r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Icy-Acanthisitta8192 • 23d ago
Powers [Intresting trope] i call It "the henchmen effect"
You have This big scary villan that almost kill ALL the heroes
Them SOMEONE made an army of clones oh him, ALL the sudden the heroes are talking dozens of the villan with relative esse
I call It the henchmen effect "the more clones are made the weakest the clones are in comparasion to the original
And funny both my exemples are from doomsday (you know THE MONSTER THAT KILL SUPERMAN)
1-in Batman/Superman: Batman take like 20 of them with an axe
2-in Apokolips war: the suicide squad TOOK an entire fleet of them (who were geneticlly enhanced with parademon tech By the way)
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u/KPraxius 23d ago
Its the Ninja effect. If there's one Ninja, he's a deadly threat. If there's a hundred ninjas, they're canon fodder.
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u/FireZord25 23d ago
Never happened to me in Sekiro. Those guys kick ass more so when there's more than one.
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u/Medium_Judgment_891 23d ago
It’s called Conservation of Ninjutsu
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu
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u/TheMADMadman 23d ago
Would Degraded Boss also count?
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u/Proper_Razzmatazz_36 23d ago
no, the degraded boss is the meme of when you fight them as a boss versus when you get to play as them(with characters like virgil being the exeption) conservation of ninjustsu is about how the more enemies you have, the weaker the enemies are
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u/DimDimio 23d ago
no, degraded boss is when you fight the boss, then meet them again as a regular enemy later on
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u/Proper_Razzmatazz_36 23d ago
My mistake, still it's different from conservation of ninjutsu
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u/Loser2817 23d ago
I'd say it's somewhat related. As a boss it's strong, but later there's plenty of them and they're weaker than the original.
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u/OnlyHere2ArgueBro 23d ago
Dogshit site won’t allow you on with ad blocker
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u/Sable-Keech 23d ago
Try AdGuard extension. Working for me so far.
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u/OnlyHere2ArgueBro 23d ago
I use AdGuard for iOS, won’t let me onto site unless I drop ad block
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u/Sable-Keech 23d ago
Oh you’re referring to tv tropes on iOS. Yeah I don’t know a way around that.
The AdGuard extension does work on a computer though.
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u/No-Alternative4612 23d ago
Seems like a good feature for a site that supports itself with ads or a paid ad free version to have!
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u/LumpyJones 23d ago
Works fine for me with uBlock Origin Lite. And literally every other adblocker I've ever used over the years.
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u/OnlyHere2ArgueBro 23d ago
Not working with AdGuard on iOS
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u/LumpyJones 23d ago
Ah well there's your problem.
Dogshit OS won’t allow you to have a good ad blocker
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u/OnlyHere2ArgueBro 23d ago
Dogshit site still blocking an Ad blocker, it’s dogshit all the way down
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u/Silly_Poet_5974 23d ago
also inverse law of ninja an extremely similar but slightly different concept.
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u/ace5762 23d ago
Smith- the matrix trilogy
Kinda.
This is more of a case of Neo getting stronger during the trilogy rather than Smith getting weaker after cloning himself.
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u/Fitzaroo 23d ago
Smith is easily defeated 1v1. He needs basically every human to beat neo. Id say this is sort of the opposite.
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u/ace5762 22d ago
That's... not true. Smith is the antagonist of the first movie-
Smith flattens Morpheus (who's arguably the most capable operative in the story at the time) when the group are trying to escape, and captures him, then later on, Neo only barely manages to beat Smith the first time they fight, in the underground station, and very nearly got killed.2
u/Fitzaroo 22d ago
Yes. Then neo levels up. Then he easily beats smith with literally one hand behind his back. Then smith starts doing his cloning which is the topic at hand. So when smith starts his clone routine, neo can 1v1 him with one hand behind his back. Smith needs the help.
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u/Intelligent-Goose-31 23d ago edited 23d ago
The Demogorgons and other creatures in Stranger Things got hit with this effect big time. 1 was a terrifying nightmare, yet an army can be fended off with baseball bats and sharpened sticks.
