User blog comment:ChunkyChipackers/The Total Drama Contestants - Worst to Best/@comment-1764858-20140731180022/@comment-24971793-20140731193608

It's more like when a character pulls a skill out of their backside that doesn't really fit their personality and isn't well explained/unexpected. Like Sugar's coin flipping, Lindsay's bike building, Harold in TDI,...

This can be a sign of lazy writing. The writers want a character to win or do a certain action but can't come up with a believable way of doing so, so they just add random skills (an exception is Harold, where it wasn't lazy writing but part of his plot). Worst offenders IMO are Zoey and Alejandro who kept gaining talent upon talent, becoming almost flawless. With Alejandro you can argue that his background of trying to constantly beat his brother in everything explains these incredible skills, but there's no explanation for Zoey's sudden athleticism in AS.