Reality Ensues/Surprisingly Realistic Outcome cleanup

The DCU

• Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld: While Amethyst's heroics are loved by people in her 2020 solo, her actions make delicate diplomacy with Dark Houses she keeps picking fights with a nightmare, to the point her own mother considers her a political liability. Torquoise is her only political ally and is constantly pressured by other houses to stab her in the back. Plot happens.
• The prologue to Darkseid War opens on a man named Wilson Morgan, who has recently developed electrical abilities after surviving the Amazo Virus. Using his new powers, he sets out to rescue his neighbor's daughter from a kidnapper. The narration notes that in spite of his incredible new abilities, Wilson is still just an overweight laundromat owner who has no combat training or crime-fighting experience to speak of. He rushes in and tries to zap the kidnapper, and is immediately shot to death. Too fantastical.
• Deathstroke
  • Christopher Priest's Deathstroke:
    • There is a more realistic take on the Healing Factor power seen in a lot of comics. Slade is exposed to radiation during a battle near a nuclear submarine reactor, and begins to go blind as a result. When someone says his regenerative abilities should make that impossible, Tanya Spears points out that his healing factor isn't magic. It can heal damaged and diseased body parts, not grow new organs to replace dead ones. He ends up needing a full corneal transplant to be able to see again. Too fantastical.
    • The run goes to great lengths to subvert and demolish the idea that Deathstroke is a heroic Anti-Hero or Anti-Villain. Even though he has some Pet the Dog moments and it's clear that he deeply loves his children, Slade is still consistently shown to be a horrible, screwed-up person who is incapable of forming healthy human relationships. Wintergreen even lampshades this at one point, saying that while people like to use colorful terms like "anti-hero" to describe him, there's really no way a manipulative killer like Slade could ever be considered a good person. Deconstructed Character Archetype shoehorn, no character reactions.
    • There is also how Slade and Terra's relationship is treated in the 2010s. Slade maintains that Terra seduced him, and she was evil because she wanted sex with him at the age of 15 in the Judas Contract arc. Rebirth and the film adaptation of The Judas Contract gave a reality check; as a minor, Terra was unable to give consent. In fact, any mental instability would guarantee that she couldn't give consent about her body period. Thus, Slade was grooming her at best and committed statutory rape at worse. If he were truly an Anti-Hero or Anti-Villain, he would have turned her down. Animated versions of Slade are remotely better in that none of the incarnations in the animated Teen Titans, Teen Titans Go, Young Justice, or the DCEU slept with Terra, but they still cross the line by turning on her when it's convenient. Yes, Terra is responsible for her actions, but she is also a kid. Irrelevant.
    • During a drug-fueled rampage, Jericho punches his sister, Rose, in the face while wearing his Ikon Suit. Most superhero stories wouldn't treat this a particularly notable event, but Rose actually ends up in the hospital with a serious skull fracture and is later shown with a number of stitches on her shaved head. Too fantastical.
  • A much earlier example was the aftermath of The Judas Contract back during Marv Wolfman's New Teen Titans run. After being arrested and put on trial for a kidnapping, Slade actually managed to avoid the charges when his lawyer pointed out that due to the face-concealing mask Deathstroke wears, nobody could reasonably be sure it was really Slade Wilson in the suit and not a Costume Copycat. Ultimately, the only thing the prosecutor was actually able to make stick was a minor charge for illegal gun ownership, which briefly got Slade sent to a white-collar prison. Plot happens.
  • The Judas Contract also deconstructed Deathstroke's dedication to the job. It ended up ruining his marriage and alienating one of his children. As his ex-wife explains, their youngest son Jericho was taken hostage, and Deathstroke's attempt to save him resulted in the boy's throat being slit because he went Leeroy Jenkins. It meant Jericho could never speak again, and he was badly traumatized. Adeline explains she tried shooting Slade in revenge but only got his eye due to his super-reflexes because he thought that a slit throat was Worth It rather than having found another solution to save their son. She and Jericho agree to help Nightwing take down her ex and save the Titans. Slade gets a Heel Realization when seeing Jericho captured, possessing him, and freeing the Titans because he burnt all his bridges. To top it all off, the whole reason he took the contract was to avenge his older son, Grant. H.I.V.E. refuses to honor the agreement using Exact Words, meaning Deathstroke ruined any chances of reconciling with Adeline or Jericho for nothing. It's no wonder that Deathstroke is broken as well at the end of the arc, and it's hinted he is willing to let Beast Boy strike him down while unarmed. Deconstructed Trope shoehorn, irrelevant.
• Doomsday Clock applies this to Watchmen. What happens when Ozymandias's grand scheme involving the alien destroying New York and bringing about world peace gets discovered? People flip the fuck out and bring the world to the brink of nuclear war. Also, this goes for Dr. Manhattan leaving that Earth for the DC Universe: he's not staying put to see the world go to shit over this "prank." Too fantastical, no character reactions.
  • Rorschach II tries to explain to Batman what is going on and gives him the first Rorschach's journal to read. Upon reading, Batman decided that Rorschach is insane and locks him in Arkham Asylum. No character reactions.
• In Final Crisis Aftermath: Run!, the Human Flame, having been given a massive power boost, decides to try and destroy everything by growing larger in size. However, before he gets even bigger, he suddenly stops moving, confusing Firestorm, Red Tornado and John Stewart. John uses his ring to find out and discovers that the Human Flame was hit with the Square-Cube Law — he weighed so much he literally couldn't move anymore. Firestorm later asks why he just didn't shrink and John and Red figure that the Flame's desire for "more" meant that he probably never thought of shrinking. Too fantastical.
• In The Flash comics, an effort was made to do this in the beginning of the Post-Crisis run (the Wally West era), until the introduction of the Speed Force, which had him struggle with a bunch of realistic weaknesses caused by his superspeed. His upper limit was about the speed of sound as any faster would tear his body apart, he had to eat constantly (his body now required massive amounts of calories to fuel his enhanced metabolism), and his uniform had to be made of special low friction materials to keep it from being incinerated by his vibrations (and required frequent repairs or replacements). During Mark Waid's run, it became clear a lot of these were actually self-imposed mental blocks caused by a mix of Wally's self-doubt and his own slightly better-than-average understanding of physics causing him to notice that his powers shouldn't work that way, resulting in these weaknesses forming^note The Speed Force's powers are very psychosomatic, with its behaviour linked to the user's mental and emotional state as well as how they believe their powers work, with the Flash's frequent Power Creep, Power Seep being entirely due to their waning mental state. After learning, first, that it's OK for him to not hold himself back for his late mentor Barry Allen's sake, and learning about the Speed Force, he regained the Required Secondary Powers that he had in his youth and that prior Flashes had, as well as new ones he could then exploit. This one and the first four bullet points are too fantastical.
  • In Flashpoint, trapped in a world where he never obtained his superpowers, Barry Allen decides to recreate his superhero origin story, which involved being hit by lightning and bathed in a bunch of chemicals. Instead of granting him Super-Speed, he's horribly burned and nearly killed, and in a Tales from the Dark Multiverse issue building off from that moment, his attempt to regain his powers ends up killing him.
  • The Flash has a Healing Factor, as do all speedsters, but unlike how its depicted in the CW series, it's consistently been a realistic one during the Wally West period. Rather than From a Single Cell, the natural healing abilities of the human body operate faster than normal, but are still limited to the same limitations. Broken bones still need to be set right otherwise they'll heal wrong and they don't heal instantly (when injured, Bart Allen had to have his kneecap re-broken several times to ensure it healed correctly), and more than one AU showed that severing their spine would leave them permenantly unable to walk. When Jesse Quick severed her achiles tendon, both her and Wally remarked how she'd never be able to run again because even if it healed, it was impossible for it to heal correctly (fortunately, Wally is able to super-charge her healing when in the Speed Force and rebuilds it). Jay Garrick gets his leg twisted, and it was consistent after the fact he still had chronic pain in the leg, while Wally once crashed while running at full speed and shattered both legs, and had to remain in a wheelchair until they healed. Also noteworthy is that Jesse Quick is shown (inconsistently) needing glasses, mostly to read; as the human eye has no natural cell regeneration abilities (unlike most other organs), there's no healing process to be sped up and thus no 'fix' for her eyesight.
