The Worf Effect / Literature

• In Animorphs:
  • David subjects team leader Jake to this during their duel. Up until this point, Jake's tiger has been one of the most lethally efficient morphs the team has. Despite having a year's worth of battle experience David doesn't, Jake still loses. Badly.
  • Rachel is the The Big Guy, and her grizzly bear morph is terrifyingly powerful. She uses it to fight a crocodile at one point, and it not only trounces her, but Cassie (as a squirrel) and Marco (as a llama) as well, though the last two admittedly aren't combat animals. The crocodile is itself Worfed, when Ax shows up and effortlessly cuts the thing in half.
• The Asterisk War: Minor recurrer Elliot Forster is ranked 12th at St. Gallardsworth Academy^note one of the top two schools at Asterisk in terms of dueling in his first appearance, 6th in his second, and protagonist and Master Swordsman Ayato Amagiri comments to himself that, given a few more years of seasoning, Elliot could become better with the blade than himself. In Elliot's first appearance, he's up against Ayato and is simply outclassed for experience and physical strength (Ayato is a couple years older). In the second, though, he's leading Team Tristan against Rusalka, from Queenvale Girls' Academy.^note typically at the bottom of dueling rankings, due to a combination of a small student body and a culture that emphasizes performance arts over dueling Mid-battle, the Rusalka girls unexpectedly figure out how to sync better with their Orga Lux, Lyre-Poros, and wipe out Elliot and his entire team.
• Bazil Broketail: Gog Zagozt shrugs off magical blasts from Ribela. Then again, the latter was not only just recently released from a dungeon, but lacked the empowerment from one of her mice-using rituals, so she was definitely not fighting him at her strongest.
• The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids: Emperor Steer casually mentions having single-handedly destroyed "several unrelated versions of the enchanter Merlin, a number of so-called legions of so-called superheroes, two different Void Armadas, and the Old God Nyarlathotep" while trying to break into the Consistency Imperium.
• InThe Dark Tower, Mordred Deschain, a villain who was recently born (not just introduced, but actually born a few hours earlier) was able to take out Randall Flagg, Stephen King's ubervillain, within about three pages to demonstrate his menace.
• Discworld,
  • In Guards! Guards! Carrot goes into the Mended Drum to break up one of their regular bar fights. The other Watchmen with him expect to see bits of him start flying out at any moment. Instead, Detritus (a troll, which on Discworld are made of solid rock) is the first to fly out. Unconscious. Softer targets follow. (It was previously established that Detritus was employed at the Drum as a Splatter. Like a bouncer, but people thrown by a troll tend not to bounce.)
    • In The Fifth Elephant, just to show how dangerous Wolfgang von Uberwald is, he beats Carrot in his turn like a red-headed stepchild.
  • Discworld's Lord Vetinari sometimes gets this. When the baddies hurt him or catch him unguarded and unprepared, you know it's serious. Although when you think about it, he probably gets hurt/poisoned/turned into a lizard/otherwise out of the baddies' way without a handy plan to save himself more often than not. But since both the characters and the readers are still left with the impression that he's a cool badass character who always has everything under control, you could say it works.
    • The lizard incident is a particularly good instance, where you get a solid half-page of exposition about how clever and menacing he is... and then he immediately gets teleported and turned into a lizard by wizards who've decided to make a point about who's going to be running things around here from now on. Which is to say, the point of the exposition was really just to contrast with how quickly he's dispatched nonetheless.
  • In Sourcery, the Sourceror Coin upon entering the Great Hall of the Unseen University asks the wizards who is the most powerful of them, so that he can duel him. Skarmer Billias, an eighth-level wizard, steps up, seeing the challenge as a joke. After displaying his most powerful spell, creating a miniature of Maligree's Wonderful Garden, Coin counters by making the garden life-size and bringing all the wizards with him into it. After this display he incinerates Billias with a single thought.
• Ghost-kicking, Hell-strutting Virgil from The Divine Comedy fails horribly to protect Dante from the demons of Dis, creating real suspense that they'll make Dante stay in Hell forever. When all seems lost, the thousand demons scramble away in fear at the sight of one angel. The angel who knocks down all their fortifications with a light push from a stick, strictly establishing that the powers of Heaven are unrivaled by those of humanity and Hell.
