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Required Secondary Powers: Difference between revisions
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'''[[Healing Factor]]''' - Any character with a healing factor presumably also requires superhuman pain tolerance, to avoid falling unconscious from the crippling pain and then waking up ten minutes later good as new. Still would be useful, but not so much in a combat situation (where being unconscious makes you useless at best, and makes you a liability or opens you up to a [[Coup De Grace]] at worst.) It's not really necessary to make the power work, though, so not actually a ''required'' secondary power, and there are many examples of healing characters who ''don't'' have abnormal pain resistance.
More importantly, they'd burn up a lot of energy accelerating the healing process that fast, and so would need super-stamina and more efficient internal energy use than normal (or an [[No Conservation of Energy|alternate energy source]]) or their own power could kill them by draining their body's resources too fast. And to regenerate takes mass, so either they have limits to what they can regrow at one time, or access to some other source of mass, like [[Another Dimension]]-- see [[
Also, they'd need a way to fight infection and other foreign substances. Having your guts spilled all over the floor would open the door to all sorts of germs and viruses, not to mention dust and such. There's a reason hospitals are super sterile. Conversely, they get infected like anyone else, but recover instantly due to the healing factor producing antibodies at an accelerated rate. [[Wolverine]]'s healing factor was used to develop antibodies to a deadly virus on at least one occasion. Most likely they would also have some kind of super-genome, considering that so much rapid healing and DNA replication would increase the possibility for cancer-causing genetic defects massively. This would explain [[Deadpool]]'s Massive scarring, since his skin is both spreading the cancer and healing the damage caused by the cancer And, cancer aside, certain kinds of attacks could reasonably be assumed to cause genetic damage to the tissues which the regenerating tissue is growing from.
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There's also the question of how a shape shifter thinks with no brain, or just without their normal brain.
And of course, if the shape shifter can also [[
'''[[Rubber Man]]''' - Flexing yourself into cartoonish shapes would be great fun, provided you were strong enough to support yourself enough to stand up. There's also the issue of organs and blood. Aside from the obvious repercussions of flattening yourself against a wall, the human heart isn't designed to pump blood into an arm that just grew one hundred feet. [[My Suit Is Also Super|This power would also have to extend to their clothes]], otherwise it'd be very uncomfortable (or publicly embarrassing).
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Over-application of this power should logically lead the user to be significantly older than they should be. This may or may not be addressed, although it really should if several in-story years go by with the character continuing to use it.
'''[[Time Travel]]''' - Most time-traveling heroes have the benefit of being immune to [[Temporal Paradox]] and the physical effects of [[The Time
There's also the problem of traveling ''only'' through time and ending up floating in space because [[Time and Relative Dimensions In Space|surprise, surprise, planets, star systems, and even galaxies happen to move around]]. Most time travel stories will completely ignore this problem, so the auto-compensation is a Required Secondary Power. Some time machines even teleport to a different place on Earth relative to their starting point, which [[Traveling At the Speed of Plot|just happens to be the perfect spot to set the plot rolling]], with no specific input from the travelers to go there.
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'''[[Deflector Shields|Force Fields]]''' - Force fields are often air-permeable, which not only allows people to speak and listen through the field, but it also allows oxygen to filter in through the force field and thus allow breathing. However when a force field is used to keep water out while underwater, the force field often appears to have the power to actually extract breathable oxygen from the water around it and remove carbon dioxide from within it. This is sometimes averted, and a non-permeable force field can actually be used as a weapon to choke foes. Similarly, they are usually invisible (or at least translucent) until [[Some Kind of Force Field|something pushes against them]], which means they let at least one wavelength of light (if not the whole spectrum) pass through unimpeded while still keeping lasers or any other emission that the force field's generator considers "harmful" outside.
There is also the matter of the energy that is distributed over the field. Something that pushes against a force field is exerting pressure, whose energy has to go somewhere. While physical barriers absorb such pressure by spreading its energy across their structure, or by [
'''[[Invisibility]]''' - Applies not just to you, but to things you are carrying, or wearing. Any dirt on you becomes invisible, and either you get clothes made of some [[My Suit Is Also Super|suitable material]], or provide some [[Fan Service]]. Also, your light distortion fits that of your surroundings, and food remains invisible through the digestive process.
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* Of course, that does ''not'' keep you from triggering the laser tripwire that fills the room with toxic gas or anything else that is automated, unless the automation takes the form of a sentient AI.