  • Similarly, one time Wally West was infected with a dangerous pathogen. Due to his fast metabolism, it hit him harder than it would a normal person as common sickness symptoms are mostly caused by the immune system's attempts to kill the infection; he recovered quicker, but it meant he needed treatment much faster than others infected.
  • The Rogues, a colourful band of supervillains armed with gimmicky weapons who frequently fight the Flash, have often been dismissed as a Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain group, on account of their mundane targets (bank robberies, mostly), and unwillingness to use lethal force unless necessary. When Captain Boomerang is hired to kill Tim Drake's father, he succeeds (though is fatally shot), and Batman lashes out at Wally for not being able to handle his villains. As Wally points out (while reminding Batman that he has no ability to threaten him given their differing power scale), Batman assumes that Boomerang is easy to deal with, while ignoring that someone who can give a person with Super-Speed a tough time is not going to be so simple to fight, and just because the Rogues are a gimicky Anti-Villain group doesn't mean they're pushovers. Even Boomerang, who at this point was old and very much past his prime, would have given many of Bruce's villains a run for their money.
  • At one point, Barry tries to get the Anti-Hero Fuerza to trust him by unmasking in front of her. Fuerza not only does not have no idea who Barry is (she doesn't even live in the same country) but she doesn't even care, making this an utterly meaningless gesture. No character reactions.
• In Forever Evil (2013) issue 1, Ultraman pushes the moon into the sun to create a solar eclipse. In Black Manta's Villain's Month issue, Ultraman's act causes tides to go wild; flooding coastal areas. This includes demolishing the graveyard where Black Manta's father is buried, and he's not happy about that. Too fantastical.
• The New 52 version of Ocean Master is a Noble Demon with a code of honour, a complicated relationship with Aquaman, a Dark and Troubled Past including Parental Abuse and Parental Abandonment, a humanising love interest and surrogate son, and is contrasted with far more vile villains like Black Manta and Atlan, putting him square in the middle of The Good, the Bad, and the Evil. Obviously he's going to be a long-running Worthy Opponent of Aquaman, a sometime ally, sometime enemy who may even eventually undergo a Heel–Face Turn, right? Well, no.
  He lead an invasion of the surface world that killed thousands, and even though he was tricked into it as part of someone else's evil plan, he still bears responsibility for those deaths. He ends up in Blackgate looking at multiple life sentences if he's lucky, and while he escapes during the Forever Evil (2013) event, he can never go back to Atlantis or come out of hiding, since if the superheroes or regular authorities ever get their hands on him, he's going right back. Given how many other sympathetic/morally ambiguous villains are Easily Forgiven or get the Draco in Leather Pants treatment, it's almost shocking to see one face lasting consequences for their actions. Too fantastical.
  • Despite being historically Aquaman’s arch nemesis and ticking all the boxes for a recurring villain, he straight up disappears from the comics for what amounts to years in Real Life and over a year in universe. It’s eventually revealed that he basically hid at his girlfriend’s place for months, making no plans for revenge or attempts to retake Atlantis, but just trying to stay off everybody’s radars, which is what one of the most wanted fugitive should in the world would realistically do. He returns as an antagonist in Mera’s miniseries, plays a brief role in a Crisis Crossover and hasn’t been seen since. Plot happens.
• In The Green Lantern, Hal Jordan lets an alien grow to immense size because he knows that he'll eventually collapse under his own weight because of Square-Cube Law, which he directly namedrops. Too fantastical.
• In her New 52 series, Harley Quinn questions a group of animal rights activists protesting outside a animal shelter if they had considering adoption instead of just protesting. As it turns out, they had and pretty much all of the protesters have adopted several animals each, there are simply a lot of them at the shelter and they can only provide for so many. Plot happens.
• Hitman:
  • An early issue has a memorable scene where a group of supervillains are hired to confront Tommy; Tommy takes advantage of the leader's dramatic and overly-long introduction speech to pull his gun and shoot the villains before they can get near him. Valid.
  • A plan that screams "Crazy Enough to Work" gets Deconstructed, discussed in issue #24, where Tommy suggests that they "do something completely and totally crazy" to escape the SAS. The cover of #25 is Tommy hung upside down and bleeding and Nat unconscious on the floor with the SAS soldiers behind them holding automatic weapons. Turns out that, while a full-blown "Enemy Mine" may not be applicable, there is such a thing as being so blood-thirstily pissed off that two opposing groups won't bother with trying to fight each other as long as they get their pound of flesh from their mutual enemy (and one side being so badass that the other gets curb-stomped so this kind of diversion doesn't makes a difference). The trope ends up being played (somewhat) straight because of other unforeseen circumstances acting up just in time and saving the protagonists. Deconstructed Trope shoehorn.
    Nat: We keep hittin' Louie's places 'til we got him so pissed his ass goes nuclear. Then, when the dudes got Sean call us an' arrange a meet, we lead Louie's boys onto 'em an' start the mutha of all firefights. In the confusion we get Sean out an' slip away while the S.A.S. an' the mob shoot the hell outta each other. We go home. That about it? [Well] You know how in movies when some dude says "in the confusion"— Like, "In the confusion we gonna rescue the princess, pop a cap in lord Vader an' do a bunch of stuff to mess up his scary-ass death star"— you know why it always works out just like the dude says? 'Cause it's a movie, Tommy. We got two sets of badasses trynna kill us. We bring 'em both together with us in the middle — what's gonna be so confusin' about that?
• Injustice 2:
  • Harley Quinn was surprisingly Easily Forgiven by Batman for her actions in the first prequel comic, but the US government haven't forgiven her at all, and send soldiers to apprehend her. Living a life of crime and having been party to the nuking of an entire city is not the sort of thing you can just walk away from, no matter how sincere your reformation. For that matter, the relatives of her direct victims won't forgive her either, such as Pa and Ma Kent for the murders of their daughter-in-law and unborn grandchild, which drove their adopted son to evil. Not surprising, and Batman's part is a character reaction.
  • Batman admits to Ted Kord that bringing Superman down didn't make all the world's problems go away, and that some people still support him despite everything he's done and want him to return. This extends to the Amazons, a faction of whom still support Diana and have merely lain in wait for someone like Kara to come along. The Regime may have fallen, but it wasn't pure evil and Batman's continued Failure Hero routine isn't giving its remaining supporters much reason to change their opinions. Not an outcome.
  • Without Alfred, Bruce's workplace has become a mess and he himself isn't looking so good. Having lived most of his life with a butler who cleaned up after him and forced him to take care of himself has left him only just functioning without him. Not surprising.
  • Ted Kord ends up going down without much of a fight after the bad guys show up at his door. He's been retired from superheroics for a long time, his costume doesn't fit and he doesn't even have most of his assets on hand. He gets a solid punch in on Deadshot, but one katana to the wrist and it's over. Being a superhero is not like riding a bike. Not surprising.
  • Bringing along a Kid Hero with some truly destructive potential but not yet experienced for a very important mission to rescue your loved ones turns out to have catastrophic consequences, even when you assigned him to stay on guard. When Blue Beetle tries to help his teammates after they were trapped inside Ra's compound, he blasts his way through when the two groups are about to resolve their issues without anymore fighting and his actions escalate to a explosion inside the animal reserve, killing countless endangered species, and making said endangered species officially extinct. Not surprising.
  • As Wildcat found out the hard way, being a Badass Normal doesn't make you immune to firearms and bullets. Bring nothing but your fists against a guy with guns on his back, you're toast. And calling their wielder a Dirty Coward still won't do you jack. Not surprising.
  • Ever since his identity was revealed to the public, Batman can't intimidate anyone with his Death Glare, in-costume or out of it. No character reactions.
  • If you are related to a mass-murdering dictator, there is a great chance you will be subjected to mob scrutiny and violence, no matter if you were personally innocent of any wrong doing. Pa and Ma Kent were evicted from Smallville just because they found and raised the alien child that turned into Superman. No character reactions.
  • After Grodd questions Solovar's authority once too often, the king orders his soldiers to take Grodd to the cells. But instead, they hand Grodd a weapon. As Grodd contemptuously scoffs, he's their direct leader, and Solovar's contradictory nature of hating humans yet allowing humans to be protected guests in Gorilla City has left them no reason to remain loyal to him. No character reactions.
  • In Issue #54, Sinestro tries to pull Soranik's Green Lantern ring off her fingers. It results in her overpowering and knocking him out with a giant punch construct. Turns out trying to take off a GL ring is not as easy as it seems, specially when you are unarmed. Too fantastical.
