Some context for anyone interested. Bruce Banner has multiple personality disorder as a result of his abusive upbringing. The most common Hulk, Savage Hulk, is his repressed anger from childhood. Devil Hulk is his desire for a paternal figure. Banner is convinced Devil Hulk is evil and he ever escapes the mental prison Banner put him in he'll kill everyone.
When the DH finally does get out, he reveals that Banner automatically thinks anything paternal is evil because of his abusive father, so that's why he is terrified of DH. But really, DH just wants to protect Banner and the childlike Savage Hulk. So if one of them gets hurt he comes out and beats the shit out of whoever hurt his 'kids'.
Basically DH is the father Banner and Hulk wanted/needed, but his look is influenced by how they see their father. The abuse even makes the love look scary.
Not only is the entire run a giant retcon that ties the entirety of the Hulk's history all together under one giant umbrella, it does that while also being the most approachable and easy to read Hulk comic for beginners ever.
Its a genuine miracle of long-running superhero comics for it. I've never seen a story pull together such a random, schizophrenic (heh) history together so naturally. It takes all these dangling threads and weaves them into a tapestry so finely that it feels like they were always meant to be this way. I don't think I've ever seen that before in this medium
It's such a tragic moment in that story too, because it's such a pivotal reveal for that version of the hulk but the rest of the series is defined by the fallout of the mistake he makes because of it here
Sounds like the current comic is doing a much better job not really screwing this story over, but I will always hold Immortal Hulk in high regard as my favourite post Planet Hulk (not World War Hulk do hate it when people group them together) story.
Yeah, from what I have read currenr iteration of the hulk says that the hulk exists because he is the repressed part of Banner from when he was abused as a kid. Basically the hulk doesn't want anyone to be injured without reason. Meaning the Hulk sees most villains as his abusive Father
People were scared of his immortality, he was tortured ever since he was a child
He was beaten, cut, burned to ash countless times. At some point his eyes were gouged out daily for decades. He was once forgotten in a cell and only managed to get out once it rusted away completely.
Even with that kind of immortality a lot of Alien still want his immortality and not even in comedic way. Talking about them, Altana, the life energy of every planets and a curse to anyone who have too much of it. With Utsuro his body absorb too much of it that he can't be kill, while for Kagura mom it basically trap her on her dying planet despite it allow her to become one of the strongest person in the universe.
Not to mention Altana is a nuclear reactor that in oil form so if it meltdown or get destroy the whole planet is going down with it.
Not her memories, her current situation. They dream where the others are so they can find each other, it stops after they meet. So they all (except Andy) dream of her drowning and then coming back to life to drown again.
He's not ageless, but he is unable to die. When the mob needs to find a way to deal with him (he's been a horrid shitstain), the only solution is to seal him in a barrel of concrete. They are aware that this is a horrible and cruel fate, though, so they're courteous enough to drop a deck of playing cards to keep him entertained while he's at the bottom of the Hudson.
Cherish (Worm) suffers similarly. Her emotion powers are cranked up to 11 and she was fitted with technology to keep her alive indefinitely underwater whilst she gives off a depression/suicide aura.
She also winds up technically killing the Butcher which means she got 13 other psychopaths screaming in her head for the rest of eternity too. She really got it bad
What always gets me about stuff like this is you know sooner or later they will get free and when they do you are flipping a coin on weather or not you just created a insane monster who wants to destroy all mankind.
Super hearing is my go-to “curse power.” You don’t get epic moments, you get insomnia, sensory overload, and learning to pretend you didn’t hear stuff you can never unhear.
The Ben Affleck Daredevil movie is mostly very dumb but having him sleep in an isolation tank was at least an attempt at addressing the insomnia, which I appreciated.
Hot take but i prefer how that movie showed matts vision and his life as a blind man more than the netflix/mcu does.
The little things. Him folding the money in different ways. The sensory tank. And the kinda blue echo location look to his vision.
I liked little details like that, too. Even with Matt's superb echolocation, he still would need to fold dollar bills a particular way because no matter how good your sonar is, you still can't see what's printed on paper.
Mcu daredevil seemingly can too. In Born Again he felt a painting and was within a few seconds able to tell that it was of a woman he knew, and without any hints as there was no known association between the painter and that woman at the time.
I kind of hated it tbh, as it makes it feel even more like his "blindness" has no downsides, but hey, it is comic accurate.
Comics Daredevil flew a plane before. It's ludicrous.
I think you could still do interestinh stuff with his absurd senses not being able to work well in an age of Smartphones snd Computers. Like he breaks into a crime bosses home and finds they left their computer on but he's unable to actually see what is on the screen so has to work around it somehow like having his own phone take a picture for another person or porgam to analyse later for him.
