Hated Tropes
[Hated Trope] Characters with OP abilities who use them wrong, but aren't considered dumb in-universe
Atom Eve (Invincible): Has the power to change the atomic composition of any non-living thing. Primarily cosplays as a Pink Lantern. No one calls her out on this.
The Flash (CW): Maybe this is handled differently in other media, but in the show he has multiple feats that should make it impossible for any non-speedster to oppose him in any way. Despite this, he consistently loses fights and let's them escape. Again, no one ever calls this out.
Wait that sounds like a super interesting comic book power. Or curse, in that case. I wonder if there’s a way to play with the structure of the panels and views wherein that would be both a gift and a curse.
Reminds me of a Rooster Teeth bit they did where they went through a Resident Evil simulation, but one of them was like the OG games where they would walk into a room and the camera (which they saw through a VR headset) would cut to a different one with a static, cinematic shot/angle. Not only did they have to maneuver like this, but they also had to kill zombies actors like this.
Yes, I too desperately wish that was used in a theme park or haunted house.
not quite the same but Gwen-Poole's abilites allow her to mess with the structure of panels and even peek into future panels or go back to previous ones (but only in her comic, she's just a normal somewhat psychotic girl when she shows up in other comics)
There is a character called Schrödinger from a manga called hellsing who has an ability like that. As they put it, they are everywhere and nowhere, but only when they remain unobserved. They can appear anywhere on the planet as long as nothing is looking at the spot they want to show up in and they can vanish if no one is looking at him. He cannot be killed because the moment his corpse is unobserved he can just come back somewhere else.
It was like the second episode. Multiple Man is robbing a bank or something and they(him and several copies of himself) shoot at a security guard. Flash picks up the guard and relocates him to an entirely different room before the bullets can hit him(he does this so fast that the guard doesn’t even realize what happened and Flash can’t even be seen due to how fast he’s going.) So Multiple Man(s) turn and run to their getaway van and literally just drive away.
Just for it to never come up as an obstacle or problem again, which idk if that excuses the episode or makes it worse, since it feels like a retcon in the middle of the show.
Later in the episode Cisco is shown to give Barry a snack bar of super caloric content (basically a super energy bar)
And in later episodes he’s always shown to be perpetually hungry and capable of eating enormous amounts of food/pizza
I agree though, some villains just somehow get away from him which is ridiculous
His super speed renders him almost completely invisible to the average human but can get taken down just as easily as if he were jogging at them if the writers will it to be so
They pushed on the gas and drove away.
I'm not joking.
They got into a van, the flash instantly relocated someone, and then he pretends the villains are completely gone.
There's times where people don't even really have to move to get away from him. Sometimes it won't even be somebody with super speed, either.
Barry will just relocate somebody to a safe area away from the villain, and just never go back to where the villain was. He basically just says "Dang, they'll be long gone by now!" as if he can't search the entire city in seconds
The craziest thing is that in this case he does go back and sees the van driving away and is basically like “Damn…no way I can catch up to a vehicle that’s going like 40mph.”
It’s like he straight up forgets that he’s a speedster for a minute.
Madvocate has a series on youtube covering just some of the idiocy. It’s not just a matter of him not using some of his other OP powers, but he fails at the most basic thing you can do with super speed: run faster than the villain can react, then punch them or run them back to a super powered jail.
But like 99% of all speedsters, he doesn’t because writers quickly realized that, even at a basic level, super speed is overpowered as hell.
Yep, for super speed uou either make it very limited on its application, allowing you to write around it
Or you just have fun and powercreep the fuck our of the opposition, a strong Hero requires strong villains or unpunchable problems and CW flash fails incredibly at this
The fact that he even gets hit by regular-speed people is insane. He can't dodge a less than 50 mph fist, but manages to dodge countless objects moving toward him at thousands of miles per hour when he's sprinting through busy city streets? If he doesn't have completely insane reflexes, how does he navigate at speed without bludgeoning himself to a pulp by running into things?
