• A British NHS advert from the late 2000s featured a crowd of people watching in awe as a Batman-esque superhero scaled a building scaffold dramatically and acrobatically to retrieve a lost balloon. When the hero reached the top, he slipped off the pole on which he was precariously balanced and fell down the building. The audience then sees an unpleasant shot of the ordinary man twitching blankly on the concrete floor. "Too much alcohol makes you feel invincible when you're most vulnerable," says the narrator. It was an effective advert.
• In the ad campaign promoting Cartoon Network's "Mil-Looney-Um" marathon in 1999, people act like "Looney Tunes" characters only to receive realistic consequences.
  • One ad has a police officer chasing a thief into an alley with no exit. When he goes into the alley, he finds the thief now dressed in drag and trying to flirt with the officer. The officer isn't fooled and immediately arrests him. A caption then appears saying, "You are not Bugs Bunny.''
  • Another "You are not Bugs Bunny" ad saw the Duck Season, Rabbit Season routine backfire on a fired employee.
  • Yet another saw a nerd try to woo his female co-worker a la Pepé Le Pew, only to wind up with his head smashed into a copy machine.
• A commercial for Big M (an Australian brand of flavored milk) has a man walking along with a carton in his hand. He sees a piano roll out of a moving van and down the street, heading directly towards an old lady struggling to walk her dog. The man puts down his chocolate Big M and runs after it, jumping onto a passing garbage truck and then a motorbike to get between the woman and the piano. But when he turns and puts his arms out to stop the piano - it doesn't stop, taking him, the woman, and the dog (pulled by its lead) with it. Cue the slogan: "Think Big! But not too big."
• A Dr. Pepper TV ad had two men moving a pinball machine down the stairs. A snapping noise, and one of the guys is in pain. A doctor with a can of Dr. Pepper comes near the guy, complete with a Dubstep song. The guy seems happy until he resumes being hurt and is about to let go of the machine, which would make the machine crash into the wall.
• A series of New Zealand safety PSAs presented several people acting like they're in standard commercials by talking to the camera while walking or working. In doing so, they don't see where they're going, so they trip, slip and fall. HARD. They are not comical pratfalls; the impact makes it clear they have broken bones at the very least.
• Sprite's "Obey Your Thirst" campaign in The '90s was a series of commercials about subverting and mocking advertising tropes.
  • One of the most famous was the "Grant Hill Drinks Sprite" series of ads, which parodied Cereal-Induced Superpowers. In one of them, a kid spots NBA player Grant Hill drinking Sprite, and thinks Sprite will make him a basketball player. He quickly disproves himself by drinking Sprite and then failing a slam dunk, falling on his ass.
    Announcer: If you want to make it to the NBA... practice. If you want a refreshing drink, obey your thirst. Sprite.
  • Similarly, another has a bunch of young guys driving around in a convertible in slow motion, bouncing the car on its wheels to look cool. The car stops, and one guy leaps out of the car and starts dramatically chugging back his Sprite. When he turns the cap, the bottle explodes and covers him in soft drink — because all that bouncing shook it up. He does not look good while shrieking and dripping wet.
  • Yet another commercial delivers a one-two potshot at both Sunny Delight and Kool-Aid as a mother brings some "Sun Fizz" beverage to her son and daughter, but before the children could even get a sip, the mascot emerges from the bottle and tells them how delicious Sun Fizz is. Rather than amazement and wonder, the family scream in terror and flee with the mascot in pursuit. It even made the dog run away. The mother trips over the vacuum and the daughter screams while the mother tells them to run as it cuts to the Sprite motto of "Image Is Nothing, Thirst Is Everything Obey Your Thrist".
    Announcer: Trust your gut, not some cartoon character.
• In adverts for Hostess Fruit Pies, the products advertised usually successfully serve as a Delicious Distraction long enough for the hero to complete their task. In this one, The Joker throws some of the pies at some police officers who want to arrest him...and immediately gets arrested the moment he tries to sneak out.
• The an M&M's commercial that introduces a Chocolate bar character that flirts with Tia Carrere, The character melts in a lounge chair while sunbathing when Red and Yellow aren't effected because of their candy shells and even if they were effected the shells would keep their chocolate inside unless they get cracked open.
  • In one add campaign where Yellow trains a dog to track a Gray imposter M&M, The dog instead chases after Red and he proclaims that "Dogs can only see in black and white". Although in recent years it's proven that dogs can see color but can't see the color red.
• Played for laughs in this Limu Emu and Doug commercial for Liberty Mutual Insurance, which is also a tie-in commercial for the film, Spider-Man: No Way Home. Doug believes if he gets bitten by a spider, he will gain the same powers as Spider-Man, which he believes will make him better at selling insurance. Instead, an ambulance rushes him to the hospital while his skin breaks out from the spider's venom.
  Doug: Did it work?
  • The short version of the ad ends with Doug giving a thumbs-up and saying he's okay as paramedics load him into the ambulance.
• In both extended edits from Telstra’s "This is Footy Country" ad for the NRL and the AFL, Mick Robinson recruits a series of local townspeople – including a police officer, a pastor and a mechanic – to fill in for the Waubra Emus in the Elimination Final due to the team’s bus breaking down. Despite Mick managing to get the ragtag team there in time for the game, they don’t fare too well against their opposing team, judging by the Smash Cut to the real team watching them "getting smashed" on the tablet device.
• A Public Service Announcement about healthy eating and staying active (seen on the VHS of Dr. Dolittle) is an ad for a fictional snack cake called "Gofer Cakes." While it starts off as a typical commercial for this kind of product in real life with the kids enjoying the cakes and stuffing their faces full of them, it ends with the kids full and sick and unable to do anything else but lie there from eating nothing but sugary snack cakes.

• Rimba Racer: When contacted by a representative of The Conspiracy who is spouting rhetoric about changing the sport for the better, Riq admits that racing is a pretty niche, high-risk, impractical sport that sponsors aren't really interested in. Pretty brutal considering the premise of the show.

