Sacrificed Basic Skill For Awesome Training / Anime & Manga

• Ayakashi Triangle:
  • Since middle school, Matsuri has dedicated his time to becoming an exorcist ninja to protect Suzu. He's gained a lot of power with just three years of training, but at the expense of any kind of social life. He never made any other friends before high school, and became distant from Suzu. When he joins Suzu's group to act as her bodyguard, Matsuri avoids actually talking to them when they were together, only getting to know them at Suzu's insistence.
  • Soga is a similarly-dedicated exorcist ninja basically for its own sake, and so has even worse social skills than Matsuri. He can't help but terrify most people he runs into, is very terse in general, Cannot Talk to Women, and any hint of female sexuality can send him running with his tail between his legs.
• Guts from Berserk, who grew up in a medieval mercenary camp and remained a mercenary until the Eclipse came down. Though he is intelligent in his own way, he knows little more than how to fight and survive.
• Blood+ has the Schiff. As prototype Super Soldiers, they're deadly warriors, but due to their upbringing as living weapons, they have No Social Skills whatsoever; even something as simple as asking for help or something they need rather than taking it by force is an alien concept to them.
• The Claymores from Claymore. Though not all of them may have been 100% willing, they sacrifice their recognition as humans to be monster hybrids for superhuman strength, speed, and other superpowers whilst being despised and feared by those they protect. They are also made to fight monsters until they are killed or become a monster themselves.
• L from Death Note was raised in an orphanage for genius children, making him insanely smart, but with No Social Skills and a couple other... uhh, quirks. Later on in the series we meet Mello and Near, two kids from the same orphanage who split the difference. Near is possibly even smarter than L in things not involving human interaction but has essentially no living skills and is entirely reliant on people around him to carry out his plans. Mello is less intelligent than both (though by no means an idiot) but is far more socially competent and capable of taking matters into his own hands.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Goku, as his perpetual interest is in fighting. He lived his early childhood in the mountains with only his adoptive grandfather, a hermit martial artist who died early in Goku's childhood. Due to these conditions, Goku has no education, has No Social Skills, no concepts of things like money and gender, and as we find out later, no job skills either. He can survive very well off the land, and even provide for his family in Z, but his wife isn't entirely happy with the situation.^note Though, if the first episode of Z is to be believed, he could've made a living as a lumberjack working just a couple of months a year, or he could have kept entering (and winning) the World Martial Arts Tournaments for the huge prizes. As an adult, he still remains pretty Book Dumb, yet he's actually quite capable at farming (it was part of his martial arts training with Master Roshi), though it still causes him problems in that he prefers to goof off with training and getting ready for the next fight. The offset of all this? Goku spends almost all of his time training and thinking about fighting, meaning he's exceptionally strong, talented in combat, and always ready to meet the next bad guy who might show up.
  • On a smaller level, Vegeta. While he does have a family life and is more educated than Goku, he too prefers training over providing for them and socially fits in about as well as a thumbtack in a balloon factory. Contrast him and Goku to characters like Krillin, Gohan, Goten, and Yamcha, who have a history of focusing on their normal lives over training. In a world like Dragon Ball's, this means they often lose their usefulness.
  • Chiaotzu has incredible psychic powers, but has to count on his fingers to solve single-digit addition and subtraction problems, nor can he tell right from left. This is actually a subtle Brick Joke to Goku and Krillin's training with Master Roshi. Master Roshi actually made a point of taking time for things like basic schooling and proper rest during the year he was training them — this is most likely the only schooling Goku ever got and why he's actually literate or capable of counting. Goku could have potentially sacrificed a lot more of his basic skills, if not for the fact that his early teacher (who also taught his grandfather) ensured that he wouldn't be a total musclehead.
• Seijirou Shin of Eyeshield 21 is incredibly intelligent, freakishly hardworking, and athletically gifted, but lacks any awareness of social norms and has a tendency to break any piece of machinery within seconds of getting it.
• The protagonist of Fly Me to the Moon Nasa Yuzaki, is so determined to overcome the stigma of his Embarrassing First Name that he devotes his youth to studying. As a result of this, his test scores are high enough that he has a good chance at getting into a prestigious high school (and probably would have if not for the accident), knows accounting well enough to save the Arisugawa bathhouse, and can even repair a display case that preserves a moon rock. Unfortunately, he lacks common sense, social skills and knowledge about romance.
