I get it, it's a trope, but I'm honestly tired of seeing this come up time and time again.

Full disclosure, I'm not saying that people are wrong to use this argument to explain inconsistent low showings: it's perfectly legitimate. But by WWW standards, we judge by consistency, and consistent low showings means they stop being low showings, they become average.

Whether this is a product of stupidity on the part of the writer, or they are in fact "holding back", I'm sick of it. Either the trope is overused, or butthurt fans can't handle some antifeats here and there, and it's something that I find deplorable in a discussion.

Like dude, if your guy was holding back, and that's like the one time this has happened out of 10 times he hasn't, you shouldn't even need to use that as the crux of your argument, you can just point to whatever they are consistently proven to do, and your opposition should have the common sense to go "Oh! I see." (Maybe I'm asking too much there, don't know)

Conversely, the argument that a character is magically treated as stronger than they have shown to be just because they weren't using their full effort is garbage. Your theoretical nonsense that hinge on the character putting in more effort than they ever do carry no weight in a WWW discussion. If that's your fallback, choose better characters to discuss lmao