Crisis Makes Perfect

"Everyone knows that the best way to learn is under intense, life-threatening pressure!"

—Peter B. Parker, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

At the beginning of the story, the protagonist attempts to demonstrate a skill, and fails dismally. This is a sure sign that at the climax they're going to save the day by attempting this skill again and getting it right (usually for the first time ever).

A sister trope of Chekhov's Skill and Chekhov's Hobby, in which the protagonist mentions or demonstrates that they can do something which will turn out to be valuable later. Crisis Makes Perfect is when the protagonist demonstrates that they can't do something right up until everything depends on them being able to.

Compare Becoming the Boast, where a character who has been boasting about their ability all story is called on to demonstrate it, admits they can't, and then has to do it anyway; Die or Fly, where a crisis brings out a previously-unsuspected ability; and One Bullet Left, another trope demonstrating that the hero can do amazing things when the climax of the story depends on it. Also see Traumatic Superpower Awakening.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works]. Shirou's attempts to use Strengthening magic on materials consistently fail in his nightly practice until after Archer fixes his Magic Circuits, but he gets it right in do-or-die combat situations right from the start. Notably, though, this is justified, though in spoileriffic manner: Shirou's magic is limited to 'stuff to do with swords'. When he's just trying to strengthen a random object, it's not going to work because the object is insufficiently sword-like. Only when he's making objects more weapon-like does his power work.
• FLCL episode 4 "Full Swing". Naota is so bad at swinging a baseball bat that he refuses to swing during games. At the end of the episode he swings a guitar perfectly to stop a falling satellite bomb in its tracks.
• In Naruto, Naruto is given a week to learn Rasengan. He doesn't manage it until the last day, when Kabuto is about to kill Tsunade and the only move Naruto knows that will put Kabuto out of the fight is Rasengan. Notably, the fight giving him a case of Impaled Palm was the only reason his method of attempting the technique changed enough to pull it off.
• In One Piece, Katakuri is able to use Kenbunshoku Haki to predict the future. Luffy's own Kenbunshoku Haki, while decent, can't keep up with Katakuri. While at first he is barely able to stand against Katakuri's attacks, let alone land an attack of his own, as the fight progresses Luffy begins to refine his own Haki to also see into the future. Invoked by Luffy himself, who goes out of his way to keep fighting Katakuri when he could easily run away, determining that struggling against such a powerful opponent will force him to grow stronger.
  • He got the idea from Rayleigh, who explained during the Time Skip that Haki in general tends to grow stronger when the user is backed against a corner.
  • When an amnesiac Big Mom puts Luffy in a situation where the collars around his neck and that of Hyogoro, an old man who has been training him, are about to explode, he is able to briefly use an advanced application of Busoshoku Haki that he had been unable to use willingly throughout his training, allowing him to destroy the collars before they explode. Hyogoro then challenges Luffy to do it again in order to defend himself from Big Mom, stating that power blooms in adversity. He fails, but is later able to master the skill with more training.
  • Luffy is able to figure out during his fight with Kaido that the latter can infuse his attacks with Haoshoku Haki. Realizing that such a thing is possible, Luffy immediately masters the skill and, where he failed to deal significant damage before, is now able to fight on even terms.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • An episode of Pokémon: The Original Series involves a guest character's two Bellossom failing to perform a stunt for a performance—until a Team Rocket attack prompts them to try it again, and they succeed.
  • Several times in the series, a Pokémon will learn a new attack when they're on the losing end of a battle.

