Almighty Janitor - TV Tropes

"In the unlikely event I ever become president of a company, my first order of business will be to promote the janitor to executive vice president. Then I'll call him into my office and say: 'All right, Herb, I want you to tell me what's going on in the company. Care for a drink before we begin? I think I have a bottle of Scotch around here someplace.'

'Lower left drawer of your desk,' Herb will reply, 'Right behind your box of El Puffo cigars, which, I might add, are excellent.'"

• Charlie, the seemingly omniscient farmer mascot for Farm Bureau Insurance. Everyone from heads of state and industry to surgeons call Charlie for advice because "everybody knows farmers have some of the best advice."

• Kyle Kinane on the stereotypical wise high school janitor:

  "I know a little something about love, young man. Come sit in the closet with me."

• Parodied in Chris Rock's comedy special Never Scared:

  Chris: You know the stripper myth? There's a stripper myth that's being perpetuated throughout society. The myth is, I'm strippin' to pay my tuition. No, you're not! There's no strippers in college! There's no clear heels in biology! Shit, man, I didn't know they had a college that only took one-dollar bills. And if they got so many strippers at college, how come I never got a smart lap dance? I never got a girl that sat on my lap and said, "If I was you, I would diversify my portfolio.", "You know, ever since the end of the Cold War, I find NATO obsolete!".

• Brian Bryan from Azrael. The main character's smelly homeless friend was capable of much wisdom, having been a psychiatrist in his former "life."
• Deadpool: Gerry, the title character's old, foul-smelling, homeless friend, is actually the former head of a galactic corporation and spends a considerable amount of time pulling strings.
• Inspector Ginko in Diabolik is a police inspector, but, thanks to his formidable skills as a cop and being the only one who can reliably keep Diabolik in check, he has authority far exceeding his rank (the police effectively treats him as a commissioner, and whenever he's replaced for some reason the temporary replacement always holds that rank) and reports directly to the Minister of Justice.
• Doctor Mid-Nite (1999): Officially, Dr. Pieter Anton Cross no longer works as a surgeon. However, the FDA regularly employs his services, almost everyone in Portsmouth’s police force owes him a favour and he is very well-regarded in most hospitals.
• The Enemy Ace story War in Heaven has Ubben, the head of the maintenance unit, whose job is to make sure that the squadron's Me-262s are kept flying. At the end, he tells von Hammer that despite shortages of fuel, ammunition, and spare parts, "If you want 'em to fly, Herr Oberst, say so. And by God, I'll make 'em fly." Downplayed by Von Hammer, who gives him a wine bottle he salvaged from a B-17 he shot down and orders Ubben to get drunk.
• Exaggerated by "Jack" a bartender at a place frequented by The Eternals. He's actually the Fulcrum, a being of godlike power who is second only to The One Above All, Marvel's version of the Man Upstairs Himself. (Clearly a Homage to Jack Kirby.)
• In an issue of Gargoyles first comic run, Xanatos meets with various members of the Illuminati. The group is arranged in numerical ranking: Each ranked number shares that rank with an equal number of members. David Xanatos, billionaire industrialist (and the man whose brand of scheming has a trope named in his name here at TV Tropes), is the lowest-ranked member at 36 out of 36. His errand takes him to the White House, where he meets an old butler. This old man, who is the head butler at the White House and who's served presidents since Lyndon Johnson, is ranked 2.
• Judge Dredd is just a single street judge (beat cop) in a police force that has thousands of officers and patrols the entire Eastern Seaboard of the continental U.S., albeit one with an incredible amount of seniority, as most of his contemporaries are either dead, retired or disgraced. Nevertheless, he is usually put in charge in times of crisis, and frequently gets his way when the Justice Department needs to make a decision. This is partially because most of the upper echelons are his old comrades and proteges, and partially because the leadership is well aware that his reputation is a huge morale booster, and plays a large part in keeping Mega City One's absurdly high crime rate to barely manageable levels, so they avoid doing anything that would piss him off enough to quit. In fact, when he once did quit, they tried to replace him with Judge Kraken, a clone from the same genetic stock as him, who quickly became possessed by dark powers and almost destroyed the city.
• Stick from Marvel certainly looks like a janitor, but he's the superhuman sensei who trained Daredevil and Elektra. And briefly trained Wolverine as well, when Wolvie was in a period of mental degradation.
• Invoked repeatedly by Dr. Wily in Archie's Mega Man (Archie Comics) comics. To the world, Mega Man is a mighty hero built by the father of modern robotics, but to Wily, he's a lackey, a gofer, a floor and toilet scrubber who was remodeled into a knockoff combat robot and then flaunted around like he's special and unique. The idea that such a cheap piece of machinery is able to foil a genius like him time and again is outrageous to him. It's hard to tell to what extent he believes this, though, as he'll quietly acknowledge Dr. Light's brilliance at times, then lapse into this mindset when his latest plan is falling apart.
• New Avengers: The nanny hired by Luke Cage and Jessica Jones to look after their daughter has also been known to defeat Physical Gods in single combat and has repeatedly demonstrated competence far surpassing anyone else on the team, but she's still the one best suited for the job.
• In the Hawaii issues of the comic Ninja High School the janitor was, while not the best fighter, definitely a formidable combatant and stronger than the main character, a very skilled ninja herself, for quite a while.
• In Paperinik New Adventures, Donald Duck has a simple job as errand boy at Channel 00 at the Ducklair Tower, which also has a secret floor that acts as a secret HQ for his superhero identity, Paperinik. Also Ziggy, one of his coworker, has the training of a PBI (the equivalent of the FBI) agent.
• Spider-Man: Peter Parker is a freelance photographer that struggles to pay rent. He's also the Amazing Spider-Man, and has saved New York City on several occasions.
• Star Wars: Ewoks: In his Backstory, Koyotta foresaw the destruction of the Death Star and used fake requisitions and other bureaucratic conniving to amass a massive hidden weapons cache for a rainy day before escaping off Endor disguised as a general, all while still a simple maintenance technician. As a general commanding a combat force, he is less impressive.
• Superman: Clark Kent is a pretty good reporter and by all appearances nothing else. But when he or a friend or a planet or a universe or a multiverse is placed in danger he cuts loose and reveals (to the reader) that he's the alternate identity of Superman. He's one of the most well known examples of this trope. (But "pretty good reporter" varies, Depending on the Writer. Clark Kent has at times been a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and bestselling author (under an alias). Then the next writer comes around, and he's dragged back down.)
• X-Men's Toad is another Marvel example since his employment as the janitor/grounds keeper of the Jean Grey School for Gifted Youngsters. Despite never being a true A-list villain (or hero on occasion), his abilities and years of experience should warrant a higher position. Although considering the students are superpowered mutants, the school grounds are a semi-sentient living island, and the school is frequently reduced to rubble due to superhuman brawls, his position as janitor might be more appropriate than first appearances suggest. Especially after we see how much the other X-Men struggled when he temporarily left.

• Dilbert:
  • Dilbert's garbageman, who ranks as the "World's Smartest Garbageman" and possibly World's Smartest Man. He's a Gadgeteer Genius who can create a perpetual motion machine without any real effort, among other amazing feats including bringing Dilbert Back from the Dead. Scott Adams has stated that if we can't understand why the world's smartest man is a garbageman, that is because we are not the world's smartest man.
  • In one strip, Alice complains to the Pointy-Haired Boss that the janitor makes more per hour than she does. The janitor then walks by holding a toilet plunger with a horrible creature stuck to it. Alice says, "I love my job," while the Pointy-Haired Boss says, "I'm giving him a raise," both with wide, terrified eyes.
  • Another strip goes into the mechanics of why the janitor gets paid more than the engineers. The company demands that everybody work 70 hours a week, but the engineers are salaried while the janitors are paid by the hour and get overtime pay. Although since there isn't really enough work to keep them busy that long, the janitor spends most of his time hiding with a magazine.
• The title character in the comic strip Frazz is an elementary school janitor who's smarter and more erudite than some of the teachers, and possibly the school principal. He's also a songwriter who gets at least a meaningful amount of royalties — it's somewhat implied he may not even actually need a day job, let alone as a janitor. At one point, when asked if he would be fired for helping with a prank, he countered that he's the only one who can unjam the copier.

• A.S.U.L.: In this Alternate Timeline, Uta is now a Marine Inspector whose main duties are to investigate Marine bases for compliance of duties and corruption. However, she still posses the Sing-Sing Fruit, which, when used in a stealthy manor, allowed her to entrance Blackbeard and his crew long enough for the Marines to bind them with sea-stone cuffs.
• Bargain, Don't Beg: Taylor Hebert's father Danny is a member of the Dockworker's Union, and served as its leader previously. Within the union itself, it's mentioned that if a leader of the Union gives/receives an order, everyone, up to the current leader, looks to Mr. Herbert for approval before fulfilling it. Outside the Dockworker's Union, they have connections to every other union in Brockton Bay (after they banded together for mutual support) and the Mayor's Office. So when Taylor's school refuses to take action against her assailants, suddenly all the school's janitors stop working, the food is barely edible, and everything starts breaking repeatedly. When the PRT foolishly tries to stop the police from taking action on the locker incident case and bury it, the unions focus their wrath on them... including the police officer's union. A group of mostly blue collar workers and bureaucrats manage to bring the city to a near standstill and change many PRT policies on a national level, at the direction of a retired union leader pursuing justice for his daughter.
• A Bat's New Bird: Despite being the wealthiest family in Gotham (and secretly the nigh-unstoppable Bat family), most of the adult family members have mundane jobs: Diana is a museum curator, Dick is a high school teacher, Barbara is a librarian, Donna's a photographer, and Alfred is a butler who once served with MI6.
• The Clockwork Consequence: Rarity is a tailor serving under Nightmare Moon and Nightmare's most highest-ranking and loyal Dragon.
• Coby's Choice:
  • Nami's official position on the Straw Hats is Navigator, but in day-to-day sailing, the rest of the crew — including Luffy and Zoro, who as the Captain and the First Mate should theoretically outrank her — defer to her guidance. She also carries a lot of influence by being Luffy's girlfriend, and later lover, then wife, which results in Luffy listening to her opinion on a lot of topics.
  • Coby's official position on the Straw Hats is Cabin Boy. In theory, he has no influence, but in practice, his morality guides the decision making of his crewmates, which results in Zoro attacking and killing a World Noble because they're scum and Luffy desiring to one day raid Mariejois to free the slaves.
• Dekiru: The Fusion Hero!: According to All Might, Nana Shimura, despite being the strongest hero of her era, never came close to breaking the top one hundred in hero rankings. Before All Might, none of the One For All users were ever close to high in the rankings since being the best was trivial compared to protecting others. All Might himself only bothered with becoming the Number One hero because it better allowed him to spread hope to the common citizen and inspire dread in the common criminal, reducing crime rates and thus, theoretically, saving even more people.
• Dreaming of Sunshine:
  • A delayed trope with Shikako, who remains a genin after Tsunade's instatement. She was nearly promoted for her deductive abilities and leadership, but not all of her skills are significantly removed from the average expected from a genin. Later on, as she grinds levels, that changes. She also gains a truly ridiculous mission record.
  • Later lampshaded by Tsunade and the Raikage during the Kusa Chuunin exams with regards to Shikako. "S-RANK?"
• Naruto for a brief period in A Drop of Poison was on par with most Special Jonin while only an academy student. He was promoted to Genin rather than Chunin because Sarutobi "doesn't want another Itachi."
• Forum of Thrones:
  • Harrick Hoare is the fourth-born son of Harren Hoare and with Harndon being declared unfit to rule, he is only the third in line of the throne, which makes it unlikely he will ever be king. He is also without a doubt the most reasonable and competent of his family and serves as his father's chief advisor.
  • Maron Mullendore is a minor nobleman from a relatively poor background. Though the commander of the city guard of Oldtown, his position is ultimately minor in the grand scale of things. Nonetheless, his plans concern the entire kingdom of the Reach and he is cunning enough to actually pull them off.
• In Fractured (SovereignGFC) and its sequel Origins, Samantha Shepard takes this role (as in canon) — being given command of advanced warships, sent on impossible missions, and granted near-unquestionable authority despite still holding the rank of "Commander." She finally receives a promotion to Captain in Frontier and is given command of a Star Dreadnaught called the "Star Shepherd."
• Ichigo and Tatsuki in Game and Bleach are far stronger than their levels imply due to Ichigo being the Gamer and having invited Tatsuki to his party. Yoruichi is over two hundred levels higher than Tatsuki, yet except for her charisma and dexterity (which are double and over triple Tatsuki's scores respectively), all of her stats range from slightly lower than Tatsuki's to slightly higher. From what Tatsuki can understand, it's because only people in the party can specifically train stats without leveling up, along with consciously choosing perks that make increasing their stats easier.
• In A Growing Affection, Naruto's mother was a genin, before her death. She was also one of the five best ninjas in the Konohagakure. She died helping Minato seal the Nine-Tails in Naruto, only days after giving birth. She also draws Jonin-level pay, because the Hokage doesn't want their clients exploiting her S-Rank Jonin-level skills for a genin's day rate.
• Harry Potter and the Guardian's Light is a fic whose author considers Argus Filch to be the Ensemble Dark Horse of Harry Potter. It makes sense that somebody who cleans up the messes of young magic wielders would be skilled, this is taken to extremes. As in, he runs a side job out of Hogwarts selling magical fire arms to the likes of John Constantine no less. And when Quirrel sends not just one troll but an army into Hogwarts, when they get beaten back, guess who cocks his gun dramatically and heads off into the forbidden forest to hunt down the survivors?

  Voldemort: [leading an army of trolls into Hogwarts] Orikal, we need to find where Dumbledore hid—
  Filch: [turns the corner and smirks] You have a hall pass?
  Voldemort: Argus Filch, you useless Squib! Still roaming the halls?
  Filch: Kind of in the job description.
  Voldemort: [starts blasting at Filch, who dodges behind the corner] I'll give you one chance to surrender. If you do, I promise you a swift death.
  Filch: [head shots one of the trolls from around the corner] I surrender, now move a little closer!

