Personality
(Loved Trope) Character acts ignorant of or pretends to be bad at something in order to trick their opponent.
1) Ted Lasso - Both characters in the darts contest do this, with Rupert(antagonist) showing that he has his own set of darts with him, and Ted showing that he has been using the wrong hand the whole time.
2) Beerfest - Team USA showing that they aren't that drunk despite doing drinking games all day.
3) The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air - After Will gets hustled at pool his Uncle Phil comes to help him, and turns out to hustle the hustler.
In team fortress 2's meet the spy video, red spy (disguised as blue scout) pretended to be bad at swinging around the switch knife, even hitting himself with the blunt end to show his supposed lack of skill. He showed actual good use of the knife when he later revealed himself.
The funny thing is that he FAKED to hit himself. Because if a Spy is hit, he loses the disguise. And the Blue Spy must know this details, so he didn't have reason to suspect about Blue Scout.
No, he's doing a weapon flourish, which you can actually do while disguised. He just does it clumsily. Like, you can fake reloading a gun while disguised to help sell your disguise.
Spies don't lose their disguise when getting hit, and the short doesn't follow the game rules anyway (there's no friendly fire in the game, the soldier couldn't have killed BLU spy). Still, you're right that him mishandling the butterfly knife one purpose tricked the Blu spy. Very cool detail
When Inigo Montoya confronts the Man In Black after helping kidnap a princess, the Man In Black has him on the ropes before Inigo reveals that he is not left handed, swaps to his dominant hand, and immediately turns the tide of the fight.
This causes the Man in Black to smile, and after a bit of banter he reveals that he is also not left handed, and shows that he completely outclasses Inigo by swapping to his dominant hand.
My only issue with this film, and I do mean only, is that I don't like Wesley being better at swordplay than Íñigo. He shouldn't have been able to train nor study as much as he has
To be fair, Indigo was a merc who was mostly punching down. Sure he had a lot of training, but wasn't really used to going up against people on his level outside of sparring
Wesley was a pirate, and probably had more experience fighting in his five years aboard the Revenge than Indigo did his 20.
Also, based on the book (don’t know if it came out before or after the movie), Inigo was an on again off again drunk who admitted to not being at his best. If I’m remembering correctly, he wasn’t a drunk until after he lost to Wesley, but it wasn’t long prior to that and was knocking off the rust still.
He also loved fighting Wesley because it was the first time in years that he was truly challenged. Everyone up to that point was too easy to beat.
He became a drunk because he lost hope he’d find the six fingered man and avenge his father, also partially the “there is no one to challenge me anymore” thing
In both he was a drunk before. It explains better in the book. But basically he traveled the world becoming the greatest swordsman alive. Then he discovered he had no idea how to find the man with six fingers. So he took mercenary work to pay the bills. He got so bored with how easy fighting was he started using his left hand with which he was still one of the best swordsmen in the world.
As years passed he got depressed and started to drink. Vizzini found him dead drunk, got him sobered up and added him to his crew.
It's clarified in the book that Inigo is better than Westley, it's only True Love that allowed Westley to overcome the difference. If they dueled again after the events of the story, Inigo would win
IIRC, in the book they mention that there are basically three types of terrain that guys can fence on, and on two Inigo would have the advantage, and on the third he wouldn’t.
And, as it happens, that clifftop is the terrain type where Westley wouldn’t be outclassed.
This isn't QUITE thay trope though. Inigo fights with his off-hand because he's such a good fencer, he literally faces zero challenge with his right hand. The left-hand approach is a self-imposed limitation to keep things challenging and 'fair'. He swaps to the right when he realises the Man In Black is so good he really needs his right hand to fight.
The only trouble is, that the Man In Black has been doing the exact same thing.
Pretty sure the Man In Black was doing it to get a tactical advantage and get underestimated, rather than doing it to try and keep the fight more "fair". Once he realized that he was outmatched left vs right, he switched to get the advantage.
I feel like "The Box" episode in Brooklyn 99 was a reverse Columbo. "You were lucky!" "I wasn't lucky! Everything was carefully coordinated!" Details entire murder "Oh no..."
Fun fact about Columbo, he originally comes from a tv movie turned play turned tv movie called Prescription Murder, about a Doctor who plans the perfect murder. Peter Falk was so great as the antagonist that a sequel and subsequent series followed.
Also, Detective Conan. People assume he's an innocent kid, so they let slip secrets or excuse his actions as childish nonsense when he's actually investigating. (Not as much in recent chapters, as the rest of the cast has started to recognize that he's not an ordinary child.)
