"Yeah, Nanao’s method of fighting was flashy and easy to understand. No wonder no one remembers everything Oliver did. So precise, yet so plain."
— Pete Reston, Reign of the Seven Spellblades volume 1
Examples of Overshadowed by Awesome in Literature.
- Despite the fact that Vlad Taltos of Dragaera fame is an assassin, mob boss, sorcerer, witch, and numerous other forms of badass, the presence of ludicrously more powerful characters around him tends to tone down his coolness from "Obnoxious" to "Awesome."
- Older Than Feudalism: In The Four Gospels, John the Baptist. In any other era, he would have been a prophet of renown. As it is, he's a minor header to the life of Jesus. In fact, he lampshades it: "Now He must increase, and I must decrease."
- Gotrek & Felix is a series set in the Warhammer world about the adventures of a swashbuckling adventurer poet who travels the world Cool Sword in hand and woos all kinds of beautiful women as he goes... and an unstoppable dwarf Death Seeker who has (much to his disappointment) challenged daemon-worshipping warlords, giants, vampires and dragons the length of football fields and slain all of them. Both of these characters are badasses, but there's no question Gotrek is far more badass than Felix.
- Harry Potter:
- Ron Weasley. Chess and snark are about the only things he can do that his best friend, girlfriend, or siblings couldn't do better. He develops a complex about it. Arguably worse in the movies, where he's mostly reduced to comic relief. Also applicable to Rupert Grint, the actor who plays Ron. To the media, Daniel Radcliffe is the face of the franchise, Emma Watson is "that hot chick from Harry Potter" (and by far the most famous of the three) and poor Rupert is just sort of there.
- Made into a Running Gag with Dawlish, an Auror who apparently got perfect scores on all of his O.W.L.s. He gets knocked out by Dumbledore twice, and later is hospitalized by Neville's grandmother.
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix reveals that according to their O.W.L. scores, both Harry and Ron are competent at their subjects (with several "Exceeds Expectations" in the core classes, plus one "Outstanding" for Harry in Defense Against the Dark Arts), but they're both overshadowed by Hermione (who got a lone "E" for Defense, and "Outstanding" for all the other classes she attended).
- A tragic Deconstruction of this is the backstory dealing with Harry's father James, and his friends Remus Lupin, Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew. The first three were brilliant and intelligent wizards, who were highly popular while Peter Pettigrew was regarded outside as a Tagalong Kid and behaved like an Extreme Doormat and cheerleader. This made him loyal only to "the biggest bullies in the playground" and after Hogwarts, he turned to Voldemort and betrayed his friends.
- On an institutional level, "those other two houses" of Hogwarts, House Hufflepuff and House Ravenclaw, fall into this. Theoretically all four houses are supposed to occupy equal standing in Hogwarts, but the cast of characters is leans disproportionately towards Gryffindors and Slytherins. House Hufflepuff has it especially bad — Ravenclaw can at least claim the title of "the House for smart kids" but thanks to a line about "taking the rest" in their house motto Hufflepuff is mostly known as the dumping House for kids who aren't spirited enough for Gryffindor, ambitious enough for Slytherin, or smart enough for Ravenclaw. On the other hand, Newt Scamander was sorted into Hufflepuff. In fact, in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Dumbledore gives 3 points to Hufflepuff, which is the first time we hear anyone give points to Hufflepuff in any of the movies.
- Honor Harrington:
- Honor Harrington is noted to be as competent as her Grayson Armsmen in personal combat, if not more so, even though the Armsmen themselves are no slouches in the subject of dealing with death at the personal level.
- Hamish Alexander is recognized as one of the most skilled military commanders in the known galaxy and an outstanding leader. And then Honor Harrington shows up, and he eventually realizes (without bad feelings) that he's no longer in the running for the best admiral in the Royal Manticoran Navy. And then more stuff happens and Hamish Alexander-Harrington isn't even the best admiral in his marriage.
