Godzilla laughs in the face of your "tanks and missiles".
Let's face it — things that are bigger than us are scary, and not just because of their size. A large part of the fear invoked by gigantic things is that while they could crush you where you stand, puny little you likely couldn't even scratch them. It seems that we instinctively know that the bigger something becomes, the harder it is to hurt. And in fictionland, things can get very, very big.
After decades of Kaiju movies have shown fruitless bombings of Godzilla and his ilk, viewers seem conditioned to accept that any giant monster or robot is completely immune to conventional weaponry. This can be a problem for filmmakers, either making the military in their films look stupid for even being there, or destroying the audience's Suspension of Disbelief when Five Rounds Rapid actually works. Not much can be done about this. It would seem that audiences like to see a more creative method for destroying the monster than More Dakka or Stuff Blowing Up.
There are a few ways to overcome this, including a Superweapon, Depleted Phlebotinum Shells and (inexplicably) attaching the very same weapons to another giant robot or monster. On the other hand, simply laying out poisoned bait for these critters and letting their appetites do them in will never, ever occur to anyonenote .
This trope is a staple of the Super Robot Genre and Real Robot Genre, since it justifies the existence of Humongous Mecha: if normal weapons can't hurt the Giant Bad Guy, you need a Giant Good Guy.
Contrast the Square-Cube Law, which suggests larger things should actually be weaker. However, assuming that the Square Cube Law is in effect, and the creature still doesn't collapse and die, then this trope is justified because the creature needs to be massively strong and durable to withstand its own weight and move with reasonable efficiency (indeed, beyond a certain size, the body would have to incorporate substances stronger and more durable than anything that exists in real animals). For example, a human scaled-up by twice his own height would weigh eight times more. If he could then move at the same speed as before, he would logically be eight times as strong, making him incredibly overpowered versus normal-sized opponents.
It's also Truth in Television in the sense that a massive difference in size between two animals can render the smaller animal largely incapable of meaningfully harming the larger one (such as an ant biting a human or a human punching an elephant) without injecting venom, attacking a vulnerable area, having a few dozen friends help, using a powerful weapon such as a gun, or otherwise attacking with something other than its own strength. In real-life ecosystems, simply being very, very large has proven an entirely viable defense mechanism, evident in both prehistoric sauropods and modern-day elephants and large whales.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Subverted in Attack on Titan. Titans are actually very fragile, and not only do conventional weapons damage them without issue, they're also prone to injuring themselves by accident. The problem is that they Feel No Pain (unless you stab them in the eyes) and have an incredibly powerful Healing Factor, with only one possible way to put them down for good. It makes killing one a very difficult and dangerous proposition.
- Zigzagged in Fullmetal Alchemist. Envy's gigantic true form is the biggest creature in the series, and focuses more on brute strength than speed. This makes him more than a match for Ed, Ling, and on other characters who are completely unprepared for his transformation. Later when he uses this against Roy Mustang, Roy simply flash-fries him over and over, pointing out that all Envy did was give him a bigger target. It also didn't help that they were fighting in an enclosed space that took away any maneuverability Envy might've had elsewhere.
- Giant Robo takes place in a world where 'Experts' have various superpowers and can duke it out with each other, to the detriment of the landscape... but with a title like that, guess where the real force is. The show mostly plays it straight — Giant does Equal Invincible, unless you're prepared to die soon afterwards.
- Gigantor: Tetsujin-28, the Ur-Example of Humongous Mecha, plays this trope completely straight. It was intended to be Japan's ultimate weapon during World War II. Since that war was over before the robot was finished, Tetsujin is used to fight mostly criminals and terrorists.
- Gundam is all over the place with this trope. The Universal Century series have anti-Mobile Suit infantry tactics being reasonably effective while armies in the Alternate Universes generally don't field infantry against Mobile Suits at all. However, one of the series' major conceits is that Mobile Suits can effortlessly take down battleships and Mobile Armors hundreds of times larger than themselves — roughly a scaled-up equivalent of a properly equipped infantryman bringing down a tank. In the original series timeline, beam weaponry is supposed to punch through all armor, but its discovered that a sufficiently large battle station/mobile armor can reinforce it's hull with a surface level deflector shield that even beam sabres can't cut. Time and resources usually make it a non issue, but eventually giant enough does become practically invincible even to new type specified Gundam line mobile suits.
- The trope is averted in Macross for both the Zentraedi and their battle pods. While Super Dimension Fortress Macross shows that Zentradi (at least those of Bretai's type) are powerful enough to dismember Humongous Mecha with their bare hands, human weaponry or Zentradi weapons wielded by humans can take them down in an instant.
- Mazinger Z and its sequels Great Mazinger and UFO Robo Grendizer play this trope straight. Combat jets, tanks, missiles etc. cannot even scratch the armor of a Robeast, and it can only be defeated by a similarly giant weapon. It is subverted with the Fembots, though, since Aphrodite A, Diana A and Venus A can be easily defeated, and Aphrodite A can be briefly deterred by an army of Mooks using conventional weapons. Subverted when Kouji destroys one of the Mechanical Monsters of Archduke Gorgon using landmines (even though it's supposed to be stronger than Dr. Hell's Mechanical Monsters!).
- My Hero Academia:
- Averted with Mt. Lady. Not only can a strong enough opponent take her down while she's in her giant form as All For One does, but due to not being able to include any padding or armor in her costume since nothing that would provide meaningful protection could stretch to fit both of her sizes, she has to be careful about just stepping on things as well; When she goes to stomp the front of a villain hideout, she has to wear a flatbed truck as an makeshift shoe to avoid hurting her foot on the debris.
- Played straight, however, by Gigantomachia. Not only does he naturally possess incredible Super-Toughness alongside his giant size, as he gets bigger the longer a fight goes on, he becomes even more unstoppable, partially thanks to his Feel No Pain Quirk and partially because he converts his own morale and loyalty into physical power.
- In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the military tries bullets, missiles, and clean nukes on the angels, all to no effect; part of the reason why the Evas exist is that the Angels are protected by a force field (they call it an AT field) that only the Evas can cancel out with their own AT fields. However, there are cases where science fiction-based weapons do defeat them.
- Played with in One Piece. While more powerful characters tend to be bigger, giants are easily taken down by the more powerful characters. One subversion is Oars Jr, who, though he could take cannonballs with ease and smash through smaller giants (wrap your brain around that), all it meant for the truly powerful characters was that he presented a bigger target.
- Science Ninja Team Gatchaman subverts the trope. You only need the Gatchaman team — a Five-Man Band of teenagers with a Cool Airship — to take on a Humongous Mecha and destroy it.
- In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the Humongous Mecha are shown to be vulnerable to concentrated small-arms fire (something that Yoko uses to her advantage on a number of occasions). This hasn't stopped some viewers from asking, "Why are they shooting at the robots when they know it won't do any good?" later on.
- In Train to the End of the World, the town of Sayama and the neighboring military base have been shrunk such that the normal-sized girls are nearly kaiju in comparison. The military attacks when Shizuru and Reimi enter the town, but only their missiles can do actual damage. Guns and even tank cannons are just extremely itchy for the girls.
Comic Books
- Alan Ford: Averted in the (anti?) climax of Sun, sky, air and...: when the villain, Gim, uses size-increasing power to become 50-foot-tall giant and attack the heroes, but Minuette swiftly kills him with a single shot of a harpoon gun to the heart.