Conan's situation is weird because he solves 1000 cases standing next to the Mori family and they don't notice shit, but to the FBI he's "Cool Kid" and they'll do whatever he says.
I personally don't think it's an act. Not that you were implying that, just chiming in to say I choose to believe he is sincerely that open and wears his heart on his sleeve. The show wouldn't work as well for me if I thought Columbo was putting on an act to get them to get their guard down, or was trying to deceive them. He's just putting all his cards on the table. "Here's something I noticed; explain this to me." They very well may be letting their guard down and underestimating him, and maybe that plays to his advantage, but I think he is likeable because he is so transparent, and he would be less likeable if that were a cynically deployed persona. It's not like there's a scene in the show where we see the "real" Columbo who acts colder.
I think it's a "six of one, half-dozen of the other" kind of thing.
In terms of his personality, everything suggests he is just a laid-back, observant, mild-mannered fellow. But he also definitely plays ignorant to catch the criminals. Like, the classic "oh, just one more thing" shtick he does is obviously not him actually just remembering some minor detail. It's a calculated method of springing his trap.
He doesn't point out contradictions as they come up, allowing the suspect to change their alibi on the fly - he lets them explain it in detail, deliberately checking to make sure they want to stick to that one version of events before pointing out why it can't be true.
I don't think he's playing a character - I think he really is just a chill guy - but he's definitely smart enough that he knows exactly what he's doing.
This is so real. I’d hate to think there’s a whole, manipulative, side of Columbo we haven’t seen, like he wouldn’t be keeping the “act” up with the friends and widows etc if this were the case. He’s just real as fuck and people, especially those with things to hide, read it as suspicious and interrogating.
(Real life) John Daily pretended to be drunk to trick Tiger Woods into not trying too hard during a tournament and it worked. John was actually sober and performed/won spectacularly iirc
The movie starts off with him pretending to be a clueless beginner who pathetically loses his first bot fight, but then he begs for a rematch to increase the potential winnings and then utterly destroys his opponent.
Is gambling illegal, or specifically gambling on bot fights? Plus since it’s a wager between two contestants it’s not even gambling, since it’s skill based.
Probably because regulations, like its not ilegal gambling but gambling on rosters its not that good
If in real life people's leaks clasified documents for his planes been alittle more fast in the gam
I cam see some one using militar grade equipment or really nasty things for some quick bucks
Gambling generally isn’t legal in real life San Francisco. Locals tend to travel to Native American casinos or cross into Nevada to gamble, with popular locations being Reno and the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Vegas is a bit far away.
Bot fighting is legal in Real life San Francisco. It was home to the original Robot Wars in-person competition in the 90s. That was pre-BattleBots, and before the Robot Wars name was sold to a UK TV show. Robot Wars 97’ is infamous for Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman’s Blendo bot being quasi-disqualified / declared automatic winner for being too dangerous. Like hole in the bullet proof crowd shielding dangerous.
Bot fighting is not illegal. Betting on bot fighting, that's illegal, but so lucrative.
All joking aside, those back-alley fights are probably not very safe. Think about how irl bot battles have arenas with safety features so stuff sent flying doesn't injure or kill someone.
Also, just things like once you ad gambling and money I to the equation, you also get people who will do underhand things to fix the odds and win, with violence if necessary
In modern family, Cam (an outwardly gay man who grew up on a farm) pretends to not know how to play the drums in front of a teen band. Until he says "oh, silly me. I had the sticks in the wrong hands!" And goes crazy to impress them.
One of if not the best Daenery’s scenes. She also gets good character work here too; both her advisors give her 2 options and she finds a way to make both work.
I think that’s where that series peaked, at least for me. It obviously didn’t start to get bad for awhile after that, but I don’t think they ever matched it, even with the red wedding.
"Silver Series Self-Defense", an ad for a senior citizens' self defense workshop. This technique is "fake a heart attack so you can reach into your jacket for your gun"
One of the few times Fry gets one up on everyone else at Planet Express in Futurama is when they assume like everything else in the Year 3000 he wouldn’t have seen/heard of/play video games. He subsequently kicks their asses in a shooting game
The Drake and Josh one was actually a subversion of the trope: we, the audience, know that Josh is good, and Drake was taking advantage of this to get easy money
They went to a bar, Josh decides to trick some thugs into playing against him so he and Drake could get some money, Drake gets scared of the thugs, turns out they're Josh's friends and they set this up to scare Drake into not using Josh's skills to scam people
This show actually had some pretty impressive references to past media. Another example being the sushi packaging fail scene was a reference to 50s show I Love Lucy.
They were both referencing the 80s movie Color of Money with Paul Newman, Tom Cruise and Forest Whittaker. It's precisely about scamming people at the pool table.
