• Beast Fables: A variant. Were-arthropods are capable of physical feats of speed and strength that can rival or even exceed those of the other clades. However, most have very poor stamina compared to the rest of the weres and can get tired quickly, forcing them to be careful and conserve their energy.

• Angel: In the show, the Senior Partners are built up to be this great unmatched evil that span multiple dimensions and can bring about the apocalypse. In the comic book spin-off Spike we see what the actual Senior Partners look like: 15 ft tall demons that can fire deadly lightning bolts. The problem? The Senior Partners are relatively fragile compared to other Buffyverse Big Bads. Spike fires at one with a pair of machine guns and it's left crying in the corner letting our heroes get away in defeat. It's revealed that the reason the Senior Partners conduct their evil scheming though law firms is that they lack the brute strength to take over worlds through sheer force.
• The DCU:
  • Batgirl: In The Attack of the Annihilator, the titular villain's energy blasts are powerful enough to bring buildings down, but physically he is still a regular human, for which a simple punch or kick can hurt him.
  • The Nail: Lex Luthor is able to use DNA samples taken from Kal-El's ship to create the Liberators, who are essentially Bizarros disguised as robots; although powerful enough to break Green Lantern's arm through his ring-shield, when deprived of the advantages of superior numbers or a surprise attack, they soon fall apart when subjected to any actual damage in a fight as their genetic structures were unstable.
  • Superman: The villain Superwoman can use powers of various alien races, including Kryptonians: super-strength, flight, eye-beams... nonetheless, in Who is Superwoman? she proves to be a total pushover when it comes to a physical brawl, being easily beaten by Supergirl when Kara gets serious (and angry).
  • Wonder Woman (1942): Two of the Heyday triplets display superhuman abilities, having Super-Speed and being able to jump further than a normal human, but they're both taken out much more easily than normal human Holliday Girls when the mob targets them.
  • Zatanna: Zatanna can do almost anything with her magic. Only the stronger magical, divine, or cosmic beings in the DC universe can resist her powers. However, she isn't any more durable than most humans and can be taken down with a single well-placed punch. Overlaps with Squishy Wizard. In Identity Crisis (2004) it is even explicitly mentioned in the narration-bubble: She is the most powerful member of the team, if she can get the words out. Slade Wilson (Deathstroke the Terminator) pokes her in the stomach, so lightly that it does not even hurt that much, but once she begins to vomit from the damage to her liver she is out of the fight.
• Empowered: Emp's hypermembrane suit provides her with amazing Super-Strength, flight, and energy beams... and has the durability of wet tissue paper. Good thing it can repair itself.
• Invincible: Angstrom Levy is a brilliant Mad Scientist who has a great deal of formidable technological weaponry, super strength and durability courtesy of cybernetic augments, and the extremely potent natural power of Thinking Up Portals, all of which makes him more than capable of being a threat to Invincible as his archenemy. Unfortunately for Angstrom, however, beneath all his defenses, his ability to give and take hits isn't anywhere near the level of Invincible's own, as the latter is a member of a species of Flying Bricks — with all the power that implies — while Levy is ultimately a man who's only "super strong" by the standards of normal humans. Resultantly, while Angstrom is more than capable of fighting Mark on roughly equal terms, this is largely dependent on his capacity to keep the guy at a distance and wear him down to a point where it's safe for Angstrom to even get near him. This comes back to haunt Angstrom when he gets sloppy in one of their early fights and tries to attack Invincible directly too soon; Mark is so used to fighting villains who are strong enough to take his hits that he instinctively assumes Angstrom is the same way and strikes back with his full potential, nearly killing Levy by accident.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Fantastic Four: The Human Torch's flame powers give him high movement speed and an offensive edge. Unlike his allies, though, he typically lacks any way to use his powers to defend himself other than flying out of the way. This example changes based on who's scripting the book — Johnny's also been shown to make himself bulletproof by melting the slugs before they hit; on other occasions, he's pulled the same thing on various flammable or meltable objects up to a bulldozer that was thrown at him by She-Hulk.
  • Magic users like Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, and Wiccan can do frightening things to time and space with little more than a gesture and some concentration, but they can also be rendered helpless by a Tap on the Head, drugs, being overwhelmed by bodies, being distracted in mid-spell, or simply being Bound and Gagged.
  • Runaways:
    • Nico Minoru has extremely powerful magic abilities, but is also a typical Squishy Wizard (and a skinny one at that; it was once implied that she had an eating disorder.) On the other hand, since her magic is fueled by her blood loss, the constant danger means that she never runs out of power for her spells.
    • Klara Plast has powerful plant-controlling powers, but she is also a 12-year-old girl with no enhanced physical attributes.
  • Spider-Man:
    • Doctor Octopus may have control of four powerful and deadly metal arms, but he's otherwise a normal, somewhat out-of-shape human. Once the super-strong Spidey gets past his formidable defenses, Doc Ock goes down pretty quickly. This ultimately led to his death as his body couldn't take the punishment various superhumans had dealt him any longer.
    • Mysterio is a master of illusion and setting up traps, but he is still just a normal human behind all the smoke and mirrors. The hard part of any fight is figuring out where he is, but once Spidey is able to get close, Mysterio usually only has one or two tricks left before Spider-Man takes him out swiftly.
  • X-Men:
    • Many telepaths, such as Professor X, have powerful Psychic Powers but are extremely poor at defending themselves, and aren't of much use against opponents immune to telepathy (like robots).
    • Cyclops' Eye Beams are devastatingly powerful, but if anyone actually hits him he's just as vulnerable as any non-powered human. Well, any non-powered human in peak physical condition with iron willpower and light body armor, but still — a lot of X-Men fight scenes start with Cyclops getting punched out or shot with regular bullets, because (from a writing perspective) otherwise he could settle the whole business with a look.
    • Storm may have god-level power, but up close, while she's hard to hit, she's just as easily hurt as anyone else. Same with most of the other X-Men whose specialty is offensive power.
    • Sunspot is an interesting case in that he has solar-powered Super-Strength but not the Nigh-Invulnerability that usually comes with it, such as with fellow bruisers Colossus and Rogue. So he has a super-powered punch and can lift tons with ease, but can go down pretty quickly in a fight if he's not careful.
    • Nate Grey is an example early on in his career. He's more powerful than Apocalypse (beating the AOA version nearly to death in one of his first serious fights), is ranked on a par with the Dark Phoenix for pure power, and equated with Franklin Richards, later squaring off with the likes of Thanos. However, he's still just human, physically speaking, which is unfortunate, since for much of his early series, he tends to lead with his fists and/or his chin, and his genetic degeneration means he has very little stamina. This leads the likes of Dark Beast, X-Cutioner, and other relatively low-level opponents who can get past the first shot posing a real threat to him early on. Unlike most, though, he trains up — more stamina is just the start (there is a reason that Dark Beast is terrified of him) and ends up becoming effectively indestructible as a being of psychic energy.
    • Prism, an on and off member of the villain Mister Sinister's Marauders, is literally made of glass. He can store light and energy (such as sunlight or Cyclops' optic blasts) and redirect it to devastating effect. But he is still made of freaking glass. Jean Grey killed him once by throwing him into a wall (not even that hard).
  • Omega the Unknown: Unlike his original incarnation, the 2007 Omega's only superpower lies in his ability to fire energy beams. Otherwise, he's just as vulnerable to regular injury and exhaustion as anyone else.
• Scott Pilgrim: Todd Ingram, Ramona's third ex, is even more powerful than Gideon due to his immense psychic powers, yet after being depowered by the Vegan Police he goes down to a single headbutt from Scott.
• Transformers: Wings of Honor has Lyzack, quick and deadly with a sword, but she was built as a support mech, and can't take much damage (a single punch sends her flying).
• Über: The Nazi "blitzmensch" superhumans have Eye Beams powerful enough to demolish towns and sink warships at ten-kilometer ranges, but their bodies are as fragile as a normal human's, allowing the stronger "panzermensch" to rip them apart at close range.

Crossovers

• Lightning Bolt is one of these in Ace Combat: The Equestrian War. She is the only pony of the main heroines to have a powerful special attack (Shining Spark), but she is prone to being injured during prolonged battles.
• In An Entry with a Bang!, the marauding pirates with their BattleTech... uh, tech... are somewhat confused by the fact that while Clancy-Earth has highly effective BVR capability, their warmachines can't take hits worth a damn.
• In Avenger Goddess, HYDRA's super-weapon, Mjölnir, is explicitly described as this; it might be a vast cannon capable of destroying an entire city with one tesseract-energy-powered shot, but it can be destroyed with little more than standard explosives in the right place.
• Child of the Storm:
  • Most mortal magical practitioners — and, indeed, powerful mutants — as being this: they can deal out a lot of damage, even reshape the world in the case of high end examples like Magneto. However, as is repeatedly emphasised, if someone gets in close and knows what they're doing (or if they're disarmed), then they are in serious trouble.
  • Harry is a particular example after his powers start to kick in around chapter 60 of the first book, making him Flying Firepower, even after he technically becomes Made of Iron, because he's operating on such a high level (as in, against Omega Class opponents) that it takes at least standard Asgardian level durability to compete defensively. It's indicated during a temporary Plot-Relevant Age-Up that he'll become more of a Flying Brick, with time.
• In Fractured, a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands crossover, some starships rely on their BFG destroying all opposition before it can shoot back, having only light armor. In the sequel, Origins, Jack and Brick start off this way with their teaching style, only to realize later on how problematic the technique could be.
• Both Yoruichi and Tatsuki in Game and Bleach hit hard but can't take as much damage, especially Yoruichi. While Tatsuki has far higher health and comparable physical stats (barring dexterity where Yoruichi has over three times as much) each blow Yoruichi lands takes out over a third of her health, despite Yoruichi holding back and deliberately aiming for Tatsuki's armor. On the other hand, a single blow by Tatsuki takes out all of Yoruichi's health and leaves her unconscious.
  • Ichigo's hollow form doesn't have the best defenses but it has a very powerful Cero. As a result, most of his fights start and end by him firing a Cero at his enemy.
• In The Games We Play, the White Tiger style offers massive boosts to offence and mobility, but no buffs to defence. It left practitioners capable of dealing lots of damage, but being no tougher than an ordinary human. This was only slightly mitigated by the later development of the White Tiger's Hide, and is exacerbated by the Cast from Hit Points nature of the style's two strongest skills. As a result, while a master of the style is a tiger, tiger burning bright, he will not last the night. Jaune gets around this problem by picking up other defensive skills.
• Gray Ghost in Manehattan's Lone Guardian is this, at least from the perspective of Leviathan herself as opposed to other ponies. The latter notes before their exhibition match that one good hit from her would be liable to seriously injure Gray, if not kill her. Gray's assorted abilities—including flight and limited intangibility—let her hit hard and fast while circumventing conventional defenses, but without Shining Armor's shield, she stands little chance in a fight against one of Neo Arcadia's Guardians.
• Harry and Luna in Metagaming? have diverse skills and are, respectively, an archmage and a high priestess whose abilities outstrip pretty much everyone who isn't a faction leader. However, they come from a world with so little magic that the two have functionally no magical resistance at all, so a Curse of Agony that would be rather painful for anyone else is more excruciating than the Cruciatus Curse to Harry. Furthermore, their artificial bodies were indestructible on Westeros but now are merely fairly durable, with Onyxia dealing significant damage to Luna's ribs and spine with a single blow.
• Kyril's four apprentices from The Night Unfurls deconstruct this trope in a nice way. On paper, Sanakan, Hugh, Lily and Soren are empowered Hunters with both strength and reflexes above the average sentient being. The four are more than capable of severing body parts, even killing most enemies in one hit thanks to their trick weaponry and firearms. However, they lack armour and shields, so they are in risk of incapacitation or even death should they take damage directly. In fact, the former case does happen to three out of the four apprentices once^note Hugh suffers a broken arm and a head injury after being caught in one sudden explosion; Sanakan gets knocked out after getting hit by one shockwave; Soren suffers a broken arm after fighting ten mooks. In practice, the inability to tank hits is compensated by the emphasis of mobility (dodging), with the occasional usage of stealth and support healing (aka. HP recovery). Adding to how the four are rigorously trained in the way of a typical Bloodborne player Hunter, the result is that these four Hunters turn out to be absolute powerhouses in battle, their defence be damned, simply because they are NOT going to get hit in the first place. In other words, The Night Unfurls takes apart the negative aspect of the Glass Cannon trope (the "poor defence" part), showing how this aspect, hence the trope, is not as bad as one would think.
• Midori is one in Seven Days Survivor, as per Word of God and comments from the other characters. Minato explicitly includes a dedicated healer (Either himself or Yukari) on the team when Midori is in play simply to keep her up.
• Kagome was already one in her home series, but in who are we to fight the alchemy?, this aspect of her is emphasized more via her interactions with jujutsu sorcerers and cursed spirits. Her spiritual powers are super effective against cursed spirits, can cut through the strongest of them like a hot knife through butter, and outright make her immune to most cursed techniques. However, her powers can't be used to enchance her body like cursed energy can, it's shown more than once that her eyes simply can't keep up with the speed of the higher intensity fights, and she can be potentially injured or overwhelmed by a physically stronger person/attack.
• Callista in The Zero Context Series has reality warping, speed, obscene cutting power and versatile weaponry that give her a tremendous leg up on her opposition, but anyone capable of matching her speed can easily demolish her in 2-4 hits.

