Heart Is an Awesome Power



"Largo: Dude, I'm battlin' zombies and all I got is luv pow3r from a n3wb magical grrl. Help me out here.

Rent a Zilla Salesman: All ya got? That's enough, mate."

- Megatokyo

The character decided to play the Superpower Lottery and ended up somewhere at the bottom of the superpower scale. In the world full of Reality Warpers and Elemental Powers, they won a heart.

What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart Anyway

Hey, Heart is an awesome power! Somehow they manage to do Curb Stomp Battles versus Nigh Invulnerable foes. Why?

First of all, they're Badass. Most of the time they're Weak but Skilled. They can also be Awesome By Analysis by guessing when and how to apply their useless power.

Usually a type of skill reapplication: often the power has utilities which no-one but the Weak but Skilled hero recognizes. Sometimes justified with the powers only becoming effective over time, or that they are only effective under certain conditions - however then they pay off handsomely.

Sometimes the character does not realize the usefulness of the skill until later, in which case it is a Chekhov's Skill. Might involve a Chekhov's Classroom on the lines of: "Sure, my only power is to control X... but you forget that Y is X too".

Might be An Aesop to make the most of what you have. Especially ironic if another character had, or could have had the same ability before, but decided that it was useless.

The video game version is usually a Lethal Joke Character, and sometimes Difficult but Awesome. Sister Trope to Lethal Harmless Powers, where normally useful but inoffensive powers turn out to be able to really hurt others. See also the Inverse Law of Complexity to Power, which can be why these powers become useful.

Compare Magikarp Power, which unlike this trope truly is useless at first but eventually ascends to extreme power through hard work and/or patience.

Not to be confused with how the Magical Girl genre tends to treat the "Heart/Love" ability specifically, where it's always something to run away from really fast and never questioned as such except by really horrible and genre-blind villains.

Anime and Manga

 * A number of characters in One Piece. Rubber Man Luffy is not a bad example (since among the other Devil Fruit abilities his one is actually rather low-tier until he starts inventing other uses for it) but the best example is Kaku, who boasts about gaining the power to turn into a giraffe AND becomes more powerful thanks to it. Word of God has said, the Devil Fruits themselves don't become more powerful, the users just use them better with more creativity.
 * Others include a character who can control sound effects like in Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure below, one who can merge anything into his body by eating it , and a main character who accidentally combined the power "to not die once" with getting lost, with the result being functional immortality and inhuman abilities.
 * Especially noticable when Luffy goes up against Eneru. Due to his rubber body not conducting electricity, Luffy was probably one of the few people on the planet who could've beat him.
 * Luffy also gets particularly clever with his abilities by taking advantage of the fact that his entire body, including heart, blood vessels and bones, are all rubber. In the former he pumps his blood flow to a pressure level that would kill any normal human. In the latter he inflates his bones and increases his hitting power significantly.
 * Batholomew Kuma, with the ability to push things, is one of the most powerful characters in the story, especially since it includes the ability to push things like pain and exhaustion.
 * Trafalgar Law's ability allows him to create a spherical zone where he can disassemble people and recombine them without them dying from the wounds. Sounds lame, although pretty effective in battle.
 * Don't forget Baroque Works Member Number 3, Galdino. His power allows him to create an endless supply of candle wax from his body. He was also able to make this wax hard as steel and make keys out of it, but its greatest use didn't come in until he
 * The Law of Ueki bases its entire setting on this. Nearly every power (with precious few exceptions) is weak or weird, but with proper application can become deadly.
 * Everyone in Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure. Powers like healing, making maps and summoning zippers have all deadly combat applications when in the hands of a stand user. In a world full of guys who can stop time, have super strength, and can even reset reality, it's amazing to see what such seemingly under-powered abilities as controlling sound effects and drawing manga can do.
 * Pretty much all the awesome and suspense comes from how inventive someone can use their powers rather than outright brute strength--though that's not to say that beating someone with your fists yelling ORA ORA ORA ORA isn't awesome in itself. Still, as was once pointed out on a JoJo forum, landing the Spam Attack isn't the real mechanism of victory, but rather the reward for circumventing/negating the enemy Stand's power.
 * In Darker Than Black, one character can take existing water and make the immediate area briefly rain. This was mostly just used to provide water for her partner who could freeze water, but the she uses the power of inertia to basically riddle someone with Super Speed full of bullet holes.
 * Ghost Hunt: Ayako doesn't even reveal her real powers usually, leading the party to view her as a phoney knockoff priestess. She does have some exorcism ability, but her real power is her affinity with trees, which allows her to exorcise massive amounts of zombies. The reason? Her power drains a lot out of the surrounding area, and can only be used in an area with a holy tree grove nearby.
 * Koyomi in Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou has the ability to turn any spell into a basin. It seems like a lame power at first, until everyone around her realizes that it can transform any spell, regardless of who cast it or how powerful it is, effectively giving her a universal Power Nullifier. Koyomi herself never actually catches onto this.
 * In Letter Bee, Heart allows you to fire Frickin Laser Beams and kill armor bugs.
 * In the absurd comedy manga, Banana no Nana, the main character has the power to manipulate... bananas! Of course, in a world where there's more traditional powers like water manipulation and superhuman strength, this seems like a pretty lame power to end up with. But Nana later explains (and demonstrates) she can manipulate everything about the banana, including size, weight, and hardness. Cue the absurd, but unusually badass scene of her using the banana as a bludgeon, morphing into a shield, and then morphing it into a sword. The fight ends with the villain taking a hostage, and demanding that Nana, "drop [her] banana!"
 * Urizane of S-Cry-ed is pretty much the same, just replace banana with watermelons that basically give him a Green Lantern Ring.
 * Also from Banana no Nana, there's a maid whose power is to "do housework really fast". She uses a sword in the form of a mop so her movements are extremely fast.
 * While the Nasuverse has a notable share of insanely durable or insanely powerful characters, there is at least one character per setting, who while having a power that sounds unspectacular, can produce results as equally ridiculous as their overpowered brethren. Consider:
 * Asagami Fujino: Mild Mannered High School student with the psychic power to... turn objects clockwise or counter clockwise? Uses? How about twisting victims into a bloody pulp by sight alone? Or reducing a whole suspension bridge into wreckage?
 * Kiritsugu from Fate Zero has the dual origin of severing and binding, which translates to breaking things and then putting them back together, which causes irreparable degradation. That doesn't sound very useful, but when his target is a mage's Magic Circuits... well, there's a reason people call him the Magus Killer.
 * For Tsukihime and Fate Stay Night, see the Video Games examples.
 * In Aphorism, each character's power comes from a specific Japanese kanji. For example, the kanji for "change" allows someone to change their appearance; the kanji for "katana" allows the user to use ...a katana. In comparison, the kanji "righteous" is pretty much useless in combat, and its user usually winds up being the Distressed Damsel.
 * In Iris Zero, most of the Irises have seemingly useless powers like seeing what mood someone is in that they use to do things like manipulate people.
 * Unico can work all sorts of magic for those who love him, and he's very good at making friends.
 * He also has the power to stop wars, anywhere he goes, just by existing. This power forces the gods to intervene and try to get rid of him because he seriously messes up their plans.
 * From To Aru Majutsu no Index, we have Fiamma of the Right, one of the most powerful characters in the series, outclassing monstrosities such as . His power? "The Holy Right", the ability to use all other abilities relating to the right hand. Lame? This is the ability that allows him to destroy an entire city in one fell swoop, teleport instantaneously to another location, and create a Flaming BFS forty kilometers in length.
 * Paper Masters in Read or Die have the power to mentally control and manipulate paper, which also evidently comes at the cost of such extreme bibliomania that it can functionally ruin their lives (they can be hard-pressed to resist the urge to read or enter a bookstore when they should be, say, working, and they typically spend hundreds to thousands of dollars a week on new books for their collection). However, like the Banana no Nana example above, Paper Masters can control everything about paper and control all paper around them -- leading to stunts like creating plane-swallowing dragon-beasts from masses of paper, turning a simple page into a sword that can cut through steel, and more. There's a reason why "Paper Master" is now considered an example of Stock Super Powers.
 * The Tsuchikage in Naruto has Dust Release as his bloodline power. No, not blasting people with dust like Gaara does with sand, creating dust by pulverizing everything in its area of effect.