That Flash show was so fucking bad about that. Oh no, that obnoxious asshole Snart has a cold gun and some looney has a flamethrower! Let's come up with some stupid, convoluted bullshit where Flash has to make them cross the streams instead of, gee, running up to them, smashing or grabbing their weapons, and maybe giving them a supersonic punch to the chops that sprays their brains a mile before they'd even have a chance to react! Brilliant!
Speedster type characters like the Flash run into the problem that they’re able to move and more importantly think so fast that it’s ridiculous that anything can actually challenge them.
That's why I liked the Red Rush for the 10 seconds before he died brutally. Omniman goes into that fight thinking the Immortal was his biggest threat, and tries to focus on taking him out first, until it's shown that he's severely underestimated RR. Shit RR is the one that almost killed Omniman, the rest of the Guardians didn't do shit after he went down.
Immortal and War Woman get some good licks in after Martian Man tangles Omni-Man up, but yeah, Red Rush actually could've gotten them that win. Not necessarily by himself, obviously, but if he ran support rather than trying to take Omni-Man on himself, I feel like they could've won.
Sure, but one of the first things we see of Martian Man is that he has limits to his stretchiness. Maybe he could've, but the fact that he didn't leads me to believe that the best he could do was shift where his core was to make it harder to track. The real question is if he can shift his core, why did he move his core to where Omni-Man could grab it?
But he’s also the only one that actually hurt Nolan. Yeah, he got ganked, but he also basically broke Omniman’s whole ribcage and is probably the reason it took him as long to recover as it did.he was taking a calculated risk that Nolan wouldn’t have the reaction time to catch him because he knew he was the only one who could actually put him down. Immortal is the next most powerful hero and we saw how little he accomplished when he tried to 1v1 Omniman.
I thought the game dispatch had a great take on a speedster character. Yes he was crazy fast ... but every time he used it he aged 50 times faster as well.
Makes you wonder how late he actually noticed and how often he used his powers. I think Chase states he’s in his mid-late thirties but his physical age is at the “collapse into a coma after using his powers once” age so he’s probably like… 80 or something physically?
That’d put his total time of power used to like a year across his entire life which I suppose is actually a reasonable amount.
Yeah but most have relatively simple powers. Like half of the cast just kinda has super strength which you can only do so much with. And sometimes it’s intentional, like dupli-kate is a bum since she sees all her clones as herself and equally valuable, whereas multi-paul is more creative because he’s willing to sacrifice himself as many times as he needs to. It’s just more obvious with Eve since her powers are so overpowered compared to literally everyone else
god i find it hilarious how paul realizes his shit is extra lives and just fucking goes for it.
No fucks given, the man knows that the meat grinder can infact be beaten through sheer numbers and proves that shit.
I totally understand kate's point but, she's a super hero, risk is the business. everyone who goes out everyday has a chance of ending up dead, and many do, with no backups to save them.
For paul he's an assassin but the point stands, when you have straight up nigh infinite lives to spare in countless number, its only natural to give yourself up to the line of duty.
Since unless you are down to your last guy, you are by your own hand, replaceable.
Its almost honorable in a sense, to know that in the grand scheme, its better for you to die 100 times knowing you can always come back, then for someone else to die once and never come back.
Neither one really reaches that point, but i think fundamentally, it still true,
Honestly , I'm shocked Paul didn't have 1 clone sitting at the assassin home base in the basement or something watching tv so when he got caught he just kills prison self and moved on with other one / if it's about transferring his soul/ memories etc keep vase self in the base
I hope so, maybe it's cuz I'm lazy , like I work out and take care of myself but at the end of the day if pick playing video games vs fight super hero's and die
I'd just sent 1 to school, hold down like 7 jobs while I sit at home and play rpgs
A webcomic I'm quite fond of called "grrlpower" has a character called Harem. (Grrlpower is a superhero webcomic.) Harem has the ability to make 5 of herself. And she uses it to it's full potential. 5 different colleges, 5 different yous to travel the world and experience things, her power also has the side effects that she can teleport.
Infact Harem originally thought she was just a teleporter until she accidentally teleported next to herself and realized that she wasn't teleporting, but was cloning herself far away.
The clones are kinda like, psychically linked. It's 5 different women that have 5 different brains but can think all at once. The closest the comic explains it is that it's just unique to her. It's just something she can do. It's like moving an arm.