• Heroic Myth:
  • Bell is officially the Vice-Captain of the Hestia Familia under Gilgamesh, but in reality Gilgamesh is technically subordinate to him as his Servant. That said, Bell is far weaker than his Servants, including Sigurd, Brynhildr, and EMIYA, who are all technically lower-ranked than him.
  • Bell's Servants are all Level 1, but their abilities match or surpass the strongest adventurers in Orario. Even EMIYA, who is known for being Weak, but Skilled among Servants is able to wound Ottar, the single mightiest adventurer in Orario.
• Housemates:
  • The first part of this Thor and Being Human (UK) crossover, "Monsters", involves Loki crash-landing in Bristol, very depressed and damaged, and moving in with Mitchell, George, and Annie. Since he needs to help with the rent and groceries, they find him a job as an elementary-school janitor. The children soon work out he's magic. He animates action figures and things. Loki's always having to point out to the myth-savvy that he's not actually a god, and so Nick Fury has referred to him as the Custodian of Mischief.
  • By the end of the third segment of the series, Loki encounters a field trip from said school, in a zoo, during a pitched battle with alien invaders and pseudo-Nazis, while dressed in the... very villainous-looking hero costume Tony made him for the occasion, and saves the group via actual rhinoceroses before running off to defeat some evil airships. When he comes back to sort them out afterward, the headmistress promises him his job back. (He'd lost it due to being kidnapped by S.H.I.E.L.D. eight weeks previously and thus not turning up for work.) This means that as the fourth fic starts, an action figure of him as the Avengers' "magical consultant" is about to start being produced, and he's working as a school custodian in a building where everyone is fully aware that he's a powerful alien wizard. This removes some of the incognito factor of the trope, but must make the experience of having a clean school one of which the occupants are unusually aware.
• I Am NOT Going Through Puberty Again!: While it is a result of a Peggy Sue, that doesn't change the fact that the four strongest ninja in the village are currently genin. Naruto and Sasuke are especially egregious cases, as they are by far the two strongest ninja alive, period and they never made it to chunin in the main timeline (exactly how this is possible since Naruto became the Hokage isn't made clear).
• Inspected by No.13 is about Harry becoming one of these unwittingly, out of desperation to survive the Triwizard Tournament. It is revealed that the Inspectors are the second most feared branch of the Ministry, only behind the Auditors, despite being fairly low on the payscale, as they're mentioned to only make twice what Arthur Weasley makes, though this is supplemented by a portion of any fines they assess. In Harry's case, he's also receiving payments from the goblins, much to his puzzlement (he does make sure to give the Department of Inspections their cut, though).
• Izuku in It Takes a Child to Teach a Village is a tutor in the slums and later a Quirkless hero course student at UA. He's also perfectly capable of ordering around villains, including Shigaraki, because of the fact he's a tutor. According to Izuku, getting an education in the slums is so difficult that someone who's not only teaching but doing so for free is the most precious resource imaginable. Even sitting by and letting someone else harm Izuku is liable to make entire gangs turn on their leaders.
• Sorta kinda, and then subverted, in The Keys Stand Alone. While Simon Calculon is part of the top tier of the Guardians, he's the low man on the totem pole because he's a mere civilian comptroller. Andro, the leader, jokes about how Simon truly holds the power in the Guardians, but the powered top tier members clearly look down on him. Subverted because much later, Simon is revealed as the telepathic leader of the Guardians, and Andro is just a figurehead (though he doesn’t know it).
• Kingdom Hearts Familia Myth: On paper, Sora is a Level 1 adventurer that has just arrived in Orario and only recently started entering the dungeon. In practice, he retains all his strength and skill from the events of III, which puts him leaps and bounds ahead of all other adventurers, and his experience fighting the Heartless has already given him plenty of practice dealing with a wide variety of monsters. Further reinforcing this status, since all adventurers start out at Level 1 regardless of prior power, this means that any excelia he gets from defeating monsters is so miniscule levelling up isn't even feasible.
• The New Adventures of Invader Zim has Nny. He's a figure of strong enough willpower to not be intimidated by the likes of Norlock, Gaz, or even Miss Bitters, but settles for merely being the Skool's janitor and cleaning up messes. Mind you, a lot of those messes are people he brutally kills for pissing him off, making this a rather dark example of the trope.
• Discussed in the Peggy Sue fic New Chance, where Minato is explaining to Naruto the difference between ninja rank and class (overall skill). He points out future Naruto was this trope since he had a low rank but high class. He also points out that in some cases this trope happens to ninjas this because A) they've never been part of a village (Haku), B) they are stripped of their rank (Zabuza) or C) they are willingly invoking this trope (Han the Jinchuuriki of the Five-Tails).
• It's noted in The New Man: An Adam Smasher SI that the titular character doesn't have any rank within the Arasaka Corporation heirarchy, being just a hired goon on the company's payroll. Unofficially, he has cart blanche to basically do anything he wants so long as it doesn't interfere with his primary objectives and only a handful of people, all but one of them being named Arasaka, can actually order him around. It is known that any suit, no matter how high up they are, is free game for him to kill should they cross him so few would dare to even try.
• In the story A New ROAD of Misfortune, Touma, being a Level 0 as usual, basically doesn't care if he faces espers with levels above him, be that a Level 1 or 5. In the end, he just breaks the illusions of whoever needs it despite their level.
• In Ordinary Girl, Jesse is the janitor's assistant, so she doesn't have the same clearance or parautility as her canon-counterpart. However, she is still able to accomplish things her canon-counterpart could regardless, including ending the Mold infection, rescue the altered items lost in the Investigation Sector, managing to escape Dr. Hartman (something whole swaths of Rangers couldn't do), be the first to realize that the book being read in the FBC book club is a particularly dangerous Altered Item and so on.
• Persona EG: Juan the Janitor has Tier 3 access to the school social network, Canterbook. There turns out to be a very good reason for this. Juan was the designer of a social networking system about a decade back called Project: Wondercolt. Sadly, the students then, as with now, figured out they could use Wondercolt to bully other students. This resulted in suicides and even school shootings, and Wondercolt was taken down. Juan was discredited and his career in networking ruined. Fortunately, Celestia knew it wasn't his fault, and hired him as a janitor and gave him Tier 3 Access to Canterbook.
• Pokeswap: A Tale Of Cosmic Duct Tape: Arceus accidentally shuffles the universe and Dialga precariously puts it back together. As a result, every human and pokemon character except Ash is roleswapped. The various Officers Goh have many different species of partner pokemon. The one in Hophophop Town has an Ultra Necrozma.
• Racer and the Geek brings us Sunny Breeze, who in spite of being an unremarkable ranked member of a bank security team, is the one who gets counted on and inherently trusted with any kind of sensitive matter. Of course, this has a lot to do with his past life as a mercenary and having more combat experience than everybody else on the team put together.
• The Rigel Black Chronicles: Margo is an orphan girl who sells flowers on Diagon Alley and Knockturn Alley. This makes her very easy to overlook or dismiss. It also means that she's able to watch everyone's comings and goings, putting her finger on the pulse of practically all the business going on in the Wizarding world and making her a highly effective informant for the Court of the Rogue. When the Ruse is exposed, it's Margo who spots Harry running through Diagon Alley, recognising her by her distinctive boots and letting the Rogue make the connection from Harry to Rigel. She also turns out to possess a weather-control talent that was believed to have died out.
• Yui is the healer of a minor village in Sanitize, said village being so small it doesn't even have a name. However, Yui remembers her previous life in our world where she was a medical professional of some sort, which gives her greater medical knowledge (the importance of sanitation for example) and a code of healing everyone who comes to her injured or sick. Both her methods and her code not only earn her village the name Chiyuku (healing ward) but also causes both the Senju and Uchiha to keep their battles clear of the village and deal with any undesirables who might threaten it.
• The Case Closed fanfiction Second Wind by Ysabet (the third entry of The Window) adds the janitor Hei-san (his name even in his own POV segments) to the staff roster of Beika Elementary. Though not "almighty" per se, he is a friend of Conan's, acting as a casual informant as well as a supplier of grown-up magazines, and odd things about the school become notable when there's nothing even he can do about them. Then, Conan disappears, and Hei-san's skills become absolutely invaluable in his rescue. Eventually, Conan realises that "Hei-san" is simply a cover for Kaitou KID, who was investigating the story's villain for killing one of Aoko's friends via drugs cut with poison. He had tracked the villain to Conan's school and had been planning to identify them by using the janitor disguise to get close. He even straight-up refers to Hei-san as "Wonder Janitor."
• The Somewhat Cracked Mind Of Uchiha Itachi: Iruka is a jonin-level shinobi but kept putting off a promotion because he already had his dream job: teaching at the academy. A promotion would force him to give that up and go on more missions. He gets promoted anyway after he and Mizuki take down Danzo, and Sarutobi promises him that he can continue teaching if he and Mizuki become therapists for the ROOT kids they just liberated.
• Sonata's Crazy and Wacky Adventure in Skyrim has Sonata Dusk of all people. She is the most powerful Siren, and was even the leader before she got bored and made Adagio the leader instead.
• During the Chunin Exam finals in Son of the Sannin, Naruto, Sasuke, Tenten, Lee, and Neji are all refered to by the narration as being "Elite Genin", who are so much more powerful in comparison to their peers that they're basically Chunin level in all but name. The former three all make Chunin on their first try, while the latter two fail to even make it to the finals and had to wait until the next one.
• In Sword and Shield, Death mentions that in a particular alternate universe, the 93-year-old janitor at MACUSA was the secret head of a Muggle crime syndicate and shot Grindlewald to pieces.
• Optimus in TFA Kaleidoscope can face off against the three most experienced members of the Orion crew, multiple powerful Decepticons at once, and even match Starscream (the Decepticon First Lieutenant and a One-Man Army himself) in single combat. However, he doesn't hold the rank of Prime and it's implied that he was a low-rank soldier given that none of the bots who lived through the Great War seem to recognize him.
• This Bites!:
  • Despite the outward appearance of arrogance, Foxy is not only a dangerous fighter, but has an intelligence network extensive enough to fill Apoo with dread. It's heavily implied that the only reason his bounty is so low is that he has been actively attempting not to make a name for himself.
  • Even though he's one of the weaker members, Blueno is the agent that Cross is adamant has to go down first due to his Devil Fruit.
  • For all their strength, as the ship guards the Kung-Fu Dugongs are technically the lowest ranking members of the crew.
  • Buggy. Unlike in canon, where the Marines think he's this, in this story, he actually is this. This Buggy is a Warlord-class combatant who deliberately "sandbagged" his career as a no-name pirate in the weakest sea in the world just because it was the only way he was ever going to get any peace and quiet without outright retiring. When he's finally exposed as a former member of the Roger Pirates and a peer of Shanks during the Battle of Marineford, he outright snaps and goes on a rampage, tearing through the Marines' forces like tissue paper and going toe-to-toe with Dracule freakin' Mihawk.
• Witness (Good Neighbors) has Izuku himself as one, as he attempted to take All Might's advice and tried to become a police officer instead of continuing his seemingly hopeless pursuit of a career in heroics. Despite doing incredibly well on the police exam, he still gets rejected due to his Quirklessness, even though police aren't authorized to use their Quirks anyway. The only job he's able to find is as a janitor, and he struggles with keeping his head above water for a time... before figuring out how to use the role to his advantage and help others anyway.
• The World's Greatest Chunin Exam Team is basically a Deconstruction Crack Fic set after the Fourth Great Shinobi World War where Naruto, B, and Gaara all enter the exam as one team. Despite being S-rank shinobi, heroes of the war, and (in the case of Gaara) a Kage, all of them are eligible to participate due to still being genin (a Kage retains the rank they had before gaining their title).

• In the final Wham Shot of Barbie in the Pink Shoes, it's revealed to be the case with Madame Katerina, the humble customer for the ballet company. She has hundreds of enchanted pink shoes that she can use to send the next girl in need of a life lesson on a dangerous adventure.
• Jack Frost from Rise of the Guardians. He's not one of the Guardians, in fact when the Man in the Moon is choosing a new Guardian none of the others even consider him. However, since he isn't a Guardian, his powers do not fluctuate based on belief until the very end, and with Pitch rapidly diminishing belief around the world, you can call this a Justified Trope. Also, taking into account Jack uses winter-themed powers, it's a good chance the ambient power of "belief" in winter for the majority of the world allows him an edge even after he becomes a Guardian against that kind of thing.
• Soul (2020): Most of the mystics who help lost souls stuck in the Zone are professional therapists, healers, or shamans. Moonwind, the "captain" though, he's a sign-spinner.
• In WALL•E, M-O (Microbe Obliterator), a cleaning bot, saves WALL•E and EVE from being expelled into space by jamming his body into the shutting doors of the garbage airlock. The best part? He didn't even know they were in danger. The only reason he ever dropped himself into the garbage dump was to clean WALL•E up.

• In Any Given Sunday, Willie Beaman turns out to be this. He starts out as the third string quarterback for the Sharks and has been on the bench so long, that when he is given his chance, he doesn't know the playbook. However, he proves to be a natural talent once he gets used to playing with people calling him a prodigy. It's later revealed that he was actually a top number one draft pick prospect during college, but lost this status when he got caught talking money from a rich donor, along with other college students who got away with it.
• Bloodfist VI features Corrigan, a courier. When the military brass attempt to look up his personnel file, they find that it's almost entirely redacted due to the secrecy of his previous work.
• The Breakfast Club features an iconic one in Carl, who explains to the kids in detention the extent to which he is the "eyes and ears" of the school through many years of going through lockers, listening to conversations, etc. He also knows that the clock in the library is 20 minutes fast. He gains even more power when he catches Mr. Vernon going through confidential files.
• Bruce Almighty has a literal example: God is seen mopping the floor of a building, dressed as a janitor. However, it's unlikely that God is actually employed as a janitor. It's more likely that God is doing this to demonstrate humility to Bruce.
• In By the Sword, Max Suba starts off as this, before fully becoming a Badass Teacher for the group of losers the Sadist Teacher Villard casts off.
• Captive State: The prostitute turns out to be the resistance leader.
• In Chill Factor, the two main characters are a diner clerk and an ice cream truck driver, who ended up having to take a top secret weapon to a military base and fight terrorists the whole way there.
• Clue: Played with. Wadsworth who welcomes the guests tells them that he is merely a humble butler, acting on the orders of an unknown host, who invited the guests by anonymous letters. However, it is clear that he is the real power behind what is happening; and after Mr Boddy is believed to be dead, he reveals that in fact he is the host, and had written the invitations. When re-enacting the evening, he reveals that he invited all the other characters who appear to turn up randomly, such as the Motorist, the Cop, and the Singing Telegram Girl.
• Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron has the lead character Steiner (James Coburn) as a sergeant who has been busted back to corporal, but whom everybody else in the squad clearly looks to as their leader.
• In Daredreamer, when not cleaning up after Winston's messes, school janitor Zach plays the saxophone, watches over the kids, and shares Winston and Jennie's daydreaming abilities.
• Edge of Tomorrow:
  • Dr. Carter is a brilliant mind and used to work as a scientist at Whitehall, trying to find a way to defeat the aliens. However he got demoted probably for his crazy ideas and ended up doing low rank mechanics work instead.
  • The main character is busted down to Private as punishment, yet he gains time-traveling powers and saves humanity.
• Eddie the Eagle: Bronson Peary, former Olympic ski-jumper who trains the protagonist, works as the ski-jump centre groundskeeper.
• Ernest P. Worrell is a janitor in most of Jim Varney's films, who always saves the day by the end of the film.
• Forrest Gump: The defining trait of the main character is that he's a Born Lucky simpleton who manages to fall ass-backwards into multiple jaw-dropping accomplishments, meets historical figures and affect the course of history without even realizing it. While all of that was going on he even worked as a groundskeeper for the University of Alabama, but he ended up doing that job for free because he liked it so much (and he was already a multi-millionaire anyway).
• Good Will Hunting: Will Hunting is, literally, a janitor cleaning the floors of MIT who is also a Brilliant, but Lazy, once-in-a-generation math genius.
• M. Gustave of The Grand Budapest Hotel. He's a concierge, thus not exactly on the bottom rung of the ladder, but has no trouble chewing out his superiors for hiring a new lobby boy without coming to him for permission first. An even better fit for this trope is that same lobby boy, Zero, who takes over M. Gustave's lofty status after the latter is sent to prison.
• Bill the Electrician in House II: The Second Story is an example of this trope. According to him, he has seen lot of things in his twenty-year career, and the portal to alternate dimension that he finds in the protagonists' house is nothing new. He just picks up his sword that he carries with him and joins the quest to retrieve the Crystal Skull from extra-dimensional Mayans.
• In The Hunt for Red October, the whole defection plot by the senior Russian officers is nearly derailed by the cook, who is actually a GRU agent.
• Hunt Her, Kill Her features a janitor named Karen, who is being hunted by five intruders in the warehouse where she works during a night shift. She manages to kill all of them by the end of the movie.
• A common occurrence in James Bond films is to have a character who serves the Big Bad in a seemingly-innocuous position (for instance, their secretary or driver) turn out to be a ''much'' bigger deal (for instance, a trained assassin) once the villains reveal themselves to be, well, villains.
• The monastery in Jasminum houses five monks (and a bunch of ducks). The only one of the five who does anything besides waiting for a certain prophecy to come true is Zdrówko, the cook, who single-handedly keeps the others from starving. When he displays knowledge of Latin, the prior is very nonplussed.