• Assassination Classroom: When the public becomes aware of the specifics of Kunugigaoka Junior High School's "E Class" system after Koro-sensei's willing death, namely a "survival of the fittest" system enforced through what amounts to relentless institutionalized bullying, there is huge public outcry, with the school board being forced to abolish the system with immediate effect and the principal who implemented it being forced to resign from the position with his reputation in tatters instead of everything continuing on after the manga's story ends.
• Asteroid in Love: While this is indeed a Schoolgirl Series, it is rather hard on the facts due to its emphasis on the Coming of Age angle of the genre. So this trope appears rather frequently.
  • Hoshizaki High School enforces the member requirement for its clubs, meaning that any club that doesn't meet it will have to disband(or, in the case of the Geology and Astronomy clubs, merge in an awkward merger since their objectives relate to academic subjects).
  • Mira learns that asteroid discovery is not an easy task for amateur astronomers, as it requires sophisticated techniques and equipment that is not readily accessible for their club.
  • Somewhat related to the above, when Mira and Ao take part in the Shining Star Challenge, they're unable to discover a new asteroid in a few days on the island, despite having the sophisticated techniques and equipment needed for it.
  • Mai takes a preliminary test for the Earth Science Olympiad that she isn't fully prepared for^note The competition assesses the whole gamut of earth sciences, most of which Mai has no experience on, and in which she is competing against dozens of fellow earth science enthusiasts. She doesn't stand a chance, so she's not too surprised or disappointed when she fails.
• The Alpha Bitch of Atonement Magical Girl Carenza finds out that bullying a girl to the point of literal suicide means that schools aren't willing to accept you any more because of your bad reputation. Her parents also throw her out because they can't be seen in public with her.
• Azumanga Daioh: When the girls are all taking college entrance exams, Osaka and Yomi are stunned to discover they’re not accepted by their first attempts. Osaka is rejected from her fallback school and needs to either find another or hope her first choice takes her, and Yomi fails the exams from multiple schools until her last choice accepts her. The latter is especially surprising considering that Yomi is the best student out of the group apart from Chiyo, a Child Prodigy who has skipped multiple grades.
• Bakuman。
  • After Mashiro and Takagi's oneshot "The World is All About Money and Intelligence" fails to do nearly as well as they'd hoped, they take it to the riverbank and dramatically rip it up. They then realize that what they did constitutes littering and hightail it out of there. In the anime, a passerby calls them out on their actions and forces them to flee.
  • Mashiro, an aspiring manga artist, and Azuki, an aspiring voice actress, are in a romantic relationship since the first chapter, albeit an unconventional one, but keep it secret, hoping to someday get married after Mashiro's manga gets adapted into an anime and Azuki plays the female lead. When word of their being a couple gets leaked late in the series, it results in a massive backlash against them, resulting in people online making hateful posts about Azuki and meaning that she'll have to work even harder to get the role. Additionally, while Fukuda publicly calling out the hatedom on a radio show is well-deserved, it doesn't make anything better, and instead makes him a target for the backlash.
• Blood Blockade Battlefront: Chain easily wins a drinking contest seen with several empty shot glasses after her victory. The Stinger of that episode shows how the drinking contest left her hunched over her toilet at dawn, violently vomiting.
• The Dangers in My Heart: Yamada gets hit in the face by a basketball during gym. With the series being a lighthearted romcom, she comically hops back up as if nothing is wrong. Then her nose starts bleeding profusely a few seconds later, she has to be escorted to the nurse’s office, and leaves school early. She also had to cancel a modeling shoot and spends the next few days with a nose plaster. The whole incident is treated seriously by every other character.
• Delicious in Dungeon:
  • A conflict with an intricately shaded and very dramatic Dullahan ends with making a deal. Before leaving, the Dullahan mounts a horse and rears in triumph... but horse and rider are indoors at the time, so it smacks its neck armor on the ceiling when it does, and as it rides out its upper body clangs against the doorway. The interior space is plenty large enough for an armored figure and even large enough for a horse to walk through but it's not built large enough for both at once.
  • The adamantine cookpot that the party takes into battle is able to withstand dragon fire without melting. But if Convection, Schmonvection applied and it didn't heat up when exposed to fire, it wouldn't be any good for cooking. So it becomes too hot to continue to use as a shield.
  • After discovering that the living armor is actually a type of bivalve mollusc, Laios and Senshi are both enthusiastic about trying to cook them. Trouble is, it's a newly discovered species, so they're not sure how to safely eat them, or what will taste good. Grilling and frying work out well, but Senshi's attempts to steam the ones in the helmet in their shell tastes rather bad, despite this method working for clams and the like. This is quite the deviation from most Food Porn-based series, where a Supreme Chef is almost never seen making something that isn't delicious.
  • When Laios and Toshiro get into a fistfight over issues ranging from Toshiro's long-standing resentment of Laios to Marcille using dark magic to resurrect Falin, Toshiro, as the better fighter, would be at an advantage. However, Toshiro has been neglecting to eat and sleep due to his desperation to get Falin back, while Laios has been making sure he and his companions stay healthy, allowing Laios to win against Toshiro. Laios specifically calls Toshiro out on his recklessness and self-destructive tendencies.
  • A post-ending omake has Laios imagining that all the friends and allies he's accumulated over the adventure will help him run the Golden Kingdom. Only to cut to reality to show he's surrounded instead by random complete strangers from distant countries as his advisors (plus Yaad). Marcille, who serves as his court mage as part of a deal to keep her from going to prison for using forbidden magic, points out none of them know anything about politics, so their assistance wouldn't be of much help, even if they wanted to help (since the job is rife with corruption and conflict).
• Dinosaur Sanctuary:
  • While the series doesn't indulge in Prehistoric Monsters and the usual tropes popularized by Jurassic Park on the idea of dinosaur zoos, and the protagonist is introduced with her desire to make people see them as individuals with frailty and charm instead of all strength and terror, it is made abundantly clear in Chapters 6 and 7, "The Ichigo Incident", that dinosaurs are still unpredictable wild animals that must be treated with caution. If Yamaga had followed proper safety cautions around the Allosaurus he had cared for over 15 years, then he would never have been killed by Ichigo and neither would Ichigo have been killed either.
  • In Chapter 19 there's news of an escaped Velociraptor. Suzume's shocked face with the snarling head of a raptor behind her suggests a Raptor Attack situation with a creature that could hunt people, which is further suggested when chapter 20 starts with a news report, police, fearful rumors, talk of how since it was raised in captivity it has no fear of humans and could be dangerous, and is too smart for traps... Halfway through the chapter it's finally shown compared to human size, and is about as big as a wild turkey. It's based on the real Velociraptor, not the huge version from Jurassic Park, and is a mid-size animal that might get bold stealing scraps and give someone a nasty bite or cut, not a man-killer.
• In Every Day is a Holiday, Hinami celebrates March 13 by walking out in public cosplaying as a Shinsegumi, complete with a sword. Despite getting away with her other eccentric or questionably legal behavior, she ends up getting arrested for violating the Firearms and Swords Law.
• Fairy Tail:
  • Proud Beauty Lucy Heartfilia gets ogled by Spear Carriers or Mooks from time to time. When this happens, Lucy sends them flying in Pervert Revenge Mode. However, at one point, main protagonist Natsu walks in on Lucy in the shower. Lucy goes into Pervert Revenge Mode again and tries to hit Natsu with a flying kick. Natsu — a powerful fighter many times physically stronger than Lucy, whose magic involves hand-to-hand combat — just blocks the kick, causing Lucy to fall flat on her face in the bathroom. Lucy lays on the floor in shock while Natsu says that Lucy's combat technique needs work.
  • When the crew goes off on an S-Ranked mission to save an island from a curse that turns people into demons, they find that there is a demon on the island that was sealed away in ice, and the villains are trying to thaw it out. The villains manage to get the ice melted, only to find to their horror that the demon inside was already dead. Turns out being frozen in ice for several years is fatal, even to demons. The villains end up in a mix of shock and grief that their victory was instantly rendered worthless.
• Fena: Pirate Princess:
  • In Episode 1, Fena's Old Retainer duo Otto and Salman break into the tower to rescue her from Maximer Jr. Unfortunately, while they're still capable of managing a breakout, they're a pair of old men whose best years of combat prowess are far behind them and enacted their plan at night on an island with a high military presence. If not for the efforts of the Samurai Seven, they would have no doubt failed and gotten themselves killed.
  • Fena cutting her hair isn't treated as permanent. By Episode 4, it has started to grow out again.
  • In Episode 5, the Rumble Rose pirates are able to trap the Samurai Seven inside a cave by igniting a Powder Trail whilst they have Fena hostage, blasting the entrance to pieces and burying them alive. In episode 6, the Seven are able to escape because not all the explosives detonated, leaving some gunpowder behind that they're able to use to blast a strategically placed exit. A large mass of explosives are used in such situations to guarantee that at lease one of them will go off, because there might be a misfire or complication with the others that prevents some of them from detonating. The explosives coming packaged in sturdy crates and gunpowder barrels for safe transport can also protect their contents from the shock of the blast, even if they're right next to it, allowing the samurai to scavenge enough usable gunpowder to suit their purposes from one such container.
  • In Episode 7, the Rumble Rose pirates end up turning against Abel and the British when Abel refuses to pay them for kidnapping Fena and delivering her and the coordinates to Eden to them, all because O'Malley and her crew got a small cut on Fena's neck in the process. The Rumble Rose have been shown in past episodes to be a skilled group of quirky individuals whose talents put them on par combat-wise with Yukimaru and the others, whereas Abel only has uniform soldiers with inferior fighting skills to face her. However, despite the pirates having better fighting skills, they still need to get close to Abel's ship to board them, and they're nothing more than a motley Ragtag Bunch of Misfits against members of a trained, disciplined, and well-funded British army. Abel simply uses the superior resources on his ship to blast the Rumble Rose before they can ever close the distance on them, though the extent of the firepower he brings to bear borders on absolute overkill. Nonetheless, when the Samurai Seven are able to sneak in closer to the ship, their skills allow them to begin overwhelming the soldiers in close combat, showing that the British are a serious threat, but only so long as they have adequate distance to their foe to use their greater resources.
  • The Rumble Rose pirates are a quirky crew of named individuals, and have an important antagonistic role in the story, having aided Abel in attacking Fena's ship in her youth and being the main forces pursuing her in his stead. At the same time, however, they're merely human beings, and not protected by any kind of supernatural luck or such. When Abel blasts their ship with the Wellington Cannon, despite the possibility being open that the named crew could have survived the blast and returned for revenge on Abel, they're effectively removed from the story by that point onwards. Even when the epilogue reveals that at least three crew members did survive, O'Malley herself isn't amongst them. Just because you're a named character with an established backstory and personality of your own won't protect you from being unceremoniously killed, especially not with the sheer firepower Abel used against them.
  • Yukimaru is shown to be a skilled and dangerous fighter, capable of blitzing through multiple foes, especially if he has the element of surprise on his side, but in a pitched and chaotic battlefield where he's right in the thick of the action, it's impossible for him to keep track of every single threat around him, especially when he's distracted making sure that Fena is safe from those targeting her. He's twice injured from bullets striking him from unseen angles in combat against the Rumble Rose and Abel, and both Shitan and Makaba comment that the former's role in combat is primarily to look after Yukimaru to make sure that he doesn't get blindsided when he's taking on entire forces single-handedly.
  • In the penultimate episode, Abel gets his arm sliced off in a duel with Yukimaru, and rather than consider it merely an inconvenience, he bleeds out and dies because of it, though he is able to last for several minutes before expiring due to his iron willpower and could very well have killed both Yukimaru and Fena before getting distracted by Helena's spirit. Similarly, Abel is able to impale Yukimaru in the torso, and whilst the wound isn't immediately fatal, it's very debilitating and Fena interferes in the fight to stop Yukimaru moving anymore, pointing out that if he fights back whilst injured like that, he could tear the wound open further and bleed to death himself.
• In Food Wars!, when Erina learns that Yuki was able to be admitted into Totsuki despite her trying to fail him in his entrance exam, she punches the wall in anger. The following panel shows her kneeling on the ground massaging her now hurting hand. A teenage girl's hand meeting a solid wall is a match-up with a clear winner.
• Forest of Piano: Kai's first attempt in participating in a piano competition ends with him getting eliminated in the preliminaries. Not for lack of skill on his part, but because his poor-etiquette angered the majority of the judges.
• Get Backers episode 7 shows how a Scooby Stack would work in real life. Madoka, Ginji and Hevn are peeking from behind a wall, but Hevn is putting a bit to much weight on Ginji, causing him to grunt under her weight, unlike in the trope namer where the characters can either lean on or stack on top of each other (we never see what's behind the wall in that franchise so it's never really clear how they do it) with no reaction at all. After that, Madoka and Ginji already start walking away when Hevn isn't paying attention and she nearly trips.
• Ghost Stories: If Satsuki hears cursed music four times, she'll die. Leo solves this by giving her earplugs. Next time she's ambushed with the song, she snaps them into her ears... to realize they do nothing. She hightails it.
• In Great Teacher Onizuka, after the title character gets rejected from the teacher position, he gives up and travels to Akita to train as a truck driver. Then he receives a phone call, telling him he's been accepted after all, but must make it to the school in Tokyo within three hours to get the job. A trip from Akia to Tokyo usually would take around eight hours, so Onizuka hijacks the truck and rushes towards the school, ignoring all road rules. You'd expect him to dramatically arrive Just in Time... but he doesn't. By the time Onizuka arrives in Tokyo, he's dismayed that he's already several hours too late. No matter how great Onizuka's resolve is, he can't make a truck travel faster than it's physically able to go. (Lucky for him, he still gets the job.)
• High School Exciting Story: Tough:
  • Dogen Arikawa can bench press 200 kilos and squat 300. His inhuman grip allows him to crack nuts between his thumb and index. The strength of his punches are also amazing. Their power is superior to those of many heavyweight boxers. However years of mistreating his body to gain that strength makes him a regular patient at Yumiko's clinic.
  • During his match with Shintaro Kakumaru, the leader of the Goetsu school, Genshu Ibara gravely wounded his defenseless opponent. He was imprisoned for the wounds he afflicted and attempted murder.
  • While Yoshiki's martial arts training may allow him to mentally ignore a knife in his gut, that doesn’t mean he can physically ignore it.
  • Not even a made of iron martial artist can survive a gunshot to the head.
  • The important quantity of adrenaline that the combatants create when fighting allows them to support a lot of pain but not to resist the "Sensual Pleasure" that losing consciousness provides.
• Imaizumi Brings All the Gals to His House:
  • Keita is given just enough expenses to live for himself in a small apartment. Having three other people hanging out there all the time made his water bills high enough that it becomes a problem.
  • Lisa is Demoted to Extra in spite of her more or less joining the harem but is also the only one who has a job and lives in her own apartment, making it obvious she has to provide for herself to make a living.
• Interspecies Reviewers: When copy-cat reviewers show up, rather than being antagonists, they are treated as a slight annoyance after initial outrage. The titular reviewers live in a world without the internet, so finding all their competitors to make them stop would be impossible. Furthermore, Zel points out that the concept of posting reviews on businesses is not something that the reviewers could claim as intellectual property — you can't copyright an idea, after all. This leaves the heroes with no legal means to stop anyone else from playing Follow the Leader in-universe.
• Izetta: The Last Witch: There are several instances of this throughout the series.
  • Tobias is shot in the stomach, and while he does not die immediately, he is unable to receive proper medical treatment. It takes a while before he finally succumbs to his wound.
  • Princess Finé is shot in the arm at the end of the first episode. During the second episode, she loses a fair amount of blood from her wound, which results in her becoming sick and weak as a result. Izetta is forced to use some of her remaining clothing to temporarily patch the wound until she can get proper treatment.
  • After Finé fires Izetta's rifle-broom, the recoil is so powerful, it causes them to nearly spin out of control. Additionally, the barrel becomes too hot to touch, and Izetta has some difficulty landing safely.
  • Episode 3 shows that the Eylstadt military is still stuck in the old ways of fighting the last war: the once tried-and-true strategies of trench warfare and static artillery have become painfully obsolete in the wake of new technologies and tactics being used by the Germanians, namely heavy aerial bombings and blitzkrieg combined arms assaults.
  • Episode 7 demonstrates that even with Izetta's great abilities, it doesn't change the fact she can get overwhelmed when there are a fair number of enemies with more advanced technology to combat her.
• Japan Sinks: Ayumu initially powers through the leg injury she suffers in the first episode and largely ignores it afterwards. The infection visibly grows worse as the series progresses. By the end of the series, leaving it untreated and exposed for so long results in the infection reaching the bone, so her lower leg has to be amputated upon rescue.
• Karate Shoukoushi Kohinata Minoru: The sequel Karate Shoukoushi Monogatari takes a shot at martial arts masters humiliating and expelling unworthy students. The Reinan High Judo Club captain had the club harass a member into quitting, because the captain didn't think the harassed student had potential. Unlike most works where such actions are acceptable, the student immediately filed a complaint to the Student Council, forcing the captain to transfer away.
• Kengan Ashura:
  • Kiryu has a dramatic reality check in the Kengan Annihilation Tournament. Despite having an unresolved rivalry with Ohma, he loses handily in the second round to the fundamentally superior Gensai Kuroki, not in an epic grudge match in the finals to Ohma. Kiryu's loss is also quite telling: at the climax of his battle with Gensai, he creates a new martial arts technique mid-combat, using his Rakshasa's Palm in a fashion he's never done before. In most such stories, this kind of on-the-fly, do-or-die stroke of inspiration would confirm his victory and increase the tension for when he enters his next bout with a new weapon in his arsenal. However, Gensai blocks the move and follows up by finishing Kiryu off, dismissing it as "improvisation"—in real life, trying to debut a move you've never so much as practiced in a fight against a skilled and resisting opponent is a good way to ensure it'll fail miserably.
  • In Omega, Haruo's still overweight despite training under Sekibayashi due to overeating on the meals he's given and occasionally slacking off to play video games. While Haruo has recovered his niceties and warrior spirit, he did spend years indulging in vices, and that will still take time for him to get over them regardless of his desire to improve himself.
  • Koga is The Protagonist, has The Gift for martial arts, and spent half a year intensely training to be ready for the Kengan vs Purgatory tournament. Except a few months of training isn't enough to get on the level of fighters who have years of experience under their belt. On top of this, he gets injured fighting against multiple armed opponents just a month before the tournament, which is not enough time to fully recover from multiple stab wounds and deep lacerations. Even Koga admits that he is both too injured and too inexperienced to participate and bows out of the tournament.
• Kill la Kill: In "I Will Wipe My Own Tears", Cadillac driver Gamagoori tries to intimidate his pursuers by spinning the steering wheel madly. The show's Rule of Cool does not come to save him in this moment; all he does is to cause his car to spin out and crash. Ryuko points out this is something a novice driver like him should've expected.
• KonoSuba: The heroes beat Verdia and saved the town, but in doing so caused so much collateral damage that the reward is basically taken away right as they get it. Sure they saved the place, but essentially flooding a town is going to cause massive amounts of structural damage, and someone has to pay for it.
• In Let's Make a Mug Too, the main character prepares to enter a ceramic art contest, over the course of several episodes. An entire episode revolves around her finding an original idea for her art piece: a ceramic zabuton seat—a concept she's very proud of, despite the skepticism of those around her. Surely her determination and originality will win her first place! ...except not; in the end, she doesn't win first place, or indeed any place, instead just getting a participation prize. For all her effort, she is a beginner competing against many more experienced artists. As for the ceramic zabuton, turns out it's completely impractical, and it shatters into pieces the moment someone heavier sits on it. That said, this being a feel-good slice-of-life series, the moral is that the participation and having fun with your friends is more important than being stunningly successful.
• Lupin III: Part II: In one episode, Lupin steals a 200-year-old bottle of wine commissioned by Napoleon. When the gang opens it and has a sip, they immediately spit it out in disgust, because the wine has turned to vinegar. As Lupin and his crew find out the hard way, wine doesn't mature forever; the vast majority of wine should be drunk within five years of being bottled, and all wine should be drunk within fifty years. In short, the only value the wine had was the sentimentality behind it, which the gang has now rendered worthless.
• Maria no Danzai: Kowase attempts to cut his hand off to get out of the Drowning Pit but is unable to sever the bone.
• Odd Taxi: In the finale Shirakawa dives into the river to save Odokawa using her caporiea skills to break the window on his taxi. She succeeds and is seen swimming Odokawa back to shore seemingly no worse for wear, only to be revealed later she injured her foot in doing the act (likely due to the water resistance and having to put more energy in the kicks to compensate) and had to get it bandaged later.
• One Piece: In the Drum Island arc, after Wapol returns to said island after months of being out at sea having run away from Blackbeard's invasion, he attempts to use his ultimate weapon on Luffy, the Royal Drum Crown 7-Shot Bliking Cannon. Only to find, much to his shock that the cannon has not only become inoperable due to the harsh freezing condition of the Drum Rockies^note The reason why this happened could be considered an example in and of itself. While the weapon was stored inside the abandoned castle, Chopper, who's squatting there along with his mentor Dr. Kureha, left the front door open because of a bird nest above the door, meaning that the main hall is as cold as the outside, but birds have made nests within its barrels. Harsh temperatures and a lack of care will inevitably cause weapons to break down and become unusable after a time.
• Oshi no Ko: An early arc focuses on Aqua trying to save the floundering TV series, Sweet Today, in order to help the career of the talented but out-of-fashion Former Child Star Kana. Through a bit of Enforced Method Acting and clever techniques, the last episode of the show is its best, managing to coax a good performance out of untalented model Melt and put Kana's skills, which she had long been holding back, on full display. In most stories, this would probably then lead to Kana having a Career Resurrection as everyone realizes invokedShe Really Can Act. However, it then turns out that by this point, the damage has already been done: nobody was really watching the show anymore, except for dedicated fans of the actors and source material and people looking for Snark Bait. While the few remaining viewers do note the episode to be surprisingly good, they're not nearly big enough of a demographic to turn Kana's career around (though she does at least come out with her dignity intact), and the show's cancellation is announced not long after. As the page for Took the Bad Film Seriously will show you, a few well-performed scenes are rarely enough to save the public image of a work that's otherwise viewed as schlock.
• Pokémon the Series: In the TV special "Distant Blue Sky" (a sequel episode to Pokémon: I Choose You! continuity), Team Rocket captures Ash's Pikachu and, when confronted by Ash, starts their In the Name of the Moon motto as usual. However, Talking Is a Free Action is not played straight. By the time they finished their introduction, Ash already walked past them and rescued his Pikachu, scoring a very easy win. Considering the famous Strictly Formula in the main TV series, it's a genuinely surprising moment.
• Pretty Cure:
  • A similar thing happens in the first of Poisony's episodes in Futari wa Pretty Cure. Normally, when the girls transform, the villain stands there and lets them do it. However, Poisony simply runs off while they do so.
• Psycho Armor Govarian: When Zeku Alba summons children with psychic powers from all over the world to his base to combat the Alien Invasion, he sends psychic messages to them to come to his base. While some of these children are orphans, some of them aren't, and later some angry parents demand to know what the hell he's doing to their kids.
• Slam Dunk: The national tournament arc's Anti-Climax conclusion. After the basketball team Shohoku went through hell to beat the reigning champion against all odds, it immediately loses in the next round off-screen and is kicked out of the tournament. It is because the team took so much stress and damage from taking down said champ (resulting in Sakuragi suffering life-changing injury and being forced to retire) that they were in no condition to do it again in another match. As amazing as Shohoku was, without any backup members to fill their blank, even they ran out of luck.
• Sonic X: In "Unfair Ball", Sonic and company play in a baseball game. After Chuck hits a ball over the fence, Sonic uses his Super-Speed to catch the home run ball outside the fence. However, to Sonic's dismay and Eggman's delight, the rules of baseball mean that Chuck's hit is still a home run, and Sonic catching the ball was functionally useless.
• SPY×FAMILY:
  • After the young boy Ken gets saved from drowning, the adults around him wonder why nobody noticed because they were a stone's throw away from him. Loid rightfully points out that drowning is much quieter than one thinks, as the victim's mouth is filled with water and his injured leg meant he couldn't swim up or splash around, so it's not surprising they didn't realize anything was going on.
  • Chapter 99 shows a young Martha writing a letter to Henry, asking him to meet her at Berlint train station to see her off before she heads to her next military mission. It immediately cuts to her supervisors reading her letter before agreeing to send it off and tells another to 'redact the hell out of it', as they put it, as she's writing sensitive itinerary information, without any code so anyone getting their hands on it knows her exact location (be they Westalis spies or other never-do-wells), and sending it to a civilian. In a similar vein, Henry notes that her letter was so severely redacted, it was practically incomprehensible.
• ST☆R: Strike it Rich: Works by Yabako Sandrovich (and fighting manga in general) tend to play Hollywood Healing very straight; if a character is given any amount of recovery time, they can fight just as well as ever, at most being a bit impeded by needing to power through their pain. This makes it a genuine surprise when after four fighters in the main cast battled each other in a brutal tournament that left some of them with broken bones, three of them remain too injured to fight in an upcoming face-off with a rival organization, even with a month of intervening time.
• Strawberry Fields Once Again
  • Akira Kouno in an alternative timeline is an intelligent and hard-working young woman who manages to overcome being rendered a paraplegic in an accident to achieve her dream job in Japan(a country that is not very accommodating for those with disabilities). However, she's forced to quit after a year because her condition is worsening and the painkillers she relies on are no longer effective, a tragic but realistic outcome to a story of someone overcoming a disability.
  • In this series, time travel involves having the traveler go back to a point in their life they've lived, and ends up as the age they were at the time. As such, not only is Ruri, who made a time machine unable to prevent his and Akira's parents from getting married(something that happened before the traveler was born), but Sumire is unable to prevent her parents' deaths, since it happened while she was a small child. Sumire would have been too young to do anything to impact the situation, even if she had her older self's memories and knowledge.
• In The Summer You Were There, since Kaori is terminally ill and goes into critical condition at the end of Chapter 30 out of 32, one might imagine that she and her girlfriend will have an emotional goodbye scene before Kaori passes on, since the chapter ends with Shizuku rushing to the hospital, but that doesn't happen. Kaori briefly regains consciousness the following day, long enough for Shizuku to thank her for everything she's done, then passes away that night, while Shizuku is asleep. Not only does her death happen at a rather late hour, but Shizuku doesn't have visitation rights due to not being Kaori's family.
• Tenchi Muyo!: Ryoko and Ayeka's emerging rivalry wrecks an old-fashioned hot springs resort for a silly gag. Five episodes later, the gang returns to the resort to find it's still a complete disaster. The elderly owner forces the others (sans Sasami and Washu) to fix the mess, as only a few months have passed since then.
• Tomorrow's Joe shows that boxing can be a very dangerous sport:
  • For his fight with Joe, a Bantamweight, Rikishi, being a much heavier featherweight, needed to drop a lot of weight, forcing himself into a starvation diet that, combined with a punch on the temple followed by hitting the ring rope in the same place immediately after, ended up causing his death. It's openly said that, without the diet, Rikishi could have survived, but he was weakened enough that the paramedics could only pronounce him dead.
  • Even if your life isn't cut as short as Rikishi's was, continuing to box over a long time can still be detrimental to one's health and longevity, as continued head trauma may result in "punch-drunk syndrome", and two, possibly three boxers suffer from it: Carlos Rivera gets hit by Joe hard enough that during their second match he suddenly starts fouling horribly only to forget what he just did as soon as he calms down, a few days later his legs suddenly give out for a moment while he's walking up a plane's access stairs (causing a horrified reaction from his manager), and soon after Mendoza hits him so hard that by the time Carlos reappears he can barely understand where he is or even walk; later Joe starts showing symptoms himself, first being unable to keep time or draw in a straight line but in time he shows diminished impulse control, motor disfunction, and increasingly severe blindness (and completely loses all sight in one eye during his fight with Mendoza); and possibly Jose Mendoza himself, who had rarely ever been hit before his fateful fight with Joe, but in that fight he's hurt hard enough he too loses it for a moment, and at the end his hair has gone completely white and he generally looks in his seventies from the sheer trauma of the fight.
• At the start of Tonari no Yōkai-san, an elderly cat becomes a nekomata, gaining the ability to speak and reason. The humans who were his owners exclaim in joy and wonder and accept him immediately as part of their family. Then in his next scene, he has to fill out a number of forms◊ related to his "rebirth" as a Youkai, including something to do with health insurance. Since this is a setting where Youkai are almost all benign and fully integrated into human society, and it's set in the modern day, the birth of a new person requires quite a bit of paperwork and documentation.
• In Toriko, the titular character is a Gourmet Hunter who goes on expeditions to recover foods from exotic locales, while being accompanied by the chef Komatsu who's interested in seeing the foods he works with in the wild. After several such trips, one arc opens with a mention that Komatsu won't be tagging along this time, as the expeditions may be Toriko's job but Komatsu has been using his vacation days and thanks to the previous trips he's run out.
• Unico: Awakening: Venus eventually notices West Wind constantly being late for summons due to having to ferry Unico around as well as how Unico's power keeps flaring up. As such, she becomes suspicious of West Wind and sends Night Wind to spy on her and soon learns of Unico's survival. An employer is going to quickly take note and act on such strange behavior.
• Wandering Son 1970: The story begins when a vengeful nurse switches two babies because of a grudge against one of the families. It ends when she's jailed for deliberately abusing her power.
• In World Trigger, Osamu is aware that he is the weakest link on his team, so he spends a week improving his combat skills with some of Border's best agents and banks on the results of his intensive training to help his team win the next match. Instead of being treated to the payoff that usually follows a shonen training arc, his misplaced confidence makes him less cautious to his surroundings, resulting in him and his team being defeated horribly. Osamu learns the hard way that hard work takes years to bear fruit and rival characters also train hard, so catching up to their level in the time frame he is gunning for (roughly a month) is impossible for someone with no talent like him. He is told that focusing on developing strategies and learning support skills instead would be a more reasonable and practical goal to strive for at the moment.
• Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches: When Yamada asks Takuma to give him the names of the other witches in his group, he refuses to do so. Not because of his perpetually secretive personality but because of the Japanese privacy protection act.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • In the KC Grand Prix anime filler arc, the Arc Villain Siegfried unleashes a devastating virus on Kaibacorp's servers. Yugi manages to stop the virus, but Siegfried is content that his virus has already destroyed most of Kaibacorp's data. Kaiba promptly reveals how he just restored the destroyed data from a backup server.
  • In Battle City, Jounouchi is set to duel Rishid on the Kaibacorp blimp. Uniquely, this fight is the only time the series realistically shows the weather at such altitudes. Because they're at least several thousand feet in the air and high winds are frequent, Jounouchi can barely keep his balance at first and almost loses his cards.
  • The franchise generally plays The Magic Poker Equation straight as an arrow, which makes it genuinely surprising in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's when redeemed villain Aporia ends up in a situation where he has to draw one specific card with a one in thirty-four chance of doing so or lose the game, announces that he has complete faith in himself and trusts his deck, and... doesn't draw that card.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V:
    • Various characters duel against Z-ARC, with others taking the place of previous fallen members. At the beginning of the duel, Z-ARC activates two cards that increase his Life Points by damage he would otherwise receive. One of Jack's monsters launches an attack on Z-ARC... and that happens. Jack wasn't there when it happened, so there's no way he would have known, unlike other duels in the franchise where characters who arrive late are somehow able to figure out what's going on. Lampshaded by Z-ARC in the English dub.
      Z-ARC: Maybe if you showed up for class on time, you would've known that my Supreme King Gate Zero's Pendulum ability protects me from any damage. In fact, my Supreme King Gate Infinity converts all that damage into Life Points for me. Too bad all your buddies didn't fill you in!
    • In episode 19, Nico stands on his seat on the bus while talking to Yuya. When the bus stops, he is, of course, knocked off before the camera cuts to a sign that asks people to sit properly in their seats.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS: In episode 8, When Akira tries to follow Aoi into the emergency room, a nurse holds him back because he's not allowed.
• Yuri!!! on Ice:
  • Despite being able to mimic Victor's impressive programs, Yuri is hampered by his tendency to comfort eat. In most sports anime, that would be a cute quirk... but Yuri isn't a rookie teenager, he's a professional athlete and his food preferences count against him, even though it's fairly mundane rather than obviously unhealthy.
  • Yurio is set up as Yuri's big Rival in the first episode. He even has all of the hallmarks of a typical sports anime rival: a Teen Genius, the best skater in the junior division, a connection to the main cast, and even a bit of a temper problem. You think that the story would be about them fighting neck-and-neck against each other... but after Episode 3, they don't meet in competition again until the Rostelecom Cup. Both Yuris have very different paths to follow in their competition season, meaning that they don't see each other often, and Yuri doesn't really see Yurio as a rival at all. Until Episode 8, the most one hears about the other is from the news.

• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • In one strip Calvin tries to fly with paper feathers on his arms, asking Hobbes to throw him off a cliff to do so. He ends up plummeting into the cliff below, injuring himself.
  • Another strip has Calvin and Hobbes try to throw a giant rock in a lake, in the hopes of it sprouting up fish from the lake for them to catch. All it does is splash water from the lake onto them instead.
  • In the winter strips, Calvin and Hobbes are often seen running a tobbogan down snowy hills. As Calvin seldom steers when riding one, many strips end with the duo either hitting trees or falling off cliffsides in order to stop.

Crossovers

• Boldores and Boomsticks (Pokémon & RWBY):
  • When trying to reach the lab floor in the Aether Foundation's building in the middle of a Grimm attack, Lillie has the idea of using the air vents - but she soon finds herself on her own, because neither Team RWBY nor her brother Gladion are small enough to fit (and Lillie notes that she's already too big for several of the vents), and the only Pokémon that could follow her quickly gets lost in the maze of vents.
  • After defecting from Aether Foundation, Faba boasts to Salem that his virus will have completely wiped their database and they won't be capable of conducting any more wormhole experiments as he now has the only copy of their experimental data. The scene cuts away to Wicke learning that the database has indeed been wiped beyond recovery, with the IT worker having no idea what program Faba used to do it. However, he's already uploading from their offsite backups and will be finished in a couple hours with only the last few hours of data missing. Wicke ponders how Faba failed to realize they'd have backup databases in case anything happened.
• Contract Labor: Without Steel Eardrums like most fiction, one of the mercenaries on Seta's dig becomes temporarily deaf from firing his rifle inside a cave.
• Cursed Blood (My Hero Academia & Zombie Land Saga): In the first chapter, Izuku tries to act as a Bullet Proof Human Shield, only for the bullets to go right through him and into the girl he was protecting.
• Cyberpunk Edgerunners: The Rebel Path (Cyberpunk 2077 & Cyberpunk: Edgerunners): At one point, Adrian is kidnapped, and his car is stolen by Scavengers and is in the process of being gutted for parts by the time he's able to break free and turn the tables on his captors. He decides to have some modifications made to the vehicle while it is in the process of being repaired to make it faster and tougher. This takes a full month and a half — no instant repair-jobs here.
• Diving for Justice, Freedom and Managed Demoncracy (Undertale Yellow & Helldivers): Clover’s first death is caused by him firing his gun straight into the air and into the ceiling of the Dark Ruins. This causes the ceiling directly above him to fall, and since his leg is stuck in the poorly-maintained bridge, he ends up getting crushed.
• Exodus (Big Hero 6 & Worm): Although Taylor surviving two point-blank headshots to the back of her skull is nothing short of a miracle, her brain gets so messed up that she can't recognize basic human interactions, much less words and language. Similarly, spending the majority of her time recovering from the experience leaves her so physically weak she has to go through six months of physical therapy.
• Fate/Starry Night (Fate/Grand Order and Fate/stay night): At one point, Ritsuka has to fight his way through a crowd of people all out to capture or kill him. While his martial arts training lets him quickly trip up or knock away weaker opponents, he's soon dogpiled by the others who are comparable to him in size and build. He may be close to a Badass Normal, but that doesn't mean he can clear a room of people all working together to fight him on his own.
• Future Is Bright (Danny Phantom): Batman notes that many of the Doctors Fentons' actions throughout the series qualify as crimes, namely child endangerment, public endangerment, gross negligence, attempted assault with a deadly weapon (on a minor, their own son, no less) and opening a portal to another dimension in their basement (which Batman states is an act of supervillainy). Their crimes are enough for them to get locked up and put on trial, with there being little to no hope of acquittal. Plus, in the DCU, there are various laws that protect metahumans/non-human sapients, which means the Fentons could get slapped with committing the equivalent of hate crimes on top of everything else.
  Batman: The Doctors Fenton are being charged with persecution of non-human sapient beings, kidnapping with intent to torture, aggravated assault, attempted murder, gross criminal negligence, and felony public endangerment.
• A Ghost In A Strange Land (Fate/Grand Order and God of War Ragnarök): After being in a small coma and then having her legs be forcibly used by Shayton, Ritsuka's legs are a mess and is told to relax and refrain from heavy use of them. When Ritsuka thinks she's alright, she goes for a jog. The result being she cripples her legs further and resets her recovery time again. A good reminder that just because you feel alright, doesn't mean you are.
• History's Strongest Shinobi (Naruto & Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple): How Ino and Kiba are ultimately dealt with, is that Shikamaru and Tenten just involve the authorities after their assassination mission fails, at which point it's revealed that both the former were in Japan on a tourist visa, smuggled in illegal weapons and were using false identification. Naturally, they are arrested and set to be deported and the moment they get back to their countries of origin they're going to be prosecuted for their actions regardless of their ages.
• Invasion of Falls (Gravity Falls & Invader Zim): At one point, Zim performs a Super Window Jump, and ends up cutting himself on the resulting glass shards.
• J-WITCH Series (Jackie Chan Adventures & W.I.T.C.H.): The story features numerous brutal fights between the heroes and villains, with both sides typically recovering in time for their next encounter. Which makes it all the more surprising when Jade's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown of her leaves Nerissa in critical condition, the cunning sorceress confined to an animated bed and hooked on life support. Magic powers aside, she is still an old woman who sustained a severe beatdown from a much younger and stronger fighter.
• My Hero Academia Marvel-verse: Izuku tries to channel his inner Solid Snake and sneak past an Inner Demon using a cardboard box. He is promptly captured and held hostage.
• The Reaping of Hatsune Miku (Vocaloid & The World Ends with You): Ritsu attempts a Punch Catch against Momo during Day 6 of the last game of Journey. The narration describes a crack coming out of his arm, and he later shows pain when he has to use that hand while defending.
• Spider-Ninja:
  • In Chapter 23, Coulson tells Raphael and Spider-Ninja that there's a warrant out for Casey Jones' arrest, as his attacks on the Purple Dragons resulted in him being slapped with several charges of assault and battery. While vigilantism by itself isn't illegal in America, a vigilante can still be charged with any crimes they commit while acting as a vigilante. The only reason Casey didn't go to prison for assault was because SHIELD took him on as a street-level informant, giving him a second chance.
  • After he spends twelve hours out in the rain after getting no food or rest for over a day, Leonardo's immune system takes a beating and he gets sick.
  • After the Hamatos defeat the Shredder and SHIELD finally arrests him, they note that they can't charge him for attempted murder of the Hamato family because Petra and the Turtles don't legally exist. However, his other crimes of terrorism, assault with a deadly weapon, and theft can be proven, ensuring that he'll be locked up for a while.
  • In the sequel, Raphael is captured by the Brotherhood. He notes that Magneto enters/exits Raph's cell by bending the metal bars on the cell door. Thanks to an old science lesson from Donnie, he knows that bending metal makes it weaker and more brittle over time. Thus, he's able to use his strength to push the bars apart and escape.
  • During a Heroic Fire Rescue, Donatello runs into a burning building without any protective gear. He ends up with minor smoke inhalation and needs to spend the entire night on oxygen.
• Takamachi Nanoha of 2814: Upon hearing that Morgana is heading to Fuyuki City in Japan, the Justice League decides to send Flash and Wonder Woman ahead as reinforcements, with Flash noting his top speed can have them there in a few minutes. When we cut to them later, they're in another city entirely asking for directions, since the man has never been to Japan before, and thus has no idea where Fuyuki is and how to get there. Even using the directions proves difficult since all the signs are in Japanese, which he can't read, and the two end up being the last to arrive.
• Taylor: Hero of Legacy!: Most of the Merchants' capes attack a police station while New Wave happens to be there attending a seminar. After the attackers are all captured, Amy gets tired of Skidmark's constant curse-laden threats and kicks him in the mouth, which is initially treated as a badass moment. The next chapter reveals she was immediately arrested for assaulting a defenseless prisoner, though the District Attorney refrained from filing any charges.
• Turnabout Communication: During the trial, after Athena exposes the contradictions in her testimony, Nakanaka tries to invoke A Glass in the Hand. Rather than looking badass, all she does is hurt her hand and scream in pain because Soft Glass isn't in effect, forcing Onemine to take her to the bathroom and use her first-aid kit to patch her hand.
• In the A Certain Magical Index/Puella Magi Madoka Magica crossover Walpurgisnaught, Touma picks up one of Homura's guns and uses it. Since he had never handled a gun before, the noise hurts his ears, and the recoil hurts his arm.

Animorphs

• A conceit of the Animorphs books is that the Animorphs refuse to share their last names and some other details to keep their enemies from knowing who they are, but provide enough detail that if said books had been published in-universe they would have been found out immediately. The hosts of Sporadic Phantoms attempt a true crime-style deep dive on the cultlike organization The Sharing. Most of the first season has the Running Gag of their being anonymous due to not sharing their last names. And generally it seems from how other characters talks about it that this is a setting where not using last names makes someone impossible to identify using the Internet. However, they are putting out their podcast and their skepticism about the Sharing on a monthly basis in-universe, and nothing stops members of the Sharing from listening. Given that they and some of their family members join it, and that they don't change their voices or any other details, going without surnames is a Paper-Thin Disguise at best. When the Sharing finally intervenes they mock the Phantoms for thinking they'd been at all anonymous.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

• The Blood of the Covenant: When Aang takes his new friends to the Southern Air Temple, Kallik faints due to the altitude. Aang is horrified and quickly explains that the monks used to warn him about bringing visitors, as the thinner air can make some people sick.

Bokurano

• Bokurano: One More Time: The pilots are drafted into the army and forced to undergo the same training as U.S. Marine Corps recruits. This includes Kana, a 13-year-old girl who the story has yet to present as anything but an ordinary human beyond her Shard. The first week of training alone leaves her so exhausted and delirious that she collapses in the middle of her Initial Strength Test and fails to complete it.

Danganronpa

• Danganronpa: Despair Time: As 16 talented students were trapped in a killing game, one of them, Arturo Giles, happens to be the Ultimate Cosmetic Surgeon. Since he’s had experience in the medical field, the students rely on him to take care of their medical emergencies such as bandaging their injuries, and making autopsies for the murder cases. However, Arturo is only a cosmetic surgeon, and while he may have medical experience, he doesn’t have the proper skill of performing an autopsy, thus messing up the class trials. As the students call him out for his lack of skill, he rants at the students for mocking his talent and calls them out for relying too heavily on him.
• Happens twice in Chapter 5 of Danganronpa: Memento Mori:
  • Madoka attempts to create an improvised explosive device to try and murder Ayane, with no prior bomb-making expertise, no instructions, and while in the throes of a Mushroom Samba. Instant Expert does not apply here, and the bomb fails to go off.
  • Later on, despite Madoka's attempt to kill her, Ayane attempts to save her life after she gets attacked herself via a Shot to the Heart. As Ayane is a prosecutor, not a trained medical professional (and even they would discourage stabbing someone in the heart with a giant needle), she not only fails to revive Madoka, but ends up killing her by mistake.
• A Student Out of Time: The death of Kana Ise. When shot in the abdomen by a hollow-point round, Only a Flesh Wound is absolutely not in effect: she loses a lot of blood and has to have her ruined intestines replaced, which takes time and weakens their body enough for septicemia to set in. Despite the best efforts of everyone at the hospital, Kana has very little chance of survival and dies when the infection reaches her lungs.