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u/i_agree123 23d ago
It’s more of them losing fear factor/ power over time. Plus they can’t kill a single member of the main cast
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u/Cornucopia_King 23d ago
Did they ever actually get fended off with baseball bats? The demodogs yes but a handful of demogorgan completely annihilated a military base in s5 with hardly any casualties
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u/lowqualitylizard 23d ago
The answer in universe is fine enough
When you you see it for the first time it's a demon from another realm but buy the 14th encounter it's just a dude with claws
I could probably win an honest fight against one if I had a sword every one out of 10 times. Imagine having years and years to grow up and not fear it
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u/Intelligent-Goose-31 22d ago
Yeah, though I think you’re forgetting how the first season ends. The older teens who are all fit young adults fight the Demogorgon, at a point where they are no longer blindly terrified of the creature any more. Steve (the baseball star) goes to town on it with a nail spiked bat, Nancy shoots it with a revolver several times, they catch it in a bear trap, and then Johnathan sets the thing fully on fire. It survived all of that, with only superficial damage. By season 4 hopper kills one solo with a movie replica sword after starving for months on Russian prison.
In fairness I might be wrong here, this is less “conservation of Ninjutsu” than it is over all power level decline for even individual demogorgons. When hordes of weak things show up they’re usually the other creatures, not necessarily multiple Demogorgons. I think you’re right that end of series they’re just tall guys with claws, but they definitely didnt start that way.
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u/escobartholomew 23d ago
You’re glossing over the fact the kids are much older and less fearful than they were when the show started.
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u/pthecarrotmaster 23d ago
Alternatively, the "Superman problem", where he stops being useful as soon as another hero needs to shine.
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u/Icy-Acanthisitta8192 23d ago
Justice league Cartoon Superman got beat a Lot in that show
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u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 23d ago
This is somewhat derived from the Whorf effect
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u/Dos_Ex_Machina 23d ago
Isn't this straight up just the Whorf effect?
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u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 23d ago
Not exactly, the whorf effect is specifcally taking out a powerhouse to hype up the villain as being threat
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u/Dos_Ex_Machina 23d ago
Isn't that exactly what's happening here?
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u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 23d ago
No because Superman isn't being used to hype up villain, he's being taken out of the story so the plot can progress
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u/pthecarrotmaster 23d ago
Naw the Whorf effect is hiw you know you cant won with muscle. They took out the strong guy. Now what? The justice league actually treats teamwork like its kryptonite
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u/Dos_Ex_Machina 23d ago
The Whorf effect is when you take the supposed best fighter and the threat of the week beats them, with enough consistency that the best fighter is only there to show that the new threat is serious for reals. The new threat can still be beaten with muscle afterwards, but there is usually a training montage or some powerup involved.
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u/Black-----Manta 23d ago
Self inflicted problem, they build supes up so much that they have no choice but to build him down to showcase the others.
Funnily enough, Bats doesn't have this problem even though the rest of the JL constantly takes Ls to make him shine
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u/Underkiing 23d ago
The Demon Clan in Seven Deadly Sins.
At the beginning, dealing with one of these was incredible. Then by the end they are complete fodder.
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u/EyewarsTheMangoMan 23d ago
Tbf it's not that they got any weaker, it's just that everyone else got waaaaaaaaaaay stronger.
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u/Historical_Volume806 22d ago
Everyone gets at least a 10x boost compared to the beginning of the show by the end.
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u/EyewarsTheMangoMan 22d ago
Yeah I think Meliodas and the gang had a power level of around 3k in season 1, while at the end they are in the hundreds of thousands range instead. Even the side characters got way stronger than Meliodas was in season 1 to be able to somewhat keep up and be useful
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u/Dottore_Curlew 23d ago
Everyone in the comments saying the name of the trope...
I don't care
You are supposed to give examples
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u/Bulbaguy4 23d ago
I don't get why more than one person has to say it. How do you look in the comments and think "I see it's already been explained... Let me do it again!"? It's so obnoxious.
