Not the Intended Use

Exactly What It Says on the Tin - someone finds a way to apply an object, ability, feature or other such thing that is Not the Intended Use for it. Whether or not that unintended use is beneficial or even safe...

The difference between an unintended use and one that simply wasn't "obvious" is one of degrees - some tools and features are deliberately flexible and lay the base for "emergence" to occur from exploration of those features. For example, thinking outside the box in real-life and fictional combat can sometimes help when dealing with a persistent opponent. Generally, to qualify for this trope, exploring the uses of a tool or feature has to unearth something that does at least one of the following:


 * 1) The use arises or is applied in a manner that goes well beyond reasonable expectations.
 * 2) Said application radically shifts the use case for that tool from its previous use.

This trope is naturally most prominent in tabletop and video games, where it typically takes the form of a gameplay derailing bug or glitch, and in more extreme cases threatens to snap the game's balance right over its knee. Benign examples are generally considered Good Bad Bugs, and a nice developer may consider turn them into an Ascended Glitch if the intended use isn't too volatile to gameplay; a less-nice one might summarily suppress it with an Obvious Rule Patch, which may also prove necessary if it turns out to be a Game Breaking Bug. Expect the response to be particularly strict if this trope occurs in tournament-level play.

Neither approach is exclusive to the other, of course: it's not remotely unheard of for unexpected Game Breakers to be solved by toning them down, and then rebalancing to integrate them into that game proper. Challenge Gamers and Speed Runners. Such unintended uses can be applied by players to solve certain cases of Fake Difficulty - if the game itself is actively lending you a hand in some manner, it may be a case of Anti-Frustration Features.

Potential subtropes include:
 * Throw the Book At Them, particularly cases where someone is told to read the book first and decides physical force (including a literal application of the phrase) is a better use of their time.
 * MacGyvering involves combining several objects in a completely unexpected way to serve a function that is usually far different from what any of its individual components were meant for.

Compare Heart Is an Awesome Power and Lethal Harmless Powers, where someone gets creative with the "intended" use of an ability considered to be weak - also compare Weaponized Exhaust and Recoil Boost. Contrast Useless Useful Spell, where the intended use just isn't that applicable, and Mundane Utility, where something intended to be powerful and awesome also has surprising use in "plainer" scenarios. A related trope is Periphery Demographic, where a significant portion of a fanbase falls outside the 'intended' audience.

Literature

 * In Ender's Game, the point of the Giant's Drink videogame is to measure the Battle School students' reactions when they face an unwinnable situation. No matter what drink you choose from the giant, you die. Most of the kids give up after a few runs; not Ender. He figures out that you can use the drinks as a weapon to take the giant by surprise, and kill him. The game is then forced to make up new challenges for Ender, based on what it knows about his mindset.
 * In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, people start tossing Dungbombs en masse after, among other things. Some advanced students use the Bubblehead Charm -- a spell meant to help you breathe underwater-- to get to class without smelling dung everywhere.
 * Parodied in Guards! Guards!. Carrot Ironfoundersson the human was raised by dwarves, who send him to Ankh-Morpork upon reaching adulthood and tell him to seek a job at the Watch - when he becomes a copper, he'll find out who he is. They give him an official Watch rulebook and instruct him to follow it wisely. Drunkard captain Sam Vimes said no one has used the rulebook in ages, and is shocked when Carrot starts arresting thieves since the book didn't have updates on the criminal guilds. When they arrest the antagonist at the end, Vimes orders Carrot to "throw the book at him", forgetting that dwarves are Literal-Minded; Carrot tosses it so hard that . Vimes remarks they should get rid of the book since it seems too dangerous.
 * In the How to Train your Dragon books, this happens when Hiccup steals a book from the library to save Toothless. Hairy Scary the Librarian accost him, Camicazi and Fishlegs. He says put the book back on the shelf, or he will have to kill them. it also turns out he's a better fencer than Hiccup or Camicazi. Hiccup asks Fishlegs to look up fencing techniques in one of the books. Fishlegs grabs a book, skims it...and whacks Hairy over the head with it. Crude, but it works.