• In the Dragonlance series, kender are supposed to be immune to fear. Consequently, they're almost constantly having a strange, new, unfamiliar feeling to let the reader know something is so scary that even they got scared!
• In The Dresden Files:
  • Cold Days has a rather passive example of this. The Skinwalker from Turn Coat is a terrifying force of suffering who can fight on equal level to a White Council member, and Morgan mentions that he once defeated one by nuking it (he lured the thing to an atomic test range, then stepped into the Nevernever just before the bomb detonated). The threat level of Demonreach's prisoners is established quite quickly when it's shown that other Skinwalkers are in the minimum security wing. And Ethniu (below) is considered an average prisoner.
  • Peace Talks: The Fomor real leader Ethniu show how dangerous she is by Sparta-kicking Queen Mab, a 5 on the Super Weight scale and effectively a personified force of nature through several walls without using any magic. Battle Ground continues the trend: an assembly of other supernatural heavies (each one an order of magnitude more capable than the protagonist at least) concludes that the only way to take down Ethniu is by attrition, i.e. having everybody throw everything they have against her while she demolishes them one by one, hoping they'll do enough cumulative Scratch Damage to exhaust her.
• Dune: The Imperial Sardaukar are the most terrifying and deadly warriors in the known universe, and their only real purpose is to establish how much deadlier the Fremen are by getting their asses handed to them at every encounter. When they attack Paul's sietch, they take devastating losses fighting Fremen who are not even warriors. The Sardaukar are never a real threat when Fremen are involved.
• The Emperor's Gift: Grand Master Joros of the 8th Brotherhood of Grey Knights is a highly experienced warrior who Hyperion describes as one of the Brotherhood's finest duellists, often able to analyse an enemy's next blow before they make it. When he faces the Space Wolves' Great Wolf, however, Logan Grimnar is able to sprint across a hall and kill Joros with a single blow from his power axe before the Grand Master can get his sword halfway drawn.
• Britomart is introduced in The Faerie Queene by handily defeating the powerful hero of Book II, Sir Guyon, and soon after defeats six knights that were giving Book I's protagonist a run for his money. Though attributed in part to her enchanted spear, both victories make it clear she is just as powerful as the other epic heroes.
• In the later novels of Alan Dean Foster's Flinx and Pip series, Pip suffers from this trope. Any time a serious threat to Flinx presents itself, the very first thing it does is restrain or otherwise deal with his minidrag.
• The Goosebumps novella, Attack of The Mutant, has three ridiculous examples in a row. First, the Galloping Gazelle, an animal themed superhero with Super-Speed, gets beaten by villain Molecule Man when the latter trips him and morphs into a leopard. The Gazelle runs in fear, while the titular mutant kills Molecule Man in the form of a pre-teen girl. Finally, the Mutant himself is destroyed when the protagonist Skipper tricks him into becoming a liquid(he can't reassemble himself in this state). And Skipper is twelve years old.
• In Matthew Reilly's The Great Zoo of China, enormous predatory saltwater crocodiles are taken down by even larger, nastier apex predators—dragons—to show how serious things are getting.
• Harry Potter:
  • Mad-Eye Moody, is touted as one of, if not the, greatest Aurors of all time, responsible for putting more Dark wizards in prison than any other Auror. He has never won a serious fight in the text. Granted he is a Retired Badass by the time of the books, and his opponents are always either Voldemort's hardest core or Voldemort himself, but you'd think he'd get a chance to beat up on someone, just to make him look good. The first book he appears in he actually got kidnapped and spends the entire book locked away while a Death Eater is impersonating him, and in the Seventh book he is killed in the first few chapters for the sole purpose of showing how serious business everything now is. In one of the movies, we at least get to see him briefly knock over a random Death Eater using some sort of magic from his cane.
  • John Dawlish is even worse: he was introduced by Dumbledore praising his combat skills before warning him that he was no match for him, and since then he has lost every single fight he had. You can't really count losing to Dumbledore against someone, but he also gets summarily manhandled by Hagrid and terrified into helplessness when he beat up a group of Aurors that underestimated him, defeated off-screen by the Order of the Phoenix to lay a false trail, summarily curbstomped by an extra, and when he was sent to take Neville's grandmother hostage...