- Superman:
- In an early story, Superman has some difficulty when he fights an alien giant robot. It's as strong and invulnerable as he is, so whenever Supes and the alien robot trade punches, neither is hurt. The robot then uses its superior size to grab Superman and stuff him inside a compartment within. Superman eventually escapes and defeats the robot by dismantling it at the joints.
- Supergirl has occasionally faced up to giant monsters and robots that are tough enough to resist her attacks. In Batgirl (2009) #14 Terror in the Third Dimension, she tells her friend Steph about it:
Batgirl: I thought only the green stuff could hurt your... is "kind" offensive at all?
Supergirl: Depends on which one of us you ask. And it isn't just Kryptonite. There's all kinds of little hiccups. Magic. Electricity. Sometimes robots, if they're big enough. - Played straight in Bizarrogirl. Supergirl usually is more than capable of dealing with monsters, but the moonsized Godship is too tough to be punched out and strong enough to smash her away. It easily withstands the assault of an army of Bizarro clones and finally the heroes have to resort to power up Bizarrogirl's petrifying vision to merely freeze it.
- Played straight in The Unknown Supergirl: The Infinite Monster is so big that its head touches the upper atmosphere, and its already extra-tough body is protected by a personal force field. It cannot be harmed by the army or the local superheroes, and Kara's godlike strength is not enough to even move it. Finally, she resorts to building a changing-size ray and shrinking it down to miniature size to defeat it.
- Subverted in The Killers of Krypton when Empress Gandelo makes herself giant to fight Supergirl. She'd be a formidable opponent against anybody else, but her greatly magnified strength is still insufficient to overpower a Kryptonian. All in all, she just makes herself a giant target, and impossible to miss.
- Played with in Final Crisis: Run!. Idiot supervillain the Human Flame is obsessed with becoming more powerful, and in succession takes several treatments intended to increase his mass and the amount of heat he can produce, capping it with a dive into a nuclear reactor that turns him into a massive lava golem. Unfortunately, he doesn't realize until it's too late that this obsession has rendered him far, far slower, so Green Lantern nails heat-dispersing rods into his body, solidifying him into an immobile statue.
- The Ultimates takes great joy in averting this as part of its more "realistic" take on superheroes. Giant-Man (non-combatant Hank Pym) is nothing more than an oversized, unskilled, still-entirely-squishy human who is repeatedly curb-stomped by his opponents or even just inconveniently placed obstacles. The entire concept is jettisoned as a useless gimmick for a superhero, and instead gets used for cleanup and construction.
- X-Men: Sentinels aren't invincible (yet), but they are built exceptionally tough because their intended targets can shatter you with a glance, cut anything, throw lightning, bend steel with a thought or just treat matter like tinker-toys. As a consequence, we don't often (if ever) see conventional arms used against them.
- This is how Giganta's powers are supposed to work in Wonder Woman volume 2. She's already somewhat large, strong and inhumanly tough, with her strength and toughness exponentially increasing as her size increases. Giganta's defense has some glaring weaknesses, however. Most relevant to this trope, her sense of balance doesn't increase with her size, and the enchantments that keep her from sinking into the Earth from her sheer weight also make falling over almost always painful. Still, most of Wonder Woman's allies, even self appointed Wonder Girl Cassie Sandsmark, find Giganta's size and toughness intimidating; even Superman dislikes fighting Giganta.
Comic Strips
- The Far Side:
- Parodied by one of the final unpublished strips, available in Last Chapter and Worse. A man is interviewed after taking down a Godzilla-like monster with his shotgun. "Well, I seen all the commotion, with that there monster destroyin' half the city and whatnot, and I says to myself 'Hell! Why don't someone just shoot the varmint?'"
- Also averted in one depicting a massive, slain mastodon, with a minuscule arrow in its buttock.
Caveman: Maybe we should write that spot down.
Fan Works (Neon Genesis Evangelion)
Seeing how this trope is crucial to the series, it's only natural that it shows up in fan fiction.
- Advice and Trust: Regular army forces do nothing against Evas or Angels. During the battle against Leliel land tropes surround the Angel to let Nerv apply pressure. One of the Bridge Bunnies asks if they are useful and Misato notes disdainfully that Leliel is intimidated by their presence not at all.
- The Child of Love: After the Angel War Shinji and Asuka are cajoled into taking part in peace-keeping missions. They don't want to kill anyone, but Misato assures them the only thing they have to do is show up and scare them because everyone knows giant robots are invincible.
- Children of an Elder God: Since the enemies in this story are Eldritch Abominations of the Cthulhu Mythos, conventional weaponry, tanks, fighter jets, missiles, nukes... are predictably useless, and they can only be found using bio-mechanical giant super robots which are, in fact, cloned Eldritch Abominations.
- The Coming of the First Ones: The first new Angel to appear -a weird, spinning, giroscope-shaped, mountain-sized, glowing thing- is confronted with an artillery batallion. Not only do their artillery shells fail to damage or even hit it, but also the Angel warps their projectiles back at the soldiers.
- A Crown of Stars: Asuka Langley Sohryu pilots a Star Strider, a flying robot just as tall as the Statue of Liberty. When she fights tanks and foot troops... you can guess the result.
- Doing It Right This Time: In the first story draft, an Admiral complains about using giant robots to fight monsters. Asuka quickly points out a Humongous Mecha is the only thing has worked so far with Robeasts and Kaijus.
"There's got to be a better way of doing this," he grumbled to himself, in the mistaken belief that Asuka's English was anything but impeccable. "I mean, giant robots for heaven's sake!"
"Technically the Evangelions are cyborgs. And you could well be right, but so far we've killed three more Angels than any other weapon of man's devising."
The man scowled, but conceded the point. - Hail to the King (Thuktun Flishithy): Subverted. Initially it is played straight: when the Evangelions, the Kaiju and the Angels come to blows the army of the Evangelion universe could stay in home for all the good its presence will do. However, the Godzilla universe army has decades of experience dealing with giant, superpowerful and nearly invulnerable monsters, and they are at least capable to provide cover fire, distract or slightly weaken the enemy.
- HERZ: The narration blatantly points out that HERZ is still invincible because... well... giant robots.
Despite of the loss of much of NERV's old autonomy, HERZ was still greatly feared. Exclusive control of Unit 01 and the remaining Eva-05 series meant that she could defeat any conventional armed force on the field.
- Last Child of Krypton: Subverted. Yes, the regular army is useless against Angels or Evangelions... but when (human-sized) Shinji a. k. a. Superman comes along, being giant only means that you are a giant target.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide: As soon as new humongous Angels show up, it's made clear that the army keeps being helpless against them, and the Evas must be deployed again.
- Once More With Feeling (Crazy-88): After Shinji got fed up with an admiral dissing the Evangelions, Shinji narrates his first engagement and points out that the Humongous Mecha is the only thing can damage an Angel because conventional weaponry is useless.
''"Well Sir, I have, so has the First Child and I'm sure very shortly, so too will have the Second [...] In my first engagement, I went up against an Angel that chewed through a Tank Battalion in four minutes flat, destroyed three dozen aircraft and took more firepower then this entire battle group could dish out, right up to the use of Strategic scale N2 weapons. The UN and JSSDF threw everything they had at it and barely slowed it down at the cost of over a thousand lives and half a billion US dollars. [...] With the greatest of respect, Sir, [...] the twin of that toy you are transporting took out that Angel in sixty three seconds, with no civilian casualties, no military casualties and minimal collateral damage to the city it was fighting in."
