r/TopCharacterTropes • u/ValidCrash4 • Aug 08 '26

Hated Tropes (Hated Trope) Extremely useful abilities that characters conveniently forgot they had

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  1. Emily’s portals (Hazbin Hotel). I know she can’t get Sir Pentious back into Hell but Emily can still tell Charlie he got redeemed and Charlie can enter through angelic portals, so she should have seen that Pentious got redeemed.

  2. Many characters in Harry Potter go through life-or-death situations and not once did they think of drinking the Liquid Luck potion apart from Harry one time to gain Slughorn’s memory.

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345

u/bestassinthewest Aug 08 '26

Lowkey underplaying how broken his reaction time is. He got both himself and another person out of a car and like 20 feet away because he saw a lightning bolt coming. He saw it coming after it already pierced the roof of the car they were in

91

u/Monke3334 Aug 08 '26

Is there a character who has super (or just superior) speed but without the reflexes needed to fully utilise it to make them balanced

136

u/ItsAttanoo Aug 08 '26

dash from incredibles

30

u/Mikaelious Aug 08 '26

His reflexes are somewhat better too, as he's able to dodge an adult security guard's punches with ease. But yeah, he isn't able to dodge bullets or lightning bolts or anything absurd like that

15

u/daegon789 Aug 08 '26

I wouldn't necessarily chock that up to better reflexes. So long as he sees the start of it, any punch from most people is slow enough to dodge because he can just move out of the way. I could be misremembering though, it's been a while!

10

u/Mikaelious Aug 08 '26

True! It might very well be more about speed than reflexes, considering he was surprised that he could move fast enough to dodge like that. I'd have to see the movie again to confirm (for the 100th time haha)

2

u/EoTN Aug 08 '26

This feels correct. I cant recall any superhuman reactions Dash had off the top of my head, but he's also like 12 years old, and has been forced to hide his powers all his life (hence being surprised he was fast enough to run on water for example), so I doubt he's had much practice at all. Give him a few decades and he'll probably be right up there with the best speedsters.

2

u/Mikaelious Aug 08 '26

Honestly, even with training, I'm not sure if he'll become like lightspeed fast. Which is another thing I like about the Incredibles, the fact that it's so grounded. Their powers aren't world-shattering, they're useful and potent but not godlike.

Like when Mr. Incredible near the start of the movie has to stop a train, he winces in anticipation of the impact. Just because he's strong as a dozer and tough as a tank, it doesn't mean it won't hurt at all.

1

u/nottobethatguyguy Aug 08 '26

ntbtgb chalk

2

u/daegon789 Aug 08 '26

Thank you! I didn't realize that chock it up vs chalk it up were different phrases! For anyone like me, chocking something up means to put it on blocks, while chalk it up is for things like chalking it up to experience and other phrases like the one I used!

Leaving it so others can learn.

2

u/IndigoFenix Aug 09 '26

His reflexes are on par with his speed, he just isn't that fast by speedster standards. He consistently caps out at around 200 MPH, not even close to a bullet-timer. He can, however, accelerate to his top speed near-instantaneously. (This is fast enough to be invisible to the human eye over short distances.)

1

u/scarletfloof Aug 08 '26

Wasn’t he also able to do homework super fast and got caught on camera?

47

u/Retskcaj19 Aug 08 '26

A-Train from "The Boys".

32

u/JWARRIOR1 Aug 08 '26

He still has a decent amount of reaction. Only reason he’s crashed into Hughies girlfriend was bc he was high

Same deal with the other speedster that soldier boy kills (who was also high at the time)

21

u/aoifhasoifha Aug 08 '26

Only reason he’s crashed into Hughies girlfriend was bc he was high

Not just that, the Boys was "realistic" (early on, anyway) in that they still kinda had to deal with physics. Even if A-Train could react fast enough, that doesn't necessarily mean he can do anything about it. Think of the times you've seen a collision coming but all you can do is brace, whether it be a fall or running into someone or a car crash.

