"Come onnnnn, look at me! No plan, no backup, no weapons worth a damn, oh, and something else I don't have: anything to lose! So, if you're sitting up there in your silly little space ships with all your silly little guns, and you've got any plans on taking the Pandorica tonight, just remember who's standing in your way! Remember every black day I ever stopped you, and then, and then, do the smart thing! [Beat] Let somebody else try first."
— The Doctor, Doctor Who, "The Pandorica Opens"
The character is facing a gang of enemies that would quickly overwhelm him after the fight starts — but it doesn't start because each member of the gang wants somebody else to to go first and take the brunt of the counterattack. Perhaps they realize the risk without being prompted; perhaps the character threatens to throw everything he's got at whoever makes the first move in order to dissuade them. This situation can arise if everybody involved believes that the gang as a whole is the stronger side, but each individual gang member is vulnerable to being singled out and targeted.
Note that, from a martial ethics perspective, it is an extremely shameful thing for this to happen, as it means that every single one of the (non-)attackers has shown cowardice in front of his comrades. Samurai in particular were specifically conditioned to enter battle with an "I am already dead" mindset, and a strong tendency for sacrifice in the name of the group. In some historical cases individuals or even whole combat units would be faced with unemployment, social ostracism, imprisonment, or even death as punishment for refusing to fight, consequences which were designed to make death in battle seem preferable by comparison.
Obviously, you might run into problems if you try this tactic against an opponent who’s likely to call your bluff. Maybe every member of the enemy group is a Determinator or fanatic. Maybe they are Too Dumb to Fool, and just want to knock your head off. Or maybe they believe you about what you can do to them, but decide to take their chances anyway because they're either convinced you're a bloodthirsty killer who has no intention of sparing their lives, or are more afraid of what their master will do to them if they chicken out.
If done skillfully, some find these to be Awesome Moments.
A Sub-Trope of Terror Hero. A Sister Trope to Peace Through Superior Firepower, To Win Without Fighting and Who Will Bell the Cat?. Bystander Syndrome covers non-combat examples where no individual in a group wants to be the one to step up. Compare and contrast with Weapon for Intimidation and Intimidation Demonstration.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- At the end of Fullmetal Alchemist, Wrath has been fighting for quite some time, already been wounded, repeatedly stated that he is getting past his prime, outnumbered, and unlike the other Homunculi, cannot regenerate. He asks the protagonists present if they would be willing to take a stab at eternity. Not a one of them even considers it. Because, you see, badass is somewhat of an understatement when it comes to this guy.
- King from One-Punch Man is known as the strongest man in the world. His reputation is so great that he rarely needs to fight. Random monsters he meets on the street have heart attacks due to fear. Merely unfolding his arms causes a horde of monsters to flee. Good thing too, because in reality King has all the fighting skill of a normal human. The reason he got his reputation was because somehow people kept crediting Saitama's kills to him, no matter how absurd the logic leap, due to him constantly being in the area. His reputation is literally the only thing he can bring to the table to win a fight. During the Monster Association Invasion Arc, his reputation (combined with his supernatural luck) allows him to scare a shapeshifting monster to death, rescue and walk out of the Monster Base with the hostage unchallenged, and single-handedly hold off 4 Dragon-level monsters until Awakened Garou arrives and deals with them.
- This is the concept of Conqueror's Haki from One Piece. The user sends out an intense burst of Haki and those with weak wills are instantly knocked out. This power is even potent enough to scare off sea monsters if the user is strong enough. It helps that this power is rare and the ones that use it are very powerful and intimating characters on their own right (such as Whitebeard, Dolfamingo, and Big Mom). Protagonist Luffy has it and during the Time Skip figured out how to do it at will.
- This happens a lot in the Toriko series; It's not uncommon for enemies and monsters to run away from a character's Pure Awesomeness. In the first volume, Toriko manages to scare an entire tribe of Troll Kongs (Think four-armed yetis) with such a display. At first, due to a low-ranking member of the pack puking on him, the other Kongs think Toriko is a small-fry and attack relentlessly. Once it rains and the scent washes away, Toriko is able to make his threat level very well-known and they all back down.