- The One I Love Is...: Although he hates fighting, Shinji gets forced to pilot a giant robot because there is nothing else that can damage the Angels, and he is the only one who can pilot Unit 01.
- Scar Tissue: Ritsuko notes in one scene that they can not beat one of their giant robots with anything other than another giant robot.
- The Second Try: Conventional weaponry does nothing to Evas or Angels. When the army assaulted the Geofront Asuka's Humongous Mecha destroyed foot troops, entire tank battallions, VTOLs with insulting easiness whereas Shinji's giant robot protected her power cord with an impregnable barrier that no projectile could pierce through. It went on until the army gave up and deployed Seele's Humongous Mecha. Shortly before Asuka had said that the soldiers were not the real problem (since their enemy were the MP-Evas).
- Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton: Subverted. The regular army is useless when it is time to fight Angels or even Evas. No weapon of theirs can damage them. However, Asuka — who in this setting is Supergirl — can fight them more effectively with her bare hands than with a giant robot despite of being an average-sized human. In fact, she manages to take Armisael down and survive, something no Eva could do.
- Thousand Shinji: Subverted. The army is mostly useless against the Angels, but some troops were capable to assist Shinji by providing cover fire to distract Ramiel.
Fan Works (Other)
- Battle Fantasia Project: Justified in the remake. When the Nightmare Factory deploys a Kaiju, it's quickly pointed out that magic tends to make beliefs real or more probable, and as it happened in Japan the Kaijuu was effectively invincible unless fought by a Physical God, someone with divine-inspired powers, or something equally large (it was taken down by the Megas).
- The Bridge (MLP) plays this completely straight on the Terran side, where only high-end mecha or extremely rare superweapons have any effect on kaiju, and it usually takes one of the more heroic kaiju to save the day. On the Equestrian side, it flip-flops. Bladed weaponry is obviously useless, and magic blasts from an extremely powerful unicorn-like Starlight Glimmer might just get a kaiju's attention, but Word of God and demonstration show that more powerful artifacts like the Crystal Heart and potent alicorn magic can do some damage.
- Discussed in The Dilgar War when a few characters talk about the latest Godzilla movie and one of them mentions an easy way to deal with it: a single railgun shot from an orbiting starship.
- Fruit of Madness: Played horrifyingly straight by the zombie Argentinosaurus, as its sheer size makes it virtually unstoppable once it decides that the Straw Hats should be its next victims.
- In Here There Be Monsters, the combined power of the Canadian and USA armies cannot slow down, let alone hurt, two enlarged Captain Marvel's villains: the fifty-foot Red Crusher and ten-foot Mister Atom.
One of their foemen was human, or appeared to be, if one could discount his fifty-foot height. [...]
Beside him, much slighter in height but not in menace, stood a figure off of an old science fiction pulp cover, brought to life: Mr. Atom. A gleaming, metal, atomic-powered robot who had turned on its creator and sought to destroy the human race, with only Captain Marvel to stop him. [...]
The two of them were advancing towards a mass of soldiers and tanks before them. They looked about as concerned as a football player stepping on a mass of roaches. - A Hollow in Equestria plays with this trope regarding the first antagonist, a dragon. Its scaly hide offers superb protection against everything the ponies throw at it, such as large boulders, magical energy blasts, and even Rainbow Dash's Sonic Rainboom. But against Ulquiorra it has no protection and is vulnerable to the resulting beatdown it suffers.
- Mesozoic Effect: Averted. Larger dinosaur breeds are typically used as long-range support units specifically because they aren't invulnerable, and their large size just makes them sitting ducks for the high-power kinetic weapons of the Mass Effect universe. When they do fight up close, they wear large suits of Powered Armor that generally turn them into Mini-Mecha, complete with arsenals of weapons and gadgets. Even with these upgrades, they still aren't as durable as tanks and typically have to rely on their superior mobility to stay alive.
- Wonderful (Mazinja): When a house-sized tank attacks the main character's super-hero team, Taylor and her teammates manage to destroy it... but they needed to use giant weapons to do so.
Films — Animation
- Subverted in Dead End Adventure: there are two giants among the participants, and are among the first to be eliminated from the race.
- Doraemon: Nobita's Little Space War has the gang in Planet Pirika, a world inhabited by Lilliputians, where they blend in by shrinking themselves via the shrink light. They're later captured alive by the PCIA dictatorship led by Colonel Dracorl and sentenced to be Shot at Dawn... only for the light's effect to wear off, turning them back to their regular sizes. They then effortlessly tear the PCIA army a new hole while shrugging off rifles and cannons, though Nobita in giant form does feel momentary pain when some of the PCIA soldiers shoot him in the rump.
- Even baby dinosaurs in The Land Before Time are harder than rocks of the same size... although maybe it's more that those are some really sissy rocks.
- In Monsters vs. Aliens, the army throws its entire arsenal at a giant alien robot without leaving so much as a scratch. Even after that, the President shoots a few rounds at it, just to show that he's a brave president. It is then that they decide to sic the monsters at it, but even they have a hard time defeating it. Considering that even the largest of the "monsters", Ginormica, is still tiny compared to the robot, this is justified.
Films — Live-Action
- Big Ass Spider! has a very literal example: the eponymous menace, upon reaching Kaiju size, is immune to gunfire and even survives a direct missile strike, while its newly-hatched (small) offspring prove to be susceptible to being shot.
- Word of God for Cloverfield tells us that the traditionally unstoppable monster was killed by the "Hammerdown Protocol", although one wonders what effect it would have on its mother.
- In both film versions of Dune, the blaster weapons and missiles of the Hakonnen/Sardaukar forces can't do anything against the sand worms that got weaponized by Paul/Muad'Dib and the Fremen in the Final Battle.
- Zig-zagged in the 1990s Gamera trilogy. Gamera is shot down from flight by anti-air missiles, but they don't seem to actually hurt him all that much, at most seeming to startle or annoy him when it comes to damage. In the same movie, Gyaos also gets bombarded with missiles, and the most it does is wake it up. While Legion appears to be much tougher than both of them, firing at her weakest area, specifically the joints on her small claws, allow them to weaken her force field. Iris, however, plays this completely straight, as nothing Gamera or the JSDF throw at it can so much as make it flinch. It takes Gamera literally punching a hole in Iris with a Megaton Punch made of explosive fire to kill it.
- Every Godzilla movie ever.note (In the original, the "Oxygen Destroyer" kills Godzilla. Still, it's not a conventional weapon, but a 'superscience' type. The SuperX in much later films has some effect.)
- Godzilla vs. Destoroyah subverts this. Turns out that too much radiation can kill Godzilla. The downside is that it'll cause him to go into a meltdown and destroy the world. Granted, nuking Godzilla is a bad idea in the first place since it'll make him larger and more powerful before it has any fatal effects.
- Subverted in Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!. Godzilla is defeated after swallowing a submarine that uses high-powered torpedoes to drill a hole through his chest allowing said submarine to escape, and causing Godzilla to explode by his thermonuclear breath tearing him apart from the inside out via said hole. It doesn't kill him, per se, but at least he's been reduced to a disembodied heart.
- In Godzilla: Final Wars, fans had every reason to expect invincible kaiju. Ryuhei Kitamura attempted to overcome this trope with superhuman mutants and flying battlecruisers with lasers.
