Blessed with Suck/Comic Books: Difference between revisions
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** Illyana Rasputin (Sister of Colossus) has a true double set. She was dreamed up as a mutant and a sorceress, specifically a ''demon sorceress''. As a direct result of her plotlines, she was raised under and by a corruptive heartless bastard from age six to sixteen, at least one alternate team of X-Men has DIED trying to help her, she's blessed with dimension-spanning powers that threaten to erase her soul and let the Elder Gods loose, and she's already died twice.
** Unus the Untouchable, a villain in the ''X-Men'' books, could repel objects. Beast built a gun to amplify it in order to defeat him, in an example similar to Midas. His powers eventually grew so strong they repelled ''air'' and he suffocated to death. Yet somehow he managed to father a child with similar powers beforehand...
*** Beast built the device so that its effects could be
*** Unus is so [[Blessed with Suck]], his powers manage to kill him ''twice''. In the ''Son of M'' mini-series, starring [[Quicksilver]], Unus showed up alive without explanation, but depowered. He & several other depowered mutants are exposed to the [[Green Rock|terrigen mists]] by the titular character, despite [[The Inhumans|the Inhumans']] warnings that exposing any non-Inhuman will end in tragedy. Everyone exposed has their powers returned, but to extreme levels, leading to madness, misery and (in Unus' case) death. Again.
** There is a character in volume 2 of ''New Mutants'' called Wither. [[Touch of Death|Guess what ''his'' power is?]]
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*** Isn't that more [[Cursed with Awesome]]? You get to go to a different place in space AND get back home in a blink! Imagine how useful that is...
** During ''New X-Men'', Grant Morrison introduced a number of new mutants whose primary power was to look weird. Beak typifies the whole lot of them: he's a mutant who looks sort of like a humanoid chicken and has no other powers than looking like a chicken.
** Jean Grey used to have great difficulty controlling her powers. Her telekinesis wasn't so bad, but her telepathy was a huge hassle because she couldn't shut it off. [[It Got Worse]] when she became the host of the
* The specials in ''[[Rising Stars]]'' all get treated pretty badly over the course of the series due to [[Beware the Superman|the public's fear of them]], but a few of them have especially sucky powers.
** Peter Dawson is almost completely invulnerable due to an invisible shield that lines his skin and the inside of his lungs and stomach. The shield let things like oxygen through, but kept out anything toxic. However, because nothing can actually touch his skin, he's completely numb. He can, however, taste things, so he eats a lot and becomes very obese. This disqualifies him from any law enforcement job where his power might be useful, and he ends up working a minimum wage job at a service station. {{spoiler|He's killed by having a plastic bag duct-taped over his head while he's asleep. The killer knew he'd never feel it, and he quietly suffocated.}}
** Chandra North's power was to be the most beautiful person in the world to whoever looked at her. Which meant they never actually saw ''her'', just their own ideas of beauty. This apparently did a good number on her psyche, and probably did very little for her self-esteem (double points for that blow: her power first manifested in the middle of a high school class.)
* Several [[Nigh Invulnerable]] characters are said to have little or no sense of
** This is implied to be part of why [[Irredeemable|Max Damage]] became a supervillain.
* The ''[[Incredible Hulk]]'' is another Marvel example (they really seem to love this trope). The difference here is that it might be more justified as a lot of people do hate and hound him (especially the army), and having multiple personalities is never fun. All that, and his wives keep on dying.
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** Oh, it gets worse. When one of his teammates offers to have sex with him, he tells her that there's no point - his invulnerability not only prevents him from feeling pain, but from feeling pleasure, too. Pretty damn rough when you consider that he's going to remain a teenager ''forever''... To be fair, he's since landed a job with the Shadow Initiative and has a bright future ahead of him in search and rescue. And, come on. This is the guy who broke the Taskmaster.
*** An extra down side is that while pretty much nothing can hurt him, he's still vulnerable to all forms of telepathy, including mind control. But an extra bright side to him, when in fights, he's pretty much the perfect shield for his teammates.
** Another character in ''Avengers: The Initiative'' who fits this trope is Trauma, who possesses both [[Telepathy|telepathic]] and [[Voluntary Shapeshifting|metamorphic]] powers, and can therefore transform into whatever a person is most afraid of. Often, he will give this attack a nightmarish twist; if you're afraid of death, he'll morph into a mutilated corpse, if you're afraid of spiders, he'll turn into a spider about the size of a ''T. rex'', and so forth. He started off with a horrible case of [[Power Incontinence]], as his powers are triggered by strong emotion. If someone near him was upset or scared, he would spontaneously transform into something horrible. Unlike most people on this list, Trauma ''did'' eventually learn to control his
*** During ''[[Secret Invasion]]'', the guys with which he was fighting Skrulls with were so afraid that one of them could be Skrull, that their fear made him change into one. While his buddies beat on him, ''real'' Skrulls caught them. He's no teamplayer at all.
*** Trauma was recently revealed to be the son of a dream manipulating demon named ''Nightmare'', thus explaining why he has his powers and why they suck so much.
**** His powers started to suck much more when he really wanted to scare someone who really pissed him off. Unlucky for him, it was [[Kryptonite Is Everywhere|a badass magician]].