- In the second major arc of Vinland Saga, Canute uses this strategy to break the English lords attempting to resist the Danish occupation of England. He goes into the English kingdom of Mercia, then has large numbers of English lords dragged outside so he can show them how as far as the eye can see he has his men ready to burn the entire country and everyone in it to ash unless the lords stop supporting the English king. If they turn on and assassinate their own king, Canute will spare them... and if not, one night he'll come back without warning and have his men actually start the fires. It works. A Danish Viking can't help but compare Canute's methods to his father, King Sweyn, who attempted a traditional military conquest and spent ten years battering and gradually beating down the English, only for them to rise again the moment that Sweyn died. By comparison, in less than three years Canute has terrified the English lords to such an extent that they've assassinated two would-be English kings and voluntarily made Canute the bretwalda, the High King of England.
- Zatch Bell!: This is how Zofis is defeated. Zofis refuses to erase the memories of Sherry's best friend that he had been brainwashing so that the guilt of her actions would drive her to kill herself. Brago takes matters into his own hands and threatens to make Zofis' life a living hell when they return to the Demon World. Being the Dirty Coward that he is, Zofis is scared shitless and ultimately gives in to the intimidation
Comic Books
- DC character John Constantine is frequently capable of this sort of thing, having a justified rep for taking on arch-demons and angels (despite being essentially just a mortal ritual magician and con artist). Hence, for example, in the original mini-series of The Books of Magic, he bluffs out a room full of magical supervillains (who were perfectly willing to take on a high-end magical super-heroine in pursuit of their current goal).
- The Punisher: Frank, having finally dispatched Ma Gnucci's hitman the Russian, shows up on her doorstep still bruised and bleeding holding the Russian's decapitated head aloft demanding "Is that the best you could do?". Her assembled mooks drop their guns as one and run away, leaving Frank to kill Gnucci.
- Subverted in an issue of Fantastic Four where Mr. Fantastic explains that after he figured out how to communicate with some hostile aliens, he simply sent the message "I am Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four and-" and they turned tail and ran before he could finish. It turns out they were actually just temporarily regrouping and returned soon with reinforcements. Reed and the FF proceeded to easily defeat them anyway.
- In one issue of Beta Ray Bill's miniseries, SHIELD was negotiating with some aliens who were threatening the Earth. At the sight of the title character, however, they gave up and left.
- A recurring character in The Tick, Hand Grenade Man, never actually fights his enemies - instead he holds up a hand grenade and just says, "I'll do it..." It always seems to work.
Fan Works
- In the AU Avatar fic Children of the War: Book 3, Fire
, Sokka uses this during the climax.
"My arm's broken, and so's my leg. I've also got a concussion and there's even a chance that I've got a collapsed lung. I've got no defenses, no weapons worth a damn. No plans, no allies, no hope of success. And doesn't that just scare you to death? I'm still going to win. Because right now, I'm feeling a little blood drunk. So, firebender: here I am. Want to test your mettle against a Tribesman?" - Sword Art Online Abridged: Kirito and up fighting a bunch of mooks... or rather, holding still and waiting for them to realize their attacks are doing less damage than his regeneration rate. What follows is an exercise in power fantasy:
Mook: I don't understand, we threw everything we had at him! How is he still standing?!
Kirito: 'How'?! Well, it's quite simple really. You see (to Rosalia), 'Girlie,' you may think ya got me all figured out, but there's one thing, you didn't account for: my numbers (unveils Level 78 stats) are bigger than yours! Funny thing, really. Get to a high enough level and you're basically untouchable, my wounds heal faster than you can make them! We could do this all day, and you would not be any closer to beating me, not that it wouldn't be fun. But, I've got good news. You see, there's no need to wonder where your god is! 'Cause he's right here! And he's fresh out of mercy!"
Mook: (starts crying) - Downplayed in With This Ring when the Team bluffs a contingent of soldiers into leaving the Logan Animal Sanctuary alone. They could easily curb-stomp a bunch of mundane soldiers, but that would reveal their presence, so instead they have Miss Martian shapeshift into Teth Adom, who could plausibly be in the area and who is widely known to be capable of wrecking armies with his bare hands.