  • In Issue #70, Ra's al Ghul has a moment of compassion after Killer Croc and Orca's wedding and deactivates the explosives on their bodies before wishing them farewell. However, Orca is less than impressed, chews him out for endangering her, her mate and unborn children by blowing up their heads if they step out of line or failed him just before Croc tears out his arm in retaliation. Having one Pet the Dog moment when you are a cruel and heartless individual will not let you get off the hook slightly. No character reactions.
• Just like with Deathstroke above, Christopher Priest plans to do this a lot to Justice League. The first issue of his run alone takes this approach to Batman's Wolverine Publicity - having multiple solo adventures and leading Justice League, JLA and Gotham Knights has left him exhausted and seriously sleep deprived, which results in him making mistakes that put people at risk. You can't "do SRO a lot," and this is just deconstruction.
• Justice League of America: In the pre-crisis Crossover event "Crisis on Earth-A!", Johnny Thunder's criminal Earth-1 counterpart steals the Thunderbolt, and uses him to prevent the Justice League from ever existing. When the Justice Society of America come to Earth-1 to investigate, Johnny has the Thunderbolt grant the powers and abilities of the Justice League to his underlings. The "Lawless League" does battle with the JSA... and are swiftly defeated, due to having zero experience with their newfound powers. As the Thunderbolt points out, Johnny's plan amounted to "sending rank amateurs against seasoned professionals". Too fantastical.
• In general, Trick Arrow-using characters like Hawkeye and Green Arrow tend to rely on Artistic License – Physics, since in the real world, many of the trick arrows in comics would have issues with weight, balance and aerodynamics. In the JLA arc where Connor Hawke joins the team, he attempts to use some of his father's old trick arrows, only to miss many of his shots while complaining about how no sane archer could actually fire them. Too fantastical.
• Lex Luthor tends to invoke this trope: You can't "invoke" SRO.
  • As a result of his high exposure to radioactive Kryptonite, Luthor eventually got cancer. Hey—human or superhuman, a radioactive rock is a radioactive rock. The irony is that it was thought to be without any effect on humans, except that Lex was exposed to more Kryptonite than any other human alive. Batman has the sense to carry his tiny piece of Kryptonite in a concealed lead-lined box. Lex, being an arrogant tool, just had to flaunt his Kryptonite on a ring. Pre-Crisis, however, Kryponite had no effect on anyone but Kryptonians. Somewhat justified as it wasn't radioactive, per see. Too fantastical.
  • Luthor's post-Flashpoint doppelganger from Earth-3, contrary to the typical Mirror Universe rules and in sharp contrast to the previous two Luthors, is very much a villain (even if he claims otherwise)^note He does play these rules straight in another sense: this Lex is the Earth-3 version of Shazam!, named Mazahs. Why? Because he's just as obsessed with killing Ultraman as Earth-1 Lex is with killing Superman. Doesn't matter how good or bad your nemesis is, He Who Fights Monsters will always end up in effect Irrelevant.
  • The aftermath of No Man's Land sees Lex Luthor elected President of the United States, and it didn't matter how evil he was, he very nearly served out a full four-year term before scandal and bankruptcy forced him out three years in. As easy as it sounds, getting rid of the most nakedly corrupt civil officers is no cakewalk, especially if they have a lot of political capital going for them. Not realistic, this type of thing even happening is unthinkable.
• The Sandman
  • When a magician tries to imprison Death and gain immortality, he gets Dream instead and causes a Sleeping Sickness. We see how the consequences play out in real life: multiple people are put in nursing homes or cared for by relatives that are desperate to see them wake up, with Unity Kincaid getting raped in her sleep. (We find out that Desire did it on purpose so that Dream would be obligated to kill Rose, the new vortex). In an anthology short story, the Nazis are revealed to have euthanized people trapped in the Sleeping Sickness, since they were technically disabled. Too fantastical.
  • Dream's stick-in-the-mud arrogance makes him a terrible boyfriend. Nada can tell anyone that; Dream pursued her and when she refused him on seeing her city collapse, he condemned her to hell. When he rescues her from hell millennia later, he tries a Backhanded Apology. Nada shows what she thinks of that: she smacks him in the face. As she puts it, one apology doesn't make up for the fact that he had her tortured for the crime of turning down the King of Dreams. Dream gets a Jerkass Realization and decides to honor Nada's wishes to reincarnate instead. Too fantastical, no character reactions.
  • Shakespeare was a Workaholic and a runaway convicted thief trying to make a living with his plays. It meant that, even after he made a deal with Dream to become a success, he had little to no time for any of his children. At the end of his life, Shakespeare voices regret on his Parental Neglect, especially since his son Hamnet died young. He asks himself and Dream Was It Really Worth It? knowing he's a successful playwright but a failure of a father. Too fantastical, no character reactions.
  • The "Cereal Convention" (actually one of the multiple serial killers coming to meet) has a very important rule: "We don't shit where we eat." This is a Moral Pragmatist stance: if there are dead bodies at a hotel, the police will start asking questions. To prove their point, some cops ask Rose Walker and her friend Gilbert to stay at the hotel when they find out her little brother is missing and his foster parents/aunt and uncle were found murdered at their house. They make an exception for a man doing a Dead Person Impersonation because he can rat them out too easily as a magazine editor. Sure enough, Funland nearly blows everyone's cover when he goes after Rose after breaking into her hotel room, though she's much older than the kids that he tends to murder.
  • "The Dream Of A Thousand Cats" shows why terrible pet owners will be lucky if their cat or dog decides to forgive them for murdering their babies. A cat prophet explains that her humans took her kittens from her, tossed them in a sack, and drowned them. They assumed because she was a cat, she wouldn't feel pain. The cat begged to differ. The next day, she ran from home, preferring the life of a stray to one of a Gilded Cage. She traveled into the Dreaming, where Morpheus in cat-form gave her the vision to spread among other felines that if they dream of a different world, her children will be alive and cats will rule over humans. Another reality check comes in from an Older and Wiser cat, who advises a kitten that getting a bunch of felines to agree to one idea is near-impossible. Still, it gives her hope and the means to change her current destiny. Too fantastical, no character reactions.
  • "Facade" shows the consequences of someone blessed to be Nigh Immortal. Urania Blackwell received unwanted powers from Ra, while on an expedition. This made her into Elemental Girl; the problem is that it also disfigured her and forced her to retire from work. She relies on pension checks and conversations with her handler to pay the bills and stay calm. Urania can only go out in public if she makes a mask to hide her face, and they tend to fall off too soon. When one of her metal ones does so, in the middle of giving advice to an old friend, it pushes her to a breaking point and she begs Death to kill her. Too fantastical, potentially ROCEJ-breaking due to discussing immortality.
  • Barbie gets locked out of the Dreaming when Rose as the vortex nearly causes a literal Dream Apocalypse. To help her return, one of the dream creatures enters the real-world. He's a giant beast and gets shot dead by NYPD. Too fantastical.
  • Hippolyta Hall in The Kindly Ones goes on a quest to avenge her son, Daniel, thinking Dream had kidnapped and killed him. This essentially means she commits political assassination when Dream finally dies, being the human vessel for the Kindly Ones. After she comes out of her Angst Coma, Thessaly the near-immortal witch says she has a Mercy Lead to get a shower because a bunch of beings, including Thessaly herself, will want Lyta's head. Even though Daniel as Dream gives Lyta protection because a part of him loves her, he exiles her from the Dreaming for the crime of murder and sedition. He has to still punish those that break the rules in the Dreaming, after all. She's not allowed back in until she and her resurrected husband in Justice Society of America atone for what happened by fighting crime. Too fantastical.
• In Scooby Apocalypse, a psionic monster tries to make a giant monster body out of all of the mutated demon-creatures in the area. The construct collapses the moment it tries to stand up, with Velma noting that it has no skeletal structure to help support it. Too fantastical.
• Similarly, the villain in Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers event. Time-traveling jellyfish-totem Gothic Queen versus runaway car. The result is messy but suitably awesome. Too fantastical, cuttable ZCE.
• Shadowpact: When the Shadowpact emerge from the magical dome the town of Riverrock was trapped in, they discover that a full year has passed in the outside world since they went into the dome. This causes the people of Metropolis to think they are dead and build a statue of them in their honor. When an old man sees them walking though a park at night, he assumes they are cosplayers mocking the real Shadowpact. Blue Devil learns that his apartment has been rented out to someone else while he was gone and Ragman loses his business and has his car repossessed. Plot happens.