  Neville: Little old witch living alone, they probably thought they didn't need to send anyone particularly powerful. Anyway, Dawlish is still in St. Mungo's and Gran's on the run.
  • Tonks, Sirius, and Kingsley were all established to be talented at magic. However, the three are defeated one by one by Bellatrix Lestrange at the end of the fifth book. It doesn't stop there! When Dumbledore joins the fray he rounds up all ten of the Death Eaters in the room in a matter of seconds, with the exception of Bellatrix who is able to deflect his spell and escape.
  • Even Harry gets this on occasion. Though he is shown many times to be an advanced duelist for his age, he is completely unable to land a single hit against Lord Voldemort or Severus Snape. He doesn't do much better during his duel with Bellatrix and only survived his first two encounters with Dolohov because the latter got distracted.
  • As Rowling herself states, anyone, no matter how badass they are, will be easily outmatched against Albus Dumbledore, as he is both the strongest and the greatest wizard in the series. He rarely fights, but the few times he takes action Rowling makes it clear he is the best of the heroes. The first time he uses magic in an offensive capacity, he blasts off hundreds of Dementors with a single Patronus spell... Which isn't even corporeal! In comparison, Harry needed the Powerof Love and some serious trouble even with his real stag Patronus. Then, in the fifth book, he barely bats an eye as he instantly knocks Fudge, Dawlish, Umbridge, and Kingsley out, despite all of them being clearly no slouches, (Rowling even admits that at least Dawlish was an actual competent fighter who just had the misfortune of trying to mess with the world's singular best wizard) and while the Death Eaters seemed to be even with the other heroes in the climax, Dumbledore arrives and within a matter of moments, he has them all beaten and tied up. After that, he casually beats Bellatrix with a single statue and then schools Voldemort while remaining perfectly cool, making it clear he is hardly giving it his best yet still makes their fight look almost a total curb-stomp rather than a curb-stomp cushion, which is especially astounding as Minerva, Slughorn and Kingsley together could only reach a stalemate even against Voldemort when he couldn't harm them lethally, though in all fairness, they had been exhausted while Voldemort was fresh and he was using the Elder Wand, meaning that he would at least be able to fight with the same level of strength as a normal mastered wand would, if not slightly greater. Even after having his hand maimed, he still thoroughly annahilates Dawlish and after being further weakened, he takes down an entire army of Inferi with a single large fire spell.
• In Book Two of Heralds Of Rhimn, Meparik makes an observation of this effect;

Meparik: If Crislie couldn’t even land a hit on Regent Ilaina, then I don’t know how anyone else is gonna kill her.

• The Giants in The Heroes of Olympus. Despite being stated to be the greatest threat Olympus has ever faced and often being direct counters to the most powerful Olympians they have all be defeated fairly easily. There is some light justification in that they may not be at full power (for Porpheryion this is explicitly the case). Arguably more important is the fact that defeating a giant explicitly requires a God and a Demigod working together. The fact that the Gods are literally incable of defeating the Giants on their own sounds like a pretty big deal, but there are literally hundreds of Demigods between the two camps (and presumably more outside of them) so it's more or less a non-issue. There might also be a degree of Overshadowed by Awesome, as slaying Giants is a relatively minor bullet point on Percy's list of accomplishments.
• Journey to the West features a two-fold Older Than Steam example with Son Wukong and Buddha. Throughout the early portions of the novel we’ve seen everyone’s favourite monkey hero and Trickster God grow and grow in power to point where he’s pulling off a Rage Against the Heavens defeating two heavenly armies of the Jade Emperor and his generals and worfing the hell out of gods like Prince Nezha, the four heavenly kings and Erlang Shen. Yet when Buddha shows up and asks if he can lend a hand in the conflict, he simply challenges Monkey to jump out of his palm and back. Wukong cockily jumps to the end of the universe and back only to discover he never once left Buddha’s hand. It’s one of the very few times in the novel where Monkey is purely outclassed in either power or cunning.
