Characters
"Weak" character goes to a much lower stakes environment, becomes super powered by comparison
Yamcha - Dragon Ball Super
In dragon ball, Yamcha has it pretty rough. He hasn't won a fight since OG dragon ball, and was outclassed almost as soon as he was introduced. By the buu saga, yamcha had all but given up on being one of the Z-fighters and tried playing baseball instead. But here's the thing: Yamcha still has basically superhuman strength, he just so happens to surround himself with people vastly stronger than him. He uses his martial arts skills and ki control to become a rich and famous baseball star.
Shocker - Spiderman / Ms Marvel
Shocker has become an absolute joke in Spider-Man and tired of being constantly beaten down by the many, MANY superheroes in Nyc, he decided to move to new jersey as it only has one superhero defending it. The inexperienced teenager, Ms Marvel. Due to the fact that shocker actually has quite a good power and literal decades of fighting experience, he actually puts up a very good fight and the only reason he doesn't win is because Ms Marvel is teleported away.
Ricky Flame from iCarly he used to be a famous celebrity chef until he lost a contest and quit cooking then he realized he just loves to win and to ensure he never loses again, he abuses a loophole in a recreational pamphlet to join a children’s mini-wrestling league
Here, read rule number 3. “Wrestling instruction and competition, recommended for boys ages six through ten.” See, recommended. Doesn't say I have to be age six to ten. So technically, they have to let me wrestle!
His true villainous twist. The reason Shocker is a criminal instead of a FetLife pleasure dom is because years of manosphere content resulted in him thinking female orgasms are a myth.
Rats. In ecosystem like mainland Europe they are pretty bottom of the food chain eaten by foxes or owls but on small islands they eat the eggs of the native birds
Honestly, just humans too. In our native environment of Africa, we were pretty top tier, but still had competition and predators. Then we migrated to the rest of the world, and royally fucked up the native wild life.
We ever hear about how large predators are just as afraid of us as we are of them?
It’s because our ancestors used to chase and hunt them. For hundreds of thousands of years, those predators who did not fear humans were far more likely to die. We pushed them to evolve to be afraid.
Though this only goes so far. Sometimes specific large predators individuals are desperate or deranged enough to acquire a taste for humans; they must be put down.
*Does not apply to polar bears. Presumably because there wasn’t much human-polar-bear contact in the past.
There’s an episode of friends where Monica’s restaurant gets a bad review, so she goes to an introductory cooking class just for the ego boost of being way better than the other students.
If I remember right, the Shocker does have a pretty good track record against his hero, as far as villains are concerned, it's just that he's smart enough to know that being a c-lister and not being in the limelight is a great way to not get targeted and keep his KD ratio up, since not many will be after him that way.
He is also one of those who is just too good to be an actual menace, like why lose time going after a guy who can at most rob a bank when fucking Doom is trying to conquer the world again?
Yasutora Sado or Chad from Bleach is probably the weakest character in Ichigo's group and he often gets sidelined in story arcs because the villains his friends face would absolutely decimate him. He becomes a famous boxer in the end, this is kind of crazy because he is still superhuman with hollow powers so normal humans are not a challenge.
I mean doesn't Clark routinely do thay already? Not just to Jimmy but to all his friends and allies since from his perspective doing crazy and dangerous stuff is easy for him when he's basically the strongest thing in existence but exceptionally brave for the people without that level of power.
As much shit as Yamcha gets, he's ridiculously powerful in almost anything else and keeps coming out to help in fights despite being crazy underpowered compared to the bad guys since early DBZ.
Yeah, put him in almost any other setting and he’s top tier. He’d be one of the Justice League’s heaviest hitters for example. Hell he’s top tier in the Dragonball setting, he’s just a top 100 dude who hangs around with people in the top 10.
He's a lot closer to Goku than we are to him. That's like comparing the average person to Elon Musk in terms of wealth.
Yamcha's at maybe 5% of Goku's power, generously. The average human is at about .0002% and that's just with the canonical power levels from the Frieza arc for an average human (5 vs 2.5M in SSJ1). Looking at Cell, Buu, or Super just makes it so, so much worse.
I mean, he is top 10 on the planet. He just hangs with the top 3 haha. I'm a bit out of date, but it goes something like Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Trunks, Piccolo, Android 18, Krillin, Tien and Yamcha, right? That's 9th strongest on a list of planet busters at a minimum.
I'd put 17 and Gamma 1 above 18, Buu definitely ahead of Trunks, and Broly above Trunks (and maybe Gohan?) whenever he's in the neighborhood, but yeah.
Still, top 15 isn't bad, especially top 5 among humans.