Genshin Impact

• God of Reflections:
  • Abusing your position and authority within a government institution for your own personal reasons can be considered gross insubordination and an illegal power play that will result in the instigator getting in a lot of trouble. When Sharif tries to shut down Zubayr Theatre based off his own authority, Alhaitham proceeds to rescind both the debate and the demolition because both were done without proper authorization from the Akademiya. Not to mention that failure for the Akademiya to uphold their own laws and to allow their own subordinates to run amok and do whatever they want will send the message that the Akademiya cannot control their own people or that they don't care what said people do, causing further distrust between the common citizentry and the government. As Alhaitham mentions to Nilou later when she catches up with him, it is the government who should be enforcing their own laws and punishing those who choose to abuse their authority and power; it should not be up to the people themselves to be fighting for their rights and against any injustice they face from the institution that is supposed to protect them.
  • When the body of the scholar that a Fatui agent impersonated is found buried in the rose garden of one of the Birmarstan suppliers with the cause of death being poison based off the dead animals that were found in the area, there is a lot of collateral damage to deal with in the aftermath. Alhaitham has to order that anything currently growing in the gardens the body was found in to be destroyed as well as the soil, water and anything grown and harvested in the last two months from the area to be tested. The Birmanstan also has to check their supplies to ensure that nothing has been contaminated.

Hellaverse

• Revelation (Hellaverse): The end of chapter 6 has Octavia shot in the leg while escaping the Guard and her injury averts Just a Flesh Wound. Her wound is severe enough that she would've bled out or died of an infection had Moxxie not managed to get her to a hospital for treatment.
• Shadows Over Hell: While the body armor I.M.P. wear during their attack on the cult does save their lives on multiple occasions, the blunt trauma by feel from the impact of the bullets, leaves their bodies battered and bruised.

Ice Age

• An Eye for an Eye: In line with the Original Flavor tone.
  • While Manny, Sid, and Diego successfully returned Roshan to his family, they still wasted many days going in the opposite direction in the wake of the incoming ice age, and the story opens with them being in a rush to catch up with the other migrating animals as the blizzards keep getting worse and more frequent, while Diego is also in poor shape after getting badly wounded by Soto and struggles to keep up.
  • Unlike in The Meltdown, where all the animals can swim in icy water without any ill effects, here, it's realistically shown as quite dangerous, with any character falling into water having to quickly leave it or they'll soon die from hypothermia. Diego almost does die from hypothermia after being sent down the river at the beginning but gets rescued by Audrey.
  • Early on, Diego and Audrey stumble upon a pair of Doedicurus buried in the snow, stragglers who dropped from exhaustion and froze to death while on the migration. The former note the cruel irony of how the giant armadillos' massive shell, which leaves them impervious to predators, is now a deadly handicap by making them too slow and cumbersome for the long migration.

Infinite Stratos

• IS: Unleashed Insanity:
  • After the multiple attacks he's suffered (both from Phantom Task and from his Unwanted Harem), Ichika has developed a serious case of PTSD.
  • Chifuyu chooses to keep the actions of Ichika's Unwanted Harem secret, expecting things to blow over. When Ichika runs out in the middle of the night and Yamada comes clean, Chifuyu gets suspended: as the Academy headmaster points out, by covering things up, Chifuyu instead prevented other teachers from potentially helping Ichika with his situation and avoid the entire mess. Yamada also gets suspended since she also covered things, but since she was the one that revealed the problem, she's only suspended for a week.
    • Similarly, the girls are also suspended for their actions. Attacking someone outside of the training grounds might look funny, but they were still hurting a classmate - the fact that their target is the only man in the world capable of using an IS, and that they were doing it out of jealousy, only adds to how bad the girls look.

Invader Zim

• The New Adventures of Invader Zim: In the fifth entry of the Mature Edition, Viera tries using the air vent to sneak into the Hi Skool in order to avoid risking being seen entering naked, but she has difficulty squeezing through, complaining that TV and movies make it look so easy.
• Ruby Pair: In "Heist of Doom", the master thief known as the Grey Panda tries to go swimming in the piles of gold stored in the Duke of Smook's vault, specifically citing Scrooge McDuck as an inspiration. The density of the gold means that he's left severely injured in the attempt, his entry swan-dive breaking multiple bones in the process.
  Grey Panda: The cartoon duck lied to me!

Jackie Chan Adventures

• Jackie Chan Adventures: Olympian Journey: Rachel, when fleeing Eros Drew's minions, finds herself too large to fit in an Air-Vent Passageway. She has to go up to the rafters, and even the below-average Jade finds it a tight squeeze.

Kim Possible

• At the Centerfold of the Storm:
  • When GJ cracks open Henchco.'s mainframe, the dirty secrets aren't all in one digital bundle. It's a sprawling mass of data, and GJ is swamped trying to process it all.
  • The fic reveals the fate of Team Go's parents: They died, aka, what normally happens when one takes a meteor with enough force to blow up a treehouse.

Miraculous Ladybug

• Miraculous Alliance: Shortly after they start dating, Adrien and Marinette try making out in a broom closet like in the movies... Only to find it too cramped and cluttered to do more than deliver each other Amusing Injuries.
  Adrien: This was a bad idea. All those movies lied to me. Broom closets are not good for making out.
• A Small but Stubborn Fire: Even though Marinette is Sabine's daughter (and still a child), doctor-patient confidentiality bars Dr. Zhu from informing her of what happened during their therapy session that caused Marinette to have a panic attack.

My Hero Academia

• Ignited Spark: Nejire constantly hitting her head in the battle trial results in her getting a concussion.
• Quirk: Magical Girl Mascot: At I-Island, a group consisting of Tsuyu, Toru, Mina and some Pro Heroes go through the air vents. However, unlike most media, which treat this as a good way to move around sneakily, the noise they make climbing through the vents gives them away.

My-HiME

• Oneesama: In a harrowing subversion, Miss Maria treats Shizuru giving a Skinship Grope to Natsuki as severe sexual harassment, and Shizuru risks expulsion.

My Little Pony

• Pinkamina in Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie tries to lick a knife dramatically. Because she isn't paying attention to the angle, she ends up slicing her tongue.
• This Equestria Girls fan-comic has the girls changing in the locker room. Applejack opens her locker to find Principal Molestia inside with a camera, nightvision goggles and a nosebleed. Rather than being Played for Laughs as Molestia tends to be, the comic's last panel sees her arrested.
• Fall of Starfleet, Rebirth of Friendship: While boarding Serpentari, The Umbra Circle mugs a group of Starfleet soldiers for their uniforms. However, the uniforms they acquire do not fit them and they have to repeat this method a few times before everyone gets a uniform that fits them.
• The Lost Element: An alarming example occurs during "Homo Pinkius" where Pinkie Pie tries to ice skate while stuck in a human form and falls through thin ice during a pirouette. James even lampshades Pinkie's shtick by expecting her to pop back up while partially encased in a block of ice, but this is not the case as she surfaces while flailing and shrieking in pain from the intense cold, forcing James to act quickly to save her from suffering an icy fate.
• Marionettes: The Traintop Battle shows how the extreme wind makes even moving on top of a train difficult, which most works don't even consider.
• Spectacular Seven: During the Snowball Fight in Volume II, Sunset tries dashing across the snow and ice. Unlike most works where such a thing is a fun pastime, she slips and falls almost instantly.

The Owl House

• Evil Luz: When the connection between Hunter and his hand is unexpectedly stunted, Luz decides to go to the human realm to acquire more military-grade weaponry after Willow once again denies her the option to destroy the hand. Needless to say, Luz is quickly hit by reality when the cops show up to arrest her. Luckily for her, by then Manny and Vee had taken over the US government by having the latter masquerade as the president, subverting the trope and giving Luz easy access to the military.

Pokémon

• In Pokemon: Shadow of Time, a man is nearly deafened when he fires a loud gun in an enclosed space, averting the conventional trope of Steel Eardrums.
• In The Road to be a Pokemon Master, Ash, Gary, and Serena steal some Team Rocket uniforms to infiltrate the Rocket-occupied Silph co. At first, it seems that the deception worked until Proton reveals they knew about them all along. Uniform or not, Ash, Gary, and Serena still are and look like eleven-year-olds. The youngest Rocket grunts are at the very least in their late teens.
• The Sun Soul: A bug catcher pulls out a knife in his leg, which this fic portrays more accurately than most fiction. Blood gushes out immediately since the blade had sliced the femoral artery, and keeping it in was the only thing holding the bleeding.
• Traveler: In a clean aversion of Convection, Schmonvection, Ash develops breathing problems after challenging Moltres atop Mt. Ember. Volcanoes pump out torrents of smoke and toxins, and most works don't even consider how unsafe they'd be to inhale.

Psychonauts

• Later, Traitor: When Pepper finally takes her puppet Sally off her hand in Chapter 31, she isn't able to move it. It turns out that keeping your hand locked in a certain position inside a hunk of wood for a few years isn't exactly healthy for its bone structure.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

• The Cat, the Sorcerer, and the Island: After Micah is injured, he and Catra try to treat the wound, but since neither of them are medics and lack any proper supplies, it winds up getting infected and leaving him out of commission for several days.

Sonic the Hedgehog

• My Arms Are Blue!: During a spice-eating contest, Sonic attempts to cool his mouth with water. He learns the hard way that this just makes the pain worse.

Star Wars

• The Gray Jedi Series: When Zari falls out of the Vindicator, then uses the Force to launch herself back up, she falls short, and Des tries to catch her, but only to be pulled down with her.
  Samala: Did you forget how physics works?

Teen Titans (2003)

• Raccoon (link): Robin decides to finally take off his domino mask and reveal his whole face to the rest of his team. They burst out laughing because, as it turns out, always wearing a mask has left him with severely contrasting tan lines on his face.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

• Like Father Like Son (Rise of the TMNT): In chapter 2, Draxum flings Leo and he collides into a metal billboard. This leaves him noticeably stunned and the next chapter outright confirms he has a concussion from it.
• Shards of a Memory: When ambushing April, Karai hits her in the head hard enough to crack open her head and knock her out. When she wakes up in a Bradford dojo some time later, April is disoriented and can't speak properly until Karai uses Applied Phlebotinum to to heal the injury.
• Snow Blind: During a rooftop fight, Donatello is stabbed in the side. After the Nightwatcher kidnaps him and takes him somewhere safe to treat the injury, Donatello passes out from blood loss.

Tolkien's Legendarium

• The very first Sue in The Game of the Gods prepares to enter Middle Earth, recites a "spell" that will open a portal there, then takes a running leap towards her television. She ends up simply crashing headfirst through the screen and dies of a massive head wound.

Total Drama

• She's Not So Famous: After triumphantly reclaiming her camera from Chris, Millie tries to escape back out through the vent like Annie did... but she lacks Annie's height and upper body strength, so she can't jump up there by herself and gets accosted by security.
• Total Drama All-Stars Rewrite: "Sundae Muddy Sundae", after Owen got his bowl of ice cream from the snowy cliff, he belly slides down the slope to the next course. Later, when he arrives to the swamp, he’s completely blue and shivering.
  Gwen: (smirks) Well that’s what happens when you try sliding belly-first on a snowy cliff.
  Owen: EXCUSE ME FOR LIVING!!!
• Total Drama Pahkitew Island Rewrite: In "Little Miss Pahkitew", each team’s paegant queens had to ride wild bison’s on a stadium, and their opposing teams had to do anything in their power to knock the player off. When Scarlett was up, Team Maskwak painted the iron gates red, hoping to provoke the bull, and make Scarlett lose her balance. But instead of charging at the wall, the bison casually trots away without any interest, disappointing the team. Scarlett informs the viewers the misconception behind this trope.
  Scarlett: The notion that bulls are agitated by the color red is a complete and utter myth. It's actually the shaking of the red cape that irritates them. Common knowledge really.
• Total Drama Voyage: As Team Heather learns the hard way in "Food Disservice", the cooking skills Mike picked up from Manitoba may be good for wilderness survival, but don't translate well to refined restaurant dining.

Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

• Victoria Falls:
  • The Victorian government's attempts to force their population into subsistence farming results in massive die-offs from starvation, as most people are not equipped to grow their own food.
  • Turns out Lind's theories of "Fourth Generation Warfare", focusing on light infantry, extreme decentralization, and living off the land, doesn't stand up to an artillery-supported, well-organized, and logistically-sound force a.k.a. a properly-led "third generation" military.
  • While the air force of Victoria is superior due to being their top priority, they are still beatable because they use horrible tactics like sticking in close formation, which backfire the moment missiles that don't need direct hits are shot at their positions. Also, their neglect of navy allows the Commonwealth to dominate naval warfare, taking over lakes and ports, and drawing out the precious Victorian planes.
  • It's made abundantly clear that a polity like Victoria would easily collapse on itself if its traits were applied in reality. The only reason Victoria is still functioning is because Russia keeps propping it up.
  • Even though the Tsar himself cannot be defeated by the Commonwealth, old age can kill him and make Russia less dangerous.

Worm

• Here Comes the New Boss: In 7.1, an Empire goon tries to turn a glass beer bottle into a weapon by breaking it. While great in theory, the bottle completely shatters and shreds his hand. He's left bleeding out on the floor as a result.

Yu-Gi-Oh!

• Being Dead Ain't Easy: Yami Bakura offers Kaiba a Deal with the Devil: he helps Joey in exchange for control of Kaiba's company. Since he held up his end of the bargain, Yami Bakura successfully becomes CEO of KaibaCorp. However, since his host has no idea what's going on and neither of them knows how to run a company, Yami Bakura doesn't enjoy it as much as he thinks he would, and gives it back.
• A Mother's Touch:
  • Reiji and Sylvio learn the hard way that being in a shounen anime where everything depends on how you play cards does not save you if you break the law. Yoko brings up how the two broke multiple laws just for Yuya's cards and she and Shuzo prepare lawsuits for all of their crimes.
  • Yuri's plan to kidnap Yuzu hits a snag when Yoko takes her away from him as he realizes he has no idea how to navigate Maiami City. It turns out kidnappings only work if you have a general layout of the location in mind, not to mention that he doesn't have a way to move around the city.

