Heavier than It Looks - TV Tropes (2024)

Ling: Did you notice their footprints? Back when we were all fighting in the forest?
Ed: What's your point?
Ling: Just that they're freakishly heavy for the size of their body. They might be a bit bigger than they look...

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Invoked in Chapter 67. Kusuri uses a drug on herself to make herself a lot heavier without getting bigger in order to get an edge over Rentarou in the sumo wrestling tournament. Unfortunately for her, the floor buckles under her new weight and she fell through.
• Bleach: Invoked by Izuru Kira's Zanpakuto, Wabisuke. Its Shikai ability causes the weight of anything it strikes to double. This effect can continue indefinitely, allowing him to make his opponent's weapons or bodies exponentially heavier until they're unable to move despite having no visible increase in mass or size. He can also use this ability on himself to crush others under his increased weight.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Many characters, such as Goku and Piccolo, wear clothes that appear to be normal at first glance but are in fact heavily weighted. For instance, Goku wears a weighted undershirt, boots, and wristbands that total up to 250 pounds of resistance despite walking around as though he were wearing a normal martial artist's gi.
  • King Kai's planet has ten times more gravity than Earth. Goku first sees this when an apple falls from the tree: it fell so quickly and with so much force that it looked more like a cannonball than an apple.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Envy's preferred form is slender. However, since they avert Shapeshifter Baggage and their true form is massive, they are heavy enough to crush an iron fence just by landing on it.
• Kengan Ashura: Due to having a rare condition, Wakatsuki has muscle fibers 52 times denser than average. At birth, he weighted 4 times the average despite looking like a normal baby. As an adult, he weighs 193 kg, much more than fighters with similar build as him.
• In Naruto, Might Guy and Rock Lee espouse the use of Imposed Handicap Training to improve their physical strength since they specialize in taijutsu. When Rock Lee faces off against Gaara, Temari scoffs at the idea that taking up some ankle weights would let Lee outpace Gaara's sand. It's not until the weights hit the floor with a thunderous crash does Temari realize what kind of weight Lee has been carrying around.
• One Piece: Invoked three times.
  • Mikita / Miss Valentine ate the Kilo-Kilo Fruit, allowing her to change her weight however she pleases. She can weigh anywhere between 1 kg to 10 tons without changing her figure at all. So she can play this trope straight and invert it.
  • Machvise ate the Ton-Ton Fruit, allowing him to increase his weight to 10,000 tons. While he's already a Fat Bastard, he can still be much heavier than he appears possible.
  • Admiral Fujitora / Issho ate the Zushi Zushi no Mi (Press-Press Fruit), making him a Gravity Master. His most basic use of this ability is to squash people by increasing the force of gravity on them.
• Ranma ½:
  • When Ryōga confronts Ranma on the Fūrinkan High School grounds, he launches his umbrella at Ranma. Ranma easily dodges it, and it ends up on the ball field. One boy tries to pick up Ryōga's umbrella, but can't budge it. Akane tries, and though she succeeds, she needs both hands and all her strength to lift it. She remarks in awe that Ryōga wields it with just one arm like an ordinary umbrella.
  • In the OVA episode featuring the Phoenix, Akane, one of the more petite girls in the series, falls from the sky and is caught by Shampoo. Shampoo is super strong, frequently walking through walls because doors are inconvenient and capable of shattering boulders with her chúi. So it's telling when Akane lands on her and Shampoo looks pained and says "Akane, when you get so heavy?", and Akane can only look sheepish.