Comic Books
""He could control every creature that lives in the sea. But I don't think either of you know what that really means. Do you know, do you understand, do you have any idea how much life there is in just one single square mile of sea? I don't think you do... and if you multiply that by lots of miles in every direction... I'd never seen anything like it in my whole life... and God as my witness, I hope to never see it again.""
 * Aquaman, who is absolutely not as weak as Memetic Mutation would have one believe. A combination of Required Secondary Powers (he can swim like a fish and punch people while under 500+ atmospheres of pressure, which is Superman level asskickery) and Fridge Horror (he commands everything that lives in the ocean; guess where Godzilla, Cthulhu, and the Leviathan live?) have had many writers portray him as horrifically powerful and outright feared by heroes and villains alike, and for very good reasons.


 * Perhaps the most awesome (and funny) example is Aquaman's friendship with sea life used to defeat Namor. Poor Namor never knew what hit him when he had an orca dropped on him.
 * A few writers give him the ability to command not only sea life, but also any animal with any connection to the sea, even vestigal or ancestral. Considering life originated in the ocean and every animal has an aquatic common ancestor, that means he can control every animal that has ever existed, including humans.
 * Heck, some of Aquaman's fellow Detroit League members qualify for this trope. How many comic-book loving Tropers don't think much of Vibe because of his vibrational powers and Ethnic Scrappy tendencies? Check out this example of sheer power. And how about this sequence in which he stabilizes time eras during Crisis On Infinite Earths? "You was sayin', Tropes?" OUTRAGEOUS!
 * Rising Stars has Laurel Darkhaven, who can telekinetically manipulate very, very small objects. Such as your carotid artery. She becomes a government assassin. She later uses the ability to control "very small things" to telekinetically sift EVERY inch of arable soil under the entire Middle East in order to make the entire region fertile again. The results can be seen from ORBIT!
 * Turns out many powers are like this because of implications or aspects directly hidden. Poet's powers are supposed to be just minor energy abilities, but they're actually control over the Power itself...
 * Mr. Brownstone was a minor Spider-Man villain who could teleport matter...a few grams at a time. He used those powers to become a drug dealer catering to wealthy clients wishing to indulge in heroin without any nasty needle marks. Naturally, he could also teleport drugs to people's systems against their will...
 * Squirrel Girl has the power to control squirrels, and has become a Running Gag and Marvel's Lethal Joke Character by defeating the most powerful supervillains in existence. Offpanel.
 * Recently the offpanel thing is becoming mostly subverted, as she easily defeats Wolverine in a sparring match, shown mostly in silhouette but still visible, and she was also shown ripping killer Nazi mechas to shreds.
 * This is a grand tradition for The Legion of Super Heroes. Most characters have only one power, and it's not always something very impressive. One of their first recruits was Triplicate Girl, with the ability to transform from one ordinary teenage girl... to three ordinary teenage girls. Useful for doing chores and pretty fun in bed, but not much good in combat. At least, not until she became a master of Tri-Jitsu, a martial art based around the fact that you have six arms, six legs, and three potential points of attack to coordinate from.
 * Matter-Eater Lad can... eat anything. Hardly a power to write home about. However, seeing as Tenzil Kem's personal definition of "stuff" includes laser beams and doomsday computers, you might want to keep him around in case you need to get rid of something. In one story he ate a supposedly-indestructible wish-granting device and so saved The Legion from the invincible monster it had created after everyone else failed. It drove him mad, but hey, he saved the universe!
 * In at least one version, being able to bite through and chew up anything meant the Required Secondary Power of acidic saliva, providing a potentially nasty ranged attack.
 * Batman villain The Ten-Eyed Man is an interesting case. Fans usually interpret this as him having ten additional weak points. But as most people will attest, eyes are pretty useful. Eyes on your hands? Makes you one of the best shooters in the DC universe, due to an unerring aim.
 * Makes it a bit hard to pull the trigger, though...
 * Stormwatch: Team Achilles had a character whose superpower was to make plants grow really fast... and he worked as an assassin. The thing is, most people at any given time have seeds in their digestive tract from the vegetation they've eaten, and growing those up to full plants in a few seconds leads to a nasty death from internal injuries and/or choking.
 * Doug "Cypher" Ramsey of the X-Men junior team New Mutants originally had the power of comprehending languages, and that was it. Then he died and came back, with his powers expanding to all forms of "language". This includes computer language (making him a master hacker and programmer), arcane languages (letting him cast spells), body language (giving him the ability to fight all the New Mutants at the same time and win), and even the structure of buildings, allowing him to pinpoint their weak spots instantly. Took a Level In Badass, indeed.
 * Dove of the (Teen) Titans is a low-level Flying Brick, who also has the power of "perfect peace". In the recent Blackest Night crossover, this not only allowed the previous Dove to not come back as a zombie, but also
 * One of the Captain Planet comic books actually has Ma-Ti lamenting over how lame "Heart" is as a power after Wheeler makes fun of him for it. Later in the issue, Ma-Ti uses his ring to reach and understand the hearts of all the creatures in the forest to help the other planeteers, including bears.
 * Marvel's very own Fad Super Dazzler has the ability to absorb sound and convert it into light. This may not sound like much at first glace, but she can do things like blinding people with bright flashes(duh),create a strobe effect that upsets equilibrium, create holograms, and even Frickin Laser Beams. She's also immune to sound based attacks, because they just make her stronger. This ability is shown to be obscenely powerful, as Galactus once recruited her to retrieve one of his Heralds and exposed her to unimaginable sounds, including the explosion of an entire galaxy(yeah yeah, no sound in space. He's Galactus, he has no care for your paltry human physics), to boost her to sufficient levels.
 * It's also suggested that one day, she could expand this property to cover other fundamental forms of energy. Ever set off a nuclear explosion with a boombox?
 * Some of the Falcon's powers include talking to birds and seeing what they see. It doesn't sound to promising until you realize that these birds can aid him in battle and act as his spies from everywhere. It's been implied that Between Nick Fury and all of the resources of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Falcon with all of the pigeons in New York, Falcon has the better intelligence network.
 * Spider-Man once ripped part of Norman Osborn's face off when he stuck to it with his stickum' powers during American Son. Not how Stan Lee imagined it being used, but awesome regardless.
 * On a more meta level, this is how Batman evolved from a mere vigilante who dresses in funny costumes, to a Crazy Prepared Chessmaster whose supplementary "superpower" is Wonderful Toys; writers wanted to give him a bigger role than mere Mission Control in crossovers where he's shoulder to shoulder (and often toe to toe) with beings whose abilities were at the very least superhuman, if not supernatural, and therefore he developed the smarts to outthink everybody and the gadgets to deal with anything.