• 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure: Cruella's car, which was somehow rebuilt after being totaled in the first movie's climactic Chase Scene, is barely holding itself together regardless and falls apart around her as she drives down the street. She herself barely avoided jail time after her past crimes, being on probation and a restraining order when she first appears.
• In Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation, when an asteroid was heading straight for Big City, Cricket had to set on a tractor beam to attract the asteroid away from Earth, but while doing that, the asteroid is now heading towards the Space Hotel. So Colleen tries to fix the situation by deactivating the tractor beam, but the asteroid is still heading towards the hotel.
  Colleen: Oh right, inertia.
• Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation: When he's fully explaining to Christy about his plan to confront True Heart and Noble Heart, Dark Heart stands up and boasts that then there'll be nobody left to stop him... problem is, he does his grandstanding in the middle of a boat on the camp's lake, and this action proceeds to upset the boat badly enough that Dark Heart stumbles and falls out, hitting his head on the boat's side, and he would have drowned right there if Christy hadn't jumped in to save him.
  • What's more, Dark Heart does this while he's a human boy. Now normally, this wouldn't happen to a smoke of darkness. But a human? He's not so lucky.
• The Chipmunk Adventure:
  • Neither the Chipmunks or the Chipettes have the slightest idea how to operate a hot-air balloon, causing them to almost wreck the mansion grounds where the race starts as the balloons fly out of control and smack into everything. They do get the hang of it surprisingly quick, but otherwise there wouldn't be a movie at all.
  • The two Mooks who follow the respective trios across the world and try to stop them from delivering the hidden diamonds end up looking like complete idiots to their boss Jamal, since they (again, for plot reasons) can't even outwit a bunch of children, and Jamal recruits more competent help who capture the Chipettes within a few scenes.
• Eiga Tamagotchi: Himitsu no Otodoke Dai Sakusen!: Kuchipatchi eats a banana and throws the peel onto the road, with Memetchi hoping it will slip up the claw arm vehicle that is chasing after the package Mametchi and his friends are delivering. The claw arm vehicle drives over it with no problems. Banana peels aren't really slippery to a large vehicle like they could be to a person.
• An Extremely Goofy Movie: Goofy, suffering from Empty Nest Syndrome after Max leaves for college, gets distracted at work and causes an accident. While up to this point, Goofy's clumsy antics are usually Played for Laughs, this time, the antics kick off a set of Disaster Dominoes that end up destroying all the equipment. He ultimately gets fired due to the damage he caused.
• Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or the Bottom?: It quickly becomes apparent that Nazuna doesn't really have a plan for how she was intending to run away, and it goes about as poorly as you'd expect.
• A Greyhound of a Girl: Mary meets a Friendly Ghost named Tansey who asks her to pass a message to her declining Granny. However, her first attempt to pass along Tansey's message and telling her mother about meeting a woman nobody else can see leads her mother, Scarlett, to think Mary is having trouble processing her grief, and brings her to see a child psychologist.
• Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie: Big Bob's Beepers goes out of business due to the rise of cellphones and Big Bob's utter refusal to switch to selling cell phones, causing the Pataki family to move into the building it's sold at. This is Truth in Television for anyone who's owned a business, especially one focused on electronics.
• Kung Fu Panda 2: At the climax, Po loudly shouts a dramatic challenge to Shen, but given how high up and far away he is, Shen can't hear him well enough to understand him.
• My Father's Dragon: Early in the movie, Boris talks about how his brother Horatio told an old tortoise named Aratuah how to save the island so that the next one could ask him. However, dragons only come to Wild Island every 100 years, and he was mentioned to be old by the time Horatio came. By the time that it's Boris's turn to raise the island, it turns out that Aratuah has died from natural causes, leaving them lost on how to actually save the island.
• PAW Patrol: The Movie: After relocating to Adventure City, the Paw Patrol get their first call and roll out like in the show... only to immediately hit a Big Honking Traffic Jam due to it being rush hour, which wasn't a problem back in the much lessly-populated Adventure Bay. It takes some pointers and back-alley shortcuts from Liberty so they can reach the scene in time.
• Ralph Breaks the Internet: In the climax after Ralph calms down the insecurity virus, it vanishes and Ralph falls. JP Spamley tries to catch Ralph using his vehicle, but Ralph who weights a ton and is falling at a pretty fast speed, goes right through the floor of said vehicle.
• Ratatouille:
  • When Linguini reveals to the rest of the cooks that Rémy was the genius who enabled him to cook and asks them to continue working alongside him, every single one of them declines and immediately goes to the door, obviously thinking that Linguini is nuts. Only Colette decides to return, and only because she is the one who believes about Gusteau's motto the most and her emotional connection to Linguini.
  • In order to get the meal served to critic Anton Ego, the protagonists have to tie up a health inspector and use rats to cook the food. The restaurant gets shut down after the protagonists inevitably have to release him, alongside the Big Bad who they tied up alongside him.
• Recess: School's Out:
  • The villain of the film is the former principal of Third Street Elementary, who tried to ban recess back in The '60s. He created an outcry among parents and was fired by the superintendent within days because he had massively overstepped his authority.
  • TJ and Principal Prickly's attempt to sneak into the lunchroom at Third Street Elementary by stealing clothes from the guards and disgusing themselves as guards fails miserably as the guards instantly recognize that a preteen boy and a somewhat out-of-shape middle-aged man are not members of their crew.
• In The Sea Beast, Jacob gets ready to break his metallic spear on his thigh to signify that his days of hunting are over... only for the spear to remain unbroken, while his thigh gets into a much more painful state. It works in the climax, when he has a wooden spear.
• The Seventh Brother: A lost puppy lives with some rabbits for several months and seems to remain well-fed the whole time. In fact, the story runs almost entirely on "kid movie" logic for the most part, but near the end the rabbits have to find a way to bring the puppy back to human civilization because, as it turns out, dogs can't live on grass and carrots the way a rabbit can, and he's suffering from malnutrition.
• Sing 2: When Buster and Ash show up to Clay Calloway's house, they decide to climb the fence after he refuses to come over, and are both given an electric shock. While other Illumination films, and most animated films in general, depict electrocution in an exaggerated and comedic manner with no lasting damage, Ash and Buster are instantly sent flying back and knocked unconscious by the shock, and both wear bandages on their scorched hands afterwards.
• Smallfoot: After spending some time in the yeti village on the mountain, Percy starts suffering from high altitude sickness due to the lack of oxygen on such a high peak.
• The Son of Bigfoot: In the sequel, unlike the animals he's befriended for years, the animals Dr. Harrison meets in a new location are as hostile to him as any unfamiliar animal would be. There's a threatening wolf and an aggressive, territorial moose that become problems for him at two points.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Miles tries to get kicked out of Visions Academy by purposely bombing a true-false test, intentionally getting every answer wrong. But Miles is surprised when the teacher points out that if Miles was truly guessing blind on a true-false test, the law of averages means that he should have gotten at least some of the answers right.^note Assuming it was a 100-question test as seen in the movie, the chances of Miles getting every question wrong by just blind-guessing are 1 in 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376. For comparison, you would have better odds of winning the real-life Powerball jackpot three times in a row than Miles had at getting every question wrong by guessing blind on this test. The only way to get all the answers wrong on a true-false test is to know all the right answers, and deliberately fill in the wrong ones. The teacher promptly gives Miles a perfect score and tells him that she won't let him quit Visions Academy that easily, much to Miles' dismay.
• Spies in Disguise: After stopping the Big Bad and saving tons of lives, including at their agency, Walter is convinced that he and Lance are going to get their jobs back. A Smash Cut instead shows them on the curb each with a Cardboard Box of Unemployment. Turns out they were still fired for committing a good amount of crimes throughout the film in their pursuit for innocence. However, it's subverted a couple scenes later in that the agency changes their mind and hires them back for a covert branch.
• In The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, he tries to escape Dennis the bounty hunter by jumping from to David Hasselhoff's other leg (It Makes Sense in Context). Dennis already got there because he just ran around.
• Superman vs. the Elite: Early in the movie Manchester Black recounts how he used his powers to stop a train from hitting his sister. We find later that stopping a train in that way killed a number of people.
• Trolls Band Together: In the climax, Veneer has a Heel–Face Turn and publicly exposes his and Velvet's schemes of kidnapping BroZone and stealing their talent for a shortcut to fame. However, unlike the other antagonists of the Trolls franchise who are redeemed after such a realization, he gets arrested along with his sister, since having a change of heart doesn't change the fact that he still knowingly committed all those crimes. Thankfully, he's willing to acknowledge this point and is still a very good sport about being arrested.
  Veneer: But I was just saying I had a change of heart!
  Crimp: You also engaged in trollnapping, troll torture, fraud...
• The Wild Robot
  • Roz is subject to a lot of injuries throughout the film, some played seriously and many more played for slapstick comedy. Being a robot, one would think it wouldn't matter much, but her injuries take a toll on her and by the end of the film, she's very weakened; this plays a factor in her return to civilization in the end.
  • At one point, Roz comes across the scrapped remains of the other Rozzum units she was shipped with that washed up on the island gathered in a sea-side cave. Rather than being able to use their parts to upkeep herself, they are all damaged and rusted extensively by the long period exposed to the salt water, with Roz barely being able to cobble together a partly-functioning unit out of what remains to discuss her "task" with Brightbill and the complications caused by his learning of her Accidental Murder of his birth family. Had the otter family not accidentally activated Roz when investigating her crate, this would have been the same fate for Roz too.
  • Roz and Fink herding a bunch of natural predators and prey together into a small hut, even if it is to help them survive through an unrelenting winter, doesn't end well. It takes some pep talking for the commotion to settle down.
  • During the climax, Brightbill smashes through the window of Vontra's ship to rescue Roz. In most works, he would have walked this off, but here he's visibly wounded after doing it and breaks his wing.
• Zootopia: A mild example with former Mayor Lionheart. It's discovered near the end of the film that the main plot was a setup and he's partly been framed by his own assistant, but as he's still guilty of false imprisonment and kidnapping in his efforts to contain the Night Howler problem, he's still in jail and has to serve his sentence. Also, while she solved the Night Howler case, Officer Hopps is also still a Rookie in her first year on the job (now partnered with another rookie), though many of the officers start to respect her more. As such, at the end of the film, Judy and Nick are on patrol duty rather than investigating major cases and their assignment for the day is chasing a traffic offender (a street racer).