Live-Action TV

 * The entire premise behind MacGyver. One such case was when the title character thought of a creative if not unnecessarily complicated way to get himself out of a locked room. There is a revolver and he could've just shot out the lock, but as he is averse to firearms he went through all the trouble of using the ammo off a revolver without actually using a gun.
 * Ditto for MythBusters.

Music

 * Scratching records in Hip Hop. It later evolved to the point where dedicated turntables were made for this practice.
 * Auto-Tune was originally devised to correct a singer or instrument's pitch in a particular song. And then Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling came in and discovered while working on Cher's "Believe" that cranking it to the most aggressive setting results in an unnatural yet somewhat pleasing sound. T-Pain further popularised the trend until people got burned out by (less-than-talented) singers having their voice manipulated to sound either robotic or better than they actually are.
 * On a deeper level, the technology behind Auto-Tune was originally applied for use by oil drillers to interpret seismographic data.

Tabletop Games

 * Dominion has the Chapel card; intended to get rid of hurtful curse cards, people realized it could be used to streamline your deck by trashing the low-value cards you start with. Later deckbuilding games such as Puzzle Strike and Ascension use this as an intentional design choice, so removing your own cards from the deck for greater efficiency is now expected. Ascension doesn't even have any harmful cards to remove.
 * Where would Magic: The Gathering be without this? Magic doesn't really have "intended use" - it just has obvious use. Part of that long list of examples includes:
 * Unsummon to save your own creatures.
 * Unstable Mutation to wipe out your opponent's creatures. Or Immolation. Or Bloodlust.
 * Countering your own spells...just to reduce the number of cards in your hand (because of Black Vise).
 * The Millstone/Visions combo. And to a lesser extent the Fireball/Reverse Damage combo.
 * Cards that require you pay life...just so you'll get your Avatar of Hope in play.
 * Using Swords to Plowshares on your Killer Bees or Carrion Ants to gain a lot of life.
 * Ornithopter/aura combos in general.
 * Tearing up Chaos Orb in order to destroy the opponent's permanents. This even sparked the creation of a "Chaos Confetti" card.
 * The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has more than a few instances of this:
 * "Barrel Behind the Door" was initially meant to bounce back damage done to you by your opponent's effects. It works just as well bouncing non-cost damage from your own cards to your opponent.
 * Munchkin allows you to use "Go Up A Level" cards on your opponent in order to force them to fight/run away from a monster that would ignore them if they were just one level lower. The creators of the game were asked if the cards could be used that way—while that hadn't been the intent, the creators responded it was such a Munchkinly thing to do, they just couldn't say no.
 * In the Pokémon Trading Card Game, Claydol's "Cosmic Power" is meant to draw cards from the deck, but its secondary effect - putting 2 cards back to the bottom of the deck - can also be used to prevent a player from losing by decking out and running out of cards.

Toys

 * 10% Benzoyl peroxide is normally used to treat acne, but also found its niche with doll collectors, who use it to remove pen and marker stains on vinyl doll bodies.
 * S.C. Johnson's Future line of acrylic floor polish, now known as Pledge Floor Gloss has earned a Periphery Demographic among scale model hobbyists as they found the stuff useful as a clear-coat finish for windows and canopies on model aircraft and other vehicles.
 * Mattel's IM-Me instant messaging device was (as the name implies) released as a safe and appropriate avenue for tween girls to communicate with their friends and family. But since it has a Texas Instruments CC1110 sub-GHz RF chip and JTAG headers, it became a sought-after item amongst the hardware hacking scene, with examples going up for hundreds of dollars on eBay. With the right tools, one could either convert the IM-Me to a spectrum analyzer or if you really are that nefarious, a garage opener tool.
 * Hobbyists took to hacking electronic toys for children such as Furbies and LeapFrog educational consoles, due to their relatively low cost compared to mainstream video game consoles as well as their use of off-the-shelf Linux distributions, such as in the case of the Leapster and LeapPad line receiving ports of Retroarch, repurposing what would otherwise be an easily-discarded kids' toy into an emulation device for retrogaming. In the case of Android-powered kids' tablets, some, namely the Nabi 2 and more recently the LeapFrog Epic, received some attention at the XDA-Developers forum where community members took the effort of developing tweaks and even custom firmware for these educational tablets, again with the intent of repurposing them long past their service life once a child grows out of them.
 * During the Harry Potter craze of the early 2000s, Mattel released a Nimbus 2000 toy complete with a vibration feature. It didn't take too long for Mattel to realise that the Nimbus has seen more use by the more raunchy crowd to have some cheap pleasure than by kids who want to play around as little witches and wizards, not to mention that the toy finding its way to sex shops led to Mattel discontinuing it not long after.
 * Anyone Remember Pogs? Well if you did, you probably don't remember that they were initially intended as playing pieces in a tabletop game, but the vast majority of folks who bought them did so just to collect them.

