Mega-Octane: Hold on, Scourge. Who put you in charge? I was the first, so I should lead the Decepticons!
Scourge: Only the most fearless deserves that honor. Is that you, Mega-Octane? [Scourge throws a punch and stops right in front of Mega-Octane's face, Mega-Octane flinches] No, I didn't think so.
Scourge: Only the most fearless deserves that honor. Is that you, Mega-Octane? [Scourge throws a punch and stops right in front of Mega-Octane's face, Mega-Octane flinches] No, I didn't think so.
An attack never meant to connect with the apparent target, whether it be stopping just short of hitting them or going right past them, intended to get a reaction out of them. It could be because the attacker just wanted to annoy the target, but it could also be as a test of courage; if they flinch from an attack that never connects, it doesn't bode well. If they don't react at all, it can be seen as impressive.
An important part of this trope is that the attacker never intends for the attack to connect, just wanting to get a reaction out of the other. It is not changing their mind mid-way, since the other character's reaction (or lack thereof) is their goal.
Real Life martial arts examples shouldn't be listed since the feint is so common. For instance, in fencing the intention of the feint is to trick an opponent into reacting early and failing to respond to an actual attack immediately afterward.
Compare Fighting Fingerprint, where a style of combat is used to identify the character. Compare Fake Special Attack.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Dragon Ball Z: After both turn Super Saiyan, Trunks draws his sword and rushes in to attack Goku, notably stopping short after the latter doesn't react. When asked why, Goku states that he felt no intent to follow through from Trunks, prompting the former to acknowledge such and put in the intent. Goku, in response, blocks all of Trunks's strikes with his index finger.
- Gundam Build Divers: Martial artist Tigerwolf teaches his students that since GBN is an online game, they are not restricted to the laws of the real world and can pull off greater feats. To emphasize his point to Riku, Tigerwolf throws a punch and stops moments before it can hit Riku's face, asking him why he closed his eyes since he can't feel pain in GBN. After Riku and Yukio's training, Tigerwolf pulls another feint on Riku and is pleased to see he doesn't even flinch.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable: Mikitaka's introduction has Josuke and Okuyasu not entirely convinced about his claims of being an alien and instead suspect him to be a Stand user. When Josuke and Mikitaka end up on a rooftop in Mikitaka's rush to get away from allergy-inducing sirens, Josuke summons his Stand Crazy Diamond to fake a punch right in front of Mikitaka as he is standing up. Mikitaka has no reaction whatsoever and doesn't seem to realize Crazy Diamond is even there, signaling to Josuke that he can't see his Stand and thus isn't a Stand user himself.
- A variation in Overlord (2012): Sebas rescues a young prostitute named Tuare at the risk of blowing his cover. The other Guardians believe he's a security risk and demand he prove his loyalty towards Ainz. Ainz brings Cocytus as security and orders Sebas to kill Tuare with a single punch. Tuare, who was shown kindness for the first time in her life, is eager to repay her savior and smiles at him as he delivers the killing blow. Cocytus blocks the punch at the last second as he was ordered to and confirms that it was delivered with every intent to kill. Satisfied as to Sebas' loyalty, Ainz allows Tuare to live in Nazarick.
- SPY×FAMILY: Towards the beginning of Great Cruise Adventure Arc, Yor's handler brings her to see "Shopkeeper", the leader of the Garden Organization, to brief for Yor's next task. After a few niceties, Shopkeeper suddenly attacks Yor with his hedge-clippers. Yor dodges Shopkeeper's attack with her footing lost for only a second or so, all while wearing high heels. Shopkeeper explains he fears she suffered Badass Decay after getting a family of her own, but what Yor just did proves otherwise.
- Transformers: Robots in Disguise: Scourge declares himself leader of the Decepticons moments after his creation, which Mega-Octane protests since he was the first Decepticon created and thus the one who should lead. Scourge retorts that the most fearless should be leader and throws a punch at Mega-Octane's face, stopping moments before it can connect. Mega-Octane still flinches, which Scourge considers proof he isn't fit to be leader.
- After Canute's Character Development in the first arc of Vinland Saga, he declares that he is Not Afraid to Die. Thorkell decides to test whether this is true or not by throwing a punch at Canute, which could probably kill or seriously injure the smaller man if it connects. Thorkell stops just short, and when Canute doesn't flinch or so much as blink, Thorkell is impressed and decides to support Canute.