Bleach

• Vow of the King: While using Eikō no Yari, Ichigo has enough offensive power to generate Razor Wind with every strike and slice up even captain level enemies from a distance. But he also sacrifices all of his defensive ability to do so. As his first time using it is against the far stronger and more experienced Unohana, she outright states using such a technique was a mistake.

Firefly

• Forward puts an emphasis on River being one of these; she's portrayed as fast and powerful, but one good hit puts her down, which happens several times in the story.

Harry Potter

• Jen in Princess of the Blacks has functionally infinite magical reserves due to being able to channel the Earth's magic, only limited by how much she can channel at once. However, not having a magical core of her own makes her far more vulnerable to others magic. A spell designed to have someone instantly awake and alert sends her into an adrenaline fueled panic.

Jackie Chan Adventures

• In Queen of All Oni, the old Oni rulers fit this. While the magic snake they conjured to attack Tarakudo was impressive, due to their advanced age and decaying power, he was easily able to stop it and kill them.

KPop Demon Hunters

• "Hindsight" notes that Mira is an example of this, as her long weapon is basically designed to stop her being in a position to take hits from opponents as she has poor defence compared to Rumi and Zoey even if her offensive is excellent.

Marvel Cinematic Universe

• Steve Rogers' eventual fate in The Hell that was Given after being shot with tranq darts filled with an antidote for the Hydra Super Serum. While Steve keeps his strength and speed, he loses the fortitude he gained and goes back to being an asthmatic with a weak heart, so using his abilities causes a near fatal asthmatic episode.
• In Monsters and Men, Doctor Strange muses at one point that this is the main weakness of the Scarlet Witch, as she has considerable power but her body is still basically human. This is also Strange's greatest "challenge" when he faces the Witch after she’s been essentially possessed by Tony’s A.I. FRIDAY, as he doesn't want to kill the innocent Wanda Maximoff even if he wants to stop FRIDAY doing further damage.

Mass Effect

• Mesozoic Effect introduces a whole class of ships that follow this rule, known as battlecruisers. Like their historical counterparts, they mount the firepower of a dreadnought on the frame of a cruiser, but stuffing in such a huge spinal gun leaves almost no room for armor. Mass production of these ships is apparently one of the things the Treaty of Farixen was designed to prevent. The Pangea Alliance's frigates also fall into this category, as they forgo armor for superior engines and racks upon racks of fusion missiles.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

• The Flash Sentry Chronicles: Toxic the bay pony is a very dangerous enemy due to being a Poisonous Person and able to damage anyone he touches with poison. But, when Flash fights through the pain of his poison long enough to hold him in place he is taken down with just one hit via a point-blank blast from Flash's gear.

Naruto

• Glass Marionette is practically named for this; Kankuro crafts multiple puppets out of stained glass, including one meant for battle, Ajisai. Ajisai is built around the concept of breaking apart and weaponizing the resulting shards, and while her body is built with the idea of easy reconstruction in mind, Kankuro fully recgonizes that she's likely to be completely destroyed/require heavy replacement.

Pokémon

• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines: A key issue with Ash's battle style; Pokémon such as Squirtle can hit hard, but their unevolved state limits the amount of punishment they can take in return.
• Pokemon: Shadow of Time;
  • As in Reset Bloodlines, most of Ash's Pokemon are examples of this, relying on raw power and speed to avoid taking hits that they wouldn't be able to cope with. A particular example is Krabby; although relatively experienced, it lost a battle to Spheal in the Cerulean Gym for the simple reason that it wasn't heavy enough to take a hit from its bulkier opponent.
  • This also appears to be a good description of Hunter J's ship, with J explicitly musing that the Defiance-class ships such as hers "were meant to hit hard and get the Hell out, not hang in a firefight for the long haul".
• Pokémon Untamed: Charcopal and Geocoprion's health and physical stats are middling at best, since large parts of their bodies are made from fragile opal, but their special attack is very strong.

Real-Person Fic

• Ringo in The Keys Stand Alone, in spades. While the others all got physical magic, his is entirely mental, and he has no defenses whatsoever, unless you count the knife-turning shirt he heisted off a wizard, or his “escape clause” teleport that only kicks in when he's badly startled. However, given that he can reach at least a hundred miles with his telekinesis, distance makes a not-bad defense. It also makes him scary as shit, as Ikaly notes (and John finds out later). Isn’t it a good thing he's an Actual Pacifist?

Star Wars

• Sublight Drive: Admiral Trench is canny enough to know that a superweapon should be kept secret as long as possible, and only pulled out when its presence can make an overwhelming difference.
  Superweapons, for all their devastating potential, carried inherent vulnerabilities. Their scarcity and symbolic value meant they were magnets for enemy attention.

Teen Titans

• Devastator in The Measure of a Titan is practically the paragon of this. His powers are theoretically capable of splitting a planet in half, and he can use them to fight multiple high-level metahumans at once, but he is as fragile as any normal human, and heals as slowly also.

Transformers

• The comic Chronicles treats Action Masters as this, particularly the main one Banzai-Tron. The process of becoming one shuts down their transformation ability, but it also vastly increases their strength, speed, and agility by infusing them with far greater vitality — and as Banzai-Tron was already a master of martial arts, he's able to take down a half-dozen Autobots by himself in seconds, including killing the famously doughty Ironhide. However, that increased vitality also means they feel double the level of pain, meaning that Prime is able to stun him simply by using the tires in his chest to give him a severe case of road rash, before ripping off his arm.

• Kung Fu Panda has Master Shifu, a Red Panda. He's incredibly fast and strong, able to run rings around and throw the far larger and heavier Po, a giant panda, but has a lack of stamina and reach against larger opponents. It often takes one blow from a sufficiently strong opponent to take him out, though getting that hit before being defeated is hard due to his aforementioned speed and own surprising strength.
• In Moana, demi-god Maui becomes this by the time of the final battle with Te Kā, as his hook- the source of his power- was damaged in their previous battle, so that all it would take is one good hit to destroy it for good. Fortunately, Maui is fast and strong enough that he manages to hold Te Kā back for some time even with that particular weakness to take into account.
• My Little Pony: The Movie (2017): The Storm King steals the magic of all four princesses, but is so unskilled with it that it offers him zero defensive options. Once the heroes get past the tornado he creates, they knock him down easily. He also has an Obsidian Orb which ends up backfiring on him.