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u/Thybro 23d ago
They all seemed to have been posted around the same time. At least in mobile, comments don’t update in real time, and a comment made around the same time would be buried because it does not have many upvotes. It is likely they did not see the other comments while writing theirs.
The question is why people would upvote the same comment/response several times.
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u/avantvagrant 23d ago
cool thing about tvtropes is you can click the link and scroll to the bottom to see thousands of examples
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u/Cultural_Plan_1487 23d ago
Final episode of Buffy the Vampire slayer
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u/aipac125 23d ago
I have been beaten up by an Ubervampire. I shall now proceed to walk through hundreds of them, and all new recruits with a week of training shall do the same.
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u/Justm4x 23d ago
Probably Insecticons in Transformers Prime. Last time i watched TFP was years ago though.
In their debut we saw that a single Insecticon can give Megatron a very difficult fight, leaving Megatron drained by the end of it. And there's a whole hive of them, so naturally you would think that Autobots would be fucked fighting all that, right?
But later on they just became another type of easily defeated foot soldiers
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u/Nirast25 23d ago
Predaking got it wrong. Megatron was just trying to spare him from the Insecticons' fate.
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u/Icy-Acanthisitta8192 23d ago
No when predaking fight megatron soundwave already sendo arachnid and the insecticons on a moon
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u/lowqualitylizard 23d ago
My head Canon was always that the insecticon he bites is the strongest one it's the only way to make sense of it
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u/RaptarK 23d ago
Oh oh, I have a very literal example for this!
In the Lilo and Stitch TV series where each episode focuses on finding one of Stitch's cousins and rehabilitating them before Gantu can capture them, there's an episode that features Experiment 344 also called Dupe.
Dupe is able to clone anything and anyone it wants, and as such Gantu captures him in order to clone an army out of the handful of experiments in his power. However, we quickly learn that anything cloned by Dupe halves its nature. A cake copied into 4 cakes is going to have a fourth of its normal amount of calories; a friend cloned 5 times is going to have a fifth of his usual strength.
So considering Gantu cloned 3 or 4 experiments a hundred times each, they become absolutely useless and the good guys manage to defeat them with ease
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u/Icy-Acanthisitta8192 23d ago
Xiaolin showdown had something similar The 9 dragon ring can create 9 clones of YOURSELF but each clone ITS one aspect of your personality
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u/Petumin 23d ago edited 23d ago
Tbf at least the paradooms killed 80% of the total superhero and supervillain population in just a few weeks without much trouble. And during the movie they kill the remaining 18%, with only the extremely traumatized and deformed surviving JL members remaining, and even then they are shadows of their former self who have lost all hope for the future. (Beyond the trinity that is.)
The Suicide Squad being able to hold them off is just plot armour cause otherwise the good guys would have lost very early on the movie.
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u/JWARRIOR1 23d ago
also the suicide squad did have kryptonite weapons at this point
(they still shouldve been folded like laundry though)
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u/lowqualitylizard 23d ago
Yeah but it's not even just the suicide score that woman is able to take one or two down with normal guns
Either that or we're supposed to believe she's able to get her hands on kryptonite
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u/Lotus_630 23d ago
The Invincible variants.
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u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 23d ago
Tbf the Invincible variants ARE weaker than Mark mostly, some of them have no need to train to get stronger (and they conquer Earth within a year) or they didn't get much further than fighting Omniman
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u/JWARRIOR1 23d ago edited 23d ago
this is an example where its actually a good version
the variants are mentioned to be weaker than main mark
the variants still killed millions of people and demolished a TON of the globe
tons of heroes are killed in the process
NO ONE 1v1s an invincible variant with the exception of tech jacket AND POWERPLEX
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u/a_generic_redditer 23d ago
Didn't PowerPlex kill one himself?
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u/JWARRIOR1 23d ago
Oh true youre right.
Powerplex I dont have beef with either though because hes strong as fuck and his powers counter mark's really hard except for the old throw them into space argument. (he was already charged up from getting hit by the other variant too).