Fan Works
- In The Apprentice, the Student, and the Charlatan, Nova Shine is being held prisoner (when he can escape at any time) by a number of unicorn guards, whom he is annoying by talking their ears off. One of them gets tired of this and tries to stab next to his head to scare him, get him to shut up, and remind him who's in control of the situation. Nova, however, casually ignores it and continues chatting with them all the same.
Films — Animated
- In Zootopia, Judy is delivering a press interview about the recent outbreak of predators going savage that doesn't end well, due to the fact that her own subconscious prejudices drives her to repeat a suggested theory she overheard that the predators might be reverting back to their "primitive, savage ways". Her erstwhile ally, Nick, who suffered from an abusive muzzling from Junior Cub Scouts in his own childhood for similar Fantastic Racism, is genuinely hurt to hear someone he thought of as a friend apparently displaying a similar attitude, and behaves like he's about to attack her as part of his What the Hell, Hero? speech:
Nick: So, look, let me ask you a question! Are you afraid of me? [Judy is stunned silent] Do you think I might go nuts? Think I might go savage? You think I might try to... [jumps forward, claws bared] EAT YOU?! [Judy jumps into a defensive posture and unclips a holster on her belt for a can of fox repellent] I knew it. Pfft! Just when I thought somebody actually believed in me, huh?
Films — Live-Action
- Die Hard 2: When John McClane returns to the airport after the snowmobile chase, his report that the SWAT team and the terrorists are in cahoots is dismissed as delusions by Da Chief Lorenzo. To prove his point, McClane takes the submachine gun he'd seized from the baddies, levels it at Lorenzo, and fires a sustained burst at him. Lorenzo cringes but quickly realizes that he's unscathed, which proves McClane's claim of collusion. Amazingly, none of the police draw their sidearms and Swiss-cheese McClane on the spot. The submachine gun was loaded with blanks, all for show with zero impact.
- The Empire Strikes Back: When Han Solo meets Lando Calrissian, Lando approaches him while making angry comments about their past together. As they get to close range, Lando makes a sudden threatening move as though he's about to hit Han. Han reacts defensively, then Lando hugs him, laughs, and greets him affectionately. Lando clearly just wanted to get a rise out of Han.
- The Last Castle: Irwin performs a risky stunt by slipping a note to Col. Winter, stating he intends to kidnap visiting Brigadier General Wheeler. Winter immediately places the prison on lockdown, securing a surprised Wheeler and deploying the prison's riot control guards and vehicles, including a helicopter. It turns out Irwin never planned to go through with the kidnapping and instead studies the lockdown procedure so that he and his fellow inmates can exploit weaknesses in their eventual uprising.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- In The Avengers, Natasha is trying to recruit Bruce's help, but the fact that Bruce has a destructive alter-ego, the Hulk, makes things tense. Bruce doesn't know if he can trust her, and he decides to mess with her and act like he's going to start Hulking Out.
Bruce: STOP LYING TO ME!
[Natasha, terrified, pulls a gun on him before he even finishes the sentence]
Bruce: ...I'm sorry, that was mean. I just wanted to see what you'd do. - Avengers: Endgame: Shortly after the Avengers are badly defeated by Thanos, they meet Captain Marvel and are uncertain of her claim to be powerful enough to challenge him. Thor judges her for himself by standing in front of her and summoning Stormbreaker to his hand, the enormous battleaxe speeding right past her head. Captain Marvel doesn't flinch at all, and, impressed, Thor responds, "I like this one."
- In The Avengers, Natasha is trying to recruit Bruce's help, but the fact that Bruce has a destructive alter-ego, the Hulk, makes things tense. Bruce doesn't know if he can trust her, and he decides to mess with her and act like he's going to start Hulking Out.
- The Pink Panther (2006): A Running Gag throughout the film is Inspector Clouseau testing Ponton's reflexes by suddenly going to attack him. Each time he does, Ponton responds accordingly, hitting him back hard. The one exception is when Clouseau is removed from the Pink Panther case and they sadly and slowly do the same thing as a goodbye gesture.
Clouseau:... Good one.
- At first in Waterloo, Napoleon attacks Wellington's flank at the titular battle to test how Wellington will react, hoping that Wellington will weaken the center of his army to reinforce the flank and make it easier for Napoleon to assault the center. Napoleon is not pleased but grudgingly impressed when Wellington refuses to react as Napoleon had hoped.