  Prior: You speak Latin?
  Zdrówko: Yeah.
  Prior: Why did you never tell me?
  Zdrówko: What for?

• In The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi is first introduced as a hotel handyman, a job he likely just does to keep himself occupied in retirement. (His Big Fancy House, fleet of cars, and other belongings suggest he's far more well-off than a typical handyman.)
• In Kelly's Heroes:, Kelly is a former army officer who is busted all the way down to private after being wrongfully blamed for a failed allied mission. Despite his demotion, he still proves to be a highly capable soldier and his fellow squad-mates still look to him for leadership and experience.
• In Kill Bill, Budd is a retired former assassin who works as a bouncer and janitor at a failing strip club in Hicksville, USA. He lives in a Trashy Trailer Home and secretly wants to die.
• Kung Fu Hustle is built around this trope, with the world's greatest martial artists all occupying extremely low and unlikely social positions. We first encounter three undercover masters of Kung-Fu who are a submissive baker, a gay tailor, and a sweating coolie. They are in turn trumped by blind street musicians, who are in turn beaten by the comedic, wacky slum landlords who walk around in their pajamas all day, who are themselves defeated by a dumpy old mental hospital patient in his underwear. The greatest martial arts master in the film turns out to be the local Butt-Monkey.
• In Kung Fu Zohra, the middle-aged gymnasium janitor from Beijing turns out to be a kung fu master.
• The Trainman of The Matrix Revolutions. Conductor for the train station program and responsible for carrying programs from the mainframe to the Matrix. He looks like a smelly hobo, but is effectively a god in his world and can defeat even Neo with just a flick of his wrist.
• Cosmo Brown in Singin' in the Rain is clearly the greatest technical genius in cinema history. Starting as a lowly pianist for sappy love scenes, Cosmo single-handedly rescues an unreleasable picture in post-production by splicing it into a different movie (paving the way for Godfrey Ho's career... but no one's perfect); comes up with the idea of using playback to dub new lines into existing scenes; invents lip-synching on the fly; invents the movie musical; and just generally saves the entire studio from going bankrupt. "Gimme a raise", indeed.
• Snowpiercer: Many years earlier, a now dead Inuit cleaning lady figured out that the world was warming up and led six people (implied to be of higher stations than her) in an an attempt to overthrow Wilford and stop the train.
• Austin Millbarge from Spies Like Us. He starts the movie as a repair supervisor working in the bowels of the Pentagon, but is also an adept codebreaker who speaks fluent Russian, attracting attention from the CIA, who select him as an agent assigned in the USSR (actually, a decoy for the real agents).
• Present in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. In The Force Awakens, Finn admits that "sanitation" was his sole duty on Starkiller Base before his first combat assignment. His knowledge of the installation is invaluable to the Resistance when they need to blow it up. Eventually, it turns out he is an even better leader than the visibly experienced General Pryde of the Final Order.
• Chief Baker Charles Joughin in Titanic (1997). His portrayal in the movie showed him being one of about five people to climb to the top of the stern... and literally rode the stern of the Titanic down, making him the last person to have exited the ship. It may look a bit like Special Effect Failure that he just stood on top of it like he was in an elevator, but this is actually Truth in Television. When Rose mentions that only six out of 1500+ people were rescued from the water, it's very likely that she included him. See his section in Real Life.
• UHF has Stanley Spadowski (Michael Richards) starts the film as a lowly janitor working for the tyrannical R.J. Fletcher (Kevin McCarthy) at Channel 8, then gets fired after a misunderstanding. Feeling pity for Stanley, the protagonist, George Newman (Weird Al Yankovic) offers him a janitorial job at the run-down Channel 62 station. Overtime however, Stanley becomes the star of what would become known as Stanley Spadowski's Clubhouse. A program that would lead to Channel 62 becoming the number one channel in the broadcasting area. Eventually, Stanley saves the day by hosting the telethon, in order to save Channel 62 from being torn down by R.J. Fletcher.
• Steven Seagal's character in Under Siege is a former Navy SEAL working as a ship's cook. His backstory involves striking a commanding officer after a bad mission, and losing his security clearance, etc.
• In Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, Seagal's character once again fights against terrorists, this time aided by a train Porter named Bobby Zachs, who helps him fight the bad guys and eventually kills one of them singlehandedly.
• Willy's Wonderland follows an unnamed drifter who is forced to take a janitor position at the eponymous restaurant for one night in exchange for the owner paying to have his car fixed. Over the course of that night, he defends himself against the restaurant's possessed animatronic mascots, all of whom are bigger and stronger than him, with terrifying efficiency and brutality. Provided he's not on his break, of course.
• The Zatoichi films (Takeshi Kitano version included) star a man named... Ichi. Zato is his title, the lowest of four ranks in the official blind people guild that existed in Japan at the time. So the title in Japanese means Low-ranking Blind Person Ichi. He ekes out a living as a lowly blind masseur, which was the one job they had for blind people in Japan back then. Ichi is also invincible. Between his sword and his wit, it is rare for anyone in the movies to get the upper hand on him, let alone beat him.

• Classical Mythology:
  • Hestia is quite literally an Almighty Janitor. Zeus's eldest sister, the eldest of the Olympian gods, and one of the six strongest beings in the cosmos, while all her siblings become kings or queens of various realms/aspects of reality, she just keeps busy as a housekeeper. Yes, on Mount Olympus the wizened old guy on the center throne with the badass lightning bolt and laundry list of slain monsters is both the younger brother of, and about as strong as, the soft-spoken lady who brings him his food and sweeps-up. Two examples of how badass she is:
    • She is, canonically, one of only three beings in the Cosmos over whom Aphrodite has no power, the others being the other two virgin goddesses, Artemis and Athena. For reference, Aphrodite is capable of beguiling Zeus himself — or granting Hera the power to — but she's powerless over Hestia.
    • Despite being one of the deities about whom the fewest myths are told, she was worshiped in practically every household and at the heart of every city. Bringing some of Hestia's flame was crucial to founding any new colony. And the Homeric hymns tell us that she receives a wine offering at the beginning and end of every mortal feast.
    • Hestia is also Loved by All of the Olympians; though she herself is an Actual Pacifist, basically the only thing her family can agree on is that anyone who slights Hestia suffers.
  • Her Roman counterpart, Vesta, was also the center of one of the most politically powerful priesthoods in Rome, the Vestal virgins.
• Jesus probably qualifies. Born to a humble family and raised as a carpenter, never went to school nor traveled far from his home and never invented anything; nevertheless if you believe the Bible, Jesus is also quite literally God Himself in human form.
• A Jewish legend has a wife of famous and learned sage asking him how comes a certain humble and uneducated man can perform miracles, while he, for all his knowledge and wisdom, cannot. The sage answers that the relationship between God and the uneducated man is that of a king and a senior official, while the sage is more like a slave, or a personal servant — and who is more likely to be heard?

• Jobbers as a whole are the "janitors" in the wrestling business. Their role is to lose or "job" to the more popular wrestlers (hence the term), but since wrestling is a cooperative endeavor, even the marquee stars won't be able get over without their help. Jobbers are often also safe, reliable workers who make matches easier for their opponents, and can even be senior wrestlers, trainers, or locker room leaders who only became jobbers due to not having the right look, not having the ambitions, or a misdemeanor in the past gave them a bad public reputation.
• Yoshiaki Fujiwara was an example of a wrestler who was legitimately skilled and always over yet for whatever reason, wouldn't get pushed by a promotion. (In this case, being the first graduate of New Japan Pro-Wrestling's dojo) Since leaving, he found some success in other places such as Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling and Pro Wrestling ZERO1 but companies tend to fall apart around him before he can really get going.
• Scott Hall, despite being one of the most popular wrestlers in both the WWF and WCW, never was, nor wanted to be, the World Champion. He was content at commanding a main event level salary while being in an upper-midcard spot, having the benefits of the former while not having to carry the weight of the company on his shoulders. It was one of the reasons he was such a successful Intercontinental Champion.
• Kazushi Sakuraba was a largely ignored under card wrestler in Union Of Wrestling Forces International. But when more heavily pushed pro wrestlers such as his mentor Nobuhiko Takada came up short in Mixed Martial Arts, Sakuraba was the one who took the sport by storm and became champion of UFC Japan, defending the honor of pro wrestling.
• While managers are expected to have some sort of influence in pro wrestling, Harvey Wippleman was a manager of jobbers, yet eventually managed to build up a sort of power base for himself simply through sheer longevity in the business.
• Women's Extreme Wrestling and Dangerous Women of Wrestling had Steve the Sound Guy, who somehow managed to stay employed after assaulting other employees, including those theoretically less expendable than him such as models and even some wrestlers and had the ability to influence who became a title contender.

• Champions: The Hero System allows characters to have "Contacts" (NPCs who will sometimes help you) and "Favors" (an NPC owes you a favor — basically a one-use Contact). Contacts with little authority or status cost just as much as higher-level ones, because their ability to help isn't less, just different (for example, a clerk at police headquarters is more likely to let you sneak a peek at the files than the police commissioner, because it's much easier for the clerk to bend the rules without anybody noticing).
• In Exalted, Sidereal Exalted have powers that aid them in using this trope, especially when it comes to adopting unobtrusive and forgettable mortal personas with incredible training and advisory skills. Chejop Kejak is "known" in Creation mostly as the humble secretary to the leader of the Immaculate Order, a minor lecturer at the most prominent academy for Sorcery in the world, and an occasional (and often low priority) visitor to the Scarlet Empress, even while he is one of the most powerful individuals in Heaven.
• GURPS Illuminati University does put the most powerful character in the setting — the ArchDean — in charge of the whole thing, but the second-most powerful character is the Janitor, who seemingly is always right where he needs to be when he needs to be, and he can clean up anything (in a World of Weirdness where nuclear reactor leaks, Cthulhu incursions, and tears in the space-time continuum are a boring weekday). He mostly uses his absurd knowledge and power to a) help him clean things up, and b) earn bribes from anyone who might need further info.
• In Nomine specifically points out that many Cherubim (guardian angels) choose to work in jobs which most other celestials would find beneath them, such as janitors. This allows them to keep a low profile and go anywhere without being questioned. With the power a common celestial wields, this can indeed be an Almighty Janitor, or come close to it for those he wants to help.
• Vampire: The Masquerade:
  • The sourcebook Lair of the Hidden has a scenario in which one of the almost god-like Antediluvians disguises himself as a mere human servant and attempts to guide some of his former students back to the path of Golconda with the help of the player-characters. All while still performing the duties of a servant in order to teach himself humility before the end comes.
  • Then there's Caine himself, who is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the aforementioned Antediluvian, but has spent millenia Wandering the Earth and working menial jobs and observing humanity, and holds his power-hungry childer in contempt.

• Figaro from Beaumarchais' plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro and the operas based on the plays. From his positions as barber and manservant, respectively, he manages to play the rest of the cast, which includes nobles, doctors and lawyers, like a violin.
• The Yang family generals are the heroes of a number of Peking operas. They come in both male and female form. One of them, Yang Paifeng, is all about the titular maidservant, who is in charge of tending the hearth and serving tea, but doubles as a badass fighter.