Video Games

 * Final Fantasy:
 * Another novel strategy to Final Fantasy is to hit yourself to cure Sleep or Confuse, as opposed to waiting for your opponent to hit you.
 * Also, in some of the games, if you have a frozen character, casting any fire spell will thaw the character. Especially nice if you have an armor/accessory that absorbs fire magic.
 * Using the Swap spell to turn you into a statistical Physical God in Final Fantasy II. Its intended use was likely for emergency HP/MP refill purposes.
 * In Final Fantasy IV, an enemy casts Reflect on you so you can't heal yourself. You'd better learn that little trick, because Asura heals herself after every attack you land.
 * Reflect can also be used offensively by casting it on yourself. Enemy has Reflect status, forcing you to hold off from powerful magic attacks? Reflect yourself and then cast devastating magic on yourself that reflects and hits the boss. In some Final Fantasy games, a Reflected spell actually does a lot more damage than if it hit normally, so the best strategy in many situations is to Reflect a party member and bombard the boss with spells. Note that this makes it impossible for you to heal yourself with healing magic, so you need to Reflect the boss and throw heals on him if you want to heal yourself.
 * You can also cast Reflect on the whole party and hit them with an aoe effect, resulting in multiple hits to the opponent.
 * In the DS version, the Adrenaline augment doubles the damage a character inflicts when he or she is at critical health. Casting Tornado on a character with Adrenaline is an easy way to satisfy this condition. This is particularly useful on Rydia who can barely take hits anyway.
 * Final Fantasy VI had Vanish, which makes you immune to physical attacks. Nice, but it makes the next magic attack hit. This led to the Vanish/Doom combo, an instant death attack that will even defeat anything that doesn't have a Vanish immunity! (Which, as you can probably imagine, isn't much.) Patched in the Game Boy Advance version, and careful examination of other status spells (which still fail on a Vanished immune target) indicates that it was a bug to begin with, but still intuitive.
 * The Throw Stone ability in Final Fantasy Tactics lets you build up Job Points. Otherwise, it's just useless damage at long range. Ditto with Accumulate/Build Power. The +1 to physical attack is meaningless unless you do it a lot, and most enemies really won't let you do it a lot. But leave one enemy alive, and send all your units running around the battlefield spamming the ability, and hello job points! In fact, there's a lot of abilities that might be useful, but are much better at building job points.
 * A particularly well-known example in Quake and many other FPS games is provided by the rocket launcher. Its intended use is of course to make Ludicrous Gibs of groups of enemies. Many players instead choose to use it to make massive Sequence Breaking leaps. Rocket jumping became an Ascended Glitch for the FPS genre - the Soldier in Team Fortress 2 is designed for just that.
 * In The Legend of Zelda, there are a few instances where this pops up:
 * In A Link to The Past, using the butterfly net against Agahnim will bounce his spells back at him.
 * In Ocarina of Time, using a bottle against Ganondorf will bounce his magic attacks back at him. This also works in Wind Waker against Phantom Ganon, and against in Twilight Princess.
 * In Links Awakening you can use the shovel against Dethl to deflect his fireballs when he assumes Agahnim's form.
 * In Twilight Princess, using the fishing rod will distract Ganondorf, opening him up for a free hit.
 * In Skyward Sword, The bug net can distract, the Final Boss.
 * In Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, the Sling Post's intended and primary use is as a key component to the Human Slingshot (hence the name). However, the players can also use it in single player mode to knock the enemy senseless. Miller even lampshades the trope by calling the player when doing this and saying "That's not what its used for!"
 * League of Legends had the Innerverating Locket. This item restored some of your mana and caused a minor self-targeted aoe heal whenever you used one of your abilities. Originally it was thought of as a powerup for healers. Then people realized you could use it on Udyr (a melee tank who uses his abilities in quick succession.) The Locket/Udyr build was so powerful that it forced Riot to remove the locket from the game.
 * Another example is Tear of the Goddess. This item gave you a very large mana pool over time. It was originally thought of as a caster item. Then people started to use goddess tear on other characters. Riot took note of this and made the Manamune, which is an item for DPS characters that builds from Tear of the Goddess.
 * While radically different uses for champions are occasionally found, the champion Gragas stands out for the alternate having massively surpassed the original. He was intended as a tanky melee fighter, using his abilities mostly for utility to debuff, disrupt, and initiate. He is basically never used this way, instead functioning as a burst mage who relies on his tank origins to make him tougher than most mages. For a long time the Riot Games recommended items focused on completely different attributes than most player recommended builds, until they eventually gave in and completely overhauled them.
 * Sion a giant berserker zombie with a massive axe, he was obviously intended to function as a beefy melee DPS, using his Death's Caress (an exploding shield) for protection in fights and his Cryptic Gaze (a ranged damage spell with a lengthy stun) to catch enemies for him to wail on. While he is often used like this, people noticed that both of those skills had high base damage numbers and perfect 1-1 ability power scaling ratios and he became one of the most powerful burst mages in the game. The scaling was later decreased to decrease make this less prominent.
 * The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind featured Alchemy, allowing you to craft potions. The intended use was to craft potions that would improve your skills in combat and dialogue... but it was discovered that by making and drinking an Intelligence potion, you could make better Intelligence potions which you could then drink. After a few iterations, you could easily make potions that made you a Physical God.
 * Similarly the alchemy-enchant loop exploit for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which you can use to become permanently invulnerable and able to kill dragons with a single bare-handed punch.
 * The flee ability in Warhammer Online is most of the time used to get from point A to point B faster.
 * Ditto for the Charge and similar abilities in Guild Wars.
 * Perfect World: the Cube of Fate can be entered via any major city, but when you exit it, you end up in Archosaur, no matter which city you entered from. As such, it is most often used as a free teleport to Archosaur.
 * When Ouroboros was introduced to City of Heroes, it rapidly became a "transport hub" in addition to being the physical location of the "Flashback System". This was because you could teleport to Ouroboros from anywhere (and anywhen, which was part of the point), and then step back through the entry point to any game zone available to your alignment.  More people used it as the first step in a two-step teleport than actually used the flashback system.
 * It also serves as a convenient "neutral ground" meeting point for toons going on Incarnate Trials and any other missions that both heroes and villains can participate in together.

