No Gravity for You

A special kind of attack a character uses when they're in space and realize something. With gravity, this week's villain is a total Badass who can take out all of the heroes singlehandedly. But turn the gravity off, and all of a sudden he's a flailing ninny helplessly floating around in the air. It would seem that in this situation knowing eighty forms of martial arts isn't that useful a skill.

While Anti Gravity is usually assumed in a science fiction setting, this trope can be a handy way of reminding the audience that yes, technically we aren't supposed to have any. Granted, this trope is almost always invoked deliberately, and is typically used by those who control the local spaceship as opposed to those who are trying to invade it. If this attack was anything except a gimmick, the viewers would likely wonder why it isn't used more often considering how effective it is.

Still, as gimmicks go, it's a pretty cool one. After all, where else can you see people fighting each other Isaac Newton style?

See also Improvised Microgravity Maneuvering.

Examples of No Gravity for You include:

Comic Books

• Used in Transformers Generation 1 comic - when a corrupted matrix-posessed decepticon leader enters the autobot ship in one of their shuttles and starts demolishing the autobots, one of the heroes turns off the gravity and opens the airlock, allowing a single harpoon shot to push the monster out into space.
• Variation in the classic 1970's Superman story "Who took the Super out of Superman?" Clark has lost his powers, but finds himself as Clark Kent having to track down a gang. He brings along an anti-gravity device and handily takes them all down because as Superman he's experienced in zero gravity and they are not.
• In Sillage, while performing a mission on an alien world, Navis tumbles off a cliff during a struggle with a native. They are saved from death by an anti-gravity field generated by the local plebothinium and she quickly overpowers her opponent since she is trained in zero-gravity fighting and he is not.

Fan Works

• In the Firefly fanfic Forward, the crew take advantage of this when the ship suffers a malfunction that wipes out their artificial gravity systems and are being chased by Reavers. They rig the cargo doors on the belly of the ship to be partially open, luring the Reaver ship into docking at that point and boarding. The Reavers leap out into the cargo bay, but unexpectedly go from a ship with gravity to a ship without one, and their momentum leads to them flailing about helplessly in the cargo bay while the crew shoots them.
• In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry has to participate into an underwater battle. He has read Ender's Game. Underwater is not quite the same as no-gravity, but someone who's "experienced" in the latter may successfully adapt quite a few tactics into the former, especially against an entirely unprepared opponent.

Film

• Moonraker. Drax's space station has artificial gravity due to rotation. As the NASA shuttle with the Marines aboard is about to be lasered, Bond pushes a button that fires the station's thrusters and stops its rotation. The station goes to zero G and everybody floats into the air as Bond and his allies escape.
• In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Chancellor Gorkon's assassins start by firing a torpedo that disables the gravity on his shuttle. They can get around because they're wearing suits with magnetic boots; everyone else on the ship is considerably more impaired.
• In Star Trek: First Contact during the scene on the deflector at one point Picard deactivates his magnetic boots in order to float over the heads of several borg.

Literature

• An inversion in Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury: Bigman Jones is in a fight with another man in the low gravity of Mercury, but someone turns the gravity up to Earth-normal at exactly the wrong moment, and Bigman's opponent is killed.
• In Warren Ellis's Ocean, the protagonist uses not only antigravity but also inverted and perpendicular gravity.
• In the Blood of Kerensky trilogy, one of Phelan Kell's fights in his bloodname Trial turns out to be unarmed combat against an Elemental (a genetically engineered giant battle armor trooper). Since he gets to choose where to fight and they're in space at the time, he picks an empty hangar under zero-G conditions to level the playing field and ultimately wins by managing to cling to his opponent's back long enough to subdue him (while still collecting his share of bruises along the way).
• Sort of subverted in Ender's Game. The characters learn special tactics for fighting in zero gravity.
• In the Dresden Files novel Changes, Harry uses a specialized form of earth magic to temporarily create this. His main goal is the extremely crushing, localized gravity that results when the spell ends. It works very well.
• In the Tomorrow War series by Alexander Zorich, capture and deactivation of "force emulator" of a spaceship early on is common tactics of a Boarding Party - this ensures a disadvantage to everyone on board except Space Marines wearing jetpacks. The protagonist also gets to see the downside of it, when disoriented and panicked green guards start flailing limbs and weapons in the presence of prisoners, including civilian passengers of the ship being recaptured.