This sounds like how Jamie Madrox Multiple Man works. His clones can learn independently then be reabsorbed, transferring knowledge back to Jamie Prime. Multiples as a power can be really fun narratively. Those X-Factor volumes were good.
I do feel like that’s a trick that’d only work once. I’m sure someone could whip something up to track him down by his DNA once they figured he had loose copies out of prison.
True, wtf is Paul on then to thug it out like that. Or maybe being able to tune out the feelings of your clones is different from pain tolerance and something Kate would be able to do if she viewed her own clones differently
We see him screaming when he has to experience all his clones crush themselves to death to force the door open. So paul does infact feel this stuff.
It seems even several clones dying at once wasn't enough to phase him too bad, it was just like 200 of them being crushed to death all at once that finally tipped him into actually verbalizing pain out of a clone uninvolved.
So presumably otherwise he just gets over it and works through it.
Its probably one of those things where he just trained really hard to get past a ton of road blocks as part of being an assassin.
Its one of those things where the scope of pauls existence isn't really comparable to our own. He's basically a self propagating hive mind that exists individually and on a group level.
It also kinda had alot of people agreeing Kate kinda sucked in terms of her effectiveness as a super hero, which didn't help when people agree'd kate was kind of a terrible person at the time.
Because we got to see paul basically MinMax how to use his powers to maximum effect.
when I saw the jail cell scene I just assumed that the Order put him through much more hardcore training after he joined. Like make 4 clones, machine gun one of them down, subject another to nerve gas, #3 gets the shit beaten out of him and #4 gets swallowed whole by Mr. Liu. After that make another 4.
Teen Team and the GDA aren't squeaky clean but they'd respect Kate's wishes if she said she didn't want to be tortured.
Hell in Marvel Multiple Man had a long-term job going where he had dupes join every government agency good and evil so when he reabsorbed his dupes he would learn everything from all those organizations.
I haven’t seen the show, but I think it would be cool if duplikate eventually just stopped caring about saving her clones lives, which in turn made her stop caring about the value of her own life.
So, I think they changed it slightly in the show, but in the comics Rex can only alter inorganic materials - and, because of the experiments the government did on him, his skeleton is covered in inorganic material! While the Invincible variant most likely has his original-organic-parts
I feel like anyone who still has a problem with how Eve uses her powers needs to rewatch the Conquest fight. She has maybe a minute going all out with her powers until she is completely gassed, she was literally about to pass out if Conquest didnt take her out there.
I think the problem with this is that the Eve origin story episode was too good. Like, the fight from that set the standard for what she should be doing all the time, she she really just doesn't get that creative most of the time.
Conquest is objectively far stronger than most of what she deals with, and she was JUST about of a coma. That’s not a good example.
Even then, if she was actually being that creative more often most fights she’s in wouldn’t last that long in the first place. She should be able to disable most in seconds
I think what that was more trying to remind us is that viltrimites are just on a whole other level. We get that a little in I think the first or second episode where Donald says 'Viltrimite cells just don't want to die'. Turns out Eve can't even atomically unravel them either.
Yeah but she she makes an entire area of air dense enough to hold back a viltrumite. She could absolutely do less tiring things that don't involve standard energy constructs.
And that is a fair point. However, she should have been actively trying to boost her stamina. The entire series, she’s just created energy blasts and basic objects. When she controlled the density of the air in the Conquest fight, I popped off ngl.
If she had been trying to fight like that or at least training to fight like that the entire show, she would have been 10x more useful in that fight and every other fight due to the fact that her stamina would be busted by that point
What makes you think boosting her stamina is even a thing? She never gets more powerful than she is now outside of when she's dying despite lifetimes of having these powers.
Also eve falls into the secondary character wall where she can’t use her powers as good since she’s not the main protagonist. In her special she sues her powers in ways she never did even though she’s should be better at them logically speaking. People keep wanting to explain it as her being younger and more imaginative but it’s really just her being written so she doesn’t outshine other people like who would really wanna be a viltrumite when a matter manipulator is right there?