• There are many examples in Steve Alten's Meg series where a megalodon defeats equally large and dangerous predators, but only the opening scene of the first novel qualifies (wherein Meg eats a Tyrannosaurus rex) because the marine reptiles are too obscure to the general public to be this trope.
• The Princess Bride has an effective example of this with Buttercup's Terrible Trio kidnappers Vizzini, Ingio and Fezzik and the Man in the Black aka Westley. For dozens of pages it's detailed and shown how badass and skilled this criminal trio is: Ingio being a Master Swordsman who trained for years and reached the level of "Wizard" (a rank above master in swordplay), Fezzik being the World's Strongest Man who can lift elephants, sink boats by stomping on them and overpower huge groups of men and Vizzini a Evil Genius more dangerous than the other two whose sheer intellect lets him read people's thoughts through mere guesswork. Yet the Man in the Black inconceivably catches up with them (despite Vizzini having the fastest ship), climbs up the Cliff of Despair via rope which was thought to be only possible for Fezzik, defeats Inigo in their Sword Fight, defeats Fezzik in their Good Old Fisticuffs match and kills Vizzini in a Battle of Wits. It's the fact he worfed them so hard that Inigo knows that Westley is the only person capable of figuring out a way to storm the castle in the climax.
• Septimus Heap: Nicko Heap in Physik is mentioned to be strong enough to tackle virtually anybody, but when he tries to attack Queen Etheldredda, she just swats him out of the way.
• Feral of Soon I Will Be Invincible. A ferocious tiger-man who's ended the entire careers of supervillains, and his entire plot importance consists of being beaten up by a baseline human, being blown away by a mad scientist, being knocked out by a mad scientist, being beaten up by mecha-insect aliens in a flashback, and being beaten up by a mad scientist again.
• In Space Marine Battles, novel Fall of Damnos, the Ultramarines are on the receiving end of a long string of these, to showcase just how dangerous the Necron threat is.
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Vendetta Delcara's planet killer makes very, very short work of the first Borg ships to encounter her vessel.
  • The Return, Worf is pwned by, of all people, the risen Kirk, using a Klingon's best weapon. Consider who these novels are written by...supposedly.
  • Peter David uses this sparingly in Star Trek: New Frontier, mainly because the Excalibur's version of Worf, Kebron, is a veritable walking landmass. But being used sparingly, it's much more effective: When someone can topple Kebron, you know they're trouble.
  • In addition, in David's Starfleet Academy novels, guess which Klingon gets in a fight with which Brikar on their very first day there?
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Nohgri, silent-stalking little commando people who are very good fighters. The same trilogy which introduces them has them accept Leia as the Mal'ary'ush, the Lady Vader, so some of them become her bodyguards. Very nearly every work set after that has them either inexplicably not present or getting tricked, out-tracked, and out-fought by everyone. Shada Du'kal even wonders if their reputation is exaggerated, although she at least is a Mistryl shadow guard, only had to get past one of them, and had a very novel way of tricking him. This is taken to ridiculous depths in New Jedi Order.
  • For Karen Traviss, the Jedi are hateful incompetent death-deserving people fit only to puff up her Mandalorians; hence they either convert, sit quietly and accept really pathetic Hannibal Lectures while being very impressed, or are curb-stomped. Every. Time. A connection to the Force which binds all things, shaves reaction times, oxygenates blood more efficiently, provides telekinetic abilities, enhances strength, and gives battle precognition sufficient to deflect blaster bolts into enemies with the narrow blade of a lightsaber is no match at all for the perfect warrior people with their beskar'gam armor!
  • What's the best way to show how strong a villain in the Star Wars Expanded Universe? Make him toss some Jedi around the room with his eyes closed and one hand behind his back. What's the best way to show how serious the situation is? Kill a few Jedi. In books, games, and comics, if a Jedi isn't a protagonist, he's fucked. Especially if he happens to meet Sith, Mandalorians, Grievous, Cad Bane, or extra galactic invaders.
  • In Legacy of the Force, they have their villain stab Kyle Katarn through the chest. Thankfully, this gets reversed, and Kyle's shown much more respect, in the Fate of the Jedi books.
  • Katarn was on the opposite side in his first game. It was very fashionable in the 90s to have the protagonist of a game go up against Boba Fett and defeat him. Dash Rendar did the same.
