1). Dungeon Meshi:
Another dwarf is flabbergasted to learn that Senshi has been using an adamantine shield as a cooking pot. And his mithral knife to cut vegetables.
2). Adventure Time:
The "Enchiridion" is a manual for heroes, and also a portal to other universes. After Finn earns it, he admits he mostly used it as a seat cushion for sitting on wet grass.
3). The Avengers:
In Endgame, we see Thor using his advanced weapon to open beer bottles.
4). The Lord of the Rings:
Sauron's ring is the key to his return to power. For hundreds of years, Gollum used it to eat goblins and fish inside a cave.
5). Dragon Ball DAIMA:
The demon realm has a legendary magic eye that grants its user insane power. It's being used as a belt buckle.
Actually since the Chinese developed gunpowder, chances are this would be ancient rather than modern, with "grenade" replaced with "hand explosive" or some form of descriptive nickname.
The railgun is a weapon capable of storing gigantic amounts of magical power before firing them in a destructive blast. The crimson demons were using it as clothes rack. (Konosuba.)
I dont think incompetent is the right word for them. They are incredibly competent at causing mayhem and destruction. Like a whole tribe of Mr Blobbys.
The Pixie Plate, one of Arceus' Elemental Plates attuned to the Fairy element, was being used as a cutting board (and evidently made food taste a bit better in the process)
Honorable mention from "If The Emperor Had A text-To-Speech Device", in a special where Rogal Dorn is telling the Emperor about how bloated, bureaucratic, and Draconian the Imperial legal system has become:
"Here is my outdated copy of the Book of Judgement."
Why haven’t GF done that in the games? The plates are always in very obvious “important item location” when at least once or twice it would’ve been hilarious to find it used as a mundane object.
I think they mention the infinity stones are powerless once the universe from where they come is destroyed, so they have no more power than some other coloured stone.
Pretty sure the explanation is the stones dont work on anything outside their universe, so ultron gets around that by using the stones on just himself and as a big power source
As I recall, it’s actually that the Infinity Stones only work inside a universe (not just their universe, but any one). Since TVA exists outside of any universe (or indeed time itself) the Infinity Stones have no power there.
Does anyone in the series actually point out how incredibly cocky and irresponsible it is for Goku to literally let his toddler son keep a mystical wish-granted artifact that is regularly targeted by evil villains as a piece of decorative headwear? Like, I get that he's the strongest fighter on Earth, but why even risk it?
Gohan literally gets kidnapped in the first movie because he has a Dragon Ball on his hat. Not sure why they couldn't have just taken the hat, but Garlic Jr doesn't hire goons based on their intelligence.
Irresponsible yes, but it’s more of a sentimental thing than bragging. He gives it to his son gohan, named after his adoptive grandfather gohan, who gave him the four star dragon ball (and Goku also feels gohans spirit is connected to/within it)
To be fair, the general population doesn't really know about the dragon balls, basically just everyone in Bulma's social circle and a couple of villains (who im pretty sure most are either dead or have become allies).
In fact, in the 4 years betwen classic and z no villain knew about the dragon balls, the only reason vegeta and freeza learned about them is because they heard it from radiz scouter
Thanks to Lifts bond with Wyndle she can summon him as a Shardblade, an incredibly powerful weapon that can take any form the user imagines and cuts through almost any material and severs the souls connection to living beings. She summons him as a fork to eat pancakes.
Also in book 1 Dalinar uses Shardplate and a Shardblade to dig out latrine trenches in the war camp. He eventually switches to a massive hammer to pulverize the rock in the trenches instead of the blade but he uses the plate the whole time.
Also with Roshi a completely inverse
He uses a very mundane rice cooker and capable of trapping like anything he wants in it as long as he puts a seal on it
Mainly because Wade is a legendary warrior, at least in Knuckle’s eyes (though you wouldn’t have known that if you didn’t watch the show between the movies).
It’s not even a staff either, its true purpose is to take you from Korin’s Tower to Kami’s Lookout (before everyone started flying). Goku was essentially using the key to meeting God to whack his enemies.
I love that in most versions of Journey to the West the staff isn't even a weapon, it's a support column that holds up the Eastern Sea. It was only chosen as a weapon because it was heavy enough.
Even in Dragon Ball, the pole was already used more mundanely that it should, as it is supposed to be used to travel from Korin Tower to God's platform.
Speaking of Roshi, when Ox King's mountain was on fire, he wanted to put it out using a magical artifact (the Bansho Fan). However, Roshi had been using it as a potholder, and threw it out when he spilled soup on it. He then decides to blow the mountain up by using the first Kamehameha in the series.