• The Atom: The second and third characters to bear the name have full control over their size and density, allowing them to appear quite small, yet be as heavy as they would be at full size.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
  • In an old Huey, Dewey, and Louie: Junior Woodchucks comic, after dealing with the Beagle Boys cheating at marbles once too often, the nephews trick them with a marble-sized ball that is actually the remains of a star, helping them win a game of marbles.
  • The Omnisolve, introduced in Don Rosa's The Universal Solvent, is a substance that destroys almost anything it touches by sucking it in and crushing it into an impossibly dense form. When Gyro dumps a ton of scrap metal into the solvent, it gets turned into a small pile of dust that still weighs a ton. At the end of the story, Scrooge acquires a bunch of diamonds from the Earth's core but discovers that said diamonds are also extremely heavy and dense, making them highly impractical to use as jewelry.
• In the French comic L'Imploseur (the Imploder), the titular hitman meets a client, an athletic man meditating on a foam mattress. The first thing the client asks is to guess his weight. The Imploder looks at the mat and sees it's abnormally compressed, and gives a number that would be better suited to a healthy cow. The client congratulates him and peels off the Latex Perfection bodysuit, revealing he's a Fat Bastard easily twice the width of his disguise.
• The Mighty Thor: Thor's signature Thunder Hammer, Mjölnir, is enchanted so that only the worthy may wield it and gain Thor's powers. Anyone who isn't worthy will find it impossibly heavy to lift despite its comparatively small size. Even discounting the enchantment, the hammer's huge head relative to its small handle means that it's rarely wielded by anyone without superhuman strength. A trading card from 1991 puts its weight at 42.3 pounds, akin to swinging around a medium-sized dog. Of course, as it grants anyone it deems worthy the power of Thor, which includes considerable Super-Strength, its weight is never a problem for its wielder.
• O.M.A.C.: In "The Ocean Stealers", OMAC is investigating the sudden disappearance of a lake, when he finds a small cube sinking into the sediment. He tries to pick it up, but discovers it somehow weighs as much as a battleship and struggles even after his strength is increased tenfold by Brother Eye. It's later revealed that the mysterious object was one of Doctor Skuba's inventions, a bar that compresses and stores water molecules, meaning OMAC was trying to carry the entire weight of the vanished lake.
• Power Pack: The Mass Master powerset allows its user to increase their density while retaining their mass. This causes the user to shrink down to the size of an insect but still be as heavy as a human child is expected to be.
• Superman: In All-Star Superman, Superman replaces the enormous key to the Fortress of Solitude with a seemingly normal house key. Lois is incredulous, so Superman invites her to try to pick it up. When she fails, he informs her that it was forged from dwarf star material, weighing a whopping half a million tons. This means that only Superman or someone as strong as him would be capable of entering the fortress.

• A Pro-Christian Cartoon depicts Mr. Incredible, Goku, Mighty Mouse and The Incredible Hulk attempting to, and failing, to lift the cross that Jesus was crucified on. Jesus stands by, commenting "It's heavy, huh?"

• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Adamantine is an inversion. It's much lighter than its equivalent iron, with an adamantine dagger being able to float on water. This lightness comes from its source material, Dwarf Fortress.

• Die Hard with a Vengeance: After Detective John McClane and Zeus Carver discover the real motive behind the subway bombing was to break into the New York gold depository, they begin to pursue the fugitives. But first, Zeus helps himself to a gold brick that was left behind. Though he's no softie, Zeus needs both hands to lug that gold brick around.

  John: Put that down.

• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines: After the T-850 gets knocked out by the T-X, the firefighters who show up to put out the fire caused by their fight, they try to lift the T-850, thinking he's just an unconscious big guy. As they struggle to lift him, one of them notes that "this guy weighs a ton," which is when the T-850 gets up and goes after the T-X in order to protect Jon and Sarah.
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine: It doesn't show from the surface, but the metal bonded to Wolverine's skeleton is heavy enough to strain a motorcycle's suspension when he sits down, surprising the owner.

  Wolverine: Yeah, I put on a little weight recently.