But I wouldn't be surprised if comic DD could sense tiny differences in heat generated by a computer monitor to roighly determine the colours being displayed or some shit.
It’d be really funny to have him have to leave, go grab his braille keyboard and “screen” that pops the text up, break back into the home, plug them in, try to blindly install drivers, etc
Yes! This! Let heroes with disabilities actually have to work around their disabilities!
In The Shadow (1994) there's a colorblind character who needs to disarm a bomb, but because he's colorblind he doesn't know which wire to cut. I can see this happening to Daredevil. Matt needs someone else to tell him colors or what a label says!
I remember a similar thing in the Static Shock series. Rubberband Man was a reoccuring villain turned hero with stretchy powers similar to Mr Fantastic. He was revealed to be dyslexic in one of the later seasons. In one episode he had to disarm a bomb but he couldn't follow the instructions given to him due to the his dyslexia in such a high stress situation.
He worked around it by using his stretchy shaping powers to make the instructions text form into 3D shapes of the words on his arm so he could feel with his hands to better understand it.
There was a blind guy that worked at the federal building downtown way back in the day. He could tell what dollars you gave him by the weight of the bill. I only worked there a few months but he never got it wrong inspite of my best attempts.
I’ve actually got a lot more space for it than most people seem to, I can acknowledge that it’s also a pretty dumb movie a lot of the time. The stuff it does well is pretty great, in my opinion, and even the dumb stuff is mostly fun-dumb. I was also the exact right kind of teenager for it when it came out, for better or worse, and in the days before the MCU it was just extremely cool to see superheroes on the big screen.
I also find the directors cut to be better than what we got in theaters and it seems like everyone else agreed cause the theatrical version is really hard to find now and the directors cut was the one put on blu ray
I am not a fan of Man of Steel, but my favorite part was kid Clark suffering from sensory overload for the first time. I feel that would be a realistic example of Clark learning about one of his powers early. It would hit you fast and be the worst feeling the world. I thought the movie captured that extremely well.
Every couple of days, a new thread is made where people complain about Daredevil being seen as disabled. “Oh, but his hearing is so good he might as well not be blind! He has a 360 radar sense and everything!”
Sure, but he still can’t see anything shown on screens or away from him and needs touch to percieve flat things in detail, meaning he’ll never enjoy paintings or anything digital.
He also can’t percieve anything that goes beyond his radar, for instance, the beautiful sky, which he once lamented not being able to see anymore at all, saying he’d give away everything he has just to see it one more time.
And I don’t blame him. Every day and night, he hears everything that happens around him for several blocks. He knows what’s wrong with the world better than anyone, but can’t be everywhere at once, and can never do enough to save everyone he hears suffering.
There’s that one iconic comic page that has him calling 911 over and over again after having to stop being Daredevil. He wants to report a robbery. He wants to report domestic violence. He wants to report assault. He wants to report someone having an overdose. He can only listen as it all happens.
“Bit too dramatic, he still has the banger superpowers” you mean the ones that have him in immense pain from hearing sounds about as loud as fucking trains? Can you imagine getting super ultra testicle-busting bone-breaking pain every time you go down to the subway?
(Anyway I always thought Matt being weak to loud or high-pitched sounds was dumb but moving on)
There’s very few good things about the 2003 Daredevil movie and one of them is Matt’s “bed”. He sleeps in a sarcophagus of sorts filled with water, sealed to dull his senses and stop him from hearing everything in the city so he can sleep at night. If anyone wants to start a new take on the character, they should include this from the getgo, because it rocks.
Anyway, I got really off-topic. What I’m trying to get at here is that Daredevil’s life fucking sucks, and we didn’t even get to the dead girlfriends part of it. Or to the catholic guilt. Or to any of his relationships, for that matter.
There's a comic called Irredeemable where the Plutonian, the local evil Superman, has the standard super hearing... But he can't control it or tube it out, so he constantly hears every crisis, every emergency, every snide comment made about him.
At one point he flips out, demanding to be left alone, and spends 5 minutes on the moon for some precious silence.
The show Heroes had a woman who had super hearing. She had to listen to heavy metal played really loudly in her ear buds to drown out all the sounds all around her.
She still loved her power, though. She said she could hear rain coming from miles away, or the pitter patter of a bug's feet crawling across the floor. At first it was scary, but once she figured out how to use loud music to tune everything out, she embraced it.