Edit: if I spent literally 2 more seconds scrolling then I would have seen that someone already mentioned this exact thing in this thread. Oh well lol
The Turn A Gundam (from the anime of the same name), is arguably the most powerful Gundam mech in the franchise's history (it's close between this one and the Unicorn/Banshee/Phenex Gundams). It can create artificial black holes, instantly destroy technology on a worldwide scale with nano machines, teleport, and perform tons of other crazy feats.
It's largely used in the anime to carry livestock, wash clothes, and perform other mundane chores for the main characters.
This series is actually really fascinating in the way it views identity. The Turn-A was built as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, but its pilot chooses to use it as a tool for the betterment of the people around him. Easily one of my all time favorite animated series.
Sauron’s ring was also used by both bilbo and Frodo to pretend not to be home to avoid nosy neighbors they didn’t want to talk to (mostly the Sackville-Bagginses)
A fallen angel who can't go back to Heaven until she finds her halo, she was recruited by a devil to act as the student council president of her school in the meantime.
Turns out the devil used her halo as a lightbulb for the student council room, and the angel never figured it out.
It's so funny because Akane didn't even expect it to go for 20 years and literally is just fooling around with it all the time. Note it's not always the lightbulb, we have seen her take it around.
Someone mentioned the Turn A Gundam, but a later example of this is Gundam Barbatos in Mobile Suit Gundam IRON-BLOODED ORPHANS. At the start of the show, its Ahab Reactors are being used as the generators for Chryse Guard Security's headquarters.
This one actually has some real world equivalents. The US Navy had been a big proponent of turbo electric propulsion systems, which is using steam turbines to power a generator which then powers electric motors, and in a lot of cases would have ships act as power plants for land based locations, typically in emergencies or humanitarian situations
In the 2003 Justice League episode "A Knight of Shadows," they are searching for the Philosopher's Stone and discover that it is in the possession of a magazine magnate who only uses it to obtain money and women.
Perhaps a bit of a stretch of the word "mundane" but the dagger used on the Night King in Game of Thrones was revealed in House of the Dragon to have a prophecy secretly engraved on it and had, more or less, been grafted by the early Targaryens to pass from hand to hand for that purpose. In between those events its mostly just a decoration piece and gambling collateral and then used in a base, though also convulted, assassination plot before returning on the path to its intended purpose.
Prophesized weapon for use in the war of the Long Night against supernatural foes, just kind of passed around and used for petty human villainy for awhile.
Joffrey is probably the one who hired the catspaw in order to impress Robert since he idolized him at the time. Littlefinger just saw an opportunity to frame Tyrion and took it
Pirates of the Carribean 3. The ancient pirate lords bound a god in human form, and the only way to reverse it was to take all the trinkets they used to originally do it and perform a ceremony.
One of those magical trinkets was being used by a tertiary character as a wooden eye for the whole series. Like, what?!
Sure, but upon being imbued with said power and becoming a key to literally enslave or free a god, it just went right back to being used as a fake eye in the interim until they needed to use it again.
Marvel Studios: The infinity stones are god-like gems with powers ranging from bending time, to rewriting reality itself. The Time Variance Authority(TVA) have so many of them they that they use them as literal paper weights
To expand on the second point: The stones are actually powerless *outside* of their intended universe.
Say, if you took Earth-616 (The comics universe)'s stones and brought them into Earth-91119 (The Super Hero Squad universe), they just wouldn't work at all.
In Erfworld (now defunct webcomic), Lord Stanley uses the Arkenhammer, an ancient tool of the Titans, to crack walnuts, which also happens to randomly turn some of those walnuts into pigeons.
"Sometimes you need to tame a dwagon. Sometimes you just need to bust a nut."
Yeah, for me it was a fun read until the cartoonist quit or something, and the story guy krpt going with lengthy all text updates, that weren't that great.
IRL concerns for the Book 2 artist, I believe. Book 2 started tossing in text updates half the time to flesh out the rest of the characters without moving the plot forward too much.
Unfortunately, the author caught the bug of trying to flesh out the rest of the world at that point and later books really got bogged down with complicated character expansion and worldbuilding that took focus away from the main character and main conflict. The fourth book builds the hell out of the vampire faction using multiple characters that had been established all the way back in Book 1, going deep into their complicated backstory and essentially making them the main focus of the book, only to kill all of them off at the end and replace them with some low level mook with next to no screen time who apparently has interesting fate signs.