Miss Adom: Did you know that in my era it was common to take a defeated enemy's genitals as a trophy in battle?
- In The Pirate's Soldier, everyone was counting on this during Heero's formal introduction to the Juraian court, to deter any nobles who wanted to challenge his birthright as a new heir to the throne. Sure enough, he gets immediately challenged by Seiryo, and not only defeats him but makes it clear that anybody who follows suit will end up the same way. It works like a charm, and nobody else dares challenge him afterwards.
Film — Live-Action
- The Fifth Element: "Anyone else want to negotiate?" - Korben Dallas, after some Aggressive Negotiations.
- A movie called Kuffs has this exchange:
Kuffs and Bukovsky, armed with pump shotguns, are facing about a dozen hoods in the film's climactic confrontation
Unidentified Hood: It's a twelve-gauge pump, boys. He's only got three shots. They can't get us all!
He reaches for his gun, Ted blows him away
George Kuffs: gestures to dead hood Well, now we know he can add...
gestures to Ted
George Kuffs: And he can subtract. So who wants to be next here? - Above the Law (1988):
Mobster (Notices that Nico has only a .45 (7 shots) and there are about 12 mobsters): You can't take out all of us, badass!Nico Toscani (shoots him, points gun at other mobsters): I'll get an "A" for effort. (Other mobsters keep still).
- On most versions of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three one of the hostages says that they should all rush Mr. Grey (the hostage-takers' leader) and take him down, only for Mr. Grey to point out that he's armed with a top-of-the-line sub-machinegun and that, stuck inside of a subway car as they are, if they all were to rush him they would all be bunched together and vulnerable to his return fire. "...you would all be dead before you got close to me". None of them ever try.
- Tombstone:
Wyatt Earp: You die first, get it? Your friends might get me in a rush, but not before I make your head into a canoe, you understand me?
- Wyatt Earp has an exchange similar to the Tombstone example:
Wyatt Earp: You boys can get me. That won't be any problem with all the guns you got here. But I'm taking ten or twelve of you with me, starting with you, Dick Gird, and you, McGee, and maybe you too, Harvey. So, if any of you want Tommy, you want me, come up front with these brave men, and we'll all go together.
- ''The Princess Bride sees Westley pull one on Humperdinck after his To the Pain speech, securing a victory through nothing more than faking a Heroic Second Wind.
Humperdinck: "I think you're bluffing."
Westley: "It's possible, pig. I might be bluffing. It's conceivable, you miserable, vomitous mass, I'm only lying here because I lack the strength to stand. Then again, perhaps I have the strength after all." *stands up and points sword at Humperdinck* "Drop. Your. Sword."
Literature
- Prize of Gor has a subversion. Gor has Fantasy Gun Control so there are no native guns; a person from our world has brought some though. Once the natives understand the power of the gun, and after a battle where most of the bullets are used up, one gets his hands on the one gun with one bullet left in it. He says that with it he's the most powerful man on Gor and everyone should obey him; another points out that as soon as he shoots the weapon he'll have nothing, so he basically can't force anyone to do anything even though he has it.
- In The Dresden Files, Dresden delays the attacks of the immortal Red Court vampires by pointing out that, while there were easily enough of them to overwhelm him, whoever went first would certainly die: "Your children have eternity before them. Which one of you wants to give up eternity?"
- This trope is discussed and explicitly defied on World War Z during the retelling of the Battle Of Yonkers. In a nutshell: a veteran of the battle notes that actual human warfare is about breaking the other side's will to fight, whether that's through losses, intimidation, etc. At Yonkers, however, they learned that this is not the case when fighting zombies; exposure to the total might of the United States military would make even the most fanatical of human soldiers hesitate (at least), but the zombies are Too Dumb to Fool, so when they see a massive military blockade all they see is a smorgasbord of human flesh just standing there ready to be eaten, and march towards it totally uncaring about the gunfire and explosions going off all around them and the massive casualties the US Army is racking up. If anything, the zombies ended up intimidating the soldiers instead.
