Blessed with Suck/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A blessing turns out to be not so great.

  • Straight: He gets Super Powers... but also a list of weaknesses as long as your arm, and has Power Incontinence
  • Exaggerated: A character is given super powers, and dies almost instantly from the terrible side effects.
  • Justified: "The magic she was using prevented her from cursing him directly, so instead she gave him exactly what he thought he wanted."
  • Inverted: Cursed with Awesome.
  • Subverted: He gets Super Powers... and Power Incontinence, which he eventually figures out how to fix.
  • Double Subverted: He gets Super Powers... and Power Incontinence, which he eventually figures out how to fix... but his family is now all targets for those seeking to control him, and if he's caught by the government, they'll take him apart to see what makes him tick.
  • Parodied: The blessing allows the hero to violently channel his now-constant flatulence, leading to both a comical superhero career and his inability to keep a girlfriend.
  • Deconstructed: The Fair Folk genuinely don't understand humanity, and all blessings come from so alien a perspective that they suck if you're a mere mortal.
  • Reconstructed: The blessing results in terrible Power Incontinence, but this is also a feature of the blessing intended to keep the hero humble and disciplined. It works.
  • Zig Zagged: The Fair Folk give the hero powers that are to strong to control. So he gets the help of a friendly fairy, that bestows him control when she is present, only she is unreliable. So the hero learn to control them by self-control, until he is asked to help in the Fairy World, where his powers are raised exponentially by environmental magic. So he have to remove most of them to keep them under control... until he come back to the real world, with now-lame powers. Luckily he learned enough magic skills to use conventional magic, at the cost of his vital energy.
  • Averted: Curses are bad. Blessings are good.
  • Enforced: We can't have a Boring Invincible Hero--let's put some crippling limitations on his greatest powers!
  • Lampshaded: "Okay, does this so called 'blessing' come with a return policy?"
  • Invoked: Heroes without problems are boring. Let's kick him for his trouble.
  • Defied:
  • Discussed: "If you want to be an hero, son, take the path of Batman. Superpowers are a trouble."
  • Conversed: "For a specific target audience, you do expect the hero to be have some problem"

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