- Michelle Henke would by almost any measure be among the greatest commanders of her generation, except that her generation happens to include her best friend and naval academy roommate Honor Harrington, who overshadows everyone. She's not at all put out by this, but it does mean that she spends quite a few decades underestimating her own considerable talents in the commander's chair.
- Journey to Chaos: Dengel literally wrote the book on magecraft and so modern mages like Eric find it hard to stand out in comparison. Eric's character arc in Looming Shadow has him grappling with this and trying to prove himself better.
- Journey to the West: Zhu Bajie and Sha Wujing are both formidable fighters in their own right, but they rarely get the chance to display it because they're so overshadowed by Sun Wukong, a Nigh-Invulnerable Reality Warper who once fought all 10,000 of the Chinese gods by himself and won. Bajie and Wujing's main role in the story is to get their asses handed to them by various demons in order to emphasize how impressive Wukong's victories against the demons are.
- In Madeleine L'Engle's Kairos novels, focusing on the Murray-O'Keefe family, Meg is a mathematical genius and Charles Wallace is almost supernaturally intelligent. Their brothers, the twins Sandy and Dennys, are just your regular straight-A students who go on to become a doctor and a lawyer, respectively. Even the twins say their siblings are the special ones, though they mostly seem glad to be normal, given how difficult Meg and Charles's childhoods were.
- Saif, the main villain of The Mental State, is undermined as a villain, despite clearly being competent enough to handle most adversaries. He has an entire underworld network, the ability to control and strike fear into even the hardest of criminals and an IQ in the 140s. He clearly has great organization and forward-thinking skills, a ruthless streak to rival any of his enemies and the ability to manipulate his pawns with ease. Aside from the one offence out of hundreds, if not thousands, that could be successfully pinned on him, he only really made one mistake in the entire story… choosing Zack as his opponent. Against ANYONE else, he would have crushed them.
- Regular people in the Mistborn series suffer from this. In a world where certain people can manipulate metals to make deadly weapons, fly, give themselves superhuman strength, rapid healing and super-heightened senses, you can be very good at what you do but still not measure up to an allomancer by a long shot, let alone a mistborn. Many characters struggle with inferiority complexes due to this fact but they tend to find other means of making themselves useful. Or by becoming mistborn themselves in one case.
- Case in point: Dockson. He has no allomantic powers but makes up for it by being a brilliant bureaucrat and generally organising everything for Kelsier's group.
- The allomancers might even have it worse than the mundanes, given that they're often employed to guard against mistborn assassins since they do have a small measure of their powers. Still, a trained mistborn can wipe the floor with a skilled group of allomancers without breaking a sweat. They are really just meant to slow the mistborn down until their employers' own mistborn can get there to level the playing field.
- Peter and the Starcatchers: Leonard Aster is part of an Ancient Order of Protectors, and shows a lot of bravery and quick thinking against both The Others and Captain Hook. Still, his accomplishments generally pale next to Peter and Molly's Kid Hero accomplishments, especially once Peter gets the power to fly.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Zig-Zagged. Oliver is a Jack of All Trades who lacks any significant special skills, but he's a good planner and a quick thinker, and he works his butt off practicing. Alongside Nanao (who is a better swordswoman but worse at spellcasting and strategy), he's consistently one of the top-ranked fighters in his year, but not by enough to be decisive, and especially early in the series, his abilities are often derided for being uninteresting and/or derived from book learning rather than natural talent. Also, the upperclassmen and professors are all far stronger than him man-to-man. He does have a Unique Protagonist Asset, but can only use it at severe cost, not to mention it would expose the fact he came to Kimberly to assassinate seven key members of the faculty. By the later volumes, this starts to wear off as people outside of his close acquaintances start to realize just how good he really is at what he does.