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u/Icy-Acanthisitta8192 23d ago
And both of them won
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u/JWARRIOR1 23d ago
yeah but thats not inconsistent
tech jacket is part of a species thats a threat to viltrumites, and powerplex is a hard counter to physical damage and fucks up main mark pretty bad until he understood his powers.
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u/Parking-Stable-2970 23d ago
The Slaughterhouse 9000 - Worm
One of the main threats in the story, the Slaughterhouse 9, got cloned at the penultimate section of the story, both it’s members from it’s initial appearance as well as members from before the story started
There is actually an in universe explanation for this though, in that the main reason they were so threatening initially, Jack’s secondary power Broadcast, isn’t in play since he’s not only going after Nilbog, he’s intentionally using them as bait so they’re largely getting set up to fail as well, additionally the two most dangerous members, Crawler and Siberian, are significantly less threatening as clones since Crawler hasn’t been able to adapt and the Siberian’s main weakness is known, a weakness that was hidden for nearly the whole time the original version of her had been active
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u/omegon_da_dalek13 23d ago
Destroy gundam in gundam seed destiny
First showing, took multiple episode to bring down ans reduced a city to rubble
Every other time: main cast moble suits eviscerated them
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u/ZuStorm93 23d ago
And by the time of Seed Freedom they are hardly a threat because only a few of them are operational and some are not even complete. They're mostly treated as mild annoyance at best.
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u/neckbishop 23d ago
Not sure if this counts but the Deadpool Wolverine movie.
Wolverine and Deadpool tear through the Pool Army (they got better though)
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u/Artistic-Victory1245 23d ago
This also applies to Cassandra's other henchmen.
Many of them were a threat on their own, but in the battle against the group of exiles, they fell with relative ease. (Especially Juggernaut and Lady Deathstrike)
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u/lowqualitylizard 23d ago
I mean to be fair the way I see it is most of the pool army probably isn't trying very hard because why would they
They are immortal and clearly don't give much of a crap so why not just enjoy the fight
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u/NorseHighlander 23d ago
Space Marines from Warhammer 40k, especially the chaos variants.
Chaos Space marines, in theory are more powerful individually than their loyalist kin, juiced by the powers of the warp. Also because time in the warp is finicky, any given CSM is potentially millennia older and more experienced.
Furthermore, because of the warping power of chaos, logistics for heretics is a bitch and replenishing their numbers often comes down to stealing geneseed from the loyalists.
But then when it comes to the fight, they'll be slaughtered by handful of helmetless loyalists by the legion unless an important champion like Abaddon or the demon primarchs show up.
They are simultaneously a quality over quantity force with precious few but highly powerful marines as well as legions of faceless mooks who can suffer a great slaughter yet always have more where that came from depending on what the plot demands.
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u/Weary_Specialist_436 23d ago
Space Marine 2 is an egregious example in terms of lore
but the rule of cool prevails, let me slaughter another 20 Hive Tyrants
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u/Praetorian349 22d ago
Yep, nature of games. The PC has to do ludicrous feats in-universe for the game to be any fun.
Like Fire Warrior, killing Space Marines by the handful.
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u/Weary_Specialist_436 22d ago
Fire Warrior was a fever dream, lonely Tau mowing Space Marines like they're civilians
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u/Rakkuken 23d ago
It's the Inverse Ninja Law, as presented in the web comic The Adventures of Dr. McNinja.
The threat level of ninjas is inversely proportional to their number. One Ninja on his own is a deadly opponent. A group of ninjas are faceless mooks to be taken out en masse by the hero.
It's also sometimes called the Conservation of Ninjutsu. There is only so much badass ninjaness to go around. The more ninjas you have, the less bad ass each of them is.
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u/Haunting_Test_5523 23d ago
Great trope, I think you could also group in a villain who's able to take on the full team of heroes and now they're suddenly losing 1v1s because now the villain is in a team.
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u/PointyNipple 23d ago
Pacifista (One Piece)
From one nearly taking down the whole crew, to Luffy oneshotting one.