• In Society of Super-Heroes: Conquerors of the Counter-World #1, we have several in the finales of various villains of Earth-40. Or do we?
  • Doctor Faust uses his high grade of magical prowess to make his way through to fight Doc Fate, and prepares himself for a Wizard Duel. Unfortunately for him, that is all he brought to the table, whereas Doc Fate brought his magical prowess, underhanded tactics, and a gun. He manages to hold off the zombies that come at him with the gun, and summarily defeats Faust with a Groin Attack. Too fantastical.
  • Lady Shiva, upon losing her plane, prepares to fight the Blackhawks with her sword, her close combat skills things of legend. Unluckily for her, the Blackhawks have handguns, and prove that bringing a sword may not have been the best idea. Not surprising.
• In an issue of Superboy from the New 52, Superboy offers to fly a woman home. Shown from Superboy's perspective, it seems to be a normal trip, but when they arrive, the woman throws up and is extremely upset. Superboy then realizes that he flew at super speed without any thought to the fact that people aren't invulnerable or used to such things. Too fantastical.
• In Teen Titans, this is the premise of the whole relationship between Starfire and Blackfire before Flashpoint and its reboot. Blackfire was the eldest daughter of the Grand Ruler of Tamaran and the first princess to be born over a century, but between the Citadel attacking on the day of her birth and destroying three cities in her name and a childhood illness that robbed her of the ability to fly she was ostracized and shunned even by her family, with her birthright transferred to Starfire and pretty much treating her as a servant until she snapped, tried to murder her sister, and defected to the Citadel. In the same way, Starfire was one of the few who actually loved Blackfire, but when she led the Citadel against their homeworld and stopped the attack only on condition she was also stripped of her royal status and Made a Slave and spent years having her tortured and humiliated, and struck her down when they were both captured by the Psions and Starfire saved her killed all affection for her sister. Even after Blackfire's Heel–Face Turn and them reconciling, their relationship remained strained because they couldn't just sweep everything under the rug. Irrelevant Wall of Text.
• The premise of Titans Hunt (2015) is that the original founding members of the Teen Titans all had their memories of each other erased. Consequently, it turns out that Mal Duncan, formerly the teenage superhero known as the Herald, has no memory of his powers or ever fighting crime to begin with. When he's attacked by Mammoth, he's completely unprepared and gets his ass kicked. The subsequent Titans ongoing series also reveals that Mal has developed severe PTSD from the incident, as being ambushed and nearly killed by a horrifying monster after years of believing you were just a normal civilian is probably gonna leave some mental scars. Too fantastical, no character reactions.
• This is the central premise of Watchmen: what happens to superheroes when there's a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome? What becomes of people who dress up in costumes but 1: They have no proper training or resources, 2: They're all at least a little unbalanced, and 3 (most importantly): They are taking the law into their own hands in a world just as full of political and social complexities as the real world? They die. They go insane (presuming they weren't insane already). Or they become monsters. Deconstructor Fleet shoehorns.
  • The Minutemen, a superhero group active from the late 30's to the late 40's, has many of the prejudices of that time period. Hooded Justice is a nazi supporter until the start of the Second World War, Captain Metropolis has racist opinions of black and hispanic people, the Comedian attempts to rape Silk Spectre on the basis that he thought she wanted it because she wore a Stripperific outfit, and Silhouette is thrown out of the group when she's discovered to be a lesbian.
  • The first Nite Owl was a police officer during his day job, so he actually was properly trained and had official authority if he chose to use it. This is why he's the Only Sane Man among either generation of superheroes.
  • In his autobiography, Nite Owl I casually mentions that once the "costumed hero" phase hit its peak, most costumed villains simply gave up entirely or became regular criminals because, honestly, what's the point? Those that didn't ended up in jail and stayed there. No Cardboard Prisons here.
  • One hero was killed ignobly after his cape got caught in the revolving door at a bank. The robbers then simply walked right up to him and shot him point blank.
  • The first chapter mentions a sadomasochist who enjoyed getting beaten up by Super-heroes, so he'd dress up like a villain and pretend to commit crimes. Unfortunately, the heroes all know each other and gossip about their jobs, so soon enough they all know about him and just do their best to ignore him. He finally makes the mistake of trying this on Sociopathic Hero Rorschach, who simply shoves him down an elevator shaft.
  • Doctor Manhattan takes Laurie to Mars in Chapter IX. She nearly dies of asphyxiation before he remembers that humans need to breathe.
  • After the antagonist reveals his scheme to Nite Owl II and Rorschach, Nite Owl tries to talk him out of it, only for the antagonist to inform him that the only reason he told the pair about it in the first place is because he already set it into motion, and it's too late for them to stop him.
    "Do it"? Dan, I'm not a republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.
  • The issue after the one with the above example makes clear that, genius or not, you cannot kill a near-omnipotent being who can walk across the surface of the sun, and literally rebuilt himself after being disintegrated. You can turn the public against him by framing him for spreading cancer, or catch him off-guard by developing a way to block his foresight powers, but you're just as much a threat to his life as a termite would be.
  • For all the effort the antagonist goes through to pull off his plan, it's heavily implied that it will still fail in the long run and the world will be even worse off for it. Especially since Rorschach mailed his journal, which details his investigation into the Comedian's death and the antagonist's involvement in it, to a magazine publisher. After all, there was a good chance he wasn't coming back from the final battle, so what sense would it make not to leave a written account? Even then, there's the possibility that nobody will believe it. The Doomsday Clock Crisis Crossover, which is partially a continuation of this comic, showcases that Ozymandias' efforts only bought the world five years of peace, tops, before people discovered the lie and war exploded again, a hell of a lot worse than before.
    Lex Luthor: ...And you're surprised that humanity hasn't stayed united? If you're the smartest man on your planet, I'd hate to meet the dumbest.
  • Speaking of the journal, Rorschach mails it to the right wing magazine he reads in the hopes that they'll publish it and expose the antagonist's scheme. However, the publisher quickly dismisses it as the writings of a crazy person and has it thrown on a pile of similar mail sent in by other conspiracy freaks, intending to destroy it all later. The only reason the journal gets a chance at being published is because they need a filler article on short notice—and even then it's left ambiguous if the publisher's dopey assistant would really pick it over all the other junk in the pile.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Every time Wonder Woman and Batman go up against each other and Batman isn't prepared. These incidents typically end in Batman getting flung off a rooftop or knocked out with a rock, simply because he can't carry weaponry capable of hurting an Implacable Woman like Diana on him all the time, and his agility can only help him so much, especially next to a woman who could block projectiles traveling from the edges of the universe to the center almost instantaneously. All at once. Additionally, Wonder Woman is one of a small number of people Batman really doesn't have a proper answer to; she's a better fighter, she's stronger, she's faster, she's more durable, and while Batman has a variety of tricks and gadgets to handle fighters with those qualities on a singular scale, altogether there's very little for Batman to prey on, taking away Batman's biggest advantage against the people he fights (to the point that Batman's contingency plan to stop Wonder Woman is to "call Superman"). Too fantastical.
  • Volume 1's Judgment In Infinity reveals that, although The Justice League helped the Freedom Fighters free Earth-X from the Nazis, Europe remains a ravaged-to-the-ground war-torn hellscape. It turns out that overthrowing a brutal tyranny will not magically and automatically set everything right. Likewise, the Resistance may not be suited to rebuild civilization since tearing down existent power structures is significantly easier and faster than replacing them. Plot happens.

• Baldur's Gate:
  • In the first game, you finally get the chance to confront the Big Bad, Rieltar, as he holds a meeting with his subordinates. Attacking and killing him results in being thrown in jail, because the only tangible evidence to his guilt are a few torn letters that may or may not even have been written by him. Plot happens.
  • Likewise, when you confront the real Big Bad Sarevok, a Villain with Good Publicity, if you don't have any evidence against him, he points this out, calls you criminals out to start a war and frame him, and successfully turns every noble in the city against you. Come on, you're a Hero with Bad Publicity with a heavy bounty on your head, he's a respected soldier and duke of the city, who did you think they'd believe? No character reactions.
  • Walking around during a storm wearing plate armor? Get struck by lightning. What did you think was going to happen? Not realistic. Lightning is not attracted to metal.