Not counting hybrids/aliens/androids it could be Tien, Krillin, Yamcha, Roshi, Chaotsu, maybe Videl or Chi-Chi, most of the DB villains, Hercule (he's very strong for a human that doesn't use Ki at all), the rest of the humans.
It's an issue of being a top 5 human but when the team has members from the top 10 saiyans/hybrids, the top 10 aliens/demons and a couple of the top 10 androids that you start looking weak.
I would say: Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Piccolo, Majin Buu, Android 18, Android 17, Goten, Trunks, Gamma 1, Krillin, Tien, Roshi, and only then Yamcha would be there followed by chaoz probably. Although even then he's extremely strong and someone that could decimate most of the universe. (except those I listed there, Broly, Freezer and a few more)
He stopped training for a long time, but during the Moro Saga he got back into it and could fight with the average escaped alien prisoners empowered by Moro. Only the top tier gave him trouble. Shame that the humans didn't get god ki. It should been the thing that let them catch up, but again is Saiyan only.
Yamcha already surpassed Roshi post Karin training. He even recognised it. After that the gap increased after training with Kami and Kaio. You could say Roshi got stronger in DBS cause he trained off screen but even then I find it hard to believe Roshi surpassed even the Ginyu force with just training at his home.
and just like that he's contributed more than Vegeta
(I also love how DBZA Cell has no animosity towards Yamcha like he has for the rest of the Z-Fighters because his dna wasn't sampled to create the bug man)
You can destroy a planet with a power level of 18,000 by the time Yamcha has a baseball career he has an estimated power level of 50,000-100,000 meaning he could destroy planets if he wanted to
Yamcha in particular reminds me of when folks were like “How many Avatar’s from the Last Airbender universe can Yamcha beat?”
And someone pointed out the straightforward point that he’s beyond a planet Buster just like everyone else of the Z fighters so it doesn’t matter how many of them he fights.
Never forget Yamcha and Tien are fairly close in powerlevel most times and Tien was damn near pushing 2nd form cell into the center of the earth with the tri-beam. Granted he would've died doing it but still. And it's not like cell was fucking around he genuinely didn't know how to deal with that
I mean, anything past the Saiyan Saga is planet buster. Piccolo blew up a moon with power lower than Raditz when he was training Gohan. Yamcha trained 3 years for the Androids. Even if he is the weakest there he is still well past the 10s of thousands. That he didn't get instantly evaporated by the Cell Juniors is also to his credit.
Oh I know, I'm just not going to sit here and listen to the Tien disrespect.
In actuality planet buster is a lot lower of a bar than people think. Roshi blew up the moon during the first world tournament arc with a power level below 200.
Even if you ignore him just blowing up the planet, I'm not sure the Avatar could even damage him. We've seen them use Ki to ignore the effects of lava, at least in the short term, and while they still need oxygen they can hold their breath longer than average.
So that theoretically leaves spirit bending and blood bending. Spirit bending wouldn't work because you would need to restrain him, and no Avatar knows blood bending.
You can probably make an argument that past Korra the Avatars can redirect energy but that’d probably still pale in comparison to the Ki strength needed to redirect Yamcha actually trying
An NBA player often memed during his career for being bad. After retiring, he let people apply to play against him and smoked them all easily. He is well known for saying he is closer to Kobe Bryant than you are to him
Reminds me of what people say about Haru in Uma Musume: Pretty Derpy. I think she is among the weakest among the Umas in the school but it doesn't take away that she is closer to the Uma athletic in the school and is still an Uma so she is still pretty fast and strong as a person.
You it would have been fun to have a series that followed fighters like Yamcha Teien and Krillian dealing with local threats and problems. Things that would mess up a region or city. Like lets face when Krillin in super would be the go to super cop to call in for bank robberys and such.
Dragonball scaling in general is WACK. Yamcha after the Namek Saga would wipe the floor with Vegeta when he showed up on Earth in the Sayian saga. And Vegeta was capable of destroying the planet.
Hell, Goku at the absolute weakest we ever see him, in Episode/Chapter 1 of the series, literally facetanks a bullet to his forehead, and the worst it did was leave a red mark, didn't even break skin. And characters are a dozen orders of magnitude stronger than that now.
So yeah, seeing a series where these human characters do relative normal stuff and handle bad guys FAR below their power would be entertaining.
When Billy Madison has to redo his entire primary education, it illustrated the fact that he learned almost nothing in school - but he was a god at dodgeball.