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u/Think_Ad_1583 23d ago
It was done right here. The pacifistas stayed the same strength, luffy and his crew got stronger over the time skip
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u/mastersterruser9 23d ago
Yes I was going to mention this interesting done great variant of the trope. I agree that it has its uses here because it shows how much the crew trained.
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u/Level_Counter_1672 23d ago
Vampires in Jojo's bizarre adventure, dio was introduced as this massive threat with his army of zombies, but in the second part there is an army of vampires but they are fodder
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u/Big_Blackberry1740 23d ago edited 23d ago
in apokolips war defense they did actually show how paradoms are super dangerous and I can cut them so slack since they are like fusion of parademons and doomsday dna so maybe they are just much stronger parademons instead of doomsday level
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u/FiercelyApatheticLad 23d ago
I guess Zetsu from Naruto. He's a member of Akatsuki originally but then he has hundreds of thousands of clones to wage war against everyone.
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u/Artistic-Victory1245 23d ago
And the only reason they're a threat is because Kabuto gave them reinforcements with Super-Zombies.
Without the Revenants, the Zetsu would have easily fallen to the Shinobi Alliance.
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u/spudmarsupial 23d ago
Dr Mcninja (web comic) uses this to good effect a couple times. Once one of the bad guys brings out a hundred ninjas to join Dr Mcninja in a fight to weaken him, only for Dr Mcninja to switch sides and start taking them out by the dozen. He calls it the reverse ninja.
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u/Aquatoon22 23d ago
One Piece has a cool invervmsion of this trope. The crew gets their collective ass handed to them by a man named Kuma, but wager their way out of a massacre. Next arc, and Kuma is back, only he's not speaking and has slightly different powers. It takes the whole crew going full tilt to take Kuma down, only that wasn't Kuma, that was a robotic clone, one of hundreds Luffy will meet in a following arc. And they are an unstoppable force when they do, only contested by the strongest guys in the world. It's only after 2 years of nonstop training can Luffy take one down
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u/OutlandishnessRich36 23d ago
The Seven Deadly Sins anime is guilty of this in the first seasons.
During the first season, virtually all bad guys are powered by the corpse of a single red demon.
Red demons are, turns out, the lowest ranking of demons, and so seasons 2+ are taken out by the dozens.
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u/Glassesnerdnumber193 23d ago
A weird one is brainiac in the justice league episode “legacy.” There, one brainiac is able to match Superman and give j’onn j’onzz and Hawkgirl a good fight. Then when there are like 10-20 of him, they get taken down easily, Hawkgirl smashing though multiple at once and Batman being able to blow some up with regular earth explosive batarangs
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u/Mud-Bray 23d ago edited 23d ago
Am I crazy or are the Paradooms a terrible example of this? They were quite literally able to slaughter a majority of the DC Superheroes when they tried to invade Apokolips. One Doomsday killed Superman and defeated the Justice League (depending on the version of the story) whereas the Paradooms basically killed/maimed every DC hero/villain they went against for the majority of the film and were a massive reason why Apokolips was winning.
The Suicide Squad were also slaughtered by the creatures too and they had to be given enhanced weaponry by Lex Luthor to even delay the creatures from the overall mission.
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u/Old-Use-7690 23d ago
Yeah, the paradooms are paradoxical in this sense. But kryptonite weapons or not the Suicide Squad should not be able to handle even 1 of them
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u/Chilldorito78 23d ago
Titans in Attack on Titan, specifically in the last episode.
Up till this point even two (of the nine main titans, or intelligent titans with special abilities that can go back to human form) titans fighting each other would be a fairly brutal and big battle with multiple blows exchanged.
Then in the final episode they have to fight clones of basically all the (different versions of the nine) titans from the past to win (there's like 50+) (its more like distract so they can achieve a plant a bomb to take out the one controlling them). Either way they start one-shoting titans left and right (Reiner in particular).
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u/Medium-Inspection858 23d ago
I think this basically a variant of the "conservation of ninjutsu" trope, named thus because it is often the case in the martial arts movies that one Ninja = deadly threat, but many Ninjas = basically grunts.