- Part of the reason for the hate for Godzilla (1998) is that this is averted. While Godzillanote is pretty much immune to small arms fire, bigger guns and bombs are able to hurt him, and late in the movie he is injured and eventually killed by conventional weaponry. The main difficulty this time around is actually hitting him with heavy weapons, as this version of Godzilla is far more agile than his traditional counterparts, surprisingly sneaky, and actively avoids the military. He's even cold-blooded, rendering heat-seeking weapons inaccurate. He's ultimately only defeated after getting reckless during a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, becoming entangled in a suspension bridge and left a sitting duck. Gamera director Shusuke Kaneko is quoted as saying "Americans seem unable to accept a creature that cannot be put down by their arms." Continued in the animated spinoff; see the Western Animation folder below.
- Brought back full-force in Godzilla (2014). The MUTOs and Godzilla shrug off all bullets, tank rounds, and sea-to-ground missiles, though rifles successfully distract the MUTOs more than once. It is confirmed in the movie that Godzilla can survive point-blank nuclear explosions in the kiloton range, though they have no idea what megaton-level explosions will do. However, the nuclear initiation that the movie shows targeting Godzilla is known to us as the Castle Bravo test, which is famous not only for being one of the first multimegaton tests, but for unfortunately exceeding expectations- the expected 4-8 megaton explosion was roughly 15 megatons. No nuke in the current arsenal is capable of that.note
- Also subverted in Shin Godzilla. After the weapons used by the Japanese military don't even scratch Godzilla, US bombers hit him with GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs
. These actually do injure Godzilla, blowing off chunks of his spinal plates and spilling a lot of blood, but this leads to Godzilla's first use of its atomic breath. Between its various forms, this leads to all the bombers being taken out, most of the Japanese Cabinet being killed in one hit, and the complete destruction of a huge section of Tokyo. To top everything off, Godzilla heals the damage and starts taking out anything airborne that approaches him, even while dormant.
- Downplayed in Godzilla Minus One. The 1940s setting severely limits what the humans can hit him with (similar to the original Gojira) compared to a modern one, and he is as invulnerable as you'd expect against mortars, autocannons, tank shells, and so on. However, the 20 cm guns on the Takao are able to damage him and cause him to retreat, with this even being confirmed in an interview with the film's director. The reason this isn't an actual subversion is that this still only deals relatively moderate damage that he's able to regenerate from — and if multiple direct hits from 20 cm guns can only do that much, it's no surprise he's unassailable to basically anything else.note Unusually for Godzillas, though, Minus One is in fact defeated conventionally by the human protagonists, albeit through use of a complex plan that takes advantage of specific weaknesses he has like his innards being less durable than his exterior.
- Justified in Independence Day: Resurgence by having the giant Queen Alien have its own individual forcefield.
- Jurassic Park:
- This could be the reason why dinosaurs in the first two movies appear to be bullet-proof. (Though the puny humans rarely get a chance to even try shooting.) They don't seem to be completely invincible. After all, the hunters in the second film are able to catch them in large numbers, and it is implied that the head hunter's elephant gun would have worked on a Tyrannosaurus rex had the environmental terrorist not stolen his ammo. Also, there's the instant death coral poison gun that got tangled in some cargo netting.
- The Spinosaurus from Jurassic Park III both may have tanked shots from an anti-tank rifle and definitely tanked a bite to the neck from a subadult T. rex. However, as it was likely a prototype hybrid dinosaur, this may be somewhat justified.
- In the fourth movie, this is zigzagged. The pterosaurs are each taken down by one shot, but it can be assumed it's because they're not really that bignote . Meanwhile the Indominus rex barely seems to notice when she's being shot at and shrugs off a barrage of machine-gun and rifle fire throughout the movie. She does improvise some quick evasive maneuvers when subjected to fire from a helicopter-mounted minigun, though, and is successfully driven away with a rocket launcher. The Indominus, however, appears to have been specifically engineered to be as tough as possible, shrugging off multiple bites to the neck from Rexie and even the Mosasaurus; it took being drowned by the Mosasaurus to eventually kill her.
- King Kong:
- Averted in King Kong (1933). Kong is gradually shot down by biplanes (Helicopter gunships in the 1976 remake), and slowly dies from shot after shot.
- Zigzagged in King Kong (2005). The largest animals on Skull Island, the Brontosauruses, avert this trope; Thompson fire is enough to penetrate their unarmored hides and bring them down. The Piranhadon from the deleted scenes isn't visibly harmed by Thomspon fire, but it's enough to deter it. Kong himself shrugs off small arms fire and tanks bites from V. rexes, though he's brought down by repeated biplane gunfire in the climax and captured with a chloroform bottle to the face. The V. rexes themselves are Immune to Bullets in the game, and tank several impacts that likely would have killed a T. rex in reality. It should be noted that both Kong and the V. rexes, whose species were fierce rivals, were perfectly capable of killing each other.
- Played straight in Kong: Skull Island, where King Kong takes out a full squadron of helicopter gunships, though he does bleed a bit and his palm shows scars from their rotors. The small Skullcrawler shrugs off several small arms and even a flamethrower and is only killed when a gas vent is set on fire under it. The big one survives even Kong cutting its throat open with a ship's propeller and it takes him ripping its guts out through its mouth to kill it.
- Taken even further in the sequel to the above, Godzilla vs. Kong; at one point, the big ape travels to the center of the Earth through a gravitational anomaly described by one character as equivalent to "A whole planet's worth of gravity pushing on you all at once." While that may be... pretty nonsensical, it is true that the pressure as one approaches the Earth's core reaches in excess of 3.5 million times sea level, and needless to say, anything that could survive that kind of pressure would have absolutely nothing to fear from any Earthly weapon. For reference, the peak blast pressure of an atomic explosion is around 65psi, already more than enough to destroy any structure in the blast radius. Our favorite monkey survived the equivalent of 50,750,000psi without so much as breaking a sweat.
- In the Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- This trope applies to Scott Lang whenever he becomes Giant-Man.
- In Captain America: Civil War, Giant-Man is seemingly impervious to both Iron Man and War Machine's artillery, though to be fair, they were not trying to use lethal shots. It takes a combination of "really old movie" tactics and a wrecking ball-like slam from a superdense Vision to knock him down. Especially odd since Ant-Man's powers are explicitly stated to change his size but not his mass, meaning when he's small he's a Pint-Sized Powerhouse, with the strength and weight of a grown man concentrated into the size of an ant, which conversely means that he should have roughly the strength of tissue paper at 60 feet tall. In practice, his powers mostly alternate between Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny.
- In Avengers: Endgame, he easily takes out two leviathans (one in the background, even!), something the Hulk and Thor had to struggle with briefly in The Avengers (2012). He also kills Cull Obsidian very easily and presumably accidentally, a foe the Avengers had to struggle a lot against in Avengers: Infinity War, even after chopping off his arm. In fact, the movie is forced to write him off by giving him a different mission in order to justify him not directly fighting Thanos in the end.
- This trait is played with in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but with a twist: during the final assault on Big Bad Kang's citadel, Scott shrugs off artillery and laser fire like he's Godzilla, smashing tanks underfoot and swatting planes out of the sky. However, given that this whole scene plays out in the Quantum Realm, the question remains whether he was actually giant, or just slightly less microscopic than his surroundings.
- The Fantastic Four: First Steps: Galactus is immense, and when he shows up in New York to claim Franklin (the baby of Sue Storm and Reed Richards), the attacks of the Fantastic Four merely annoy him (and he calls them "bugs"). He's only defeated when pushed through a dimensional portal by Sue's force field (and she strains herself to death at it), with the charge of Shalla-Bal/the Silver Surfer providing the final blow to shove him in it.