• Advanced V.G. is about an MMA competition for waitresses. Waitresses who also happen to be among the strongest martial artists in the world, enough that a Nebulous Evil Organisation sponsored the tournament looking to test their biological weapons against them.
• Angry Birds Fight! has a somewhat more literal example in the form of the Janitor Pig. It proves to be one of the most annoying opponents in the game due to its massive health pool.
• Armored Core:
  • The series always had rankings, but it isn't until Armored Core: Master of Arena that you can fight each other. In that game, the lowest-ranking ones, even after the post-story unlockables are very weak. Along came Armored Core 2 and Armored Core 3. In Armored Core 3 and the sequel Silent Line, the arena also features a post-story unlockable enemies. The catch is that the lower in the rank they go, the tougher they are, so much so that in Armored Core 3, there's an email challenging you to defeat the bottom-most opponent, Exile, while giving you the Game-Breaker OP-I (albeit you need to train it properly first) just to give you a slight, repeat, slight edge over the opponent. To further hammer the point home, the email added "you may be considered unfair should you choose to use the equipment I provided."
  • Another example would be Armored Core 2's Werehound. He apparently stays at a relatively low rank specifically because he enjoys wrecking the confidence of hopeful new ravens. Too bad that one can simply evade all of his weapons to the point that he has no method of attack whatsoever.
  • The Almighty Janitor in Armored Core 2 is known as Mattheas. He pales in comparison to Armored Core 3's janitor, Exile, but is far and away the most skilled A.I. Raven you'll face in the game. He packs two of the most powerful weapons available.
  • In Armored Core 4, you stay at the bottom rank no matter how many opponents you trash. By the time For Answer rolls around, and 4's protagonist goes rogue, he's risen in rank — to Rank 9. In-story, the League is so afraid of him and his mech (as well as Fiona Jarnefeldt), that they send in the Rank 1... with backup, because alone, well...
    • This will makes perfect sense to anyone that remembers the earlier Armored Core games, who probably just saw the "9" part and connected it to Nine-Ball, the Big Bad of the first game and a recurring That One Boss throughout the series.
    • 4 has another janitor archetype fittingly named "Roadie." While he's only Rank 36 (just three ranks above the player) and his bio describes him as "a match only for a small squadron of Normals", in a real fight he hits incredibly hard thanks to his powerful and accurate missiles and his bazooka arms, and his defenses as a SUNSHINE model are strong enough to withstand high-powered laser blasts that can destroy a lighter NEXT in two or three hits. Because of this, not only does Roadie survive the events of 4, but he also becomes one of the top five pilots in Collared in for Answer, and potentially even one of the Final Bosses depending on the player's route in that game.
    • Also in Armored Core: For Answer: You, once again. Even though you're given the option to advance this time, nothing's really forcing you to, and you can destroy any number of other NEXTs and Arms Forts, and still be placed behind the guy who uses a mech speced for construction work instead of combat.
  • Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon has... well, you again, starting as just one of Handler Walter's nameless Hounds, having to steal your license to even operate on the planet from another unlucky pilot, eventually working up to deciding the fate of Rubicon and its prized Coral.
    • Turns out the pilot you stole your license from was (or rather, is) also one of these, as Boss Banter with the PCA's Cataphract unit reveals that despite their bottom-of-the-barrel arena rank, they were responsible for leaking the intel that brought the corporations back to Rubicon after the Fires of Ibis supposedly destroyed it, and they turn out to be quite the formidable pilot when they confront you to see if you're worthy of taking the name "Raven," after all.
    • Like White Glint in For Answer, the Arquebus Vesper V.IV Rusty holds the infamous rank 9 in the arena, and proves to be much more than mere numbers would suggest. After defecting from Arquebus and getting his own Mid-Season Upgrade to Steel Haze ORTUS, Rusty becomes either the penultimate boss of the Fires of Raven route (notably after you fought the top-ranked V.I Freud), or the player's support in the Liberator of Rubicon route, taking out an entire fleet of Arquebus' warships off-screen while you deal with his old boss V.II Snail and the Xylem.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • Assassin's Creed: Subverted with Altaïr. While not "largely immune to the whims of the higher-ups", after he royally screws up he is stripped of his rank and the privileges that come with it, effectively starting from the ground up despite having previously attained the title of Master Assassin. He spends the majority of the game being a badass, trying to earn his status back and eventually gets there... sort of.
  • Assassin's Creed II: Ezio spends a decade (and most of the game) as an unofficial Initiate assassinating Templars, shoring up the Assassin power base and thoroughly derailing Templar plans before being formally inducted. He's given also a great deal of leeway in his revenge quest — it just so happens that his goals line up with those of the Brotherhood.
• Roy Becket from Astebreed is literally this trope. He's just a cleanup man for a military company, but once he's in battle as the pilot of a powerful Humongous Mecha, goes to show why he's The Hero of the story.
• Astra Hunter Zosma: Although Zosma is a fairly capable fighter, he's ranked dead last as an Astra Hunter. He later states that it's because he plays it too safe by only taking on easy ruins, which have already been scoured clean by other hunters. Depending Zosma's treasure count, he can end up in 99th (last), 50th, 10th, or 1st place in the guild rankings in the ending, though his combat prowess is undeniable considering he and his blob companion defeated Deneb, the former top Astra Hunter.
• Baldur's Gate III: One of the camp followers you pick up is Withers, a mysterious undead being who can bring back your party members, re-spec your stats, and provides Hireling (which, in-universe, are undead he resurrected and controls) temporary companions. Beyond that, he's content to observe and make the occasional comment. But if you know anything about the tabletop game, you can realize that that Death Is Cheap spell he charges you 200 gold for (less than Revivify, the lowest-level resuscitation spell that only works 60 seconds after death on the tabletop) is True Resurrection, a 9th-level spell that is normally impossible to throw around as casually as he does, even for the greatest of liches.It's heavily implied that he's Jergal, the old god of the dead, helping you out against the Dead Three.
• Kid Ultra from Battleborn was originally designed to be nothing more than a robotic babysitter. However thanks to what happened to him in his past and later being picked up by the Battleborn, he became a fellow badass fighting a legion of star consuming cosmic horrors.
• Deconstructed in Bioshock 1. Andrew Ryan created the Underwater City of Rapture to act as a utopian Rich Recluse's Realm for the best and brightest society had to offer. Unfortunately he Didn't Think This Through as he failed to realize that he would still need laborers to keep the place running, so a good chunk of wannabe business magnates and scientists ended up scrubbing toilets. This led to a great deal of resentment towards Ryan himself among the newly-destitute working class of Rapture, which Frank Fontaine capitalized on to bring about the city's downfall.
• Borderlands 3: The "Guns, Love, and Tentacles" DLC brings back Gaige, one of the Vault Hunters from the second game. Wainwright and Hammerlock have hired her as their wedding planner. She considers it her duty to make sure the wedding goes perfectly, so when a crazy cult starts interfering she doesn't find anything odd about picking up a gun and fighting back. She coordinates much of the DLC, and makes it clear several times that she just sees it as a normal and expected part of her job.

  Gaige: Never mess with a wedding planner.

• Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter: Ryu. In a world where your place in society is determined by your D-ratio, Ryu has the depressingly low D-rank of 1/8192. As it turns out, though, that D-ratio indicates the chances of a person bonding with a dragon; Ryu beats the odds and proceeds to carve a path of destruction all the way up the chain of command, eventually defeating a trio of 1/4-rank Physical Gods.
• Bug Fables: Stratos and Delilah are low-ranking Explorers who have been dubbed "Team Slacker" in-universe, known for never finishing a mission and being scouts who find points of interest rather than fighters. In the postgame, they can be sparred as a superboss, where it is revealed that they are among the most powerful characters in the entire game. Lampshaded by Leif, his notes on Stratos having him say that their fight with the Wasp King would have been easier if they had Stratos and Delilah with them.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: James Ramirez, the Player Character for the American Front, has basically the authorization for and training with basically every weapon system he's ever laid eyes on. And he uses them to pretty much win the war by himself, putting him almost on the same level of more professional agents like Price and Soap. Very impressive for a mere private.
• Chest:
  • Downplayed with Zong. While he's the prince of the Nether, in the earthly realm, he currently works as a handyman taking on various small jobs, all while having maxed stats in everything except luck.
  • The mayor of the Snow Village and the barkeeper Silin are known as the Aluxes brothers. Due to being descendants of a great hero, they're both among the strongest warriors in the earthly realm.
• In Chicory: A Colorful Tale: Finding the brush on the ground gives Pizza, the janitor of Wielder Tower, the power of color, which they use to become the next Wielder of the Brush.
• Chrono Cross:
  • Glenn is one of the best, if not the best, optional character you can recruit in this game. But despite being a dual-sword wielding badass with familial connections to the higher-ups, his only real job seems to be guarding the resident Damsel in Distress during her walks about town. No explanation is ever given as to why this is or why a bratty ten-year-old girl is his commanding officer, except that he has a childhood crush on the damsel he's guarding and that she happens to be a sadistic killing machine. With recognition like that, no wonder he betrays the Dragoons.
  • A much more literal example of this trope is the janitor on the S.S. Zelbess, who is actually the Sage of Marbule.
• Chrono Trigger: The Nu is an odd example of this. In the palace of Zeal, Nus serve as janitors, and you can steal their Mop weapons. However, the self-proclaimed God of War's ultimate form at The End of Time is a Nu, and Nus are surprisingly capable fighters as well as having out-of-this-worldly knowledge.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Comrade Dasha, the intelligence officer/Voice with an Internet Connection of the USSR. Despite her relatively lowly position as a coordinator, in the Soviet campaign she ends up running the show alongside the player thanks to everybody else betraying one another. In the canonical Allied ending, meanwhile, she uses her status as "technically a civilian" to avoid getting locked up along with the other Soviet leaders and becomes de facto head of La Résistance.
• Ahti, the Cloudcuckoolander Finnish janitor of the Federal Bureau of Control, in Control (2019). He can seemingly come and go anywhere he pleases, even the most secretive and tightly restricted areas. He also apparently just showed up one day soon after the FBC first moved into the Oldest House. Nobody remembered hiring him, and he seemed to already know his way around the place better than anyone else. The FBC is so baffled by him that they just gave up on trying to figure him out, while Jesse offers a more mundane explanation: "the janitor always has the keys". Either way, it's clear that there's much more to him than meets the eye, with him possibly being either an avatar of the Oldest House itself or the Finnish sea god he's named after. It's worth noting that the Finnish word for "janitor" translates literally to "man of the house", and Ahti frequently uses Finnish metaphors translated literally into English.
• The fourth and youngest of the playable heroes, Yan, from Crisis Beat, is a teen karate expert working part-time as a janitor on a luxury cruiser, The Princess, when the ship gets taken over by terrorists. Players using Yan can kick plenty of ass with a broom as their main weapon.
• Dawn of War 2: Cyrus is a veteran of multiple campaigns and has served two decades in the Deathwatch, and could easily make a much higher rank if he sought it, but is content with being a scout sergeant in charge of training the chapter's initiates. The reason for this is because Cyrus' unorthodox (though often highly successful) tactics has made him unpopular with several of his peers and superiors, but by remaining in charge of training he is able to ensure that all the generations of space marines he trains will be molded to his way of thinking.
• Deadly Rooms of Death: Beethro Budkin is quite the literal example of this, starting out as just a janitor for hired by King Dugan to clear out his dungeon, but his penchant for curiosity ends up leading him into a giant plot that culminates in him saving the entire world from apocalypse. All the while, Beethro still ends up clearing out every place he finds himself in of the hostile monsters.
• Deus Ex: This is invoked by MJ12 by having Walton Simons appointed director of FEMA. When they spring their plan to take over the United States, he would use the agency to imprison the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court and run the country himself. Later subverted when it doesn't work as numerous generals, state governors, and the Secretary of Defense refuse to acknowledge his authority.
• Disgaea:
  • Across the series, there are penguin-like demons known as Prinnies who are at the bottom of the totem pole, doing menial labor for Overlords, with their wages often being described in single-digit sardines per month. But they can also be recruited into the player's army, and like with all other classes, enough Level Grinding makes them into powerhouses that inflict so much damage that their damage numbers turn into rounded-off values with a "M" (for million) at the end.
  • Another example comes from Mr. Champloo. A Home Economics Teacher at Evil Academy (unlisted, at that), whom has also been taking orders from the lingering spirit of the Overlord to guide Mao and company to unmask and stop the real villain of the game, Super Hero Aurum.
  • Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten: Though Valvatorez was once the powerful and widely feared Tyrant, he is now just a simple Prinny Instructor — a Prinny Instructor who The Most Badass Frickin' Overlord in All the Cosmos considers a Worthy Opponent.
  • Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance has the Maid class. Their backstory involves a Nether Noble seeing a zombie living such a free lifestyle, and he couldn't stand the sight so he made the zombie into a house servant, resulting in authority figures employing zombies as maids en masse. And like with Prinnies, Maids can be raised to ungodly levels, helped by their Evilities allowing them to use items without ending their turns and improving the efficiency of consumable items, including attack items, allowing them to easily nuke enemies with throwing knives, shuriken, darts, and the like.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: Before finding the Virgo stone, Akira was a low-ranked Hunter due to prioritizing smaller, lower-paying jobs over larger demon hunts, despite being just as capable in combat as the top Hunters.
• Doom:
  • The backstory of the nameless Space Marine in the original game is explained in the game's README file that he assaulted a superior officer after being ordered to fire upon civilians, and was transferred to duty on Mars as punishment. This is why he's just a lowly grunt soldier despite being able to kill all of The Legions of Hell singlehandedly.
  • The movie has a Shout-Out to this when "The Kid" is ordered to fire on civilians, refuses, and is promptly shot in the brain pan.
• Dragon Age II: According to a sarcastic Hawke, this is what being the Champion of Kirkwall entails. Despite ascending to the nobility and later becoming the Champion, Hawke refuses to get themselves into a position of actual authority, preferring to run things from the ground, as this gives them the freedom to act without going through political red-tape. By Act III, this is actually given as the reason why the nobles want Hawke as the new Viscount, because instead of political posturing, they are the only person who actually manages to get things done.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • One of your migrants is a High Master-level Lye Maker? Too bad you don't need soap yet (or lye production is bugged again), it's refuse hauling duty for you pal.
  • Also, military dwarves on a month of leave. Sure, they may only be good at hauling stuff right now, but they're still decked out in a Steel Breastplate and are only a few days away from training his axe skills up to master.
• In the mobile game The Executive, you play as a generic Salaryman who works as an intern at a mining company, who demonstrates inexplicable martial arts skills when a lycanthrope apocalypse suddenly hits. Subverted later on, as the in-game newspaper not only credits him for saving the day, but he gets promoted as the game continues.
• Fallout 4: One of your companions is Codsworth, the protagonist's old Mr. Handy robot house servant. He even remarks that he's not a military-grade Mister Gutsy, but he's still quite good at mulching raiders with his saw and flame thrower. With the Automatron DLC, the "almighty" part can become reality with the right allocation of perks and resources to seriously beef up Codsworth's hitting power.
• In Fate/Grand Order: After successfully resolving the Grand Order and restoring mankind's history the player is given the rank of "Cause", the third-lowest rank in the Mage Association. Justified, for multiple reasons. First, the protagonist's magic ability is so abysmal, it's said that even this rank is way beyond anything they could've achieved. Second, most of their achievements are severely downplayed by da Vinci in order to prevent the Association from issuing a Sealing Designation on the protagonist, and/or dissecting them.
• Fate/Samurai Remnant: You'd think someone as bombastic as Gilgamesh to demand a job placement more grandiose than a fabric shop, even if it's a high-class one, but here we are. Woe betide anyone who thinks the boasting of this textile salesman is a bluff, as he is in fact the Ruler for the Waxing Moon Ritual meant to keep the Servants in line, and would have enough power to bury them even with a traditional Servant class.
• Final Fantasy VII:
  • In Final Fantasy VII Remake, Roche is a SOLDIER Third Class, which is odd to see considering that he's very skilled and capable of holding his own against Cloud. All other similarly ranked SOLDIERs you encounter are barely better than the usual Shinra mook. It's likely that his Wild Card nature and frequent team-killing in pursuit of a good fight keeps him from rising the ranks.
  • Roche's status may actually hint towards the fact that the SOLDIER ranking system isn't all its cracked up to be, especially when it's revealed that Cloud (who was a grunt infantryman, not even a SOLDIER) could defeat Sephiroth (a Person of Mass Destruction and First Class SOLDIER) by running him through with the Buster Sword and throwing him into the Nibel Reactor even after Sephiroth had impaled him. Granted, Cloud did have personal factors empowering him (Sephiroth had killed his mom, slashed up his childhood sweetheart, and set fire to his hometown), but even Sephiroth couldn't believe it as Cloud overpowered him. Regardless, Cloud's willpower alone shows he probably should've passed his SOLDIER training, and even after coming back stronger Sephiroth doesn't take this blow to his reputation lying down, going out of his way to torment Cloud whenever he can in retaliation.
• Final Fantasy Tactics:
  • Ramza spends the entirety of this game as a squire, quitting the royal military academy and going rogue before ever obtaining noble title like the rest of his family has/had. He also misses out on acquiring all the awesome holy sword abilities that come with knighthood which every other character who is an actual knight (including his former best friend Delita) possesses. That said, while he may only be a squire he is a monstrously powerful squire who goes on to stop a bloody and pointless war and saves the world from no less than six Eldritch Abominations.
  • Also, his Squire class is one of the strongest classes in the game, thanks to a couple of unique abilites he gets, plus equipment other squires can't use.
• Freedom Fighters (2003) takes a cue from the Super Mario Bros. franchise. It's about a plumber who's on a job when the Russians invade and take over America. He then forms a military resistance to kick the Russians out of America.
• Future Wars: The hero is a window washer, who stumbled upon his employer's dark secret and ended up fighting aliens in the past and future.
• Geneforge 2: Among the Shapers, Asskicking Leads to Leadership is not in effect. No matter how many people and Mons you kill, you're still a mere apprentice magician as far as the NPCs are concerned, until you get back home and can have your status re-evaluated. And if you gained your powers through use of an Upgrade Artifact, you won't be climbing the ranks.
• Genshin Impact: An NPC named Jiangxue can be found near the Wangshu Inn. While a fisherman, he is much more powerful than he appears: he once owned a Vision, he is able to sense monsters approaching, and without his Vision or any weapon, takes down a Ruin Hunter that is immune to any attacks from the player.
• The Godfather: In the game, while Rank Scales with Asskicking is largely in effect, almost all of your levelable skills come from Respect levels gained by free-roaming rather than the plotline promotions up the Family's ladder. This means that your rank can still be "Outsider" while you're already far more accomplished than any number of enemy Underbosses.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: The in-game character encyclopedia outright says that the royal court of Kaocho are egotistical half-wits and Meisa the scribe is the only one who gets anything done.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Frank Tenpenny, the Big Bad, is officially a patrolman with the LSPD. Unofficially, he's the gangland kingpin of Southern San Andreas.
• Half-Life:
  • Gordon Freeman. Yeah, he's a Badass Bookworm, but his doctorate is in theoretical physics, not ninjutsu, and the resonance cascade happened on his first day in the Anomalous Materials laboratory. He's fairly low on the totem pole.
  • Half-Life 2 lampshades this when you overhear the Big Bad broadcasting a speech to his Mooks, shaming them for their constant failure in stopping Gordon.