• In Back to the Future 1, George is a lanky kid who gets manhandled pretty easily by the much taller and burlier Biff, but when he finally gets serious he one-shots Biff with a single punch.
• Battleship (2012) correctly shows that modern-day missile destroyers are this. They carry lots of missiles and the Aegis system allows them to Macross Missile Massacre an enemy, but they lack any real armor to protect them from return fire. The CIWS guns do an admirable job trying to protect the ships from the alien attack, but the enemy employs the More Dakka tactic to overwhelm the defenses. Their aforementioned Aegis systems also failed to work given that the attackers were often too close and failed to properly show up on radar.
• Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance: Roarke compares himself to a flamethrower made of paper while explaining to Danny about his powers; he is unable to use his full power while in the human world because of his fragile human body. Thus, he needs to possess Danny, the boy being his son and all.
• Godzilla vs. Megaguirus: Megaguirus is so fast she can Flash Step circles around Godzilla, and is strong enough to knock Godzilla down and even lift him into the air and throw him. Her main strategy involves confusing him with her high speed and painful wing frequencies, giving her the opening to fly past and strike Godzilla repeatedly and pick him up. Once Godzilla manages to catch Megaguirus's stinger in his mouth and bite it off, she's completely defenseless, and goes down to a single shot of his Atomic Breath.
• The Hunger Games: Katniss is a quickdraw with a bow and takes out several competitors in seconds. Compared to the opposition, she is untrained in how to fight up close, and is slowed down significantly by relatively minor injuries.
• Mad Max 1: A psychological application of the trope in the form of the Nightrider. While most of the pursuit has him in total control of both the situation and his faculties, taunting the MFP relentlessly over the radio, one near-miss with Max reduces him to a blubbering, insecure, terrified wreck.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Scarlet Witch has immensely powerful telekinesis, but she has to concentrate on whatever she wants to affect and seems to take a short time to ramp up to full strength. This makes her nearly unbeatable if she can focus on a single opponent (notably in Avengers: Endgame where she completely overpowers Thanos one-on-one), but much more vulnerable against unexpected attacks and any hit that does get through disrupts her current focus (such as in Captain America: Civil War where during a mission she accidentally destroys an office building). By Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda grow up out of this as she can now No-Sell attacks that rendered unconcious before, best demonstrated when she soloed the Mystics of Kamar-Taj and the Ultron Sentries.
  • Spider-Man: Far From Home: Mysterio has full control of his Attack Drones disguised as Elementals, whose holographic projections are capable of warping their senses as well as pelting them to death with bullets, which makes him incredibly deadly when out of reach. However, Beck himself has the resilience of an ordinary human to the point that, when Peter manages to close the distance and find him, he goes down rather easily without putting up much of a fight.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: The High Evolutionary's gravity powers are undoubtedly deadly — they can annihilate an entire roomful of enemies in a Sphere of Destruction at maximum output — but they (and his combat skills in general) are so crude and simple that they offer him zero defensive options. Once you get past that, he's a lightly-armoured Human Alien with perfectly ordinary durability and pain tolerance — which is even more of a problem than it sounds, since being a Gravity Master apparently requires some level of concentration on his part. Any reasonably serious injury will distract him so much that he essentially loses any meaningful ability to fight back against whoever injured him, leaving him entirely dependent on his first-strike capabilities. There's a reason his "fight" against the Guardians can be summarised as "Rocket shoots him, and then a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown ensues".
• The Mighty Ducks: The titular team provides an athletic example. They use lots of Confusion Fu on offense, but their defense is rather lacking. This is pointed out in the third movie by Coach Orion, who teaches them how to play "two-way" hockey.
  Orion: I've seen your tapes. I know you can score goals; I just don't know if you can stop them.
• In The Mummy Trilogy, while Imhotep and the Dragon Emperor are basically invincible at their peak unless specific means are used against them, the other mummies they summon as their agents are typically more fragile. While their servants can deliver damage in a fight well enough, they tend to fall apart if they're hit with a sufficiently powerful blow; most of the time the challenge is in their speed and weight of numbers making it difficult to hit them hard enough to stop them for good.
• Pacific Rim: The Japanese Jaeger, Coyote Tango, has huge retractable cannons mounted on its shoulders, but is apparently the most lightly armored of the Jaegers.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: The flashback to the DL-6 incident shows that young Edgeworth was able to bite Yanni Yogi hard enough to distract the bailiff from hitting his father, and later threw a gun at him hard enough to knock the guy out. When Yogi shoves him hard enough to be knocked against a wall though, Edgeworth collapses almost immediately. Given that he's a kid, it's pretty justified.
• Real Steel: Metro beats down Atom badly but gets taken out by one hit.
• Rocky:
  • Apollo Creed is strong, fast, and has decent stamina but can't take lots of punishment. It should be noted that this is a downplayed version to the usual; Apollo doesn't really have a glass jaw, but his ability to take damage is merely average compared to Rocky’s more impressive ability to absorb his opponents’ blows and keep standing even against overwhelming odds. Apollo was strong enough to deal with most opponents in the ring before this became an issue, but Rocky and Drago were durable enough to hold out against Apollo’s earlier blows and do more serious damage later when he was less prepared to fight back.
  • In Rocky III, Rocky’s opponent Clubber Lang is ultimately a variation of this, with his weakness being stamina rather than defence. While Lang is a powerful fighter who hits hard and generally demolishes his opponents quickly, his reliance on this strategy means that he puts too much power into his initial assaults. He defeats Rocky in their first bout because Rocky was out of practice and emotionally shaken by his manager’s recent fatal heart attack, but when they engage in a rematch Rocky has worked hard to get back in shape and manages to provoke Lang into a rage where he makes mistakes, resulting in Lang exhausting himself while Rocky utilises his greater endurance to strike back and win.
• Scream: Ghostface, unlike most iconic Slasher Movie killers, is not an Implacable Man who can No-Sell any attack the heroes can come up with. Under the mask in each film is an ordinary man or woman without any supernatural abilities, armed with only a knife, who the heroes can easily push around if they get the chance. However, unlike the lumbering Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, Ghostface is fast and regularly runs after his or her targets, and one stab from that very large knife is usually enough to debilitate a victim and allow Ghostface to go for the kill.
• Snack Shack: AJ is bullied by the Carmichael brothers, two hulking seniors on the wrestling team. AJ's buddy Shane, an older Army veteran, recalls the Carmichaels always crumbling when he wrestled them in school.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Sonic is insanely fast but his small size means he has trouble dealing harm to even regular humans by conventional means (his rapid-fire punches do nothing to a big guy in a Bar Brawl) and it doesn't take much to knock him down. It isn't until he develops his spinball move coupled with lightning powers that he learns to fight bigger opponents.
• Star Wars:
  • TIE Interceptors' armament — twice or even occasionally thrice that of the more widespread TIE Fighters — means that they actually represent a threat... for a short while. Their shielding is no better than that of the Fighters (that is to say, they have none whatsoever), so they break apart as soon as someone shines a laser pointer at them. Though if one actually watches the films, Rebel fighters actually die just as easily when not flown by main characters. So one wonders what those shields are for.
  • The MG-100 Star Fortress SF-17 bomber in The Last Jedi is an exaggerated and infamous example of this trope in the Star Wars saga. It's a giant target that is sluggish, poorly shielded, and possesses a brittle hull. But carries a massive payload of magnetic proton bombs that can destroy a single dreadnought if it reaches the target. Unfortunately the bombs need to be in close proximity to the target, and the magnetic bombs can be a hazard to wingmen should a bomber be destroyed.
  • Force Users are essentially this in general, especially considering that they carry laser swords that can practically cut through anything, including themselves
    • This is especially demonstrated with Snoke in The Last Jedi, he can use the Force to punish Hux from across the Galaxy, create Force Bonds from afar and hand Rey her biggest defeat in her story, the last one of which without having to stand from his throne. But a slow-moving lightsaber can cut him in half like butter.
  • Rogue One: The AT-ACT has the same offensive power as the Mighty Glacier AT-AT, but much weaker armor.
  • The Rise of Skywalker: The Xyston-Class Star Destroyer can blow up planets, but has no shields while in the turbulent atmosphere of Exegol, and can be blown up with one or two shots to its main cannon.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze strongly implies that Shredder has become this after his defeat in the previous film. Where Shredder was able to hold his own against all four Turtles in the final battle, after being thrown into a garbage truck by Splinter and subsequently crushed by Casey Jones, once he returns to the Foot Clan he is never actually shown fighting anyone. This strongly suggests that Shredder is still weakened by his injuries and is essentially relying on his street cred to maintain authority over the rest of the Foot, justifying his use of the ooze to create fighters capable of facing the turtles and ultimately leads to his death when he tries to mutate himself directly.
• The World's End: The Blanks have inhuman strength and agility, but you could burst their heads open with a well-thrown punch. This probably explains why our heroes, a bunch of a middle-aged, out-of-shape men, are able to deal with crowds of them.
• X-Men Film Series: The ultimate example is Professor Charles Xavier, whose considerable telepathic powers are generally taken Up to Eleven by allowing him to take control of minds halfway across the world, potentially commit genocide, and even transfer his consciousness to his comatose twin brother. He can't take any more punishment than any other human, though, and he's paralyzed from the waist down and restricted to a wheelchair.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse:
    • Professor X is the second-most powerful mutant (third after Jean Grey accesses her Phoenix Force), and the story even makes a point about how a "god" is incomplete without his psychic ability ("To be everywhere, to be everyone"). But because his telepathy is ineffective against Apocalypse's Psychic Block Defense, Charles is totally defenseless; he's no more physically resilient than any other human, and as a paraplegic, he can't even try to run away from his captor.
    • Quicksilver's Super-Speed, which normally gives him a huge advantage over his foes in combat (Apocalypse is flying through the air when Peter is punching him),^note in physics, Mass x Acceleration = Force, so Quicksilver's ability generates Super-Strength in a fight situation is nullified after Apocalypse traps his foot into the ground and breaks his leg. In the vicious hands of the god-like mutant, Maximoff is as fragile as a toy.

• The third GrailQuest book, Gateway of Doom, contains an interestingly extreme example with the Bota-Botas. Their only form of attack is their war-cry, and rather than fight back at you they will concentrate on absorbing enough energy from the earth to be able to make the war-cry. The moment one of them manages to do so, you will die. There are six of them in total, and each one has so few LIFE POINTS that one hit is enough to kill them... but you can only hit one of them per round, and they take six rounds of combat to absorb enough energy, so there is no room for manoeuvre at all. If even one of your attacks misses, you're dead.