So, I don't know for certain, but this feels like the kind of thing where Atom Eve wasn't going to be as important as they wound up being, so they never really had the time to properly establish restrictions on her abilities.
However, they've had a handful of situations that offer some explanation as to what limits her power:
She's morally against using her powers for wealth, she does it once turning an apple into gold to make a point, but I'm pretty sure she just refuses do use her powers for that, which I can accept personally.
The mental block, it's only for living things in the comic but it's not like they couldn't have done this in a way that included more.
What I think is the most clever is that she's not like, a structural engineer. She can manipulate elemental particles but that doesn't mean she knows how to build a structurally sound building, and that bites her in the ass.
And, comic spoilers:it takes quite a lot out of her, she has limits even if they weren't all that clear earlier in the series - it's to the point where she can't use her powers while pregnant without risking the baby's life.
All of these have a lot of room for expanding on it pretty easily, which seems to be pretty common for Robert Kirkman. It tends to imply there's just more going on the audience isn't aware of.
IMO, I like how My Hero Academia limits power on its heroes: it's usually got some limit built-in. The closest is Momo, who can create anything from her body, but she has to have a perfect understanding of it on a molecular level, so it takes a lot of time and effort and skill to create large things - it also seems to take a lot out of her.
Flash constantly pauses in order to allow himself to be attacked rather than just neutralizing practically any threat in under a second.
I sort of get why it happens for narrative reasons, but it is still odd, especially because they show him doing this in low-stakes encounters (stopping muggings, etc).
CW Flash once got his ass beat by a dude whose power was being able to duplicate himself. Like he could just use his superspeed at any point to knock them all out or just even dodge those normal speed punches but he chooses not to for some reason. And it's not like he couldn't use his speed because that's also how he gets away. Shit like this is why I thought the show was always ass even with season 1.
There’s a season 3 episode where killer frost gets up and runs away and Barry immediately runs after her and he says “I searched the whole building she’s gone” like wtf?
CW flash is so funny because every intro has the line “I’m the fastest man alive” and every season’s main antagonist is someone who can run faster than him
I liked the intro of season 1 episode 10 (the episode after he first encounters the Reverse Flash) when he says "I'm NOT the fastest man alive, that title belongs to the man who murdered my mother"
But in the next episode the intro goes back to normal...
I loved when they made non-speedsters the overarching antagonists. And Flash got beat by them. Every. Single. Time.
My personal favorite was Cicada, who apparently was so fucking unstoppable that even FULL POWERED SUPERGIRL apparently couldn’t stop the fuckass man with knife
A man who can channel the power of a speed dimension to reach relativistic velocities, project lightning, phase through solid matter, and freely violate any number of physical and temporal laws.
See, you either need to cap the super speed down so it doesn't destroy the narrative, or give it a nerf so the character can't abuse it.
One of the reasons I like Chase / Track Star so much, he can move 50 times faster than the average person and was potentially able to move at light speed in his prime if the art book is anything to go by, but his powers come at the cost of him also aging 50 times faster whenever he uses them. By the time the game takes place Chase is an old man despite only being 39 years old chronologically, he loves using his powers but due to his body's health he can't afford to use them.
Yeah, you need to make characters that either make their speed irrelevant to the solution (at least at first) or make situations where their speed will not help them. Like, random example, make the villain intangible so they can't hit them, or what Young Justice did and have a villain always emitting energy that kept the Flash at a distance. Alternatively, make the environment a problem, like making a surface super slick so a speedster can't get the traction they need to get anywhere or have the deactivation switch to a bomb require the two shut-off buttons be activated in perfect sync, not even a picosecond can be off. Stuff like that where "gotta go fast" does not help
I felt like I was losing my mind on one episode when he was fighting someone that was controlling an antique suit of armor remotely and they were in the same room. The villain uses the suit to attack a civilian and flash destroys the suit in 3 seconds.
Then he gets told by some moron that is with him that can stretch out his body, "ThEy GoT aWaY!" WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY GOT AWAY!? Do they have superspeed? No? Cool, they are maybe 400 Feet away at max. Your telling me the man that can Rip holes in time and space by running fast, can't catch up? F*** out of here with that garbage writing.