Napoleon: You can tell by the position of his guns that his might is on the right side. So that's what he's afraid of, his right. Therefore that's where we'll tease him. We'll have a diversionary action... if he weakens his center to support the right side, then I'll know the caliber of this English aristocrat.
- Young Frankenstein: While demonstrating voluntary vs. involuntary reactions for his medical class, Dr. Fronkensteen feints kneeing a volunteer in the groin, causing him to flinch and block reflexively. Seconds later, after disabling the guy's reflexes, Fronkensteen does it again, to no reaction... until he returns the volunteer's reflexes and he collapses in pain from the blow.
Dr. Frederick Fronkensteen: (muttering to orderly) Give him another dollar.
Literature
- Discworld: In The Fifth Elephant, Vimes tosses an orange at a clerk sent by the Patrician, which bounces off him. Vimes was looking for confirmation that the "clerk" is actually part of the Assassin's Guild, whose reflexes are sharp enough to see the orange and tell it's not a threat and so make no attempt to catch it.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: When rival claimants and brothers Stannis and Renly Baratheon agree to meet to parley, Renly reaches into his cloak. In response Stannis takes hold of his sword, ready to defend himself. However, Renly reveals he was reaching for a peach and offers it to his older brother. Later, after Renly's death, Stannis can't help but wonder what the peach was about, even suspecting that Renly deliberately acted suspiciously so that Stannis' own movements showed him to be paranoid and/or cowardly. He laments that he'll probably go to his own grave trying to decipher what the damned peach was about.
- Star Wars Legends:
- The Thrawn Trilogy: Grand Admiral Thrawn sometimes orders a small attack against an enemy, not expected to do any real damage, in order to see how they react. This lets him deduce the best tactics to use against the enemy in the subsequent real attack. He first does this in the opening scene of Heir to the Empire: his flagship the star destroyer Chimaera is attacked by a New Republic flotilla, and he sacrifices the TIE fighters on picket duty to determine that the enemy commander is an Elomin, then directs his full wing of fighters and the star destroyer to attack in a way Elomins aren't psychologically equipped to handle.
- Exploited in The Hand of Thrawn: Specter of the Past:
- The Imperial conspirators' flagship is attacked by a trio of ships, and Flim, the Con Artist pretending to be Thrawn Back from the Dead, orders his sentry ships to attack just like Thrawn would have. He can't actually tell anything about them from their reaction, but it buys Moff Disra the time he needs to identify the attackers as Diamalan by digging through recent ship purchase records. The Big Bad Triumvirate pulls from the real Thrawn's old records the tactics he used against Diamalans during his invasion and begins to counterattack... and the Diamalans promptly pull a Hyperspeed Escape, because their attack was also just a feint to see if the rumors of Thrawn's return were true from the way the Imps responded.
- At the end of the novel, Gilad Pellaeon comes under attack by a number of ships that appear to be part of the fleet controlled by Garm Bel-Iblis, a high-ranking member of the New Republic Pellaeon is on his way to sign a permanent peace treaty with. Pellaeon is confused as to why Bel-Iblis would want to attack him, so he orders his ships to perform a modified A-Wing Slash, a technique Bel-Iblis invented and would never fall for, as a means of verifying his identity. While it was originally meant as a feint, Bel-Iblis' ships did not deploy appropriate countermeasures, so Pellaeon reasoned that this could not actually be Bel-Iblis and allowed the feint to become a proper attack, which was enough to destroy its target and scare the imposters away.
- Star Wars Expanded Universe: Thrawn has an incident where Botajef's human governor declared secession from the Empire. Noticing two ships leaving the planet, Thrawn ordered his own ships to graze both, and then immobilize and board the one that altered its trajectory: Jefies were too unflappable to alter their trajectory on impulse, and Thrawn rightly suspected one of the ships had a human crew because the governor was escaping with stolen Jefi art, and had set up the "rebellion" to try and trick Thrawn into destroying the palace, erasing evidence of the theft.
Live-Action TV
- The Big Bang Theory: In "The Desperation Emanation", Howard sets up Leonard on a date with Joy, who is learning Krav Maga, which she describes as "one hundred ways of ripping a guy's nuts off." She then keeps scaring Leonard by lunging at him while shouting "Number (X)!" just to watch him cringe.
- Burn Notice: In "Hard Bargain", a US intelligence bureaucrat named Perry Clark offers to meet Michael to discuss lifting his burn notice. Michael is suspicious enough that he sets up a fake meeting at the beach, then calls the cops on him to see how he acts, noting that "a foreign agent would run, so might an armed assassin. A bureaucrat's gonna... act like a bureaucrat." Perry indignantly tells him later that this has been done to him before. Michael should have listened, because Perry really is planning to kill him and was savvy enough to play along with the police-call gambit.