Live Action TV

• The Doctor Who episode "Flesh and Stone" is mostly set in a crashed, now-upside-down spaceship where the Doctor and friends are trying to outrun what is effectively an army of Weeping Angels (the pseudo-moving statues that first appeared in "Blink") and deal with a crack in time that erases its victims. The Angels ultimately defeat themselves by draining the ship of all its power causing the gravity to fail so they all fall into the crack and, as such, never existed in the first place.
  • More recently, the extra-universal entity House (no, not THAT House) takes over the TARDIS, and begins toying with Rory and Amy; one such method of doing so involves turning off the ship's gravity relocator, turning many of the corridors into horrendously deep pits...
• An episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine deals with a character who comes from a planet with very little gravity who must get around in a wheelchair, because medical treatment to acclimate her to normal gravity would make it impossible for her to return to her homeworld for extended periods. In the climax, she's able to save a captured shuttle crew by turning off the gravity and kicking the hostage-takers' asses in zero-g.
• Star Trek: Enterprise presents the opposite approach to this trope, in an episode where a dangerous alien is defeated by increasing the gravity over the deck plates it was walking on. This causes the reptilian biped to heave onto the floor and remain trapped there for a few seconds before it was shot to death.
• Firefly uses a variation of this trope. Rather than turning the ship's Anti Gravity systems off, Mal and River trick a villain into going outside the ship into the Zero-G environment of outer space. One well-placed punch is enough to send him flying endlessly into space with no way of getting back.
• Referenced on the Stargate SG-1 episode "Wormhole X-treme," when the show-within-a-show's producers are trying to scale back the special effects budget, and are stuck on a scene where the hero is supposed to become weightless and float past an alien guard. O'Neill, as their military advisor, asks "Why doesn't he just... shoot him?"

Tabletop Games

• In Dungeons & Dragons the levitation spell can also be used against enemies. Without contact to the ground or anything in reach to grasp, they float more or less helplessly in mid air.
• GURPS has plenty of rules available determining the exact effects of zero-gee on virtually any aspect it can think of. The penalties applied generally means that anyone not used to moving in it will become a flailing pile of mess; Martial Arts even has a special zero-gee fighting style, complete with an in-universe cinematic equivalent where the practitioners replace their legs with extra arms to enhance their fighting capability.

Toys

• Subverted/Defied in Bionicle. Lariska is aware of this trope, so when she is assigned to kill a Toa of Gravity, she first spends quite some time using levitation disks to practice fighting/assassination/both in zero-g conditions.

Web Comics

• In Sluggy Freelance, Bun-Bun actually weaponizes a ship's artificial gravity by toggling it a few times to make everyone inside fall "up" towards the ceiling, then fall back down to the floor.
• Quentyn Quinn Space Ranger in "The Federation" arc, when they had a disagreement:

Quentyn: Ahem. To reiterate: I have control of all your ship's systems, including the artificial gravity

• In Crimson Dark, when Sarah got access to her AI bugs and a lonely guard ran in. "I have complete control over every system on this station. Including the variable gravity plates."

Web Original

• Academy of Superheroes: A rare case of the antagonist using this on himself. The hero, a Gravity Master, pins him to an asteroid that's heading for Earth and leaves him to die. Fortunately for him, the villain was The Smart Guy of his team and an electrokinetic.
• In Pay Me, Bug!, part of the drill for repelling boarders on the Fool's Errand is to switch the gravity on and off at predetermined intervals. Since the boarders wouldn't know the schedule, they wouldn't be prepared for the sudden shifts.
  • A more mundane example is that, because the Fool's Errand uses older gravity technology, they can't have the artificial gravity on at all while they're in tach. Well, they can, but it's dangerous.

Western Animation

• Justice League Unlimited features a fight between Mister Terrific and The Flash who's had a Freaky Friday Flip with Lex Luthor. As Mister Terrific's only superpower is that he's really smart, this proves problematic, and he evens the fights by turning off the Watchtower's Artificial Gravity. Flash Luthor is non-plussed, and used his Super Speed to turn his arms into propellers. Mr. Terrific responds by turning the Artificial Gravity back on, causing Flash Luthor to plummet painfully to the ground, getting knocked out in the process.
• Avengers Earths Mightiest Heroes: one of Graviton's tactics.
• Kim Possible pulled this on Monkey Fist and his army of monkey ninjas while on a space station.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars sees Cad Bane use this trick to help even the odds in a fight against Anakin, Ahsoka and some Clone Troopers.
• The Autobots shut off the gravity in their ship to give themselves a fighting chance when they first battled Megatron in Transformers Animated.
• In one episode of Darkwing Duck, Negaduck negates the Super Strength of the duck-turned-dinosaur Stegmutt by putting him in a chamber with no gravity in it. Justified in Stegmutt can't even figure out how to fight a villain on his own.
• In the Futurama episode "Love and Rockets", when the Planet Express ship's central computer goes crazy, it shuts off both the gravity and the oxygen on the ship to prevent Fry and Leela from thwarting her.
• Treasure Planet, during Jim and Scroop's fight on the Legacy the gravity is turned off. Since the ship is completely open-topped Scroop goes flying out into space.