* Yet another Marvel character who belongs here is Black Bolt, king of [[The Inhumans]]. This guy can produce a destructive force with his voice. If he so much as whispers, he'll destroy the landscape around him. Black Bolt has a bad case of [[Power Incontinence]]
** Also, the reason why Bolt's brother Maximus is an insane supervillain is that BB used his vocal powers too close to him once, and that shattered his sanity.
* And yet another Marvel character, Adam Warlock, whose Soul Gem gives him various spiritual powers, up to and including the ability to rip someone's soul from their body. As the souls taken then go to a miniature paradise dimension contained within the gem, this doesn't seem too bad... until you learn that the gem is sentient and has a nasty tendency to try and break free of his control to steal souls on its own. Also, during the soul stealing process, Warlock has to relive ''every single one'' of the victim's memories. Now think about the fact that at one point, the only way to save the universe was to soul steal about 10,000 or so enemy black knights at once.
* An (apparently) rare DC example is the interpretation of The [[Flash]] given by the song ''The Ballad of Barry Allen'', by Jim's Big Ego. In the song, it is explained that because The Flash's perception is so much faster than normal, he is isolated from the rest of humanity, unable to form true connections with other people and tormented by the continual boredom of the rest of the world being so slow. As the lyrics say, "And I'll be there before you know it, I'll be gone before you see me, And do you think you can imagine, Anything so lonely?"
** So he's a superspeed version of [[Watchmen (comics)|Dr. Manhattan]]? He probably belongs here too, if not for the near-total indifference caused by his powers.
** [[Captain Ersatz|Speeding Bullet]] of the series ''Common Grounds'' is unable to enjoy movies because they were far too ''slow'' for him, essentially a series of still frames. He learned to lip-read so that he could fast-forward them with the sound off. That led to the problem of him having read every decent book and seen every film ''ever made'' to the point of boredom, and being unable to even enjoy sex due to it taking a subjective week or two for him if slowed down to human speed - and friction burns being involved for his partner if he actually allowed himself to move at a comfortable pace. Yeowch. The only thing that makes life worthwhile is the thought that as a superhero, he can improve the lives of others and make a lasting impression.
** It's basically a canon interpretation for Marvel's Quicksilver, who once told a psychiatrist they would be short-tempered too if everyone else was like that one slow person in the checkout line.
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* Steve Rude and Mike Baron's ''[[Nexus (comics)|Nexus]]'': the hero is Horatio Hellpop, who has vast powers granted to him by a [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien]]. The problem is that he never asked for these powers, and said alien forces him to spend his life executing mass murderers, including his own father. Many of his targets are, of course, utter monsters who arguably deserve death, but others are penitents who just want to live a quiet life and put their sins behind them. Horatio is a good and decent man who hates being burdened with this task and frequently tries to escape it.
* In "Sleeper", the main character's power is kind of this way; he "absorbs" his pain without experiencing it, but also has most physical pleasures muted to little or nothing (I don't recall the details). However, the real Suck Stick Hammering got applied to his off-again love interest, Miss Misery. She literally gets physically ill from engaging in virtuous acts, and can only relieve her condition through sadism and sociopathy! Talk about being trapped in the villain role! She can't even get Wangsty about it; she has to be genuinely evil or she'll WITHER AND DIE. And as far as I know, there's no upside to this "power". So glad am I not to live in THAT universe....
* [[Iron Man]] built his first armor to keep himself
* Multi-Man has two super powers. One is a relatively normal super power like flight, or x-ray vision or what have you, but temporary and based around his second power. The other super power is of the suck variety: any time he <s>dies</s> is killed, he comes back to life with a new super power. This leads to him being [[Butt Monkey|killed repeatedly]] by both villains ''and'' "heroes" until he has a super power that fits their current needs. What makes it worse for him is that he's not really a supervillain, he's only being held in Arkham because of the potential of his [[Blessed with Suck]] and is considered a "model prisoner".
** Played to comical effect in ''Joker's Last Laugh''. Multi-Man is an integral part of the Joker's mass prison break scheme. There are almost two whole pages of the Joker's playing cards and engaging in other mundane activities while asking "Now?" over and over again, while various other henchmen murder Multi in the background, punctuated by an announcement of his new powers.
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** Wolverine's [[Super Senses]] have the drawback of always being active. It's a wonder he doesn't pass out from sheer agony given the horrific injuries he suffers so often. This is arguably the case for anyone with [[Super Senses]].
*** He has on occasion complained about being in public places such as airports due to the olfactory overload he receives from all the different kinds of b.o., deodorant, cologne, bad breath, etc.
** Wolverine's [[Healing Factor]] is pretty awesome, but prior to M-Day (which gave Wolverine all of his memories back), it apparently helped him get over ''mental''
*** The amnesia was recently revealed to be due to Weapon X "memory implants", which amount to nothing more than Weapon X doctors taking a cattle prod to his brain and allowing it to grow back, and then telling him some bullshit story about why he can't remember anything and who he "really" is.
* The Darkness powers in ''[[The Darkness]]'', which while making Jackie completely godly, only work in the dark and stop him from enjoying one of his favorite pastimes, casual sex (The Darkness is passed down from father to son, killing the father at the moment of conception process - which is how Jackie's father died).
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