• 1632: Invoked. When the USE attacks Denmark with ironclad warships more advanced than anything else at the time, Prince Ulrik counters by building a fleet of longboats armed with spar torpedoes. Being little more than large rowboats, they're easily gunned down by the USE navy, but they can be built sufficient numbers to swarm the larger battleships, and, if they get close enough, it only takes one good torpedo hit to disable an ironclad.
• Bolo: Some Enemy units are just counter-grav platforms mounting Hellbores. They can be easily swatted by said supertanks, but can be a problem if allowed to attack. They aren't One-Hit Kill-capable, but the numbers are always on their side.
• The Dresden Files: Harry mentions that wizards are like this; for all of the magical firepower they can throw around, they are still mortal humans and still need all of their squishy internals to work. They can mitigate this somewhat with defensive enchantments like projected shields and bulletproof clothing, but these are still subject to limits. Harry also frequently notes that most supernatural creatures are Made of Iron compared to humans.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl: Princess Donut has attack spells and a higher strength score than Carl, who serves as her Tank, but she's stuck at 2 Constitution, so she can't risk taking any damage.
• Fallocaust: Jade is one of, if not the, most powerful character in a series full of them. However, he lacks the pure muscle of some of his brothers, and several characters manage to incapacitate him by virtue of getting a lucky hit in.
• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: Ranger Grainger claims that dragons were specifically designed by the gods to be used as fodder for quests, hence why it's so easy for them to die in an improbable number of ways (striking at a specific spot next to their heart, tripping over something, spontaneously exploding from anger, etc). Combined with their low birth-rates, dragons are considered a protected species in the United States due to their declining population and there are dragon preserves that have a no weapons policy because of it.
  Ranger Grainger: ...if you put a wandering idiot up against a dragon in a fair fight, well, the dragon will win most of the time. But all it takes is that one time, that on stumble, that one desperate stab with an enchanted dagger, that impossible moment of triumph, and the dragon ends up dead.
• Heroes Of Olympus: Nico di Angelo is incredibly powerful due to his shadow travel ability and his domain over the dead. However, his time in Tartarus and, later, kidnapped by Otis and Ephialtes has put his body through intense starvation, exhaustion, and suffocation, and this among other factors makes him very physically weak and vulnerable, especially when he pushes past his limits, as he has a habit of doing.
• Honor Harrington: Various navies have classes of ships that can be described this way.
  • Downplayed with some obsolete classes of Solarian Navy ships, which put more focus on offensive weapons than counter missiles and point defense lasers.
  • Maya's Arsenal ships are capable of carrying thousands of long range missiles, but are just converted freighters and have no defense at all.
  • Most of the pirate ships that Honor and company encounter in the Silesian Confederacy qualify, as they are either converted freighters or small, obsolete warships with inadequate armament and grossly undertrained crews. Very few of them are capable of giving any real warship an even fight.
  • Special mention to HMS Wayfarer and her sisters, in Honor Among Enemies. These are "Q-ships": converted freighters, sluggish and virtually unarmored, but carrying super-dreadnought-class main guns capable of carving up a battlecruiser like a roast turkey, a complement of light-attack craft capable of laying down significant hurt in their own right, and, oh yeah, the first roll-out of the Manticoran Missile Massacre.
  • Honor's first cruiser, the HMS Fearless, was refitted with weapons that would allow it to kill far bigger ships. But the weapons' ridiculously short range and the lack of any decent defenses resulted in a single resounding success during the first fleet exercise, and getting 'destroyed' in every exercise thereafter once the opponents had realized the threat and decided to give some payback for the first success. Fortunately for them it worked again against an actual enemy who thought the defenses of the Fearless were spent and closed to point blank range to eliminate them.
  • The Manticoran LACs introduced in Echoes of Honor are armed with battlecruiser grade grasers, but they're not very survivable should an opponent decide to focus on them. In universe, LACs in general are described as "eggshells armed with hammers".
• The Hunger Games: Despite being quick-thinking, agile, and a good shot with a bow and arrow, years of being underfed really limits how much stress Katniss's body can take.
• Lensman plays with this one, but the vulnerable sluggers are always accompanied by copious numbers of their exact opposite — ships that are all shield and nothing else (sometimes not even a human crew). There are, however, usually large numbers of balanced ships in the same fleet.
• Mage Errant: In Talia's words, "armor's for people who don't have enough firepower". That being said, after she almost dies enough times, she and the rest of the gang end up developing their own unique battle armors. Godrick's armor is the most conventional, being made of stone, just like his father (though he upgrades by creating an "armor elemental" to serve as a sort of "living armor" to aid him in battle). Sabae's armor is classic wind-style Elemental Armor, coating her body in what is basically a skin-tight hurricane. Hugh's armor isn't so much armor as it is a swarm of levitating crystals under his direct control that allow him to set up instant Deployable Cover in any configuration he desires. And finally, Talia's tattoos interfere with most spells, including armor spells, so under the supervision of Hugh, Loarna, and most of the healing mages in Skyhold, Kanderon literally inscribes armor spellforms directly onto Talia's skeleton. Running mana through them literally gives her a full-body Deflector Shield.
• Mistborn: Coinshots are a kind of Misting who have only one power: the ability to telekinetically shoot metal away from their bodies. This makes them able to dish out a ton of damage, since a Coinshot with a pouch of money is basically a human machine gun, but they have no greater ability to resist damage than anyone else. Have a half-dozen Coinshots protected by about the same number of Thugs (Mistings who can increase their strength, speed, and durability to superhuman levels) though, and you've got yourself a small but very effective army.
• Night Prince: A human ordinarily couldn't hope to defeat even the youngest vampire, yet, with her electric whip, Leila once killed a group of five. Before that, she took out a group of three. This is purely an offensive power, however; she's as fragile as any other human.
• An Outcast in Another World: Malika is an exceptionally strong spellcaster for her age, but she hasn’t bothered boosting her HP or Stamina very much.
• In The Phoenix and the Carpet, the titular carpet turns out to be a version of this. While it is a magic carpet, it was apparently never intended for regular use as an actual carpet, with the result that it rapidly becomes worn and full of holes as the children walk over it on a regular basis. The Phoenix notes that when it was originally used, people would take their shoes off before walking on the carpet to make wishes. This leads to the carpet becoming so worn that at one point Robert and Jane fall off when their portion of the carpet tears as they're sitting on it, culminating in their mother buying a replacement and planning to give the magic carpet away with the rubbish.
• RCN: Because the main anti-ship weapons in the setting are antimatter-propelled relativistic kinetic-kill missiles, any spaceship is essentially an eggshell wielding a sledgehammer: even a corvette like Daniel's Princess Cecile can inflict serious damage on a ship of the line under the right circumstances. The closest anyone can come to armor is to wrap the entire hull in sailcloth, which will protect from a single direct broadside of plasma cannon fire (normally used to deflect incoming missiles but also usable against ships at close range).
• The Reckoners Trilogy: Deathpoint can kill almost anyone just by merely pointing at them, but lacks a "prime invincibility", meaning that he can be killed just as easily as anybody else.
• Runeblade: Rootborer worms can strike faster than a whip crack, punching through armour and skin to inject an exceedingly nasty necrotic venom, and when not actively lunging, they have uncanny dodging abilities. However, they're soft enough and small enough to be taken out in a single swing if it's timed right.
• Second Apocalypse: Anasurimbor Inrilatas is half Dunyain by birth, inheriting his Lightning Bruiser father's strength, speed and intellect. However, when he attacks a fellow Dunyain descendant, Maithanet, he gets his face crushed in, causing Maithanet to sneer that he had "his mother's bones."
• Worm:
  • Besides enhanced timing and perception, Flechette/Foil has no defensive abilities. She has, however, demonstrated the ability to cancel the Siberian projection, which no other cape in history has managed to do. She was also able to kill a cloned Grey Boy which had only been done previously by one of the most powerful characters in the story. It's later revealed her power literally cannot be defended against, even by other superpowers.
  • Shatterbird's power is to control glass. She can cause serious citywide devastation by using her powers to shatter all the glass in her range, but her powers give her no defensive buffs aside from using glass as makeshift armor, unlike most of he other Slaughterhouse 9 members, who generally survive joining by having something up their sleeves to protect them when pissed-off heroes inevitably land hits.

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has most of the Inhumans, at least the ones relevant to the series. Most of them only gain one power, and while that power tends to be very useful, they generally lack anything else to protect them. In particular, the series' lead Daisy Johnson has a power that is comparable to The Incredible Hulk in terms of damage she can dish out, but excessive use of it can injure her and beyond that she's a rather short woman who, while exceptionally combat trained and more resilient than most, can still be overpowered and outmatched by stronger combatants or numbers. As a result of this, the Inhumans that avoid this status, such as Hive and Lash (who both have a very wide array of powers that include super-fast healing factors and/or invulnerability), are treated as pants-shittingly terrifying as a result, while Joey, whose power to control matter makes him both bullet proof (bullets just melt) and useful in combat situations, is a Story-Breaker Power who got Put on a Bus to avoid him being able to solve most problems.
• In Andromeda, the two Deep Stand-off Attack Ship classes: Righteous Fist of Heaven and Siege Perilous. Both are, essentially, artillery ships. They are armed significantly better than a Glorious Heritage-class cruiser like Andromeda Ascendant, but they lack any fighters and their defenses have been reduced to make room for more offensive missile tubes. They are to appear on the battlefield, launch a Macross Missile Massacre (60 missile tubes on the Fist and 180 on the Siege), and then disappear back into slipstream before the enemy has a chance to retaliate. There were hundreds of Righteous Fist of Heaven-class ships in the Commonwealth Space Navy, but they were in the process of replacing them with the newer Siege Perilous class when the Nietzscheans rebelled. Only three of the latter were completed (Balance of Judgment and Wrath of Achilles), and one was destroyed in drydock. 300 years later, the restored Commonwealth built an upgraded version and named it Resolution of Hector.
• Babylon 5 has the Centauri warships. Their firepower is high enough that they usually destroy their targets with one or two shots, and their rate of fire is high enough that a single Centauri battlecruiser overwhelmed the station's Interceptors faster than multiple EarthForce warships would be able to in other occasions, but once you manage to hit them they go down quickly.
• In Elementary, Sherlock Holmes has trained himself in stick-fighting and other forms of hand-to-hand combat, but early in Season Six he is diagnosed as suffering from post-concussion syndrome due to various blows he has sustained in previous fights, most notably a recent beating from former associate Shinwell Johnson. While he gets over the worst of the damage and is able to return to work, by the start of Season Seven Sherlock notes that it would be dangerous for him to take further blows, so while he can still defend himself in a fight he can’t let himself get into one unless he’s sure he can end such a struggle before his opponent can hit back.
• Game of Thrones: While riding her dragons, Daenerys is a person of mass destruction, capable of sinking an entire fleet of ships by herself and managing to deal a massive blow against a good third of the Lannister army during the Battle of the Goldroad. Having said that, outside of her immunity to fire, Daenerys is still as vulnerable as any normal human being to blades and arrows. When she lands with Drogon on the ground to remove a scorpion bolt from him, she is practically defenceless to Jaime's do-or-die charge and she likely would have been run through if Drogon hadn't interposed himself between them. In the end, after Daenerys undergoes a Face–Heel Turn and burns a surrendered King's Landing, Jon Snow fails to dissuade her from further destruction and, agonized, reluctantly kills her with a single stab from his dagger to stop her.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kuuga's Pegasus Form grants Kuuga enhanced senses at the cost of overloading his brain if he uses it too much. This form grants him the Pegasus Bowgun, which shoots out a powerful air of arrow, but needs to be reloaded. It has the weakest defense out of Kuuga's base five forms.
  • Kamen Rider Blade: Garren's base Ace Form is specific tailored for its gunslinger-oriented design and with Rouze Cards combos, Sakuya can attack much harder and defeat Undead with little difficulty from its strong attacks. However, its defense is the worst out of the four riders, and needs to constantly be on the offensive at close and long range. Tachibana's health in the beginning also attributes to his form's weak defense in the beginning.
  • Kiva's Bassaha Form can one shot opponents with its Bassaha Magum, has sharp vision for firing accuracy, is good for aquatic combat, and can create water on dry land. However, its physically weaker than Kiva's base, Dogga, and Garulu forms and Kiva has a tough time tanking attacks or tiring out while in Bassaha Form.
  • In Kamen Rider Gaim, Ryugen's main Budou Arms is stats wise nearly identical to Gaim's Orange Arms, but has little armor and defense. To compensate for its lack of close combat, Ryugen can overpower his opponents with its long range abilities and strong Dragon blasts.
  • Drive's Type Deadheat is much stonger than his three main basic forms in all categories but is risky to use from going berserk and damages Shinnosuke physical if he battles in it for too long due to exposure from the Dead Zone.
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Kamen Rider Snipe has more speed than Kamen Rider Brave and is stronger physically than Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, but has lower defenses than both due to the being the basis of the shooting game genre. He has more offensive potential due to his ranged weapons but also has moves that can hurt himself and cause collateral damage if he's not careful. Later in the show, Kamen Rider Genm becomes an extreme case: while his fighting style is as aggressive as it's ever been, his Extra Lives gimmick combined with Good Thing You Can Heal as a trope means he regularly drops dead from attacks that would just knock down most other Riders.
• David Haller from Legion (2017) is possibly the most powerful mutant ever, with immensely strong telekinesistic, telepathic, and Reality Warper abilities. However, he’s as vulnerable to physical damage as a regular human being is.
• In an episode of Lois & Clark, Lex Luthor creates a boxer that he believes can take on Superman. The boxer delivers a flurry of punches that stagger Superman. For a moment it looks like Superman is actually on the ropes, but then he simply flicks the boxer in the forehead and knocks him out.
• An almost literal version appears in MythBusters when the Build team tested whether an ice cannon could be a viable weapon. It isn't as good as a regular cannon and blows out if too much gunpowder is packed in or if it is use too much.
• The Outer Limits (1995) episode "The Camp" has super strong robots that are ludicrously fragile. An untrained woman can tear them to pieces.
• In robot combat events, such as Robot Wars and BattleBots, full-body spinners (robots with a chassis that rapidly spins and has blades, spikes, or hammers attached to it) tend to fall into this category: While they are able to deliver some of the strongest attacks ever seen in robot combat, any opponent who can slip through their offense or can withstand multiple blows without breaking can easily and quickly render them useless. In particular is Mauler 5150, which is infamous for getting tipped upside-down by pretty much anything that its spinning doesn't wreck first, such as with a light tap from Jabberwock.
  • Any robot with a flywheel too. They're very devastating weapons, but also very heavy too, usually taking up 20%-25% of the robot's weight allotment. Designers, forced to shed weight to ensure it's light enough to compete, often go for shedding armour first. Flywheels also tended to have enormous recoil when they struck something, causing damage to internal components. One of the best examples would be Robot Wars' Hypno-disc, which became the reason bots had to invest on heavier armor after utterly tearing apart another bot in its very first match, and would generally mangle its opponents spectacularly. But it had the problem the rest of its chassis was rather frail and easy to shove around, and a bot with enough armor could simply outlast it by tanking its strikes until it tore itself apart. Most of its losses were from having taken so much damage even after a Curb-Stomp Battle it had to battle with incomplete repairs.
  • Nightmare from BattleBots is one of the finest examples in robot combat. The details have changed over the years, but at its essence Nightmare's basically a monstrous vertical flywheel mounted on a spindly, easy-to-tip three-wheeled frame with exposed tires (although it did get wheel guards for the 2015 reboot). Whenever Nightmare fights, someone is leaving the Battlebox in pieces — usually depending on who gets the first hit.
  • Deep Six's 2019 version consists of an enormous vertical spinning bar that alone takes up over half of the robot's weight. The rest of the robot exists mainly to allow that bar to spin and move about. As a result, of its three matches fought that year, two of them ended in it eliminating itself from the fight by recoil — on its first hit.
• Star Trek:
  • The Romulan Bird-of-Prey from Star Trek: The Original Series is armed with a very powerful plasma torpedo that can one-shot a starship. However, it can't fire its weapons while its Invisibility Cloak is active, during which it can take damage from indirect-fire weapon detonations; when it's visible and can be directly targeted, a few hits will cripple it.
  • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Jem'Hadar Fighters are able to deal heavy damage, at least early on, with only a few bursts of their phased polaron beams, but a few phaser cannon shots or a single torpedo are enough to either cripple or destroy them. This is deliberate on part of the Dominion, with the Fighters being cheap-but-deadly throwaway ships with minimal and expendable crew, and no features that aren't essential to combat.
• Super Sentai:
  • Lou from Choushinsei Flashman. An Action Girl functioning as the secondary muscle of the team, Lou relies on kick attacks more often as a possible way to conserve her physical strength due to even her strongest and punch based attacks easily exhausting herself in battle.
  • Luka Millfy from Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger is not only the strongest fighter on her team, she's also the most evasive due to her lower physique and choosing to only focus on melee combat, leaving her open to attack.
  • Ian Yorkland from Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger has a preference in long-range combat with no defense, relying heavily on evasion and strong & quick fighting style until Ramirez forces him to consider his defensive options.