Fan Works

 * Or, in this case, clairvoyance in With Strings Attached. The Hunter calls Ringo's mindsight “the single most valuable ability” amongst the four—beating out Super Strength / Nigh Invulnerability, complete control over water, and unlimited shapeshifting—because he can see anything. Including atoms. With perfect clarity. At any distance, up to and including the surface of the sun. Knowledge is power, indeed.
 * In Luminosity, Elspeth's powers all relate to effective communication. By the end of the novel, she can

Literature
"Sandry: The cloth-head tied [my bonds] with ribbons. I suppose it didn't occur to him ribbons are made of cloth.
 * The main characters of Mur Lafferty's superhero novel Playing for Keeps are examples of this trope. In particular, the heroine, Keepsie, has the superpower that nothing that belongs to her can be taken from her without her consent. In the beginning of the novel, she considers this to be a pretty useless power. Once she figures out that her life counts as something which belongs to her...
 * "You're breathing my air."
 * In the Rose of the Prophet trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, a wizard named Mathew teaches several women how to cast a simple spell that will create a fog to help them escape from their enemies. The chief component of spell is water and Mathew has never cast the spell in a desert environment. While they provided all the water they could for the spell to work, it was not enough. What they didn't know is when the spell is not given enough water, it will seek out water from any source possible. And what is the human body mostly made of?
 * Door from Neverwhere can... open doors. Thing is, it doesn't matter where the door goes or whether there was even a door there to begin with. The Big Bad is treating her as a Living MacGuffin to get her to open a door to Wow.
 * Not to mention that early in the story she is driven to corner by her pursuers, and literally opens one of them. Yes, she can open doors in human bodies - the results are messy.
 * The powers in Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz Series are all examples of this trope. The main character, Alcatraz has the gift of breaking whatever he touches, which he uses to break himself out of prison later. His grandpa has the power to arrive late to things, which comes in handy when he is being tortured and decides to arrive late to the pain! One of the other characters has the ability to say complete nonsense, which allows him to become unable to give away their secrets to the bad guys. Later Talents include bad dancing that doubles as kung fu fighting and "getting lost" from a flying glass dragon to the ground.
 * The Oculator lenses also apply. There are lenses that let you shoot wind, fireballs, inflict terrible pain... and the one that is the most powerful is a pair of glasses that lets you understand, read, and write any language. Knowledge is power.
 * In his short story "Leaks", David Langford mentions a wild talent with the ability to incinerate individual grains of dust--but only one at a time. He gets the idea of focusing his power on gunpowder, and goes on to have an illustrious superhero career as Mr Misfire, the Man Whose Adversaries Shoot Themselves in the Foot.
 * Similarly, the main character is targeted by a Mad Scientist who wants to see if his power can be expanded to other fields. The main character's power? Teleporting a pint of beer between glasses. Can it be expanded? Yes, to include any liquid in any container. Including, to the mad scientist's chagrin, the blood in the human circulatory system.
 * From the same short story anthology, Temps, the heroine of Roz Kaveney's Totally Trashed can materialize random pieces of litter and garbage out of the air. She stops a homicidal robot by covering it in old stamps and scraps of paper that block its sensors, and discovers that when she really gets mad, she can drop an old, rusted-out car on top of someone. Later she finds out that many of the things she materializes are actually potentially valuable antiques from alternate universes or timelines, such as a tarnished, slightly dented Roman centurion's shield that looks at first glance like a garbage can lid and old newspapers from other timelines that prove the existence of alternate universes, drawing in the interest of Nobel Prize-hungry researchers.
 * Don't let his power fool you. In the Circle of Magic books, Briar Moss' power is that of plants. You might think he can only grow plants, but in Tris' Book he works with his three foster sisters to create killer thorns to protect the temple he's currently calling home. And in Street Magic of The Circle Opens, he's considered a full mage, and on his own, he uses a basket woven from dried reeds to bind up and hold down a girl he was trying to convince she needed magic training, use roses to torture an allergic gang member for information, and in the climax Awesome Power, indeed.
 * No, the awesome comes in when his teacher tells him that due to how much Briar put into his effort, it's not going to ever be unrooted from that spot. All those plants he fired up are going to stay right there, and nothing (not even other people's magical efforts) is going to undo it.
 * Lady Sandrilene Fa Toren would like a word with you, and she will tie you up with your own clothing (or anything else that could be considered "thread" or "woven material") if you try to defy her. Thread is an awesome power.