  • In the second game, Ellesime decides to exile her former lover, who has become a crazed megalomaniac Mad Scientist with a god complex, instead of killing him, hoping this act of mercy will cause him to seek redemption. However, when she does so, she also strips him of his soul, but not his magical powers. Long story short, he gets even stronger and comes back seeking revenge. Love Makes You Stupid at its finest. Too fantastical.
  • As is now common in RPGs, it's possible to enter romances with some of your companions. Contraception isn't particularly common in medieval fantasy, so it's entirely possible for a female partner to become pregnant. At which point she can decide to leave you, since traipsing around dungeons fighting dragons and the like isn't a great environment in which to raise a child. Too fantastical and Genre Deconstruction shoehorn.
• The Bard's Tale:
  • The "good" ending ends with the Bard saving the world from an ancient and terrifying evil. However, as nobody aside from a small cult who don't really like him know this, he's soon back to hustling inns for free booze and sex. Too fantastical.
  • The various "Chosen Ones" encountered during the game are victims of this. Bright, bold lads setting out to meet their destiny, they're quickly murdered by everything from wolves to trow to zombies. One sheriff took to locking them up for their own safety. Too fantastical and character reactions
• In Battle Brothers, Orc weapons are big, gnarly, and deal tons of damage when they hit, but because they are ergonomically designed for beings much bigger and stronger than humans, your hired swords won't get a lot of practical use out of using them. Too fantastical.
• Battletech takes a lot of its cues for Overheating rules from its tabletop counterpart. Deserts and hot badlands make it harder to sink heat, snowfields make it easier. Standing in a river lets cold water wash over the heatsinks and improves cooling. Battling in space... makes heat management your worst nightmare. Space is NOT cold, in fact, there's very little for heat to conduct into at all, giving barren worlds and space platforms the most punishing heat modifiers of all. Not surprising and too fantastical for the last part.
  • Khan McEvedy's allowing people to migrate between classes put Wolverine on a fast upward climb. Letting people do what they wanted wound up increasing food output, fielding new Mech designs, and increasing morale in the Clan. This, naturally, drew jealousy from the other Clans and wound up backing them into a political corner. No character reactions.
  • The Wolverines used proven, effective SLDF tactics rather than adhering to the Honor Before Reason Clan tactics. The tactics worked, but going against the would-be dictator Nicholas Kerensky's wishes got them rebuked time and again. No character reactions.
  • Nicholas Kerensky assigned several other Clans to watch the Wolverines, and when the Wolverines logically found and ferreted out these spies, the others took that as proof that the Wolverines were up to no good. The Wolverines, for their part, took the fact that they were the only Clan left out of the Watch as proof that they were being singled out. No character reactions.
    • Knowing that they were being spied on, and that she without spies inevitably loses to he who does, McEvedy planted her own operatives in other Clans. When these operatives are inevitably discovered, it leads to even Clans the Wolverines were on friendly terms with becoming hostile to them. Since spying is both dishonorable in the new Clan way of doing things, and if you're gathering intelligence, it stands to reason you intend to use what you've learned. Bad indentation.
  • Sarah McEvedy has a private meeting with Nicholas to try to settle matters, and he bluntly admits that he's singled out the Wolverines to bring the rest of the Clans together against a common enemy. Finally fed up of everyone's crap, Sarah drops all the evidence in a Grand Council meeting the next day, including calling out Nicholas to his face on his plans. While she wasn't wrong, it didn't do the Wolverines any favors when most of the other Clans were looking for an excuse to take them out and Nicholas took any questioning of his authority or wisdom poorly, to say the least. No character reactions.
    • At the Grand Council meeting, Sarah announces her plans for the Wolverines to secede from the Clans. Knowing that the other Clans aren't simply going to let them go, the Wolverines are ready to fight and are preparing to withdraw, but rather than being able to simply disappear, the Wolverines are attacked at every turn. It also pushes the other Clans to hunt them, as the only place the Wolverines could have gone was back to the Inner Sphere, where they would most likely reveal the existence and location of the Clans. No character reactions.
  • When the Wolverines get marked for Annihilation, they are massively outnumbered, and even with seizing several mothballed WarShips and managing to quietly follow behind the pursuit fleet rather than try to outrun them, they don't really stand a chance with being outnumbered nineteen-to-one. Not being idiots and knowing that they were outnumbered, they split up, and a fair amount of the Clan apparently managed to survive and was essentially lost to history. Not being complete idiots and checking against roll lists, Clan Wolf found that there were a large number of people unaccounted for, but couldn't point out that they'd screwed up without loss of face, so they covered it up. Plot happens.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine: Even if the boss of an animation studio is respected and talented, he'll lose his employees' confidence if he undergoes obvious Sanity Slippage, introduces an Awesome, but Impractical machine, and allows for unsanitary working conditions. On the first tape recorder, Wally threatens to quit if another pipe bursts. No character reactions.
• BioShock:
  • With the sole exception of the final boss in the first game, all the antagonists are dispatched with one blow or in a cutscene. Sure, most of them are intelligent and charismatic people with a vast array of people and resources under their control, but they're still ordinary people that are no match for the One-Man Army main character. Characters weaker than another character.
  • BioShock has this trope as instrumental to the fall of Rapture. The city was explicitly built as a place with no laws or morals, and so Rapture attracted sociopaths and sadists only concerned with their own power. Without laws or ethics, these people inevitably rose to the top of Rapture society due to underhanded methods or because Andrew Ryan favored them for incidentally proving his idealogy right. The city's location under the sea meant that Ryan couldn't convince the best members of various fields (science, engineering, the arts) to come live in his underwater utopia, because those people were both sane and well-established, so he only got the desperate ones or visionaries who weren't up to the tasks set to them. Despite the "everyone can make it" propaganda, the citizenry still needed people to scrub the toilets, so there was a huge underclass disillusioned with the Rapture dream and effectively trapped in the city, furious at founder Andrew Ryan and his ilk. All this came to a head with the discovery of ADAM, the miracle substance that powers plasmids, and the city promptly tore itself apart fighting over this highly powerful and valuable resource, with those same sociopaths taking their chance to get more powerful by splitting into their own factions. Too fantastical and no character reactions.
  • Andrew Ryan's philosophy of how to defeat monopolies and big business is... to offer a better product. Not so easy when they got far more resources than you do, especially when they control the supply. Furthermore, Ryan lost virtually all of his public support when he nationalized his primary competitor, as most people don't like their politicians to be hypocrites. No character reactions.
  • Fontaine directly benefited from this trope: when nobody feels like doing menial work and yet some people are forced into it, who is the likeliest customer for goods that make menial tasks go away? Suddenly he went from a small-fry thief and conman to one of the most influential people in Rapture because he saw something nobody else did and grabbed it with both hands. No character reactions.
  • So what happens when you build a massive city at the bottom of the sea? A hell of a lot of engineering problems, that's what. It's frequently mentioned that large parts of Rapture are leaking before society fell apart, and it only got worse since nobody's sane enough to do the upkeep when Jack arrives. Some of the Big Daddies can be seen patching holes, but they're hardly trained engineers or a coordinated maintenance crew. By the sequel, parts of Rapture have just plain collapsed. Too fantastical.
  • The phrase "Code Yellow" is meant to make Jack's brain command the heart to start slowing. Except the heart is a muscle that works independently from the brain (as Fontaine notes, "The heart is a stubborn muscle"), so making it shut down via brainwashing is going to take a while while the brain figures out how to cause a stroke severe enough for it to be followed by cardiac arrest. This ultimately allows Jack to find a way to stop the brainwashing and cure himself. Not for lack of trying on the brainwashing though, as he suffers constant heart-attacks that reduce his max HP until he finds the cure. Too fantastical.
  • The prequel novel Bioshock Rapture shows an incident that serves as a perfect example of the consequences of a completely privatized society: a grocery shop owner drives his main rival out of business by buying the local garbage collection service and charging the rival far more than he can afford, causing the latter's garbage to pile up, and clients to avoid his store as a result. Since this is not illegal, a public garbage collection service is anathema to Ryan's beliefs, and the grocer is threatening to buy the building hosting the rival's grocery and evict him (making him homeless and jobless in a society without any sort of social safety net) the rival resorts to Murder-Suicide. No character reactions.
