Feet of Clay

"You, O king, were watching; and behold, a great image! This great image, whose splendor [was] excellent, stood before you; and its form [was] awesome. This image's head [was] of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. You watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were crushed together, and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; the wind carried them away so that no trace of them was found. And the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth."

—Daniel to King Nebuchadnezzar, The Bible, The Book of Daniel, 2:31-35

This is when a character who is generally held to be incredibly talented is revealed in the end to be a total incompetent. If the incompetent character is on the side of the heroes, this forces the heroes to save the "savior", who is usually an obnoxious example of The Rival, or a phony example of Always Someone Better. Straight-laced heroes usually have to swallow their Pride to help this jerk. The Naive Newcomer may be shocked to find he's not the nice guy everyone thinks he is. Other heroes will squeeze every benefit they can out of it. If the character with the Feet of Clay is a villain, at first he will appear to be all-powerful and frightening, but will turn out to be a coward, a weakling hiding behind illusions, a Harmless Villain, or Too Dumb to Live.

The villain option tends to appear either in comedy, or in children's TV (with a moral about standing up to bullies).

See also The So-Called Coward, Informed Ability, Miles Gloriosus. Contrast Shrouded in Myth. When the character turns out to be just as competent as he is supposed to be, but is also a complete and total Jerkass and not all that heroic at all, its Warts and All.

Not to be confused with Feet of Clay, a Discworld novel about golems with literal clay feet. The villainous option should also not be confused with the Big Bad Wannabe, a villain who looks powerful only because he delivered a luck-based kill on the hero or the hero's True Companions, but proved to be a weakling when compared with the other bigger villains.^[1]

Divided into heroic and villainous examples who have a reputation belied by reality.

Examples of Feet of Clay include:

Heroic Examples

Anime and Manga

Don Kanonji from Bleach plays with this trope. The audience would assume he's a fake, judging by his over-the-top style and the fact that he's using his supposed powers for personal gain, but he really can see ghosts. Unfortunately, he has no idea how to actually get rid of them and, in the episode that introduces him, ends up turning a ghost into a Hollow before Ichigo can stop him. He does mean well, setting up the Karakura Heroes, which at least keeps the kids out of trouble. His main problem is the fact that everything he does is done through a Large Ham filter. He later proves to at least be useful with his negligible reiatsu and saved Tatsuki from Aizen by buying her some time.
- Not to mention that he saved Ichigo's ass when he got caught dead to rights by that same hollow while trying to save Kanonji's ass. The look on Ichigo's face after Kanonji's paltry-looking Cannonball says it all.

Fan Works

In Heir to the Empire, a Ranma ½/Sailor Moon crossover fic by "Ozzallos", Akane can't decide whether to be angry at Ranma or disappointed at her hero Sailor Moon when the former easily bounces the latter around the Tendo yard like a rubber ball.

Film

In the 2004 version of The Alamo, Davey Crockett expresses the sentiment that he, himself, is an example of this trope, being propped up by public opinion and overblown stories about his so-called exploits. He's not, but it makes for a poignant moment.

Literature

Gilderoy Lockhart of the Harry Potter series manages to coast along fairly well on his own hype and stories stolen from the people that actually did them, who he magicked into forgetting and nothing else—at least until he runs into Harry.
- Rita Skeeter goes out of her way to explore this in both Dumbledore and Snape.
In the The Big Over Easy, Inspector Spratt often has to contend with gloryhound Detective Inspector Chimes who is incompetent, but gets great write-ups in the newspapers and magazines.
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the wizard himself. He carries this characterization to the movie.
- And even further in Wicked.
- Fascinatingly, the book of Wicked is the only iteration of the story in which he has actual power. He appears to be some kind of magical criminal fleeing his home dimension, and Dorothy, who comes from the same place, is his inadvertent nemesis. ( Elphaba is his daughter.)
  - In the musical he has a long self-justifying song with about the same content as his original explanation.
The title character of The Lies of Locke Lamora has a reputation as the folk hero the "Thorn of Camorr", a Gentleman Thief seeking justice for the common people. The real Locke is a much more selfish and flawed character, but not without heroic qualities.
In A Series of Unfortunate Events we have a character named Ishmael who is this. He tells colonists that he can predict weather using "magic", constantly uses coercion disguised as cordiality in his role as a facilitator, and makes others give up on possessions in order to use them himself under the excuse that he's doing it for their well-being. Naturally, the Baudelaires were disgusted. And it is even hinted at by having him cover up his supposedly-damaged feet with healing clay.