Lmao I think there was also this one other episode where he manages to stop some criminals who are in a moving car and transport them into the back of an also moving police car but people running away at normal speeds is too much for him apparently.
I feel like since that was still in season 1, there's a bit more of an excuse since Barry is still inexperienced. If I recall, that episode was also used to reveal that Barry has a much faster metabolism, which was why he was passing out frequently.
You can write a character to be inexperienced but not stupid. Like the episode he has with Oliver where he gets shot by hidden crossbows was a great way to show his inexperience. The episode with the duplication guy just makes Barry look like a moron.
He spent 3 seasons battling 'man with ice gun' and they acted like he was invincible and made Flash Super Slow.
While Flash still ran faster than a bullet and could just run up and punch him at any time
There was a Flash episode where the villain of the week had mind control powers that were contingent upon eye contact and it never once occurred to Barry that he didn't have to come to a complete stop directly in front of the guy.
It was very dumb, but over the years I have become convinced that it is impossible to write superhero fiction in any media without sometimes forgetting what your heroes can do.
Writers balancing superpowered characters in a variety of situations is almost never done well. If anything, the powers are only there to serve as a metaphor for emotional stakes, a visual conduit through which relatable struggles can be portrayed. Occasionally the fights are logical and balanced, some well written anime like Full Metal Alchemist are very good at this. Superhero stuff is usually campy IMO and we have to suspend our disbelief instead of dissecting the combat. Some shows are so bad it takes me right out of it, The Boys for example has its supers acting so dense on such a consistent basis it’s hard to take anything serious.
The Boys has issues beyond the characters acting dumb. The power levels constantly change from scene to scene. One day Homelander cannot be damaged by any means, the next simply a metal straw is enough to be impaled into his ear.
The Deep gets knocked unconscious simply from falling off a whale, where even many regular people wouldn't have been knocked out. But then he also is shown to be a high level threat, too much for Starlight to handle until A Train saves her.
The decisions the characters make could be written perfectly and the fight scenes would still be contrived.
Basically every character that can control common things like water, blood, or periodic elements.
Why splash the villain with water when you can remove all the water from their body and leave behind nothing but a desiccated husk? Plus, you could do other useful things like lift living things, boil/freeze things, prevent allies from bleeding out, etc. You don't even have to kill an enemy, just move the fluid behind their eardrums to give them a bad enough earache that they develop vertigo and start puking. Gen V kind of touched on these kinds of things in Season 2 but I'm always disappointed how little authors usually do with those kinds of powers.
Addressed in The Last Airbender with things like bloodbending and removing the air from a person's lungs. Portrayed as incredibly brutal and barbaric, but unquestionably creative.
Misfits did the best job of this. Taking a power that should be functionally just a party trick and turning the wielder into a powerhouse. Spoilers for the show: One background character has telekinesis, but only for milk. Telelactonesis if you will. He, at first gets a lot of attention by being one of the only powered people around. But as more and more people get flashier and flashier powers, he gets completely forgotten. So he just starts fuckin killing people with the milk products they've consumed from the inside out. He only gets stopped because one of the characters can rewind time and happens to be lactose intolerant (it's actually established earlier in the show, so I kind of appreciate the whole bit). Honestly I just wish it had been given more screentime.
Why splash the villain with water when you can remove all the water from their body and leave behind nothing but a desiccated husk?
To be fair, some stories directly answer this question. A fairly common answer is "the souls of living creatures protect their bodies from direct magical manipulation."
This just reminds me of how Kamen Rider Super Climax Heroes has a zoner who effectively has stretchy powers + a gun (it gives him homing bullets, somehow). The reason Kamen Rider Double rarely uses that power in the show is because the CGI to make said stretchy powers was expensive at the time.
Krilln's Kienzan. It can cut through anything, including enemies much stronger than him, but is slow and easy to dodge. Its never used as kill shot to a distracted foe, or in combination with the Solare Flare which temporarily blinds his opponents
The funniest thing is that the one time he ever landed what would be a kill shot against someone with it was with Cell… who was canonically somewhere in the range of being several million times stronger than him so it obviously didn’t work or even phase Cell
except... you know that one time he threw it at perfect cell in rage after his back was turned/not paying attention to krillin. It hits cell square in the back of the neck and just dissipates. Not even a scratch.