• The Great Divorce: Objects in Heaven weigh a lot more than the narrator and the other visitors expect because they are that much more real. Exerting all his strength, the narrator can barely lift a fallen leaf.
• In The Hammer, Tiny's Mana Body technique creates a phantom image of his own body that's overlaid with his real one just beneath the skin. This Mana Body is much heavier than his actual one and is responsible for his inhuman strength. A Mook trying to lift Tiny into the air only manages to tear Tiny's shirt from the effort.
• In I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too, the World Striker hammer feels like an ordinary mallet in Yuuya's hands. But anything on the receiving end is struck with a mass equivalent to an entire planet. When Yuuya first uses this against a monster, there's absolutely nothing left of the monster as it was annihilated by the sheer force of such a hit.
• Judge Dee: In "The Chinese Nail Murders", Ma Jong and Chiao Tai encounter the boxing master Lan performing his exercise regimen with a wooden ball a foot wide, running it the length of his outstretched arms, tossing it in the air and catching it just before it hits the ground, etc. Lan then tosses it to Ma Jong, who fumbles it as the "wooden" ball is actually made of solid iron.
• Lensman: Upon their spaceship being pulled into hyperspace by the Overlords and the passengers chained down to be tortured, Kinnison tries to seize a nearby club to fight back, but it moves as if he's dragging it through putty — then doesn't stop when he lets go. He ends up taking a small scalpel that proves to be "as massive as a dozen broadswords" and wreaks havoc with that. His Valerian companion tries to wield a larger weapon but gives up when it's like trying to pick up a bridge girder. Investigating in the aftermath, it turns out that regular materials are effectively insubstantial when interacting with matter that has been rotated almost entirely out of space, and so a special super-dense metal that's solid to both was invented by the Overlords for their tools.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Daenerys Targaryen receives three dragon eggs as a wedding gift from Magister Illyrio Mopatis. When she lifts one up, she expects it to be made of "fine porcelain or delicate enamel or even blown glass," but it is far heavier, as if it's solid stone.
• The Steerswoman: Even small dragons are stated to be much heavier than they look by William when he and Rowan need to reposition one to serve as a distraction for the wizard who controls them. This is because they aren't reptilian creatures at all, but robots made to resemble dragons.
• Downplayed in Sword Art Online. Kazuto describes his cousin Suguha as being "monstrously muscular" and a lot heavier than she looks when she's wearing her baggy school uniform. While he undercuts this in his narration by claiming to be exaggerating, the third-person narration does describe her as big-boned and strong from her kendo training.
• Wax and Wayne: Zig-zagged by the protagonist Wax and others with the feruchemical power of iron — they can store their weight, becoming lighter or outright weightless, and draw on it later to become vastly heavier. Wax habitually stores 25% of his weight, so he has a lot available to unleash at once when he wants to cannonball through a floor.

• Blake's 7: In Orbit, Avon and Vila find the shuttle they're on board has become too heavy to achieve escape velocity, and will crash unless it can be lightened. Avon eventually finds a small plastic cube that weighs several hundred kilos, and realises it contains a fragment of a neutron star that is weighing them down. Unfortunately, he has to move it on his own, as his previously planned method of lightening the load has scared Vila into hiding.
• The Crystal Maze: Many "physical games" are categorised as such because the contestant has to lift heavy objects, and the weight is not always apparent on-screen, until the contestant strains to move it. If a contestant is strong and lifts it effortlessly, the host often comments on the weight, for the benefit of the viewer.
• Doctor Who: While investigating "The Devil's Hump" (a supposed Iron Age burial mound outside the town of Devil's End) in "The Daemons", Jo and the Doctor come across what looks like a toy spaceship. However, when the Doctor asks Jo to pick it up, she discovers she can't even move it an inch, confirming the Doctor's suspicion it is a genuine article, only miniaturised for storage, thus meaning the supposed mound is really the resting place for its owner.
• Mr. Bean: In "Merry Christmas, Mr Bean", Mr Bean confiscates jewelry and money stolen by a young pickpocket, and places them in a charity bucket. He then hands the bucket over to the leader of a band, who almost drops it, as it is much heavier than he expects.
• Night Court: Bull Shannon has a huge degree of strength, though how exaggerated is often Depending on the Writer. At the start of season 3 Christine goes up to the roof to talk to a despondent Bull after Flo dies. She faints when she thinks Bull either fell or jumped off the roof, so he carries her to Harry's office, telling Harry, "Move! She's not as light as she looks!"
• Odd Squad: The Shapeshifter has the ability to shapeshift into anyone or anything. The one flaw in her transformation is her inability to change her weight to match that of the object or person she's turning into. This is how Olive and Otto manage to find her in "The Briefcase", with Otto attempting to lift a gum wrapper that is sitting on the ground and finding out that it's much heavier than a gum wrapper should be.

• Namine Ritsu of UTAU looks like a roughly 5'5'' woman, but he officially weighs 25 tons due to the missiles on his chest.

• In Norse Mythology, Thor was challenged by Útgarða-Loki to lift a cat off the floor. He was barely able to do so, only lifting it a few inches off the ground; however, it turned out that the cat was the world-serpent in disguise, and he had lifted it so high that its back grazed the sky.

• Pathfinder 2nd Edition: The Stone of Weight is a Cursed Item used to catch thieves. It looks and feels like a precious gemstone, but after one minute in a thief's possession, it fuses to the thief and becomes as heavy as a full set of plate armor. Since thieves seldom have high Strength, the burden likely forces them to drop most of their other ill-gotten gains just to escape.