• Food Wars!: Erina has a sense of taste best described as the "tongue of God". This, along with the training provided by her family, has made her a fix-star in the culinary world at age 16, already raking in millions in consulting fees. However, she needs assistance to perform basic tasks like buying her favorite manga and doing laundry, has never even heard of mass-produced snack foods and doesn't understand why people do things like visiting the beach and go on dates. As it turns out, Erina's case is Played for Drama. She was made to give up her social skills on purpose by her abusive father in order to refine her culinary skills, the result making her a genius in cooking but utterly dense in everything else.
• Sosuke Sagara from Full Metal Panic!. Most of the time, he approaches everyday life as if he were in a combat environment. He has landmines buried on school grounds. He responded to a secret admirer leaving him a package by blowing it up from a safe distance as per EOD protocol. And when he was buying food from a popular vendor, Chidori advised him to be "aggressive"...as such, he fired a pistol into the air and made his order as if he were robbing a bank. The tradeoff is that he's an incredible soldier and pilot, especially considering he's a teenager.^note 16 at the start of the series, 18 at the end.
  • There is a darker side to it: Sosuke is a Child Soldier who grew up in a thinly veiled Expy of Afghanistan, and has at age 16 already spent six years of his life on campaign. It is also heavily implied that he was sexually abused. That is the lens he views the world through. Sosuke was only chosen as Chidori's bodyguard because he was the only candidate with the necessary combat skills who could fit into a high-school environment (anyone else would be in their late twenties at least) and treats life as an ongoing combat situation because... well, that is what his entire life has been.
• The titular Goblin Slayer spent years training under an abusive and somewhat psychotic Rhea Burglar to become a goblin killing machine. This combined with the harrowing experiences of being the Sole Survivor of the goblin attack on his hometown (especially seeing his own sister being raped and killed by goblins while he was helpless to save her) has severely hampered his ability to interact normally with other people. A big part of his Character Development throughout the series is him coming out of his shell with the help of a band of True Companions he manages to gather in spite of himself. Another problem is that his training and specialization in goblin slaying tactics has given him a case of Crippling Overspecialization — he tends to have a lot of trouble handling anything stronger than bog-standard goblins (including the strongest goblins such as Goblin Champions).
• The Greatest Magic Masters Retirement Plan: Due to his talents in magic, Alus Reigin was recruited into the military at age six and spent most of his life in training and combat, but has no idea how to function as a civilian. When he sees a vending machine in the school cafeteria, he needs help from Tesfia and Alice to operate it.
• Ippo from Hajime no Ippo is the best infighter in Japan, and possibly even the world. However, he's accomplished this by all but ignoring the skills that would make him a well-rounded fighter, to focus his training only into increasing his devastating punching power and his inhuman endurance, and almost nothing else. This isn't a decision that was made lightly, as Ippo and his coach knew that wasting precious training time building general boxing skills (that would be wasted on Ippo's unique body and personality) would make him a worse fighter overall. Instead, spending all their effort building his strengths directly would have the highest chances of success.
• Heaven's Lost Property: The First-Generation Angeloids all get hit with this. Ikaros has strength & intelligence maxed out at the expense of her emotions, to the extent that she is incapable of voluntarily smiling. Nymph has intelligence & emotions maxed at the expense of strength; her strongest attack doesn't even leave a scratch on most of her enemies. The Harpy twins appear to have gone the jack-of-all route, but their High-Altitude wings are next to useless when they leave Synapse. Astraea has sacrificed intelligence for strength & emotions.
  Ikaros: You have three apples and four oranges. How many total pieces of—
  Astraea: I eat them all!
  Ikaros: Okay, let's try again. Seven bananas—
  Astraea: I EAT THEM ALL!
• In Hirogaru Sky! Pretty Cure, Sora spent a good chunk of her life training to be a hero. She is quick, agile, extremely strong (and that’s before she becomes Cure Sky), but her social skills leave a bit to be desired. Before the series, she’s never had a friend, has no idea how to work certain devices, Cannot Tell a Lie and can be extremely overprotective of people.
