Mass Super-Empowering Event: Difference between revisions

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The Mass Empowering Event serves to kick start the series (The Event usually happens in act 1 or 2 of the pilot) and provide a handy reason for the entire cast to get [[Stock Super Powers|super powers]]. The Event<ref>(For some reason, it's usually called "The Event" or some capitalized version thereof and the superheroes [[Differently-Powered Individual|will never be called superheroes]])</ref> can be technological, mystical, [[Freak Lab Accident|accidental]], [[Super Soldier|deliberate]] or [[Leave the Plot Threads Hanging|unexplained]], but it always serves as [[You ALL Share My Story|a tangible link]] between the heroes and villains. Often, it also kills a great number of people in the process, both to [[Disposable Superhero Maker|discourage repeated usage]] and/or give the resulting superheroes an aura of pathos - "[[Survivor Guilt|I got all these cool powers while all those others died]]".

So why do authors use this trope? After all, one valid criticism of this trope is that it takes the "inventiveness" and diversity out of a [[Super-Hero Origin]] story by repeating it across several characters. Well, it turns out that having fifty ways a [[Freak Lab Accident]] can give you super powers got old, fast, forcing quite a few [[Meta Origin|Meta Origins]] to be applied to tidy up the place. Another is that it frees the author from having to give exposition on the source of the powers to focus on the characters themselves and the way that they use their new powers, effectively giving more [[Character Development]] and characterization by showing how they react to getting great power -- be it [[Transhuman Treachery|betrayal]], [[Smug Super|smugness]] or [[With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility|responsibility]]. Lastly, the cause for The Event can be a major plot hook for the hero(es) to unravel throughout the season.

A subtrope of [[Meta Origin]]. Compare [[Bizarre Baby Boom]]. Contrast [[Randomly-Gifted]].

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== Anime & Manga ==

* The anime ''[[Darker ~~Than~~ Black]]'' fits this rather neatly, having a mysterious event which opened two mystical singularities known as "Heaven's Gate" and "Hell's Gate" -- in South America and [[Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe|Tokyo]], respectively -- resulting in people from around the world being transformed into either Contractors (those with special powers who are stripped of their emotions/morality) or Dolls (people left almost completely non-sapient who are used as living tracking devices), and the atmosphere around the earth being replaced by an [[Alien Sky]] that cut off Earth from the rest of the universe.

* The anime ''[[Darker than Black]]'' fits this rather neatly, having a mysterious event which opened two mystical singularities known as "Heaven's Gate" and "Hell's Gate" -- in South America and [[Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe|Tokyo]], respectively -- resulting in people from around the world being transformed into either Contractors (those with special powers who are stripped of their emotions/morality) or Dolls (people left almost completely non-sapient who are used as living tracking devices), and the atmosphere around the earth being replaced by an [[Alien Sky]] that cut off Earth from the rest of the universe.

* ''[[NEEDLESS]]'' has a WWIII level event causing a 'black spot'. Many of the people within this area have superhuman powers. {{spoiler|Late in the anime, it's revealed that originally there existed a [[Crystal Dragon Jesus]] Figure existed previously within the area and his death caused the powers to spread throughout the black spot.}}

* Calumon from ''[[Digimon Tamers]]'' is something of a sentient version of this. {{spoiler|It's hinted throughout the series that he's the power of digivolution incarnate, with reactions and shows of power from him whenever the Tamers' digimon needed to evolve. Calumon is then captured by one of the Digimon Sovereign, and after being rescued and his captor beat around by one of his peers (as well as the Tamers), he fully 'awakens' and summons an army of Digimon to warp them all to Mega-level in order to fight the D-Reaper.}}

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* [[J. Michael Straczynski]]'s comic ''[[Rising Stars]]'' has a version of this, where all the supers on Earth were in utero in a small midwestern town on the day of a bright flash of light. The first powers manifested when they were in elementary school. [[Inhumanable Alien Rights|The government put them in a camp under military control]] [[Averted Trope|until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.]] They did have a normal-as-possible high school experience after that, but all the heroes and villains have [[Everyone Went to School Together|already known each other]] since childhood.