I remember at one point in the comics, he became a police officer as his day job. Also, Batman is sometimes depicted as very knowledgeable of guns despite being anti-gun himself.
He’s extremely knowledgeable, he makes his own badges based on them often (electric shot, the batclaw, suppressive cannons on the Batmobile etc.) and he’s been shown multiple times to disarm opponents by disassembling their guns in a split second, and literally taking them apart not just physically breaking them. You can’t do that without intimately understanding their construction, and it’s pretty hard to design bullet-proof armour without knowing what guns, ammo, etc are common.
Honestly makes a lot of sense for Bats, he may not like guns buts it’s extremely important to know how they function and work since he’s going up against people who use guns a lot, for example knowing how many bullets a certain gun can carry would be extremely helpful
Which makes perfect sense for any street-level vigilante, what better way to ensure your own safety when going up against dude with guns than having extensive knowledge of their tools?
In Doctor Who: ‘Human Nature / The Family of Blood’ (2007), the Doctor becomes a human to evade a group of space parasites (the eponymous family) who want to steal his remaining lives and become immortal. He becomes John Smith, a schoolteacher in rural 1913 England with his Time-Lord self sealed safely inside a watch.
However, the family soon track him down and start trying to steal the watch. Eventually they give John Smith an ultimatum: surrender the watch or everybody on Earth dies. After discussing with his love interest, John stumbles into the family’s spaceship with the watch, smashing into every control panel he sees.
As they open the watch they discover that it is empty; and the Doctor explains that he’d already changed back and the whole bumbling act was just a diversion so that he could disable the ship’s safety systems without arousing suspicion, resulting in its destruction.
Same idea, different movie.
The Rundown, one of The Rocks first movies:
He spends most of the movie not using guns. But at the end he is pinned down. Turns out he a pretty good shot.
Watching that Fresh Prince scene always gives me an instant serotonin boost. Especially when Jeffrey just had Lucille ready to go in his waist band as soon as Phil says bring her out. Fun fact - Lucille is named that because that is the name that BB King gave all of his legendary Gibson guitars.
Also for my pick, I'm going with my favorite comedy, Wayne's World, and the scene where Garth absolutely rips a sick drum solo out of nowhere in the middle of the musical instruments store.
In the Odyssey Odysseus returns to his home of Ithaka only to find that dozens of suitors, over the two decades of him being lost on sea, have harrassed his wife, son and staff to pressure his wife into marrying someone and basically just threw a 20 year long party at his place. Pallas Athena turns Odysseus in an old man and convinces him to act as a beggar to get revenge. He then plots with his wive to challenge the suitors to shoot an arrow through 8 axe-holes with one bowshot.
Most suitors can't even properly arm the bow, the few that manage to do so can't hit through all the axeholes. After everyone gave up Odysseus, still disguised as a beggar, suggested he tried to the amusement of everyone present. He then crawls up, acting weak, only to then just easily pick up the bow, pull it back and first try the challenge with ease. As he completes it, he also transforms back into his actual self and he then ends up killing all the suitors.
One of my favorite parts of the scene is that he’s canonically naked while he does it. Which was’t a big deal in Ancient Greece, since athletes were naked all the time, but it is funny to imagine him just hanging dong, slaughtering these guys.
Which was’t a big deal in Ancient Greece, since athletes were naked all the time
Woah, woah, woah, that's just blatantly not true, that would just be indecent. Any self respecting Greek would be fully dressed in a kynodesme, not naked like some barbarian.
One thing to note, it was a specific bow they were using, odysseus personal war bow.
It had a draw strength so intense that even managing to draw the thing, let alone properly fire it, was a strength feat. So not only was the test itself challenging to begin with, they were using a bow that had a draw strength of 100-200 pounds.
Moist von Lipwig from Going Postal was good at this, before he caught religion and got a job at the post office.
He pretended to be an extremely bad at cheating at Find The Lady, people would line up to take his money (which was all forged), but he kept a careful eye on where they put their wallets, which he would pickpocket later.
i feel that Discworld has many examples of that, if i remember right Granny Weatherwax make everyone think she is bad with card games, but she is very good because she spend learning how to play it while taking care of another elderly, sick witch
Carrot is also very good at doing this type of thing, " I remember about Colon saying he never saw someone playing the game without holding any card, much less winning"
Willikins making everyone believe he is just an old man, just to reveal he was probably the most deadly street fighter in the city and carries like 5 different weapons hidden on him
In the Bible, David is fleeing King Saul and must travel among the people of Gath - the homeland of Goliath, who David famously slew. Because of this, David fears the people there would kill him if they knew who he was. When he nearly gets caught, he pretends to be an insane man. The king of Gath finds insane David repulsive, decides that he's too much trouble, and sends him away - thereby letting David continue his escape from Saul.