• In Infinite Dendrogram, because Ray jumped straight into a High-Rank Job (Paladin) without going through a Low-Rank Job in the same skill tree, he doesn't learns basic skills initially learned through the Low-Rank Job (like Horse Riding). However, because he jumped into the High-Rank Job with such a low total level (the combined levels of all his known classes), he was able to learn a skill with a requirement made harder to earn at higher levels (Purifying Silverlight) and would require anyone else to reset every other job barring Paladin to 0 just to have a chance to learn it.
• Aiz Wallenstein from Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?. She's 16, yet a ten-year veteran dungeon delver and one of the strongest and most famed adventurers in the city of Orario. Fighting in the dungeon from such an early age, however, has left her knowledge base focused almost entirely on combat and dungeoneering. Outside of her particular skillset, she's a bit of an airhead, has next to no people skills, and has difficulty understanding people and her own emotions.
• Shichika from Katanagatari spent his entire life training under his father to master Kyotoryuu on a deserted island. At the start of the series he has absolutely no knowledge of the outside world and can't even pick up the differences between other people. This seems to have been intentional on his father's part; a Kyotoryuu master is supposed to be a sword (not a swordsman) with no will of his own that someone else wields. Most of Shichika's Character Development has him realizing that he is still a human and has a will of his own. Another side effect of Shichika's training is that he is completely unable to wield swords. This becomes an issue in episode 9 since the owner of that episode's Deviant blade is a kendo master who refuses to duel Shichika unless he is also armed and armored. At the last episodes, we discover that this trope is exaggerated: Shichika was the last product of an Ancient Conspiracy, the Kyotouryuu, the No Sword School, that wants to create the perfect swordsman (a man so powerful that he doesn’t need swords anymore), and he is the seventh generation of a school that had made the practicing of this martial art the principal motive of their lives. That means that Shichika is the last in line of five generations, each of them who were educated by a father who Sacrificed Basic Skill For Awesome Training, meaning each generation had more and more problems with social skills.
• Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple: Subtly played by the Masters of the Ryouzanpaku: Six masters of their own martial arts, all of them (except the oldest) are Socially Awkward Heroes: Akisame Koetsuji is a Broken Ace, Shio Sakaki is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, Apachai Hopachai is a Manchild, Shigure Kosaka has No Social Skills, Kensei Ma is a Henpecked Husband who ran out on his family, all of them depend of Miu Furinji to run the dojo. All of them were reunited at the Dojo because they have nowhere else to go. Hayato Furinji claimed that Kenichi (The Heart) united them in a true family.
• Medaka of Medaka Box can do everything, literally everything. She is a master of every single sport ever played, top of every class, could read entire libraries of books when she was three, can rip entire buildings off their foundations with her bare hands, and she has a superpower that lets her copy and perfect any other superpowers she witnesses. Because of her near perfection though, her people skills are non-existent. She can barely understand how normal people work and generally causes trouble everywhere she goes. It has required the lifetime of effort and struggle of her childhood friend Zenkichi to just barely keep her in check.
  To a lesser extent, it's shown that because of this flaw, the one thing Medaka is actually bad at is any form of artistic expression. In one chapter she plays the drums for the first time in her life; though her technique is described as godly, it utterly fails to inspire any kind of emotion in those who hear it. Zenkichi describes her performance as too perfect, remarking that because it lacks the human touch of little slip-ups or errors it doesn't "feel" right, and explicitly says that it's like the opposite of the Uncanny Valley effect.
  Another flaw in this ability is she will learn things regardless of whether she intends to or not. For this reason, it is dangerous for her to face an opponent who's ability might actually be a problem such as Munakata's impulsive need to kill and understanding of how to kill others. Unlike Munakata, who is kind-hearted so he restrains his ability, Medaka doesn't understand right from wrong beyond their concepts so it's likely she'd have become a crazed killer.
• Poor, poor Extendeds from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. Especially Stella. One of the best Alliance pilots, but has a mind of an eight-year-old.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury: Suletta Mercury is a stuttering, self-conscious mess who can barely say hello without falling on her face, and altogether gives the impression of someone who has never interacted with people outside her immediate family. The only thing she is confident in is piloting her Mobile Suit, to the point that when the best duelist in school jokingly challenges her she is relieved, because that's a problem she knows how to solve. Despite all the legal and social problems surrounding her being a "witch," it is clear that she is never worried when she's in the cockpit.