• Dwarf Fortress:
  • Slade is the supernatural rock that forms the caverns of Hell and related structures, and it is the heaviest material in the game by far. A standard boulder of the material weighs twenty metric tons, where a granite boulder of the same size (for reference) would only weigh around a quarter-ton. This may explain why it's impossible to mine outside exploits.
  • Inverted with Adamantine, a much more useful material that can actually be worked, if you dare provoke what lies behind its ore. The actual metal is fantastically hard and durable, and can be sharpened to blades capable cutting through steel even in unskilled hands... but it's also about as light as styrofoam. This poses some problems, as adamantine armor isn't the Armor of Invincibility it should be when standing against blunt weapons, and adamantine hammers and maces are hilariously useless.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: The traitorous head of the Cheydinhal Mages Guild sends you to retrieve a magic ring from a well. It turns out to be enchanted^note to weigh as much as a suit of heavy armor — a deathtrap that drowned the last apprentice he gave the job to.
• In Fate/Grand Order, Koyanskaya's Saint Graph weighs a whopping 100,000 tons despite being the size of an average adult woman. She somehow doesn't crush the ground she walks upon, though Servants are known for defying the laws of physics on the regular.
• Pokémon:
  • According to their Pokédex entries, many Pokémon are much heavier than they look. For instance, Larvitar is about the size of a small dog but weighs 72 kg (158.7 lbs)! The anime doesn't seem to take this into account, as Ash is able to carry Larvitar without much effort.
  • Both Aron and Lairon are 1'04 and 2'11 respectively, but weigh 60 kg (132.3 lbs) and 120 kg (264.6 lbs). This likely has to do with their steel armor skin.
  • Beldum is 2 feet long, yet it weighs 95.2 kg (209.9 lbs). It being Psychic and having the ability to float likely helps with this.
  • Munchlax, despite being 2 feet tall weighs 105 kg (231.5 lbs). The anime also doesn’t take this into account, as Max, a 7-year-old boy, carried May's on his back with ease.
  • Hippopotas is 2'07 long yet it weighs 49.5 kg (109.1 lbs). This is especially egregious in the anime where Ash actually has one ride on his head without serious injury.
  • Bronzor is only 1'08, but it weighs 60.5 kg (133.4 lbs). Shieldon are the same height but weigh 57 kg (125.7 lbs).
  • Despite being only four inches tall, Cosmoem is a whopping 1,000 kg (2,204.4 pounds)! Despite this, Lillie can easily carry it in her bag. That fact that it floats likely has something to do with it.
• : In " Bright Side of the Moon", Slothful Max is revealed to be much heavier than the original Max as Sam cannot pick or turn him up (Sam easily can use original Max as a bludgeon) and the player must buy Bosco's gadget to do the latter.

  Sam: Hm. He's heavier than he looks.
  Max: Aren't we all?

• In Red vs. Blue, Andy the bomb is about the size of a bowling ball, but only Caboose is strong enough to lift him.
• Played for Laughs in the Real-Time Fandub of Sonic the Hedgehog. When Sonic has to carry Elise to safety from robots in the sky, he bluntly comments that she's heavy. Later, when Shadow and Silver travel to the past, Silver has to carry Elise as an 11-year-old girl and he also comments that she's heavy, but he's also the least strong of the three hedgehogs so he's in agony carrying her.

• The God of High School: Yeoui, the size- and weight-changing staff of the Monkey King, is potentially even heavier than it is in the myths. Heavy enough to shatter the ground even when set down carefully, heavy enough to tear the arms off of the self-titled strongest god Uriel when she tries to catch it. Most of the time, though, it's just the size of a regular bo staff, and can shrink even further, even small enough to hide in Mori's ear.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: The Ambiguously Human Jones sinks like a rock in water and walks unimpeded along the lake bed. It's unclear what her body is made of, but it's indestructible and opaque to all scanners.

  Reynardine: She's always been a little touchy about her weight.

• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: Snooku*ms the tentacle bunny used to be an outright Kaiju, but once dropped on earth environmental conditions caused him to shrink to the size of a basketball while keeping the exact same mass. Thus, a thing the size and shape of a somewhat large rabbit shakes the earth with every hop.
• True Villains: The Dance Battler Cecile wields a custom longsword that looks normal but weighs almost as much as a human — she's used to throwing a dance partner around, so she plays to her strengths. Grey is unpleasantly surprised when he tries to steal it from her.