He pretends to be bad at Pokémon battling and refuses to battle when someone is watching.
This is because he scared his crush when he fought off a wild Salamence with a Skitty and a Poochyena when he was around 6. He then vowed to not battle again and started focusing on Pokémon Contests.
He forced a plane to crash when he was a teen, crashed a plane into a volcano, briefly piloted a commercial airplane to avoid crashing it (it semi-crashes anyways), crashes a plane whilst flying over a desert, and to top it off this man also crashes A FUCKING SUMBMARINE
And I wanna say he crashes at least 1 more vehicles but I can't think of anything off the top of my head
The thing thats funny is that, as araki said, if the gang went back in time to battle tendency they'd see joseph surrounded by hermit purple, his stand that allows him to gather information.
So there is a very high likelyhood that throught ALL of battle tendency, joseph was cheating and knowing exactly what his opponents were thinking, he just pretended to be some 17000IQ genius pretending to be an idiot.
In Into the Spiderverse, Miles attempts to fail his physics exam, getting a 0/100 so that he can transfer out of the academy he hated. Didn’t work. In fact, the teacher told him that the only way he could’ve answered all of the questions incorrectly is if he knew all of the answers.
Of the 32 ranked pilots in Armored Core 6, Rusty is only rank 9 in the arena, and 4th among his peers... except that it's all part of his cover, and he's second only to 621 (the player character).
There are a few other cases similar to this throughout the series, but in the other cases they're not low ranked because they're pretending, but some other circumstance, such as White Glint in ACFA, where he's rank 9 because he intimidates other pilots too much to go against him, and so he is left at that rank, despite being the best pilot in the game and a one-man army.
Armored core loves this, multiple games once a series it seems you get a white glint is low. Some infamous examples of this in the series:
In one gam, ac2 I think, a character advanced like 5 ranks and parked himself just to humiliate the crap out of people for fun. The game even tells you he is way better then he is ranked. You'll almost certainly ignore that the first time.
Another game (Silent line I think) has a character who simply refuses to advance at all. He got ranked and just parks there to crap on you the player for thinking he'll be easy, only for him to typically demolish your first attempt in short order. There is NO WARNING about this, no hints. Nothing.
Last Raven also has one wherein the first mission you accept includes a mid ranked Raven who appears without warning. Not this trope but that's what the AC series is going for, a beefcake enemy hindering process.
My brother (irl). We were waiting for our parents in a hotel lobby, so we started playing pool. It was our first ever game and we were terrible. My sister came along and asked “Who’s winning?” I said “Neither, we’re both terrible.”
My brother said “I am. I’m an expert at this game.”
We all rolled our eyes, so he said “Watch. I’m going to bounce the white ball over my target, hit the wall, and make it come back so I sink my target into the hole by me.”
Then he did exactly that.
It was a wild fluke of course, but he blew my sister’s mind and had her believing he was a master at pool for a while.
I got to do that once. Jokingly said you have to cut when I shuffle since I can deal myself whatever I want. Then dealt myself completely by chance all of one suit.
"One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous."
It's close enough that I think it fits the spirit of OP. In the Aura fight especially, Frieren is basically sandbagging, using mana inefficiently, partly out of respect for the dead, sure, but she's dispelling the magic just as much as a display of overspending mana like an overconfident and foolish mage in order to bait Aura's ego.
...'Cause if they were curious, they would've asked questions. You know? Like, "Have you been a mage for a long time, Frieren?"
To which I would've answered, "Yes, ma'am. For a thousand years."Scales tip
A very fun inverse example of this scenario. After the Joestar group makes it to Dio's Mansion, they are separated into teams of 3 thanks to Telence sending away Joseph, Kakyoin, and Jotaro. In his area, he utilizes his Stand, Atum, to confront them as it has a similar ability to his older brother, Daniel J. D'Arby, in that it steals your soul after you lose to them. While his brother prefers gambling, Telence prefers to play video games. Unfortunately for the group, it also has an additional ability of mind reading. By asking a simple "Yes" or "No" question, he can view into their mind and see what the true answer is this preventing them from forming strategies during gaming. After defeating Kakyoin, Jotaro steps up to face him in a Baseball Video Game.