Films — Animation

• Dot from A Bug's Life is a young queen ant with wings, but struggles to fly throughout the movie. At most, she can lightly hover off the ground a few micrometers (ant-sized, remember) before they give out and she falls. Come the third act of the film, where the grasshoppers invade the ant colony, she overhears their plan to kill her Mom to make a statement, and she's chased off a steep cliff by the psychotic grasshopper Thumper, whom she's deathly afraid of. The last event is enough for her to perfect her flying, which she then uses to find Flik to help.
• Barnyard: Otis' friend Peck has a Running Gag of being a scrawny rooster unable to crow. He's finally able to let out a crow at the very end to get Otis' attention when Dag is about to pounce on him from behind.
• In Happily Ever After, Thunderella has trouble focusing her storm-control powers. In the climax, she successfully throws a lightning bolt at the villain, which creates a distraction for Snow White to deal the final blow.
• The opening of How to Train Your Dragon 2 has Hiccup and his dragon Toothless practice rider-less flying combined with squirrel-suit flying, a difficult task for both of them because Toothless can't make tight turns without a rider to control his prosthetic tail fin and because Hiccup can't gain altitude, only glide. The climax relies on the two of them both pulling off these tricks again, aided by Toothless' discovery of stabilizing back spines to let him turn sharper even with a stiff tail fin.
• In the The Hunchback of Notre Dame sequel, Madellaine struggles with her ambition to become a tightrope walker. At the end, she pulls it off to save Zephyr.
• In The Land Before Time, Petrie is a young pterodactyl who doesn't know how to fly, but he learns pretty quick when he has to save Ducky from the Sharptooth.
• Recess: School's Out: Vince is shown early on struggling with a pitch at baseball practice. When saving summer (literally) depends on him making the pitch, he's able to do so. In this case, it's explicitly because the coaches were making him change his technique; he's normally a good pitcher.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Miles is forced to web-swing while fleeing from Alchemax and Dr. Octopus and succeeds, however briefly, after Peter's attempts to walk him through it failed. In the climax, Miles develops his own web-swinging style while rushing to the Super-Collider after everyone else left him behind.
• In The Tigger Movie, Tigger shows Roo the Whoopty-Dooper Loopty Looper Alley Ooper bounce. Roo can't do it at first, nor later when he's practicing before bedtime. At the end, he has to do it to save Tigger from an avalanche, nailing the move.

Films — Live-Action

• The Blob (1988): At the beginning of the film, Brian is trying to jump a broken bridge at the edge of town on his motorcycle, but he chickens out at the last second and ends up crashing. Later in the film, he's being pursued by government agents because He Knows Too Much, and is chased towards the same bridge by armed soldiers on trucks, ATVs, and helicopter (under the impression he's a possible infectee to a non-existent disease). This time, he makes the jump and escapes, but his pursuers are not so lucky.
• In Down Periscope, the diving officer screws up her maneuvering early in the film, but then in the crucial moment near the end gets it exactly right thanks to the captain Obfuscating Stupidity and giving incorrect orders to induce her to jump in with the correct ones. It's noted that the captain used this to help her get it right when she speaks to him afterwards and asks him how much longer he would have waited before doing it properly.
• In Enola Holmes, the titular character fails for most of the movie to pull off a certain jiu-jitsu move. In the climax, with her life at stake, she somehow manages to do it.
• In the climactic game of Major League, veteran pitcher Eddie Harris is flagging at the top of the ninth inning, when Yankees power hitter Clu Haywood comes up to bat. The Indians' manager calls Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn in as relief pitcher, even though Vaughn has never failed to give away a hit to Haywood in the season. The catcher protests, but the Indians' manager insists, saying, "I've got a hunch he's due." Vaughn throws three straight fastballs and strikes Haywood out.
• In Man of Steel, it takes quite some time (years) to Kal-El/Clark to master his yellow sun-powered Superpower Lottery (X-Ray Vision, Eye Beams, Flight and so on). Perhaps also due to his military upbringing, General Zod masters them way faster during his brutal fights against Clark/Superman.
• In Maverick, Maverick has a superstition about being able to draw exactly the card he needs, which fails every time he tries it except during the climactic poker game with everything riding on it.
• A running gag in One Crazy Summer has Hoops repeatedly failing to make improvised basketball shots (wastebasket, trash can, Ack-Ack). During the boat race, one of the villains cheats by using a sniper rifle to shoot out the line for their sail. Unfortunately, they have to repair it by putting the line back through the halyard hole and they don't have the equipment to do so. Their solution: tie the line to a metal ball and have Hoops throw that through the hole. Somehow, he makes it. Even he is surprised.
• In the 1997 movie Rocket Man, Randall has proven that he's an absolute genius, having designed several of the pieces of equipment in the Mars lander, but he can't rewire them when spinning around. Sure enough, the craft gets sent into a flat spin when they're trying to leave and he has to rewire the entire electrical system in less than two minutes. With some encouragement from the mission director after a brief moment of panic, he pulls it off flawlessly.
• In Santa Claus: The Movie, Santa attempts to show Joe the Super Duper Looper maneuver he's been trying to teach his reindeer, but Donner's acrophobia forces the reindeer to abort it. At the climax of the movie, when Santa has to save Patch and Joe from an endangered Patchmobile, he is forced the perform the Super Duper Looper in order catch them, shouting encouraging words to Donner. The Super Duper Looper is performed flawlessly, and Patch and Joe are rescued.
• In Shanghai Noon, Owen Wilson's character is shown to be a terrible shot. When it comes to the final shootout, however, he manages to put his only remaining bullet through his opponent's heart. It's hard to tell who's more surprised by this.
• In SpaceCamp, the pilot trainee is unable to recover from a spin in the simulator. After being inadvertently launched into space, she finds herself having to do it for real.
• A Running Gag in Steel is John Henry Irons (Shaquille O'Neal) not being able to make basketball shots. Then he successfully lobs a grenade through a vent in a very similar way to save lives.^note Actor Allusion at work here; Shaq as a basketball player was well-known for not being able to make free throws.
• In Willow, Willow attempts to perform a disappearing trick and it goes disastrously wrong. At the climax, he foils the evil sorceress by successfully vanishing the MacGuffin.
• Mole's catchphrase in the 1996 film version of The Wind in the Willows is "But I can't throw for toffee!" But near the end he manages to literally throw a spanner into the works of the Weasels' dogfood machine.