Lloyd Belladona from Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town
In pretty much all RPGs, the farther you go in the game the stronger the enemies become; you can stretch this info to imply that the random NPCs you find near the end of the game should be powerful enough to survive in those harsh environments, therefore being extremely strong. This anime is about one such “NPC” from said hypothetically overpowered town going to the “starting area” and dominating everything since he’s used to facing vastly more powerful threats despite being what should be a weak “random NPC”.
Adding to this, kid was the weakest person in his village and went on a journey to gain experience. He doesn't realize that being the weakest person in his village still puts him leagues ahead of nearly everyone else.
Although the boss monster terrorizing the first city in the game is less powerful than the non-boss monsters that are only casual nuisances to cities later in the game, nobody from the first city ever thinks of hiring a few mercenaries from the later cities to kill the monster.
That's because everything in town 1 costs 10g and everything in town 10 costs 1000g
Once I ran into this picture and there's so much wrong in it but the thing of note here is what the fuck is Yamcha doing in 0$ he wipes the floor to everyone but the 10$ line and maybe the gag characters
This is such a dumb one too. You have to take Thanos with the full gauntlet and Light with the Death Note, since those two are literally reality warpers.
Indeed he certainly isn't strong compared to most of the DBZ cast, but he actually is a strong fighter compared to normal human martial artists he just barely gets the chance to show it.
I low-key love that Satan is just there to contrast how far our heroes have risen.
Like the shit he does is straight up superhuman, he's incredibly strong by normal standards and all the cheers and fame are arguably actually deserved. We are just used to what a bunch of superhumans do who scale so far above him they might as well be gods in his perspective.
Considering how fast Videl learned to fly with only a fraction of his training and experience. He'd be a fairly crazy fighter if he ever allowed himself to learn
Hes legit super human. Could had been a decent match in the first tournament. Not Nam level good but he could find himself a good match with kid Krillian.
Normal physically. No healthy mind kills a relatively harmless supervillain because the other supervillains like him so he can poison them all when they come to his funeral.
i wonder if it's just exposure bias but it feels like the punisher seems to get used a lot as a target for this kinda bit. One of my favorites being the earlyish runaways. Was not prepared for the child to hit the reset button on his bowels manually here.
I think that it's because a lot of the writers don't like the Punisher. Also, IIRC these comics came out around the height of both Black Lives Matter and the racist Blue Love Matter counter-movement, when cops were wearing Punisher skulls.
Moria from One Piece used to be a powerful pirate, but after he lost to Kaido (one of the most powerful pirates in existence) and his crew got killed he retreated to the first half of the grand line where he was quite overpowered by comparison and could basically afk farm power thanks to his fruit for years (iirc even decades).
It backfired on him in the long run though as he got lazy and weak as a result.
Arlong stayed out of the Grand Line because while he’s by far the strongest East Blue pirate, he’s pretty average in strength in the Grand Line
Crocodile stayed out of the New World because he couldn’t handle it after getting his ass beat by Whitebeard, it was only after he broke out of Impel Down and started training again he went to the New World
Hell, even if he didn't actually win the Hoenn one, he beat all the Frontier Brains (harder than any Elite 4 and regional League) and was offered to become a Frontier Brain as well.
Mr. Hercule Satan, also from Dragon Ball. Despite completely lacking in ki control capabilities, which makes him downright pathetic in the main plot of the series, Hercule is still well into the territory of being superhuman by real-world standards, just on raw brute strength alone. Because of this, he's actually the undisputed World Martial Arts Champion on Earth (mainly because the contest is completely beneath the Z-Fighters, but he still maintains the title regardless). And this is when he doesn't even train that seriously.
He’s also stupidly lucky he in a cross over “beat” I think Goku, Toriko and (i think) Luffy in a fight because those three went so hard they ringed each other out by destroying the majority of the ring and Hercule stayed in
Something similar happened in a Z movie where lol Gohan trunks and others I think fighting the villains leave Hercule with the only part of the ring left.
Like Hercule may also be the only human in dragon ball z to NEVER die
He won the martial arts tournament while the Z-Fighters were away on Namek legitimately and trains his daughter, who we've seen is very skilled as well. She didn't even know the power the others had until Gohan went to her school.
While I'm sure this can apply to various Pokemon in the competitive scene, Duraludon is a standout example.
This Steel/Dragon type is pretty decent in normal playthroughs, but in competitive battles it's not exactly the best options in high-power tiers like OverUsed or even UnderUsed. Those upper tiers have proper powerhouses like the starter mons and Legendaries. On the other end of comp, there's the Little Cup, where weaker, Not Fully Evolved mons can fight; basically the kids' competitive.