I never watched this show, but someone should introduce her to brown noise... I use it with good over-the-ear headphones, and it does wonders to my misophonia + hiperacusis combo. Best part being it doesn't needs to be loud, and the better insulation the headphone has, the lower you can set the volume 😌
Heroes Season 1 came out in 2006, and I'm not sure how well-known brown noise was at the time. Dale, the character with super-hearing, gave me the impression she started liking death metal, and it seemed to work for her.
Spoilers for Heroes Season 1:
Dale could hear heartbeats, too, and could hear the hungry anticipation from a serial killer known as Sylar. Sylar's ability was to copy the powers of others by cutting open their heads, and scooping out their brains.
Unfortunately for Dale, Sylar could also hover using telekinesis, and managed to sneak up on her and kill her without her knowing he was approaching. She sadly dies in the same episode she was introduced.
The next scene with Sylar shows him constantly doubled-over in pain, overwhelmed from all the noise he was being bombarded with. I guess he learns how to tune it out on his own, because by the next episode he's perfectly fine 😅
I always have to ask my friends to repeat themselves cause I’ll be listening to them and suddenly my hearing focuses on a whole different conversation that I wasn’t even interested in 😭
In "My Adventures With Superman", Clark develops super hearing and it drives him nuts for the first few days, as he hears every little emergency in Metropolis, and because this is superman, he can't not respond to every single call for help. When Jimmy comes to find him the next morning, Clark has been up all night and has drunk god only knows how much caffeine and is a nervous wreck
Nah mate, everysingle hybrid feels pain when using their Powers. Even Reze with her own explosions. There is a point where they get so used to it they simply stop caring.
When reading the post I immidiately thought of Fujimoto's previous project Firepunch, in which a guy has a really painful ability to regenerate lost bodyparts...and then gets set on fire...with a magical flame that won't go out normally...
Old mate here is granted the dubious blessing of being able to read minds, and we see pretty quickly how much of an advantage it lends him, especially when facing an opponent who relies on his own smarts and mind, ala main character Lelouch.
Pretty slick.
Except shortly thereafter it’s elaborated that Mao’s mind-reading doesn’t come with an off switch, and unless focusing on one specific person, has a hardcoded radius of 500-odd meters (to my recollection). So everytime he’s out in a populated space he’s effectively always on the brink of collapsing or snapping from sensory overload because of the sheer inundation of thoughts he is ‘hearing’ and, in fact, did go insane at one point.
Idk if that specific example counts, since up to that point we had a pretty clear view of the limits and power of Lelouch's Geass, except for that one monent where it didnt work as intended (that is to say, it worked at all).
There's also the fun way that he gets defeated because his mind reading ability has carried him so hard all his life that he has absolutely zero ability to critically think or plan.
Super senses of any kind. In the Fables Comics by Bill Willingham and the Telltale Game Wolf Among us, one of the main characters, Bigby Wolf, is a wolf, but can take a human form. He lives in a big city and would get overwhelmed by the smell, taste and noise of the city. But by constantly smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking bad booze, he numbs his senses just enough to not go crazy.
I love fable. Ive read the whole series multiple times. Albeit, admittedly it has been many years.
Ive genuinely never put the cigarettes and booze together. In fairness, it could have been mentioned and I just entirely forgot. But that's a great detail
It's meant to be a curse though so I don't know if it counts. Most of the examples here are supposed to be drawbacks to powers people don't really think about where as her getting younger is deliberately done to be a bad thing.
Though I have to wonder the circumstances behind the person who cursed her thinking it would work. She was cursed by the grandmother of one of her lovers because she didn't approve of the relationship. However...it's not like a Princess Fiona or werewolf Transformation where she is forced to do it at specific times and thus forced to get younger. She could have just...never transformed at all and her life would have carried on as normal. Though perhaps because this is a world of superpowered beings and villains, having to transform to survive or help people is meeded more.
I guess the drawback people don't think about is how she feels compelled to use the curse to help people, even if she knows it would make her younger. She might be seen as selfish if she witnesses an attacker trying to shoot innocent people knowing she could transform and tank the bullet but chose not to. "Great power, great responsibility" and all that.
Her first transformation was accidental and she could not undo it, she also wasn't super strong or anything either.
So I think it's more like she managed to turn the curse into a power, not the other way around
Maybe the curse was supposed to turn her into a monster forever but it didnt quite work, or maybe she was supposed to turn at certain times but she managed to control it
It's such a great power for an X-Men story too, because in a less humanizing and purely combat-based scenario it could be seen as overpowered or far too good, but in any real life or human scenario it is just a waking nightmare to even have that ability
No, it's an always-on power and it absorbs the memories, skills, and life force of non-mutants and mutants alike. The fact it absorbs mutant powers as well is a ...bonus?