 * later*

Sandry: (her captors are now encased and gagged in woven cocoons, the ringleader tied to a rock in a similar predicament) You can tell all Namorn this is what happens when I'm vexed."


 * Even more impressive is in the first book, where she This is because her power doesn't just extend to physical thread, but also any magic that can be visualised as string, such as life and nothing.
 * In the first quartet, her consideration of escaping bonds by un-weaving knots leads to the idea of enacting a Defeat By Modesty.
 * In Elana Frink's short story "The Los Angeles Women's Auxiliary Superhero League", the character Jane is initially embarrassed about her power of "niceness". It turns out that she can mesmerize people by speaking to them gently in a soothing tone of voice, to the point where she can stun would-be muggers and reduce a supervillain to a drooling vegetable. She later gets the superhero name of "Hypnotique" which she likes much better than "the nice one".
 * In the Xanth novels by Piers Anthony, everyone has a magical power, but many of them are nearly useless. Some of these seemingly useless abilities turn out to be much more powerful than previously realized.
 * Useless abilities are referred to as "Spot On The Wall" powers, meaning that they do useless things like making a colored spot appear on a wall. One character literally has that power, but it turns out that she can use her power to make mosaic images with amazing detail. Furthermore, she doesn't even have to know what she's making in order to create it. In one scenario, she makes an image of an "operations manual" to a device in order to learn how to use the device.
 * Irene's power is to make plants grow faster, which is actually a pretty useful ability, but seemingly mundane. However, Xanth is full of a ridiculous number of plants with very specific powers, and armed with the right seeds Irene can produce virtually anything. Her talent is re-evaluated to Magician-quality a couple of books after her first appearance.
 * There's no specific criteria for a Magician level talent in Xanth (except, by definition, ), Magicians tend be seen as powerful with the application of their talent.
 * The eponymous item in The Sword of Shannara and its sequels. It's power, which is hidden for much of the first book, is revealed to be . Lame right? Well, no not quite. You see, the Sword not only . This comes in pretty handy as The Big Bad is . Bye bye Brona. But that's only one use right? Wrong again. The Sword shows up in almost every book in the series, proving to be the perfect antidote to every Manipulative Bastard and Evil Mentor out there. It in The Heritage of Shannara by, and  after revealing . So what's a lame power again?
 * A side character in The Wheel of Time is a very weak Asha'man who can channel just a little of the One Power, and therefore stands miles below the main characters. Fortunately for him, he's very good at making Gateways, to the point that he can make Gateways hundreds of times better than he should have been able to. The character uses this with quite a bit of imagination. We see him using his skill to cut an iron chain, but from what we've seen of the Asha'man, he could easily devastate a horde of Trollocs in seconds.
 * Children of the Red King is basically made out of this trope.
 * Several characters from Wild Cards use this.
 * Digger Downs can literally "sniff out" aces, but also happens to be a paparazzi who works in the magazine about aces.
 * Astronomer won Superpower Lottery, but employed a lot of aces and weak deuces and taught them to use their powers well. Did you know that if you can control nearby water, it also extends to bodily fluids?
 * Popinjay arguably takes the cake. He has a power to teleport... only other people, only if he can "shoot" them with a pretend gun (you know the gesture), and only to places he's been to numerous times and knows excellently. He works as a private eye and, amongst other things, teleports people to jail. However, later into the story we find out that  apparently works, too.
 * Billy Harrow, the main character of China Mieville's Kraken, is a hapless museum curator and preserver of dead animal specimens. In fact, it turns out that he is the saint of museum curators who preserve dead animal specimens. This isn't all that impressive, until he realizes that his preservationist powers extend to . He's also a pretty capable Barrier Warrior.
 * In Mistborn, a Feruchemist can use the fictional metal Atium to alter his or her age, but because Feruchemy is an Equivalent Exchange based magic system, in order to become young they'd have to spend an equivalent amount of time old, and as such, this power is considered worthless except as a disguise..
 * Tin, as an Allomantic metal, allows one to have Super Senses, but if you're just a Misting instead of a Mistborn (who is able to use all Allomantic powers) it essentially turns you into just a human watchdog. Useful, but not as devastatingly powerful as the powers granted by other metals like pewter, iron, or steel. Spook, who can only use tin, is Overshadowed By Awesome thanks to his comrades' far greater physical combat abilities. Then in Hero Of Ages he
 * In The Alloy of Law Marasi is a Cadmium Misting, a person who can burn Cadmium to create a bubble of slowed time; time moves slower within the bubble than outside it. Initially this power is considered rather useless, as there aren't many times that someone needs to move slower than the rest of the world. However
 * Sculpting in The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor
 * He-Man villain Stinkor wasn't allowed to appear on the cartoon itself because his power of smelling really horrible was deemed too ridiculous. However, a supplemental book for the rejected Stinkor episode was in fact published. Turns out that Stinkor smelled so bad it sapped even He-Man's strength and Stinkor came closer to beating He-Man than almost any of Skeletor's other servants.
 * The Hunger Games: Peeta was a cake decorator at his family's bakery, which doesn't seem like it would be too useful in a death match. Until, that is, he uses it to paint his body to camouflage himself in the trees.
 * John Taylor of the Nightside has a gift that lets him find anything. Big deal, right? Well, with only the slightest application of learned magic, he can find the activating key to any spell, holes in dimensions, the one pin on the grenade-belt that's looser than the others, the glass jaw of an eldritch abomination, etc. He calls taking bullets out of opponents' guns his "party trick", and routinely counters villains' threats with offers to do likewise to their favorite internal organs.
 * Harry Potter defeats Quirrel armed only with his mother's love