  • The penultimate level of BioShock 2 reveals that Eleanor has been seeing through Delta's eyes the whole time, which has dire consequences for the ending if you've been harvesting the Little Sisters. After all, what else would happen when your little girl wants to be just like daddy? Actions have consequences and implied character reaction.
  • Also from Bioshock 2, Persephone Correctional was meant to be the perfect dumping ground for Rapture's dissidents: almost unassailable, hidden on the edge of an oceanic trench, and kept secret from most of Rapture's populace, making it impossible to break out of. So, just about anyone Ryan didn't like was sent there for life... and given all the social problems mentioned above, that amounted to a lot more people than the guards could safely control. Plus, because nobody was ever released or paroled, the population just kept growing. Add to that the fact that many of the prisoners were being leased out to Fontaine Futuristics for plasmid testing, and the inmate population was dangerously unstable. When Sofia Lamb was sent to the prison, she was put to work in giving therapy to the inmates and rewarded with additional privileges for cooperation; as such, she was able to use inmate discontent, her privileges as a model inmate and her own charisma to stage an uprising and seize control of the prison - and because the facility was so well-defended, it was impossible for anyone to dislodge her. As such, Lamb was able to turn Persephone into her own personal Hotel Escobar where she could wait out the civil war in peace. Too fantastical and character reactions.
  • BioShock Infinite repeats the same scenario as Rapture in Columbia. The city is a miracle of technology, presenting itself as a divine haven far from the sins of the world below... along with the same racism, imperialism, antisemitism, and xenophobia that was rampant in America during the 1800s and in 1912. So not only does it get used as essentially a floating WMD (more than once in the Bad Future), but despite in theory being only open to WASPs they still need labourers, hence the oppressed underclass of, "negroes," and "potato eaters," and the inevitable civil war that boils over because of their treatment. Too fantastical and character reactions.
    • Songbird is big, he's powerful, he lurks as a threat in the background of most of the game, he's intimately tied to the backstory of the deuteragonist, and everyone with even a passing knowledge of Video Game Tropes expects him to be fought in a big Climax Boss or even Final Boss battle. But Booker, for all his tricks, is still just a single human, and Songbird is still a giant flying Lightning Bruiser that's Immune to Bullets, so every time they cross paths Booker barely escapes with his life, incapable of doing the slightest shred of damage to Songbird. He's only defeated by a temporary Heel–Face Turn brought about by his design to protect Eleanor and then by dropping him at the bottom of the ocean since Songbird was not designed to withstand water pressure. Any timeline where Booker tried to fight Songbird directly quickly ended with Booker being torn to pieces. Too fantastical and character weaker than another character.
    • The US government were not aware that Columbia had weapons capabilities. When the city got involved in the Boxer Rebellion, Congress was not happy with Comstock, and ordered him to return to the US. And when Comstock refused to return, the government declared that the entire city of Columbia had gone rogue, and cut all official ties with it. Even in the early 20th century, such a massive weapon would be a major liability to any sane government. No character reactions.
  • After Elizabeth killed Daisy Fitzroy, the Vox Populi don't simply pack up and surrender. Not only did the character's death fail to stop the Vox Populi's actions, but they are now even a bigger threat since Daisy is no longer controlling them. No character reactions.
• The Blackwell Series: Throughout the course of her investigations, Rosa repeatedly breaks into homes and businesses, harasses multiple people well past the point where they want nothing to do with her, and is in close proximity to a lot of dead bodies. By the time of Epiphany she's banned from a hospital and two campuses, has multiple restraining orders put out against her, and being near to yet another freshly dead body gets her arrested, with the officer perplexed that she hasn't been arrested before, and the only reason she escapes being sent to prison is because of her Friend on the Force (a deleted scene shows that Police Commissioner Alex Silva has been protecting Rosa from police scrutiny for her own ends, but it isn't clear in the final product if that's still the case). Plot happens.
• Blaster Master Zero completes its Golden Ending with Jason yanking Eve out of the Mutant Core's flesh before utterly vaporizing it. All's well that ends well? You're kidding, right?! Turns out hypermutagenic cells and viruses don't cease to exist just because the source body is obliterated, and Eve comes down with a case of corruption because of it. And because Jason and Eve are the only beings on Earth that know the mutants existed in the first place, there's no cure of any stripe anywhere on the planet. Time for another adventure, young Frudnick! And an adventure without your best tools, at that: Too fantastical.
  • SOPHIA Zero was a Flawed Prototype with an unstable fuel source designed for one thing: destroying the mutant core. A focus on power over longevity, followed by Jason running it into the ground searching the Earth for a cure, left the tank so trashed only the main cannon was worth salvaging. Too fantastical.
  • The Blaster Rifle was similar, being designed to fire with as much power as the wielder could provide and only last for a single planet's defense campaign. Eve states point-blank that firing the Game-Breaker weapons continuously was slowly burning the weapon out and again, a new one needed to be built from scratch to be less powerful, but more reliable. More comically, Eve gives Jason a hard time for asking her to add an energy whip setting, since constraining a damaging energy stream to just beyond the barrel was very difficult - since that's the exact opposite of what the weapon was meant to do. Not realistic. A Blaster Rile isn't real.
  • Remember, folks: maintain your equipment or it will fail on you. In addition to SOPHIA Zero and the original Blaster Rifle breaking down after extended use, Leibniz is forced to withdraw after sustaining excessive damage to GARUDA due to lacking Lucia to repair it, and said failure to maintain means GARUDA goes down hard against Planet Sophia's anti-air; and similarly, running the G-SOPHIA SV ragged means it fatally breaks after Planade-G drags Eve into super-dimensional space; you can see it crackling with electricity while traversing the Forbidden Sector, which hints its failure is imminent. Too fantastical.
• BlazBlue has several examples, as part of its overall Darker and Edgier tone.
  • Following the Dark War, humanity had to relocate to high mountains due to the seithr concentration being too lethal for them at all lower altitudes. The main reason that such mountains aren't covered in cities in real life is that they're both difficult to build on, and such locations are both too cold and the breathable air is too thin to support large cities. Humanity had a clear and present need to go up to the mountains after the aforementioned war, but the only way they're able to build those settlements and keep them habitable is through weather control devices that deal with these issues, and when one of them no longer functions, as shown with Akitsu-Kō, the place becomes bitterly cold. The subsequent ruination of the Hierarchical Cities and massacre of countless NOL soldiers in the process at the hands of Ragna the Bloodedge has put a multi-billion dollar bounty on his head. Too fantastical.
  • Hibiki Kohaku being raised for nothing other than fighting has rendered him very psychologically unstable, to the point that he was willing to kill Kagura to become the ultimate killing machine. His loyalty to Kagura clashing with his desires is a source of frustration, through which biting snark and lecturing Kagura over his constant philandering and irresponsibility is his only reliable vent. Character has truama.
  • The Yayoi family's practice of inbreeding under the belief that it's the best way to create new soldiers for the NOL causes a myriad of health issues for them, to the point that Tsubaki is the only person of her generation in the family to survive past birth. Raising Tsubaki like a golden child of your family as a result likewise leaves her with multiple inadequacies. Not surprising.
  • In Continuum Shift, Yuuki Terumi is willing to fuck with Ragna, Jin, and Hakumen (both immense combat threats) and troll Rachel and Kokonoe (both knowledgeable about his affairs) to no end, and yet he wants Makoto swept off the board immediately; as it turns out, when your scheme relies upon others wasting time fighting with each other because they can't explain themselves calmly and clearly, anyone who can clear the air in a concise manner and knows the faultlines of your plans is your bane. In her CS story and the alternate timeline she is cast into, Makoto's information on affairs throws the entire timeline into chaos the likes of which his plans do not survive, with her promise to assist Tsubaki and Jin after "asking something of Hazama" being the final nail in the coffin. Too fantastical and Plot happens.
• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
  • The backstory involves the Alchemist's Guild attempting to prove their relevance in an age where machines were beginning to overlap and erase the old ways, which they did by summoning The Legions of Hell - ostensibly so they commit an act of Engineered Heroism - but didn't plan beyond just opening the portal (which ended up being way larger than they intended). Unsurprisingly, faced with such numbers the Alchemists were promptly overpowered with any attempt to stop the demons and created a massive infestation that killed millions before it could be brought under control. And when the world found out that the Alchemists were the ones who summoned it, completely intentionally, their leadership was executed on the spot and it just hastened the decline of Alchemy and Magic even faster. Not realistic because demons, magic, and Alchemy are involved.