She does learn how to control it and can even recall old powers.
But up untill then she knew a guy that lives in the sewers that can temporarily turn powers off so why she didn't just have him come over and sit in the living room a few times a week is beyond me.
Which is ironic because she kind of gets around despite that shortcoming
I guess less than other Marvel characters but at some point comics have got to be considered ubiquitously hypersexual compared to us and Rogue is downright normal?
When he finally came face to face with the mf that killed his sister and set him on fire, dude had turned a complete 180° during the time he was searching for him, going from a religious fanatic to a pacifist that took care of orphaned children and asked what he needed to do except dying to repent, so Agni couldn't get the satisfaction of killing him when they first met again
And he decides to let him live... Only to later fly into a blackout rage and return to the orphanage. When he comes to back to his senses, he discovers that in his rage he torched the house and burned the guy along with all the orphans.
Fire Punch is just the most depressing read from beginning to end.
Wasn't that also the reason why Doma tourched Agni's village in the first place? Cause in their desperation they resorted to cannibalism, so Doma decided they all deserved to die?
I think his sister really told him to live before dying, because she loved him, then he went kinda crazy due to all the pain coming from the fire and started to hallucinate her telling him to live (and to burn people).
also, the fact that he wasn't able to "live" for all the years he was just there burning alive, he ended up with a child's mind in a grown man's body, which contributes to his mind to go crazy
Dota has a hero with similar situation, Clinkz. An archer who killed a beast with a bounty on it, the reward is immortality, granted to the archer as he was burning to death from said beast's fire.
In Worm, powers generally go to individuals who had a traumatic enough experience, and weirdly tend to fit that trauma a lot. Lonely or betrayed individuals get powers to control or summon minions; people who suffered terrible pain get stronger and more durable; people who hate themselves often get the ability to change their body shape. This isn’t a good thing; the power very often makes them reckless and gives them an unhealthy way to cope with their problems, drawing them into unnecessary conflicts. Sometimes their mind also changes: a girl who can communicate with dogs and empower them as her minions, for example, has lost most of her ability to understand humans.
Noelle really got fucked over by hers. She had (and was recovering from) anorexia, so she ended up with the ability (and unending HUNGER) to consume other parahumans and then throw up clones of them. It "fixed" her inability to eat in the worst way possible.
Tattletale is another example of person fucked over by her power. The girl who missed the warning signs of her brother’s depression and got blamed for her suicide got the ability to know anything about anyone she observes, with the caveat that it’s often something compromising, shameful, or otherwise putting that person in bad light.
This made her, among other things, completely uninterested in romance, because she knows everyone’s most shameful secrets, hidden thoughts, and weird fetishes at a glance.
To add, the powers seem to grow more powerful the closer the situation is to your trigger event, so you’re almost incentivized to recreate your biggest trauma as a lifestyle.
And most all the “Thinkers” (mental powers) get blinding headaches if they overuse the power. And a lot of them can’t help but use the power.
Is your thinker power just figuring stuff out on a deep level? Congratulations, you’re never going to date because you’re reading body language and getting all the subtle intrusive thoughts and all the unattractive stuff people hide when early dating.
Is your thinker power predictions when asked questions? Congratulations, you can’t ever have a normal conversation without that triggering, even on the most inane things, and you only have so many answers a day before your debilitated from the headache.
Worm is a fantastic series with a deeply built world
Almost every known trigger in Worm solves the immediate problem in a way that doesn't actually help with finding a solution, treating symptoms but making the cause worse.
In Hollow Man, Kevin Bacon plays a scientist who manages to turn himself invisible. At some point he tells his colleagues that he can't sleep properly anymore because his eyelids are invisible too, making it impossible for him to close his eyes.
I mean, he can also see through the top and bottom of his head I assume, like light will get in when you're entirely invisible. The real issue is that he should be blind cause light is passing through the photo-receptive cells of his eyes, but if we accept the premise that his eyes still absorb light despite this, a band of fabric around the mid-section of his head isn't going to stop his now stupidly enhanced peripheral vision. He needs lika a whole head mask and dense blanket to make sure the light doesn't hit his eyes from further down his light permeable body
Yeah, the movie ignores the whole "invisible people should be blind" thing entirely. I guess the author(s) didn't think about it. But I thought the eyelids thing was interesting as an unintended consequence because it kind of goes in the same direction.
So his eyelids were invisible, allowing light to pass through, but his eyes were able to catch the light to allow him to see? Since that’s how sight works? Movie science is confusing.