Live Action TV

 * One of the Objects in The Lost Room is a pair of scissors which can rotate things around a point, which seems pretty limited until you realize that the center of rotation can be outside of what's being rotated. The protagonist finds out the hard way when the previous owner uses the scissors to toss him around the room like a ragdoll.
 * Another is the clock, which can sublimate manganese. How often does one encounter manganese, you ask? Turns out it's a component of quite a few alloys, including brass and stainless steel.
 * On one episode of Misfits we see a guy who can control milk and dairy products telekinetically. No one takes him seriously until he realizes that he can force dairy food around people's bodies and more specifically, back up people's digestive tract to choke them with it. The episode ends with a Kill Em All situation.
 * One of the first spells Willow Resenburg learned was levitating a pencil. She levitated it into a vampire's heart.

Tabletop Games

 * The player characters of Nobilis are Physical Gods. Mortal NPCs often have enormous magical, supertech, and quasi-miraculous powers - and remain completely unable to challenge them, except extremely indirectly. What is the one class of mortals these Sovereigns of Creation must be cautious of? Botanists. It turns out the Angels used a language of flowers to define reality. Clever botanists can write their own addenda.
 * The Nobles (player characters) themselves can be like this, if the player wants them to be. There's an example of a Noble who is the Power of... Blankets. All blankets. Everywhere. And he can see through them from any distance. And he can make them do anything he wants, also from any distance. Including suffocating you while you sleep in them. He is one of the most feared Nobles in the setting.
 * Power of various emotional Estates are ridiculously powerful when combined with the animistic nature of Mythic Reality, especially in 1st & 2nd edition. Suddenly, gravity doesn't like you anymore.
 * In 3rd edition, Persona miracles can let you affect the "borders" or your Estate, making things more or less like the important traits of it. For example, if the Power of Hope states that one of the properties of Hope is that "Hope springs eternal," then Persona miracles of Hope can make things immortal.
 * Mentioned in the What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart Anyway page, but the in Dungeons and Dragons the magic school of Divination, at its higher levels, make you a metagaming pro.
 * Illusion is the same way. Even a low level illusionist has the ability to create voices in crowds, pass unreadable messages, and make documents that appear to be whatever paperwork is required, which while not spectacular in straight combat are ideal for running a rebellion. At higher levels, incredibly complex illusions can be created with a nigh-impossible saving throw, or can manipulate foes by substituting their reality for another or causing them to die of a fright-induced heart attack. (Your Mind Makes It Real applies in all these situations.) The problem here that something like 2/3rds of the creatures in the game are flatly immune to 90% of the spells in the illusion school, the same issue with Enchantment has this same issue.
 * In 4E, there's Warlords (and to a lesser extent, Bards) with the "grant free melee/ranged basic attack" gimmick. Hey, cool, a free attack that usually has a lower to-hit chance than most abilities, and one roll of weapon damage instead of potentially between 2-5 rolls plus all sorts of bonuses. Nice, not great. And then Essentials came out, whose character classes usually base around turning someone who only has melee/ranged basic attacks into a Person of Mass Destruction suddenly lashing out three times their equivalents' damage per attack, and a Warlord that could grant an extra attack or three just cut the average encounter time in half...
 * Some classes also have powers that can be used as a basic attack.
 * Magic the Gathering has cards designed specifically for players who fit this trope. As the article states, this is Johnny's whole deal: Find good uses for "bad" cards.
 * The (very) old Marvel Comics Superhero RPG had numerous weak powers that could be awesome in the hands of a creative player. Best example is Coloration, the ability to change the color, transparancy and refractive index of matter. Seems very lame, until you're fighing vampires in the sewers and you turn the ground above, not just transparent, but into a giant magnifying glass.
 * Mage: The Ascension becomes this trope for beginner characters. Being limited to a couple Spheres at rank 1 or 2 does seem sucky, doesn't it ? Until you realize that, for instance, the first rank in the Mind Sphere already gives you the ability to boost your cognitive abilities to superhuman levels (total eidetic memory, information processing, etc) and psychic Aura Vision. Being that the whole game is pretty much about thinking outside the box, players and Storytellers are encouraged to take lateral thinking Up to Eleven.
 * As a warning for potential game masters out there: Don't let someone who understands basic chemistry or physics to take matter or forces unless you are prepared to deal with the consequences of mud in a swamp being transmuted into sodium metal under your bad guy. If you don't know the consequences of that statement... just don't let your chemistry geek friend take matter.