    "This is not some agent provocateur or highly-trained assassin we are discussing. Gordon Freeman is a theoretical physicist who had hardly earned the distinction of his Ph.D. at the time of the Black Mesa Incident."

• Hiveswap has Marsti Houtek, a lowblood assigned to cleaning duty. That doesn't stop her from being a badass, though.
• Iji: The Playful Hacker Yukabacera ranks as a common Tasen Soldier and looks like one. He's also, bar none, the most badass Tasen around. He's packing 50 Health (the second highest Health value for non-boss enemies, only beaten out by the rare Annihilator enemy), is the fastest NPC in the game, and is the only enemy who can use a CFIS.
• Kero Blaster:
  • Kaeru's job is officially listed as "custodial sciences" (read: janitor), and his only real job is to go out and clean teleporters. However, since the teleporters are housed in areas that are apparently quite hostile, he's armed to the teeth, and seems to do the most actual work around the company (he's even half of the name).
  • Pink Hour and Pink Heaven show that Comomo the secretary is just as skilled with a blaster as Kaeru.
• Henry of Skalitz, protagonist of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, is this. Born the peasant son of a blacksmith, he's nearly at the bottom of Medieval European society who couldn't expect much aside from learning his father's trade, but events and certain revalations lead him to becoming embroiled in the affairs of nobility, even entering the service of and becoming a squire for notable Bohemian lords, Radzig Kobyla of Skalitz and Hans Capon of Pirkstein. He still doesn't rate much, more so after leaving the Sasau region because his noble connections have limited authority outside of there, but he manages to get on speaking terms with august persons such as Jobst of Moravia and John II of Liechtenstein, and even joins with Jan Žižka to have an impact in Holy Roman Imperial politics.
• Kingdom Hearts protagonist Sora has never been promoted to the title of Keyblade Master, despite being vastly more powerful than several characters who are given the rank of Master and having saved the world three times and counting. Part of the reason for the lack of promotion is that he just can't seem to stop getting knocked back down to Level 1.
• Knights of the Old Republic: Cool Old Guy Jolee Bindo is a powerful Jedi with mastery of the force, and his idea of a soul-searching vacation is to spend a few decades in a forest so dangerous that most Wookies fear it. But due to both contentment with the ranking, and disillusionment with the Jedi Order in general, he's technically still only a Padawan after Declining Promotion to Knight. Canonically, he eventually gained the rank of Master and sat on the Jedi High Council after the events of the sequel before retiring.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Link. In fact in the beginning he is really just a kid, sometimes a soldier. As it turns out he's actually the legendary hero, the only one worthy of wielding the Master Sword. Each game's Link gets stronger and earns the almighty title, and by the end of the game he's tearing through Ganon's Army like it's tissue paper, before throwing down with the King of Evil himself. Few people realise afterwards that Link is the person that saved everyone.
  • Then we have the nameless and diligent postman from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess who is able to travel all over the monster-infested world that's on the brink of apocalypse... completely unarmed. Not only is he not afraid of Link's wolf form, but he recognizes it as a Forced Transformation form and will gleefully greet it as Mr. Link and run up to it. And, if that's not enough, this guy was able to clear the entire Cave of Ordeals, unarmed, without any of the tools Link needed to get there, and on the second time when the cave is harder. Just to deliver a letter.
• Liberal Crime Squad: You have dancers and yoga instructors. They all have very high Agility, Strength, and Health, making them even tougher than agents.
• Mass Effect:
  • The player character Shepard holds the rank of Lieutenant-Commander on the Alliance military. However, given how slowly and gradually Shepard becomes important in the story enough to gain the full attention of the Big Bad of the series, they become this. This helps that they become a Spectre, who holds a lot of authority across the Citadel space and thus they are now outside Alliance authority (although they still answer to them from time to time, they just have a lot of freedom in their choices). Even among their crew, which some of them outrank the player character, they still defer to them for orders. By the time of the third game, they are acting as the military ambassador of humanity for the multi-species alliance and essentially act as Hackett's second-in-command during the Final Battle.
  • One of their squadmates, Garrus Vakarian, becomes this around the third game. All of Turian Hierarchy, including the generals and the Primarch (the leader of his people) himself, defers to him (even saluting at him) once they fully understand the Reaper threat. He even lampshades how come a failed law enforcer, dreaded vigilante, and being a companion of Shepard for the last two installments land him to one of the most pivotal positions in defending his homeworld and the galaxy as a whole.
  • If Tali is exiled from the Migrant Fleet and survives the Suicide Mission in the second game, by the third game she's personally asked by the Admiralty Board to help them reclaim Rannoch due to her invaluable expertise on the Geth. Because she's officially an exile, however, she can only lend them her assistance in secret. If she wasn't exiled, however, she's appointed an Admiral herself.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man was originally created to assist Dr. Light in his lab work, which is the main reason why Dr. Wily passed up on abducting Rock alongside the other Light bots in the original game (and its remake). Despite being the second-oldest Robot Master in existence, Dr. Light's upgrades turned Rock from a mere housekeeper into what is effectively the Super Prototype of the Classic series, able to defeat newer models and robots whose specs actually surpass his like Bass. Said robots make the continued mistake of underestimating him, with Tengu Man outright writing him off as a child, while Dr. Wily only once attempted to steal away Mega Man for his own nefarious purposes in comparison to the numerous times he's stolen and remodeled the creations of others. And it's implied Mega Man's original function is still his primary one, making this trope literal.
  • In the Mega Man X series, X is consistently at Rank B due to his general aversion towards fighting despite being the one to have handed Sigma his viral ass no less than ten times now.^* His rank can increase in-game starting with X5, but usually only in a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation since it doesn't stick story-wise until X8. Contrast Zero, who spends most games either blown to smithereens, providing support, or Brainwashed and Crazy, yet is consistently classed at Rank S (or Special A, depending on the game). This is even subtly invoked as a plot point in X5: The battle between X and Zero always ends in a draw, even in the non-canon scenario where Zero reawakens to his true nature after coming into contact with the original form of The Virus. Finally averted come X8 (and Command Mission), where X is recognized as a Rank S Hunter alongside Zero and Axl. Notably, this is after the much-maligned 10-Minute Retirement that sidelined X for most of X7, with X less hesitant to pull the trigger when necessary despite maintaining his characteristic Martial Pacifist stance and weariness about the ongoing Maverick Wars.
  • A villainous example comes from Dynamo, first introduced in Mega Man X5. A mercenary of unknown origins who works for Sigma, he's said to have skills beyond that of a SA Class hunter, which would therefore put him no less than on par with the likes of Zero and his own employer! Story-wise, Dynamo is arguably the most competent ally/underling of Sigma's, as he's the one responsible for engineering the Eurasia crash crucial to Sigma's plan^note  and proactively tries to thwart the Maverick Hunters' attempts to retaliate (or at least stall for time) by attacking their base directly. Strangely, he's completely irrelevant to the plot in X6 and disappears from the series entirely afterward.
• The twist ending of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain reveals that "Punished" Venom Snake, is not Big Boss, but the medic in the helicopter during the Ground Zeroes prologue to Phantom Pain that gets shot down. He is given plastic surgery to look like Big Boss as a distraction while the real Big Boss goes into hiding. Turns out despite being a medic, he had the military training and skills to equal that of Big Boss, making him a perfect double and would go on to form a powerful military army in his own right, which Solid Snake takes on in the original Metal Gear.
• Monster Hunter: Rise: Everyone in Kamura is more capable than NPCs in previous games, but Hinoa and Minoto put on a particularly devastating show during Rampages, expertly weilding a Hunter-grade bow and lance respectively. The two of them are content to remain in the village otherwise, handing out and administrating quests they seem perfectly capable of handling themselves. Talking to them at the right time reveals they both have Hunter training, but decided not to pursue a certification for their own reasons: Hinoa is so much of a Big Eater she always goes through her rations too quickly, and Minoto suffers from Heroic Self-Deprecation that destroys her confidence and leaves her as The Shut-In.
• Night in the Woods: A literal example, the Janitor is a theorised supernatural entity with an access to preternatural knowledge. He occasionally appears to the protagonist Mae to give sagely yet cryptic advice at key moments in the game.
• No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: Nathan Copeland is an assassin ranked second from the bottom out of a whopping 51 combatants, but is easily more skilled, agile, and powerful than nearly half the killers above him. Justified, as he says he simply joined the ranks and hung around at the bottom waiting to fight Travis.
• Oddworld: Meet Abe, meat packing slave and former Employee of the Year turned savior of the Mudokon race (well, maybe). He also has psychic mind powers that can open portals made of birds and control his enemies.
• The Player Character of The Outer Worlds. At the start of the game, the character is a Human Popsicle with a bevy of unimpressive backgrounds. From dirt farmer, a sports mascot and a literal janitor. They go on to cut a swath through the galaxy and turns civilization on its head.
• The protagonist of Paperboy is just that, a paperboy. (Or a papergirl in some versions.) It's just that his route is one where Everything Is Trying to Kill You.
• The Player Character in Papers, Please is a border inspector in the Fictional Country of Arstotzka who gets paid just enough to sustain his family, and that's assuming he processes entrants in a timely fashion and doesn't suffer too many penalties from incorrect admissions or rejections. But over the course of the game, he also becomes a crack-shot sniper who stops terrorist attacks better than the official security detail can (and one of the foot soldiers assigned to that security duty is a war veteran), can potentially stop a sex trafficking ring (and subsequently, save the lives of multiple sex workers) by detaining the right person, and can even help overthrow the national government just by making the choice to aid a conspiracy group.
• Persona:
  • The Superboss in Persona 3 is an elevator attendant. In a Jackie O. hat. It's Igor's assistant Elizabeth, and she will wreck you.
    • This is lampshaded in her playable appearance in Persona 4 Arena, where the title she is given is "The Lethal Elevator Attendant." For obvious reasons, however, her power is toned down considerably in order to make her competitively viable. Until you face her in Score Attack Mode, that is...
    • Her brother Theodore in the PSP version is just as dapper, and just as formidable.
  • Persona 4 has Igor's other assistant (and Liz's and Theo's older sister) Margaret. Also, the game's True Final Boss is the gas station attendant from the very beginning of the game, actually the goddess Izanami in disguise. At the end of the Vita Updated Re-release (Golden), Inaba's new local weather lady turns out to be Marie, aka Izanami-no-Mikoto, who happens to be controlling the weather herself.
  • Persona 5: The ultimate Superboss and toughest enemy in the game, the twins Caroline and Justine, are two prison guards in a run-down gulag (granted, said gulag happens to be the supernatural Velvet Room). One of whom is an admin with nothing but a clipboard on her. It should come as no surprise that they're heavily implied to be the younger sisters of Margaret, Elizabeth, and Theodore. Their original/fused form, the no less diminutive Lavenza, serves as an even tougher Superboss in the third semester of Royal.
• Pokémon has plenty of examples.
  • Pokémon Black and White:
    • After fighting through the Battle Company of Castelia City, you get the singular opportunity to face the chairman of the Battle Company, Janitor Geoff (and as you might expect, one Pokémon he uses is Trubbish).
    • During Black/White, he really is the chairman, he just likes pretending to be the janitor. However, in Black 2/White 2, he's retired as the chairman to actually become the janitor full-time and give advice to the new chairman (his grandson), henceforth playing this trope straight.
    • Both games actually have quite a few Janitor Trainers, and some are tougher than Geoff. Not to mention that there are a lot of Trainers in the game with unlikely professions, like Clerks, School Kids, Nursery Aides, Chefs, Maids, and even Preschoolers. Some of them that you encounter after completing the main storyline have Mons that rival even the ones used by bosses.
  • Pokémon Legends: Arceus has Volo, who presents himself as just an Intrepid Merchant who's following your journey. The post-game reveals that he's actually the strongest Trainer in the game and is even capable of commanding Giratina.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet:
    • Ridiculously Average Guy Larry, a salaryman who just so happens to moonlight as both a Gym Leader and Elite Four member.
    • The Rival Nemona is the strongest Trainer in the region (excluding the Player Character), but like everyone else who defeats a League she's a Champion and not the Paldea League "Top Champion", as she's still just a student like you while Geeta's an adult who has to do the hard work of administering the region (when she's not delegating to poor Larry). As a result of being at the same level as everyone else while leagues above them in skill, she ends up being Lonely at the Top until you come along.
• Rise of the Third Power: The Bell Ringer's job is just to ring a bell to wake up everyone in the castle on time. He's also a former soldier capable of taking on Rowan and Corrina at the same time, and he defeats the duo in the post-boss cutscene anyways.
• Skullgirls: Adam Kapowski, elite member of Parasoul's personal guard, the Black Egrets. His skills are usually relegated to babysitting and fetching ice cream for Parasoul's Annoying Younger Sibling, Umbrella, who Parasoul is a Parental Substitute for.
• Slap Happy Rhythm Busters: One of the characters, fittingly named Trash, is a literal janitor, who happens to be a more than competent fighter with his trusty vacuum cleaner.
• Space Quest:
  • Roger Wilco of this series of adventure games — a literal janitor who never goes anywhere in terms of rank or popularity even after saving Xenon multiple times.
  • OK, he was promoted to head janitor between Space Quest I and Space Quest II. Then again, he was the only janitor staffed on the XOS-4's crew.
  • He was also an official Starcon starship captain in Space Quest V, if only for one game. And it was a garbage scow. The ending of the game also implied that he commanded the Goliath, if only briefly. The opening to Space Quest VI has him busted back down.
• Space Station 13:
  • The Janitor position comes with a free Haz-Mat suit. Captain's garb and Detective's trench coat are both nice, but when the radiation storm rolls around they won't do much good.
  • The Assistant gets access to the back-rooms and corridors of Maintenance, common enough but they have no duties except wandering around the station and wasting space. Maintenance has access to pretty much every room, so it's common to see Assistants with a full toolbelt for hacking through otherwise locked doors, though they risk electrocuting themselves unless they steal a pair of insulated gloves which is often a giveaway that the player is up to no good.
  • Invoked with the Mime, who has but only access to maint and a dressing room and is rewarded with a magical barrier-creating spell. The condition? That the mime not talk.
• Spyro the Dragon: Hunter the Cheetah, despite being rather ditzy and being primarily proficient in archery, has a wide array of machinery and tools that one wouldn't expect out of him, including a Jet Pack, a snowmobile, a remote-controlled fighter jet, a jet-powered skateboard, a motorboat, and, inexplicably, a pair of wings. He's also seen at the end of Year of the Dragon repairing a submarine.
• In Stellaris, we have the Scavenger Bot. It used to be an ancient space junk collection droid, but after millennia of collecting junk, breaking it down for fuel and to repair itself, and A.I. glitches, it started using the tech from the junk to upgrade itself until it evolved into a Mechanical Abomination.
• Subnautica:
  • According to a personnel roster from the Aurora databanks, the player character was "Chief of Non-Essential Systems Maintenance" before the crash turned them into a badass Action Survivor. You can even find a log about cleaning toilets.
  • Below Zero reveals that thanks to saving the Sea Emperor's young at the end of the last game, they cured the Kharaa plague and singlehandedly saved every single living thing on Planet 4546b from extinction. Not bad for a guy who cleans toilets.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Mario. Plumber. Has managed to, among other things, defeat a powerful mechanical overlord and his second-in-command, slay a thousand-year old demon and her three pet dragons, kill the sun, and repel the forces of a powerful nation about a hundred times. (The idea that Mario and Luigi are plumbers has persisted since the game Mario Bros., even though they no longer do much plumbing. They encounter warp pipes in many games, and actually fixed plumbing in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga and Super Mario 3D World.)
  • In Paper Mario 64, there's Parakarry the clumsy Paratroopa mailman. He later joins your team and manages to kick major ass in battle, ultimately being one of the most useful party members in the game.
• Tamriel Rebuilt's sister project Game Mod for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Project Tamriel, has Thane Fomir in Karthwasten, who is a downplayed variant. Thanes are important figures in Skyrim's holds, but normally they rule a stronghold at most. Major settlements like Karthwasten are the domain of Jarls if not directly under the King or Queen of the hold^note , but a series of events led to the nominal Jarl of Karthwasten being barred from her own city^note  and left Fomir, still technically only a thane, as the ruler of Karthwasten and trusted enough that the heir to the Reach has been sent to learn statecraft from him.
• Undertale:
  • You encounter a skeleton named Sans. He's supposed to be a sentry on the lookout for humans but he decides he'd rather help you fool around with his brother, and the two of them are the only sentries who aren't part of the Royal Guard. Any appearance of him later is usually him loafing off, although he at one point implies that he could've killed you whenever he wanted (which he immediately claims was a joke afterwards). Then you find him in the Last Corridor, nicknamed the Hall of Judgement by fans, where he will judge your actions, and is implied to have been The Dragon all along. And if you have done a No Mercy run, you have to battle him, where he proves to be far and away the hardest boss in the game by ignoring your Mercy Invincibility, dodging your attacks, and even attacking you when it's your turn! On top of this, he reveals that he knows about your ability to save and reload your game, and somehow knows exactly how many times he's killed you despite not being able to consciously remember previous timelines.
  • Said brother, Papyrus, is introduced as a Harmless Villain and a bumbling fool who tries to capture the player character so he can become a member of the Royal Guard, but fails repeatedly because his traps constantly fail or backfire in his face. When you finally face him in combat, as expected, he is a Zero-Effort Boss. Until he reveals his ability to physically manipulate your SOUL, the first character in the game to pull off such a feat, and proves to be one hell of a Wake-Up Call Boss (albeit one who doesn't actually kill you, instead sending you to prison each time you lose). Undyne, the leader of the Royal Guard he's trying to join, eventually confesses that he is extremely strong and should by all accounts have made it in a long time ago. She keeps "training" him as she doesn't have the heart to tell him he'll never make it in... because he couldn't bring himself to kill a fly, much less a human. There are also hints that, should the gloves ever come off, he might truly be the most dangerous monster. Flowey notes a suitably irritated Papyrus killed him a number of times in previous saves before Frisk took the ability away from Flowey and the developer confirmed his original ultimate attack was the Gaster Blaster his brother uses in his fight. It's quite stunning how strong this otherwise all loving goof is but the player never gets to truly see it.
  • In the Golden Ending, Woshua can literally become this should you meet certain requirements for sparing him.
  • In the spin-off, Deltarune, Sans is a literal janitor at the grocery store. He is also filling in for the roles of cashier, manager, and store owner, but he insists that he's just the janitor despite almost certainly owning the whole store.
• In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, you get driven around between places by a vampire cab driver. If you play as a sane character, you never really suspect anything about him. If you play as a Malkavian, your character has an EPIC freak-out at one point late in the game when they realize that the guy who's been driving them around is CAINE HIMSELF.
• Wild ARMs 3: One of the many, many Optional Bosses is the legendary fighter, Bad News. He's incredibly difficult to take down and has a ton of HP, second only to the two forms of the ultimate Superboss of the game, Ragu O Ragla. His Secret Identity? Ortega, the clerk at the counter of the arena where you fight him. He doesn't even bother to take off his flannel shirt and apron to fight you. He doesn't have to.
• Wing Commander:
  • Col. Christopher Blair gets demoted to Captain after the loss of the Tiger's Claw in the prologue of II, relegated to a desk job on a remote outpost. That doesn't stop him from kicking ass when the Kiltrathi come knocking on his door (despite Admiral Tolwin's efforts to keep him pinned down) and eventually defeating them, and getting his rank back.
  • He then tries this voluntarily between III and IV after singlehandedly defeating the Kilrathi by retiring to a life of a farmer on a remote desert planet. It doesn't work out and he goes back in action in IV.
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: Hearts of Stone, Gaunter O'Dimm aka Master Mirror presents himself as a mangy vagrant, but he is the most powerful being to appear in any of the games and is heavily implied to be The Devil himself.
• The World Ends with You:
  • Kariya is a field agent only because he has declined several promotions to the management. True to form, his fighting skills rival those of the top brass, and the Player Characters are appropriately hesitant about fighting him.
  • Hanekoma is Shibuya's Producer, an entity charged with making sure all the Reapers follow the Composer's rules. Producers are angels, and thus — according to the in-game lore — one rank higher on the cosmic totem pole than the Composer himself. Only Composers know the identity of their assigned Producers, so to everyone else, he's just a random coffee shop owner with oddly specific knowledge of the Reapers' games.
• X-COM: Can have this thanks to randomly generated stats. So let's suppose you hire a group of rookies, one of them with no reflexes and who just got his grade from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. So you keep him in the base for Psi-lab screening. Having not seen any fight, he is still a rookie among his fellow generals and lieutenants. Results come, showing a psionic strength of one hundred. The lowest possible guy in the hierarchy is potentially able to Mind Control any alien his squad will come across. While staying inside the craft.
• YandereDev discussed this trope as an obstacle to adding a school store to Yandere Simulator. In the game, very few NPCs are unkillable. All three of them (Info-chan, the headmaster, and the guidance counselor) are very important to the plot or backstory, and one of them you can never meet in person (Info-chan). The clerk of a school store would not have the plot-importance of these NPCs, but would have the same invincibility, courtesy of being behind a counter and window in a locked room, and it would be kind of anti-climactic to get an unavoidable Game Over because a clerk spotted you killing someone (not even teachers do that — they will pursue you, and they are hard to kill, but you definitely can take them out before they apprehend you).