Live Action TV

Monk, "Mr. Monk and the Other Detective" (with Jason Alexander as the guy with Feet of Clay).
Heroes: Hiro Nakamura spends most of the first season going on and on about the legendary samurai Takezo Kensei. After meeting him through a time travel accident we find he's a rude, dishonorable English con-artist who gets his legendary status largely through Hiro's intervention and his Healing Factor.

Newspaper Comics

Parodied, lampshaded and played straight in Peanuts, when Charlie Brown's baseball hero gets sent down to the minors:

"Your hero had feet of clay, huh?"
"No, he had a low batting average!"

Video Games

The characters in Metal Gear Solid make a big fuss about how incredibly tough Meryl is - an eighteen-year-old female soldier with a Desert Eagle. However, she trembles when told to shoot, forgets to take the safety off her gun, gets Mind Controlled by a psychic into shooting Snake and attempting a suicide, 'takes point' in the most useless way possible for the gamer and for Snake, gets shot by a sniper, and spends the rest of the game getting tortured and arguably raped off-camera, to make a return, unconscious, at the end. Depending on the ending, she may or may not live to crash her car and pin her and Snake under it. But unlike, say, the Faux Action Girl, we learn that it wasn't that she was inherently useless so much as very young and inexperienced - she becomes aware of this over the course of the game and her façade of arrogance is dropped.
- And when she returns in MGS4, she has Balls of Steel.
Inverted in Persona 4. Adachi is depicted throughout the entire game to be an incompetent and idiotic detective (similar to Matsuda from Death Note). In reality, however, Adachi is actually an intelligent, smart and powerful psychopath.
Captain Qwark in Ratchet and Clank.

Web Original

Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, who has Super Strength and all the arrogance to accompany it, but turns tail and runs when Dr. Horrible's Death Ray explodes and makes him feel pain for the first time in his life. Unlike the typical use of the trope, Hammer is a Hero Antagonist and the Downer Ending makes it clear that there's nobody waiting in the wings to back him up.

Western Animation

Futurama's Zapp Branigan, a military hero whose exploits are based on one of two factors: sending wave after wave of men in unnecessary suicide gambits, or fighting totally helpless or pacifistic foes.
Darkwing Duck: Gizmoduck (originally from DuckTales (1987)) repeatedly visits Saint Canard for the express purpose of thwarting evildoers, and his sterling reputation as a "super-powered" champion of justice far outshines that of the headline-hogging glory-hound ostensibly starring in this show, but more than once he has gotten himself captured by supervillains and needed Darkwing to rescue him.
- One episode even had Darkwing attempting to emulate Gizmoduck to even up the egregious disparity in their abilities, asking Gizmoduck to make him his own super-powered gizmo-suit, but in the end the high ferrous metal content of the gizmo-suits turned out to be the very Achilles' Heel that the villain Megavolt exploited to subdue the heroes with his Evil Plan du jour, a giant electromagnet. "Without my suit, I'm nothing!" Gizmoduck groused. Darkwing proved that he was something more, by shedding his gizmo-suit and saving the day.
- On the other hand, there's also episodes where Darkwing gets in over his head and is forced to admit he needs the help of other heroes, Gizmoduck among them (like Just Us Justice Ducks).
"Bowling Paul" from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Mac gets some very Jedi-like bowling training from him after seeing all the pictures of him with his bowling trophies. Turns out that he can't bowl at all. He was only in the pictures because the guy next to him in every single one of them won all the trophies, and he was the guy's imaginary friend.
Sentinel Prime. The most arrogant Autobot of all time, and though he is Optimus' equal in terms of rank, he still acts as if he's far superior ho him. And then along comes the Headmaster...
- And again with escaped Decepticons...
In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic The Great and Powerful Trixie presents herself as a badass magician who once beat an Ursa Major, and humiliates the mane cast by one-upping them on everything (or rather immaturely playing tricks on them because she actually can't do better than them), but when an actual Ursa Major (actually an Ursa Minor) shows up, she reveals that she made the story up to give her a better reputation. It's then left up to Twilight Sparkle to actually get rid of the bear.

Villainous Examples