http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeWeakness

Evil Overlord List Cellblock B Whatever my one vulnerability is, I will fake a different one. For example, ordering all mirrors removed from the palace, screaming and flinching whenever someone accidentally holds up a mirror, etc. In the climax when the hero whips out a mirror and thrusts it at my face, my reaction will be 'Hmm... I think I need a shave.'

As every smart hero or villain knows, the best way to defeat most adversaries is to Attack Its Weak Point. But said savvies will also know that this is coming, and may very well decide that they don't like being shot in their weak point.

Advertisement:

The hero or villain may have a weakness, and they know about it. Or, they don't have any (or they've removed/cured it), but they want to make their enemies believe that they do.

This is where the Fake Weakness comes in: faking a weakness, whether it's an actual flashing weakpoint, a Weaksauce Weakness or just an Achilles' Heel, to put your opponents off their guard and make them waste valuable time and energy on a Red Herring before you proceed with the curb stomp.

Compare Obfuscating Disability, I Am Not Left-Handed and Briar Patching. Related to, but not to be confused with Faking the Dead. Often this is used as a justification for Our Vampires Are Different and the like, because if you start debunking beliefs in fake weaknesses, they might start stumbling onto the real ones.

Advertisement:

Examples:

open/close all folders

Anime & Manga

In the anime version of Bleach during the battle between Kyoraku and Starrk, the later intentionally holsters his right gun every time he fires a large Cero in an effort to trick his opponent into thinking that he needs to recharge a shot after every attack while continually firing weaker ones with his left gun. When Kyoraku attempts to exploit this, Starrk whips it back out and shoots him point-blank.

In Heroman, the Big Bad implants some information about his race in the mind of a guy who later does a HeelFace Turn. This information includes the fact that the massive eye on his chest is a weak point that can be targeted to kill him. The titular robot punches said eye, putting his fist right through it — at which point the eye socket clamps down on his arm, immobilizing him long enough for the Big Bad to outright kill him .

. In a flashback in the first episode of Moshidora, Minami, playing in a junior baseball game, intentionally makes a terrible wild swing at the first pitch she faces, letting the pitcher think she is a terrible batter who will be easy to get out. On his next pitch, she makes a solid hit.

Played straight and inverted at the same time in Overlord (2012), The title character fights against Shalltear uses an item which protects him from holy attacks . During the fight he acts as if he was resistant to fire but still very vulnerable to holy magic , tricking his opponent into spamming holy attack while also using the False Data:Life spell to make it look like he has less hit points than he actually has. He also pretended to not know anything about quite a few of her skills and spells while he knew about them since the beginning ( in fact, since Shalltear's creation ) to trick her into wasting them. The face of pure horror from said opponent once she realizes that she's been tricked and is now low on Mana is priceless.

. During the fight he acts as if he was resistant to but still very vulnerable to , tricking his opponent into spamming while also using the False Data:Life spell to make it look like he has less hit points than he actually has. He also pretended to not know anything about quite a few of her skills and spells while he knew about them since the beginning ( ) to trick her into wasting them. The face of pure horror from said opponent once she realizes that she's been tricked and is now low on Mana is priceless. In Shakugan no Shana, Shana is fighting Sorath and Tiriel, who keep regenerating. Shana notices a magical plant in the distance and attacks it, but it fights back and restrains her. The two reveal they put the plant there because they knew she would mistake it for their Soul Jar.

In Goddess Creation System it's implied that Xiaxi feigns physical weakness in an archery competition so she'll be allowed to use her own equipment. Since she brings out a crossbow, known for being a short ranged weapon, it's allowed with some amusement on the part of her adversary. However, it has a laser scope, allowing her to score a bullseye with no effort.

Comic Books

Subversion in Blackest Night: the heroes were led to believe that they had to recreate the white light of creation to stop Nekron, but their first attempt only made him stronger leading the heroes to believe they'd fallen victim to this trope. Turns out they needed to free the white entity itself to do the job right (and resurrect Nekron's undead anchor, Black Hand.)

There was one X-Men story where people discover ancient scrolls with rituals that would destroy Apocalypse. It turns out that they were created by Apocalypse himself, just to get people to try them out. The '90s animated series used the same plot.