• The Big Bad of Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit, a Manipulative Bastard who ultimately succeeded in his lifelong quest for revenge against four people by manipulating events so that they were either killed or brought to justice for their crimes, has a day job as... a circus clown.
• In Akatsuki no Goei, Kaito is ranked in the bottom five ranks of the class with poor grades in every subject. In truth, he is by far the strongest person in the class and could be the most intelligent as well given how he educated himself from illiteracy to capable of studying advanced robotics in less than a year. Of course, he does end up with the most prestigious bodyguard position anyway, but even then his principle doesn't actually think he's anything special rather than just easy to get along with.
• Danganronpa:
  • Officially, the title of “Ultimate Lucky Student” is used to refer to a talentless person who was selected at random to attend Hope’s Peak Academy alongside the actually talented Ultimates. Makoto even claims that he’s more unlucky, with things such as getting a bathroom door that doesn’t open correctly. However, this defect on his bathroom door proves to be critical for proving his innocence in the first murder, as only he and Sayaka knew how to open it correctly, so he wouldn’t have needed to pick the lock like the killer did. Fast forwarding to the second game, Nagito takes it to an even further extreme, with his luck allowing him to do things like play Russian Roulette with five bullets loaded and survive, and pull off an almost impossible to solve murder, resulting in his talent being portrayed as one of the most potent in the series.
  • Some characters, such as Chisa Yukizome (housekeeper) and Kirumi Tojo (maid) have service job talents. In practice, this usually means that they're good at anything that could possibly help their employer; Kirumi, for example, can not only cook and clean but give business and political advice, rescue kidnap victims, and run the entire Japanese government.
• In the "true" ending of the Unlimited Blade Works route of Fate/stay night, Rin talks with Shirou after class, telling him that she has been accepted as a student at the Clocktower, and is allowed to bring him as her apprentice. This way he would be there for free but be the lowest on the totem pole, not even officially registered there. Despite his Reality Marble, something that, chances are, nobody else there could ever hope to obtain. Which is a great way to lay low since if news ever got out about his true power, they'd likely try to rip him apart to find out how it works.

• Helluva Boss: Our three most prominent characters, Blitzo, Moxxie, and Millie, are Imps, who are on the very bottom of Hell's Hierarchy. Even Hellhounds, who are viewed by most of hell basically as sapient pets and are legally considered as the property of their masters, are technically higher-ranking than them. And yet they are exceptionally talented at killing people.
  • Blitzo's proficiency at killing borders on Savant Syndrome, being terrible at basically everything else including running his assassination business but is skilled with just about any weapon and can easily do things without weapons that would get a human killed if they tried with them, despite lacking the Nigh-Invulnerability of most higher-ranking Demons which is essentially Complete Immortality made incomplete by an Achilles' Heel.
  • Moxxie couldn't punch his way out of a paper bag and he's a bit too soft to really be good at his chosen profession, having a panic attack in the first episode when he was asked to kill a mother who had kids. He's also more egotistical than his effeminate demeanor would suggest, which causes him to make dumb mistakes in the heat of the moment, at best causing him forgo playing to his strengths in favor of protecting his ego and at worst making him crossover into Too Dumb to Live. But when he's able to set aside his own emotions and ego enough to get his act together, he's a Crazy-Prepared and impossibly skilled marksman able to hit a bullseye with a cheaply-made toy gun without paying attention.
  • Millie is the most skilled fighter out of the three, being more physically capable than even Blitzo when she's in a good mood. But if you make her mad, you better start praying to whatever God has just forsaken you. In Blitzo's own words, "It would take a roided-out Hippo to take down that woman when she's upset."
  • Zig-zagged with Striker, who is also considered a member of the Imp race yet is more skilled than any of these three, with none of them being able to defeat him alone. But he's also clearly not a pure-blooded Imp due to his snake-like features, likely being a hybrid of an Imp and a higher-ranking demon.
• Zig-zagged in the case of Little Kitten in If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, who juggles two jobs as the Emperor's Caretaker and Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes. The Caretaker job is mostly housekeeper and Butt-Monkey rolled into one — but he's one of the few people allowed to speak with the Emperor. He keeps him happy and informed about the state of the galaxy (usually not at the same time); the Emperor has power, but needs Kitten to know the problems to solve. Even the janitor part gets dangerous sometimes; cleaning the sewers often involves killing eldritch infestations. As Captain-General, he technically outranks everyone in the Imperium except for the Emperor himself and the Primarchs (possibly), and the fact that the Emperor isn't going anywhere any time soon makes his word synonymous with the Emperor's will. A lot of that job is taking care of the other Custodes, and he can be found cooking and cleaning for them^note . In other words, the job that sounds menial is incredibly important, and the job that sounds prestigious involves a lot of menial work.
• Mani Mani People: Shuji was fired from his company and he decided to become a janitor at a college. One day, he found a USB containing pictures of the professors having relations with his female students. He turned the USB to the authorities leading to the professor's arrest. Shuji revealed that he used to be a police officer working in the cyber crimes division.
• The Red and Blue Blood Gulch Teams from Red vs. Blue are simulation soldiers, just meant to be test subjects for new equipment and cannon fodder for Freelancer training. Despite this status, they tend to come out on top of situations where regular UNSC Marines and Freelancers just die. Most notably, they took out the Meta.