Video Games

 * Touhou contains plenty of Superpower Lottery winners who are Reality Warpers or have immense Elemental Powers... then there's Reimu, who has the power to fly, something which nearly everyone else in Gensoukyou also possesses along with their other powers. Except Reimu can also fly away from reality, making her completely untouchable for as long as she wishes.
 * Yukari, whose power is "manipulation of boundaries". And she's the single most powerful youkai in all of Gensoukyou, because she can manipulate any kind of boundary, including abstract ones. From the magical boundary that protects Gensoukyou, to the physical boundaries between two points in space, to breaching the barrier between the physical world and the world of dreams, to moving the horizon (the boundary between earth and sky), and manipulating the boundary between truth and lies to turn the reflection of the Moon into a portal to it. There's a reason one of her spell cards is named "Boundary of Life And Death".
 * Kogasa isn't as spectacular, but she still qualifies, an umbrella youkai with the power of "surprising humans", and she's not even very good at it. She appears as a Stage 2 midboss and boss, and that appears to be the height of her power. Until ! What a surprise for us!
 * Subverted with Yuuka, whose mastery of flowers is explicitly noted to be just as useless as it sounds, however she's still one of the oldest residents of Gensoukyou with physical and magical power to match.
 * One of the Cobras in Metal Gear Solid 3, The Pain, controls bees and is effectively a living bee hive. This makes him pretty much unstoppable on an open battlefield, stinging to death any soldiers without having to even be present himself.
 * The Sorrow, another Cobra, is kind of a spirit Aquaman. He didn't just talk to spirits, he could pull battle plans, orders and other assorted information regarding the opposition from ANY dead soldier (which, you know, there can be a lot of in a war). He could also, apparently, temporarily take on the abilities of certain fallen soldiers, going from untrained to combat ready in a matter of moments (though this could be simply Fan Wank).
 * The second Knights of the Old Republic turns the leadership "power" up to eleven. While the two main characters were still badasses in their own right, it's explained through backstory that Revan converted his entire legion of doom with this ability. The player character of the second game is an extreme example,
 * Nasuverse examples that don't belong to the Anime section:
 * Tsukihime : Tohno Akiha's power is called Plunder, which gives her the ability to "steal body heat." ...Well, okay, but we have people that can kill absolutely anything and others that can drop the moon on you, so what? How about being able to steal all of it from a person at any range, with such sudden violence that the target will instantly and functionally Self Combust?
 * Shirou in Fate Stay Night is so limited in magic that he can only use two kinds; Reinforcement and Projection. Neither seems very useful because Reinforcement just strengthens existing objects and Projection can only create an object for a very limited amount of time. In Shirou's case however . By the end of the three routes Shirou is... rather dangerous for a human.
 * Let's not forget that anyone who read the visual novel knows that those two magics are Think of it this way: When Shirou  However he doesn't think that he has sufficient magical power to use it normally -
 * And that's without mentioning that
 * See the Anime examples for Kara no Kyoukai.
 * Slouching your way to victory with Cheibriados in Dungeon Crawl leads one to realize that being slow as hell is an awesome power.
 * In City of Heroes, one of the least-played Controller powersets is Mind Control; it has a bad rep due to not having a summonable combat pet as a tier 9 ability (among other issues). This would seem to give it "What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart Anyway" status, except for the minority of players who use this set, who can attest to just how powerful it is in capable hands.
 * As an aside, Mind Control is actually one of the more popular sets for Dominators (who have control and ranged damage abilities, as opposed to buffing/debuffing abilities like Controllers). M.C.'s ability to hold, sleep, and confuse multiple targets while your character is in "Domination" mode makes the immobilization powers found in other sets seem obsolete.
 * Monkey Island's Guybrush Threepwood can famously hold his breath for 10 minutes. The Pirate Elders are, to say the least, less than impressed when Guybrush mentions this as his special skill. As it turns out, being able to hold your breath for 10 minutes is a DAMN useful skill for, y'know, A PIRATE.
 * Kingdom Hearts. It's right there in the title. At one point in the first game, six Disney Princesses (and Kairi) are kidnapped because their pure hearts are the key to unlocking Kingdom Hearts.
 * To an even more basic extent, the strength of one's heart decides if the person is able to bear a Keyblade, a giant magical key that can cause a world of hurt on any creature it hits.
 * The Realm has 5 schools of magic, magic costs mana crystals which cost gold. One of the circles is Enchantment, which lets you permanently enchant items. But enchantment has no innate spells so its entire circle requires you to have learned other circles, but with enough ability, you can enchant any spell to any item.
 * Epic Mickey uses the thinner and paint mechanic to mean destroy/kill or repair/love. There is not actually any change in battle style, except the first will remove the tank from the fight, and the second will make him fight for you. Many have also pointed out the Fridge Horror in that mind control is the far darker option.
 * Arguably, this applies to Chell in the Portal series, particularly the second entry. All she's got is a gun that can apply portals to any reasonably-flat, reasonably-white surface, and some fancy springy-boots that prevent fall-damage. Very useful gear for getting around places, and solving puzzles, but not so good for fighting an evil, megalomanical AI and an army of Turret Guns, you'd think. But you'd be wrong. In a true demonstration of this trope, Portal 2 ends with  And the funny thing is, at least part of 'em totally saw it coming...
 * The 27 page free online comic has a bell curve plotting the "tenacity" of the test subjects. Chell is to the extreme right, at 100%. For this, they had her cut from testing, or were going to before G La DOS went crazy.
 * In the Super Smash Bros series, a number of characters have moves fitting the description of this trope. However, an extreme example of this is seen in the case of Jigglypuff, whose "Down-B" special attack is "Rest". This doesn't even heal the character, as it does within Jigglypuff's origin franchise. However, if used with perfect timing, it.
 * Until they Nerfed it in Brawl. Even then, it can KO in 3-4 hits against an opponent with full health, as well as inflicting a health-draining status (which helps reach the KO-mark).
 * In World of Warcraft, the engineering was largely considered a joke profession, most of its unreliable gadgets being watered down versions of better spells. Then the Burning Crusade expansion was released, and some smartass figured out that you could use the otherwise pointless Gnomish Remote Control to take command of the unstoppable Fel Reaver. Hilarity Ensued.
 * This Troper remembers even in vanilla Wo W using the net gun to immobilize the other faction members as they ran so they would get swarmed by the guards. The mind control helmet to turn a 3 vs you fight into an even match. A favorite however, was to use the gnomish death ray (decent one time damage cast from hitpoints) combined with the warrior stance that makes you take more damage for improved crit chance(improving the death ray damage) and the ability that makes you take even more damage, for a few seconds worth of guaranteed crits to do a very respectable boosted critical hit death ray that could potentially one shot players 10 levels higher than you, with the downside of being near death after.
 * Final Fantasy VI gives us Gau, who has a lot of powers, but most players don't know how to use them, and lament that he is uncontrollable. He also gets to attack for quadruple damage by using the rage of a lost housecat. Or he can use flowers to turn your enemies against each other with his charm ability. And he can use a jellyfish for the one time in the first half of the game that pussycats can't kick ass.
 * Very rarely in the early game, while wandering the area that lets Gau learn his abilities, you may encounter a Marshall, which is a sort-of boss from the start of the game. Gau can learn a technique known as Wind Slash from him, which is a very powerful attack that hits all enemies on the screen. For much of the game, this essentially lets Gau do constant heavy damage to nearly every enemy and turns regular encounters into near-instant victories and can significantly shorten boss fights. There is a reason he is known to some as "Wind God Gau".
 * The same game also has Relm. She can draw pictures. Completely useless, right? Except that with it, she can single-handedly defeat the most powerful cephalopod in the game.
 * The Top Spin in Mega Man 3 is frequently regarded as the absolute worst weapon in the series. Once you figure out how to use it, however, it is one of the most powerful weapons in the game. It will one-shot any enemy who's not outright immune to it, with the exception of most bosses. Even some bosses are destroyed in one shot by it, including the final boss! The only thing you have to keep in mind is which enemies are immune to it, and the fact that the weapon drains energy for as long as you're in contact with the enemy, so it can empty out its energy very quickly if you're not careful.
 * Dungeon Crawl features Cheibriados, the god of time and slowness. Followers are rewarded for pious deeds by slowing them down, but Cheibriados eventually rewards the slow with seriously great time-related powers and attribute boosts.
 * Various ghosts get various powers in Ghost Trick, but the one who takes the cake for this trope is