- Many of the stronger characters from Tolkien's Legendarium can do this as a mere side effect of their presence, from Gandalf and Sauron in The Lord of the Rings to Feanor and Fingolfin in The Silmarillion. The latter was even able to cause entire armies to flee just by approaching them.
- The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: After the Battle of Changban in 208, Zhang Fei covered Liu Bei's escape by standing on the opposite side of a river from Cao Cao's forces and challenging them to single combat. No one dared. One of Cao's generals even died of fright.
- Ma Chao was so feared by native tribes that Liu Bei stationed him on the fringes of his territory of Shu to keep them under control.
- In Watchers of the Throne, Shield Captain Valerian at one point defuses a burgeoning riot by ordering the government forces not to fire and simply walking out to the plaza where the mob is gathering. Faced with a giant Super-Soldier dressed head to toe in ornate golden armor and carrying a spear more than three times the size of a regular human, the mob parts and lets him reach their leader without any issues; in fact, some even start to kowtow to him.
- It should be pointed out that as a Custodes (i.e. the Praetorian Guard to the Emperor of Mankind), he's basically a demigod literally stepping out of myth to the common folk of the Imperium.
- Epithet Erased: Prison of Plastic: Trixie is introduced scaring a mugger shitless by claiming to be a member of a prominent local crime family who doesn't have a reputation because all the others, who do have reputations, leave witnesses. The mugger is reduced to trying to use Molly and Phoenica as hostages to scare away a 12-year-old, before giving up and running away. Trixie, as it happens, has nothing - they are a member of that crime family, but have never been in a real fight - except a gift for drama and an alarmingly large collection of box cutters.
Live-Action TV
- The 100 episode "Murphy's Law" has Bellamy play this card when Murphy leads a gang to lynch Charlotte. Bellamy, though he's the toughest fighter in their camp, admits that he can't take on five people at once, but vows that if they try to fight him, at least a couple of them won't be walking away from it. No one steps forward to initiate the fight, so Murphy resorts to hostage taking instead.
- Doctor Who:
- "Forest of the Dead": Despite having no way to defeat the Vashta Nerada, the Doctor manages to scare them into submission based on his reputation alone. "I'm the Doctor, and you're in the biggest library in the universe. Look me up."
- "The Pandorica Opens" features the speech at the top of the page. Ironically, it's actually a subversion. After the Doctor gives the speech all the ships flying around in the sky head for the hills, but it turns out to be a bluff to lull the Doctor into believing they're running away when actually they're just waiting for the Pandorica to open so they can lock him inside of it. This episode also demonstrates the downside to using fear to conquer one's foes: do it too much, and your enemies get pushed past the Godzilla Threshold and begin getting desperate... and desperation often leads to truly disastrous consequences.
- River Song gets her turn in "The Big Bang".
"You are an associate of the Doctor's. Records indicate you will show mercy."
"I'm River Song. Check your records again."
"...Mercy."
"Say it again?"
"Mercy!"
"One more time."
"MERCYYYY!!!"
[Later...]
Rory: What happened to the Dalek?
River: It died. - Doctor attempts to do this once again in "The Impossible Astronaut" when he found himself being aimed at by White House security. He quickly points out that he "walked into the highest security office in the United States and parked a big blue box on the rug" and that it would be unwise to assume they can "just shoot him." However he overlooked one thing.
River:(rushing out off the TARDIS) They're Americans!
Doctor: (hands in the air) Don't shoot. Definitely no shooting.
- Deconstructed in an episode of Happy Days. When Fonzie pulls this off against a group of thugs who were menacing Richie, he wants Fonzie to teach him his secret. When he confronts the thugs again, he does the same intimidation routine, but gets beaten up anyway. Fonzie mentions that in order for it to work, he has to actually have a reputation for winning fights.
- An episode of The Saint had Simon Templar holding off a few mobsters:
Mobsters: He/You can't shoot all of us!