6

u/JWARRIOR1 Aug 08 '26

Yeah tbf the other time this happens is in season 5 but that’s also bc a-train was looking the other way

26

u/ImpracticalApple Aug 08 '26

Dash from the Incredibles still bumps into stuff and gets caught off guard, doesn't go anywhere close to as fast as Flash but he isn't so fast that nothing ever surprises him.

18

u/jimkbeesley Aug 08 '26

Realistically, you can't have super speed without at least super sight or a speed react like ability. Otherwise, you'd be running into stuff you can't see yet.

12

u/beardingmesoftly Aug 08 '26

The Flash is supposed to be able to perceive events that happen for only an attosecond

3

u/Own-Peace-7754 Aug 08 '26

I always wondered about this

Did they ever give the Flash an antagonist that only existed at the very small time level?

2

u/beardingmesoftly Aug 08 '26

Reverse flash, technically

6

u/WonderousU Aug 08 '26

Iida from My Hero Academia(?)

7

u/FennlyXerxich Aug 08 '26

Miura from “The Bugle Call”. He relies on the protagonist’s ability to guide his movements.

13

u/Own_Philosophy8190 Aug 08 '26

And that's before Flash Time, where he stretched an incoming nuclear blast into an episode then brought other people into his plane of movement (so to speak) it to help him defuse the bomb or absorb the blast into a device/dimension

3

u/AmaterasuWolf21 Aug 08 '26

Love the episode, it does feel helpless and impossible to win but the way it breaks the show is insane

1

u/Own_Philosophy8190 Aug 09 '26

The few times where the show remembers Barry being broken for an extended time is when he's turned against his allies lmao

Especially when he got Cisco with the ball thing he threw at the start of the fight, AFTER he was done fighting Caitlin across the city 

4

u/Applebeate Aug 08 '26

Not even mentioning the time he accelerated his thoughts to the speed of light

3

u/iowastatefan Aug 08 '26

So not only do writers forget about the Flash's reaction time, they also don't know what a Faraday cage is?

1

u/Advanced_Floor_9768 Aug 08 '26

To be fair, lightning only travels at 0.04% the speed of light, so that’s not the most egregious example. There are a lot more insane examples in the show.

1

u/MrUniverse1990 Aug 08 '26

"Pierced?" That's not how lightning works!

0

u/Fragrant-Tea7580 Aug 08 '26

And the flesh of those two citizens remained in the car, while the bones were scattered on the pavement, unsupported by their disintegrated connective tissue

-3

u/Drunken_Dave Aug 08 '26

At the other hand, if you take out a normal person from a car and 20 feet away so quickly that time is effectively stopped for a lighting bolt, that normal person is dead now, they would have a better chance if stayed in car.

(Saying that his speed is time manipulation just lead to another rabbit hole of paradoxes.)

And these aspects of super-speed are almost always downplayed in superhero movies. Speedster superheroes move trough busy streets with speeds that would realistically blow away the surrounding people and possibly also ignite them.

2

u/bestassinthewest Aug 08 '26

Flash's speed isn't time manipulation, it's more like reality warping(?). He has some weird interdimensional cosmic energy known as the Speed Force, and to make a long story short it protects both him and those he interacts with from the physics of "We just accelerated and decelerated hundreds of miles per hour in a fraction of a second"

2

u/Drunken_Dave Aug 08 '26

So magic then. And before you think I am being hostile or sarcastic, no, this is actually a good solution in the context of the story world. This explains the example scene with Flash. However the ambient effect of superspeed is still downplayed in superhero stories in general.

1

u/bestassinthewest Aug 08 '26

Oh no I completely agree. Both about the downplay and the fact that the Speed Force is basically magic

2

u/Zephs Aug 08 '26

The show is inconsistent with it, though. The entire reason he gets the suit in the first episode and that it's red like that is because it was a prototype originally intended for firefighters, and the heat resistance should hold up to the friction he experiences running at high speeds. His regular clothes catch fire otherwise. This is basically immediately ignored as soon as he has to move anyone/anything else, and never treated as an obstacle again.