• Animorphs:
  • Alternamorphs: The First Journey, a gamebook, has a few instances of this.
    • There's an option to transform into a poison dart frog, which ends in the narrator's death as they're eaten by an enemy in the shape of a large predator. "But it's a poison dart frog!" is a common objection - however, these frogs aren't inherently poisonous and only become so by eating lightly poisonous insects and sequestering these toxins in their skin. A frog that hasn't eaten these is completely harmless to the touch - and even if it was poisonous, it's a small animal and getting bitten by something big would kill it, regardless of whether the predator would also die.
    • The final choice is how to try to stop an enemy who's taken the form of an Angry Guard Dog and is in sight of a policeman - you can choose to turn into a German shepherd, a hyena, or the "joke" answer, a giraffe, a choice that has been available before and only led to disaster. The shepherd can't beat the larger, more powerful dog. The hyena can, but alarms the cop who shoots it. The giraffe, though, can send the dog flying with one kick and is too baffling to be shot at. Some fans think this is un realistic, but despite their ungainly forms and gentle reputation, giraffes are still huge animals and quite strong, and a lone heavyset dog has no chance of reaching any vulnerable parts.
  • Typically in this series, head trauma is the usual trope of Tap on the Head, something the Animorphs rely heavily on while fighting humans infested by Yeerks. Unlike with infested aliens who generally have to be killed or heavily wounded, they can just make humans go to sleep to get them out of the way. The fourth Megamorphs, though, starts in the aftermath of a particularly bloody battle. They encounter a dying human who had his head stoved in by one of the heroes. The man's skull is deformed enough that the parasite in his brain can't escape to let him die as himself, but he wasn't killed instantly and pleads for help and some kind of warmth as the Animorphs, traumatized by yet another bad fight, try to ignore him and slip away. None of them really react to a blow to the head being fatal which suggests it's not surprising to them but it may be to the reader, who's watched them be quite cavalier about this "nonlethal" move.
  • This is done deliberately in the final book with regards to the Big Bad of the series. You'd expect a big terrifying villain like him to go down in an epic final clash, where he pulls out all the stops and some crazy morph we've never seen before. But once it becomes clear that the Animorphs have ensured the Yeerks will lose the war, and The Cavalry is bearing down on him, he... surrenders, gets taken into custody, and spends the rest of his life imprisoned. According to Applegate, this was an attempt to show that real wars aren't glamorous: they don't usually end in epic final clashes where the leaders go down fighting, but with a lot of surrendering and capitulation once it's clear that one side can't win.
• In Ascendance of a Bookworm the main character transmigrates into what is basically medieval Germany as a sick little peasant girl. She has a lot of miscellaneous knowledge on how to make various things, but unlike the isekai standard of becoming a beloved celebrity overnight for inventing dozens of modern inventions, she finds it nearly impossible to make much of anything for a long time: the tools just don't exist and she doesn't have the resources. It takes a solid year to even create paper and doing so doesn't improve her social position at all. It makes her a bit of money, but that's about it. If anything, she needs to not make it too obvious that she's behind her subsequent Giving Radio to the Romans products until she gets proper protection from the local Supernatural Elite because it might attract the attention of people who see her "inventions" as a threat to their livelihood.
• The Asterisk War:
  • Kirin's katana, Senbakiri, is a completely mundane metal sword. This means that it has no chance of causing appreciable damage on the robot AR-D, averting Katana Superiority.
  • Ser Veresta is damaged at the climax of the Gryps Final, and Ayato pulls his backup sword lux. His opponent, Team Lancelot leader Ernest Fairclough, promptly drops his own Orga Lux and draws his own backup weapon, hoping for a climactic sword duel with a man he sees as Worthy Opponent. Instead, he snafus his own team's defensive teamwork and all of Ayato's teammates promptly gang up on him, since it's a five-on-five match in which breaking the leader's badge wins it—which Claudia promptly does. Should've just challenged him to a regular duel, Ernie.
• The Berenstain Bears Big Chapter Books:
  • Multiple cases in The Berenstain Bears' Media Madness.
    • First, when Teacher Bob's class is given the opportunity to run Bear Country School's new TV station, Principal Honeycomb warns them to keep up with their regular schoolwork too. Naturally, everyone — being third-graders — gets too caught up in the excitement of being on TV to worry about balancing the station with schoolwork, resulting in their falling behind in their normal classwork and getting in big trouble as a result.
    • When BTV goes from operating for half an hour to a full-hour and from an in-school station to an over-the-air station, Ferdy Factual volunteers his uncle's over-the-air broadcasting license (available to the professor and his associates, whom Ferdy considers himself one of due to working for his uncle on weekends) to make it legal. Unfortunately, when Principal Honeycomb is subsequently summoned before the Bear County Communications Board, they point out that Ferdy is too young to legally use the license (or to authorize its use), so they have no choice but to make the school pay a large fine.
  • In The Berenstain Bears and Queenie's Crazy Crush, after years of only getting detention or suspended for the trouble he causes, when Too-Tall is caught out for outright criminal theft (having stolen Mr. Smock's new painting and swapped in one of his own), he's facing serious trouble, to the point where he's nearly expelled for it (and would have been had Mr. Smock himself not stepped in after Too-Tall returned the painting, unharmed, and apologized for doing so).
• Chuck Barris's The Big Question: The titular Deadly Game is cancelled two weeks after its premiere in the wake of massive protest. Because, surprise, televised murder is illegal.
• Catalyst: Kate is rejected from MIT, and her attempts to push for an appeal do not work to help her overturn that ruling. She's able to at least get a clear explanation as to why they turned her down, but in the end she has to face the fact that she's not getting in though the admissions office wishes her luck.
• Christine: Buddy pulls a knife on Arnie and Dennis. After a brief fight, the shop teacher comes in and breaks it up, being told afterwards that Buddy has a switchblade on him. Being a punk, Buddy threatens the teacher just like he did Arnie and Dennis. Instead of backing down in the slightest, the teacher counter-threatens to call the police if Buddy doesn't give up his knife.
• Deadline At Durango: Yandere Ruby masterminds a plot to have forger Alf Fontana impersonate her kidnapped crush Jeff Lantry and empty his accounts so (in addition to her getting a cut of the money) the destitute Jeff will either be open to her seduction disguised as comforting or she can laugh at his plight if he still rejects her. Well after the plan is underway, Ruby is chagrined to be reminded that banks have to pay back customers whose money they lose due to fraud, letting Jeff remain wealthy.
• Destroyermen: In the first book, Tamatsu Shinya ends up on the United States Navy boat of the destroyermen after they end up in a new world after the squall, and while most of the men aren't comfortable with him, the Bosun is most uncomfortable and longer than the other men. In the climactic battle at the end of the book, Shinya saves his life. After the battle the Bosun reveals that he can't just accept him for personal reasons, his son having died at Pearl Harbor.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days has Greg claim a bicycle some neighbors threw away so he can get to the pool and carry stuff easier. It falls apart in four days, as a bike someone threw out for anybody to take is almost certainly defective.
• In most Discworld books, the Tap on the Head trope is played straight to the point where several characters can choose how long they want someone to remain unconscious by being really precise (e.g. hit someone on the right part of their skull with the correct amount of force). In Men at Arms though, Edward d'Eath wants to get Beano the clown out of the way and accidentally kills him while trying to knock him out like this (Beano even hears a crunch just before he dies, implying that his skull was broken). Misguided Well-Intentioned Extremist that he is, Edward is quite horrified. Later books often toss off a line to the effect of "an expert can hit people on the head safely but amateurs can really hurt someone".
• Don't Go to Sleep!: When he is informed that he has to be put to sleep forever, Matt tries to beat the Reality Police up. But as he lampshades later on, even though he was in the body of a muscular boy, he is still wimpy in skill, and they easily defeat him.
• In The Elenium, one character tells another about a war in the past wherein the continent was nearly depopulated fighting the evil god Azash. When the younger boy excitedly asks what happened after the fighting, he is told that there was nearly a century of famine as the war had left insufficient numbers to work the fields. Additionally, the previously celibate Church Knights were forced to change their policy to allow knights to marry in order to attract new members after the orders had been decimated in the fighting.
• In the novel Fear by Ronald Kelly, once of the good guys is lynched, and while does dangle for about a minute, the others manage to rescue him. Happy ending, right? No, that brief dangle was enough to crush his windpipe, and he dies shortly after.
• Find Layla: Layla is an aspiring scientist with a poor and neglectful home life. She decides to film the various fungi in her run-down apartment for a biology contest. The video goes viral but forces Child Protective Services to take her and her little brother due to unsafe living conditions.
• Furthermore: Alice is shown to be a good swimmer, so falling into water is unproblematic for her right? Wrong - when she is suddenly trust into water while fully clothed (including heavy skirts whick soak up water and become veryx unwieldy) she is unable to swim and starts panicking, having to be rescued by Oliver. Not for nothing is "swimming fully clothed" a dedicated subject in Scandinavian schools.
  • Later, when Alice finds out that Oliver was lying to her she decides to abandon him and continue her search on her own. Except she still knows much less about the eponymous land than Oliver and quickly gets herself in trouble. A trikster but well-intentioned guide to a new place is better than no guide at all.
  • in the sequel Whichwood, the ghosts attack the town and start skinning people alive. The protagonists arrive on the scene, stop the ghosts and have a cool idea to keep the skinned people alive - but they can't save anyone and some people ultimately die despite their best efforts. Then it is revealed that the people don't really appreciate being saved by being covered by insects. The townspeople turn into an angry mob, and Laylee's father is executed purely to cool the things down, with no regards to justice or whether it'll help
• In Godless, a group of kids start a new religion called Chutengodiaism that makes them get into all kinds of antics. This includes swimming in the town's water supply results. Obviously, it ends up requiring an expensive cleanup, and the leader of the Chutengodians Jason is punished with an overnight stay in prison.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: The objective of the Second Task is for the Champions to rescue people they love from being held captive by the merpeople. At first, this is treated as a genuine ticking clock, and Harry goes so far as to try to rescue as many people as he can. At the end of the Task, it turns out that the whole thing was just a framing device, everyone was there by their own consent, and they were never in any serious danger. Harry quickly realizes that it was kind of stupid for him to assume that Dumbledore and company would kidnap civilians and put them in real mortal peril for the sake of a sporting event.
• In the Heralds of Valdemar book Storm Rising, Treyvan and Hydona offer their services in translating two thousand year old technical documents written in Kaled'a'in. Other characters present are from cultures that split off from the Kaled'a'in and became something else, and they can barely parse anything about the documents. Treyvan and Hydona actually are Kaled'a'in, it's their native language and their culture has retained technology that the offshoots have lost, so they're quite confident. But while they can get the rough gist, they can't give the precise and accurate translations needed. Modern Kaled'a'in may be more similar to the old tongue than the offshoots' languages are but it has still changed in two thousand years.
• Inheritance Cycle: In Brisngr, Roran defies his orders and leads the Varden forces to a heroic victory over the empire. Despite this, he is still guilty of ignoring his superiors and Nasuada is forced to punish him in order to prevent others from following his example.
• Jaws: Infamously done to the Great White shark that terrorizes Amity Island. At first, it seems to be an unstoppable force of nature, showing no signs of slowing down after Quint harpooned three barrels on its body, and then later destroying the Orca boat by jumping onboard. After drowning Quint, Ahab-style, the shark then turns to devour Brody (who has no weapons to defend himself from the shark's jaws)... only to then anticlimactically die just before it reaches the police chief. Turns out, the three barrels (plus Quint's corpse) created enough drag on the shark that it couldn't pass enough water between its gills.^note Great whites need to constantly move in order to get enough oxygen from the ocean. As a result, the shark dies of suffocation (and blood loss) like any regular animal. Steven Spielberg found this ending to be unsatisfying for movie audiences and thus changed it in the film to have Brody blow up the shark by shooting the oxygen tank stuck in its mouth, much to the protest of author Peter Benchley, who found it unrealistic.
• King Thrushbeard: The beggar who comes to the palace is extremely reluctant to be saddled with a royal wife, since he knows she can't do any hard labor.
• The Kingkiller Chronicle involves a University (sic) with the largest library in the world. Many works would have some contrivance to keep the protagonist from finding the information he needs on the Big Bad. The two biggest obstacles are actually the fact that the bad guys deliberately destroy any solid info on themselves, and the fact that the library is heavily disorganised. Nobody has invented their equivalent of the Dewey Decimal System. Master Archivists have tried to impose order, but it's so big a job that they inevitably fail and leave it to the next guy, who might tries his own system, and so on. Before the DDS, libraries didn't have standardized organization systems.
• Little House on the Prairie:
  • Pa illegally settled in Native American territory. He's convinced that as long as they don't argue with the locals, all should be good. That's not what happens; the government, in a moment of goodwill, forces the settlers off the land to honor the treaties.
  • A similar event happens to Laura’s Uncle Tom. Like the Ingalls, his traveling group also chose to make a permanent settlement in the middle of Indian territory, which the natives did not take kindly to. The US Army arrives on the scene as the settlers are being besieged, but to their great surprise, the Army marches them right out of the fort before setting it on fire. Charles and Caroline are outraged, but Tom quickly reminds them that a group of half-starved and battle-weary pioneers could hardly have made a stand against actual soldiers.
  • Eliza Jane Wilder's last class ends in bedlam when the school board walks in, and she tries to defend herself by throwing Laura under the horse carriage, as it were, scapegoating her for the chaos. It doesn't work; the board fires her or she resigns from the disgrace of all the boys rebelling because they made the choice to undermine Ms Wilder's authority. If you can't manage your students, as Laura notes in the next book, then you're not fit to be a teacher. Even though Ma and Pa tell Laura she needs to respect her teacher, they get her side of the story and admit that it wasn't her fault because Nellie decided to cause trouble.
  • Almanzo as a wedding present to Laura buys her a new house with many fancy fixings and supplies for cooking. She appreciates it. Come the next book, they're in heavy debt from all of the purchases. Laura lampshades it as she's calculating their losses. (This also helps to explain why she gets so upset in The Rose Years at Almanzo buying her a new stove.)
• The Magicians: Quentin gets his head smacked against the stone floor in a fistfight with Penny. After being superficially treated for the bruises, he tries to go about his day but abruptly vomits up his dinner and passes out. It's not a Tap on the Head, and he's suffered a concussion, earning him a stay in the infirmary and a stern talking-to from the Dean.
• Misery:
  • Invoked by Paul when Annie demands to know why Misery died. He points out that in the 1800s, there was less medical expertise to save women from childbirth and it was quite common.
  • The police end up pegging Annie as someone who knows about Paul's disappearance when a deputy goes missing after he visits her house. They seem to find nothing wrong, and Paul doesn't dare call for help after what Annie did to the deputy, but they are not stupid. The two get a search warrant for her house and more manpower before returning, just as Paul has killed Annie. In the movie this is the reason why Annie plans to kill Paul after she murders the sheriff: it will only be a matter of time before the police find her.
  • While technically Annie did get away with the murders, she's still effectively a pariah simply by association.
• No Country for Old Men:
  • Gunshots are not something you can easily shrug off, even if you are a trained veteran or an unstoppable killing machine. Both Llewelyn and Chigurh have to carefully treat bullet wounds they get, and both spend days recuperating.
  • Llewelyn and Chigurh don't face off in an explosive showdown. Chigurh isn't the only person looking for Llewelyn's stolen money, and unsurprisingly, some cartel hitmen get the drop on Llewelyn instead, resulting in him being killed anticlimactically.
  • Chigurh's car crash shows that, for all he thinks of himself as an unstoppable entity, he's still just a man, and evading death in a gun fight without breaking a sweat doesn't mean you can't be killed by something as mundane as a driver on a sleepy suburban street running through a stop sign. The fact that he only survives through pure luck just drives it home further.
• The One and Only Ivan is a middle-grade chapter book about Talking Animals taken from the wild by Evil Poachers and put into a Menagerie of Misery. You might expect the ending to have them return to freedom in the wild, perhaps even to surviving family members, and for all the animal characters to live together happily at the end. But Ivan and Ruby have been in among humans and in cages for too long, so they're taken to live in a zoo - and separately, because gorillas and elephants aren't housed together. Bob the dog can visit, but good zoos don't have little dogs going in and out of the exhibits.
  • Ivan specifically is brought to a gorilla exhibit, and having feared he was the Last of His Kind you might expect immediate, unalloyed happiness, but after more than a quarter century of isolation from his own species, he doesn't know how to socialize with them and initially they dislike him. The ending is a bit drawn out to show him learning how to be a gorilla and becoming accepted. Ivan also acknowledges that he still lives in a cage and on display, it's just a much bigger and better one in which he can be largely content. It's altogether a Bittersweet Ending that actually had some parents objecting that the book was too sad, but the author defended her choices.
• The Problem of Susan: The professor describes the reality of being the only survivor of a family caught in a train crash; she not only had to identify the bodies, but also had to live on her own with few luxuries.
• Ranger's Apprentice: In The Royal Ranger, Maddie is initially introduced as a rebellious princess with a thirst for adventure. And while she does accept the Call to Adventure, she's still accustomed to the privileges that come with being a princess and it takes her several chapters to adapt to the simple lifestyle she has to live as Will's apprentice. Additionally, while she has natural talent, she has only practiced with her bow and sling as a hobby before, and Will's training regimen is just as difficult for her as Halt's was for Will in the first book.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Oliver's no-spells duel with Tullio Rossi in volume 2 (episode 8 of the anime) demonstrates that it really is important to learn the fundamentals of a topic (swordplay in this case), before you try to innovate, and why trying to turn an armed duel into a fistfight against an opponent you know is well-trained is foolhardy. Because Rossi never learned the basics, he doesn't realize that punching with his offhand gives a prepared opponent the opportunity to grab that arm and immobilize him, as Oliver indeed does with a standing armbar: grappling is more useful at extreme close range than strikes. Even discounting sport fencing where barehanded strikes aren't allowed anyway, this is why real-life swordsmen usually either keep both hands on the weapon, or the undefended arm held back out of the way.
• Rick Brant: In The Deadly Dutchman, Rick is being chased by a mob of crooks near a windmill and grabs onto one of the blades so it will lift him away from the pursuers and take him up to the roof of the structure. Instead, his weight makes the windmill come to an immediate halt.
• Scarlett: Scarlett finally discovers her maternal instincts after having Cat and returns to visit Tara with the full intent of pouring out this newfound love on Wade and Ella and bringing them back to Ireland with her. Only to find that thanks to the crucial bonding time lost in the first book along with her essentially abandoning them at Tara for years while she ventured off, they are now complete strangers to her and she to them. She sadly resigns herself to this and accepts complete responsibility for it.
• The Sherwood Game: While Flynning against a crowd of Mooks in the climax, Carl admits that it is easy to fence against multiple people for hours and ultimately win while just playing a video game from a couch or chair, but when you can actually feel how heavy the sword is and have to stay on your feet for real, you tire pretty fast.
• In the young adult book Skinnybones, protagonist Alex Frankovitch is running towards first base in a Little League game, with Jerk Jock T.J. Stoner just about to get Alex out. Alex, in the spur of the moment, starts jumping up and down, waving his arms, and screaming "BOOGA BOOGA!" at T.J. in order to distract him. T.J. thus misses the ball, which allows Alex to run past first base and eventually reach second base, ecstactic about finally having got one over on T.J. in baseball. However, Alex is quite surprised and disheartened when the umpire walks up to Alex at second base and calls him out for interference. One of the reasons Alex is so surprised is that he thought interference involved making contact with an opposing player; in reality, it's basically anything that a runner does to intentionally prevent a fielder from making a play. Even when Alex's coach attempts to argue that there's no "booga booga rule" in the book, the umpire refuses to budge and Alex has to walk back to his dugout in shame.
• So This is Ever After:
  • The entire beginning of the novel plays this for laughs by showing the triumph of the hero's party over The Vile One to be much less cinematic than he pictured. Arek thought he would be able to cleanly behead The Vile One, raise his decapitated head as a trophy, and subsequently, declare his love for Matt and maybe even kiss him. He doesn't get to do any of those things, as beheading someone ends up being a messy and tough affair that soils everyone with blood. Arek also feels no desire to raise the head because it would be hard since he is bald and it would be really gross to touch a decapitated head as he notices. Matt and Arek are also not in any position for a romantic declaration, being bloodied, dirty, tired, and sweaty, which makes the entire scene much less picturesque than he wanted.
  • Further, when Arek finds himself thrust into kingship as the last heir from the former ruling dynasty is dead, he and his friends quickly struggle with going from commoners to ruling a kingdom.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • X-Wing: Iron Fist: The book starts with a Bar Brawl and one of the pilots being hit in the head by a bottle. The bottle doesn't break and rather than brushing it off the pilot has to be helped to leave by his friends and ends up on medical leave for a week and a half with a concussion. Later, these pilots stage their own bar brawl and bring a bottle made with stage glass for one to use against another, so it shatters dramatically and the one struck stands up and joins the fight. They didn't want to hurt each other, and they had to make it look convincing for onlookers... who on some level do expect this to be how Grievous Bottley Harm goes.
  • At the end of X-Wing: The Bacta War, Booster Terrik manages to convince the New Republic military to let him keep the star destroyer Virulence (on two conditions; remove most of the weapons and change the name) which he helped Rogue Squadron to capture. He intends operating it as a travelling casino/resort/hive of scum and villainy and indeed he does, even having it painted red, but every single subsequent appearance of the Errant Venture, particularly I, Jedi, makes it clear that it's Awesome, but Impractical for a private citizen because of the logistics involved. A truly enormous capital warship that's normally kept maintained and staffed by a multi-planetary governing body requires a monstrously expensive upkeep, and the money it takes in isn't enough to cover those costs properly. The full complement of crew for an Imperial II-class Star Destroyer is thirty seven thousand people, and Booster is unable to hire and pay that many. He often can't even meet the bare minimum skeleton crew of five thousand. It rarely has all its permitted weaponry in operation and is generally constantly on the verge of breaking down.
• Tortall Universe tends to bring this in with well-inclined Royals Who Actually Do Something. Given the Black-and-White Morality of the first quartet you'd expect a good king/queen making good laws would simply dismantle oppression, but because they aren't absolute monarchs (and the writing becomes more complex) there are complications and progress is often slow.
  • Song of the Lioness has Alanna become the first lady knight in living memory, one who's absurdly, fantastically heroic and acclaimed. Her friend Prince Jon becomes The Good King, marries the Rebellious Princess she rescued, and together they enact reforms including nulling the law that women can't seek knighthood. Little girls are shown being inspired by Alanna. Having broken the glass ceiling she expects to not be the only lady knight for long and fantasizes about helping the next one. However, Tortall's misogyny is too entrenched to be so easily dismissed. Alanna, being god-touched and a mage, is seen as an exception, not a demonstration that women are as capable as men. When Kel, the next prospective female knight, enrolls over a decade later, she starts under probation and has a difficult road to walk. Alanna is also barred from contact with her for years, to prevent rumors that she's helping an unworthy person to succeed.
  • In Protector of the Small Kel's maid is kidnapped at the behest of a noble in order to hurt Kel. When he's caught and brought to trial she expects justice. The readers have heard nothing about the courts being unfair, the previous quartet went to great pains to depict Tortall as being quite enlightened for a feudal culture, and Kel knows that if he'd kidnapped her, he would be in for dire penalties. However the noble, having "only" harmed a servant, is merely made to pay a fine that he shrugs off, and most of that fine doesn't even go to the maid but to Kel. The feudal society still holds nobles as more important than commoners. An outraged Kel goes to King Jon about this, and he agrees that the law is unfair and agrees to change it, but also explains why it can't be an instantaneous change. He has to build coalitions and get enough people on his side.
  • In Beka Cooper, King Roger is moved by the trials his young son went through after being kidnapped and treated as a slave, and abolishes slavery in Tortall. His son is ecstatic and convinces an uncertain Beka that this is a triumphant moment, a fantastic thing that does away with one of Tortall's great evils and makes it a better place. It does eventually but like his descendant Jon, Roger's not an absolute monarch and his unilateral action made a lot of his subjects angry - slavery was well-entrenched and there hadn't been a broad push for abolition in Tortall. Tortall: A Spy's Guide and The Numair Chronicles mention that a civil war resulted and nobles who'd benefited from slavery fought the crown for decades.
  • Usually media involving a Friend to All Living Things who's regularly perched on by numerous birds, nuzzled by horses etc won't have the animals make messes, unless it's a gross out moment Played for Laughs after which the animals in question are regarded as disgusting. Daine of The Immortals is one such character. Her animal friends try to be clean for her but she's usuallly left with little smears and spots. Horses are always smearing her with grassy saliva. In Emperor Mage she treats some sick birds which absolutely streak her and her things with filth, something regarded quite neutrally in the narrative as gross and degrading to more pampered characters but just part of being around animals by everyone else. Similarly if less markedly, friendly sparrows in Protector of the Small and pigeons in Beka Cooper leave droppings which are simply cleaned up and regarded in a manner of fact way.
• Twig takes place in a Bio Punk world where scientists are constantly coming up with new ways to change and alter living beings. For all it may seem like they can do nearly anything, one character admits that even with their innovations, they can't make humans fly- the human body is just too damn heavy. The closest equivalent is a character who can manage a controlled glide with her wings, but she had surgeries to reduce her weight as much as possible.
• Wayside School:
  • At the end of the second book, the school is flooded with a herd of cows. The opening chapter of the third book showed that despite Wayside School being a World of Weirdness, the cows caused so much damage to the school that the students had to be sent to other schools while Wayside was repaired.
  • The only thing Ms. Gorf ever bothered to teach the class was fear, and Ms. Jewels’s curriculum is incomprehensible to anyone outside of the class. As a result, the kids have significant gaps in their knowledge, and when they get transferred to normal schools, they struggle with learning there.
• Winterhouse: Elisabeth Somers, an orphan who lost her parents at four is is since living with her aunt and uncle, who are very strict and impose a large set af arbitrary rules on her. The only thing she inherited from her parents is a mysterious locket. When she visits the eponymous hotel, the owner, Northbrindge Falls, recognizes the locket as the one that his long-lost daughter took with her, meaning he is Elisabeth's grandfather. At first it seems that Elisabeth can just live with him, but this is not the kind of proof that woud actually be enough in a court. Even if it was, a biological aunt is a closer relative than a grandfather, so Elisabeth stay with her current family for quite a while. And when she eventually does get to live with Northbridge, she keeps imposing some rules on herself (like restricting her own Internet access) just because she is used to have many rules. Damage from bad parenting doesn't disappear overnight.
• World War Z deliberately subverts some zombie movie cliches:
  • During their exile, the Chinese submarine crew discovers a number of vessels that are dead and abandoned because the people fleeing on them made no preparations for long-term survival at sea. The American zeppelin pilot watched highways full of people fleeing the cities with no plan after abandoning their supplies in the resulting traffic jams, and in some cases attempting to flee to cities that others are fleeing from. An entire segment is dedicated to the panicked flight to Northern Canada that resulted in nearly all refugees being wiped out and Canada's ecosystem irreparably destroyed, thanks to the complete lack of logical planning on the part of the refugees, many of whom had time to prepare but thought bringing a few items would be enough and didn't read up on wilderness survival, leading to things like trying to bring kids' blankets to a snowy hellscape that regularly goes below freezing and drinking alcohol and hot beverages to warm up, which only speeds up hypothermia. It's a Take That! to various zombie films showing the protagonists fleeing somewhere without any supplies, especially Romero's Dawn/Day/Land of the Dead movies, which ended with the protagonists driving, flying, or sailing away from the zombies with no plan or supplies.
  • Several of the stories revolve around this happening to people who didn't think things through. The Japanese Otaku had the realization that shimmying down so many floors on a set of bedsheets isn't as easy as the movies depicted, and being a scrawny-ass nerd who spent all his time posting on Imageboards hoarding data instead of disseminating it to survivors, he tires easily, loses his grip, and plummets into a balcony below — he notes he would have died if he hadn't managed to crash into that balcony.
  • A helicopter gunship pilot at Yonkers tries to cut through a zombie horde with his rotor-blades to try and impede the horde, a la various zombie movies that show copter pilots managing to do this... and promptly crashes.
  • The CIA director says that although ordinary people pre-war thought of the CIA as an omnipresent and omnipotent force, it was really an earthly organization with finite resources and very human limitations. As such, they were stripped of funding and capability when their bad intel lead to the quagmire of Gulf War II, which lead to the US being ignorant of the outbreaks until it was too late. He also notes the same people who think the CIA were conspiracy masters would also blame the CIA, when the CIA has nowhere near the capability to do what people think they do.
  • A bunch of celebrities hole up in a well-stocked, heavily-fortified mansion and broadcast it to the world. They soon get swarmed by survivors looking to take that fortress for themselves.
  • Various civilians try out cool-looking stunts to kill zombies, and die horribly. One example is a long-haired guy on rollerblades equipped with a cleaver strapped to a hockey stick to fight a horde of zombies in New York City, without protective gear. He promptly crashes, and his long hair gets grabbed by zombies and yanked into a horde. The military veteran watching this notes how stupid that was.
  • At Yonkers, the airspace is crowded with all sorts of aircraft, from news choppers to helicopter gunships, to look cool and cinematic for military propaganda. Instead, two news helicopters end up colliding in mid-air amid the chaos when it becomes clear the military is losing.
  • At Yonkers, far from headshots being 100% effective, some zombies survive being shot in the head because the bullet did not penetrate the brain — this is notably realistic as opposed to headshots always being lethal in zombie fiction and causes panic that the zombies are invulnerable, demoralising many soldiers.
• Albright is such a menacing presence that when he escapes the climactic gunfight at the end of Devil in a Blue Dress after being non-lethally shot by Mouse, Easy suspects he isn't dead. A news report in the next chapter reveals he died of blood loss while trying to drive to the hospital. Easy is somewhat disturbed by the idea such a terrifying man could die from something so mundane.