** In another of his comics, ''[[Supreme Power]]'', all superpowers (except Hyperion and Zarda's) were caused by a nanovirus that came to Earth along with Hyperion.

* The ''Elementals'' comics by Bill Willingham had the Shadowspear, a mass of supernatural energy collected by [[Big Bad]] Saker to help him conquer the world; when Saker is defeated by the Elementals, the Shadowspear spell runs wild and becomes attracted to pain and death, causing various people and animals all over the world who have died in especially weird ways to be resurrected as supernatural beings, most of whom fought the Elementals.

** What's more, an extremist religious group learns how the Shadowspear works and sacrifices hundreds of its followers in gruesome ways, trying to create their own superhumans. And it worked. The vast majority of these "martyrs" died, but enough were empowered to create the Rapture super-team.

* The [[Green Rocks|gems of knowledge]] in ''[[The 99]].''

* In ''[[The End League]]'', most superpowers are a result of the Green Event, wherein <s>Superman</s>Astonishman was tricked by <s>Lex Luthor</s>Dead Lexington into blowing up a crashed alien spaceship, releasing exotic radiation from the ship's power core. The radiation killed around 3 billion people but empowered several hundred thousand.

* [[Wildstorm]] Universe had several - the Comet Effect, Gen Factor, being a partially human from one of the alien races that masquaraded their way through Earth's history, whatever it was that created Century Babies, exposure to the Snowflake... that should about cover it.

* In ''[[Project Superpowers]]'' Pandora's Urn didn't so much mass-empower the heroes as it twisted their existing powers and/or skills in bizarre ways.

* Inverted in ''[[JLA: Act of God]]'', which involved a mass depowering event.

* ''[[Transformers Wings of Honor|Transformers: Generation 2: Redux]]'' (otherwise known as the comic book that was distributed at BotCon 2010) revolved around the Decepticons experimenting with [[Applied Phlebotinum|forestonite]]. Eventually, an attempt to destroy it to keep it out of the Autobots' hands results instead in forestonite gas granting superpowers to all the Transformers present (along with the occasional [[The Nth Doctor|new look]]).

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* The ''[[Wild Cards]]'' book series has an alien virus that grants superpowers to about 1% of victims, while the other 99% either die horribly or become grotesque mutants. In 1946 it is released in the atmosphere over Manhattan, killing thousands and creating a few dozen supers. By the late 1980s it had spread across the world, creating "Aces" and "Jokers" on every continent, but the large majority were still in America.

* In [[Philip José Farmer]]'s "biographies" of [[Tarzan]] and [[Doc Savage]] (and the [[Massively Multiplayer Crossover]] "Wold Newton Universe" based on his stories), the Event is the titular Wold Newton meteorite. The radiation of the meteorite affected the passengers of a passing coach (and several animals in the area); their descendants were endowed with unusual strength, intelligence, and ambition, becoming [[Literary Agent Hypothesis|the inspiration for]] many of the heroes and villains of fiction. (See [[wikipedia:Wold Newton family|the other wiki]] for more details.

* ''Midnight's Children'' by Salman Rushdie has 1001 children born at midnight on the day India gained its independence acquiring low-level superpowers and a telepathic network as a result.

* The creation of The Maze in [[Gary Gibson]]'s ''[[Against Gravity]]'' novel marked the beginning of a rather long and drawn out empowering event; as an [[Elaborate Underground Base]] dedicated to researching how to make [[Super Soldiers]] via the use of [[Nanomachines]], it processed hundreds or perhaps thousands of people. Many eventually escaped and spread across the world, with [[Super Speed|enhanced speed]], [[Super Strength|increased strength]], [[Healing Factor|regeneration]], [[Super Reflexes|superior reflexes]], [[Technopath|sensing and control of electronics]], [[Super Senses|enhanced vision and hearing]]... you get the idea.

* In ''[[Scorpion Shards]]'', the protagonists' superpowers are triggered by the supernova of a distant star. The shards of the star's soul enter the bodies of all six of the infants born at the exact moment of its destruction.