• Taako from The Adventure Zone is an insanely powerful wizard, capable of casting giant fireballs and missiles of pure magical energy, and has on one occasion dealt 160 damage with one hit. He also has pathetically weak armor and low max-HP, meaning he can get knocked out of the fight with just a few solid hits, and needs healing most often out of all of his teammates.
• The Runepunk podcast series from RPGMP3 features a character called Kieron Hammerfall, an Andari Rune caster. Kieron is imbued with momentous arcane power, as well as the durability of a dry twig.
• Antares from Sequinox can dish out a decent level of damage, but has next to no defence and therefore has to hide behind her Scorpie minions.

• Masakatsu Funaki in both pro wrestling and mixed martial arts, the latter even more so. Susceptible to take downs and no chin, he relied on simply submitting you before you hit him.
• Kevin Nash, big guy around seven feet tall, likes to brag about how badass he is, tears his quadriceps by stepping through ring ropes.
• Many power wrestlers tend to be injury prone, such as Mark Henry and Gangrel and Jazz. Batista's case was lampshaded by Triple H, who teased an Evolution reunion to deal with Legacy, only to reject the idea because Randy was a jerk and Dave was always hurt. It was also lampshaded by AJ Styles in a wonderful Take That!.
  AJ: (in response to Dave calling him a Spot Monkey) I think it's funny that a guy who takes a bump and tears his back tells me I don't know how to wrestle.
• Minoru Suzuki was an example of a mixed martial artist, who in turn went back to pro wrestling as his injuries started to rack up. He was solid in taking down people and submitting him, but some hits were enough to stop him.
• Many "high flier" wrestlers such as Matt Sydal, who showed these tendencies right out of Gateway Championship Wrestling, are also this trope, the commentators actually yelling at him for doing a cannon ball off a balcony after returning from injury. Místico became one when he went to WWE and was repackaged as "Sin Cara".
• CM Punk is a downplayed example, as his famous hour long matches and Garbage matches make it hard to view him as "fragile" but he's one of the few wrestlers who will actually sell for the notoriously non athletic Paul Heyman. Punk has only "sold" when Heyman was wielding a weapon, but Madusa and Chris Benoit wouldn't even do that much. Punk can hoist wrestlers like Raven and Samoa Joe up, if they get careless, and knocked the likes of BJ Whimter and Alberto Del Rio unconscious, so he could presumably harm Heyman much worse than Heyman could harm him.
• WSU has many examples, such as The Human Tornado (before they became an All Women's fed in 2007), Marti Belle (large spirit, small frame), the Fly Girls (Niya's really strong anyway but both tend to get tossed around simply because they're so short), the AC Express (great at countering moves, tend to be gone as soon as they don't).
• The Queen of Cats La Felina in the Apocalypse Wrestling Federation. Able to go entire matches taking virtually no offense from opponents only to lose in the end.
• La Rosa Negra's self appointed bodyguard Noemi Bosques. One the top ten bantam weight boxers in the world, top three in the country, most of Rosa's would be assailants shrink away from her fist and those that don't get floored. Boxing bantam weight's 110-118lbs, making Noemi noticeably smaller than her charge and quickly brushed aside by the few who managed to get her before she could land a punch.
• Manny Ferno in Puerto Rican EWO. Perhaps the best spear in the business ("una lanza incredible!"), but he's much smaller than most men who use the move, to the point one of his other moves, which involves putting his weight on the back of his opponent's neck, has seen him flung skywards.
• Part of the reason why Ashley Massaro's momentum was killed in WWE. She only wrestled for three years, yet suffered about as many injuries as someone who had been wrestling for ten.
• Layla also became very injury prone in her final years.

• In American Football, quarterbacks can do punishing damage throwing the ball downfield and serve as the offense's field general. However, if the Stone Wall offensive linemen screw up their blocking assignments, the quarterback usually doesn't have the strength or mobility to do anything except brace for impact and try not to get hurt by the 300+ pound men piling onto him. Mobile quarterbacks like Dak Prescott or Deshaun Watson have the speed to evade defenders, but exposing themselves out of the pocket keeps the trope in force: both quarterbacks have suffered gruesome injuries — Prescott a compound fracture of the leg when tackled on a run during a game, Watson tearing an ACL in practice running a read-option play — trying to make plays on the go.
• Bob Sanders, safety in the NFL, long of the Indianapolis Colts. One of the league's hardest hitters, maybe the best safety in all of football... when he was healthy, which for a while was about as rare as the Colts beating the Chargers in those days (the latter is no longer rare for the Colts). Sanders frequently spent half the regular season on the injured list, which might be because he played so hard all the time, running full-force into offensive players on every play. The Colts finally released him after the 2010 season, and Sanders played one more (injury-shortened) season for the Chargers before being dropped for good.
• The Eagles' Michael Vick fits the archetype perfectly. With his freakish speed and arm strength, Vick is the single most dangerous playmaker in the league... as long as he doesn't get hit too hard. In 9 seasons, he's played all 16 games only once, and has spent quite a few contests limited due to one injury or another. Not counting the 2 seasons he missed while answering to "Federal Inmate #33765-183".
• Dan Marino of the Miami Dolphins is frequently ranked as one of the NFL's greatest quarterbacks of all time, setting or breaking numerous records. Sadly, during his professional career, the Dolphins had one of the worst defenses in the league. He got to play in only one Super Bowl, Super Bowl XIX in the 1984-85 season, where the Dolphins were throttled 38-16 by the San Francisco 49ers. It probably didn't help that he wore the #13 jersey.
• The Houston Oilers of the Late 80's-Early 90's lived and very much died on this trope. Spearheaded by Quarterback Warren Moon, the Oilers with their famed "Run & Shoot" Offense would consistently blaze up and down the field and light up the scoreboard en route to many wins, but never won anything of note due to their glaring weakness: they couldn't slow the pace down or run the ball effectively to grind the clock down, leading to their Defense remaining on the field for long stretches, where they would eventually collapse. This infamously bit them hard in the 1992 playoffs against the Buffalo Bills, where Houston ran up a 35-3 lead on the road, only to blow it and lost 41-38 in Overtime.
• Hockey player Eric Lindros was called the "Next One" by pro scouts in the late 1980s, in reference to Wayne Gretzky's nickname of the "Great One" as the single best player to ever put on skates. Lindros seemed to have it all, from massive size to impressive speed to a gifted scoring touch. When he made it to the National Hockey League, he was one of the most dominant players in the league...and one of the most injured, which led him to top both the scoring charts and the injury reports.
• Hockey in general allows a team to do this whenever they want. Technically speaking, a team can have six players on the ice at any one time. One of those is assumed to be the goalie, but there's nothing saying you have to have a goalie on the ice. As such, when a team is losing in the final stretch of the game, it's not uncommon to pull the goalie in favor of an extra attacker to try and at least tie things up. It's risky, since no one guarding the net makes the opposition scoring goals extremely likely as well. But, if you're guaranteed to lose if things keep going the way they're going, you may as well give it a shot.
• The "Seven Seconds or Less" Phoenix Suns of the mid-2000s had arguably the most potent offense in NBA history, but their porous defense caused them to never reach the NBA Finals. The 2016-20 Houston Rockets, under the same head coach as the Seven Second Suns in Mike D'Antoni, suffered similar fates in the postseason with one of the most potent offenses in the league but an inability to stop anyone in turn.
• In baseball, the Colorado Rockies, although part of it is out of their control. Coors Field in Colorado is a mile above sea level, and the thin air exponentially boosts fly balls to incredible degrees, even with the somewhat deep field dimensions. This, in effect, has turned the Colorado Rockies franchise into baseball's perpetual Glass Cannon; no matter the roster, they will be atop offensive categories in the league and at the bottom in pitching. While the Rockies have no trouble developing or signing hitters, developing or convincing pitchers to come there is a whole other story. This forces Colorado into simply bludgeoning teams to win at home, since they can even the odds against teams with superior pitching, who will be negated by the altitude of the park.
• Mixed martial artists:
  • Alistair Overeem is known for two things: his freakish knockout power and his glass chin.
  • Brock Lesnar was known for his incredible speed and strength, which he used to ragdoll heavyweights and pummel them into paste... unless he got hit on the chin, in which case he'd instantly turtle up.
  • Johnny Walker became infamous for this. Out of all the 23 fights in his record, only five went past round one. He either completely destroys his opponent or gets destroyed in the first round.
  • Andrei Arlovski had excellent hand speed and punching power, but was notoriously easy to knock out.
• Many a college basketball star player wound up falling short once in the National Basketball Association as their bodies just couldn't stay healthy. The Portland Trail Blazers had two big cases in Brandon Roy, who was Rookie of the Year yet only lasted five seasons before his knees forced a retirement at the age of 27, and Greg Oden, who missed what would be his rookie season recovering from surgery and would then only play 82 games across two seasons before again spending a whole season on the injury list that made him be waived (and to make it worse, the guy picked right after him, Kevin Durant, would become a superstar).
• In motor racing, it is not untold of teams which were very competitive but struggled in reliability. For example, in Formula 1 known examples were the Williams-Renault of 1991 and the Mclaren-Mercedes of 2005: by far the fastest cars on track, but afflicted by technical issues that costed many retirements, ultimately giving up the title to their opponents (respectively Mclaren-Honda and Renault). This mostly because innovative designs can result in high performance but also increased fragility until enough development is done through seasons, but also because sometimes high performance puts more stress to technical components which are more prone to failure. In these examples, Williams managed to become one of the dominant forces of the 90s starting from 1992 when it achieved both speed and reliability.