Web Comics / Web Originals

 * This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal combines this with Precious Puppies,.
 * Junpei of Megatokyo claims that Magical Girls follow a "code of love," which is much more dangerous than the ninjas' code of honor, and results in "much destruction of urban area". Considering that magical girls have been shown to possess super speed, super strength, super athleticism (balance and so forth), teleportation, and shrinking, he may be right. Considering that the closest thing this setting has to a Big Bad is an immortal Really Seven Hundred Years Old Dark Magical Girl who controls hordes of zombies and destroyed one of the most complicated MMORPGs in existence when she was bored, then he's definitely right.
 * Three so-far-unnamed Magical Girls are "potentially catastrophic grade." The zombie master mentioned above is not one of them.
 * While we are on the subject of Magical Girls, let's talk abut Yuki Sonoda. Her power is stealing things. Even she doesn't think her power is any good, but at one point she steals a Rent a Zilla. And it seems to obey her perfectly.
 * Several of the characters in the Whateley Universe.
 * Aquerna has the spirit of the squirrel, and is a joke on the campus of Whateley Academy. But in her combat final, she figured out how to use her powers to pwn one of the school bullies.
 * Generator is practically the patron saint of this trope, since her power starts off looking unbelievably lame. But she keeps figuring out new things she can do with it (other than babysitting and doing the dishes).
 * Gateway can only open 'gates' to other places. Then she finds out she can summon things from other dimensions through those gates. Starting with Rythax, an intelligent winged panther-like thing bigger than a tiger.
 * Verdant can secrete stuff. But she can secrete anything she can think of, through any of her glands. She can bite you and inject the deadliest poison known to man.
 * In the Global Guardians PBEM Universe, Madras had telekinetic control over fabrics, and only fabrics. That sounds like an amazingly lame power, until you look around and realize just how much fabric surrounds us every day of our lives (and the fact that most people go around covered in the stuff). Combine telekinetic control of fabric with a ten-foot-long canvas cape, and you've got one Badass crimefighter.
 * There was a similar low-level villain in the Marvel Universe who went by the names of Gypsy Moth and Skein. She had the ability to create knots in material and control fibers -- which not only gave her the ability to trap someone in their own costume, but also the power to inflict muscle contortions at the worst possible moment.
 * Tavros in Homestuck. His seemingly-useless ability to commune with Alternian fauna? Suddenly, the guy who was mercilessly taunted for being a useless cripple before, is now probably the most powerful player in the session.
 * Said powers of communion extend to
 * Applies even more so to John. His friends eventually have the power to teleport, jump around in time, and manipulate luck. John just has wind powers. And he ends up stronger than all of them put together simply because he  into a permanent Super Mode.
 * So it turns out that Gamzee can
 * The fanbase assumed that Heroes of Heart in Homestuck were simply good at managing relationships. Eventually, we discover that in Sburb mechanics, Heart is roughly synonymous with . To hammer it in even further, this is revealed to a character known as the " of Heart", along with the fact that . In other words, he's the ""
 * In Sidekick Girl, Illumina's powers are floating a few feet off the ground and creating light, powers that she has no idea how to use practically and uses them just to show off. Then she and Sidekick Girl have a Freaky Friday Flip, and the much smarter Sidekick Girl shows what these powers can really do.
 * For reference, she manages to discover that Illumina can fall safely from any height -- she slows into a hover rather than suddenly stopping by hitting the ground. As for light? Well, extremely high-intensity but otherwise normal light is the "flash" part of flash-bang grenades. Intense enough light can stun, as well as temporarily or even permanently blinding.
 * This tends to be the case on this forum. One person got the power of being Arthur Wellsley, the first Duke of Wellington. Another got heat resistance and super reflexes, allowing him to be an awesome fire fighter. One even got Circadian control (the ability to manipulate daylight hours by rotating the planet faster or slower), money ray (the power to create any currency), and water generation (the ability to secrete purified water from any part of the body) How do you do anything with these useless powers? One person said
 * Link to the quote here.
 * Ashlie Jackson of Survival of the Fittest: Evolution falls into this trope nicely. Her power was that if she spoke, her speech would come off as Ear Rape rather than anything intelligible, causing the listener to feel ill. How does she use this? She uses it as a distraction so that she can get a bullet into someone while they're down.
 * El Goonish Shive: Elliot has the ability to turn into a girl. Any girl. If he were so inclined, he could impersonate just about any female on the planet. He later got a spell which turns him into a superhero with some Stock Super Powers, and three "Secret Identity" forms which gently alter his behavior so as to keep a low profile. All of these forms are female.
 * In the Spanish-language A Friki's Life, an elf's gun of choice when surrounded by giant, carnivore ants: Invoking the flower fairies.
 * Suburban Knights involves this
 * Invoked at Luke Surl comic strip 299.
 * Done with a magical object rather than a person in Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes. Forgath has the Anymug, an enchanted mug capable of creating any drink the owner desires. When in a fight, he uses it to create an indefinite supply of Dragon Lung, an ultra-flammable liquid.
 * In the superhero serial Worm, the main character is a fifteen-year-old wannabe superhero in a world full of people with powers. While most famous heroes and villains have standard abilities like flight, strength, healing, etc, she only has the power to control insects, spiders, and other invertebrates. She's smart enough to come up with all sorts of creative ways to apply her powers, which means she has put a famous and nearly-invulnerable supervillain in the hospital by attacking him with hundreds of black widow spiders and other venomous creatures, learned to spy on people from two blocks away by looking through the eyes of insects, and devised a bullet-resistant costume by commanding spiders to spin one from their silk according to her directions. When she is caught outside without her costume, she surrounds herself with carefully directed insects, which not only conceals her identity but intimidates her opponents with a giant, creepy-looking human-shaped swarm and leaves plenty of space for bullets to pass through without touching her actual body.
 * Even more creative applications come up later in the story. The main character figures out how to arm even the nonstinging, nonvenomous insects that are available for her to summon. Imagine being divebombed by bugs whose undersides are coated in capsaicin(what pepper spray is made from), who are guided to the mouths, nostrils, and eyes of an opponent. Also, a large enough insect like a beetle is strong enough to carry a lit match in its mandibles as it crawls up your leg...
 * Even more creative applications come up later in the story. The main character figures out how to arm even the nonstinging, nonvenomous insects that are available for her to summon. Imagine being divebombed by bugs whose undersides are coated in capsaicin(what pepper spray is made from), who are guided to the mouths, nostrils, and eyes of an opponent. Also, a large enough insect like a beetle is strong enough to carry a lit match in its mandibles as it crawls up your leg...