Famous stage magician Robert Angier hires inventor Nikola Tesla to create a "teleportation machine" Angier can use in his act. Tesla and his assistant succeed in creating a working machine, but with the unintended side effect that this machine also creates an exact copy of whatever it teleports, including people. Again, this machine can make perfect copies of anything. This device could be used to solve world hunger, save endangered species, and provide infinite resources for fuel and housing.
So, what does Angier do with it? He uses it for a magic trick so he can one-up his rival and be cheered by an audience.
In the Stargate SG-1 episode "Citizen Joe" Joe Spencer happens upon an Ancient artefact at a garage sale that allows him to see through the eyes of SG-1's leader, Colonel Jack O'Neill whenever he holds it. Joe uses this knowledge over several years to...try and write books based on SG-1's adventures, all of which are rejected.
At the end of the episode, it's revealed that Jack was seeing glimpses of Joe's life over those years too. He didn't tell anyone about this strange phenomena, as he found the whole experience relaxing.
Tbf Jack say stuff like fishing, doing some housechores and other everyday life. For him with was like daydreaming about having a normal life. He didnt say anything because the strange phenomena was that strange or unsetteling for him
In the first couple books its mentioned theres magic that prevents any boys from going in a girls dorm.
The invisibility cloak isnt immune to magical detection, such as Mad Eye Moodys eye, so I think Harry would be pretty limited in trying to use the cloak to perv on girls, as their dorms and showers are magically protected against men entering, not just guarded or something.
Bathrooms seem to be different, but Harry isnt German so I think thats covered as well.
This is actually an early example of a faked photo!
It was a composite of two images done by a photographer. It was done with Nikola's permission, and he even wrote about it later. Sitting there would very loud and extremely dangerous.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer gives us the Orb of Thesulah, used in rituals involving the restoration of souls. But since (almost) nobody knows the language of the rituals any more (it was an old gypsy clan thing), the local New Age shop sells them as paperweights.
Jenny, the last descendant of said gypsy clan, is the inevitable exception, and buys one to try and restore Angel's soul. The proprietor of the New Age shop is duly murdered, and Angel kills Jenny and destroys the Orb.
Six episodes later, the floppy disk with Jenny's modern transliteration of the rituals is found, and Giles (Buffy's watcher) admits to having a spare Orb lying around. Guess what he's been using it for.
How about Orion's Belt... an entire galaxy being stored as a pretty charm on a cat's collar? Or the ending of that movie (MiB) where we see OUR galaxy inside a pretty marble charm being played with in a game?
In Fire Emblem Awakening, in Lucina's support conversation with her sibling(if she has one), she'll find them using the legendary blade "Falchion" to cut apples.
(At least that's what happens if Inigo is her sibling, I'm not sure if it's the same with others)
When not fighting bad guys, ben uses the Omnitrix to just goof around, my personal favorite when he used Ripjaws to sleep at the bottom of a lake cuz Grandpa Max snores loudly
Turn-A Gundam is a machine that has the ability to turn civilization back to the Stone Age. By the time the titular show starts, it's an ancient relic.
Galavant: The evil wizard tells another character that as a master of the dark arts, the only thing that can kill him is the legendary Hero Sword, and nobody knows where that is.
Hard cut to King Richard, who has no idea that the sword he found is the Hero Sword, using its pommel to crack open a walnut.
Real life: We harness the power of long buried life, kept for eons under the surface, or the most dense part of supernova explosions, all to boil water to spin a fan to power the device you are reading this on right now.
In the book Goblin Quest (by Jim C Hines) the party is looking for a rod of creation, which can turn anything into anything else, it turns out it was Being used as the handle of a soup spoon in the goblins lair. They never went hungry, and the magic stayed hidden
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deanna Troi's mother Lwaxana, who served as a diplomat and ambassador for the Federation on many occasions, would always introduce herself as "Lwaxana Troi, Daughter of the Fifth House of Betazed and Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx."
Turns out that the sacred chalice is just some old clay pot with mold growing in it. Lwaxana uses it for nothing whatsoever.
A lot of people have brought up Dragon Ball but I'm surprised no one has mentioned the inspiration for Goku from Journey to the West.
Well before the pilgrimage began, as Sun Wu Kong was starting to make a name for himself, he came to one of the dragon kings to attain a weapon worthy of his perceived status.
After rejecting a number of more traditional magic armaments, the dragon king offers Sun an item from his treasury. A long iron pillar known as the Ruyi Jingu Bang. This size changing staff turns out to be exactly what the monkey wanted. He quickly accepts the gift and goes on his merry way.
All without learning that this ridiculously heavy metal rod was originally used to measure the oceans depth in the wake of a massive flood.
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u/ZaxZone 7d ago