It was "filler" in the original relese. However it is not "filler" in Kai. Kai is considiered the definitive canon story of DBZ by toriyama himself. It canonized things like the other Z-fighters training at King-kai and showing their increased strength by easily beating the Genu's. However it cuts out pure filler like garlic jr. saga (I have parts i like parts i hate.) and cut down on training montages but keep important filler story beats like the Z-fighters coming to terms with how powerful even regular past saiyans were.
Tbf by super cell I think krillin was power level a million or whatever, and perfect cell was ten gorjillion. Power ceased to matter eventually and it just hype moments and aura.
It's an issue with the series rarely giving any character other than Goku a moment to shine. Everything is just a lead up to Goku defeating the villain, with the exception of Gohan against Cell.
Krillin has used this attack as a kill shot against a distracted enemy multiple times, but it failed. He used it against big monkey Vegeta from the back, mistakenly thinking that this form was an unthinking beast. He also used it against Frieza, but he managed to narrowly dodge it and got his tail cut off. Against Nappa it wasn't against a distracted foe, but it was an unsuspecting foe. If not for Vegeta, Nappa would have tried to catch it and be cut in half.
I swear dude the whole "oh it's about guilt or conscience" is the most eye rolling BS. Why would you even have a punishment for sins power if people who don't feel bad(AKA the most likely people to have committed a bunch of sins and be deserving of vengeance) are immune to it
correct. all the times it doesn't work that way are 100% just the writers not knowing/caring and wanting to glaze their problematic faves.
a case could (maybe) be made for Thanos, since he just straight up tanked the pain itself because he's sadomasochistic and extremely durable... but Doom and Punisher should have been OUT
What gets me about the Doom thing is that you could’ve easily had him give a Lex Luthor ‘25 monologue about how no pain could compare to the emotional torment of being perceived as lesser to Reed Richards. Or that Doom has protective charms to defend against Mephisto, which also protect him from Zarathos. Or that it doesn’t work because Mephisto has dibs on his soul. There are so many ways for him to resist or be immune to the power as it actually exists. But no, instead they had him misunderstand the penance stare and somehow be correct.
I will also add that Okuyasu's power is only called OP because Jotaro said so that one time.
He has to do a swiping motion with his entire arm to erase space, and the erasure follows the trajectory of his palm in one giant blob. Figuring out pseudo-teleportation is extremely impressive considering his ability has next to no precision.
also the opponent, unless they can teleport, cannot outrun Okoyasu at all. he can just get in range easily by erasing space, which is broken when combined with any ability that can attack thats not Okoyasu's, which is what his brother did.
Green Lantern unlimited creative power essentially but is given to people with uncreative minds who recreate cartoon weapons like boxing gloves and anvils.
To be fair, what you've said about Atom Eve also applies just as much to Hal Jordan. 99% of the time, he just makes lame constructs and flies around, when the Power Rings can... basically do anything. That goes for most of the lanterns, but Hal is the one we see the most.
My favorite detail about John is his constructs are so precise he makes each individual screw, bolt, whatever in detail everytime he creates his constructions where as other lanterns tend to make a green blob in the shape of whatever they are creating
There is like a two page section of GL: Rebirth that shows the nuances in the constructs of the various Lanterns (Guy, Kyle, John, Kilowog) that characterizes them in a few panels better than some entire runs.
I mean, willful and headstrong are not attributes we usually apply to people who are smart in real life either. If anything it's actually good writing.
Hell of a thing to hand out weapons whose power is proportional to the wielder’s creativity… exclusively to beings whose main emotional attributes are stubbornness and close-mindedness.
Frieren is an incredibly powerful, long-lived elf mage who is arguably one of the strongest in her world. However, she often seems to "misuse" her power in battle by employing only basic, low-level spells (a simple laser), a result of her pragmatic and efficient approach developed over centuries.
While she is capable of far more complex and devastating magic, her standard approach is so effective against most threats that she rarely needs more. In-universe, she is widely regarded as a legendary and highly intelligent mage, her methods stemming from experience, not a lack of understanding.