Western Animation

 * Aquaman receives this trope in the animated medium as well, Justice League Unlimited and Batman the Brave And The Bold in particular use it to great effect and make him one of the most powerful characters in each series, while in one episode of Super Friends he uses microscopic aquatic organisms to control water itself.
 * In Danny Phantom, the Box Ghost becomes the definition of Harmless Villain after the first few episodes and Danny gains some control of his powers, but his A Day in The Limelight episode reveals 'control of all boxes' includes Pandora's Box (although that one kinda backfired).
 * In the Bad Future episode, we meet Boxlunch, daughter of The Box Ghost and another recurring enemy, The Lunch Lady. She's got the powers of both her parents, which she quickly uses to create some Power Armor for herself.
 * In Shrek 3, Snow White uses her animal-friend ability to its full extent: she summons them to do battle.
 * Cinderella has this one in The Princess Series. Birds and mice? Try sharks and sea serpents!
 * Captain Planet's Ma-Ti himself is no pushover. In the Its a Wonderful Plot episode where Wheeler never got the ring, Ma-ti managed to get a snooty businessman to give him money. He can sense the location of seemingly any conscious life form, and if the comics are to be believed he can read minds, knock people out, influence their decisions and command an endless horde of rabid wildlife to do his bidding. Screw fire! Heart is hardcore!
 * Influence their decisions, indeed. One episode even shows a Bad Future where Ma-Ti stops playing around and becomes an unopposed dictator. Used effectively, Heart really is the strongest power, and Gaia wasn't just lying when she told him that in the first episode. However, Ma-Ti is so kind-hearted that he doesn't dare to use it to its full extent.
 * South Park's Mint Berry Crunch. He can control mint and berries. And use them as weapons. To punch out Cthulhu.
 * Assuming Captain Hindsight ability to see how thing occurred after the fact is real, it would be a powerful asset in crimefighting, and in any field where it's useful to know how a problem occurred, which is pretty much all of them.
 * Vince, the one guy in Voltron Force who doesn't get a weapon or tool from his Voltcom, is arguably the strongest; he allows Voltron to reconfigure its component lions and overcome the Haggarium Kryptonite Factor.
 * My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic:
 * Amongst the unique abilities ponies possess, Fluttershy being the Friend to All Living Things is highly useful when nature needs to managed, but doesn't seem that impressive. Except her ability really does include all living things, including a manticore, a gigantic adult dragon, a cockatrice, and even Cerberus himself, all of whom she managed to pacify with nothing but a firm tone and a kind touch (with a bit of help from The Stare). Good thing she's the nice, shy little pegasus she is...
 * Earth ponies don't have any obvious magic, unlike the unicorns, who cast spells from their horns, and the pegasi, who walk on clouds, control weather, and have tactile telekinesis that allows them to tow things while in flight. According to Word of God, they're stronger and have more endurance than a unicorn or pegasus of comparable physique, and have a deeper connection with nature and the earth. The latter means that they are inherently better at growing and tending plants of any kind, to the point where in ancient times earth ponies were the only pony tribe capable of producing food, and even in modern times only earth ponies have ever been seen growing anything.
 * This also handily explains Pinkie's seemingly impossible (at least in our world) "Rock farming" backstory. Earth ponies probably really can farm rocks, growing rare minerals inside rocks (that turn out like the one Rarity split when she got her cutie mark).
 * Twilight Sparkle's special ability is magic, which might seem odd as every unicorn can perform magic. But as Twilight herself explains most unicorns only know levitation and one or two other spells to help with whatever special ability they have, whereas Twilight can learn any spell, including ones she's copied from other unicorns, and magnify them with her high levels of raw talent. As a result she is ludicrously powerful, far surpassing everypony else except for the real heavy hitters like Celestia and Discord.
 * Pinkie Pie's special ability is making other ponies happy. While this mostly manifests in throwing sweet parties and being a delightful Cloudcuckoolander, this also gives her access to the Rule of Funny, allowing her to regularly perform feats that break even the magical rules of Equestria.
 * A literal example with Princess Cadence, the third Alicorn in the series. She's a Love Goddess who has the power to repair the bonds between ponies and spread love wherever she goes. Compared to the Physical Goddess level abilities her aunts show, this doesn't seem as impressive. Then you remember that The Power of Friendship is the most powerful magic in the world, and The Power of Love is it's close cousin. Cue her and her husband-to-be using The Power of Love
 * The aformentioned Stinkor in the 2002 He Man and The Masters of The Universe series. In this cartoon, the character got the chance to show just how lame of a power stink really was, and He-man was almost defeated. In later episodes, Skeletor treated Stinkor much better than his other minions, just because of how powerful he was. Stinkor's stench is so awful that Skeletor has to hold his nose around him. Skeletor doesn't have a nose.
 * DC Comics' Sportsmaster is a minor super-villain who uses sport-themed gimmicks. In Young Justice, he's one of the most powerful villains, and his repertoire seems to have been expanded greatly, to the extent that he's effectively an evil version of Batman.