Western Animation

 * Happens in an episode of Sabrina the Animated Series "Xabrina the Teenage Warrior" a few times after Sabrina and Chloe enter a videogame world when Harvey can't stop playing:
 * The goddess Athena gives him a heavy book about all the hazards in this world, and a backpack that can hold anything. When the sphinx sics a giant monster on the girls and Sabrina can't use her magic, they hole up in a tree. Sabrina remembers Athena telling them to use the book and pulls it out, with Chloe asking if there's a section on pest control. Then Sabrina drops the book, and it knocks out the monster. The sphinx concedes they technically won and lets them pass.
 * The sphinx rewards the girls with a Singing Shield. They're not sure what it's supposed to do since the singing goes on and annoys them. While they end up using it to block Aphrodite's barrage of spells, the shield allows them to befriend a nice minotaur in the maze where he's trapped. They sing a duet as the girls lead him out, while covering their ears.
 * Aphrodite's gift of a makeup kit proves surprisingly useful after the girls intimidate her. They use the golden dental floss to navigate through a maze with minotaurs, and combine all the cosmetics in a horn they receive from said minotaur to blow at the Big Bad, the videogame CEO who appears in digital form and plans to wipe out the girls as well as Harvey who still believes he is Spartacles. He had told the girls that he's allergic to cosmetics, so he goes down in a matter of minutes.
 * The backpack itself was meant to hold any items as standard for a videogame. When the Big Bad starts having his Sneeze of Doom, Sabrina tosses Harvey into the backpack, before she and Chloe jump in and zip it shut. The sneeze is so powerful that it blows them and the backpack out of the game. Chloe lampshades that's probably not what the creator intended.
 * In the The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror short "Wiz Kids" that parodies Harry Potter, Bart steals Lisa's wand when Montymort coerces him to sabotage her trick for a show. He has a crisis of conscience when Lisa asks for help as Montymort steals her magic, but knows that he can't cast spells. So instead he charges at Montymort and stabs him in the leg with Lisa's wand. Turns out to be the evil wizard's weak-point; he collapses and dies.

