Basic Trope: A character wears a suit of armor that enhances abilities while offering protection.
- Straight: Alice wears a suit of armor which enhances her strength, durability, and speed.
- Exaggerated: Alice's armor encapsulates her to the point where she looks more like a hulking robot gorilla than a soldier.
- Downplayed:
- Alice's armor is little more than a powered skeleton which leaves most of her body still exposed.
- Alice's armor is actually a mining suit that, while not designed for combat, can be used as Improvised Armor if nothing better is available (and if Alice's crew dug the wrong asteroid, or was attacked by Space Pirates, there may very well be nothing better available.).
- Justified:
- Armor plating is heavy, and powered armor is used to offset the weight so that soldiers can move without fatigue.
- Alice's armor was designed as an environmental suit for a hostile planet with high gravity; the ability to repel gunfire and throw tanks on Earth-like planets is an extension of its existing characteristics.
- Alice operates in urban warzones where tanks are impractical due to mobility but soldiers need extra protection.
- Inverted:
- Alice is a durable robot with softer flesh surrounding her mechanical skeleton.
- Alice's armor is designed to tone down or contain her abilities, allowing her to work without harming her teammates.
- Subverted: Alice's power armor is Awesome, but Impractical, being too clumsy and dangerous to use reliably.
- Double Subverted: ... but Alice fixes its mechanical failings and masters it and becomes an unstoppable killing machine.
- Parodied:
- Alice wears powered armor and rides a robot horse into battle.
- Alice's armor visibly enhances other abilities.
- Zig Zagged: Alice is a mercenary who will occasionally don power armor, but not every job requires it, and some jobs require more armor than others.
- Averted: Alice is a soldier with the knowledge, resources, and technical ability to make just about anything, but she is endowed with super strength, speed, and resistance, making powered armor redundant.
- Enforced:
- Alice's character is easier to render in CGI during fight sequences when her entire body is hidden behind a suit of armor, so the producers decide to make her wear a power suit whenever she fights.
- The series in which Alice appears is an American adaptation of a Japanese series. During non-action scenes, the producers can use location-specific actors, but when the character suits up, they can use Stock Footage of the Japanese series.
- Lampshaded: "I'm a walking tank, is there something I can do to help here?"
- Invoked: The government invests money and research into building an ability-enhancing suit of armor in hopes that they can create special operatives.
- Exploited:
- Emperor Evulz uses high voltage to short out Alice's suit, bricking it so that she can't move when he kicks her into the ocean, where her suit makes her sink like a stone.
- Evulz kidnaps Alice by hacking her suit switching it to external control.
- Defied: Alice runs to a suit of armor to fight the Big Bad, but he blasts it into pieces, forcing her to use her wits instead.
- Discussed: "What if I have to take a crap in this thing?"
- Conversed:
- Carol comments to Bob on how Alice's power suit wearing character is just a giant appeal to masculinity.
- Bob comments to Carl that Alice isn't really a super hero, because her armor does all the work for her.
- Implied: Alice wears a suit of armor that is way too clunky for her to properly wield without Super-Strength, which it's been demonstrated she doesn't have... so something else has to be moving the armor.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice proves that powered armor is useful, and her armor is mass produced. This gives Alice's nation a temporary advantage... until every other nation develops it for themselves. This causes war to escalate in brutality, since powered armor dehumanizes the troops and makes them harder to kill.
- The suit has an unfortunate tendency to hurt anyone who wears it, due to the suit having better capabilities than the person inside it.
- Wearing someone else's suit (or even your own but poorly-optimized suit) is fatal, because misaligned joints plus multiton-force muscles equals new joints.
- Because the suit's power supply need to be compact enough to fit in, it has a rather short mileage so when it runs out of juice(which happens often) the suit becomes a cumbersome hindrance to its wearers not unlike a bomb disposal suit.
- Reconstructed:
- ... however, due to the expense of creating power armor on a massive scale, most suits prove to be ersatz in nature. Alice remains one of the elite users of power armor due to the quality of the suit and her mastery over its use.
- However, it works fine for people who are similarly superpowerful.
- Adaptive AI and limited shapeshifting is incorporated into the suits, allowing them to accommodate a wide variety of body types.
- The suit uses a longer-lived power supply from nuclear, extraterrestrial, or other sources, or the wearer simply carries spare batteries.
- Played For Laughs: Alice, while learning to use her armor, proceeds to break whatever she accidentally bumps into. She knocks a hole in a wall she turns into, turns a coffee table she accidentally kicks into splinters, and winds her colleagues when she turns around to apologize. She walks outside to avoid doing more damage, only to be hit by a truck, which does more damage to the truck than to her.
- Played For Drama:
- Alice's suit, while enhancing her abilities, turns out to be a death trap, as it saturates the user with dangerous levels of radiation every use. She finds this out when it's too late to reverse the effects.
- Alice uses her power suit to the point that she becomes defined by using it. She no longer feels safe without wearing it, and her family and friends no longer feel that they can connect with her anymore.
- Alice ends up committing (or receiving) horrible acts since the armored suits make it difficult to see the soldiers as anything more than robots.
- Played For Horror: Alice's suit is Powered by a Forsaken Child, and when she unleashes a Mook Horror Show on her enemies it's not so much like it appears in Iron Man but instead it's like the police station massacre in The Terminator.
Suit up and head back to Powered Armor!