When Pokemon Scarlet & Violet's Indigo Disk DLC got released, Duraludon got an evolution in the form of Archaludon. This meant it was now an NFE mon, and thus, eligible for Little Cup. Of course, it got banned less than a day later for basically demolishing the literal babies there.
Worth noting, Goku fits this trope since he was a low-class saiyan warrior prior to being sent to Earth. For contrast, Vegeta had a power level of over 9000 as a kid.
His first time playing, he started off in a power position, but lost his grip of the game halfway through, surviving a few more rounds as a straggler before being picked off.
His second time playing was full of returnees, where he was out of his depth and went out early.
His third time playing, he was one of two returnees on a season full of new players. He ran the season with an iron fist and came two votes away from winning the whole thing.
His fourth time playing was again full of returnees. He seemed to be doing well at first, but completely flamed out about halfway through the game.
Lmao it's hilarious to see all the Coach posting on this subreddit recently.
Controversial take, maybe a better example of this trope is Boston Rob. Merge boot on his first season. Runner up in his second, which was an all star season, but could be argued he was able to fly under the radar because of much bigger threats. Pre merge boot on his third. Absolutely insanely dominant game for his fourth in a season of all newbies and one other infamous returnee. Literally ran circles around every member of this cast, and played one of, if not the most dominating games of the shows history. Followed up by a very weak final showing in an all winners season, socially alienating himself and being unanimously voted out very early.
There's a professional cricket player who was captain of a major leagues team. But after a harsh season, he played a bit of local leagues games where he kinda dominated. The organization that handles the major leagues demanded that he return to play in his team because he has contractual obligation to the league, and he insists on staying in the local league. I forgot his reason and don't want to try throwing ideas as I might also throw in my own assumptions in confusion.
I can't say who it was or what country it even happened on..Mostly because the cricket organization strictly controls its brand online.
In Lupin the Third, Inspector Zenigata spends the majority of his life getting absolutely clowned on by Lupin and his crew. He chases them seemingly out of a Sisyphean obligation, but even the one time he actually truly does catch Lupin, he goes mad with doubt and fucks it all up.
There is one episode that focuses on him, and only him, where his chase puts him on the trail of a scheme involving murder, insurance fraud, and a plot that would make a film noir antagonist grimace. He wraps it up in about eight hours.
Zenigata actually is one of the world's greatest detectives. He's cool under pressure, he has absolute confidence in surviving basically any situation, and he really is smart in terms of turning clues into fully assembled puzzles. It's just... none of that is ever enough for Lupin.
But it sure as fuck is enough for some random goons that thought they could use him to commit life insurance fraud.
Shocker is the perfect benchmark villain and minor-villain, he’s not high stakes to be dangerous, he just wants money and doesn’t want to kill anyone, but competent and smart enough to actually be a threat.
I remember this issue Shocker was really giving Ms Marvel a good beating!
There's a book like this called System Universe, where a dude in a standard post apocalyptic AI system takeover type world, who is decently strong, but not the top of his world by any stretch, is isekaied into a different AI system takeover type world, but manages to keep his powers. The new system decides he's a level 1, and let's him start stacking again so he's ridiculously OP. Fun series, nowhere near as dumb as it sounds
Sauron is only dangerous because he's a relic of a very different age. He played second fiddle to a considerably more powerful foe: Morgoth. When the Valar and Maiar properly battled on Middle Earth, mountains were uprooted, continents sank into the seas. Sauron only made his power play when these other beings departed Middle Earth because he knew it'd be considerably harder for only elves and men to defeat him without their more powerful predecessors.
Kaoru from Rurouni Kenshin is actually an incredibly accomplished and talented swordswoman, shown when she has duels or training against other normal or even professional dojos or swordsmen.
She just happens to be around some of the most dangerous warriors of the century in most of the fights she’s involved in, bordering on superhuman.
I once saw someone describe her as a “once in a generation talent surrounded by multiple once in a century talents.”
While I certainly wouldn’t call him weak; but in Baki after Retsu lost his leg to Pickle where he decided to learn Boxing to change his fighting style to make better use of his hands since he now only had them, one leg, and then a peg leg. As expected; he absolutely dominated the Boxing Sport because Retsu is at a level of skill where even World Champions are free eats.
Yamcha is not "basically superhuman" The man is most likely capable of destroying the planet at that point in the story. Yes, the weakest Z-fighter, but that's not really giving you the real perspective
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u/GhostBoyJames 5h ago
Ricky Flame from iCarly he used to be a famous celebrity chef until he lost a contest and quit cooking then he realized he just loves to win and to ensure he never loses again, he abuses a loophole in a recreational pamphlet to join a children’s mini-wrestling league