- This trope applies to Scott Lang whenever he becomes Giant-Man.
- Downplayed in Pacific Rim: the Kaiju aren't entirely immune to conventional tanks and bombers, but are so resistant to them it takes days of constant attacks just to kill one, all while the things tear the hell out of cities. The collective world community agreed to stop using nuclear weapons on the Kaiju, because even though they work, doing it over and over again was far more destructive to the planet and humanity in the short run. The point of Jaegers isn't just to kill the things, but to kill them quickly; preferably before they even reach the coast. The Kaiju eventually built a nuke-proof variant anyway. There is also the issue that Kaiju blood is highly toxic, so a Kaiju slowly bleeding out during a days-long rampage can poison a much larger area and be harder to contain and clean up than one killed swiftly upon being detected.
- Averted with Rodan. Both monsters die in a volcano while the JSDF bombs them with an airstrike.
- A number of Star Trek films seem to love this trope:
- In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the alien "whale probe" that arrives at Earth is gargantuan and disables every spaceborne or technological object in its path. Multiple Starfleet vessels and their crews are shown dealing with the aftermath of an encounter with the Probe before it reaches Earth and starts manipulating weather across the entire planet.
- In Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg cube that supplies an Action Prologue manages to get the better of an assembled fleet of Federation vessels in a running firefight straight to Earth. Subverted, though, as the Enterprise-E officers note that the cube sustained heavy damage to its outer hull, and it is promptly destroyed as soon as the entire battle group targets their weapons on a single vulnerable spot.
- Star Trek: Nemesis introduces the Scimitar, a Reman-built Romulan uber-warbird that's essentially The Juggernaut with a huge array of weapons up to and including lethal thalaron radiation, multiple-layered shields that still work while cloaked, and a Cloaking Device that is said to be perfectly effective. Everything the Enterprise-E and two arriving Romulan vessels manage to throw at it only manages to disable the cloaking system and brings the Scimitar's shields down to seventy percent strength. It takes Ramming Always Works to do any lasting damage, and detonating the thalaron generator to actually blow it up from the inside.
- Star Trek (2009) brings us Nero's ship, the Narada, which is said to have originally been a Romulan mining vessel before apparently being heavily augmented and thrown back from the 24th to the 23rd century. Nero and his crew make short work of an entire Starfleet squadron sent to intercept them at the planet Vulcan, and back when they first arrived, George Kirk and the crew of the Kelvin were so thoroughly outmatched that the crew were forced into escape craft right away and Kirk had to buy them time to flee by ramming the Narada. A single salvo from Nero's ship is enough to nearly collapse the alternate-timeline Enterprise's shields, and another volley would have made them share the Redshirt Army's fate. Eventually, it takes an artificially generated black hole to finally take Nero and his ship down for good.
- The follow-up to the 2009 film, Star Trek Into Darkness, has the Vengeance, a huge warship built in secret looking like a dark Constitution-class vessel. It utterly outclasses the Enterprise in every way, and the protagonist vessel doesn't even get to fire a shot as its weapons are taken out within seconds of the Vengeance even engaging. In this case, seventy-two internally detonating torpedoes are necessary to take the Vengeance down, and even then, Khan retains enough ability to control the ship to deliberately crash it into San Francisco at Starfleet Headquarters.
- Then Star Trek Beyond (sensing a theme with J. J. Abrams-led films?) has the alien warlord Krall and his vast swarm of robotic attack craft left over on the planet Altamid. When the swarm reaches the Enterprise they destroy the ship in moments, and would have done the same to the starbase Yorktown if the main cast hadn't figured out a way to jam the drones' communications frequencies to cause them to crash into one another in a chain-reaction.
- Transformers Film Series:
- One of the (many) common complaints against the second film is the presence of human soldiers with rifles during the battle. It seems that they're only there because Bay wants to see their bodies pinwheel through the air from explosions. Never mind that we see Megatron himself driven back by concentrated fire from the fleshlings.
- By the third film, they have learned to take down Cybertronians with assault rifles. Granted, those rifles are firing armor-piercing rounds, but they are shown to be training in tactics specifically designed against large robotic opponents, such as dropping from above, going for the eyes, and blowing their feet up with specialized explosives (size means less when you're flat on the ground). They still drop like flies, especially when the Decepticons bring out the disintegrator guns, but are able to take down a number of enemy 'bots, including Shockwave.
- All of this is justified, though. The first movie revealed that humans discovered just what type of man-made weapon was capable of injuring a Cybertronian, and actively made that the standard-issue ammo for all soldiers in the following films.
Literature
- This is certainly the characters' initial reaction to the skyscraper-sized vordbulks in the final Codex Alera book, First Lord's Fury, but then a few bright sparks work out their weak points...
- Averted in the Destroyermen series. The alternate Earth features many extant dinosaurs and other giant creatures (such as Mountain Fish, which are enormous whale-like creatures that eat ships for breakfast), but enough bullets, especially firing at eyes or opened mouths, will bring down any creature. Hell, several times, attempts to scare off a Mountain Fish result in their accidental death; it turns out that it can't handle a depth charge very well. In fact, one of the main characters, a Boisterous Bruiser named Dennis Silva, turns a Japanese anti-aircraft gun into a BFG musket he calls the Doom Whomper, designed specifically to hunt the allosaur-like superlizards but doubling as a sniper rifle in a pinch.
- This is more or less true of all the creatures in Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters, with only the occasional Humongous Mecha being able to scratch them. Given that this is a horror anthology, even that isn't necessarily going to work all the time.
- Zigzagged in the Nemesis Saga. The natural black armor on the kaiju protects them from anything the military throws at them, including a M.O.A.B.. However, their armor is not completely impenetrable and if removed, their soft, pale skin underneath is susceptible to conventional military fire.
- Averted in The Salvation War: despite both the Demons and Angels being much larger than humans, they go down easily due to modern weaponry.
- Averted in The Scar: the gargantuan avanc slowly succumbs to infection after it gets injured by the grindylow. We don't actually see what weapons they'd used to damage it, but the lakeful of pus it emits while ailing is a definite sign that it's the infection, not the wounds themselves, that proves fatal.
- Averted in Shadow's Fall when the "unpowered" retired superhero Lester Gold takes on a T-Rex by tricking it into swallowing a grenade, leading to Your Head A-Splode. Played straight with the Great Wurm, Cromm Cruach.
- The War Against the Chtorr: The Enterprise fish can mass over a million tons and requires a tactical nuclear weapon to destroy. Justified when it's revealed the 'fish' is actually a large number of symbiotic creatures joined together.
- Worm: The only way to fight an Endbringer is to throw hundreds of capes at it at the same time. No gun, explosive, nuclear bomb or other human weaponry can harm it, save for Applied Phlebotinum. Fenja and Menja, Kaiser's two henchwomen, are a much more literal example. They can increase their physical size, and cause all damage to them to scale inversely to their size — the bigger they get, the less hard they get hit.
Live-Action TV
- In Power Rangers, if you don't have a Megazord, you should basically run. It's exceedingly rare that the most godlike weapons used at human scale can scratch the monster after Make My Monster Grow ensues. Yes, it is freaking awesome and remembered forever when a Ranger manages to avert this. (As you can imagine, of the three times it happens, once it was a Red Ranger, once it was a Sixth Ranger, and once it was Tommy.)