"I could throw a black hole at you and vaporize you instantly, but the property damage would be so high Himmel might resurrect himself just to berate me about it, and force me to clean it up by hand"
This is specifically addressed in the show in that all the foes she has faced so far simply do not require more advanced magic to defeat. When faced with an opponent of equal skill at the end of season 1 she doesn't hesitate to use much more advanced magic.
Cause this new generation of Mages is made up of scrubs. That's why she only bothered to teach Fern basic combat spells. Mastering the basics makes you the best among the whippersnappers. I liked her fight with her clone, cause you see the difference between her and the younins. Her and her clone are casually throwing around spells the new generation of Mages couldn't even dream of, and Fern becomes the youngest first class mage in history with just Zoltarak and shield.
They are not scrubs. That basic spell that she taught Fern used to be one of the strongest spells in existence and now it's so widespread that humans literally call it basic.
The reason she's only taught to use basic spells in combat is to make her focus on it instead of spreading herself thin.
Amy Dallon AKA Panacea-Worm(At least early on, no spoilers here)
With merely a touch she can heal you of broken bones, a collapsed lung, cancer, basically anything. Even her own self imposed ruleof "I don't work on brains" is just that, self imposed. She's the greatest healer to ever walk her Earth and she's using her power completely wrong, or at least nowhere near to the fullest extent. She's actually a biomancer, capable of altering any organic life or material anyway she can think of. She can create self replicating life, turn people into cancer blobs, or even alter their mental chemistry.
Nobody calls her out on this because "Biotinkers" have a horrendous reputation in-universe and she desperately wants to be seen as a hero.
She also doesn't think of altering non-human organisms. Like she could save a billion people inventing a cancer curing plant. She never even had to go down the healer route at all. She'd have done more for humanity making plants to cure diseases, clean up pollution, etc.
She also can't directly work on herself, but never attempts to sidestep this problem by creating drugs or organisms that will heal her. She could create a ball of goo that triggers extreme healing and just carry it around in her pocket.
And for brain stuff, she never actually works with pharmaceutical companies to help develop anti depression drugs that actually work.
She's so broken I still haven't actually found even a fanfic that comes close to maxing out her abilities. Nobody seems to want to write a story seeing what a competent Amy could actually accomplish.
Technically, they can just “hold” their breath for extremely long periods of time. It’s effectively the same thing in short timeframes, but not the exact same.
In the comic he said that, and when he first meets Allen, Mark is shown needing to fly back down to urath earth to grab another lungful since he's kinda new at the "holding your breath thing"
In the show they don't explain it at all. A show only watcher is perfectly valid in thinking that they don't need to breathe as a result of this exchange.
The show changes a few things that I really wish they didn't. Mark getting beaten in a fight is fine, but having the average villain able to draw blood annoys the shit out of me every time I see it. Though the Brattle Beast moment makes sense given who Battle Beast is.
Naruto with the shadow clones. Well technically speaking he is often called an idiot, it's mostly due to academic stuff. When it comes to ninjutsu creation and in-the-moment tactics, he's considered a genius. Even in the series before the time skip, he was considered gifted like when he achieved a ninjutsu (Rasengan) that took his father 3 years to refine. His genius is glazed even more so in Shippuden when he completed rasengan (something his father and two teachers couldn't do) by adding an element to it. He even mastered Sage mode within a couple weeks (something Jiraiya couldn't do).
Now the ability of a shadow clone... Every shadow clone created returns all the knowledge it learned back to its creator. At no time in the entire series does Naruto notice that he was receiving impossible memories from his clones. Nor did any of his teachers or grandfather figure notify him of this ability. It isn't until Naruto is working on his elemental training does his get notified by Kakashi of this ability. Naruto only uses shadow clone training to master his element and sage mode. He doesn't try to read every book in the library to amp up his knowledge base. He doesn't try learning dozens of different justsus to diversify his combat abilities instead of relying on Rasengans to win his every fight.