- Dexter: Subverted when Rita's ex attempts a fake punch at Dexter, Dexter barely even flinches.
- Elementary: "One Way to Get Off": While searching the apartment of murder suspect Victor Nardan, Sherlock observes marks on the ceiling and an odd arrangement of various items. He deduces that Nardan is probably blind in one eye (the marks are from him bouncing a rubber ball off the ceiling to practice depth perception) and therefore would have a Disability Alibi for the murder. He tests this theory by opening the door to the interrogation room and throwing an orange into Nardan's face from his blind side to see if Nardan reacts.
Sherlock: Victor Nardan, think fast!
Nardan: Ow!
Sherlock: (to the detectives) This man is innocent.
Nardan: Why he hit me? - How I Met Your Mother: At the end of "Slap Bet", Lily as "Slap Bet Commissioner" declares that Marshall will get five slaps to give to Barney at any time he chooses. Marshall then motions to slap Barney, who flinches. Marshall smiles as he says, "This is gonna be fun."
- The Librarians: Prospero has entered an interdimensional forest accessed through the Library where every tree represents some abstract concept. Prospero is looking to make a magical staff using the Tree of Knowledge. Flynn is determined to stop him, and Prospero has been deprived of his magical aid to tell him which tree is the correct one. So he lunges, causing Flynn to move protectively towards one tree. Prospero smugly notes that Flynn just revealed the Tree of Knowledge to him. Before he can take one of its branches as a staff, though, Flynn uses Zeus's lightning bolt to destroy the tree, and Prospero retreats, empty-handed. Ultimately a subversion, as Flynn knew he could fake out Prospero, and deliberately moved to an old tall tree to trick him, when the Tree of Knowledge is a perpetual sapling, always young and growing. Flynn notes to Baird that he doesn't know WHICH tree he did destroy, and they both agree they won't tell Jenkins.
Radio
- Star Wars Radio Dramas: The adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back repeats the gag from the film where Lando Calrissian fakes like he's going to punch Han and then gives him a bear hug, with Lando saying afterwards, "I just wanted to see if you could still duck as fast as you used to!"
Toys
- G.I. Joe: Ace Pilot Wild Weasel got his name from pulling off this sort of mission, where a pilot would deliberately expose himself to enemy anti-aircraft fire so that their location could be identified for follow up attacks. His reputation was made by his skill at performing such missions in just about any sort of aircraft imaginable, skillfully evading enemy fire no matter how unexpected and being so good at distracting them they didn't have time to respond when Wild Weasel's backup arrived to bombard them.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy XIV: At the end of the second Lancer quest, you walk in on a confrontation between the guildmaster and a Duskwight who seems to have a vendetta against the guild. The Duskwight promptly turns his focus towards you and charges spear-first, stopping just before he would have struck, while you don't even flinch. Afterwards, the guildmaster calls you out for not having made any move to defend yourself, but the display convinces the Duskwight that you're worthy of his "tutelage", whether you want it or not.
Web Animation
- Dorkly Originals: In "What Human Fights Look Like in the Pokemon World", Skylar pretends to punch Jeremy, only to pull back at the last moment, making Jeremy recoil. Skylar laughs at him for flinching.
Western Animation
- Family Guy: In "Patriot Games", Stewie agrees to give Brian one free punch as payback for the No Holds Barred Beatdowns he gave Brian earlier in the episode. Brian responds on several occasions by raising his fist as though he's about to hit Stewie but is only doing it to watch Stewie cringe in fear and become ever more paranoid about when Brian is actually going to hit him or what Brian will do.
Real Life
- Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD)
, nicknamed Wild Weasel in the US Air Force, is an air mission profile wherein aircraft are designated to identify, suppress and destroy enemy air defenses. The original Wild Weasels were first utilized during The Vietnam War when Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) began to be used against American aircraft, and would deliberately try to provoke SAM sites to fire on them so they could be located and destroyed by other aircraft. The Wild Weasel unit suffered atrocious attrition rates due to the level of danger involved (since by the time a missile launch was detected it was often too late to take evasive action). Modern SEAD aircraft are instead equipped with advanced radar tracking technology, which allows them to track radar waves back to their source and then destroy it with on-board air-to-surface weaponry.