- In Prehistoric Planet, extremely large animals are virtually immune to attack and shrug off any hits they actually take. The Kaikaifilu in "Coasts", in particular, is more annoyed by the plesiosaurs attacking it than actually hurt. In fact, when the narration shows off a herd of Alamosaurus, the narration explicitly points out that no predator alive would dare to hunt a fully-grown one in good health—to the point that the scene focuses on the fact that one of them has actually lived long enough to die of old age. Subverted, however, with a male Mosasaurus and a male Dreadnoughtus, as both face the one thing that their size doesn't defend against: another member of their own species.
- Terra Nova: Even dinosaurs that are only slightly larger than people shrug off small arms like they're nothing, and even the mounted wave cannons on the walls of the compound only repel a ten-foot-tall dinosaur.
- The Ultra Series sees this a lot. The defense teams always attack the Monster of the Week with a huge variety of weapons and technology, from ray guns and high-tech jet fighters, but typically only the Ultras can actually defeat the monster. However, it has been averted on a few occasions, where the team is able to kill or seriously injure a kaiju with their weaponry. It takes circumstances, (often) special one-of-a-kind weaponry, and a lot of hard work, but the human teams are capable of protecting Earth on their own. Not to mention that it's even better when the teams and Ultras cooperate.
Professional Wrestling
- Japanese professional wrestling enforces this trope every time two wrestlers from different weigh classes face off. Unless it is a special title match or the weight difference is actually very small, it's just not considered adequate to book the smaller to win. For that reason, superheavyweights like Akebono, Giant Silva and Giant Bernard were usually booked to be unstoppable in singles matches except against exceptionally strong opponents (often fellow giants) and/or reigning champions.
- Because of how the human body works mechanically (as mentioned above while discussing the Square-Cube Law) many large wrestlers actually are overwhelmingly faster and stronger than their smaller coworkers, at least while young. Once age catches up to them and they become Dented Iron due to the tiny injuries they accumulate in their chosen career this trope tends to be averted. The fact that this trope is generally true for young people, especially young men, is why weight classes exist in non-scripted professional wrestling as well as other full-contact sports.
Roleplay
- Destroy the Godmodder follows this sometimes, and other times throws this out the window. It all depends on if said giant beastie is the godmodder's or something one of the players summoned.
Tabletop Games
- Averted in BattleTech. BattleMechs may be the more-or-less official "kings of the battlefield", and heavier designs are tougher than lighter ones, but they're still only glorified tanks on legs and remain vulnerable to lucky hits and cumulative damage from even 31st-century infantry weapons, assuming that the infantry can live long enough to get into range and exchange fire with them for a while. (Urban combat in particular can become a legitimate nightmare for them.) Also, in an interesting reversal, instead of the mechs being tougher than conventional tanks, the tanks are weaker. For one thing, tanks are smaller targets, but no more difficult to hit than a 'mech. For another, although the mechs are depicted as having more exposed or lightly armored parts, the odds of a critical hit are higher versus a tank than a mech.
- Ultimately subverted in Champions: while bigger PCs and NPCs get harder and harder to take down (especially when PCs take "Nigh Invulnerable"), they will fall eventually. It's more about players not having to spend sessions trying to grind down one giant and to keep a sense of danger when a giant PC fights.
- The Dresden Files has a power available called "Hulking Size," which, while it doesn't make the creature invincible, does give it two extra stress boxes, meaning it can take more damage before it's wounded — the normal max is 4 without outright toughness powers. Given this is for creatures the size of a small house, the main downside of the power is it gives any enemy a +1 to hit it when size is a factor.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Bigger monsters tend to be tougher, but not necessarily because they're bigger. Bigger monsters are also bigger targets.note
- The Titanic templatenote is a downplayed version of this trope — it is entirely possible to kill Titanic creatures using ordinary weapons, but they have a lot more hit points than the base animal, and a lot of natural armor (meaning that, due to what AC and Touch AC represents, they are a lot easier to hit, but roughly as easy to somewhat harder to hit well enough to actually do any damage).
- Averted with 5th Edition's Enlarge spell: it increases the target's size, weight and damage, but doesn't make the target any easier to damage (and conversely for Reduce) since being easier to hit is offset by having thicker skin/armor to penetrate.
- Averted in GURPS. Whenever a single giant monster appears, the players tend to take it out with a single shot to the eye. Creatures that big tend to have eyes that are easy to hit, and damage multiplier tends to make even a T-Rex go down in one or two hits.
- Fate rules for Mecha vs. Kaiju offer several different forms of this. The simplest is to simply assume that the giant monsters and giant mechs are completely impervious to anything smaller. A more complicated version has a system of six scales ranging from "Human" to "Astronomical" (with even Godzilla not being "Astronomical" at his biggest), and every difference in scale lets the larger party replace one of the FUDGE dice with a standard D6, meaning that a weak Towering kaiju is effectively rolling an average of 7 higher than an infantryman, and 3.5 higher than a tank (switching from dice that range from -1 to +1 to dice that start at +1 and get higher is very strong in Fate). It does try and balance this out a tiny bit by preventing any kaiju without the Bug Stomp stunt from directly engaging a specific puny mortal.
- Played mostly straight in Warhammer 40,000. Big monstrous creatures like Squiggoths or the larger Tyranid bio-forms (to say nothing of Titans) have such a high Toughness or Armor Value that most standard infantry weapons are incapable of dealing damage to them. That said, even basic infantry squads can purchase a specialist weapon like a missile launcher or meltagun, so such big, nasty, expensive units ignore infantry at their peril. Furthermore, certain units fire special poisoned rounds that are effective against any creature regardless of Toughness, while sniper rifles have a similar rule representing how their wielders are able to target weak points.
Video Games
- Asura's Wrath:
- Subverted when the first boss, Wyzen, grows to the size of a planet, then tries to poke the man-sized Asura to death. Asura blows him up, and he is posthumously mocked by his allies for thinking it would work.
- Played with during the final battle with Gohma Vlitra in its planet-sized Orochi form. At first, Asura and Yasha are unable to do lasting damage to Vlitra...until Mithra gives them both a recharge and 11th-Hour Superpower to even the odds. Even then, they recognize attacking the planet-sized monstrosity means nothing if they don't kill the beast's core at the center of the planet.
- Played with during the Final Battle between Asura and Chakravartin, as the former grows bigger than the planet himself, but this just means he actually has a chance of countering the planets and stars Chakravartin starts chucking at him and he can die from them. Chakravartin, meanwhile, is so huge (as in, he's attracting galaxies towards him), that Asura can't actually destroy this form and he needs to get inside it to confront Chakravartin directly (now both of them at a much more reasonable human sizes).
- In the commercials for Clash of Clans, the Giants are portrayed as colossal guys who laugh as cannonballs, arrows, and mortar shells bounce off of their skin. In the game, they are only about three times bigger than a Barbarian and are just very tough, not invincible.
- Dawn of War: The second level of every campaign in "Retribution" has you fleeing a traitor Baneblade tank that you can't even deal Scratch Damage to. Killing it involves baiting it near its own side's defenses, then shooting the targeting cogitators so they think the Baneblade is an enemy, turning it into a Cutscene Boss.
- While the two ordinary dragons menacing Boletaria Castle in Demon's Souls are subject to the "if it bleeds, we can kill it" principle, the Dragon God is invulnerable to conventional weaponry until you weaken it with two point-blank shots from conveniently-placed magic ballistae. At which point you can wail on its nose horn and take out what remains of its health bar.