• Anecdote of Error: Yensha seems at first to just be the museum's security guard with a chip on her shoulder about students sneaking in, but it turns out that she's a bona fide war hero, who killed the most ruthless war criminal among the Dalgysume.
• Eario the janitor from Brawl in the Family may be a Butt-Monkey in that universe, but he can apparently work at breakneck speed in resetting a level every time Mario loses a life.
• The Temple of Phred, in Dubious Company, has the almighty janitor's closet, which houses the divination pool. The high priest admits that it didn't draw as much attention as the card tables.
• Deliberately invoked by the players in this strip of Full Frontal Nerdity. The guys are playing Call of Cthulhu where their characters are Lovecraftian cultists and Fraternity students at Miskatonic University. Trying to gain more information about a rival Frat/cult, Nelson metagames by asking who is the oldest employee serving on campus to which Frank replies the head of maintenance. Nelson says that anyone surviving everything that has happened at Miskatonic over the decades of living in a Cthulhu Mythos world has to be one of these.
• Girl Genius gives us Airman Third Class Axel Higgs aka "The Unstoppable Higgs". Besides his moments of stoic Determinator badassery in the face of danger, the adventures in Castle Heterodyne hint that he's actually someone far beyond your mere third class crew member. Later on, Higgs turns up as a low-ranking officer in England's navy as well, leading Tarvek to speculate that Higgs is none other than the mysterious seventh Jägergeneral, the "keeper of many secret things" alluded to in the Castle Heterodyne arc. Higgs does not deny the charge. A short time later, Axel himself confirmed this, also revealing that not only is he a Jägergeneral, he's one of the first Jägers, making him one of the oldest beings in Europa.
• Homestuck: So, your home planet of Prospit has been destroyed, you are now exiles living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and you need someone to lead the rebuilding of civilization. Who do you appoint? Why, the mailwoman.
• One-Punch Man:
  • Saitama, the titular Invincible Hero, is initially ranked dead last in the Hero Association despite acing the physical part of the Hero Exams and shattering every record the Association had... all because he bombed the written portion of the Exams. In reality, he's the single strongest thing in the series and is way stronger than literally any other hero (including the S-Class), but it doesn't stop politics and inner organization workings from throwing wrenches at him.
  • The three top-ranked heroes of A-Class, B-Class, and C-Class are downplayed examples: They could all get promoted to the higher classes, but for various personal reasons, choose not to. Licenseless Rider (C-Class) considers himself unworthy of B-Class, Fubuki (B-Class) would rather be the queen of B-Class than a high-ranked A-Class, and Sweet Mask (A-Class) views himself as being the buffer between A-Class and the prestigious S-Class. It's worth noting that Licenseless Rider's full power is never made clear, and he may have only reached the top of C-Class because he's the embodiment of a true hero in personality if not power (as most clearly demonstrated when he keeps throwing himself at a Demon-level monster despite being horrifically injured and knowing full well he won't even be able to buy time, or when he gets a cat out of a tree).
  • S-Class itself was created in part to address this trope. Before its formation, several future S-Class Heroes were placed at B-Class (such as Bang) or were in C-Class (such as Superalloy Blackluster). In fact, the latter was the lowest ranked C-Class Hero while still being comparatively as strong as his current self. S-Class was made to recognize the One-Man Army heroes who defied classification.
• Played with by Questionable Content. Martin unknowingly meets one of the senior research librarians at his workplace — who's dressed as a janitor and carrying a plunger.
• This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip presents a dark (and weirdly logical) twist: the janitor's lack of status makes it easy for the professor to kill him and steal credit. This one takes it in a different direction.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • Chief Warrant Officer Thurl. On paper he ranks barely over the grunts on payroll, in practice he is more vital than Tagon in the day-to-day running of the mercenary company and is the oldest and most experienced member of the crew. He is more adept than several of the actual COs in negotiation and command, and has invaluable contacts with old military and mercenary buddies. He also threatens to quit the moment somebody saddles him with a higher rank. After being killed, his uploaded personality takes a job with Petey as afterlife guide to Petey's Virtual Afterlife, where he goes on to have pretty much the same relationship to his new god-A.I. employer.
  • Schlock himself, as well. He's just a sergeant, but he's easily the most dangerous mercenary in the company, is smarter (and faster) than he looks, and used to own the company but gave it back for a pittance. The only control he took during his time as owner was to request the Sergeant rank; the previous owner made herself an Admiral. Although he usually doesn't, he can still ignore orders at will, and often just shows up at officer meetings. In his case, though, he's deliberately kept that way by the higher ranking people, who are all very well aware that giving Schlock any kind of actual power would be a horrible, horrible mistake. And that probably suits Schlock himself, who does not want the responsibility nor paperwork that officer rank would come with.
  • Specifically addressed in two of the Seventy Seven Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries:
  • Technically, General Bala-Amin's role is more like the Chief of Traffic Cops within the Sol system. But since "traffic" around the area includes things like speeding asteroids and out-of-control starships, even this position lets her have at least one Battleplate at her beck and call. And since she was the closest responder available during the Fake Civil War crisis on Earth, she was given a significant boost in political power during the duration of the event, upping the "almighty" part even further.

    Sorlie: What's our budget look like?
    Chester: Your budget for this project is, and I'm quoting General Bala-Amin, "all the money".

• Grexzol from Second Empire is a borderline senile, Cloudcuckoolander Dalek working in menial positions in the Ziragalen fortress, rummaging for otaku memorabilia in the middle of an attack. And then we learn exactly what it takes for a Dalek to reach senility age.
• Spellshocked, a (sadly now defunct and lost to the internet^note ) webcomic that took place at a magic academy had, near its start, a near riot by a bunch of magic using students picking on an accident-prone non magic user. This is ended when a mysterious figure appears, sending everyone scattering. The figure is revealed to be an extremely intimidating individual, with, among other features, glowing gauntlets of power. Said individual then pulls out a mop and starts cleaning up the mess, revealing himself to be the custodian. Probably a Justified Trope, since it would require someone extremely powerful to fix the kinds of messes that a bunch of irresponsible kids playing around with the fabric of the universe could cause.
• Reynir from Stand Still, Stay Silent is effectively a stowaway who ended up in the expedition on accident and is not at all prepared for the Silent World. As a result, he tends to only do menial jobs that don't put him in danger of infection, helping with food, laundry, and other things. He's also a Mage who, while untrained, figures out how to create runes that ward of Vengeful Ghosts and can even function as landmines. Since he can communicate with the undead, which most of the crew can't (and the only one who can is knocked out half the time, and grossly underestimates the threat the other half), he's also the only one who can actually figure out a permanent solution to their ghost problem.
• Chessmaster and Master Anima Yu Hansung from Tower of God was originally offered a position as high-ranker (the top 1% of those who have reached the nigh-impossible goal of climbing to the top of the Tower), but he declined and became proctor of the second floor under Evankhell instead.
• Transcerebral has Gerad, Andrea's school janitor, who seems suspiciously aware of her circumstances.
• Unordinary:
  • Seraphina. In terms of official positions in school, her position as "Queen" has been taken up by Remi for activities such as the Turf War. However, it is still acknowledged that she is likely the strongest in school.
  • John is also one and is played more straight as he's is one of, if not, the strongest characters in the series, but pretends to be a cripple because he's afraid of being a monster again.

• Atop the Fourth Wall: Linkara has defeated a Multiversal Conqueror, two Eldritch Abominations, one of them twice, and several Evil Counterparts from alternate universes, owns the most powerful warship in The Multiverse (stolen from said Conqueror), and has been acknowledged as his universe's Champion by a race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens... yet he seems pretty content to spend his days reviewing bad comics on the internet. This is something even he's questioned several times over, but it's simply what he loves to do.
• By the time of the third campaign of Critical Role, Pike Trickfoot has largely retired from adventuring in order to focus on running the Slayer's Cake bakery. When Bell's Hells need to find a divine spellcaster powerful enough to bring Laudna back from the dead, most of them ^note  are confused as to why they're asking a baker for help.
• The Armory Master of the Paracelsus' Sword in Einsteinian Roulette spends her time reading magazines behind a counter, answering the occasional doubt about weaponry the convicts may come up with and being bothered by some of the aforementioned convicts with "romantic" ideas. Aside from that, she went through 27 HMRC missions (in which loss of limbs and deaths are constant) without as much as a scratch and is perfectly capable of shrugging off nuclear attacks with the assistance of her equipment.
• Harold the janitor in The Elevator Show.
• An episode of Freeman's Mind has the titular character thinking of how the janitors must have the highest survival rate of Black Mesa employees caught in the catastrophe: They have a mop for use in melee, know the layout of the facility, and have the keys to all the locked doors he keeps running into.
• During Season 2 of Noob, Gaea was under Level 20 and part of the game's worst guild. Yet, thanks to her guts in terms of blackmailing and her friendship with a hacker, she managed to get favors from both the game's top player and the creator of the game himself. After getting banned for blackmailing the top player.
• Parodied by The Onion Radio News: "At the University of Chicago this week a janitor gave the planet some much needed breathing space after bumping the Doomsday Clock back by 30 minutes while dusting it. The janitor has been awarded the status reserved for living gods and flown to Japan to sweep up around an out of control particle accelerator."
• In his satirical online series Ransom Notes, comedian Taylor Ransom plays a cast of typical characters to be found at a fictional American mega-church. One is The Janitor, a dutiful (but slightly sinister) employee who not even the otherwise almighty Senior Global Pastor would dare to sack or make unhappy - simply because he knows too much about the workings of Daddy's House Church, where the money comes from, where it is spent, and most crucially, where the bodies are buried. (not necessarily metaphorical bodies).
• Ace, of Ruby Quest. Ace is the only member of staff shown to actively carry out maintenance, and is often seen lurking throughout the Metal Glen as an ominous presence. Even Subject #6 (actually #5) is afraid of him by the endgame phase, crying out for his mother in fear:

  ＨＥ'Ｓ ＣＯＭＩＮＧ

  ＡＣＥ ＩＳ ＣＯＭＩＮＧ

  ＨＥ'Ｓ ＧＯＩＮＧ ＴＯ ＬＯＣＫ ＭＥ ＵＰ

  Ｉ'Ｍ ＳＣＡＲＥＤ, ＭＯＭＭＹ

• SCP Foundation:
  • Despite the "no universal canon" nature of the Foundation, a character named Wilhelm Grungkok starred in exactly one tale written a few years ago. He's still brought up now and then, is one of the longest-surviving members of the Foundation that hasn't been augmented in some way (mostly because he knows when to duck), and between cleaning up the messes of the various "detainees" and overhearing conversation, the man's brain probably contains half the database of a multinational shadow organization for whom the phrase "knowledge is power" is a quaint starting point. And the poor slob still can't even get employee of the month...
  • There's also this LEGO stop-motion short building up on the idea that even janitors (or especially the janitors) at the Foundation are badass beyond what should be humanly possible.
• An Internet urban legend concerns a new hire at a low-wage, dead-end job who is vastly overqualified and wealthy, but pleased to be there. Upon asking, his new coworkers find out he used to be a highly-paid manager at a prosperous company, but left them following a nasty divorce... and as long as he's still employed, his child support payments to his ex-wife are based on his current income, not his past job or savings.
• There is a 4chan greentext story about a Star Wars roleplaying campaign in which the narrator's character is a runaway criminal laying low as a low-ranking spaceship technician, basically the closest thing to a janitor In Space. After some unfortunate events and abuse from his own party members, he ends up falling to The Dark Side. While the campaign goes on, the janitor begins training in the dark arts, completely unbeknownst to the other party members and with some help from the dungeon master. At the climax of the campaign, he uses both his skills as a technician (turns out, being the primary responsible for the maintenance of the party's spaceship has its perks) and his newfound Sith powers to pull a magnificent act of treachery, eliminating both the Big Bad and the rest of the party and establishing himself as a powerful Sith in his own right, combining this trope with The Dog Was the Mastermind.