  • Played rather straight in the Revan prequel to Star Wars: The Old Republic. The Sith Emperor casually kills a number of major supporting characters from Knights of the Old Republic, disfigures Revan and leaves him as little more than a charred mess. He is then kept alive as a power source for the Emperor, admittedly having some small influence over the Sith's mind which does help end the Great Galactic War, and is rescued during the game. But only so it can happen to him again at the hands of Imperial characters because his 300 years of imprisonment have driven him mad.
  • In the novel "Death Star", TIE pilot Vil Dance remembers how one time he and a bunch of other TIE pilots were participating in exercises led by Col. Vindoo "The Shooter" Barvel, who was one of the Empire's best pilots. He goes on to remember that Darth Vader showed up in a TIE fighter to take part in the exercise, and makes really short work of Barvel and everyone else to the point that Dance decided that if he had to face Vader in combat he'd just self-destruct his fighter to save Vader the trouble.
  • In Galaxy of Fear, Darth Vader is this once or twice. But it's used pretty carefully, considering — he's not part of the regular cast and never actually gets defeated, but he's definitely brought in so the reader can go "Whoah! Vader Curb Stomp Battles everyone! This guy must be tough!" In Army of Terror Eppon holds his own against him in a lengthy fight, countering his best moves but having his countered in turn, and that fight never concludes. Darth Vader's clone is also on nearly-equal footing and is only beaten because he has no lightsaber, but that might be expected.
• In Super Minion, a team of elite monster exterminators go into the sewers under E13 trying to rescue prisoners from a puppeteer super. Despite being cleared to use their most powerful and restricted weapons, they get scattered and nearly wiped out just from the native wildlife and barely even encounter the minions of the actual puppeteer. Tofu and Nicole generally have no trouble navigating the sewers, and Nicole can handle almost any of the monsters.
• The Sons of Progress strongman from Super Powereds. Despite having a power enhancer increase his strength by a factor of dozens at least beyond what was already superhuman, his most incredible accomplishment is making Titan take a step back. He doesn't even noticably hurt him, although Roy had apparently never seen any strongman make him step back.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Hobbit: The Orc army led by Bolg is made out to be nigh-unstoppable even against the united forces of dwarves, men, elves and one hobbit (even Dain who slew Bolg's father Azog cannot beat them back) with Thorin, Fili and Kili falling to them. Yet when Beorn joins the fray, he single-handedly beats down Bolg's bodyguard before crushing the orc in his arms. As noted by Bilbo, Beorn is a formidable warrior and they should be thankful he's on their side.
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • The Balrog aka Durin's Bane is a tremendous example of this. Since The Hobbit the reader is well aware of how powerful Gandalf is and proir to Moria no enemy has been able to shake him or outright defeat him (at most Saruman could trap him in Orthanc). So it's very concerning in Moria when Gandalf encounters something behind a door that forces him to use a spell of command, rattling him so badly that afterwards he outright tells the Fellowship that it's Run or Die. It's also reflected in Legolas (the badass elf warrior)'s Oh, Crap! reaction, in that he literally drops his bow in fear upon seeing the Balrog. While Gandalf does manage to slay the Balrog in combat after being dragged down into the bowls of the earth and chasing him for eight days to the peak of Zirakzigil, the wizard still dies in the effort and has to be brought back by the Powers That Be.
    • A two-fold example with in Return of the King with the Gondor invasion by the Mordor army led by the Witch King. It's stated frequently throughout the trilogy that the Gondorian are the greatest army of man and will withstand the might of the enemy far longer than the rest of Middle Earth. So it's a bad time for the good guys when Osgiliath is overrrun and the Mordor army are literally banging on the gate of Minas Tirith and it takes Hope Bringer Gandalf the White and prince Imrahil to keep back the enemy and rally the desparing troops. On the other hand the Witch King himself gets this from the heroes first having his mount slain, then staggered by Merry and killed by Éowyn. Though it is specified Merry's Dúnedain blade was a Kryptonite Factor to the Nazgûl and both him and Éowyn still almost died as a result.