Literature

• In The First Law, there's a couple of scenes where Nicomo Cosca, an infamous mercenary turned seedy drunk tries to do a knife throwing trick where he points out a target and says he will hit it. Inevitably, the knife hits way off course, which doesn't exactly instill confidence in his allies. However, in a climatic fight, he actually succeeds in doing the trick and hits an opponent right between the eyes.
• Harry Potter:
  • Played With in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where Harry has been attempting to cast Patronus spells all book so that he can defend himself from Dementors, but can't seem to get it fully right. He does get it to succeed once, but he (and the audience) doesn't see it happen because he's in the middle of a Quidditch match and looking for the Snitch. (Plus, he didn't have real Dementors to deal with that time.) Later, he has to save himself and two others from an entire swarm of Dementors, and fails the first time, but eventually he travels back in time and is able to save his earlier self with a Patronus he'd (at the time) thought his dead father had somehow cast. By that point he'd realized he would succeed because he already had.
  • In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry has trouble with the summoning spell, Accio, until he finds out that he needs it to beat a dragon.
• Played With in Ursula Vernon's Dragonbreath series. Danny Dragonbreath is a young dragon who is sensitive about his inability to breathe fire. When facing a giant octopus in the climax of the first book, he does finally manage to breathe fire— but because he's underwater at the time, it has no effect.

Live-Action TV

• Andromeda: The first episode opens with the Andromeda Ascendant going through battle stations drill as the crew get to grips with their brand-new starship and its cutting edge systems. Captain Hunt tells the crew they're making progress but there's room for improvement, and he wants them to have the process well-rehearsed enough to be at full battle-readiness in less than two minutes by the time the ship is on station. Later on in the episode, the ship and crew have to go to battle stations for real, and Hunt's Number One notes that this time they got it done in about one minute and forty-five seconds. It doesn't make a lot of difference to the outcome of the battle, but Dylan is suitably impressed.
• In Chuck season 3 when he was training to be a "real" spy, Chuck had to do an Improvised Zipline using a power line and his belt as the pulley, but failed. Then at the end of the ep in a real situation he was forced to use a power line as a zip line with his belt as the pulley. This time he succeeded.
• Family Ties: In the Season 3 episode "Auntie Up", with Elyse out of town and Mallory grieving the death of her beloved great-aunt - his own Aunt Trudy - Steven says "funerals, first dates and plumbing" have always been Elyse's job, while he handles "colds and flus, open school nights and office supplies." He also says, "I don't deal that well with death myself." Season 3 would end with the two-parter "Remembrances of Things Past," in which Steven travels to his own father's funeral, which he had known was imminent since the Season 1 episode "I Never Killed for My Father," and he must comfort his mother.
• In Fringe, a villain threatens a biological attack unless Olivia can make a box of lights switch off with her mind. Fringe Division assumes he's mad, and prepares a rigged box to fake the effect - but the episode ends with Olivia having to use her latent mental powers to switch off another box, wired directly to the bomb that will release the contaminant. She succeeds.

Theatre

• In Hadestown, Orpheus tries working on the song that will reconcile Hades and Persephone for much of the musical. He gets so in the zone that Hades manages to convince Eurydice to come to Hadestown when Orpheus is busy composing. When does Orpheus finally get it right? When Hades is threatening to kill him after he sings "one more song".