• In Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation disciples of the Sword God are usually illiterate. Ghyslaine, a Master Swordsman and skilled adventurer who's a former companion of the main character's parents and even better than Rudeus' father, admits that this, along with her inability to do basic arithmetic, made life as a solo adventurer hard because it was so easy for merchants to trick her.
• My Hero Academia: Shoto Todoroki has won the Superpower Lottery, being able to wield both ice and fire. However, his father Endeavor has subjected him to intense Training from Hell ever since he got his Quirk for the sake of ensuring Shoto becomes the Number One Hero: this has left him with a serious case of Daddy Issues combined with No Social Skills.
• Sai in Naruto can go toe-to-toe with S-Class criminals twice his age but needs a book that tells him how to act tactfully and politely. This is explained as part of his training in Root, which kills emotions and empathy, though none of the other Root members seen in the series so far are nearly as socially maladjusted as Sai.
• The denizens of Nazarick in Overlord (2012) are this due to the fact that they were originally designed as MMORPG NPCs. Many of them have no practical skills such as cooking, cleaning or basic maintenance, relying on Nazarick's specialized NPCs for such services. Many also cannot interact meaningfully with anybody outside of Nazarick since they are seen as "lower lifeforms". This culminates in a character introduced in a later part of the work; a dragon who has spent so much of his time learning from books, he is obese, cannot fight well despite being a dragon and can only barely fly. His awesome skill? Knowing that pissing off that Overlord will mean instant death. Something that his relatives generally lack.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon: The Series:
    • Used well with characterization when Ash and Pikachu take on Lt. Surge and Raichu. After losing, Ash gets a Thunder Stone, allowing him to evolve Pikachu at any time with it, but Pikachu vehemently refuses to evolve to match Raichu. Turns out that in Lt. Surge's haste to evolve his Pikachu into a Raichu, it didn't learn basic attacks (especially ones involving speed). ^note This comes almost directly from the games: Raichu will miss out on important moves like Quick Attack and Agility if prematurely evolved. Bulbasaur and Squirtle also adopt this philosophy, but contrast Charizard who evolved as quickly as possible because of its low self-esteem. While Charizard goes into the Johto region as Ash's strongest Pokémon, he discovers an entire valley filled with Charizard much stronger than he is. This motivates Charizard and Ash to part ways so that Charizard can train there and realize its full potential.
    • Though Charizard's a bit more complicated. While it did evolve early, it remains as Ash's most powerful Pokémon throughout just about the entire series. Its weakness compared to other Charizard is more attributed to the facts that A. It flat out refused to battle/train for most of its time with Ash, and B. The Charizard it's compared to spend ALL their time in brutal training with other Charizard. After Ash's Charizard spends some time training, it briefly comes back and beats a Legendary Pokémon in a one-on-one battle.
    • Meowth of Team Rocket almost never fights directly, and can't even use Pay Day. This is because, in his efforts to walk and talk like humans, he used up most of his skillset that normal Pokémon use for battle.
  • In Pokémon Adventures, Sapphire has a bit of a problem with this due to living in the wild for most of her life. She's incredibly strong and agile, with a powerful sense of smell and quite a bit of nature survival knowledge... but she has some trouble with reading and writing. She's not completely illiterate (she maintained some contact with the civilized world), but can't read kanji (original Japanese) or big words (English translation). She is also unaware of what a Pokémon Center is, although she's capable of treating her Pokémon's ailments herself.
• The cast from Ranma ½. In particular, see Ranma, Ryouga, Mousse and Shampoo; by and large, they make up for their extensive martial abilities with their lack of social skill and modern knowledge: Ranma, because of his father's upbringing; Ryouga, because of his lack of upbringing; and Shampoo and Mousse, because they were raised in a warrior society.
  • For a specific example, there is Ranma's training in the Cat Fu school of martial arts. On the one hand, he gained access to a powerful feral attack style that allows him to tear through almost anything as if it were excelsior paper. On the other hand, the training gave him a crippling fear of cats.
• Naofumi from The Rising of the Shield Hero, having been Locked Out of the Loop due to his ignorance about MMORPG mechanics and a royal conspiracy to destroy him preventing him from sharing info with the other Four Heroes, went for ages completely in the dark about basic functions of his shield (including the ability to copy pre-existing weapons of the same type just by touching them and his shield's built-in Item Crafting and fast-travel functions) being forced to do these things the long and hard way like any normal person. However, despite this handicap, he actually ends up stronger than the other Four Heroes due to his intense bitterness from being the victim of the aforementioned conspiracy causing him to unlock the Curse Series.