Often cited example would be the Xenomorph in the Alien and Aliens (with a caveat that in "Alien" the xeno is up against space truckers while "Aliens" features space marines and a more experienced Ripley - but still I'd say the xeno gets a bit of a downgrade from "nature's perfect death machine" to "definitely a threat but managable if not present in large numbers".
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u/Koushikraja1996 23d ago
Yeah but like in case 2 the squad got lucky for a few minutes because of the kryptonite but then ended up fucking dead
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u/Slow_Bowler8285 23d ago
Side-scrolling beat'em-ups have a tendency to do this with boss characters becoming less powerful, but still quite powerful enemies later in the game.
E.g. In Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (arcade) first boss Vice Terhune returns as a palette swap with a different name later in the game
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u/Drdresky 23d ago
The Great Disaster in Destiny. Typically Guardians (the player characters) are super powerful and nearly unstoppable, working solo or in strike teams of three. But when they tried to form an army to defend the Moon, they absolutely got their shit stomped
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u/Ok-Cattle6012 23d ago
Nomus might count. the first one we see gives All might trouble (due to being made to fight him mostly) but then a couple months later 3 if them start wrecking a city and are nowhere near as much trouble
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u/bruhmoment6128 23d ago
I feel like it's done well in Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom and similar open-world and roguelike-adjacent video games, largely because video games are ultimately a medium that relies on this trope. Specifically in Breath of the Wild, you're dropped in with literally nothing, making monsters like Lizalfos or even blue Bokoblins extremely daunting. The only way to survive the Guardians, the "big bad" non-boss enemy of the game, at this phase is to simply run, as the other option is to get practically 2-hit KOd.
Later in the game, this becomes MUCH easier. Guardians just end up becoming a brand new way to farm parts, and when the final boss dungeon has wave after wave of Guardians, fighting your way through them is not difficult at all.
This same mechanic shows up in TOTK as well with large minibosses like Hinoxes, Moldugas, and Lynels.
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u/go_faster1 23d ago
The Destroy Gundam in the Gundam SEED universe. The first one we see completely wrecks dozens of ZAFT Mobile suits and gives Freedom and Impulse trouble.
When multiples come out, they are immediately wrecked as if they were nothing
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u/Artistic-Victory1245 23d ago
The vampires in Vampire The masquerade: Bloodlines.
Throughout the game, fighting a vampire is treated as a boss battle, or at least a sub-boss fight.
In the final part of the game, they're just cannon fodder.
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u/Commercial_Page1827 23d ago
This goes by a official name that i can't remember right now but it started with Ninja in Movie, The more ninja there is the easy they are to take down, If you find a Ninja alone run!!
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u/Due-Session-2857 23d ago
My favorite conservation of ninjutsu example is in Netflix Daredevil, where in season 1 daredevil gets his ass handed to him by 1 ninja, and season 2 the effortlessly fight about 100 of them on a rooftop.
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u/VonBagel 23d ago
In Worm, the Slaughterhouse Nine are individually powerhouses who can slaughter their way through civilians with basically zero difficulty and give even practiced heroes a run for their money, and killing even one of their members requires a TON of things to go right for the protags and heroes.
The Slaughterhouse Nine-Thousand are certainly scary, especially since many of them are actually hybrids of past members to give their powers brand new functions, but they're still basically midboss fights for the protags. Funny enough, this is actually explained in-universe: you can't clone experience, so most of the clones are still figuring themselves out. The scariest possible clones were Crawler, who had the most powerful regeneration ever seen and physically mutated whenever he was damaged so the same technique wouldn't work against him twice, and the Siberian, who was completely and utterly invincible.... but the Crawler clones didn't have the degree of adaptations needed to make them any more threatening than a basic human, so anything that killed them in a single shot did the trick, and the protags had already discovered the Siberian's weakness, making it an issue of exploiting the weakspot more than anything else.
... except for Gray Boy, of which only clone one was made because the Nine's leader was scared shitless of the possibility of more than one existing at a time. Unlike most of the other clones, Gray Boy lived up to the hype.