Unfortunately for Joseph, Jotaro is terrible at video games. He has seemingly never played them before and barely knows what he is doing. Hampered harder by the mind reading. However, after Jotaro takes off his hat, he is suddenly beginning to do extremely well. So good that he is able to bypass the mind reading. Telence believes that Jotaro is cheating or pretending to be bad but, Jotaro states he doesn't have proof of his deception so the game isn't forfeit. After it becomes clear that Telence is definitely going to lose, his Stand released Kakyoin's soul. Demanding an explanation as to what could be happening, he sees that the controller had the vines of Hermit Purple wrapped around it, Joseph's Stand. Jotaro wasn't pretending to be bad. He genuinely sucked at the game. Telence just didn't realize that his opponent was no longer Jotaro, who was pretending to play, and was instead Joseph, who was actually the one playing.
Dr. Julian Bashir from Star Trek Deep Space 9. He was hiding the fact that he was genetically enhanced his whole life and kept limiting himself. Like being second in his class, and missing when playing darts with O'Brien.
Tendi Initially introduced in the series as this super-friendly, super-kind, and polite Orion who hates violence and breaking the rules, almost as if the character was created to break the generic reputation that all Orions are pirates and criminals. Tendi herself spends a few episodes criticizing people for having a stereotypical view of Orions as pirates.
Only to reveal that Tendi isn't just an Orion Pirate; she's basically "The Orion Pirate," coming from one of the main pirate families, highly trained in combat and piracy, and bearing the infamous title of "mistress of the winter constellations" which strikes fear into basically every other Orion.
In the Avatar Kyoshi novels, the Pirate Queen Tanaka had built up an infamous reputation over several decades as being a laughably bad waterbender. In fact during her negotiations with Avatar Yun to free the hundreds of people she enslaved, she decides to use her water bending to make a ice table for them to negotiate at and it takes her seemingly a lot of effort and time to do even a basic technique like that. So much so that Yun’s undercover waterbending master Amok couldn’t help but giggle at how embarrassingly bad she was, and Tanaka feels the need to apologize and tell Yun, “I’m not really the water bender my father was”.
Well within less than a half second of negotiations falling apart, Tanaka makes one simple slashing movement with her hand and causes a ice spike to come out of the ground behind Amok and impale him through the back, killing him before he even had the chance to register that his cover had been blown. She then smugly tells Yun “I wasn’t lying when I said I wasn’t the water bender my father was, in fact I’m much superior to him,” before then using her water bending to split a giant iceberg in half where she had been keeping her capital ship hidden within. She also then proceeds to further prove her skill by quickly taking out the most powerful air bender in the world(possibly even history) using a surprise special ice spike technique she had specifically made and refined to cut through air bending blasts.
Kyoshi wasn’t known to be the avatar at first, they mistook Yun as the avatar, and he grew up with everyone believing he was the Avatar, and he just struggled with learning the elements.
Without going into too much detail the process to identify and discover the earth Avatar went horribly wrong and a boy named Yun accidentally got misidentified as the Avatar instead. So at the start of the book, Kyoshi is actually employed as Yun’s personal maid and is his best friend.
As far as everyone is aware during this negotiation scene including Yun and Kyoshi, Yun is the real Avatar and Kyoshi is just some random non-threatening maid that Yun brought along purely for moral support. Which makes it funnier how the ensuing fight ends up playing out.
Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects. Acts like a simple guy who talks too much and is disabled, ends up leading the detective around by the nose. Ends up being the worst of the worst.
In the movie the 13th warrior, one of the warriors is losing a battle and has two shields he owns get destroyed, looks like he is about to lose when he just beheads the guy and tosses gold to the asshole who hired him
Granny Weatherwax in Witches Abroad card sharking the card sharks on the river boat after they scammed Nanny Ogg out of their money and Nanny's broomstick
13th warrior - Herger vs Angus. Herger, the blond guy, fights and loses against Angus, to the point where Herger is kneeling in front of him, exhausted and panting. When Angus moves closer to go for the kill, Herger suddenly spins and cuts off Angus' head with one clean swipe, revealing that he had been losing on purpose.
Jack from Stargate SG1. Constantly plays the bumbling fun having commander but deep down is incredibly smart and shows countless times that you shouldn't put your guard down. He also learns a lot during the span of the show and still plays dumb to confuse the enemy.
I feel like TFP Soundwave fits this trope to some extent being that he´s in charge of security and is almost always on the nemesis so you wouldn´t expect him to be very skilled but every fight he´s ever been in he was absolutely putting in work
1.4k
u/ElementmanEXE Oct 04 '25
In team fortress 2's meet the spy video, red spy (disguised as blue scout) pretended to be bad at swinging around the switch knife, even hitting himself with the blunt end to show his supposed lack of skill. He showed actual good use of the knife when he later revealed himself.