  • Guns have, point for point, the most potential damage in the game depending on what gun it is and which ammo is loaded in it, as firearms are relatively new, demons don't know how to counter them, and even weaker non-blessed bullets will beat out the damage from a sword that isn't outright magical (the only exception are the extremely weak infinite bullets, which are presumably made with magic), all while keeping one safe at a range. Not realistic because demons are involved.
    • Special mention should go, however, to the word potential. These are still early firearms, meaning they're prone to all the failings of early firearms. The only way to rapid-fire the guns is implied to involve copious amounts of magic, and until endgame, actually getting usable bullets for the guns is a long, tedious, or expensive process. Bad indentation.
  • Demons, on a whole, are far further along technologically than humans are, already possessing ID badges and security gates that use them. Many of the demons are also explicitly ancient powers, and many, such as the vampires, are intelligent. It only makes sense a culture that doesn't need to fear time or the church (the usual enforcers of New Technology Is Evil in the middle ages) will come out ahead in an arms and science race when its smartest citizens can take however long they need to invent. Too fantastical.
• Borderlands: Being a Handicapped Badass will only get you so far in Pandora. T.K. Baha, for instance, is very handy with a shotgun despite being blind and missing a leg, and has killed his fair share of Rakks and Skags. But when he's confronted with a large group of ravenous Bandits, he's easily overwhelmed and murdered. Deconstructed Character Archetype shoehorn for Handicapped Badass.
• Borderlands 2:
  • In the Commander Lilith DLC, Vaughn from Tales From The Borderlands has his entire bandit clan either killed or mutated. As he himself notes, turns out arming your entire clan with nothing but Hyperion-issue laser pointers on death world like Pandora isn't the best idea. Not surprising.
  • In the mission "Where Angels Fear to Tread", you discover that Handsome Jack has been pumping his daughter Angel with Eridium for YEARS, and was using her as a living battery for his own personal gain. You'd expect there to be an option to save Angel's life, but nope! She's been plugged to the device she's trapped in for so long (since her early childhood), she needs Eridium in order to survive. I.e. if she doesn't have the substance directly injected into her bloodstream 24/7, she will die. The only way you can "save" her at this point is by destroying her life support system completely. Not realistic. Eridium isn't real.
  • Handsome Jack acts as an Orcus on His Throne throughout the whole game, sending wave after wave of enemies at you, but never confronting you directly. After the above incident with Angel, though, he's more than willing to face you personally at the end of the game, and he does - and goes down quicker than any of the main bosses you've fought at this point, due to being a normal human being with no special abilities or powers despite his bravado. By no means is he a pushover, but he's no tougher than all the other Badass enemies you've killed up until now. Not an outcome.
• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!:
  • Unlike on Pandora, enemies can't be set on fire everywhere you go, since Elpis is a moon with no atmosphere and little-to-no natural oxygen. The human population needs technology that creates an atmosphere and oxygen to survive, and most of the playable characters are equipped with portable oxygen kits for areas with no atmosphere... except for Claptrap, a robot who doesn't need to breathe. Too fantastical and not an outcome.
  • After Jack discovers the Meriff to be a spy for Zarpedon, but decides to let him live and turns to leave, the Meriff tries to murder Jack by shooting him in the back. He misses point-blank, and quickly starts begging for his life, but Jack shoots and kills him. Jack is then much less willing to forgive his enemies - or even let his guard down around possible traitors - from that point onwards, seeing as it nearly got him killed the last time he did it. No character reactions.
• Borderlands 3:
  • Torgue assault rifles/pistols/shotguns now deal explosive damage to you as well as your enemies if you use them in too close of a range. Their bullets are essentially grenades, after all. Not realistic. Torgue weapons aren't real.
  • The game gives us two-for-one in the game's second DLC, Guns, Love, and Tentacles. Turns out that A: the life of a Vault Hunter is kind of taxing on one's mental and physical health and leaving the lifestyle makes readjusting pretty hard, and B: even an Ultra-Badass Vault Hunter Veteran can't take on an entire corporation on their own (especially when the leader is not an egomaniacal asshat and is actually competent and out for your head specifically). Don't believe us? Just ask Gaige. By the time she turns up again, she has become a little more unhinged, possibly an alcoholic, and has been on the run from her deceased rival's father with only her robot Deathtrap for company for years. When Deathtrap breaks down near the end of the DLC, Gaige is absolutely broken, having been her only company for all that time. It's a Disney Death and he gets better, but still. Character has trauma and vault hunters aren't real.
• In Breath of Fire III, Ryu, Teepo, and Rei attempt to pull a Robin Hood on the nearby McNeil family, who is oppressing the villagers with outrageous taxes. The heroes bravely break into the McNeil mansion, defeat the McNeils^note or to be more accurate, the ghosts of previous McNeils, as the only living one is too cowardly to even fight them, and rob the place, returning the ill-gotten gain to the villagers. Unfortunately, the villagers turn on the heroes, afraid of reprisals from the McNeil and the criminal syndicate he belongs to, forcing the heroes to flee. No character reactions.
• Bug Fables: Even the Everlasting Sapling, despite its powerful magic, would eventually wilt being kept in a sealed container in a place with no sunlight as it's still a plant, which the party and the cockroach elder discuss in the post-game epilogue. Too fantastical.
• Bully:
  • The plotline with the Greasers has Jimmy investing an affair between Johnny, Lola, and Gord and helps Johnny punish Gord for dating his girlfriend. After doing so, Johnny gets even more paranoid and Lola begins cheating on him again with Algie, Chad, and Jimmy and after Jimmy starts running errands for her, he begins to wise up to the fact that she doesn't care about him. After beating Johnny in a fight, Jimmy tells a surprised Johnny that he's not interested in Lola and he can "keep that slut for yourself". Afterwards, it's confirmed that Johnny and Lola broke up because of her disloyalty. No character reactions.
  • In "Here's to you Ms. Philips", Jimmy is roped into helping the art teacher prepare for a date, under the assumption that Ms. Philips had feelings for him, only to find out that she was getting ready for her date with her coworker, Mr. Galloway. Ms. Philips is in her thirties and Jimmy is only fifteen, so if his fantasy came true, then it would be considered a sex offense. Valid.
  • As is Rockstar tradition, the Final Boss also falls under this. Jimmy Hopkins is a scrappy Combat Pragmatist who's been spending the entire game time fighting constantly, and as a result, getting stronger and learning more ways to beat people up. Gary Smith, his archenemy, is a Smug Snake who's been hiding behind the scenes making the other kids do his bidding. When you finally get to fight him, he's just as easy to beat up like anybody else. Even Elite Mooks Damon and Bif are tougher to beat in a one-on-one. Character stronger than another character.
  • Earnest convinces Jimmy to take pictures of Mandy Wiles, the head cheerleader, because she's a bully and the act would rile up the jocks. After a while, however, the jocks assault the nerds out of sheer disgust for what they did and Mandy is absolutely horrified by what Jimmy and the nerds did because the nerds printed and posted those pictures all over town. As a result of their revenge, Mandy has received an unwanted reputation as a slut, is bullied relentlessly for the humiliation, and it was suggested that her furious parents were on the way to Bullworth to find out what happened.

    Mandy: I mean, sure, I've been a bitch at times, been nasty, but I don't deserve this. No character reactions.

• Ace Combat:
  • The agility and tenacity of the Game-Breaker QAAMs may be what happens when you put a real-world nigh-unbeatable heater, a la the Python 4/5, the AA-11/R-73, or the AIM-9X, against planes that usually encounter missiles sloppy enough to be outflown without needing countermeasures. Plot happens/strength discrepancies exist
  • Likewise, when Captain Bartlett in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War draws a missile away from Nagase, and then again when Nagase is targeted by a hidden AA position a few missions later, in both cases the missile stays right on them despite them pulling maneuvers that would have shaken off a standard missile in gameplay - must have been QAAMs. Maybe. It explains why you'd expect this to happen differently, but it might also fit better under Gameplay and Story Segregation or Cutscene Incompetence
  • Similarly in the Xbox 360 game Over G Fighters. Did you know that afterburner in the presence of heat-seeking missiles is a bad thing? On the other hand, unlike Ace Combat, the player (and also enemies) can sometimes break missile locks by turning enough to reduce their plane's radar cross-section. Plot happens. And why is this grouped with the Ace Combat examples if it's from an unrelated work?