- Doctor Watson, friend and helper of Sherlock Holmes, is a skilled medical practitioner, a former soldier, and is quite probably a good bit smarter and more insightful than your average man. When it comes to criminal investigations however, he is constantly struck silent by Holmes' deductive powers and his all round big-brainyness. Because of this, Watson is often Flanderized into a bumbling idiot in adaptations of Sir Arthur's works.
- One of the many tropes that are deconstructed in A Song of Ice and Fire. Robert's Rebellion was led by the Power Trio of Robert Baratheon, Eddard Stark, and Jon Arryn, and as a consequence people tended to forget about Robert's younger brother Stannis, whose main accomplishment during the war was successfully defending the Baratheon stronghold of Storm's End during a long siege. While certainly not as flashy as any of Robert's battlefield victories, holding Storm's End for so long meant that Stannis kept a significant part of the loyalist forces too busy to actually fight Robert in the field, indirectly contributing to the success of the Rebellion. It's mentioned that Stannis's successful defense of Storm's End was nothing short of miraculous: the stronghold was woefully underprepared for the siege when it started, and it was only through a combination of strong leadership and the fortuitous arrival of loyal smuggler Davos Seaworth and his supplies that they even survived at all. But the lack of recognition and respect causes Stannis to grow bitter and resentful, and after Robert's death Stannis allies himself with darker forces in an obsession to prove himself the rightful King.
- Strangely averted in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Luke's basically an instant Deus ex Machina, as befits his role as only being paralleled by other Skywalkers and being the most experienced Jedi in the galaxy, but TPTB always find some reason to not use him as such.
- Super Powereds:
- Many of the students in Lander's Hero Certification Program come from small towns and were often the only Supers around, so they were popular and powerful back home. In the HCP, they're suddenly not so powerful, and pretty much every single student in the current year is upstaged by Chad (even later no one in the class seriously considers that Chad could ever lose: "It's fucking Chad!"). Alex, a not-quite-telepath/telekinetic admits that he never had trouble getting girls in high school because he was the only Super in his class, but now his natural shyness and nerdiness (plus his insistence that he's a Jedi) makes him a social outcast. His abilities are also upstaged by Mary's raw telepathic and telekinetic power, and he has no hope of ever catching up to her. That said, he, quite cleverly, decides to focus on improving his focus and other aspects of his abilities that are unique to him.
- This is also brought up in the Corpies spin-off by the dean of Sizemore Tech's HCP. He complains that his program's students are pretty good in their own right, but Lander is all everyone is talking about.
- Becomes a plot point in Terra Mirum Chronicles when everybody talks about how amazing the White Queen is and how many wonderful things she's done but almost nobody talks about the White King. It sparked some resentment.
- Tolkien's Legendarium:
- The Lord of the Rings novels:
- One of the best bits of the 'Scouring of the Shire' segment is a version of this. While the hobbit characters are sometimes overshadowed in strength while traveling with the Nine, they command a lot of respect and sternness once they return and deal with the problems in their homeland. In general, hobbits subvert this trope, especially Bilbo, by being unexpectedly useful.
- The Return of the King is basically one big subversion of this trope: Merry helps kill the Witch King, Pippin saves Faramir's life, and apparently Sam and Frodo did something cool too. Just to hammer the point home, when Frodo and Sam finally get back from Mordor, Aragorn himself kneels in honor of them.
- Played straight with Faramir. He's a fine commander and a dangerous warrior, but he's standing next to Boromir, Aragorn, and Eowyn.
- Also played straight with poor Celeborn. He's one of the oldest and wisest elves in Middle-earth, a mighty Elf-Lord and heroic warrior. All in all a pretty badass guy...But he happens to be married to Galadriel, who Tolkien describes as being the mightiest elf in Middle-earth after the death of Gil-galad and the "greatest of elven women". She's also an immensely powerful sorceress who was tutored by none other than an angel (Melian) and the lower level Gods (Yavanna and Aulë) themselves. So yeah...poor Celeborn.
