When All You Have Is a Hammer/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character uses one power (or a few powers) for every situation.

  • Straight: Alice, a great martial artist, almost always uses her finisher techniques Dragon Impact, Phoenix Tempest, and sometimes the Starlight Explosion, to deal with her foes.
  • Exaggerated: Alice beats inter-dimensional overlords, wins political debates, fixes electronic equipment and educates her children by Dragon Impacting the hell out of everything.
  • Justified: Alice sticks with what she knows, because it's worked in the past.
  • Inverted: Alice uses a wide array of attacks, and might even be a Master of None.
  • Subverted: Alice busts out a never-before-seen attack...
  • Double Subverted: ...to use as a distraction while she uses the same Finishing Move.
    • the never before seen attack fails and so she was forced to use her usual techniques.
  • Parodied: "This Magic Armor is rather costly." "Let me use my negotiation skills to get a discount!" "What? I didn't know you had diplomatic abilities" "Just watch and learn" [Alice approaches the Shopkeeper and...] "...DRAGON IMPACT!"
  • Deconstructed: Emperor Evulz fights Alice enough to where he learns all of her moves, and absolutely curb-stomps her.
  • Reconstructed: Alice protects herself from eventual curb-stomping by using all of her moves creatively.
    • Alice has the ability to gain power if someone else uses the same move as her.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: Alice uses a fairly wide array of attacks, but nothing too extreme.
  • Enforced: "Animation is expensive, people! Let's use as much stock footage as possible!"
  • Lampshaded: "Hey, I stick with what works!"
    • When Alice is about to finish someone off, everyone shouts "DRAGON IMPACT!" along with her.
  • Invoked: "Fear the one that has practiced 1 kick a thousand times, not the one that has used a thousand different kicks once."
  • Defied: Alice learns a new technique for a climactic battle.
  • Discussed: "Let me guess...you're going to use your Magic Blast again. Yup, called it."
  • Conversed: "Isn't Alice supposedly a powerful mage? How come she only uses the same five spells?"

When All You Have Is a Hammer, you have to go back to that trope.

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