• The Amazing Digital Circus: Jax is simultaneously the most abrasive and the most sensitive member of the cast. He'll incessantly belittle and bully others without provocation but is driven into a rage the moment the joke is turned back around on him.
• DEATH BATTLE!: Being a glass cannon turns out to be Bayonetta's downfall when pitted up against Dante — despite being considerably stronger than him, she was also much more frail as well. Which proves to be a problem when Dante is not only durable enough to survive her attacks, but also strong enough himself to take her down.
• Mera Salamin in Epithet Erased has a powerful destructive epithet that can defeat the likes of Indus in one blow, but her stamina stat is tied for the lowest in the cast. Just kicking a box in frustration is enough to break one of her toes. This is mostly due to a case of Power Incontinence; her “Fragile” epithet allows her to weaken and break practically anything, but also weakens her body and causes her constant pain. Using it in combat actually causes her to take damage.
• RWBY: Weiss' glyphs are one of the most powerful and versatile Semblances in the series, letting her both do large amounts of damage with her summons and buff her teammates. Unfortunately, this is mired by her having the worst endurance and stamina among Team RWBY. This results in her thriving in team combat, but struggling whenever she's forced into a one on one fight.
• The three gods in the Sock Series have very destructive powers but can be killed in rather simple ways, such as being crushed by a magical shrinking cylinder, being cut in half by a tongue or being bitten in half.

• 8-Bit Theater's Black Mage described himself in these words, a few days after this page was launched.
• Bob and George: Ran Cossack is an exaggerated version. His Cossack Buster is the most powerful weapon in the comic amongst the various robots, but even a slight breeze can kill him. Death only annoys Ran, however; he has a Body Backup Drive at home, complete with teleporter to return him to the place he was last alive.
• Darths & Droids: Chirrut in the Rogue One adventure turns out to be this. Pete applied his usual extreme Min-Maxing to the character, making him formidable in combat, with a Dodge modifier so high that he was literally incapable of being hit by a direct attack... at the cost of having only 9 hit points, resulting in him dying the moment he was hit by an area of effect explosion.
• Dominic Deegan: Dominic is physically weak while mentally untouchable. He describes himself as his body being "frail and weak, but [his] mind is a fortress you have no hope of conquering."
• Kid Radd: Played with with the titular Kid. On the offensive side, his Mega Radd is technically only able to charge enough to deal 255 damage within his own game, but thanks to sloppy programming, there's actually no preset upper limit, meaning it's as powerful as the number of bits in the console he's on. When he's out on the internet, its power is effectively limitless, making him potentially strong enough to destroy the entire internet. On the defensive side, he can only take four hits before dying, but it doesn't matter what hits him. Getting hit with a nuclear bomb does the same amount of damage as having a Mook walk into him.
• The Night the Magic Died: This is the case with Gralo, the Big Bad. While immensely powerful and capable of causing a universe wide extinction on his own, he's only protected by being able to eat any magic sent his way to a Walking Wasteland level and isn't exceptionally durable without it. Once that's bypassed, he is easily wounded and easily defeated by the Princesses.
• The Order of the Stick: Vaarsuvius fits this trope. As with Black Mage, they fall pretty squarely in Squishy Wizard territory.
• Outsider: Loroi warships have tremendous ranged firepower compared to the Umiak's, but aren't as robust.
• Sluggy Freelance: Torg is capable of killing just about anything when his Cool Sword Chaz is powered up and starts glowing. While his sword is unbreakable and nearly unstoppable, however, Torg himself is as physically vulnerable as your average human being. It doesn't help that the sword's true potential can only be unleashed when it's fueled by the blood of the innocent, a cost Torg is understandably reluctant to pay.
• Suppression: Charlie is a electricity-wielder who was kidnapped by the villains so that he could power their entire facility. He can give off enough electricity to blow off Maxwell's arm. He is also skinny as a rail and has neither armor nor the ability to take a hit.
• What's Shakin': Coffinshaker is a fairly powerful fire mage, but without his reliance of fire, is mostly vulnerable to all other attacks.
• XRS: Despite its vaunted capabilities, the XRS is extremely vulnerable when its energy shields are down.

• In the Gamechanger episode “As A Cucumber” (S 05 E 06) when asked “If you punch yourself and it hurts are you weak or strong?” Brennan Lee Mulligan answers “strong” immediately, the explains what a Glass Cannon is
• Cobra Kai has two notable examples, from that dojo:
  • Hawk is a combination of The Berserker and Blood Knight. He thrives on fighting and throws some wicked shots that can overwhelm his opponent (as the tournament at the end of the first season showed). While it wasn't much of a problem in the first season, the second season brought this trope into full force. Training under Kreese, he would become surprised when a defense-oriented opponent (such as Demetri) held him off for a while. In such a case, it usually takes only one shot to lay him out (as both Robby and Demetri ended up doing). But in the third season, he neatly subverts the trope by internalizing Kreese's "fight smart" lesson — and utterly obliterating Brucks during tryouts.
  • However, Unskilled, but Strong Tory plays this trope straight throughout: great at charging and has some wicked kicks and punches of her own. Problem: she's not much better defensively (especially against Sam, who is Weak, but Skilled) and tends to get pissy when she can't put away an opponent fast enough. Once she loses her cool, one good shot can stop her.
• DSBT InsaniT: 'VRcade' shows that Evil Balloon is far stronger than he looks...but also as fragile as he looks.
• Left POOR Dead: The zombies are clearly dangerous, but never seem to manage to do any damage and are felled by even a gentle push.
• Shadiversity: In this video Shad discusses the idea by name, saying magic users having greater physical vulnerability to offset their magical powers is one way medieval-type knights could remain relevant in a fantasy setting (otherwise, they would just slaughter a knight every time, as demonstrated humorously at the beginning).

• Arcane: While Caitlyn's an excellent shot with a rifle, she proves easy to knockout in close combat.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • While firebending boasts immense raw power than other bending arts, one of its glaring downsides is that they have no special defensive abilities whatsoever, fitting for the element's confrontational and upfront nature. Their combat philosophy centers around overwhelming their opponents as soon as possible. True to the themes of how elements are similar to one another, this obvious weakness can be mitigated by applying other bending philosophies to firebending. Iroh, Zuko, and Jeong Jeong, all who subscribe to such innovative thinking, employ firebending as a defense, utilizing fire walls, redirecting flames and even lightning, and doing circular motions to dispel attacks. In fact, one of the signs that a firebender is a master firebender if they can last long in a fight, which is taught at Dancing Dragon, an ancient firebending form that the Fire Nation forgot upon taking up their imperialistic ambitions to the world.
  • The Avatar can become the Master of All elements and a Person of Mass Destruction in the Avatar State. Either way, they still have (mostly) human durability. And if anyone is killed in the Avatar State, the Avatar as a whole will cease to exist.
• Batman Beyond: The assassin Curare is a deadly combatant with a sword, incredibly fast and agile, and very hard to lay a glove on, but when Batman actually manages to do so, it seems to hurt her badly.
• Donald Duck: In "Canvas Back Duck", Donald ends up in a boxing match against Pee-Wee Pete, and is only saved from a merciless pummeling when he accidentally discovers Pete has a (literal) glass jaw.
• Hazbin Hotel: Vox's a new Overlord of Hell with a significant power base in modern technology, but as seen in his Quarreling Song against Alastor, if he gets too riled up, he risks shorting out and shutting down his media presence across blocks. Interestingly, this is exactly how their representative technology works: Vox is the newer, fancier televisions and digital screens, but they are more fragile compared to Alastor's older and simpler, but much more robust radios.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The Elements of Harmony are ultimately a literal example of this. They can one-shot major threats to Equestria but can't survive a stomp from Nightmare Moon or a fall from the Tree of Harmony.
• The Owl House: Eda is a powerful witch and easily the best fighter of the main trio, but it doesn't take much for her to get worn down and she gets blasted into a wall twice during her duel with Lilith. Downplayed in that she could survive being decapitated, and anything sliced off seems to be able to pop back on.
• Transformers: Animated:
  • Soundwave can easily take on multiple Autobots at the same time with The Power of Rock, has a massive number of various gadgets, and can control machines, but he's made of Earth machines mashed together, which means that even Sari's little hand-blast can put a hole in his shoulder, and when he is forced into melee combat, he is smashed apart in single blows. This contrasts with normal Decepticons, which are both figuratively and literally Made of Iron.
  • Swindle. As a result of his arms dealing he has some of the most impressive weapons in the universe, but is the only Decepticon in the whole show that Bumblebee's stingers have ever been effective against.
• Voltron: Legendary Defender: The Red Lion is stated and shown to be a Fragile Speedster but it also has a heat beam that can melt starships and a back-mounted Wave-Motion Tuning Fork that can destroy whole sections of a massive space station.