Real Life

 * Mag-Lite brand flashlights were the makeshift melee weapon of choice for both law enforcement and criminals alike, especially biker gangs such as the Hells Angels. There have indeed been incidents where Angels and their rivals were seen bludgeoning each other to pulp with Mag-Lites no thanks to their all-metal construction. They were however banned by some law enforcement units due to incidents of police brutality using Mag-Lites. That being said, one could just simply flash a Mag-Lite on a perp to temporarily blind him and thus buy time to make a quick escape.
 * Clarks released two lines of children's school shoes in 2007 called "Daisy" and "Jack Nano" with a hidden compartment housing a small toy figure. BBC News reported the toys as a "term-time distraction", and the hidden compartment could, at least in theory, be used to stash small slips of paper containing exam answers for the purposes of cheating, or in the case of a certain Twitter user, other contraband such as LEGO figures. Another Twitter user even jokingly suggested hiding cannabis in said compartment, cheekily lamenting that Clarks should've made adult-sized versions of said shoes. The latter makes sense as Clarks was also the ones behind the Wallabees style of shoe as made infamous by Breaking Bad, though of course the shoe company wouldn't want to be associated with illicit substances.
 * As seen in American Girl's Kit Kittredge story arc, housewives repurposed flour sack fabric into articles of clothing since the early 20th century. This led George P. Plant Milling Company and other firms to sell flour and feed packaged in dress-quality sacks especially during the Great Depression and World War II when fabric was in such short supply.
 * Game engines like Unity are, of course made for developing video games. This however didn't keep software developers from using it for purposes other than games, such as in the case of the app launcher for the LeapFrog Epic which was powered by Unity.
 * In the same vein, its chief rival Unreal Engine was initially developed for 3D polygonal games, specifically first-person shooters in its first generation. TV production houses saw its potential as a viable solution for creating virtual sets for actors to be composited on, saving them tons of money and time in the process. One such example was the children's TV series LazyTown where it was used to render the virtual sets alongside a framework called XRGen4.
 * At least some narcotics and inhalants are a case of this, as they were initially intended for the treatment of certain ailments, or in the latter case, as propellants for aerosol sprays or solvents for contact cement and permanent markers. Needless to say, they became better known for being abused by destitute youths than for their intended purpose.
 * This is also the basis for general-purpose computing on graphics processing units or GPGPU, where graphics processing units are used to perform calculations normally done on a CPU. Since GPUs are able to perform tons of calculations in parallel through dozens of cores, they were eventually put to use in fields beyond video games or computer graphics in general, such as digital signal processing, scientific computing and cryptography to name a few. The various "@Home" projects, of which SETI@Home and Folding@Home are probably the best known, use this practice (plus the efforts of thousands of volunteers) to turn individual PCs the world over into massive virtual supercomputers to process vast amounts of data in parallel.
 * The COVID-19 pandemic led to doctors and scientists scrambling for a cure or at least a form of treatment to alleviate if not outright rid the body of the virus. A number of drugs that were initially intended for unrelated diseases were studied and proposed as potential treatments for the disease, one of them being ivermectin which was touted as a "wonder drug" to be used against COVID-19 especially by fringe groups and media personalities like Raffy Tulfo despite the lack of conclusive evidence to its efficacy.
 * Note that "a way to apply an object, ability, feature or other such thing that is Not the Intended Use for it" is not the same as "a useful way to apply an object, ability, feature or other such thing that is Not the Intended Use for it".