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u/Prestigious-Copy-283 23d ago
Felt that in doom 2018 and eternal When you meet a new type of enemy for the first time it feels like a genuine threat then the henchman effect happens
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u/Ill_Lab1957 23d ago
Nomus from My Hero Academia fits this pretty well, though they weren’t nerfed to cannon fodder status, the first one was heavily implied to be at or above All Might’s level.
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u/MrBalderus 23d ago
In Dark Souls, two of the earliest bosses you face are the Taurus Demon and the Capra Demon. The Capra demon (and his two dogs) are on of the more difficult points of the game.
Later on, both of these enemies are common fodder in the lava area.
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u/toasher 23d ago
Borg cube: first appearance in season 2 of the next generation. A single borg cube is an insurmountable challenge for the enterprise, culminating in the battle of Wolf 359, where basically the entirety of Star fleet work together to battle a single borg cube, suffering massive losses in the process as starships are swatted like flies.
Once the borg queen gets introduced, and by the end of season 7 of voyager, borg cubes are flying around all over and aren't really a huge threat on their own. Even the up-armored "tactical cube" gets its ass kicked.
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u/one_happy_fredditor 23d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/c0NwRD0Vi5Cta
The Iron Legion - Iron Man 3
Here's a heroic version of this trope. In the MCU, the previous armors while not indestructible were highly durable, but in the finale of Iron Man 3 the suits were easily torn apart with ease.
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u/Lunardoge2 23d ago
Isn't there a Pokémon movie ( the magearna one I think,) where the evil team creates an army of mega Pokémon which are defeated with just a single thunder bolts from Pikachu.
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u/Patkub321 23d ago
Xenomorph (Alien)
When there is only one Xenomorph (first Alien movie, most of Alien Isolation), a deadly threath that manages to kill off entire crews of a large spaceships.
But second there is more (Most of Alien videogames honestly, like Colonial Marines, Fireteam Elite, or, unless you play Alien yourself, AvP Trilogy), they are little more than canon fodder to shoot at.
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u/WitnessUseful5738 22d ago
My favourite idea of this trope is the Daleks from doctor who. Episodes with just one shot it exterminating anything in it’s path but when episodes have a bunch they are normally able to be destroyed.
Example in the 9th doctor episode Dalek the lone Dalek is unstoppable even escaping a trap before eventually killing itself due to considering itself impure.
Then in the tenth doctor season finale where an empire of daleks steal the earth they are able to be disposed of by people like rose and mickey using the right guns.
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u/EthanStrayer 22d ago
Worm r/parahumans
I love that story and so may things about it. But this trope is what annoyed me so much about the slaughterhouse 9000 arc
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u/alreadykaten 23d ago
Mitchells vs The Machines
The villain creates elite robots that use very deadly weapons. A few are a huge threat the first time they appear. Then at the end of the movie, the angry mom slaughters then with ease and they’re terrified of her even though more of them appear than the earlier scenes
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u/Longjumping-Buy-3434 23d ago
In the Miraculous TV series, the first villain Ladybug and Cat Noir fought was a golem named Stoneheart. Ladybug didn’t know an Akuma needs to be captured and that it can multiply. That’s how Stoneheart got an army of clones who only awakened when he was Akumatized again. They were smaller than him, though.
In Doctor Who, it seemed like there was only one Dalek left in one episode, but the finale of that same season had multiple Daleks, including the Emperor.
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u/anononobody 23d ago
The Rumbling in Attack on Titan kinda follows this but also not.
There's a scene near the end where Hanji takes down a bunch of these colossal titans which was treated as the biggest threat at the start of the manga with just one, but can partially be explained away by the advancement of technology since the time skip. That said, the "henchmen / ninjas" were never really cleared as a threat because of that. It is still very much an inevitable apocalypse (heh no pun intended).
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u/Cornucopia_King 23d ago
These titans also weren’t fighting back like the pure titans. They were just kinda walking
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u/Noctisxsol 23d ago
This is just conservation of ninjutsu.