Basic Trope: The Token Minority can do no wrong.
- Straight:
- Alice is the only female member of the Five-Man Band - and is the most competent member.
- Colin is the only black member of the Five-Man Band - and is the most competent member.
- Exaggerated:
- Mary Sue is a black, wheelchair-bound lesbian trans woman and is The Ace. The rest are all straight, white men and Too Dumb to Live.
- It's a 30-Sue Pileup Five-Token Band, and Bob (a cis, straight, right-handed white man) is The Load and the only incompetent Butt-Monkey character.
- Downplayed:
- Alice, a Jewish left-handed woman, is a bit more competent than other members, but her status as The Reliable One is almost balanced by the others's Crazy Is Cool or Heroic Resolve antics. Thus, she sounds Closer to Earth.
- Colin may be the most competent character, but he still screw up sometimes and gets everyone into trouble.
- The Five-Token Band consists of Alice the white woman, Bob the bisexual, Colin the black, Danny the wheelchair-bound, and the Only Sane by Comparison member, Ebony, the wheelchair-bound black bisexual woman.
- Justified: The Mentor of the Five-Man Band is racist, so Colin's got to work extra hard to prove himself.
- Inverted:
- Alice is left-handed and is constantly getting into trouble — Bob, who is right-handed, has to bail her out.
- Colin, the only black guy in the Five-Man Band, always finds himself getting in way over his head and losing badly. It's only after undergoing training by Bob that Colin's track record improves significantly.
- Bob is The Ace Mighty Whitey among the entire cast of the natives.
- Subverted:
- Colin only claimed to be the most competent, but when he has to face a villain, he runs the opposite side.
- "Alice" The Ace is actually Alex, the white cis male who Disguised in Drag.
- Double Subverted:
- Only because he knows he can stop the villain from a far range. He handles his gun carefully to stop the villain while the rest charge at him blindly.
- And then Alex comes out as gay.
- Parodied:
- Alice is just as incompetent as the rest of the team, but receives most of the credit. Then she is saved by Bob just once, and she can never let anyone forget it.
- Alice trips and accidentally creates a chain of events that brings the bad guys down. Bob turns to Davis and says "Wow, talk about girl power!"
- Characters are increasingly competent the more oppressed they rank on the progressive stack. As such, the black female in the Five-Token Band is much more competent than the white male, but the wheelchair-bound quadriplegic black bisexual transgender Muslim with Asperger's syndrome is better than every other character in the show put together.
- The reason why Colin wins all of his fights is because all of his white opponents are so afraid of being Mistaken for Racist that they don't fight back. Colin is either aware of this and exploits it for all it's worth, or completely oblivious and thinks he is winning all of his fights on skill alone, which he brags about nonstop.
- Colin thinks his race needs more representation in media, so he creates a Show Within a Show with an all-black cast. He is surprised and totally baffled when his show is branded "morally disgusting" and he gets accused of betraying his own race, just because the villains in the show are black too, and that's racist.
- The minority's superiority is proportional to the size of the majority. With this in mind, Colin intentionally remains the only black member of the team, recruiting more non-black people so he can sap their power.
- Bob is a heterosexual Christian who the team has to drag around despite his not having any useful abilities. After converting to Islam and dumping his girlfriend for a guy, he suddenly becomes practically unkillable, despite the odds, and improbably lucky with any sort of weapon.
- Zig Zagged:
- Most of the heroes are fairly competent, while Alice is either a superstar or The Ditz, Depending on the Writer.
- Most of the heroes are fairly competent, while Colin seems to be the most competent, but he is actually The Ditz, but then he becomes the Chekhov's Gunman who save the team by Curb-Stomp Battle, but then he is magically changed his race to white, then Alice The Ace joins and the team surprisingly improves in the battle field thanks to Alice, but "Alice" later reveals himself to be Alex, the Camp Straight Wholesome Crossdresser, but then Alex finds himself as bisexual, and he dumps his girlfriend for a guy in the team...
- Averted:
- The blacks and whites/males and females are all equally competent. Or incompetent.
- There are all kinds of people, with their fair share of forte and flaws.
- There are neither minorities nor woman at all.
- Enforced:
- "A lot of girls watch this show! Let's make the female lead the only competent one."
- "A lot of minorities watch this show! Let's make the minority lead the only competent one."
- "We'll get in trouble if the token character is in any way, shape, or form a bad person, or not in some way superior to the generic white male. Let's make Alice the most competent and the rest of them incompetent, for they are, after all, white males."
- "We'll get in trouble if any character who isn't a straight white male is in any way, shape, or form a bad person, or not in some way superior to the straight white male characters, so let's just have one Token Minority who is perfect at everything and make everyone else white dudes so that we can actually give them personality and character flaws without anyone getting offended and boycotting the show."
- Lampshaded: "Colin is both the only black in our group and the only competent one. But I'm sure it's just a coincidence."
- Invoked: Alice is the only female Asian and works hard on becoming highly skilled and competent.
- Exploited: Bob takes a lot of breaks knowing that Alice could cover him easily.
- Defied:
- When Bob sees that Alice is showing him up, he starts training and working hard himself.
- Alice denies the invitation of the team full of incompetent white men, and she joins either Amazon Brigade or moderately competent Five-Token Band instead.
- Discussed: "Why did you just assume I was better than my white teammates? As far as I can tell, we're all equally competent and equally heroic."
- Conversed:
- "Ever notice how it's always the girls and the minorities who win most of the battles, particularly against the white guys?"
- "Okay, here comes the rescue scene. 2 to 1 odds it's Alice saving the guys again."
- Implied:
- Alice was never being shown fighting, but she flaunted how her could fight better than the guys.
- Felix scores his subordinates: Greg 5/10, Harry 6/10, Isaac 3/10, Jihyun 10/10.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice decides to leave the team because she's far more competent than the rest of them.
- Positive Discrimination is still discrimination, so she still feels like the odd one out.
- Alice cracks under the pressure of having to prove women in general are competent to the rest of the team.
- An envious tension between Alice, Colin vs prejudicial members is erupted, that leads Alice and Colin to suffer from Tall Poppy Syndrome.
- Reconstructed: ...But she comes back because she needed them as much as they did her, even if it's just so she'd have people to entertain her since she's so much better than the rest of them.
- Played For Drama:
- Colin dies, and The Bad Guy Wins instantly.
- Colin may be raw skill incarnate, but he is in no way flawless. In fact, between his massive Inferiority Superiority Complex, arrogant attitude, dangerously obsessive approach to whatever the team does and refusal to act like a team player, he is probably the most unstable member. Having been discriminated against all his life, he dedicated himself to becoming so skilled that he could overcome it. He succeeded, but at the cost of losing friendships and basic skills that he deems 'unimportant', a crippling perfectionist streak, and a body that's starting to deteriorate from how hard he's pushing himself. He lives in mortal terror of ever being upstaged, as he has staked his entire self-image on being perfect. When Colin is finally, inevitably defeated, he has a complete mental breakdown.
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