 * The Willys MB Jeep was originally intended to be a rugged and reliable non-combat transport vehicle during World War II, having been an iconic fixture of the war, and was subject to various field modifications in ways far beyond the original designers intended, such as "a power plant, light source, improvised stove for field rations, or a hot water source for shaving", though given the conditions it was subjected to, it is to no surprise that troops would MacGyver their jeeps to their needs. And then there was a bunch of Filipinos who, faced with the fact that their transport infrastructure was utterly destroyed by the war, took those surplus Jeeps, modified and stretched them to accommodate several passengers, and decorated these ex-military vehicles in the most campy way imaginable, giving rise to the Jeepney. Japanese scale model firm Tamiya would later commemorate them in 2019 with the "Dyipne", a Mini 4WD kit inspired by the vehicle.
 * For decades cosmetologists and makeup experts used Preparation H (a hemorrhoid medication) to shrink puffiness and fade dark circles under the eyes. In the early 21st century the manufacturer of Preparation H changed the formulation such that it was no longer effective for this (allegedly specifically to prevent this use), but the change was made only to the United States market; it was still possible to buy the original formulation outside of the country; buying it in bulk from Mexico and Canada became very popular.
 * In a similar case to the above-mentioned Harry Potter broomstick, the Hitachi Magic Wand was originally manufactured and marketed for relieving tension and muscle pain, but would later gain notoriety in the late 1960s as something more, ahem, stimulating, with third parties producing aftermarket accessories made with the adult crowd in mind. Hitachi caught wind of its off-label use and briefly discontinued the device in 2013, fearing a public relations nightmare as they didn't want themselves to be associated with sex toys, only for them to acquiesce when sex toy company Vibratex persuaded them to continue production of the massager, albeit without the Hitachi branding. It is likely that Hitachi tacitly saw a market with the sex industry but didn't want to be directly associated with it anyway, never mind the brand being used as a by-word for electric sexual vibrators.
 * Pirated repacks of computer games, e.g. those from FitGirl and DODI, are a convenient avenue for those wanting to pirate the latest titles without having to wait so much due to less-than-ideal internet connections as they are compressed to at least half or a third of the game's original install size, though they do take significantly longer to install due to aggressive use of compression. While downloading them is still not without its risk due to their less-than-legal nature, some who did buy the games on services like Steam or the Epic Games Store but are hampered by slow or limited connections simply downloaded the repacks and unpacked their contents on the folder where the legitimate copies are to be installed, thereby rendering them as legal copies.
 * Ever since more restaurants started offering gluten-free food, many consumers have viewed it as a new trend in "health food". Truth be told, however, unless you actually have celiac disease, gluten free food has no additional health benefits. In fact, it might actually make you gain weight.
 * Game controllers are cheap, easy to use and are familiar to younger generations. This is precisely the reason why the US military utilised them for controlling things like UAV drones as it would be easier to train rookie soldiers using something they already had experience with (which has unsurprisingly led to some controversy as some found this rather video-gamey way of killing enemy combatants Call of Duty style in Real Life to be of extremely poor taste). In 2023 it has been pointed out that the Titan submersible involved in an incident where they went missing whilst attempting to explore the remains of the RMS Titanic used an off-the-shelf Logitech G F710 game controller, a $40 joypad they might have snatched off GameStop or some other electronics store and modified for submersible use.

Professional Sports

 * Time outs in several sports including Basketball and Lacrosse. Intended to allow teams to meet and plan strategy. Can be used tactically to prevent a player from losing possession and restart play in a controlled manner.
 * Football, too. The most common use for a timeout is to stop the clock, and the second most common is to avoid a penalty for delay of game or too many men. It's far rarer for a timeout to be called to talk strategy on a critical play.
 * Somewhat less common is the use of a timeout to "freeze the kicker". If your opponent is about to kick a field goal, calling a time out just before the play starts will often mess up a kicker's timing enough to cause him to miss the field goal when he does eventually kick it. This is only done occasionally, however, because in most circumstances time outs are much more valuable for the above-mentioned unintended uses than for this one.