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== Live Action TV ==

* The eclipse in ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'' at least looked like one of these at first, but it's not completely clear. The eclipse didn't grant everyone's powers, certainly not all at once, but it did remove everybody's powers once.

* The cast of ''[[Misfits]]'' and most of the [[Monster of the Week|Monsters Of The Week]] are empowered by a mysterious storm that included misshapen black clouds and hailstones the size of dogs. Anyone struck by lightning got superpowers.

* The [[Green Rocks|Kryptonite]] meteor shower of ''[[Smallville]]'' in which Clark first arrived to Earth and at the same time giving many of the locals odd powers and/or [[Psycho Serum|altering their personality sometimes]] and causing them to become the [[Monster of the Week]]. There are a few humans empowered by Kryptonian technology, and it's vaguely implied that there's some Kryptonian ancestry among humanity.

* The powers manifested by ''[[The 4400]]'' are eventually revealed to stem from a "[[90% of Your Brain|fifth neurotransmitter]]" called "Promicin". It can be [[Super Serum|injected into normal humans]] to give them powers. Or kill them, it's about even odds.

** The series has arguably had three [[Mass Super-Empowering Event]]s, the first being the infusion of the initial 4400 returnees with promicin. Many non-returnees later get powers when [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]]s make promicin shots available to the public. The series ends with thousands of people in Seattle, {{spoiler|including almost all of the remaining protagonists}}, getting powers as a result of the [[Power Incontinence]] of a character with the ability to release promicin into the atmosphere.

* ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' '''ends''' with a mass superempowering event, with Willow using the power of the Slayer Scythe to make all the Potential Slayers around the world into full Slayers.

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* ''Lionheart'' had a cataclysmic magical explosion known as the Disjunction during the crusades. Many people were possessed by spirits this time which granted them magical powers, though such possessed people are shunned and distrusted by normals.

* ''[[City of Heroes]]'' has a grand total of three Events, two playing it straight and one inverting. The first is [[Big Good|Marcus Cole]] and [[Big Bad|Stefan Richter]] drinking from the Well Of Furies, which supposedly opened the Pandora's Box on superpowers of all origins. Similar to the [[X-Men]] example above, mutants began appearing with more frequency after the first atom bomb was detonated. Finally, the Event was inverted at the beginning of the comics series when Lord Recluse (alias Stefan Richter) depowered all of Paragon City's ''extremely'' numerous heroes. Tying into this is the Event that ''re''-powered all the heroes, the unleashing of Prometheus's Flame.

* [[Mass Effect]] has an explosion at a Singapore spaceport that spread [[Applied Phlebotinum|Element Zero]] around the world, affecting many unborn humans exposed to it. If you were lucky, nothing happened. If you were extremely unlucky, you died from radiation poisoning. And if you were ''extremely'' lucky, you got [[The Force|biotic powers]].

* ''[[DC Universe Online]]'' has something like this. Lex Luthor comes from the future where he killed the Justice League, only for Brainiac to show up and ruin his party. So he goes back in time to give large numbers of people superpowers to stop his past-self's plans AND Brainiac. The Exobites contain data on all of earths heroes and villains, they are released into the atmosphere infecting random people who can be either good or evil depending on their personality before being infected.

* In the [[Multiple Endings|"good"(ish) ending]] of [[Deus Ex: Invisible War|Deus Ex Invisible War]], all of humanity is [[Bio Augmentation|Augmented]] with [[Nanomachines]] that provide [[We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future|Perfect Health]], [[Viewers Are Geniuses|Universal Education]], and a link to a central AI as part of program of "perfect democracy" - not just universal suffrage, but universal ''intelligence'', ensuring that everyone's vote is based on educated opinions. This results in [[The Singularity]] - world peace, [[Matter Replicator|universal prosperity]], rapidly advancing technology, [[I Want My Jetpack|easy space development]] and nanotech superpowers... for ''everyone.''

** In comparison, the [[Black and Gray Morality|alternatives]] are dictatorships by [[Mega Corp|Mega Corps]], [[Church Militant|Church Militants]], or [[Darwinist|Darwinists]].