Templar: Which of you wants to be a hero? - During the third season of Vikings, Ragnar partially accomplished this against the Mercian army. After having defeated another, smaller Mercian force, he has his men cut off the heads of many of the fallen and mount them on their ships when they sail across the river to face the other Mercian army. About half the army deserts on the spot, although the leaders do later pull at least some of the army back together and try to make a stand against the combined forces of the Norsemen and Wessex.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40K: The Night Lords are masters of this: such was their capacity for cruelty and psychological warfare that mere rumors of them were usually enough to quell rebellious worlds. Definitely helped by them being Astartes who could cleanse planets on their own if anyone was stupid enough to call their bluff. After falling to Chaos they only became crueler and more terrifying, to the point that one of their campaigns of intimidation ended with a third of the hive city they were targeting dead from fear-induced nervous shutdown. Before they even landed.. Nothing says 'Victory Through Intimidation' than being able to literally scare people to death. On the flipside, the emphasis on terrifying enemies into submission means that the Night Lords generally fold like tissue paper against enemies they can't scare.
Video Games
- In Dragon Quest VIII, you have the option at the start of combat to try to intimidate your opponents. If you are much higher level than them, they'll run away immediately. This is bad for grinding (you get no money or experience), but great for item farming (the drop rate is increased).
- Dawn of War: A unit whose morale drops to 0 gets massive stat reductions (but a boost in speed), ensuring they'll be dead if they don't run away. There are units with no morale bars who can't get scared, thanks to their faith, bloodthirstiness/insanity, or having no souls.
- The Necron Lord can take an item that forces every enemy unit around him to run directly away, morale shot to hell.
- In Soulstorm, Berserkers of Khorne can use a lesser version of the same ability by tracing the skull-rune of Khorne on the ground.
- Dark Eldar Terrorfex and Horrorfex instantly reduce an enemy's morale to zero, and have an ability that does so for every unit on the map.
- Pokémon:
- The "Roar" move makes an opposing wild Pokémon flee in fear if its level is lower then the Trainer's.
- One of the abilities a Pokémon can have is Intimidate, which lowers the opponent's attack power. Humorously, a few Pokémon have this ability despite being not scary at all, such as Growlithe, a puppy and famously Shinx.◊ This is bizarre because said Pokémon are not typically characterized as Killer Rabbits.
- Streets of Rogue offers a variety of ways to deal with non-friendly NPCs, with threatening being one of them. Attempting to threaten someone has a chance to make them surrender without a fight, or it has a chance to make them hostile and force you to kill them anyway. Threatening is more likely to succeed if you are holding a powerful weapon, have a lot of followers to back you up, or play as a Mobster.
Webcomics
- Maytag uses this method to defeat a whole gang in Chapter 2 of Flipside.
- Girl Genius has a chapter called "Gil deals with it". Therein, Gil deals with an entire army of war clanks using a single Death Ray that takes out one machine with each shot. It takes him two shots to convince the enemy that he "did not get lucky".
- Afterwards, Gil is looking for the army's commander. One guy says the commander is dead; his second- and third-in command are also toast. He's the fourth, the highest-ranking survivor. Then he tries to kill Gil. A Jagermonster stabs him, then asks, "Who else vants to be promoted?"
Western Animation
- Tiny Toon Adventures: In the episode "Hero Hamton", Hamton, who has been challenged to a fight after school by Montana Max and has been trying to dodge it all episode long, forcing his friends to try (quite ineffectively) to fight in his stead, uses a bunch of easily-breakable comedy props to make Max and his cronies believe that he's achieved Super-Strength via Unstoppable Rage and that "You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!". Max, who had been expecting an easy target, decides to take off immediately.
Real Life
- Three Kingdoms – Shu, Wei, Wu: The Records of the Three Kingdoms (a collection of biographies compiled by the Jin Empire after they reunified China) reports that during Cao Cao's pursuit of Liu Bei in 208 (the same battle described in the Romance Of the Three Kingdoms example under Literature), Zhang Fei led a small group of bodyguards to a bridge in order to act as a rearguard. When a small force of Cao Cao's soldiers approached, Zhang had some of his hidden soldiers make dust clouds and make a racket in order to make Cao's forces think reinforcements were approaching. Not willing to fight a pointless battle (especially since by that point the battle was over anyway), Cao's forces withdrew, allowing Zhang to retreat with his men as well.