• Fefe Dobson's "Stuttering" music video is about her preparing to confront her cheating boyfriend in a seedy motel after the other woman has stepped out. She even puts on the other woman's jacket while she waits for him to come out of the shower. Turns out it's not her boyfriend, and Fefe immediately leaves, embarrassed. The video goes to some weird places from there, but it's an interesting twist on the usual cliche.
• Johnny Cash's "One Piece At A Time" has this Played for Laughs. Its protagonist resolves to make himself a Cadillac for free from parts that he stole while working at a General Motors assembly plant. The scheme takes several decades to complete, and at the end of thirty years of work, comes out with a machine that's almost impossible to assemble and looks like an ugly mess of a thing, with a title that weighs sixty pounds. The protagonist still loves it, though.
• The music video for Cher Lloyd's "Want U Back" features the singer and three friends of hers trashing a diner and causing mayhem... so by the end of the video, the police have been called and all four of them are led away in cuffs.
• The song "Scalp" by Atmosphere features the narrator describing his night. He goes to the bar and meets his friend Sonny, who offers to pay him for retrieving a package from a tattoo parlor. One expects the protagonist to follow through with his task, possibly finding something surprising in the package along the way, but instead, he is killed in a car crash immediately after leaving the bar. This is what happens when you actually drink $50 worth of alcohol and then drive at night.
• Eminem's songs often run on Amusing Injuries, but occasionally he will portray violence more realistically.
  • "Brain Damage" is a song about an over-the-top encounter between a disaffected kid and his school bully full of Zany Cartoon voices and hinting at Concussions Get You High (Slim's brain damage led to people assuming he was on drugs). But the description of brain damage symptoms (Slim's disturbed vision and foggy behaviour) is authentic, based on Eminem's own real-life experiences of it. Until Slim's mother hits him over the head, causing his entire brain to fall out onto the carpet, so he picks it up and calls her a cunt.
  • "Bad Guy" features Stan's brother Matthew trying to murder Eminem in revenge for what happened to his brother. The attempted killing involves Matthew doing 90 on the freeway the same way Stan once did, but all it does it attract attention to him and get cops on his tail.
• In DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince's song "I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson", Will Smith declares that he could beat Mike Tyson after watching old fight tapes. He impulsively calls Don King to set up the match and King accepts. Most of the music video is Will engaged in a Rocky-esque Training Montage with reporters and random people on the street laughing at him and saying he's going to get his ass kicked. He gets in the ring with Tyson, and is indeed beaten to a pulp.

• EPIC: The Musical: During the fight between Antinous and Telemachus, Athena intervenes and uses her Quick-Thought ability to help Telemachus. Antinous still ends up winning, since improved reaction time and encouragement alone aren't enough to make up for Telemachus's prior injuries and Antinous's greater strength and experience.

• Ace Attorney:
  • In the last case of the first game, when all hope seems lost, Larry shows up and demands to be a witness to the event. Unlike most moments where an immediate, dramatic conclusion happens, the judge calls a recess. Having a witness show up last minute requires the prosecutor team to have time to interview the witness. Also, letting someone talk without context for their evidence is a possible risk.
  • In the final case of Justice for All, Gumshoe calls Phoenix to tell him he's found decisive evidence while speeding down the streets and running red lights. He almost immediately gets into a car accident, stopping him from getting to the courthouse.
  • Investigations
    • The final case takes place in an embassy, so the killer naturally attempts to exploit his extraterritorial rights. This eventually leads to his home country revoking his diplomatic immunity, allowing Miles Edgeworth to take him down.
    • Also from the final case, Miles gets two vital pieces of evidence that prove the killer had in the past ordered a hit on someone. Both pieces of evidence, due to being concealed or stolen from the police, are illegal in a court of law. Fortunately, the spin-off happens to take place outside the court of law, and they're still useful for forwarding the investigation and proving the killer's criminal connections to his home country's government, which leads to the above revocation of diplomatic immunity.
  • In Investigations 2, Miles attempts to prove that Simeon Saint was a middleman who transcribed correspondence chess letters between two of his former associates in order to manipulate one of his targets into believing the two were connected and killing one of them as a result, since the target was already deathly afraid of the other...only for Miles to turn up empty-handed since Simeon usually disposed of his letters. However, Simeon's boss then shows up with a letter that arrived late. Simeon does work for a traveling circus after all, meaning that it would take them quite a while to process letters and other written correspondence.
  • The Great Ace Attorney:
    • While Ryunosuke uses Sholmes' new scientific inventions to uncover evidence several times, Barok and the judge refuses to accept it as official evidence since those inventions and techniques are untested in the scientific world.
    • In the end of the first game, Ryunosuke temporarily loses his right to practice law in Great Britain over his actions in Case 1-3 because he unwittingly presented tampered evidence and false testimony to get his client acquitted.
    • It's been noted that Lord van Zieks prosecuted the Professor trial despite being a rookie prosecutor and having a clear conflict of interest, seeing how his brother was one of the murder victims, and failed to remain objective during the trial, missing little details that could have changed the course of the trial. When asked about this late in the second game, Lord van Zieks explains that the prosecutor agreed to switch with him as a favor. Mael Stronghart did this deliberately so the otherwise logical Lord van Zieks couldn't prosecute fairly and wouldn't catch on that Genshin Asogi was framed and realize that it was his own brother who was the Professor.
• Cinders initially leads the player to assume that Carmosa hid Cinders' father's will because it would reveal Cinders as the true heir. However, if Cinders chooses to search, she quickly finds it, revealing the will left everything to Carmosa. Hiding and lying about such a document is incredibly idiotic, which Carmosa is not. Carmosa hid it because it's a sensitive legal document. Carmosa and Cinders' father had a good relationship, so it makes sense for him to leave everything to his new wife. His daughter wasn't in consideration, considering she's all but stated to have been a minor when he died.
• Collar × Malice:
  • In the common Bad Ending, Ichika decides to work alone to solve the X-Day crimes because she doesn't trust the detective agency. She is a rookie cop with little investigative experience and no connections. Naturally, she isn't able to solve anything and X-Day still occurs.
  • Sasazuka deliberately taunts Souda, believing the latter is inexperienced with guns and would not actually use the gun. In one of his Bad Endings, this belief would get Ichika killed because she pushed Sasazuka out of the way when Souda became deranged enough to shoot at Sasazuka.
  • Mochida and Minegishi quickly catch on that Ichika is seeing Yanagi's group and that she is involved with the X-Day crimes to some extent. After all, the police via Okazaki and Yoshinari are monitoring the detective agency closely.
  • Some Bad Endings occur and Ichika can get attacked and killed if the player chooses to take a different path to take home or wander at night alone, despite multiple warnings it was dangerous at night.
• Heart of the Woods:
  • At the end of the first chapter, Tara and Madison get video footage of the forest spirit, but due to the fact that it's at night during a snowstorm and Tara's hands were shaking due to the cold, they only have a few seconds of usable footage. Madison believes that will be enough to serve as evidence, but also fears that people will accuse them of doctoring the footage. Unfortunately, the footage ends up becoming corrupted, likely due to Evelyn's influence.
  • Abigail wears the clothes that she died in- a light 19th century dress that she most likely wore during the warmer months of the year. When she's brought back to life in those clothes, Madison has to hurry and get her warmer clothing, since it's the middle of winter.
• In Nightshade:
  • Enju's father and her village are quick to abandon Enju when she is accused of killing Hideyoshi. The idea that one of their own shinobi tried to kill the feudal lord, truthfully or falsely, would cause the country to declare war against their small village, something that would surely eradicate everyone in the village.
  • Tying into that, on certain routes, Enju's friends are ordered to kill her. Despite having conflicting feelings, they still go through with the order as their families' lives are on stake if they failed to complete their mission.
  • Even if Enju successfully defeats all the shinobi hunting her down and/or find out Hideyoshi is actually alive in some routes, she is still unable to return home since she is still officially branded the murderer of Hideyoshi.
• Paper Perjury: Chandra is hit on the head hard enough to knock her unconscious and send her into a coma. She regains consciousness days later, but isn't anywhere near being fine, since she suffers from seizures and won't be allowed to drive until enough time passes without having one.
• Piofiore: Fated Memories:
  • Dante and Lili both drink a drugged wine Nicola brings them without realizing it but are not knocked out instantly. They continue their dinner and conversations long before Lili starts feeling drowsy.
  • In Gilbert's Bad Ending, Orlok dies after taking a hit to protect Lili. Unlike most instances where the love interest can keep fighting after sustaining multiple injuries, sometimes it only takes one to cause severe internal bleeding.
• Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair:
  • After one of the guests turns up dead in what may or may not be a suicide, the survivors discuss whether it was suicide or murder and if so, who was responsible, especially after one or two additional people die. Unlike most cases in which an untrained civilian solves a crime, it's made clear that the police are better at this sort of thing, and some characters rightly propose leaving this to the pros. In the bad endings, the police quickly prove that whoever was falsely accused of the crime is actually innocent. In the good ending, the culprit turns out to be already dead, so no one gets arrested at all.
  • A ten-year-old girl(Raiko, the protagonist) manages to save another girl(Kamen) from being falsely accused of shoplifting. She doesn't employ any clever tricks or skills a girl her age shouldn't know, but asks the store manager to review the security footage to prove that someone else put the stolen item in the accused's bag.
• GENBA no Kizuna
  • Video and digital photo evidence is not always reliable, since it's possible to edit it or manipulate the time stamps Terano hastily edits together the surveillance footage to make it seem as though the victim re-entered the house after the actual time of his murder, using footage from a previous day.
  • In the good ending, the death of the victim is considered an act of self-defense, but all four members of RPP are arrested for lying to the police, tampering with the crime scene and otherwise hindering the investigation, unlike how some characters would get off scot-free for such actions in other stories.
• In case 4 of Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane, the judge tries to hold Tyrion in contempt of court when he jumps down from the gallery, goes up to the prosecution's bench, and asks permission to cross-examine the witness. Needless to say, a defense attorney watching a trial should not suddenly prosecute it, specially when the two attorneys belong to the same law firm. Luckily for Tyrion, Prosecutor Steelwind already predicted he would do that and allowed him to be her official replacement.