- The Silmarillion:
- Everyone knows Fëanor had seven sons. Everyone knows Maedhros and Maglor, and most people know Celegorm and Curufin. The number of people who remember the twins (Amras and Amrod) is considerably lower. And if you asked the average Silm fan who Caranthir is, you'd get blank stares. If you're lucky, they might remember his outburst at Angrod, or his rescue of Haleth, or even the fact he died in the Second Kinslaying along with Celegorm and Curufin. In the fans' defense, the aforementioned incidents are really the only times Caranthir does anything note-worthy.
- Orodreth. If fans remember him at all it's usually as one of the "canonical" candidates for Gil-Galad's father. It doesn't help that, like his half-cousin Caranthir, he doesn't do anything note-worthy (beyond listen to Túrin, a decision that leads to his death). Some of Prof. Tolkien's later notes even demote him from Finarfin's son to his grandson.
- Beren, the Sole Survivor of his father's people, conducted a one-man guerilla war against Morgoth and was so good at it that he failed to be a Death Seeker and got a bounty on his head equivalent to the high king of the Noldor. Then he wandered into Doriath and met Lúthien, which takes him out of the realm of mortal Men and into the world of semi-divine or godlike immortal beings and it quickly gives the impression that he's in over his head thanks to Lúthien's dad setting an impossible Engagement Challenge in an unsuccessful attempt to make him go away. Beren does beat the sons of Fënor when they try interfering (knocking one of them from a horse with a leap that has never been matched by any mortal) and avenges his father-in-law's murder later on, but at the same time by Lúthien breaks him out of Sauron's fortress, puts Morgoth asleep with Magic Music, and persuades the guardian of the underworld to let Beren out after he's killed.
- The Lord of the Rings novels:
- The Villainess Lives Again: A major factor in Laurence's Inferiority Superiority Complex is the fact that he's perfectly aware of how painfully average he is compared to everyone else around him. Laurence isn't an idiot and, when not guided by his ego or his impulses, is actually reasonably competent. But he doesn't really excel at anything. He's not a master schemer and political mastermind like his sister, nor a genius military strategist and accomplished soldier like Cedric. He doesn't even have his uncle Roygar's strong business sense. If it weren't for his heritage and Gregor's favor, he'd just be another bastard noble child, and he's well aware of it, which just feeds into his insecurities and resentment for those that are more accomplished than him.0
- At the Super Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, there are mutants who just don't have the best powers:
- Aquerna possesses the spirit of the squirrel. She can do a 25-foot standing broad jump. She's far stronger and quicker than any normal human her size. She has super-senses. She can talk to and command squirrels. And she's regarded as one of the biggest losers on campus.
- For that matter, Phase is a good example. Phase has pounded Matterhorn, fought an interdimensional demon to a standstill, one-punched Fantastico, and still thinks of himself as being in the bottom half of his team. He's probably right, given who's on his team.
- Gadgeteers often find themselves falling into this. They don't tend to have flashy powers - though their mechanical advantage, so to speak, can be utterly devastating. They don't usually have the Exemplar package, or magic, or super strength, or the like... so it's easy to underestimate them. One does so at one's own peril.
- The Wheel of Time:
- Lots of non-channelers, since the One Power is so powerful that there really isn't any way for them to compete, with the exception of Mat Cauthon, who has an Anti-Magic medallion. Also, Min, who is pretty good with her knives but is laughably out of her league compared with every single character in the series, realizes this in the later books and decides to become The Smart Girl instead by relentlessly studying the Prophecies of the Dragon. On a related note, when Mat protests that he's a lesser ta'veren compared to Rand, Verin tells him that in any other time, Mat and Perrin would be the strongest ta'veren in the world.
- Demandred presents a villainous example. During the age of legends, he was second best to Lews Therin Telamon at everything. While LTT treated their relationship as a friendly rivalry, Demandred saw it as being consistently one-upped throughout his entire life. He turned to the dark primarily out of jealousy, and he is described as hating LTT more than anyone hated anything ever.