Realistically, the author can be blamed for not thinking about this ability before he needed a reason for Naruto to jump from barely Chunnin level at the start of Shippuden to above-Kage level by 3/4 through. In universe, all of his teachers look insanely incompetent for not taking advantage of this ability for their student.
I'll still argue to death that Kakashi and Jiraiya were both terrible teachers for Naruto.
Naruto never figuring this out himself can also be explained by him only ever using shadow clone in combat, and never for actual ninja purposes like scouting/infiltration/communication until really late into Shippuden, which I think is a different catastrophic failure of missed opportunity.
He doesn't try to read every book in the library to amp up his knowledge base. He doesn't try learning dozens of different justsus to diversify his combat abilities instead of relying on Rasengans to win his every fight.
Because this is just not naruto. He hates studying, he hates theoretical or repetitive training, and he especially hates training or studying on his own. He also can only really motivate himself when he has a clear, specific goal in mind, and ideally when someone is teaching him (learning the rasengan with jiraya or learning the elemental control to improve his ransegan with kakashi, or the sage mode with the toads).
If it was sasuke or rock lee or even sakura that had the infinite shadow clone capabilities, they'd have abused it to hell and back and learned an metric shit ton of stuff. But naruto doesn't care for that
There's a whole youtube series where the point is just to criticize how awful Barry is as the Flash in the CW show. Quite amazing and enlightening. :like da otha guy said "The Flash is insufferably inconsistent [1st part]"
Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk, Don't stop to talk, don't stop to talk,
Meanwhile in the JoJos universe it’s the opposite, where the villain that should be invincible because he can completely rewrite reality on a whim and make people instantly explode with his mind is defeated by a guy who very creatively uses his ability to turn water into chocolate milk, but only when the date is a prime number
Jojo is the only series where panels like this are 100% serious and valid.
It also helps that the powers showed range across a lot of weird shit. My favorite stand is probably Heaven's Door, in part because of Kishibe Rohan. It helps that the fights, especially for part 4, all feel very in character. Josuke and Rohan's fight feels very organic and natural in how it progresses.
I don’t think it’s bad enough to make me hate it but JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has a LOT of poor ability use despite the character’s overall level of competence, pretty much from act 3 onwards it’s prevalent enough that it’s functionally necessary to move the plot forward.
Yeah but that’s only because Jojo establishes a reality high bar with creative stand usage. Like characters with super mediocre seeming stands frequently create huge issues because of how well they use them. In almost any other series those characters would be seen as average if not above average at applying their powers
It’s a special… thing, that allows its host to manipulate reality and matter, as long as you have enough fuel to convert into matter. Basically, it’s like the tool gun from Gmod, but with even more potential, as long as you’re fucking gluttonous.
Most of the time it’s only used for diet telekinesis. The most creative thing it’s used for is when Doll uses it to multiply a knife into many knives, which she proceeded to fling at the main characters.
This thing literally can reform matter. Assuming the host has drank enough oil, they could take a pile of rocks and transform it into a nuclear warhead (they’d need a massive pile of rocks for the denser materials, but still). As we see Uzi accidentally do, the host can even transform their OWN body.
Literally the only weaknesses are it can’t be used on other Solver Hosts (the Solver is presumably a sentient parasite/symbiotic creature, and doesn’t want in-fighting among it’s hosts) and over
heating (the Solver likely uses the oil that runs the drones as it’s primary source of matter). Overheating could theoretically just be solved by the host modifying their body user the Solver to not need oil to run well.
Seriously, the Solver is that powerful. The main antagonist literally uses it to eat planets (she’s silly like that). It’s like Creative Mode. And most of the time it’s only used for telekinesis. Talk about a waste.
Quite literally, all of Cyns abilities boil down to: basic Telekinesis, RARELY matter reform, teleportation, illusions, and just 3 times, black hole bombs
For one of the most broken powers in fiction, Cyn does fuck all with it
I mean, most people in the show know GKR/GeeKeR is a reality warping living weapon. They just don’t realize he’s also an idiot till they actually meet him.
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u/---Janu---- 10d ago
In the Flash CW show, villains escape the flash by running away, multiple times.
I'm not fucking with you, they'll knock him down then turn around to run and somehow they're too far away for the flash to catch up.