Combo-Platter Powers/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character with a combination of powers that don't seem intuitively linked.

  • Straight: Amazing Girl has Super Strength and prehensile hair. This is explained as a result of "secondary mutation."
  • Exaggerated: Amazing Girl has Super Strength, prehensile hair, Invisibility, teleportation, the ability to sense the emotions of cats, and changes her eye color at will. This is explained by "she's a Venusian."
  • Justified:
    • Amazing Girl's actual power is to manifest any power she needs to solve the current problem, but once she's got a new power, it doesn't go away.
    • Amazing Girl's powers were bestowed by a group who chose them on the basis of utility rather than thematic coherence.
    • Amazing Girl is actually a Gadgeteer who gets her Super Strength from her costume, and the prehensile hair is actually a wig she made after a lab accident rendered her bald.
    • Amazing Girl's only power is actually telekinesis, but it's limited to her own body. She discovers she can use it to add strength far beyond her own muscle mass, or move her hair around.
    • Amazing Girl owns a Transformation Trinket that uses Power Crystals, but she has five crystals while the trinket can only use two at a time. She just chooses which two are most useful for the given situation.
  • Inverted:
    • Amazing Girl only has one major power (and quietly, the Required Secondary Powers to make it work properly.)
    • Or Green Lantern Ring, where it's all one power that manifests in myriad ways depending on the creativity of the character/writer.
    • Or Amazing Girl is a Costumed Nonsuper Hero - she sticks like glue to her thematic gimmick, but has no real powers.
  • Subverted: Amazing Girl seems to have a nonintuitive set of powers, but it turns out the rest of the Justice Team has been using their abilities to make it seem like she has all these wacky powers as a Batman Gambit to fool Emperor Evulz into considering her more of a threat than she actually is.
  • Double Subverted: But the experience leaves her with at least one genuine new power that doesn't fit in with her others.
  • Parodied: Alice is seen before she becomes Amazing Girl, literally picking her powers from a menu. "I'll have one from Column A, two from Column B, ooh, prehensile hair sounds good, and that comes with complimentary Most Common Superpower, right?"
  • Deconstructed: The very different manifestations of Amazing Girl's power are due to an instability in her mutant DNA. If she's exposed to any further triggers, she's as likely as not to suffer a Superpower Meltdown. Worse, the powers actively interfere with each others' operation, so Amazing Girl is much less effective than if she just had one power.
  • Reconstructed: Amazing Girl still finds a way to optimise her power use for the situation, despite the interference, and becomes on par with her fellow heroes this way.
  • Zig Zagged: New Powers as the Plot Demands + Power Creep, Power Seep = What The Hell Powers Does Alice Have This Week?
  • Averted: The rules of this superhero universe require all powered beings to have a properly unified theme to their powers.
  • Enforced: "You'll have to roll for Amazing Girl's powers on the random generation chart, just like everyone else in this game did."
  • Lampshaded: "Superstrength and prehensile hair may be a weird combination, but it's gotten me out of a lot of tight spots."
  • Invoked: Emperor Evulz turns a Mutation Ray on his underpowered minions in hopes of giving them new random powers.
  • Defied: "I'm sorry, but I'm crossing 'prehensile hair' off Amazing Girl's character sheet. It just doesn't fit with the rest of her powers."
  • Discussed: "Every time we capture Amazing Girl, and put her in a cell designed to negate her powers, she reveals another oddball ability that allows her to escape. We tried just shooting her, but it turns out she has the ability to turn bullets into cotton candy with her mind."
  • Conversed: "Sometime it seems like Amazing Girl's writer is just making up whatever power he needs to end the story."

Take One from Column A and Two from Column B, pick a beverage and a dessert, and go Back to Combo-Platter Powers.

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Combo-Platter_Powers/Playing_With?oldid=1945058"