Basic Trope: A completely one-sided battle.
- Straight: An unprepared Bob encounters General Drake, then promptly gets owned.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is a Master of None and encounters Drake, a Master of All who literally tears him into his component molecules.
- Drake is so powerful, he is capable of disintegrating the weak Bob into atoms by merely touching him.
- Drake beats Bob in a microsecond.
- Bob is erased from existence after his defeat.
- Bob is sent flying with one hit.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown
- Downplayed:
- Curb Stomp Cushion.
- Bob and Drake fight, Bob can't possibly hope to damage Drake because he has no way of getting past the energy shield, but Bob proves to be about on the same skill level as Drake, it's just that the energy shield means Bob can't win yet.
- Justified:
- Bob is too weak or too unprepared for the fight with Drake.
- Drake had took Took a Level in Badass, and Bob didn't know this and found out the hard way.
- Inverted: Neither fighter wins the battle, and it ends up losing them both something.
- Subverted: Bob pulls out a Heroic Second Wind.
- Double Subverted:
- ...but that was just a Hope Spot.
- Or Bob's Heroic Second Wind is so powerful that the fight turns into a Curb-Stomp Battle in Bob's favor.
- Parodied:
- The battle is literally Drake just curb stomping Bob in a corner.
- Alternatively, Drake beats Bob while eating a sandwich.
- Alternatively alternatively, Drake just backhands Bob without notice him.
- Alternatively alternatively alternatively, Drake backhands Bob without noticing him while eating a sandwich and stomps him on the curb when he does notice.
- Zig Zagged: Pendulum War.
- Averted: The battle could go either way.
- Enforced:
- Drake was designed to be a badass, and the writer decided to use a curbstomp battle to try and make it more clear. It worked out pretty well.
- The story is aimed at an audience that prefers one-sided fights over close fights.
- The budget or time remaining is running low, and the production team cannot afford to depict any other kind of battle.
- Implied: Bob getting stomped into the curb happens over a Gilligan Cut.
- Lampshaded: "This isn't fair, can't you not use one of your arms?"
- Invoked:
- The MacGuffin that Drake was going for was to greatly enhance his superior abilities, thus making every battle end like this.
- The Juggernaut
- Exploited: Bob understands the battle is not going to end well for him, so he sets it up so that, despite being unable to win against Drake, he accomplishes many more victories through the battle, by having Drake ruin important equipment and broadcasting the brutality of Drake.
- Defied:
- Bob is not yet skilled enough to fight Drake. He pulls out that item that allows him to instantly win any battle that was Too Awesome to Use before.
- Bob is not yet skilled enough to fight Drake. He runs like hell.
- Bob explicitly aims to annoy the living hell out of Drake before going down rather than actual victory. Drake's own psychological issues find this even more enraging than actually being hurt, and eventually pulls a Rage Quit.
- Discussed: Alice takes bets on the fight between Bob and Drake, and the odds for Bob are something along the line of 100000 to 1.
- Conversed: "Why did Bob even bother to fight Drake? If I saw him on the street, I'd run away until he couldn't see me..."
- Implied: The Gilligan Cut between Drake and Bob facing off and Bob being loaded into an ambulance looking like a train ran him over turns out to have skipped over ten In-Universe seconds.
- Deconstructed:
- Drake is so powerful and bored, acknowledging this fact, he tries his very best to even the odds for Bob. But that wasn't enough.
- Drake is that much more powerful than Bob that he could end the fight in a blow if he cared to. The fact that he instead drags out the fight is equated to torture, and he's called on it.
- Reconstructed: Drake loves challenges, and because he encounters so very few, he recognizes the fact that he may start underestimating his enemies' abilities, and promises to always go full power when encountering even the weakest challenge. Overkill or not.
- Played For Laughs: Bob the Jerkass bullies Drake not knowing how bad an idea this is. The resulting "fight" is resolved by Drake administering a Megaton Dope Slap.
- Played For Drama: Bob faces off against Drake praying that he can buy enough time for his girlfriend to run away. He buys her precisely two seconds.
- Played For Horror: Bob is the point-of-view character of Drake's Mook Horror Show, in which he slaughters Bob's entire platoon in an offensively casual manner.
Back to Curb-Stomp Battle