Fan Works

In Falling Up, both Mabel and Dipper Pines pretend to have specific weaknesses. Mabel pretends her powers are bright and flashy and that she requires an amulet to use them. Dipper pretends to have a weakness for redheads after Mabel asks, "Would you rather your enemies throw redheads or grenades at you?"

both Mabel and Dipper Pines pretend to have specific weaknesses. Mabel pretends her powers are bright and flashy and that she requires an amulet to use them. Dipper pretends to have a weakness for redheads after Mabel asks, "Would you rather your enemies throw redheads or grenades at you?" Xander in Crush pretends to have powers over magnetism when he's actually a Gravity Master. This becomes a plot point when he's put before a Kangaroo Court that has a Tailor-Made Prison for people with magnetic powers. Xander calmly crushes the cell holding him, then plays it off as manipulating the magnetic fields between atoms.

Advertisement:

Films — Animation

Megamind: Metroman pretends to be vulnerable to copper to fake his own death, because he has come to feel he and Megamind are in a rut and he wants to explore another career. This comes to bite Megamind in the ass later, as a trap made of the same stuff can't stop the rampaging superhero-turned-villain Titan who had Metroman's powers.

Films — Live-Action

In the film Seven Samurai the lead samurai says, "A good fort needs a gap. The enemy must be lured in. So we can attack them. If we only defend, we lose the war."

Literature

One Animorphs book featured aliens with translucent skin and completely visible internal organs. When Jake has to fight them he realizes that no animal would evolve such perfect targets for a predator and deduces that they must be distractions. He hits one of the aliens in the one empty spot and it drops almost instantly.

In The Bible, Samson made up quite a few of these to mask his true Weaksauce Weakness of cutting his hair. However, it was less an attempt to be cautious and more an attempt to get Delilah to stop pestering him about it. Upon learning each "weakness," Delilah would send some Philistine soldiers to try it out, only for Samson to laugh and kill them. He apparently never noticed he'd accidentally Fed the Mole repeatedly, and eventually told Delilah his real weakness.

Discworld: The new(ish) Count de Magpyre of Carpe Jugulum added fake banishment rituals to several holy books. After those rituals fell out of use due to being completely ineffective, he and his family built up a resistance to the standard vampire weaknesses instead. A variation on this is actually exploited by Discworld vampires in general. While stakes, holy symbols, and sunlight can all reduce a vampire to dust, this is a fate they can, and eventually usually do, revive from with a simple drop of blood. There are, as it happens, more permanent ways to end a vampire's existance, and the de Magpyre's building a resistance to the more traditional methods caused the local villagers to experiment with such (usually culminating with separating the vampire's head from his/her shoulders). Turns out vampires remain susceptible, and encourage, the more traditional methods as a means of self preservation since humans easily outnumber them and are not tolerant of relentless predation. The witchfinder Perspicacia Tick is herself a witch, hunting prospective witches for recruitment rather than for terminal purposes. She distributes a manual on witch hunting and disposal to the more intolerant villages, with tips like tricking the witch into complacency with a good meal and bed for the night, nullifying her magic with a silver coin in each boot, and leaving immediately after binding her with easily escapable knots and throwing her into the nearest lake.

In The Keep, the vampire-like Molasar allows himself to be studied by a Jewish history professor. In one session, the professor brings in several holy symbols. Molasar ignores most of them but reacts violently to a Christian cross. It's later revealed that he's not really afraid of the cross, but only reacted the way he did to feed off of the destruction of the professor's faith. Later in the book one of the German officers tries to use a cross to ward off Molassar and it goes very, very, badly for the German

It is implied in The Madness Season that many of the weaknesses that popular culture says belong to vampires were fabricated by their kind so that they could escape angry mobs relatively unharmed. Of particular interest is their "weakness" to wooden stakes. A properly skilled immortal is able to absorb the organic matter in the wood before it causes any damage to their heart. Unfortunately, some vampires wind up assuming that these weaknesses are the real deal, giving them a genuine aversion to such mundane things as garlic and holy water.

In Brandon Mull's Beyonders trilogy, Maldor plants the Word- an ancient spell activator that would completely destroy him. It turns out that the Word is actually a fake. Maldor uses the hunt for the Word to not only send all of his enemies on a massive and dangerous wild goose chase, but is able to recognize the ones who survive as his actually dangerous enemies.