- Played almost entirely straight in the opening sequence of Dino Crisis 2, where David scores a direct headshot on a rampaging T-Rex with an RPG, which was developed to destroy enemy vehicles, tanks and fortified emplacements (all things presumably sturdier than a dinosaur skull). This does result in the Rex losing an eye, but it quickly recovers and keeps chasing the heroes like nothing happened. Later averted when Dylan dispatches the even bigger Giganotosaurus (which itself dispatched the aforementioned Rex) by activating a Kill Sat, but then, the satellite's beam is powerful enough to not only vaporize the Giganotosaurus, but also burn a massively deep crater into the ground underneath it. As you can infer from the above, none of the weapons he or Regina carry have any appreciable effect on either of these dinos (though Regina does temporarily stun the latter at one point by luring its face into jets of intense flame).
- Massive units in the Dominions games generally can take and dish out a lot of damage, but their large size can work against them. Since they're so large, they can be surrounded by many smaller units and whittled down. Being mobbed like these increases the harassment penalty, which lowers defense and makes them easier to hit. Their size also makes it easier for projectiles to hit.
- Early versions of Dwarf Fortress gave bigger creatures direct boosts to various combat stats, making elephants among the most ridiculously-overpowered threats in the game — even more dangerous than carp for fishermen, though not as ubiquitous. Their reign of terror is best exemplified in Boatmurdered.
- More-recent versions of the game handle size more realistically; creatures who rely on muscle for their strength and fat for their defense still benefit from bigness, but it's nowhere near as absurd as it used to be. However, there are now giant elephants; four times bigger than the titans themselves, they nearly match their predecessors.
- Giant sponges were the aquatic elephants for a good long while; they were just big enough that their softness didn't matter against puny dwarves, and they were effectively immortal due to having no blood or internal organs. Such was their terror that the developer had to add "pulping", just to give players a chance at victory after antagonizing these beasts.
- Subverted with certain kinds of titans, forgotten beasts, demons, and angels; some of them are made of materials that struggle to hold together, resulting in even a baby's punch killing them.
- In the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi series, giant characters will not flinch at most smaller characters' punches and almost all rush moves will ricochet off them before they can do anything. This means characters like Hercule and Videl are almost completely helpless against them. Also somewhat averted in that while they don't flinch to attacks, they can still ultimately be defeated by the smaller fighters, including the aforementioned Hercule and Videl.
- The Earth Defense Force 2017 series gleefully averts and inverts this. You play as a wimpy-looking guy in a baggy jumpsuit who is tasked with killing swarms of giant bugs, towering mechs, kaiju, flying saucers, and walking fortresses, on foot, with conventional weaponry like assault rifles and shotguns... and it works!
- In GigaBash, when a character activates his/her "S-Class" Super Mode, they don't take damage from normal-sized characters. Instead, getting hit charges the opponent's meter faster, giving them an opportunity to activate their own "S-Class" mode and make it a fair fight.
- Henry Stickmin Series: In Stealing the Diamond, growing to huge proportions using a Growth Mushroom from Super Mario also renders Henry bulletproof. Downplayed since a cannonball does manage to take him down.
- The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction has harmless infantry enemies. They're members of the US army, but they'll try to avoid the Hulk... for the most part. If he gets close enough, they'll try rifle-butting him, which works about as well as you'd expect.
- Jurassic Park (Arcade) (2015): Some of the largest dinosaurs — Spinosaurus, Triceratops, T. Rex and the sauropods — are immune to your guns, only slightly slowed by hitting their weak points, and only defeated by getting them to follow you into a two-door cage, then quickly leaving while the doors are shut behind you.
- Jurassic World: Evolution 2: Averted, as all of the sauropods can be hunted and killed by (depending on their size) the medium and large theropods and the pack-hunting small theropods (Velociraptor, Pyroraptor, Atrociraptor, Dilophosaurus, and Proceratosaurus). Since the game launched there have been several nerfs to pack-hunting and buffs for the sauropods, including pack hunters doing less damage overall, the number of individuals needed to start and maintain a hunt being increased, increased damage to the pack hunters when the sauropods stomps them off, and the Defensive gene granting sauropods greatly increased defense against pack hunters and preventing them from incurring bleeding damage from larger theropods until their health becomes low. The sauropods still cannot directly defend themselves, though.
- The MechWarrior series and its spinoff MechAssault actually zigzag this trope quite a bit. Five Rounds Rapid can't do much to even a scout Mech barring extremely extended attrition (the harmless infantry enemies are excused in that they're members of a fanatical cult who aren't afraid to die), but a single properly placed satchel charge can bring even a hulking Assault-class machine down, and clan Elementals (or IS Battle Armor) can take down several Mechs alone if the wearer is skillful. The effective variant tends to rely more on damaging a vulnerable spot via Humongous Mecha Knee-capping. Most of the games where non-Powered Armor-wearing troops fire infantry-scale weapons at 'Mechs don't include this tactic, and examples such as MechWarrior 3 messily demonstrate why an average human shouldn't be anywhere remotely near a 'Mech.
- The Monster Hunter series averts this trope in its later monster hunts.
- New Super Mario Bros. introduces the Mega Mushroom, which transforms Mario (an unarmored guy who can die very quickly) into an invincible, screen-filling giant who plows through anything in his path. Some bosses can at least manage to bounce Mario off of them if he walks into them, but if he stomps on them, it's a One-Hit Kill.
- Professor Layton and the Unwound Future: The giant machine Clive had made to destroy London is treated like this trope, but it ends up defeated pretty easily with some puzzles and a cutscene. (That's not a spoiler to anyone who knows what game this is.)
- Averted in the Rampage (Midway Games) series: the player-controlled monsters are vulnerable to not only missiles but small arms fire. Of course, it can take a lot to kill them, depending on the player.
- Technically averted, but played straight in any practical sense in the "Hoth" level of Shadows of the Empire. While you certainly can take a full AT-AT down with your blasters, it will take a really, really long time. Using your harpoon and tow cable to go for the legs is not only much faster and easier, but infinitely cooler.
- StarCraft:
- Averted for the most part in the series: no matter how big an enemy is, it can still suffer Death of a Thousand Cuts, and with units specializing in dealing damage to some unit categories (mostly Armored), not even that many. Units that are actually invincible are usually due to gameplay reasons:
- The Purifier mothership in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is invulnerable, but only because it's being powered by buildings around the map that must be destroyed to weaken the shields.
- The ginormous Gorgon battlecruisers in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm are so huge that they're entirely invincible (your units can't even attack them), and must instead be brought down by activating dormant Scourge nests (the Scourge are flying Action Bombs) — even then, the nests are expended after one shot.
- Inverted in the sequel with the Protoss Colossi, which are so big that they're valid targets for dedicated Anti-Air weaponry.
- Super Paper Mario has the Mega Star, which similarly makes the user giant and invincible, but also turns them into an 8-bit sprite. The power-up is amusingly turned against you by a savvy Koopa Troopa in a secret room in world 3-1. However, it ends up being a subversion as despite its ridiculous size, the Koopa is just as frail as ever and can be eliminated with a single hit of almost any manner of attack.
- Averted by giant Transformers Omega Supreme and Trypticon in Transformers: War for Cybertron, who despite their massive size advantages can be defeated by conventional Transformers. Played straight in the sequel with Metroplex, who is only once slowed by enemy assault (knocked out after taking a direct hit from a building-sized artillery piece — he's no worse for wear afterwards).