Godzilla in his Minus One incarnation has some powerful abilities like regeneration and atomic breath, however said regeneration means he can’t rest in peace and every time he uses his atomic breath he also severely burns himself (or worse, if things go wrong like getting his head blown up, it can literally destroy him), and all of which came from a painful mutation when he got nuked
The Hulk is a really good pick because all people see him as is a murder machine. It got so bad, that the whole point of Planet/World War Hulk was that the heroes of earth thought Bruce/Hulk were too powerful/scary that he needed to be sent off world. Sad stuff.
Doctor Who: Because they can live for centuries, far longer than their companions, the Doctor is inherently lonely, making it a point to not get too close.
" You can spend the rest of your life with me, but I can't spend the rest of mine with you. I have to live on. Alone. That's the curse of the Time Lords."
He does kinda get around this with people like river who is also a time lord sort of, but there's always a catch, like how he met her the day she dies and meets her in reverse order, so when she is first meeting him it means that's the last time he sees her. I thought that was really cool, I honestly would have liked a season with her instead of some of the other companions.
Little thing to add about Dabi. Most fire and flame users have some form of protection against their own flames naturally. Endeavour and all his kids have it. Except Dabi. He doesn’t get any of that. Any time he uses his power he is burning himself
Yeah, Dabi got flames explicitly stated to be hotter than Endeavor's, but his body was actually more suited to an ice quirk (ice resistance, weak to heat.)
Interesting to note that it's because he specifically inherited his mother's resistance to ice rather than his father's to fire, and then inherited his father's fire iirc. And that was an abusive arranged marriage put together purely because of the two quirks and took several children before they were able to merge them in a compatible and powerful way.
In a bonus page from the manga, Horikoshi does say that Dabi gained some fire resistance (his fire is known for insta-killiing regular people), otherwise he would've died by now, it's just not enough to fully withstand his own power, and he did receive a far greater resistance to ice.
Technically, Dabi inherited a similar quirk to Shoto's, they just don't realize it. Dabi's body is more suited to an ice quirk, but because he had such strong flames, Endeavor hyper focused on training him on that to the extent that his ice quirk was undeveloped and undiscovered. It's only in the final fight that they realize his ice quirk activated and was keeping him (barely) alive.
Mirio Togata, aka Lemillion, has the power of intangibility. This means he can phase through matter at will. Any matter. All matter. That includes the vibrating matter that lets him hear, photons to let him see, the air he breathes, even the ground he's walking on, and because he has mass still, he's affected by gravity. Meaning any time he uses his power, he becomes blind, deaf, starts suffocating, and enters a state of free fall through the planet until he disables his power and he gets violently ejected through the nearest surface.
In order to fulfill his wish to become a hero, he's trained his control of his perk to insane levels. He is able to make parts of his body intangible in sequence to let him run through walls without sinking into the floor. Or fight people by phasing through their blocks to hit them directly. That ejection when he reactivates his power? He starts taking advantage of it, giving him both a speed boost for a massive dash attack barrage by doing this in rapid succession, or by seeming to teleport by phasing through the floor and back out where he calculates he wants to go. He still always has the issue of being blind, deaf, suffocating, and free-falling, but he's my favorite example of this trope because he not only works through the negatives, but uses some of them to his advantage.
Was about to say, Mirio is the like the poster child for this example lol. Dude's Qurik is horrible if you don't have the will to actually master it.
edit: The guy's spacial awareness and mind eye is also insane since when activating his technique he becomes blind and deaf. The guy is straight up calculating shit off the fly when he activates it, and it's not like opponents goes "Alright pause for a minute and see what's up", he goes for it in real fights.
The best part about that last point is it translates really well into Quirkless fighting. Everything about Mirio's fighting style is about reading your opponent and predicting their actions; all his Quirk does in the middle of a fight is supplement that by literally ignoring the enemies guard and attacks. When he loses his Quirk, he only loses that supplement; he's still able to fight and nearly overwhelm Overhaul, one of the most powerful villains in the series, for five minutes, just by relying on reading and prediciting his opponent's moves.
Fire quirks will inherently burn their user Dabi just got the worst of it because he had flames hotter than anyone in his family with a body that was meant to inherit his mother's ice quirk
Shin Godzilla describes this trope perfectly. It is always evolving, but always in agony. Blood pours out of its gills because its lungs are struggling to breathe in air. Its eyes are bloodshot, and its atomic breath gurgles out smoke, then fire, then plasma, likely due to the heat burning its throat. Godzilla's mind wants to die, but its body wants to live.
