Basic Trope: A character who's speedy but frail.
- Straight: Lila can move fast enough to evade almost any attack, but one hit leaves her down for the count.
- Exaggerated: Lila moves as fast as lightning, but dies if she crashes into a cotton wall.
- Downplayed: Alice has a small edge over her cohorts in being a bit swifter than them, but she is no pushover either, and can only take slightly less punishment than they can.
- Justified:
- Shed Armor, Gain Speed
- In a World… where Armor Is Useless, the first good hit that lands determines victory and defeat. Fighters ignore defensive strength in favor of being able to land that hit before the enemy or avoid it.
- Lila is the Token Mini-Moe of the group. Her little body can't withstand a powerful attack, no matter how hard she trains. And since the group want her to stay out of combat as much as possible, her training is focused on speed.
- There is only so much Super-Toughness can do to prevent being hurt when you crash while going somewhere near light-speed.
- Lila is a cheetah, Russian blue cat, thoroughbred horse, greyhound, bird, or other animal that can move quickly but is fairly fragile in build.
- Inverted: Lila is too slow to evade enemy attacks, but tough enough to No-Sell them.
- Subverted: Lila seems like this at first, but it turns out she can take more punishment than you'd think.
- Double Subverted:
- She turns out to have a common Weaksauce Weakness other than purely physical fragility, making her functionally frail in most battles.
- Lila has to be highly resilient to survive her own powers, but she is still subject to inertia and thus is effectively hit exponentially harder by all attacks when she's at full speed.
- Parodied: When Lila moves, everything else seems to be stopped in place. Then she trips and goes down. Hard.
- Zig-Zagged: Lila encounters a lot of speed-canceling powers or traps, but is okay most of the time.
- Averted:
- Lila has average speed and defense.
- Lila is just as resilient as she is fast.
- Enforced: "Lila's the fastest on the team, but we need Competitive Balance, so we'll take away her armor."
- Lampshaded: "How can we hit someone who moves so quickly?"
- Invoked: Lila is a Lovable Coward and focuses on speed at the cost of defense in order to run from any fight she can't win.
- Exploited: Emperor Evulz rigs his castle full of string traps and trip lines to counter Lila's breakneck speed.
- Defied: After being defeated in a fight, Lila puts herself through Training from Hell and becomes a Lightning Bruiser.
- Discussed: "Lila may be fast, but can she even take one punch?"
- Conversed: "You would think that being able to run that fast would also make someone tough a brick, but apparently not."
- Deconstructed:
- Moving at Super-Speed is quite a burden for Lila. She often suffers serious injury even if she never gets hit, and God help her if she trips over something... which is all too easy at her speed.
- When Lila fights General Drake, he finds some way to slow her down, then promptly finishes her off.
- Reconstructed:
- On the bright side, Lila realizes her speed causes her attacks to be just as powerful as the Mighty Glacier.
- Realising that she often goes Too Fast to Stop, Lila instead relies on spot-dodging and Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs rather than just outrunning opponents. The net effect is The Slow Walk, and becoming an Implacable Woman despite being a fragile speedster on paper.
- Lila moves so fast that Drake doesn't even have time to use his slowing method on her.
- Played For Laughs:
- Lila's super speed takes her into a banana peel factory, where Hilarity Ensues.
- Lila realizes she is too weak to defeat Emperor Evulz and his magic blasts, so she uses her speed to annoy him. He becomes frustrated that he can't land a blast on Lila and doesn't realize he destroyed the support beams of the room. Lila then waves him goodbye as she runs outside; Evulz is crushed by his own lair.
- Played For Drama: The other party members ask Lila use her speed to scout around the map for them. However, they don't hear back from her anytime soon and they all assume the worst.
Back to Fragile Speedster