  Cecile: (That, and I had it enchanted to be heavier for anyone holding it who isn't me, but that's beside the point.)

• SCP Foundation: SCP-115-1 is a remote-controlled toy dump truck that has the properties of a real dump truck; it weighs 90 tons, can carry or tow roughly 120 tons of cargo, and somehow needs diesel fuel to run.

• Multiverse Tales: In "The Kaiju Slayer", we're officially introduced to Sterling Engeal and Alexis Jones, a couple of retired demon hunters turned superheroes. Sterling can coat his body in organic silver armour or create weapons from it, in addition to shooting fire out of his palms to enable him to fly. Alexis, meanwhile, can magnetically attract stones and minerals to her body, and because of this, she has the Required Secondary Powers of enhanced strength and durability, despite her small size. This means that, when Sterling tries flying into the air whilst carrying her on his back, he initially takes off in a clumsy way and spirals through the air under her weight.

  Alexis: Whoa! How rusty are you?
  Sterling: It's not my fault you're like 300 pounds, despite being two feet tall!
  Alexis: [gives him a playful slap] Five foot two! And I'm 160 pounds of pure muscle!

• Futurama:
  • Nibbler, a diminutive alien, is able to consume massive amounts of live food and excretes it as a ball of dark matter about the size of a marble. The dark matter is so dense and heavy that Bender, a robot able to bend steel girders with his bare hands, can barely budge it. Fry even gets fined by the local police for failing to scoop up the dark matter in public despite them watching him actively trying to do so.

    Fry: I'm trying! It weighs as much as ten thousand suns!

  • In "Brannigan, Begin Again", the Planet Express crew has to bring pillows to a guy on a planet with high gravity. Due to the high gravity, the pillows are absurdly heavy despite being, well, pillows.
• Teen Titans: Kole is a small teenage girl who can transform into an incredibly heavy crystalline statue.

• Heavy metals are incredibly, shockingly dense; it's common for people to fail to realise just how much, for example, gold weighs; a gold bar that looks like it could be picked up in one hand weighs 12.5 kg (28 lbs), about as much as a poodle! For this reason, a common prank among gold miners is to tell a new miner that if they can pick up a piece of gold from a table with one hand and walk out with it, they can have it. Between its smoothness and this trope, it's a complete Impossible Task.
• Downplayed cases can be the source of workplace injuries (even if the injury is as minor as pulling or spraining a muscle), especially in retail where a box full of items may be small, but it can potentially be far heavier than it appears depending on what's inside. Workplaces that value the health of their workers will typically advise to test the weight of an item before trying to lift so the worker in question isn't taken off-guard by this trope.
• Mercury is the smallest of the Solar System planets with a diameter of 4,879 km and 5% the mass of the Earth. Yet, despite its small size, Mercury's gravity is about the same as Mars (0.38 g), even though the latter is larger (6,779 km) and 5% more massive (10% the mass of the Earth). The reason why Mercury is heavier than it looks is because it's very dense with an unusually large iron core compared to the other inner planets, and in fact, is the second-densest planet in the Solar System after the Earth with a density of 5.4 g/cm3. This density is what gives Mercury its strong gravitational pull relative to its mass.
• A famous psychological experiment relies on this trope to work. A person is first asked to lift some light object, like a hollow dumbbell. They do so easily. They are then asked to do it again; they fumble, and find it incredibly difficult to get a grip. Unbeknown to them, the experimenter had filled the object with ballasts, for example sand, while the subject's back was turned. The person's expectation of lightness was thrown off, preventing them from applying the correct amount of force to lift it. This demonstrates how a person's muscle strength is driven up or down by what the brain expects it to need.
• Paradoxically, neutron stars are among the smallest and heaviest known non-black hole celestial objects in the known universe. To use our own Earth and Sun for comparison, the Earth has a radius of about 3,959 miles while the Sun's is about 432,450 miles. This means their radii are, respectively, more than 600 and 72,000 times greater than that of the mere 6-mile to 20-mile radius most observed neutron stars have. However, most neutron stars weigh about 1.35 solar masses, which in layman's terms means they are nearly one and a half times heavier than the Sun, and almost half a million times heavier than the Earth. Where the justification comes in, is that neutron stars are the remains of the collapsed cores of supergiant stars, which can be a hundred times bigger than our Sun, that were not quite massive enough to become black holes when they died.