  • One of the differences the competing Airforce Delta series has with Ace Combat is that the effect of air resistance on the control surfaces is more accurately depicted. Whereas Ace Combat tactics revolve around flying just above stall speeds to have maximum maneuverability and prevent overshooting and ending up in front of your target, planes in Airforce Delta all have specific speeds, much higher than in Ace Combat, where they're most maneuverable - slower than that means there's not enough airflow to properly change your heading, while faster than that means the systems to reduce airframe stress and your plane's inertia get in the way. Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay shoehorn
  • Air power being the number-one deciding factor in any sort of military engagement in the series means the armed forces of several nations and alliances are at risk of Crippling Overspecialization when weapons that are really good at taking out large chunks of an air force enter the picture. Ace Combat 04's "Stonehenge" is probably the most obvious case - a giant set of eight railguns that were designed to destroy an asteroid before it hit the planet turns out to be really good at anti-air operations when the enemy takes them over as their opening act of aggression. By the time the player character enters the picture, the enemy is already on the verge of winning simply because the sheer size of Stonehenge means they have guaranteed air superiority over roughly three-fourths of the continent. Plot happens
    • Of course, the aggressor army gets their own dose of reality when Stonehenge is destroyed: they started the war in the first place because their country was in the midst of an economical and infrastructural crisis and they needed resources badly from the territories they occupied; the Narrator Boy notes that the army that took over his town literally bled the town dry of modern amenities, reducing the people to a roughly 19th-century technological level. The only thing they had going for them was Stonehenge, and when it finally gets destroyed, they're pretty much completely on the defensive for the rest of the game. Plot happens
  • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown has the traditional Airstrike Impossible take place through highway tunnels. Jet planes are wider than cars. A lot wider. It's the tightest fit the series has ever seen, with only the very smallest planes having any sort of breathing room, and some of the very broad DLC planes needing pinpoint precision to thread the needle on the bulkheads. Plot happens
• Advance Wars:
  • In Days of Ruin, Greyfield/Sigismundo threatens the soldiers under his command with execution if they contract the Creeper, a virus that causes the infected to eventually die and sprout flowers from their bodies. Unsurprisingly, this results in the men that end up infected not reporting their infection and going into quarantine, mingling freely with the healthy soldiers and resulting in the Creeper spreading like wildfire through his army. Meanwhile, the protagonists only isolate the soldiers who fall ill, which works out far better in terms of encouraging them to report infections and thus allowing the virus to be contained more easily. Plot happens.
  • Also from Days of Ruin, when Greyfield/Sigismundo is finally beaten, he surrenders purely to save his own skin. Unfortunately for him, Lin is not having this, given that Greyfield himself executed a POW who had surrendered, and gives him the Karmic Death he deserves. Plot happens
• AI War: Fleet Command: What happens when you make the AI with far more resources than you ever can have and no compunction against holding back sit up and decide you're a threat? Does it continue to arrogantly take its own sweet time about the pesky human problem? Nope! You get flattened, that's what. Too fantastical
  • In turn, what happens if you turn your back on a problem before you completely finish it off, and take too long to get back to it even as you get little hints it's growing out of control? It'll pick up all that trash you have lying around, grow strong on your scraps, and by the time you turn back around there'll be ten thousand plasma beams heading straight for your forehead. Same as above, also not surprising
• Alien: Isolation:
  • Even after Ripley does get a few weapons it just takes two or three bullets, even fired from across a room, to take her down. Attempting any kind of head-on fight will end up with her dead within seconds. The Lethal Connotation of Guns and Others shoehorn (that trope really needs a shorter name, because it's not thriving and a lot of SRO examples could fit better there
  • Also, using the proximity scanner or hacking tools will alert others of her presence. They do emit pretty conspicuous beeps after all. Not surprising
  • As expected of a stealth game, hiding and noise-making play important factors in the game. In regards to the former, hiding is something that can only be done temporarily, since enemies are likely to double-check hiding spots if you remain in them for too long; they're actively looking for you anyway, and they'll double back if they don't find you. As for the latter, making too much noise from anything you do, from just simply walking to fighting off enemies, can alert nearby enemies (most usually the Alien) of your presence. Not even NPC human characters are immune from this since their gunshots and frequent talking can also attract the Alien. Not surprising
  • Talking Is a Free Action is thoroughly averted. Except for scripted sequences which require the Xenomorph to be somewhere else, interaction with computers or conversations can be cut short by Ripley being tail-stabbed in the back. Possibly an Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay shoehorn
  • The flamethrower is your best anti-Alien weapon, not because it hurts it, but because it's basically an animal and like most animals, it's scared of fire. Also like an animal, though, it's unpredictable, so sometimes instead of "flight", it might decide a better option is "fight", resulting in it charging you and knocking you down, or outright killing you if you are dangerously low on health. Too fantastical
  • Despite being driven by instinct, the Alien can learn from its experiences and will adapt to Ripley's tactics as the game goes on. Hide in the same kind of place a lot and it will begin to check those areas more carefully. Distract it with the noisemaker enough times and it will start to ignore them entirely. Use the flamethrower too much and it will not only start to back away at the sight of it but stay just outside of range and wait for Ripley to look away, turn her back or run out of fuel entirely. Too fantastical
  • Amanda isn't a soldier. When using the basic revolver, her aim is pretty bad because she lacks training with firearms, and so unless standing still and focusing long enough, most of her shots miss. Even other weapons she encounters that she can use both hands for in a more sturdy way have this issue. She's essentially a maintenance staff worker, not a fighter. Not an outcome
• In Alice: Madness Returns, any time Alice falls out of Wonderland into reality tends to strike a nerve, as Alice is a helpless teenager wandering the streets of London and the game really drives that home; the second time you return, for example, Alice gets slapped unconscious by a pimp for trying to come to her friend's aid. Everyone is also aware Alice isn't entirely right in the head, a fact the Big Bad tries to use to pull a Karma Houdini; who would believe that a highly respected child psychologist raped and killed someone's sister with only the word of a known mental patient? Let alone one that's speculated in-universe to have killed her family by setting their house on fire? Alice also admits he's right, then takes it into her own hands. Plot happens
• Alone in the Dark: If you light up a molotov cocktail (accidentally or otherwise) in the 2008 reboot, it simply cannot be stowed back in your inventory. Either you throw it away or it will explode right in Edward's hands after a few seconds. Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay shoehorn
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons will sometimes have a villager talk about their favorite cooking show from their childhood. It was described as "a kid's cooking show with NO adult supervision!". Predictably, unsupervised children and cooking are not a good combination and what resulted was bad food, a total mess, and massive amounts of lawsuits. Even though it's described as "predictably", this might count since it's the punchline of a gag, which is the type of "surprising" this trope is mainly about.
• Ao Oni: Hiding in a closet to avoid the monster sounds like standard horror faire... except standard horror games usually don't account for the monster seeing the player jump into the closet. Here, The Guards Are NOT Crazy: closet-diving with the Oni still in the room ends just as well as you'd think it would. Not surprising. It's normal for game enemies to be able to find the player if they see them go into hiding.
• Near the end of Ape Escape 2, Specter decides to fight the player in a gigantic robot suit. While trying to stomp the player, he has the suit balance on one foot, concentrating all its weight on one small area... and the robot promptly falls through the floor. Too fantastical
• Apex Legends: In Titanfall 2, players have used Grenade Jumping to pull off record-breaking Gauntlet runs. When Octane tried it, he blew his legs off. Valid
• In Armored Core 3, an extremely powerful AI called The Controller is in control of what remains of human society, including the Corporations who hire you for their various missions. Mirage, one of said Corporations, is the most openly rebellious against The Controller and is the most supportive of your missions acting against it, especially when it appears to be going haywire. But the Controller was still the only thing keeping human society from dying out for centuries. So, when it becomes clear that you might have to destroy it, the Mirage corporation directly tries to have you killed. After all, they have no idea what will happen if you succeed. Too fantastical
  • In Nexus, Crest (another Corporation and Mirage's main rival) is falling behind Mirage in terms of economic growth and is straining their resources to catch up. So when the Corporation decides to directly hire Ravens to serve Crest's interests solely, they end up almost bankrupting themselves in the process and and one of them actually turns on them. Turns out that mercenaries are expensive, especially when they're Ravens. Plot happens