Web Animation

• RWBY: Weiss has always struggled with one aspect of her glyph Semblance: summoning spectres of past enemies to fight for her. Every time she tries, she fails. However, when rushing in to defend Velvet from an enormous rogue war machine, she suddenly gets it right for the first time, successfully summoning the arm and sword of the knight she fought in her pre-series trailer, which blocks the mecha's attack and then obliterates the mech.

Webcomics

• Villain to Kill: As far as Cassian is concerned, the best way to learn how to use his new powers is trial by fire. He purposefully picks a fight with Screwdriver, a Villain with three times his raw power at the time, to get a better handle on using his abilities against a superior opponent.

Web Videos

• Played for Laughs in the real trailer for the fake reboot of Raumschiff GameStar: the AU Captain Langer tries to reproduce the original Captain's catchphrase ("Oh God, we are all going to die!") but repeatedly mispronounces it. Then, in the end of the trailer, he finally gets it right—just as his entire ship blows up to smithereens.

Western Animation

• In The Backyardigans episode "Caveman's Best Friend", Austin has to whistle to get his pet dog-like dinosaur to come back, but he cannot do it until he is about to sink into a tar pit.
• In BIONICLE: Mask of Light, Takua's new Kohlii move, a Catch and Return front-flip, ends up missing spectacularly. His move becomes the deciding blow in the match against Makuta.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers:
  • In "Rain of Terror", Ma-Ti struggles with the climbing wall and eventually loses his grip and tumbles to the ground. When the other Planeteers are trapped and his only way to help involves climbing a wall, he manages it. Given that Ma-Ti says he's "afraid" and that Gaia gives him a pep talk the second time, it's implied his initial failure was more related to lack of confidence than lack of skill.
  • In "Skumm Lord", before taking the controls of the geo-cruiser while escaping from Skumm, Ma-Ti had only done one simulation and had apparently crashed (which Kwame only learns after the chase begins). Despite Kwame's terror, Ma-Ti manages just fine.
• In the DuckTales (1987) episode "Top Duck", Launchpad (unsurprisingly) crashes spectacularly the first time he attempts the "Treetop Bebop Tuck and Roll". At the episode's end, he manages it to save Scrooge and the Money Bin.
• The Legend of Korra:
  • Korra manages to get a grip on the Airbending stance she struggled with earlier just in time to turn around her Pro-Bending match. Later in the season 1 finale she actually airbends, something she had been unable to do all season, after Amon takes away her other three bending skills and is about to de-bend Mako.
  • Bolin lava-bending in the season 3 finale is a subversion, as the skill he had been trying to master all season was metalbending, which he still hadn't gotten by the end of the series.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "Sonic Rainboom", Rainbow Dash struggles to pull off the title maneuver while practicing for a flight competition. Come the day of the competition, she pulls it off to save Rarity and several Wonderbolts from falling to their deaths.
  • In "Hurricane Fluttershy", Rainbow Dash sets the goal for every pegasus to achieve 10.0 wingpower so they can make a tornado and lift water to Cloudsdale. Fluttershy initially gets 0.5 wingpower, and trains to get up to 2.3 wingpower. When the pegasi try to create the tornado, they don't have enough wingpower to lift the water, so Fluttershy joins and manages to fly faster than she ever did before.
  • In "Equestria Games", Spike is unable to light the torch with his fire breath, but he later uses it to melt a falling iceberg created by a stray ice arrow, saving the spectators from being crushed.
• In Regular Show season 5 "Dodge This", when the park workers form a dodge ball team, Rigby practices his dodge ball throw, the "Rignado", but he can't aim it properly. When his team is against "The Magical Elements" and Rigby and Reginald, one of the giant flying babies, are the only ones remaining, Rigby does the "Rignado" again but this time it hits his opponent and his team moves on to the finals.
• In The Simpsons episode "Homie the Clown", Homer is repeatedly shown flubbing Krusty's spin-cycle trick (which Krusty describes as "a great piece of buffoonery if you pull it off, but if you blow it, you'll look like a fool"). At the climax of the episode, he is forced to perform the trick by a Mafia Don threatening to execute him if he fails. He's delighted to find that he's actually pulling it off... only to fail horribly at the last moment. Krusty himself was made to ride the bike when he and Homer had to do the trick together, yet Homer (who had to ride on top of Krusty) still manages to nearly jeopardize it.

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