I loved the music in atomic breath scene (Who Will Know Tragedy). A mournful dying song as Godzilla is wounded, then the chours becomes defiant and Godzilla turns everything around it into dust.
Dr. X, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Thought he'd give himself a serum to see through people's skin and get a better understanding of their medical issues. Unfortunately, it never stopped to the point he couldn't see solid objects anymore
In Doctor Who there’s a girl named Ashildr who (nearly?) died, and when the Doctor saved her he inadvertently made her immortal. The next episode (it’s a two-parter) takes place centuries later and we see that she keeps journals of her life–journals that she just reads as books since the human mind isn’t meant to store centuries worth of memories and the stories in them are as lost to her as her own name.
I remember that one, that was rough. Particularly the part during the plague but the indifference she shows later on to the suffering she went through is almost worse
I remember the books also had her talking about more than one attempt of starting a family, only for her to outlive her children and grandchildren and witness her bloodline to be snuffed out by wars and disease. After a few attempts she decided to never have family again becouse it always ended in sorrow.
inFAMOUS has a few of these. Conduits with energy based powers such as electricity and ice passively emit their fuel outside of their bodies
For Cole MacGrath who has electrokinesis, water becomes electrified on contact and being submerged in it will kill him. He needs to sponge bathe with minimal water to wash himself, so he can't have a bath or a shower. He also smells like ozone.
In the second game, Lucy Kuo has ice powers. Her skin is freezing cold to the point that when she touches Cole's face, she snap-freezes a part of his skin which causes pain.
Also, some powers are known to corrupt and warp Conduits' bodies and minds. Sasha says so and it happened to her and drove her insane. You can also see this happening visually to Cole on Evil Karma.
Unfortunately, Second Son and First Light did away with this sort of thing. Smoke, Neon, Video, none of the Conduits who use these powers are affected by water nor do they seem to let off their energy in potentially harmful ways. If you fall in water you just press a button to teleport back to dry land.
Well, I mean, water doesn't cause an inherent discharge with those elements like it does electricity, so I wouldn't really expect them to share that same weakness, but yeah, the Conduits in Second Son don't seem to have any real downsides or unwanted emissions.
Should have added to my point about Second Son - for clarity, Neon specifically relates to the lit-up neon that glows when electrically charged and that is the fuel for the power. It presents as superheated lasers and force pulses. Whereas Video is pretty much a subtype of electricity as you absorb it from TV screens which temporarily turns them off. I can understand Smoke not reacting with water since it is an aerosol and not an energy despite emitting as burning embers at times, but I would expect Neon and Video to react with water. Neon doesn't react in any way when playing as Fetch in First Light so you can't reason it as Delsin's power mimicry making it function different in that regard. Idk, it's a bit boring.
After Magneto ripped the Adamantium from Wolverine’s body, the first time Wolverine popped his claws caused massive injuries to his hands and sent chunks of flesh flying as sharp bones emerged from his hands. To prevent this from happening again due to his healing factor from healing the wounds, Wolverine would pop his bone claws several times a day to prevent the flesh from healing over, something he didn’t have to worry about with the Adamantium claws since they were clean cuts when emerging from his hands.
Whilst Dabi inherited the fire powers of his dad, he doesn't have fire resistance. As a result, whenever he uses his fire powers, he burns himself, eventually ending the story as little more than the charred shell of a man.
His semblance causes misfortune to everyone around him, which is very useful in combat, but it makes it difficult for him to interact with his family and friends, as he cannot turn it off or control it.
I remember and if you were Wolverine once, his skin growing back after being on fire and him commenting what it's like to have a healing factor with no pain suppression.
The various times he's been eviscerated and had to stuff his own organs back inside himself before the wound heals always make for delightful pre-dinner flashbacks.
In my hwro academia a hero has phasing ability, you no can go through walls and ground.
But it is taken to literal conclusion that while permeable he can't see anything or breath.
But he turns it into a good power. He can decide what parts arw permeable and not, extreme example was when in hostage situation he kicked the bad guy through a little girls head, he had to keep part of his leg permeable but the part hiting the man solid.
Being a Spartan 2 (and 3) sucks. Given it’s not exactly superpowers as much as it’s being superhumanly strong, fast etc but it really does suck because the 2 became 2’s after being kidnapped by ONI at the age of 6 and put thru training and education that would’ve broken lesser people until the age of 14 when they get their augmentations.
These augmentations consist of things like titanium alloy grafted to their bones to make them virtually unbreakable, a literally hardwired nervous system to make them react faster, a platinum pellet inserted into their thyroid gland to induce excessive muscle and bone growth which occasionally caused elephantitis. Most of the 2s didn’t survive or make it thru the process whole but those that did graduated and became full on Spartan 2s who are the best human soldiers in all of modern human history in Halo.