• Battle for Dream Island:
  • Battle for Dream Island Again:
    • In “Well Rested”, as FreeSmart is driving their Super Van, they pick up some balloons to lift their van up into the sky, but then they spot a pipe, and are about to crash into it, Book tells Pencil to hit the brakes, but since they're in the air, they have no ground to use as friction, so they crash into it.
    • In “Intruder Alert”, W.O.A.H. Bunch needed to use the Yoyle Warehouse to build their loser chamber, but after last episode’s storm, the place flooded. So Coiny brings an idea by drinking the water away with bendy straws. But as the team starts drinking, they struggle to finish due to the rainwater being too dirty and bitter.
    • In “Catch These Hands”, the contestants had to play charades in trash compactors. While Tennis Ball was left with a complex phrase, Gelatin was too dumb to understand it, so in a quick effort, Tennis Ball creates a laser constructed out of some of the machine's parts, and draws out the molecular structure for acetylsalicylic acid on the moon. That way, Golfball, Tennis Ball’s other teammate, could read it out and free him from the compactor. But now, Golfball is in the compactor for answering correctly. Because Golfball missed a whole portion of the game (being glued to a tree in Yoyle Land), she has no idea what to do. And they can’t tell her anything, because the compactor is protected with sound proof glass. So she dies without a clue in the world.
    • Also, while Coiny was trapped inside a cash register floating adrift in space for 4 months he dies from asphyxiation.
    • In “Lots of Mud”, when swimming for keys in the lake, Nickel struggles to swim because he doesn’t have a snorkel, so Bomby lends in his own, but now Bomby’s about to drown, so Nickel gives his snorkel back. After the problem keeps getting repetitive, Bomby comes with an idea by sharing the snorkel with Nickel together, by trying to share air back and forth between one snorkel, but because oxygen is reduced by half every time it's breathed out, they promptly drown after Nickel lampshades that it isn't working.
    • In "Well, Look Who It Is!", the WTF inhabitants decided to visit the Yoyle Bakery. Firey feeds Gelatin one of its cookies that were lying around. That’s until Gelatin finds the cookie to be stale. As Firey points out, the bakery hasn’t been in operation since 1338.
      Gelatin: 600 YEARS?! [Gelatin dies due to eating a centuries-old cookie.]
    • Battle for BFDI: In “The Escape From Four”, Two demonstrates their awesome powers, as they rise magma out of the sky, and fills the magma inside Bottle. At first, Bottle giggles with the magma inside her, until she screams in pain, and immediately shatters from the intense heat. Glass isn’t durable enough to hold magma.
  • Battle for Dream Island: The Power of Two:
    • In “The Worst Day of Black Hole’s Life”, Teardrop zapped out one of Death P.A.C.T Again’s blocks from their block stack, so it began to collapse, but mid-fall, Marker used his stretched-out paper clip from earlier to hold the gap between the blocks. Of course, this doesn’t work, as the clip wasn’t strong enough to hold the blocks, so it sprung away, as the blocks fell to the ground.
    • The show has a Running Gag with the number 2763, mainly being used for the amount of distance to locations, but in “Dishes and Fishes”, Coiny explains the distance from their point to Yellow Face’s Warehouse to be 2762 miles away.
      Pin: 2,762?
      Coiny: Yeah? Not everything is always the same distance.
• In Camp Camp, Max and co. manage to successfully hijack the bus and escape from David and Gwen, only to be caught shortly after when they crash the bus because none of them know how to drive.
• Cyanide and Happiness: In this short, a barbershop quartet attempts to perform surgery, happily singing what they need ("Scallllllpeelllll..."). Their patient suddenly goes into cardiac arrest, and the singers can't do anything—because they're a barbershop quartet. They then lament the fact that they're not doctors, at which point a real surgeon enters the room and stares at the dead body in confusion.
• Dr. Havoc's Diary:
  • Firing a gun without a Hollywood Silencer inside a nuclear submarine will grant you a high-pitched, ear-shattering ringing noise. You're lucky if you don't go completely deaf after that.
  • Because he's in a secret bunker 20 feet underground, Dr. Havoc can't properly acquire wi-fi.
• Eddsworld:
  • In "Moving Targets", Tord lands on one side of a seesaw with the rest of the gang landing on the other. Instead of the expected Seesaw Catapult trope, in which Tord gets sent flying, the board snaps as it could not support the gang's weight.
  • At the end of the episode "Saloonatics," Edd tries to have an inspirational moment by drinking from his wild west ancestor's cola. Despite the rest of the episode portraying such cola as giving you a harmless sugar rush, it then cuts to him vomiting into a toilet. A baffled Tom asks why he'd drink from a 100-year-old bottle of cola.
• Helluva Boss: In the episode "Oops", as a mobster is charging at him, Fizzarolli throws a Banana Peel in the mobster's path. The mobster steps right on the peel, but much to Fizz's frustration, he keeps going like nothing happened. Fizz even groans "This usually works!" before the mobster reaches him. In real life it is very hard to slip on a fresh banana peel no matter how slippery the floor is, not that the concrete floor in the warehouse would be (the iconic banana peel gag was based on rotten banana peels).
• Homestar Runner:
  • The book Where My Hat Is At? ended with Homestar, having found his hat, arriving at the Big Game "just in time to score the winning run." It's left to interpretation whether this means he showed up in time to go up to bat and scored a home run or if he just ran onto the field at home plate and somehow didn't get thrown out for disrupting the game. When the book was remade as a cartoon ten years later, the Brothers Chaps decided to go with the latter, minus the not-getting-thrown-out part:
    Homestar: Safe!
    Umpire: Uhhhhhh, whaddaya doin'?
    Homestar: I found my hat just in time to score the winning run.
    Umpire: Uh, no, actually it's the bottom of the second, your team's down by 94 points, and you just illegally ran onto the field!
    Homestar: Get this, it was between the milk and the Cold Ones!
    Umpire: Yeah, yeah, you need to head back to the dugout before I toss you out of here, buster!
    Homestar: Man, Mr. Umpire, you sure have a funny way of pronouncing... "Homestar Runner's team wins!"
    Umpire: ...Yeah, you're suspended from the league.
  • The Dangeresque: Puppet Squad episode "The Hot-Jones Hijack!" involves the villain attempting to kill the heroes by throwing them in a deathtrap involving a "robotic Santaman"—that is to say, a motorized dancing Santa toy with a pair of knives taped to its hands. Since the Dangeresque films tend to feature (deliberately) awful special effects, you'd expect it to still be treated as a threat... but then a later scene reveals that it met the fate you would expect of such a deadly weapon, which is to say that it lost its balance and fell over to do nothing but spin around uselessly.
• mashed: "Mario MD: Donkey in Distress", Donkey Kong checks in Dr. Mario's office with a slipped disc, so Mario tries to fix it by giving the disc enough damage to push it back in formation. Throughout the episode, Dr. Mario takes x-ray shots of DK's back to see if the disc fixed back into place. Eventually, Donkey Kong's back was fixed, and was cured of his back pain. But just as he exits, Mario notices a glowing lump that had formed on his back, after since he took all of those radioactive x-rays.
  Toad: Maybe a couple less x-rays next time, Mario.
  Mario: Mamma Mia.
• The Most Popular Girls in School:
  • Rachel carrying her luggage in a trash bag ends badly, as trash bags tend to rip when holding too much weight.
  • Sorry, Brittnay, but being unarmed and having just come out of Force Feeding will not have you Curb-Stomp Battle Team France as you did with The Expendables.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • After a history of the Reds and Blues learning to cope with Caboose's habit of getting team-mates killed while trying to help them, that ends when he's reassigned. He is sentenced to the brig and tied up as soon as his new C.O. realises how Lethally Stupid he is.
  • Washington is an established Made of Iron Determinator, continuously bouncing back from injuries that would leave anyone else a blubbering shell of a person. Indeed, he seems to start recovering from being shot in the throat at the end of Season 15. However, Season 16 reveals severe brain damage due to his brain losing oxygen for one minute, leaving him as a Mood-Swinger with short-term amnesia.
  • Season 16 shows Sarge using Time Travel to recruit a team of warriors from across history. While including Alexander the Great in this lineup looks good on paper, in practice, he's less than impressive: he's constantly coughing and collapsing due to his immune system being unprepared to deal with modern diseases (it's mentioned that he eventually died of the common cold), but any tactical knowledge he has is completely useless because he only speaks Ancient Macedonian (which is a dead language even today, let alone the distant future Red vs. Blue takes place in). It's later revealed that Sarge failed to recruit Achilles to this same team because of similar language barrier issues.
  • It's repeatedly pointed out and shown that Felix is far more skilled than the Reds and Blues and that none of them individually are a match for him in a physical fight. In the Season 13 finale, he chooses to go after them despite being injured and unarmed, assuming he'll easily beat them. Since the Reds and Blues are both heavily armed and outnumber him, he's rather easily beaten and killed in a Curb-Stomp Battle.
• RWBY: In Volume 6, Maria and Weiss have stolen an Atlas military airship and the Atlas base radios them to try to figure out why they're not on course. Maria dismisses Weiss's concern and says she can bluff the radio operators at the base because she knows their lingo. The bluff fails, and the operators note that while the lingo was correct, Maria has the voice of an elderly woman and the ship's assigned pilot wasn't an old lady.
• Sonic Shorts:
  • In the series proper, Amy is shown hugging Sonic from the front and back all the time without injury. Sonic Seconds 8 features a skit that shows a more realistic outcome of her hugging him from behind; she's covered in bandages in her arms and face due to his sharp quills piercing her.
  • Sonic Seconds 9 features a skit where Shadow finds a pistol and tries to use it. He finds himself unable to fire because his fingers are too big to work the trigger properly.
  • Sonic Seconds 11 does this with a skit based on Sonic Adventure. Sonic and Tails try to sneak into a casino to get a Chaos Emerald before Dr. Eggman. Unlike in the game, they are denied access by Casinopolis' security guard because they are both under 21. This allows Dr. Eggman to go inside and grab the Chaos Emerald without a fight.
• Spooky Month:
  • In "Tender Treats" when Bob, the serial killer came into Kevin’s candy store, Kevin tries to stop him by spilling gum balls for him to trip over. But Bob was still standing, so he just kicks the gum balls aside. Ironically enough, when Kevin tries to run away, he ends up slipping over them.
  • A Rule of Three also plays in the episode. When Skid and Pump cross the street, they always Look Both Ways before crossing. The second time, when they, Lila and Jaune, ran away from Bob, they all looked both ways, before crossing the street. But the third time, when Bob crosses the street, Skid alerts that he’s crossing without looking, and just then, Bob gets rammed by a 3D police car, while flailing like a ragdoll.
• Sufferhymn
  • In "Lyon Nemesis : 2.0 You Can (Not) Fantasia", when Nihilyon is sent to the quarantined Oceania server, he imagines himself gracefully falling through the air, hitting the docks of Costa Del Sol with a Three-Point Landing and the water splashing behind him, complete with rock music. When he actually lands, Nihilyon just painfully faceplants into the dock, much to his shock and dismay because the Rule of Cool from the European server no longer applies to him.
  • "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens" sees Cinder beat up three male Au Ras because one of them said "hey babe" to her while she was trying to kill Nihilyon. Cinder's beatdown is a full-on Curb-Stomp Battle in her favor. But once Cinder is finally done beating up the Au Ra men, several hours have passed, as evidenced by the sky changing from midday to sunset. By that time, Nihilyon has just walked away and left the beach, much to Cinder's surprise and frustration.
    Cinder: (thinking) Typical. Now back to the target... (she turns around to see that Nihilyon is gone) Who is no longer here. Brilliant.

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: A resident superhero flips over a room full of bad guys shooting at him. The hero ends up dead, riddled with bullets.
• Batman: Wayne Family Adventures: In one episode, Dick, Jason, Tim, and Damian go through a pretty intense workout while trying to one-up each other in the gym (ending with one hundred upside-down push ups on their thumbs and forefingers). Cassandra tries to tell them this is a bad idea, but they don't listen. Later, at dinner, they're sore and tired that they can't even lift their forks. No matter how in-shape you are, a really intense workout will still push your body to its limits.
• Grrl Power: The Truth Serum scene, unlike many uses of this trope in fiction. Although blamed on Sydney's ADHD, the result is what you should expect from a lot of so-called "truth serums" in real life: it gets the subject talkative, but in a fully incoherent way, with the signal-to-noise ratio preventing any hope of getting useful information before it wears off.
• Doc Rat: A longrunning storyline involves Quarrydog and Kathy, the wolf and rabbit campaigning for an end to hunting, being pressurised by their respective societies to appear on Law of the Jungle a predator vs prey gameshow that seems designed to reinforce the very structure they're protesting against (predators win by "killing" the opposing team, prey by outbreeding the competition). Apparently, there is a grand plan (that they've not been told) which requires them to face each other in the final. Quarrydog is inceasingly uncomfortable with the hypocrisy, and tries to lead his team to a victory in the semifinals without directly attacking their opponents. It fails horribly, because the show is specifically designed for that not to work. You can't challenge the assumptions behind a game within the game itself.
• At the end of Dubious Company, the insane God-Emperor Kreedor is defeated and The Empire is taken over by the noble General Izzor and his lieutenants. In the last few strips it shows them struggling to transition a society that has been engaged in expansionist wars for decades to peace: Izzor notes that because Kreedor funded the military to the exclusion of everything else the country has a bloated military, a crumbling infrastructure and economy in ruins; multiple regions are on the verge of rebellion; when they announce to the soldiers that the war is over and they can go home, the now unemployed troops are furious because now they have no livelihood and don’t know anything else; recently annexed territories are left in chaos when the Empire withdraws leaving no functioning government behind and with some people calling for reparations. It's lampshaded when someone notes that it doesn’t go like that in the stories.
• Experience Boost: The final battle is ultimately resolved not due to a grand conflict with a decisive victor, but because the large amount of effects and traffic in a new expansion area necessitates a server reset to keep all the other servers stable. And there was much grumbling.
• In Jupiter-Men, Nathan catches himself when he's thrown off a building by digging his sword into the wall as a Blade Brake. But trying to support his body weight with one arm and coming to such a sudden stop injures his shoulder, leaving him clutching it in pain as he barks orders at the other Jupiter-Men.
• Miss Guillotine: Putting the power of deciding who becomes a magical girl in the hands of a young child who has a similarly childish sense of justice and responsibility goes about as well as you expect it would.
• Paranatural: Spender briefs the club while facing the window, which makes for a dramatic image with the sun shining on him. There's a short pause after he speaks, and it turns out they can't hear him very well because he's facing away from them.
• Pet Foolery: In "Anvil", we see a parody of a classic 1900’s cartoon, resembling Tom and Jerry, as a mean dog is about to give a cat a beat down, but the cat prepares to knock him out with an anvil hoisted from above. But rather than turning into comedic slapstick, the dog actually gets brutally hurt, so much so that his whole body had to be pixelated. The dog then sends the cat to the court for injuring him, and the cat will now spend the remainder of his days in jail.
  Attorney Dog: What do you mean "I wasn’t trying to kill him"?! You dropped a 400lb anvil on his head!
  Cat: I-I just thought he’d, like, turn into an accordion or something.
• Some Square Root of Minus Garfield comics show Garfield and/or others reacting to things how they would in reality instead of the cartoon setting they live in, most infamously in "Garfield Minus Cartoon Physics", an edit of the 04/16/1989 strip, wherein instead of emerging from underneath the fridge dizzy but unharmed after it falls on him, Garfield is Squashed Flat and dies, much to Jon's horror.
• In a Team Fortress 2 comic, Saxton Hale grabs a flying eagle after being dropped out of a plane, announcing his intention to have the eagle fly him to the ground safely. Since Saxton runs on Rule of Cool, you'd expect this to work, so it's a shock when the eagle turns out to be unable to fly while carrying a person.
• Wand Scum: Necromancer was tasked with amassing a skeleton army, but he has yet to figure out how to get them to march without knee-joints.
• Weak Hero thrives on the underdog heroes never losing and overcoming all injuries and trials to take down their opponents. Alex spends all of Season 3 angsting over his need to power up, removes a Power Limiter he didn't know he had, and acknowledges how to overcome his mental blocks. Expectations of his victory were high when he faced off against Dongha. Dongha mocked him for thinking his willpower would allow him to win and dislocated his arm, the most brutal injury inflicted on a protagonist yet. Alex lost unequivocally, with Gerard needing to come in at the last minute to save him.
• One Adam Ellis comic tells the story of a gymnast's encounter with her rival's Loony Fan in an elevator, with the comic set up to imply that she's recounting the story of her own death. Then the final page reveals that she not only survived the attempted stabbing but was able to shoot her attacker dead, having had the common sense to keep a pistol in her bag for self-defense.
  "The daughter of a Texas rancher always carries a gun."

• The Onion: "Romantic Comedy Behavior Gets Man Real-Life Arrested" is about a man whose gestures of affection toward his love interest are not portrayed as romantic or endearing, but the acts of a stalker. When he pushes his luck too far by impersonating a cable repairman to get into her apartment, he ends up getting arrested.

• Adventure Is Nigh!: Season 2 ends with the party bringing home a 450-pound chunk of King Fuzzyhug's skeleton, which is made of solid platinum and thus worth a ludicrous amount of money (one pound of platinum is worth 500 gold, so that's 225,000 gold total). In most RPGs, the party would just add +225,000 to their gold counter and call it a day, but the prelude to Season 4 shows that actually spending any of that treasure is not easy: they have to find ways to launder the platinum without crashing the economy or making people ask questions about where it came from.
• American High Digital: "Realistic Face Wash Commercials" shows the problem of getting those nice slow-mo shots of people energetically washing their face; it gets water everywhere.
• A number of Civvie 11 videos featured hints that Civvie was planning to escape the prison that the series was set in and detonate a bomb, with him doing brief asides of talking to contacts or requisitioning weapons. This culminates in his Unreal video, where he finally puts the plan into action... and his handlers inform him that they figured out the plan and defused it some time ago, since he was discussing the details of how he was going to do it in a publicly-available YouTube review show.
• In Critical Role: Campaign Two, Beauregard tries to invoke And Show It to You in her "How do you want to do this?" on a giant minotaur demon. Because the heart is roughly the size of a beachball and she has no knowledge of the creature's anatomy, this takes a lot of effort and ends up looking a lot less cool than she envisioned.
• Dream SMP: Immediately after winning the election, Schlatt — already established as being not the most physically fit and somewhat frail — begins downing alcohol by the truckloads and using steroids to compensate for his lack of physical strength. His unhealthy lifestyle and the impact on his health are largely Played for Laughs and never factors into the main plot, until the Season 1 finale. When Schlatt is surrounded and confronted by Pogtopia after losing the final battle, Schlatt goes into a furious Villainous Breakdown - only to overexert himself and suffer a fatal heart attack. As it turns out, his heavy substance abuse posed a genuine threat to his life, and he likely would have died regardless of whether or not he won.
• The Painter: The episode "Hell" has the titular Serial Killer (or rather killers) get caught in the act by a bodycam-wearing police officer while torturing and preparing to kill the Sole Survivor of their killing spree. You'd expect Police Are Useless to be in full effect considering their massive body count and how they've evaded authorities until then, right? Nope. One of the killers tries to rush the armed officer and is immediately shot in the head, killing him instantly and leaving the other to surrender. For all their theatrics and brutality, they were just a pair of mundane psychopaths who relied on taking defenseless civilians by surprise, and thus stood no chance against an armed and trained police officer who had them at gunpoint.
• Shephard's Mind: When Shephard tries to eat a chocolate bar, he immediately realizes how awful it tastes after he swam through sewage in his adventure.
  Shephard: That was maybe not a good thing to put in my mouth.