- Generally averted in World of Warcraft. Giants are met pretty often and while they usually can easily stomp a lone adventurer of an appropriate level, the tactics for taking them down is to bring friends and kick its ass as a team (of varying sizes). Your human-sized (or dwarf-sized, or even gnome- or goblin-sized) 'tank' will weather the giant's stomping as well as he does normal-scale enemies'. Only few quests are centered on driving or riding another giant and wrestling the monster giants on their own scale — and in these cases the trope often plays in your favour in regard to normal scaled monsters.
Webcomics
- Averted in Tuesday Titans. The Titans are unquestionably impressive creatures and just as hardy and powerful as their stature would imply, but the sheer, unyielding force they face oftentimes dwarfs them.
Western Animation
- Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1990)
- In the cartoon episode "Camp Casserole...So Vine", Dr. Gangrene wants to wake his long-slumbering giant tomato monster Larry because he believes that Larry's sheer size will make him an unstoppable threat. Since Larry is over two miles in diameter, he has a point.
- In the second season of Attack, Zoltan and his goons all become notably larger as part of their collective One-Winged Angel makeover, and this goes hand-in-hand with their becoming far greater threats.
- An episode of Dexter's Laboratory plays with this one: they accidentally awaken a giant Kaiju monster (it specifically happens in Japan, so it's a clear parody). The monster stomps all over a variety of superheroes and small superweapons, and isn't defeated until they assemble a giant Voltron-esque robot (though it's supposed to be An Aesop about family togetherness more than giant robots).
- Godzilla: The Series, like its source material, averts this. The very first scene is Godzilla being killed by the same jets as the original film. Like his dad, the new Godzilla (and the Monster of the Week) can shrug off smaller human weapons, but is constantly endangered by even mid-sized bombs and missiles; at one point, he's knocked out by shoulder-launched rockets (which wouldn't have budged his dad), and at another, a crate full of explosives is stated to be able to turn him into giblets. F-18s with air-to-ground missiles are basically treated as the boogeyman for the early series, and it's stated that they'd be able to kill the new Godzilla the same way as the old. More than once, the protagonists have to save him from his impending doom-by-plane, with these scenes even giving the F-18s ominous music you'd expect from a slasher villain.
- My Life as a Teenage Robot has Armagedroid, an older Humongous Mecha designed by Dr. Wakeman, which fits this trope to a T. There are a couple of other giant-sized threats throughout the show, but Jenny is able to beat them with some sort of force.
- In the ReBoot episode "Nullzilla", which plays off kaiju and mecha movies, the monster has to be stopped by creating a Combining Mecha.
- The Simpsons: In "Treehouse of Horror VI", giant advertising mascots go on a rampage. Predictably, conventional weapons are useless, but it turns out that our attention makes them real and they'll keel over if we just don't look.
Real Life
- As previously mentioned, the Square-Cube Law means that any real giant creature would need to be extremely strong and durable to hold its body up. If such a monster was weak enough to be hurt by conventional weapons, it would be squashed by its own mass before we'd need to fire a shot. If you ever do meet a kaiju IRL and it hasn't collapsed into jelly, you can safely assume this trope is in effect.
- Considering a simple hunting rifle can bring down an elephant, this is definitely not Truth in Television, even in the rare cases there are big things to shoot at.
- With a much more relative definition of "giant", this applies to all macroscopic life. Nearly anything can be taken down by an infection by much smaller organisms (such as bacteria or viruses). That said, this is mostly due to their ability to reproduce to absolutely huge numbers in a very short time, and even then most infections can be dealt with by the immune system alone in a healthy adult.
- They are resistant to many small arms fire, that is what elephant guns are for.
- Elephant guns aren't strictly necessary for elephant hunting. In the olden days of unregulated slaughter for ivory many an elephant was killed with the lowly 7x57mm hunting cartridge, today now mostly used (at least in the United States) to bring down the relatively tiny whitetail deer. The main advantage of said "elephant guns" was that they could bring down very large game more quickly and more reliably. You could kill an elephant with a 9mm pistol if you had to, but it'd take a while (not as in shooting it until it dies video game style, but rather in waiting for it to bleed out, or with less severe injuries, wait for an infection to develop, since a small cartridge would have a hard time piercing the skull or penetrating to an internal organ). A more powerful firearm has the advantage of being able to bring forth a quicker death from farther away (which helps considering that said elephant may be trying to kill you), but once it dies, dead is dead one way or another.
- Whales can be killed with a simple harpoon, but it is not as easy as it seems as they need to nail it at the right spot to make it effective. Then came grenade harpoons.
- The old harpoons of both early whaling ships and pre-Industrial hunters such as the Inuit did not deal the whale a mortal wound. What worked was the droge, aka drug or drugg, a giant, very buoyant device attached to the harpoon. When the whale dove, it would fight any droges attached to it until it tired, was dragged to the surface, and they're finished.
- Whales are a straight example of this trope. Harpoons were not typically used to kill at all, they were used to anchor the boat to the whale so the whale couldn't escape; the kill usually came from repeated stabs with a whaling spear, and could take an hour or several hours even after stabbing the whale for it to die, as the massive reservoir of blood causes the whale to take some time to expire.
- Real Life massive vehicles of both civilian and military types are largely immune to or not significantly compromised by most small-arms fire, which is the reason that specialized anti-vehicle and anti-material weapons (which often have firepower on the same scale as the vehicles themselves) exist. Giant aircraft are slightly more susceptible due to the mechanical balancing act that keeps them aloft but a platoon of infantry would still need a lot of lucky assault rifle shots to down a heavy bomber if it somehow came within range. Even with weapons designed to take out such vehicles, size benefits durability. Weapons that would reduce a tank to burned-out scrap metal will mostly just poke a hole in most warships, and even among warships aircraft carriers are both the largest and most durable. Soviet anti-carrier missiles were universally colossal weapons, not only to achieve the range and speed asked of them, but because they needed to carry very large warheads to put carriers out of action.
- The biggest of dinosaurs are thought to have adhered to this trope at least somewhat. At their adult size, animals like Argentinosaurus would likely have had little to fear from predators, and the few predators that could fight them still had to be careful and couldn't guarantee that their attacks would be effective. In essentially a Real Life lampshading of this trope, one sauropod closely related to Argentinosaurus was named Dreadnoughtus, which translates to "Fears Nothing".
- The largest examples of extant life have little in the way of natural predators besides technology-equipped humans or fights within their own species. Adult whales will sometimes be attacked by orcas, but deaths are very rare. Elephants, rhinos, and hippos are basically immune to the teeth and claws of every predator in Africa. Adult polar bears are pretty much unchallenged on land in the Arctic.
- This trope being true is also generally why weight classes are strictly enforced in full-contact sports like (non scripted) wrestling, as well as MMA and boxing. Two grown adults who train professionally to fight to the same level will generally be evenly matched, unless one is also considerably taller and heavier than the other, as that height and weight advantage will generally also translate to a speed and strength advantage that can quickly result in deadly consequences. The critical feature here, however, is that a person must be strong for their height, it isn't simply raw mass that defines the difference. Japanese so called "Freak Show" matches regularly pitted 300+ pound men against men 70lbs or more lighter and found that men who were weighed down by their added mass would avert this trope. Where it was played straight however was with fighters like Bob Sapp, a 6'5" 300lb super heavyweight kickboxer who packed raw muscle mass onto his frame rather than body fat to ensure that he could remain fast and strong, and proceeded to prove how this trope is as much about having the strength to move at large size as it is the raw size. Over a 12 year period, Bob Sapp was responsible for 55% of the wins in these "Freak Show" matches by himself.