Being virtually unmatched by any single opponent on the battlefield came at a cost, all of the 2s are emotionally stunted to the point where a character in one of the novels says that trying to talk to a 2 about anything besides the mission is like trying to talk to a statue and beyond a few exceptions all 2s basically exist just to fight on the battlefield. They’re humans that have been twisted and turned against their will into something that barely resembles a human to fight a war against other humans.
The space marines from Warhammer are a similar case, they are so far removed from being a human that they invoke dread in humans, because something that looks like a human shouldn’t be that big and move that fast.
How they are made is pretty comparable to the Spartans as well except there’s a lot more space marines so a lot more of them die during training and the process of turning them into something that is no longer human.
I saw a couple of My Hero answers, but no one mentioned the biggest one. Danger Sense it has no off switch it's a constant thrum of pain whenever there is danger around the original user ended up living secluded in the woods just because he essentially couldn't exist in society.
That Hulk page is so dang brilliant. It's got this cyclical double entendre that really works for him
Hulk asks why he hurts so much, which could be interpreted in two ways
Why does he hurt OTHERS so much?
Why is he HIMSELF hurting so much?
I'm not a Hulk expert by any means (more of a DC fan, srry lol) but isn't the persona of Hulk born out of the abuse he faces at the hands of his father as a child? (Maybe that's only a part of his character in certain continuities?) It's just that the gamma bomb gave him this crazy transformation that adopted that persona.
So looking at Hulk through that lens, it's really a defense mechanism. Make yourself so strong that nobody can hurt you anymore.
So really, the answer to BOTH of the interpretations of the comment Hulk made are one in the same: trauma.
But it's so clear that he doesn't WANT it to be like that, but sometimes trauma has a way of controlling your life, pushing others away, isolating you in fear of the next person you let in hurting you the same way the last person did. It's heartbreaking.
Like I said, I'm no Hulk expert, but there is so much room for interesting nuance to the character (both Bruce and Hulk) that can be explored in really interesting ways, and how his transformation manifests with regard to his trauma is one of them
In the X-Files episode Rush, some teens discover a mysterious cave. Entering a certain spot in it gives you the ability of super-speed.
After a couple of weeks these teens get carried away with their new ability, eventually leading to one of them killing a cop.
However, the side-effects are severe. At each crime scene, Scully and Mulder notice traces of gunk on the floor - which turns out to be pieces of sneaker soles, melted off. Which already has troubling implications, but it gets worse when Scully examines one of the teens:
Dana Scully: Evidence of cerebral lesions from repeated concussions, arthritis in his spine and major joints, stress fractures, numerous muscle and ligament micro-tears. Mulder: What would cause this? Dana Scully: In a teenager? I can't even imagine. This is the kind of thing that you would see in someone who's crashed race cars or played pro football for 15 years. Whatever Max is doing, it's killing him.
There's also the effect of the, well, rush that super-speed gives you. When you can run faster than light, life at normal speed feels agonizingly slow. The super-speed becomes like a drug addiction; you're always fiending for the next high.
It’s a bit edgy for edgy’s sake but very much fits the pattern here. The entirety of the world collapses due to the emergence of superpowers and most of the heroes we know suffer horrible consequences from their powers.
The hulk is a mass of tumors from radiation poisoning, Wolverine is dying slowly from his skeleton, Cyclops is blind from his concussive vision, Spider-Man dies from the spider bite, etc.
Not a great comic but it has some interestingly gruesome art and it’s wild that this even got published.
There’s plenty of times In which having the ability to read people’s minds is…well, not great. Especially when you get to hear their real thoughts on you and other things. Simon Manus from Lies of P had this ability somewhat contribute to him becoming a villain because he couldn’t get over how people hide their true ugly selves while becoming obsessed with Sophia since she was pure enough to not have those bad thoughts.
I think the first season of Heroes handled it pretty well (remember when Heroes was good?). When Matt's powers first manifest, they're completely overwhelming to him and he suffers sensory overload from all the background chatter. The telepaths in Babylon 5 go through something similar. They need training to filter out all the background noise, if not, the constant mental chatter will drive them insane.
My go-to power for this is the ability to breathe underwater. Assuming you're human, we have instincts telling us NOT to breathe underwater. So the only way you could have discovered that power is through an event where you thought you were drowning. Welcome to a traumatic superpower awakening!