• Since the introduction of gunpowder in The High Middle Ages, artillery is (probably) the very first and oldest definition of this trope: deadly when given a chance to attack from a safe distance but easily neutralized by the destruction or capture of its crew and/or the cannon itself. As such, battle plans for centuries have included goals to capture or destroy artillery units as quickly as possible; the advent of modern beyond visual range firing allows units to be placed at a safe distance from the action, while self-propelled artillery units can be moved at a moment's notice, both to new positions for firing, and to dodge counterattacks.
• Between the development of practical firearms and bulletproof body armor, armor became obsolete so armies just stopped using it. Similarly, although muskets were often unreliable and inaccurate over long distances, bullets could rip flesh and shatter bone if they hit. Everyone could either One-Hit Kill their enemy or be OHK'd themselves.
• Before gunpowder, there were Battering Rams, whose only functionality and purpose was to knock down walls. They were slow and heavy, and unless they were constructed with an outer shell, they were completely helpless against ranged and melee combatants. When carried by people, as opposed to supported by ropes or chains, those carrying the ram would be defenseless themselves, as both their hands would be occupied. In spite of these drawbacks, they continue to be used by modern-day police forces and fire brigades to enter locked doors; the latter even benefits from being used in a non-combat context, with the raw power of the battering ram only helping them in their goal to extinguish the fire as soon as possible.
• Most anti-tank weapons teams count as this. Whether armed with an anti-tank rifle, manning an anti-tank gun, or carrying around a guided missile launcher, they have the power to potentially destroy an enemy tank before it gets the chance to destroy them. However, they lack any protection other than their firearms, and the sheer bulk of their weaponry limits their mobility, making them easy targets if detected.
• Tank destroyers. Popular back in WW2, they were designed to specifically counter tanks— they're usually armed with a tank-grade BFG to destroy enemy vehicles with great efficiency, using the element of surprise. However, their limitations compared to regular tanks (lack of armour, a gun with limited traverse, or both) make them vulnerable to a well-coordinated counterattack. In modern warfare, the role of tank destroyer has been taken up by helicopter gunships, though a number of lighter vehicles have been adapted to the purpose as well.
  • Modern wheeled tank destroyers are armed with large calibre guns and very mobile, though lacking in armour. They're not supposed to take on enemy tanks unless necessary, as their main missions are tactical reconnaissance and fire support.
  • American tank destroyers during World War II in particular were very lightly armored, in most cases lacking a roof for their turret which exposed the crew to all kinds of nastiness. They usually mounted a relatively powerful anti-tank gun in a fully-traversing turret and were extremely fast: the M18 Hellcat can clock up to 55 mph on good roads. (That's 88 km/h for the rest of the world.) Conversely, M36 Jackson sported a 90 mm M3 cannon, which was able to defeat any German armour at any distance. Last Jacksons participated in the Yugoslavian Wars of Disintegration and were finally phased out in 2002.
  • Though the German and Soviet tank destroyers tended to go in the opposite direction, with heavy armour and powerful guns with limited traverse, they also produced a large number of lightly-armoured, open-topped self-propelled guns which were often used to take out enemy armour. In the case of Germany, some of these were specifically designed and pressed into service as tank destroyers, following their encounters with superior Soviet armour.
  • Israeli upgrades of their remaining M4 Shermans resulted in the M-50 and M-51 Super Shermans. The M-50s received longer-barreled and more powerful 75mm guns from French AMX-13 light tanks and the M-51 had 105mm modèle F1 guns used in the French AMX-30 tanks cut down to 51 calibers. The latter especially were able to knock out any armor they encountered, but were able to be easily knocked out in turn because of their somewhat-weak for WWII era armor during the Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War.
• This a big reason that the USMC didn't adopt the Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife (and its derivative Marine Raider Stiletto) for general issue during WWII. While the needle point profile was excellent for killing things with a stab in the right place, it was too fragile to do anything else when compared to the more durable spear point profile. Because of the shortcomings in its design, the Ka-Bar knife was issued to the Marine Corps in 1942, as it was simply more versatile.
• The Swedish Thirty Years' War era Leather Cannon. It was basically a copper barrel wrapped in stout leather, like cow hide. The idea was to make the cannon light enough to be mobile and easily carried, which it was. It weighed 40kg (90lb) and could easily be carried by two men. Unfortunately it also was prone on over-heating — leather is a good heat insulator — and tended to burst if three or more shots were shot in succession without letting the barrel cool down a bit. Purely as a weapon it was a failure, but as a concept it revolutionized the role of the field artillery.
  • This was excellently highlighted in an episode of MythBusters, where the cannon was recreated and fired. Their prototype replica cannon successfully damaged the targets, but broke on the first firing. They still considered it a successful recreation because the output of the cannon was comparable to a period iron cannon, and because of its historical reliability issues.
• Aircraft carriers exist to operate aircraft. Anything not related to operating aircraft is usually considered unnecessary, as the embarked aircraft give the carrier the effective ability to spot and engage enemy targets in a radius of several hundred miles or more. That they also tend to be crammed full of munitions and volatile aviation fuel is just icing on the cake. Taken Up to Eleven by Japanese WWII carriers, which had an enormous airplane capacity, but tended to ignite violently on two or three hits, largely because of poor damage control and internal design. They attempted to rectify this with the Taiho, with the design expected to remain able to operate after multiple bomb and torpedo hits. A single American submarine-launched torpedo caused a fuel vapor explosion that sank her.^note The torpedo hit had cracked an aviation fuel tank due to shock, which caused a build-up of fumes within the forward elevator pit into the hangers. The inexperienced Damage Control teams noticeably failed to spray down the gasoline with foam and were generally ineffective in solving the problem. In an attempt to clear the fumes, the chief damage control officer turned on the Taiho's ventilation system to full. However, this caused the fumes to spread into the ship as well, where an unknown, errant spark set off the entire ship. The British carriers of the Illustrious-class and Implacable-class were aversions, as they had armored flight decks and when struck by kamikazes, would usually be operational again from within a few hours in the case of HMS Formidable, to within 30 minutes for HMS Indefatigable. As a US liaison officer noted "When a kamikaze hits a US carrier it means 6 months of repair at Pearl (Harbor). When a kamikaze hits a Limey carrier it's just a case of 'Sweepers, man your brooms'."Modern day aircraft try to subvert this by loading them up with the best anti-air and anti-submarine defenses possible, but hold superiority mostly due to just how huge the ship is and how deadly the aircraft and how precise the targeting and sonar systems are.
• "Treaty Cruisers" of the interwar period (so named because the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 placed strict limits of 10,000 tons displacement and 8"/203mm gun caliber on cruisers, and the London Naval Treaty of 1930 refined this by codifying the difference between heavy and light cruisers) were almost all glass cannons. The tonnage limit made it nearly impossible to build a truly balanced heavy cruiser, with enough armor to have any meaningful defense against its own guns. The only way to achieve a heavy cruiser with acceptable firepower and also acceptable armor was by building them significantly heavier than was legal and then lying about it.
  • The American Northampton and Portland heavy cruisers, designed in the 1920s and '30s, were particularly infamous examples of this. These ships were designed as light cruisers under the WWI definition with nominal armor and heavy 8" guns, but were reclassified as heavy cruisers as a result of the Washington and London naval treaties due to their gun calibers. These ships suffered horrendous losses during the war due to their inadequate protection, including three being sunk with within two hours during the Battle of Savo Island in 1942.
  • Japanese heavy cruisers from the WWII era are also examples. They had excellent firepower, especially thanks to their long-range torpedoes already mentioned above. However even if they were not badly armored a lucky hit on the torpedo launchers could be enough to disable or even sink them, as happened during the Battle of Samar. Japanese torpedoes used highly-compressed pure oxygen as their fuel oxidizer rather than the typical compressed air used by other nations. This allowed the infamous Type 93 "Long Lance" torpedo to be faster and longer-ranged than other torpedoes despite being larger and carrying a much heavier warhead, and also made them nearly invisible in the water since they produced no wake. However, pure oxygen is extremely dangerous if exposed to flames, because the liberated oxygen will rapidly intensify the fire. So having torpedoes whose air tanks were filled with pure oxygen instead of 21% oxygen and 78% inert nitrogen meant any explosion near the torpedoes would set them on fire and detonate their large warheads.
  • The British Courageous -class "large light cruisers" (strictly battlecruisers) of late WWI had battleship-grade main guns (albeit in fairly-small numbers)... and next to no belt or deck armor, in order to maximize speed and minimize draft. They were so lightly armored that the Royal Navy saw them as fairly useless in a fight, as they had absolutely no ability to take a hit from anything heavier than an anti-torpedo-boat gun, and all three were converted into aircraft carriers during or after the war.
• "Q-ships" are another example. A Q-ship is a freighter armed with guns and depth-charges, and sometimes torpedo launchers as well. The concept originated in the First World War as a way of defending against German U-boats, which had a habit of attacking freighters on the surface with their deck guns. A Q-ship was certainly capable of outfighting a submarine, and given a lot of luck it could engage any warship up to heavy cruiser size with some chance of victory. However, it was still a freighter underneath, with a freighter's thin hull and vulnerable engines and control systems.
• Light tanks by definition are supposed to be very mobile, primarily designed for scouting and exploiting breakthroughs in enemy lines, so they would often give up armour in exchange for greater speed and range. Although many fall under the Fragile Speedster category, several designs (particularly the American M24 Chaffee and M41 Bulldog, as well as the French AMX-13 series) qualify as Glass Cannons, having sufficient armour to tackle heavier armour.^note A few designs, namely a number of WWII French tanks, would invert this completely by being relatively slow Stone Walls. The Soviet and British "cruiser tanks" of the 1930s and 1940s (which eventually evolved into the Cromwell, Comet, and T-34) also placed speed and armament above armour. A good example would be the British "Crusader" cruiser tank: extremely fast and agile and armoured with the superb 6 pounder 57 mm cannon, which was able to knock out any German tanks at the desert, but itself vulnerable. By comparison, the Matilda and early models of Churchill, while far superior to most German tanks, were armed only with a 2-pdr.
  • The Vickers Medium Mk.II, designed in 1925, was armed with a 47mm anti-tank gun (and as such, were among the best-armed tanks of the time, even better than many WWII designs) but only had 8mm of armour. By comparison, the WWI-era Whippet had 18mm. The design was due to the doctrine that the best tool to fight a tank was another tank, and that armour was essentially for defence from small-arms fire (against which it was fitted with machine-guns). The Medium II was designed to replace both the WWI-era medium and heavy tanks, to break through the the enemy line and then exploit the rear, destroying headquarters, artillery parks, etc. while taking prisoners as a precursor to the cruiser tank doctrine. Crucially, it was designed in a time when carriage-mounted anti-tank guns were not yet developed, and later British cruiser tanks following the same doctrine against such weapons tended to fare poorly.
  • The Soviet BT-series tanks were among the fastest tank designs of WWII, and were also fairly well-armed for their time with a high-velocity 45mm gun. They could reach speeds of up to 72 km/h on good roads, and had good range to boot. However, their light armor couldn't protect against anything much more powerful than rifle-caliber gunfire.