  • It also inverts in that, due to having to learn and do things like a normal person, Naofumi winds up actually being much better equipped to interact with the world, because he’s spent time learning the ins and outs of it (I.E.: "When in Rome do as The Romans Do"), whereas the other three heroes were basically handed everything they needed on a silver platter, and instead focused on leveling up and powering up their weapons. For example, because he didn’t have access to the tools the other heroes had to learn magic easily, Naofumi had to study magical texts instead, which necessitated that he actually learn to read in the world’s written language (the heroes’ weapons’ translation ability only applying to spoken language), which resulted in him being able to learn magic the other three were unable to access.
  • Not to mention that Naofumi having to craft items by-hand naturally resulted in him making better and higher-quality products to use or to sell as wares during his time as an Intrepid Merchant and translating those abilities into the shield forms he unlocked through his natural crafting skills, such as using his Potion-Enhance Skill to boost the healing of any potion or elixir he administers to patients, which allowed for Elrasla Grilaroc to no longer be bedridden with sickness and later fighting alongside Naofumi in the Waves, and later modifying the seeds from a cursed monster plant one of the other Heroes accidentally unleashed upon a starving village in order to turn it into a harmless, fast-growing nutritious crop that the residents could actually eat.
• Rurouni Kenshin: Sanosuke doesn't really have many skills outside of fighting; his activities mainly included mooching off and being lazy. Even during fights he's often reckless and relies more on his inherent strength, but his inhuman endurance and power from street fighting make him a formidable opponent.
  • Kenshin fits to a lesser extent; he's a nice guy with a fair bit of wisdom to offer. However, most of his life was devoted to learning swordsmanship. Coupled with his wanderer lifestyle, there's not much else he's good at.
  • A sadder example exists with the Oniwabanshu. Other than Aoshi, none of his four remaining comrades had any skills that were applicable in a new era. This coupled with their grotesque appearances meant that fighting was the only thing they were really capable of.
• This trope fits Millia Falnya Jenius from Super Dimension Fortress Macross to a T. She is an ace pilot and proficient in close-combat as well, but as soon as she and Max are married, she nearly burns them out of Max's quarters by the simple act of making coffee. Justified due to her Zentraedi upbringing: cooking is not a necessary skill for a race of pure warriors.
• Spy X Family: Yor trained as an assassin since she was a young teenager. She's insanely strong and pretty much unbeatable in hand-to-hand combat, but she's pretty incompetent when it comes to any sort of basic life skill- she can't cook at all, her attempts to do so usually poison whomever eats it and the ingredients that she buys in order to attempt to make minestrone include a chunk of beef, a whole fish (minestrone is vegetarian), chocolate, rope, and a potted cactus. When attempting to peel potatoes she slices her fingers to ribbons and when chopping vegetables she chops all the way through a thick wooden cutting board.
• Barnaby from Tiger & Bunny has been focused on becoming a superhero for four-fifths of his life, and as a result has developed a very odd personality; he knows exactly how to behave in public in order to inspire awe and boost popularity, but flounders badly when it comes to personal relationships. Throw in the "absolute trust or complete mistrust, nothing in-between" bit and you've got a guy with a very weird form of No Social Skills.
• Jin from Samurai Champloo fits this to a T. Trained from childhood in a high-level and super purist dojo, by age 20 he's a fearsome, near-unbeatable kenjutsu prodigy who can't cook, catch fish, or hold a conversation (especially with women). He does get better once he has to.
• Yoruka in Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle is a master assassin, capable of slaughtering small armies on her own. But due to a combination of this trope and being ostracised for her killing instincts, she can't function as anything other than an assassin who serves someone else. She doesn't even try to socialise with her classmates and instead spends her time trying to protect her master from (other) assassins. More comedically, she doesn't know how to do basic housework, trying to use her katana to cut grass for example.
• The titular Violet Evergarden. She is very adept with fighting, obeying orders and military duties but knows next to nothing about civilian life, emotions, and basic human cues. When Gilbert first meets her, Violet was practically feral. He had to teach her how to talk and how to see human contact as more than a threat.