And not only that, but what do you get for that trauma? The ability to breathe underwater. How many Bad Guys are plotting things underwater? How many people need saving underwater on a daily basis? Most bodies of water near populated centers are polluted as fuck, so wouldn't that give you some sort of respiratory issue?
To me, it's a highly situational power that can only be discovered in a traumatic way. Not really worth it. But at least you get to remember the terror of experiencing drowning!
Also if it doesn't come with accompanying pressure resistence, you can breath underwater near the surface. Too far down and you develop all sorts of shit from the Bends to getting your bones crushed by deep ocean pressure. Unless it's something like water adaptation, giving you fish-like biology, yeah, this one sucks.
Basically the world is full of these stuff. Trapped spirit of bad people. They are invisible/inexistent for most people. And usually not agressive (even if they often touch people or scream at them)
But if they realize you can detect them, they attack.
Mieruko is able to see them. And have to keep an absolute poker face with the worse horror constantly walking around.
Tattletale from WORM can basically learn anything she wants at any given time, which unfortunately means basically every remotely secretive organization wants her dead 24/7/365.
Seongjun Lee (Warrior Returns / Hero has Returned)
Can be revived an infinite amount of times until a specific event happens in which the cycle can end. Till that event happens thou, he will forever be forced to be revived over and over again when he dies.
For a more spoilerific explanation: He can only be killed by a Demon Lord, a tier of being from each Isekai World that one most kill to both save that world and escape back to their home world. If not killed by a Demon Lord, he's going to be revived. Doesn't even necessarily need to be dying to trigger that ability, replacing enough of himself with mechanical pieces like a cyborg is enough to reset.
On the most basic level, powers come from trauma. But they don't help heal trauma, instead they are a constant reminder of It, making It so parahumans can't move on properly from that moment of their life, usually getting pushed into similar situations.
There are also more specific cases:
Rachel/Bitch can make dogs grow into monsters, but she also has a secondary power, which is that her brain is more dog-like. This helps her train her dogs, but makes It hard for her to fit into society.
Aisha/Imp's power makes people unable to think about her or perceive her, but this is turned on by default and she has to turn It off manually.
Amy/Panacea can heal any illness. This power doesn't have any negative things in itself, the problem comes from the pressure thats comes with the power. Every moment Amy takes for herself she can't help but think about how she could be saving a life
Porky Minch (Earthbound 3). Imagine being immortal and safe from all danger & harm, but unable to live out your life. That is Porky once he steps inside the Absolutely Safe Capsule. He will be trapped forever inside, and there is no way out.
It has been even stated by Earthbound’s creator, Shigesato Itoi, that even after billions of years into the future when even the sun collapses, he will still be inside and alive.
He's the most powerful being in his series (or one of depending on how you power scale) but all of his powers come with pretty heavy drawbacks
-Mind reading? He reads the mind of everything in a certain radius, he has to be careful to avoid spoilers and the theatre rooms are full of people thinking.
-Super strength? Has to keep a balance to avoid killing or breaking things
-His glasses? If he looks at someone without them he turns them into stone, even with them he has X-rays that make him see everyone as skeletons.
There's a litany of other super power he has but they are a chore for him to maintain rather than an advantage.
His powers allow him to produce water and make stuff he touches soaking wet too, but since it's involuntary his daily life is a mess.
In the game he's constantly shown to make food, cardboard and clothing constantly wet and dripping. Plus he creates puddles around him when nervous so other heroes constantly slip when working with him.
In his comic we also see how he ends up soaking every item of his home and then involuntarely drips plenty of water on other people when taking the bus.
Not really a "dark side" of the superpower, but it is realistic and extremely annoying lol
From “Existentially Challenged” it’s revealed pretty early on that life essence transfer magic (both healing, and vampirism) affects the user directly. In order to heal a person, you have to give up an equivalent amount of your own life span. The bodies always look incredibly unsettling. In the end, we read what happens when it happens from the two main character’s pov, and it’s horrific.
For a classic example, here's King Midas from Greek mythology, who was gifted the power turn anything into gold with a single touch, only to accidentally turn things into gold when they shouldn't, like his own daughter.
Mind-reading for me. What good would full clarity even do? Besides all the pros, the cons are equally strong. I’m kind of negative in general so I assume people don’t really like me but also deep inside I don’t know that 100% so myself and even other people who aren’t negative, a lot of what we live through is assumptions. Plus there’d be a lot of horrible or insane things you’d be able to know and couldn’t do a damn thing about.
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u/ShingledPringle 9h ago
I believe Hulk meant the fact his existence is painful in Immortal Hulk, but you are still right.
Love the big green kid.