    • BTs were actually the typical European "cruiser tanks", that were envisioned to work much like the horse cavalry as a raiding and attack force, and thus featured high mobility^note Their very designation means "Fast Tank" and firepower at the expense of the protection, unlike the "infantry tanks" that were planned to advance in the infantry ranks against the enemy fire and so were heavily armored but slow. These narrow niches were, however, proven to be impractical in the actual fighting, and the later types become much more balanced machines.
  • The American M551 Sheridan (technically an "armoured reconnaissance/airborne assault vehicle") provides a remarkable example of this trope, being poorly armoured but armed with a low-velocity 152mm gun. Put into context, its shells packed almost as much explosive as heavy artillery shells. It could also fire anti-tank missiles, which could theoretically take out any contemporary battle tank, though these were almost never used.
    • In the 1930s, the Soviet Union experimented with mounting rockets on tanks, producing this monstrosity◊, a BT-5 with a pair of rockets that for some reason were referred to as "tank torpedoes". Due to several defects with the design (namely horrifying lack of accuracy), it was never put into production.
  • The modern Russian Sprut-SD(P) light tank is basically a T-90 125-mm smoothbore cannon put into the BMD-3 APC chassis. It packs a huge kick, is extremely fast and nimble, and is actually air-droppable, being envisioned as a paratroopers' own tank destroyer, but its thin aluminum shell can't really take anything much above the small arms fire.
• Main Battle Tank design took something of a detour in this direction during the 1960s, at least in Western Europe. Confronted with widespread HEAT weapons, against which steel armor required prohibitive thickness to stop, the designers of the French AMX-30 and German Leopard I dispensed with the heavy steel armor of many contemporaries in favor of greater mobility afforded by the lighter weight. Not that they were un-armored, mind you, but they were emphatically not designed to take hits from anything larger than autocannon and keep trucking. This detour ended in the 1970s with the development of composite and reactive armors, which could provide protection against HEAT weapons without prohibitive weight costs.
• Missile transporter-erector launchers are arguably the ultimate example of Glass Cannons in real life, being armed with a weapon that can wipe out a small town but completely lacking any means of self-defence. With that said, the concept inverts this in that the launchers are hard to track down and can relocate after firing.
• For much of their existence, submarines have proven to be exceptionally deadly against ships, utilizing their stealth to sneak up on surface vessels and sink them before the latter can react. However, if they are detected before they have a chance to fire, submarines pretty much lose the only advantage they have.
  • Ballistic missile submarines take the concept to an extreme, in that they are armed with enough nuclear weapons to vaporize a small country, though are virtually incapable of defending themselves if detected.
• Torpedo boats were essentially small but inexpensive vessels armed to the teeth with explosives, and later on destroyers after the latter took on the role of the former. They have sometimes managed to sink even vessels as heavy as battleships; they also were highly vulnerable to gunfire from larger ships, especially WWII Japanese ones with their explosive "Long Lance" torpedoes.
• WWI-style monitors were shallow-draft ships of questionable seaworthiness onto which the largest spare gun(s) at hand was crammed. Basically a floating artillery battery, they had the advantage of being cheap and able to get in very close to shore where traditional naval ships could not go, even going up rivers.
• Anything the Finnish Navy can throw in. Their ships are crammed with oversized guns and missiles, and outfitted with minelaying equipment, but have no armor whatsoever — they rather employ hiding in the archipelago as their defensive strategy. It helps that Finland has one of the most diabolical archipelagoes and littoral waters in the world. There is always a small island behind which you can hide.
• Japanese aircraft during the early stages of WWII; while fast for the early 1940s and well-armed, they had next to no armor or safety features such as self-sealing fuel tanks or armored glass to protect pilots and crew. While some Allied designs were notorious for taking hundreds if not thousands of rounds of ammunition and still flying, even a short burst of gunfire would be enough to set a Zero ablaze and generally take its pilot with it. Later designs had armor and speed to match next generation Allied fighters, but by that point Japan had lost the best of its pilots and could only send up half-trained rookies to fight.
• Humans are generally a race of Glass Cannons in that our technological ability to inflict damage is much greater than our technological ability to defend against damage. They had to build NORAD inside a small mountain to maybe protect it against nukes. On the purely physical level, with peak physical training, you can dead-lift hundreds of pounds, fight several other people or animals at once, and even kill with your bare hands if need be. But you have no natural external armor, and your vital organs are still vital and vulnerable to nasty things such as being stabbed or shot.
• Doc Holiday suffered from tuberculosis his entire life and required a walking stick. His ally in the Earp gang Bat Masterson once stated that Doc “could not have whipped a healthy fifteen-year-old boy in a go-as-you-please fistfight”. However Doc’s reputation as The Gunslinger had basis in reality (albeit often exaggerated to Fastest Gun in the West in Western folklore and adaptations).
• Many venomous snakes and bugs can seriously injure or even kill with a single bite/sting. but with the snakes, the second you grab the back the head or they run out of venom, all they can do is wriggle helplessly or try to escape. It's even worse for the arthropods, since if you can see them coming, all it would take is a shoe or a newspaper to take them out. Of course, not needing defenses is much the point of having venom in the first place; the reason so many are brightly colored is that they realize the threat of injury is a much more effective deterrent than most any physical defense.
• Small dromaeosaurs such as Velociraptor had a sickle claw on their feet that could deal grave damage and bleeding to prey, especially if they managed to slash a prey's throat. However, thanks to their small size, one good hit from a larger dinosaur could gravely injure or even kill them.
• The technical, basically a four-wheel pickup truck with a weapon mounted in its bed. It's quite speedy and maneuverable, and thanks to its heavy weapons (which have historically included things like rocket pods, anti-aircraft cannons, and turrets from proper fighting vehicles), it can be a terror to even armored vehicles if it gets the drop on them. It also has the armor of, well... a pickup truck.
  • Historically, the "technical" evolved out of the portée anti-tank guns used in WW2. This concept was evolved independently by Britain and Germany and was seen as an expedient to get the best possible use out of their standard towed guns, in the wide-open spaces of North Africa and Russia. The standard British AT gun, the two-pounder, was over-engineered and its carriage was simply too fragile to withstand being towed across rocky North African terrain. Britain got round this by scrapping the carriages and welding the gun assembly into the cargo-bed of the trucks that had once towed them, creating a fast and manoevrable self-propelled gun which remained vulnerable to counter-fire. Germany did likewise with many of its PaK 35 37mm weapons. When the USA entered the war in 1942, it copied the idea by marrying its 37mm anti-tank gun to the cargo bed of light trucks, usually the Dodge 3/4 tonner.
  • The Willys MB were often converted to combat vehicles, most notably by the SAS "Desert Rats" in North Africa; the nimble little vehicles could be mounted with a staggering amount of firepower, including but not limited to Tommy Guns, twin Vickers .30 cal machine guns, M2 50 caliber machine guns, and even bazookas, and usually carried all these weapons all at once to rain absolute hell on German bases. However, the core vehicle was still the humble Jeep, which typically had armor measuring between nil and none. For this reason, the Desert Rats would operate primarily at night, forming raiding parties that would rush in, cause as much damage as possible, and then rush out before the enemy even knew what hit them.
• The Macuahuitl, a pre-Spanish-conquest-era Meso-American weapon which is essentially a large, flat wooden club embedded with obsidian blades. Said obsidian blades make for a deadly weapon capable of easily cutting off a person's head, and it was even capable of decapitating horses. Unfortunately, obsidian — being, essentially, natural glass — is very brittle in comparison to steel, so these blades easily shattered if they hit anything hard enough, such as steel armor or swords.
• Some spiders, such as the black widow, brown recluse, and Brazilian wandering spider have venom powerful enough to cripple a human, something at least 100 million times their weight, however, all it takes for a human to kill them is a simple step or swat.
• Generally speaking, octopuses have a smorgasbord of tools and skills for killing prey. Most species have: a very sharp beak, excellent camouflage, the ability to squeeze through small holes, and incredible intelligence. Some species even have venom, and there's still more. However, their soft, squishy bodies make them very vulnerable to predators like sharks and large fish. Some, like the coconut octopus, use coconut shells or seashells to defend themselves, as those things are much harder than their bodies.
• Most muscle cars can easily keep pace with sports cars that cost more than twice as much... when racing on a straight road. The "muscle" refers to their massive, highly-tuned engines, and in their original configurations in the '60s and early '70s, these engines were dropped into family sedans that were given just enough modifications to handle their power. While this kept them very affordable compared to dedicated sports cars, it also meant that they had the handling of large American sedans, and were prone to spinning out if you tried taking on tight corners in them. This is why oval racing predominates in American motorsport: because the emphasis was originally on showing spectators what they could do in a car that they could buy from any dealership (the old slogan being "win on Sunday, sell on Monday"), tracks that played to those cars' strengths predominated, while more technical circuits fell by the wayside. On the international front, muscle cars are considered Quirky Works because their engines consume more fuel than smaller, lightweight vehicles, and thus come off as inefficient in comparison. More modern muscle cars typically offer more high-performance models that come with suspension and handling upgrades to go with the monster V8 engines, but these usually come at a higher price point.
• Box jellyfish (class Cubozoa) are curious relatives of normal sea jellies (class Scyphozoa), that seem adapted to output as much damage as possible. Like most cnidarians, they have a gelatinous, really soft, body, but box jellyfish are basically transparent and almost invisible, with several extremely long and thin tentacles trailing behind, which makes them extremely hard to detect. Unlike your average sea jelly, box jellyfish have more advanced nervous system, sensory organs, and musculature, and these animals actively hunt their prey, like small fishes. And of course, they are some of the most venomous of all animals. Particularly large species, like the "sea wasp", are fully capable of killing an adult human. Smaller box jellyfish, like Irukandji's jellyfish, have a harder time flatlining a person, but to compensate, their venom causes a series of symptoms named "Irukandji syndrome", which can make patients wish they were dead instead. Irukandji jellyfish are also known for being exceptionally fragile and require special handling and containment to survive in captivity (to the point of almost being an Exaggerated Trope, as some specimens have been reported swimming into the plastic walls of the containers holding them and died on impact).
• Stinging hymenopterans are relatively small; even the largest specimens, like the Asian giant hornet, grow to a maximum size of about 5.5cm. Despite this, their stings can be lethal to even large mammals due to a combination of sheer amount of attackers and the possibility of allergic reaction. The most fragile of this type are bees, who on top of being small and lacking in the thicker carapaces of their wasp and hornet cousins, can only sting a victim once. The stinging action leaves the barbed stinger stuck in the target, causing the weakly anchored venom sac to rip out of the bee's abdomen and remain behind when the bee tries to fly away. This turns bees into little one-shot poison darts: dangerous enough to threaten even large mammals, but so delicate that their own attack will kill them.
• In the microbial world, Norovirus stands out as this: if it infects someone, they're going to be agonizingly and violently ill with vomiting and diarrhea, and it's very contagious. If someone is dehydrated enough from it, the little menace can cause a hospital visit or worse. But even among viruses, Norovirus has a very weak outer casing, and soap and water absolutely shreds it to pieces way more than other bugs.