    • The Ents also provide a heroic example of this. Saruman and the Isengard forces have been made out to be a force to be reckoned with, almost destroying Rohirrim in Helms Deep and killing Boromir one of the Fellowship. Yet the Ents in one great Unstoppable Rage are able to decimate Isengard in a single day and force Saruman to hide in his tower.
    • Gandalf the White in the same book delivers this to Saruman: the secondary antagionist of the series, the greatest of the White Council and whom previously could trap Gandalf the Grey with his power. But when Saruman tries walking away from the balcony during his Villainous Breakdown, Gandalf is able make him to stay with a single command and break his staff with a gesture.
  • Sauron is a massively powerful fallen angel Dragon Ascendant, but trickery is his bread and butter, more so than physical strength. In Beren and Lúthien' he gets brutally whooped by elven princess Lúthien and the great hound Huan in tandem (in fairness she's Semi-Divine and Huan is blessed by the Valar). Later in The Fall of Númenor, despite becoming lord of Mordor and fooling the elves he suffers another defeat from the Númenóreans who force him back to Mordor with little more than his own bodyguard and a handful of orcs. When Sauron takes over Númenor, he gets his entire body obliterated by Eru himself when the supreme God sinks the island. Then in the Last Alliance despite having the One Ring he gets taken down again by Gil-galad and Elendil, albeit with them both dying in the effort. If that wasn't enough, during the events of The Hobbit in the Third Age Sauron (known then as the Necromancer) gets booted out of his abode in Dol Guldur by the White Council.
  • The Silmarillion: Melkor/Morgoth himself like his aforementioned lieutenant has gotten this plenty of times himself throughout the First Age. Despite being a Reality Warper who could ravage the world with his dark magic, Morgoth gets unceremoniously clobbered by Boisterous Bruiser Tulkas (who isn't even the most powerful Valar) twice and brought to heel. Later on after stealing the Silmarils and draining the Two Trees, Giant Spider Ungoliant (who was empowered by the sap of the trees) overpowers Morgoth making him literally quake in fear, before the Balrogs come along and bail their master out. In the quest for the Silmarils, Lúthien is able to down him with her music quote: "The dark and mighty head was bowed; like mountain-top beneath a cloud the shoulders foundered, the vast form crashed, as in overwhelming storm huge cliffs in ruin slide and fall; and prone lay Morgoth in his hall". Then in the War of Wrath led by Eärendil, Morgoth gets beaten again (this time permanently) by the Maiar Eönwë "cast upon his face" and then thrown into the void by the Valar. Granted it is stated Morgoth had weakened over time.
  • The Elves are exceptionally badass in might having been taught directly by the Valar themselves. Yet, the elves have actually suffered the most defeats of all the races. The kingdoms of Gondolin, Beleriand, Nargothrond and Doriath as well as the slaying of Finwë, Fëanor and his sons, Glorfindel, Fingolfin, Finrod, Celebrimbor and many others. Elrond himself lampshaded it, claiming he's seen "many defeats, and many fruitless victories" for his people during his long life in Middle Earth.
• The Twilight Saga: At the end of the second book, Edward attacks the Volturi to try to keep them from using a psychic attack on Bella and is promptly smacked down to show why they're so feared.
• Possibly lampshaded in Warhammer 40,000 novel, Daemon World. When a group of Word Bearer Chaos Marines board his ship, Arguelon Veq's first target is Vrox, an Obliterator (which, for the uninitiated, is a mutated monstrosity twice the size of regular Chaos Space Marines and can spawn weapons and armor from his body). After he kills Vrox with relative ease, he even comments that he was the least threatening of the Chaos Marines on board.
• In the final book of the original story arc in Warrior Cats, the newly-introduced villain Scourge kills Tigerstar when all of the Clans are gathered, for spite, to intimidate the Clans into complying with his demands, and (we learn later) for revenge.
• In The Wheel of Time Nynaeve in canon is one of the strongest channelers in the world. When a channeler comes along who is the best at something, this is often established by noting that they're better at it than Nynaeve. This isn't as egregious as it might be, because she has very little training, and raw power is often shown to not be equal to skill or technique. Be'lal is shown to be a better swordsman than Rand, who is himself a Master Swordsman.

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