Live-Action TV

Sylar does this in the third season of Heroes. Danko stabs him in the back of the head when he betrays him, which is the only spot that can stop the regenerating man via putting him in a coma as long as something is stabbed back there. Sylar gets up, though, thanks to his shape-shifting powers he got with Danko's help. He can now move his weak spot anywhere on his body, as he gloats.

An episode of Scrubs has the Janitor convincing JD that he goes into a trance when he hears the word "popsicle". Of course this just serves as another way to lull JD into a false sense of security.

On The Vampire Diaries, Damon stabs Mason Lockwood with a silver knife, which backfires when it turns out that werewolves arent actually vulnerable to silver, and he just made an enemy of someone who wanted to live in peace. And eventually we find it's more than fake — silver jumpstarts their Healing Factor. Mason : You know, I think werewolves were probably the ones who started this whole "weak to silver" thing, just for moments like this.

Radio

Glynn Washington of Snap Judgment tells a story from the perspective of a frustrated supervillain. Kryptonite? Please, I think he started that nonsense. I tried everything: kryptonite rays, kryptonite missiles. Once I had the fool locked in a kryptonite coffin. "Oh, oh, it hurts, kryptonite, kryptonite." Then he broke out and started tearing up my secret lab! He just never stops. Then... then he's got the nerve to put on some glasses, and suddenly he's incognito. Like I'm stupid.

Tabletop Games

Zigzagged in Vampire: The Requiem in several different ways: By default, the classic vampire weaknesses of running/holy water, holy symbols, and other folkloric weaknesses (like dying if pricked by rose thorns) don't work. Except both the first and second edition of the game feature rules for vampires who are vulnerable to them despite this not being the norm. The traditional "stake through the heart" is a straight-up zigzag of the trope. On the one hand, it does force a vampire into Torpor, leaving them a seemingly dead corpse. On the other hand, that state ends the moment the stake comes out, so a vampire can easily fake its death by letting itself get staked and then having some minion pull the stake out after the ignorant monster hunters have congratulated themselves on their victory and gone home.



Theater

Used in the musical version of Wicked, where a rumor is perpetuated that water will make Elphaba melt , and she uses it as a way to fake her death.

Video Games

Web Comics

Grrl Power: During the fight with Vehemence, he hits Maxima with an electrical attack and notices that all her strength is draining away. The cameras that are broadcasting everything live overhear him say that lightning drains her powers. The thing is, Maxima's weakness is purely tactical: She has the top-secret ability to swap her stats between strength, speed, armor, flight, and blasting power. Vehemence hit her with so much power that she was forced to dump everything into armor, leaving for Nigh Invulnerable but otherwise largely helpless. After, when her superiors realized that people thought she was weak to electricity, they were happy to subtly encourage that rumor.

In Spacetrawler, Yuri gets captured by some not-too-bright alien mercenaries who intend to torture her but know nothing about human physiology. She pretends to be horrified at the prospect of eating chocolate or butterscotch, so the aliens duly try to torture her with these. In the following pages she is given more and more "tortures" of the same vein. Things go south when her torturers decide to cut off her limbs instead.

Web Original

As quoted above, the Evil Overlord List condones this sort of action.

A small one appeared in The Salvation War. A group of human insurgents were wiping out small groups of demons and their outposts, but always retreated when the Grand Duke of the area came with his army, making him assume that the humans feared him and his presence would always win battles. The fact he was leading his force made him easy pickings in an ambush.

In Worm, Tattletale realizes that the Simurgh, the most "human" of the Endbringers, is doing this. Simurgh appears to be a fifteen-foot-tall humanoid with wings sprouting asymmetrically all over her body, but Tattletale realizes that the body itself is of no use to Simurgh, as she's a powerful telekinetic and telepath and not even human. Instead, the center of her cognition and power is located in the main joint of her largest wing, the most well-protected point on Simurgh's body.

In the Whateley Universe, Phase gets a fake weakness put on his powers testing results: dark chocolate, administered orally. So now he can have enemies try to stop him by bringing him delicious desserts (and, you know, find out who was paying off Third Platoon for that information). The one who fell for it? Tisiphone, who admitted has the money for it, a genuine grievance with Phase, and serious psychological issues.

Western Animation