would have been his world's greatest hero had he not been Trapped in Another World), but their main base of operation is the New World, where people of their skill are a dime a dozen and the real power players are the likes of Whitebeard and Kaido, who can smash entire fleets on their lonesome and whose very presence can cause weak-willed foes to faint in terror. Then the Germa arc sees the two hop over to the North Blue, where the most threatening pirates are small time crooks and Serial Killers with bounties in the low millions, and it's their turn to be at the top of the food chain for once.

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