- Several generals became so feared that their arrival alone was enough to make their enemies flee. For example, when the warlord Gongsun Yuan (a nominal vassal of the Wei Empire) began courting support from Sun Quan of Wu, Emperor Cao Rui of Wei decided he needed to be dealt with. Sima Yi was given the job following the failure of the first invasion. Gongsun was terrified when he heard of Sima's approach, but was confident that with his defenses and the aid of a large river as a barrier, he could hold. When he learned Sima Yi had somehow circumvented the river and his defenses, he immediately tried to surrender. Sima refused and laid siege to his capital, and then executed him before exterminating his entire clan.
- Guo Huai was such a successful general that at the peak of his career Sima Yi (then acting as commander in chief of the Wei Empire's military) ran out of ranks to promote him to. The only position higher than Guo's was that of Sima Yi himself. Dispatching him into battle was generally treated as overkill.
- The biography of Sun Jian (father to eventual Wu emperor Sun Quan) mentions an occasion when, as a youth, he managed to capture a band of pirates by making himself seen, when gesturing as though he was ordering troops into position. He was so convincing the pirates surrendered.
- Vlad Tepes supposedly managed to repel a Turkish invasion thanks to the thousands of impaled corpses put on display.
- Many conquerors throughout history have established a reputation for giving enemy cities and strongholds a choice: surrender and be taken over with minimal disruption or resist and be subjected to Rape, Pillage, and Burn when the invaders made their way inside.
- Piracy on the high seas heavily relies on this trope to work.
- Smart pirates, usually more interested in loot and profit than in a bloody battle, would naturally try for this. In fact, this is reportedly Blackbeard's ENTIRE M.O., cultivating stories and creating an absolutely demonic persona—which involved tying cannon fuse into his hair and beard and lighting it so that smoke would come off him while he threatened and extorted people to give the impression that he was the Devil himself—despite there being no records of him murdering or even harming any of the hostages he ever took. Considering his reputation as the pirate through to the present-day, it worked.
- All pirates followed this M.O. The purpose of the pirates showing their colors - here colors means flag - was to declare that they would do something awful to you if you resisted, but if you surrendered they would just take your valuables and leave you alive. This is good policy; if pirates did slaughter indiscriminately, no one would surrender, and piracy would be a lot more dangerous and a lot less profitable. Even today, Somali pirates prefer to not have to fight and would rather have a reputation of ruthlessness precede them. The corollary is also true; if you did resist, pirates would have to make you suffer, since they can't afford a reputation for being soft. This did occasionally backfire on them when they happened upon warships or other vessels that could call their bluff.
- Fights between animals often involve a lot of posing, roaring, mock fighting, and other forms of threat display before any actual attacks are launched, which may be enough for one animal to earn a victory without an actual dangerous fight. Thanks to this, especially if it's between animals of the same species, the weaker combatant will usually understand that it's not worth attacking the stronger opponent and run off without either combatant wasting any energy on the combat and risking injuries. In certain situations, a smaller critter, if sufficiently desperate, may even be able to scare off a larger animal if it can convince its opponent that they'll get a Pyrrhic Victory at best if they engage in combat - this happens most often when a potential prey tries to scare off a predator. Predators, on the other hand, generally try to go for the kill quietly and efficiently without accidentally scaring off their prey, unlike how media likes to portray them.
- The famous 'Attack of the Dead Men', a battle of World War I in which the Germans bombarded the Russians with poison gas at Osoweic Fortress and rolled in, expecting all of their opposition to be dead already. They were met with a countercharge of the remaining Russian defenders, covered in chemical burns and coughing up chunks of their own lungs. Faced with what they were certain were the living dead, the Germans fled in terror, running smack into their own c-wire traps, to be finished off by the remaining Russian machine-gunners.
Anyone else want to give examples?