• Adventure Time has Princess Bubblegum's servant, Peppermint Butler. He serves his master and does not run the kingdom itself, but his name can grant a favor from Death himself, he's golf buddies with the show's version of Satan, and is the go-to person for dark sorcery.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Long Feng, the Grand Secretariat of Ba Sing Se, and head of the Dai Li. Despite his position as just an "adviser to the King", as an adviser, he's managed to manipulate the King, control all information that flows through the palace and prevent him from even knowing about the 100-year long war with the Fire Nation. This comes to an end, however, when Team Avatar exposes him, and Azula out-manipulates him.
• Terry McGinnis of Batman Beyond qualifies. He is, after all, officially (and de facto) Wayne's errand boy. Then from Batman: The Animated Series, there's Alfred, Wayne's butler...
• Ben 10:
  • The first few seasons (and associated live-action films) of the original series established that there is a powerful alien fighting force that takes cover identities such as school teachers, mailmen, and phone repair people. They even call themselves The Plumbers, a job most would consider as low or lower than the janitor!
  • Ben 10: Omniverse: The final episode taking place in Gwen's magic university reveals the local janitor to be Bezel, the creator of the Charms of Bezel and the most powerful sorcerer in the world. Notably, he hates real magic because nothing is out of his reach anymore, preferring simple sleight-of-hand card tricks.
• Beware the Batman puts more emphasis on Alfred's past as an MI6 operative, with him actively helping Batman in combat since Alfred's incarnation is younger and in his prime than in most versions.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command had Booster as one for Star Command HQ before becoming an actual Space Ranger after proving himself in the pilot episode along Buzz with Mira and XR.
• In Class of the Titans, the school janitor Mr. Suez turns out to be Zeus, King of the Gods.
• Code Lyoko: Jim Morales, the Janitor and gym teacher of Kadic, is the one that the heroes have the biggest problem with when they try to sneak off campus. And when he's on their side? The pudgy, nosy man (who's held so many jobs that he doesn't have the time to talk about it) grabs a nail gun, stalks off to the school, and takes down invading monsters that shoot lasers.
• "Yohnny the Yanitor" from Dexter's Laboratory gets so fed up with the title character staying behind to work after school, forcing him to stay late as well, that he turns the whole school into an obstacle course to get revenge in the episode "Trapped with a Vengeance". Though he lost, so to speak, he had some badass skills for a janitor.
• The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants has custodian Mr. Ree, who is arguably the nicest member of the faculty at Jerome Horowitz Elementary, one of the few people who can get away with sassing Mr. Krupp, and was once a high-ranking government agent. As a result, he's also one of the few adults on the show that George and Harold can rely on for help.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • The show pays tribute to this concept: Timmy makes a wish that backfires, and Denzel Crocker ends up as a buff, brilliant janitor instead of the hunched, looming teacher.
  • In another episode when Timmy wishes everyone in the world was super but then later was forced to wish that there were no superheroes, turning everyone normal except the supervillains, the only way to defeat the supervillains is for all the kids and other "normal" people, including a janitor, to team up and use their "normal people powers" to defeat them.
  • Denzel Crocker actually plays this trope straight, even outside of the episode in question; in spite of being portrayed as an incompetent elementary school teacher, you still have to take into account that he's done everything from creating a functional portal to Fairy World, discovering cold fusion (before someone hit the Reset Button on the universe), and creating a functional rocket with embezzled school funds. Oh, and he's always right about Timmy's fairy godparents.
  • Referenced yet again in another episode "Future Lost." When Timmy wishes for the world to be all retro-futuristic, human teachers have been replaced with robots. And because of this, Mr. Crocker is once again the same muscular janitor mentioned above in the retro-futuristic Dimsdale, where his obsession over Fairies has likewise with lots of things in retro-futuristic Dimsdale, been replaced with a hatred and fear of robots. For example, instead of shouting his usual "FAIRY GODPARENTS!", he now shouts "ROBOTS ARE EVIL!"
• Fanboy and Chum Chum has Janitor Poopatine, a parody of Emperor Palpatine who trundles around school in an A.I. wheelchair with robot arms, destroying gum in an over-dramatic Acid Pool mounted on the back of said chair.
• Flying Rhino Junior High has Buford, a former CIA agent, now custodian of the titular school. His expertise is usually called upon to help the students deal with "The Phantom's" latest reality-warping attack on the school. In one episode, a running Shout-Out to James Bond, he gets to supply the four main students with spy gadgets.
• Futurama: Philip J. Fry is biologically unable to produce delta brainwaves, making him the only being alive who can defeat the Brain Spawn and has in fact done so twice, saving every living creature in the universe. Almost no one is aware of this, though, and Fry continues to cheerfully work a low-paying job on an interstellar delivery crew, living a relatively mundane existence by 31st-century standards.
• Golden Gate is a short cartoon about a very secure bank vault. And an old woman, who works as a janitor and uses a back door to bypass everything.
• In Gravity Falls, though it's more or less just Played for Laughs, Soos becomes this during Weirdmageddon, wandering the landscape helping strangers in need during the apocalypse. Apparently there's already some folk songs about him by the time he encounters Dipper and Wendy.
• Hong Kong Phooey: "Is it Penry, the mild-mannered janitor? Could be!" Though, in HKP's case, he's not so much an Almighty Janitor as he is an Idiot Hero with a Hyper-Competent Sidekick. The sidekick in question, Spot, seems to fit the trope more appropriately, given that he's basically the janitor's pet cat, yet ends up thwarting the villains more times than the titular hero by a ridiculous landslide.
• Spiff from Iggy Arbuckle, who is a "sanitation worker" and cleans up trash while simultaneously performing martial arts.
• Invader Zim:
  • Agent Dark Booty is a borderline example. He's a high-ranking member of a secret society dedicated to protecting humanity from paranormal threats, and Dib's contact in the group. We never actually got to see him in action before the series ended, but the indications up to that point are that he really is or was as much of a legend as that indicates. His day job? Janitor at a NASA facility.
  • Sizz-Lorr is likely one of the biggest and most powerful of the Irken race, yet he runs a restaraunt on the Irken snacking planet of Foodcourtia. His job title? Frylord. He's the highest-ranking Fry Cook in the Irken military.
• The Janitor: Literally, in the case of God's janitor, who does routine maintenance tasks like put a fresh coat of paint on Mars. Once told by God to wash off the earth because it was getting dirty, he forgot to turn off the spigot, and inadvertently caused Noah's flood.
• One episode of Kim Possible featured the school janitor who was actually Canada's greatest secret agent, working undercover. His replacement was another nation's greatest secret agent.
• King Rollo: The Cook could be considered the real ruler of King Rollo's kingdom. As she was a wiser mother figure, Rollo would usually defer to her advice.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Spike the dragon is often discounted by others for being rather immature and for being a baby, but he's still a baby dragon: a fire-breathing creature that is Made of Iron, can eat anything, and routinely bathe in lava. He may be the butt of jokes, serves only as Twilight Sparkle's assistant, and typically holds little the lowest rank imaginable such as not even having a position in her School of Friendship (he's described as "essentially being Twilight's executive assistant"). That said, he's also the reason the ponies made peace with dragons and changelings, has taken on both a massive Timberwolf King and King Sombra and won, and once casually saved an entire stadium from a stadium-sized falling iceberg by melting it.
  • Derpy Hooves is just a humble mail carrier and delivery pony, who's presumably been held back by her scatterbrained behavior and bad eyesight. Flashbacks however show she was a more capable flier than both Rainbow Dash and Spitfire until her eyesight went bad, she dove between Twilight Sparkle and one of the Storm King's bombs in the movie (making her the reason Twilight was even able to save the day), she was the only non-Wonderbolt to attempt to attack Tirek, she can apparently deliver letters to Tararus (yes, that Tartarus), and she has a habit of appearing amongst nobility and the elite during high profile events like the Royal Wedding and the Grand Galloping Gala. And, notably, she's still depicted as a fast flyer in spite of her eyes: during the attack on Tirek she was shown flying faster than anyone else and she was the Airsprinter's first pick to replace Rainbow Dash for their team.
• Moville Mysteries features a school janitor who is a former archaeologist and adventurer. He devoted his life to keep contained an evil elder god named Polipotanaketl which he accidentally released some years before.
• Pole Position combines this trope with The Dog Was the Mastermind in an episode where the main characters are searching for the elusive leader of a foreign spy ring. Initially believing a scientist was the spymaster they were looking for, it ultimately turns out to be his janitor. When the main characters Lampshade this trope, the janitor annoyingly replies "Just so you know, I'm a General in my country."
• One episode of The Real Ghostbusters had the titular characters dealing with a Banshee who's singing causes destruction. When they go her location, they find the building looking like a disaster area and find an old janitor who's been pushed over the edge from all the cleaning he's had to do. He chases after them with his suprisingly good mop skills and the ghostbusters only managed to escape from him when his mop gets caught in a staircase's guardrail, sending him flying backwards.

  Janitor: Come on, one at a time or all at once! This mop is registered as a deadly weapon!

• ReBoot: After becoming an adult and surviving the games, Enzo becomes an incredibly strong fighter, both physically and mentally. However, he is still technically a Guardian cadet because he never had the chance to attend the Guardian academy.
• Hank from Recess. One episode had the kids discover that he was a math genius, whereupon he got scouted by the university, the military and by NASA — only to point out that if being a genius were his job, that would take all the fun out of it, so he'd rather be a janitor.
• Regular Show:
  • Skips is a simple groundskeeper at a public park. Yet he has lived for centuries, and possesses knowledge and wisdom so great, that one would wonder why he chooses to spend his immortal life as a simple groundskeeper. Mordecai even points this out (insultingly) when doing a karaoke duet with Rigby.
  • The other Cool Old Guy Pops is the son of the park's owner and technically has more authority than Benson, but prefers to act like one of the guys.
• Lenny and Carl from The Simpsons; despite being blue-collar workers who are typically as incompetent as Homer, it's later revealed that they are not only important figures in the Stonecutters (ranked 12 and 14 respectively), but are of higher standing than their billionaire boss Mr. Burns. Lenny and Carl are also revealed to have Masters Degrees in Physics, implying that they aren't so much incompetent as simply incredibly lazy when it comes to doing their jobs. (One episode confirmed the laziness.) Also, Lenny once took over from Mr. Burns after he went temporarily bankrupt and in more than one episode set in the "future", we see Lenny in charge of the Nuclear Power Plant.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: SpongeBob's fry cook status has occasionally granted him opportunities to cook for Neptune. Of course, Status Quo Is God and he enjoys his job at the Krusty Krab too much.
• SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron fits this pretty well. Due to them getting screwed over by their superior officer, Jake "Razor" Clawson and Chance "T-Bone" Furlong are given a life sentence of tending to a military junkyard. Ironically, this job gives them ample access to most of the technology they need to build their crime-fighting arsenal.
• In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) series, it's not until the sixth season episode Graduation Day: Class of 2105 where the Turtles finally attained the middle ninja rank of Chunin. Before all that, they were able to fight on par with long-lived warriors like Ch'rell and Agent Bishop who have at least centuries of experience on them, defeat some of the greatest warriors of the multiverse with Michelangelo himself winning the tournament in the Battle Nexus, play a huge role in stopping a Triceraton invasion of Earth, bring down an Eldritch Abomination in The Darkness Within, and ultimately become mystically powerful enough that they could transform into dragons and manhandle the Demon Shredder, stated to be the greatest evil who ever walked the earth. So in retrospect, the greatest accomplishments of the Turtles were achieved while they were still lower ranked ninja.
• Transformers:
  • Transformers: Animated:
    • While not exactly as low as a Janitor and technically high ranking, Optimus Prime is in charge of a group of lowly Space Bridge repairmen after screwing up somehow, respected only by his team. He lacks self-esteem and wants to be a hero more than anything. He's working on it. This has led some to call him "Maintenance Prime", after an insult given to him by Sentinel Prime.
    • And Bulkhead, a big low level rube who is 100% big guy... and the universe's greatest space bridge expert. He was at least working on a space bridge at the beginning of the series, which was his life-long dream anyway, but if it weren't for a certain screw-up with Sentinel, he would probably be much higher up.
    • Also Prowl, another member of Prime's crew, who happens to be one of the most badass Ninjas on Cybertron. His reasons for being held back were a combination of early life pacifism, and a Heroic BSoD after his master died.
    • Also Ratchet, a vet of the Great War and is bonded to the single most powerful Autobot weapon in existence, Omega Supreme, which has been serving as the team's "simple non-combat" repair/maintenance ship all along. Seriously, outside of Bumblebee, the entire "lowly maintenance crew" are absurdly overqualified for their low station.
    • Outside of Team Prime, we have Arcee, who was the equivalent of an elementary school teacher before she became an operative for Autobot Intel during the Great War.
  • In Transformers: Prime, in his youth, Optimus Prime (or Orion Pax, as he was named back then) was a data clerk. In other words, a librarian.
• Ultimate Spider-Man (2012): Stan, the janitor of the school Peter Parker attends, was revealed to be an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Not to mention he's the creator of Marvel Comics Stan Lee.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Brock Samson is seen as one by his peers in the secret agent community as he's a top-tier agent playing bodyguard for a super scientist washout in Rusty Venture. (This was actually intended by the O.S.I. as a Reassigned to Antarctica situation for Brock to keep him from nosing around the Guild of Calamitous Intent.) He eventually quits, and by the time he returns to working for the Venture family, Rusty has inherited Jonas Jr.'s company in New York and is now high-profile enough that someone as tough as Brock being his bodyguard makes sense.
  • Red Death is in a similar situation. Despite being a veteran villain with god only knows how many years under his belt, failing health and increasing family commitments means he's stuck working under Wide Wale. Eventually subverted, as he gets a seat on the Council of Thirteen following Wale's resignation from it.
  • The Random Power Ranking the Guild uses labeled Professor Victor von Helping, a friendly Carl Sagan-esque college professor, as a 5/10. However, he's actually the son of supervillain Vigo von Hellfire, and inherited a pretty impressive powerset of metal skin, flight, and bursts of explosive flame. The Monarch and 21, who together managed to off multiple Level 10 archvillains, couldn't even scratch him and needed to threaten his students to even get him to bother to fight back at all. This is because the Guild rates people by aggression level more than actual level of power: a guy who has highly dangerous superpowers and sci-fi gadgetry but only uses them as a last resort would rank below a Badass Normal with mundane firearms who goes for lethal force at the first opportunity.
• In X-Men: The Animated Series (the 1990s series), the fourth season involves a four-episode arc in which Apocalypse tries to rewrite time in his own image from the Axis of Time. During this episode, Bishop interacts with a demented Reality Warper who eventually reveals he is the actual janitor who takes care of the Axis, meaning he's ultimately responsible for managing all timestreams in The Multiverse. Then, after everyone has left, he reverts to his true form as Immortus and sets about repairing all of the damage that was done in the process of stopping Apocalypse.

• Josef Stalin was given the role of "General Secretary" by the other members of the Politburo of the newly-formed Soviet Union, because from their point of view, it was a menial functionary position within the Cabinet with little relevance to the political moving-and-shaking of the government, whose sole purpose was to determine who was fit for party membership and assign positions within the party. Stalin, however, discovered that this allowed him to staff the key positions in the Soviet government with people who were loyal to him and/or consequently owed him favours; when the inevitable power-struggles came after Lenin's death, Stalin had a power-base to work with that the key theorists and political figures of the party, such as Trotsky, didn't. We all know how that worked out.
• The party secretary of the Norwegian Labour Party for more than 20 years, Haakon Lie, practically ruled the party (ironically after the same centralistic principles as did Stalin despite his fervent anti-communism), although he never had any other political positions. The party members respected prime minister Einar Gerhardsen, but Lie was genuinely feared, and even after he was officially criticized by Gerhardsen, the general assembly of the party dared not oppose him. Having access to all members' personal files certainly helps.
• This is often the case with remusters in the Canadian Armed Forces, that is soldiers who changed from one trade to another for whatever reason (usually physical or mental health-related, or they want a trade with transferrable civilian qualifications). When you change trades your rank and pay drops back down to that of a Corporal, the second-lowest rank, so it's not at all uncommon to have Corporals with over 25 years of experience, tons of qualifications and competencies, countless deployments, and a whole rack of medals, and yet be the lowest officially ranked member of their troop whose boss is a Master-Corporal with only 10 years in. Also, as your pay only drops if you chose to remuster, while a forced remuster due to an injury allows you to keep your original pay rate, it's also not unheard of to have a Corporal making more than his Warrant.
• An explanation for why some very intelligent people work in jobs seemingly a long way beneath their abilities and pay grade (hinted at in various places above) is to satisfy the tax authorities. If all the income tax people actually see is a low-status job at which the person pays appropriate tax for minimum wage, the over-worked and under-staffed Inland Revenue tends not to look any further and considers the minimum wage employee is officially beneath notice. Therefore they are then free to pursue other, better-paying, side jobs which may well be part of the black economy and on which no tax is declared. Being a janitor is a smokescreen.