Michio Kaku of ''Scifi Science'' proposed the best practical path to invisibility is a [[Form-Fitting Wardrobe|form-fitting suit]] that [
'''[[Intangible Man|Intangibility]]''' - You are immune to gravity or gain some kind of buoyancy, hence not plummeting through the ground. You also gain some self locomotion, so as not to worry about friction, (though many intangibles can float or [[Not Quite Flight|explicitly fly]]). You can still interact with air normally allowing you to breathe (if you need to breathe), hear and speak.
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'''[[Shock and Awe|Lightning]]''' - Unfortunately, one of the coolest powers is a good deal more difficult than pointing your finger and watching it go. If you want to splice together a [[For Science!|pet]] [[Pokémon|Pikachu]], you need to overcome these hurdles first:
* Electricity has a tendency to take not only the path of least resistance, but to a lesser degree all other possible paths as well. Hitting your target without inundating everything around it with current would require a great deal of setup, meticulous planning, prior knowledge of electrodynamics, and the resulting hours of linear algebra to ensure that all other available paths are sufficiently resistive enough not to cause collateral damage. Here's hoping you're ''really'' [[Good With Numbers]].
* It takes a stupefying amount of energy to [
** Of course, electricity is just the flow of electrons. A character who could psionically control electrons wouldn't have to worry about that; they could just keep a large amount of extra electrons in their body and shoot them at targets like small bullets. Many electrically-powered characters that are shown having to "charge" from sources of electricity probably work this way.
*** But then again, electrons don't really like being all by themselves, even more so if you've got a bunch of them together in a theoretical container. So a character keeping a bunch of "extra electrons" in their body would be constantly trying to keep them all neatly packed together. That's not even mentioning the effects all these negatively charged particles would have on quite a few very important physiological processes.
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* In one of the ''[[Superman]]'' annuals (as part of the "Legends of the Dead Earth" motif), there was a team of heroes, each of which having one of Superman's powers, but the powers were either [[Power Incontinence|stuck "on"]] or coupled with potentially-hazardous side effects, even when those were powers granted by a "supersuit" rather than bio-modification. The speedster's suit had to keep her blood sugar levels up and the super-breath guy's collar worked both ways, so he could have ruptured his lungs if he breathed in too suddenly. Of the bio-modified heroes the super-strong one couldn't even feed himself because he would crush the spoon and the food, the X-ray eyes hero saw everything in X-ray eyes and had to wear special lead glasses, the flier had to be tethered to something because if he wasn't deliberately moving towards something he could drift away, the heat-vision guy had to discharge the energy from his eyes every so often to prevent a fatal buildup, and the invulnerable one had no sense of touch.
* [[Chris Claremont]] usually averted this, giving the [[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]] their [[Required Secondary Powers]] explicitly and having some of them learn to use them on their own. Shadowcat, for instance, can often be seen climbing air. (However, he wrote one of the [[New Mutants|junior team]], Sunspot, as super-strong but not invulnerable, which led to a letters-page discussion about why the character didn't break bones while lifting things.)
** Also, though it may not have had anything to do with Claremont's work, some of Wolverine's secondary "powers" have been indicated: When Rogue got a full taste of his [[Super Senses]] she was overwhelmed by the sensory input (and in intense pain, as the tactile sense was in overload as well; his use of meditation apparently helps him deal with it, along with constant exposure to mild-to-excessive pain giving him a very high threshold for pain, and it may also explain why he always seems to be in a bad mood and how, though he can survive it, he doesn't collapse from pain whenever he takes a few hundred rounds to the chest and face). The problem of why the backs of his hands, where the claws come out, don't each have three holes is explained by his claws actually punching a hole through his flesh every time he extends them, at which point his [[Healing Factor]] closes the wounds before he bleeds all over the place. Just where all the [[
*** It isn't COMPLETELY ignored actually...it probably wasn't Claremont's, but there was a short arc in which Logan, while travelling through a desert, catches and eats raw a crow (he feigned fainting to let the birds approach) after a hallucination he was having (long story) reminded him that his healing factor needed proteins in order to regenerate tissues. For regeneration of far more severe injuries, another explanation has been given in a more recent comic: Logan had...ahem...defeated the Angel of Death in a duel (he didn't know who the guy was though) and had since then been granted a sort of "immortality" (his healing factor was able to heal him from ANY injury). At the end of the arc, Logan had his "pact" with the Angel canceled and was informed that, from that moment on, his healing factor was going to be far less effective.
*** He's got to have superhuman strength (or close to it) to be able to be agile at all while carrying around a skeleton that weighs around a hundred pounds, [[Depending On the Writer]], more than a normal human's. Possibly the result of his healing abilities building more efficient muscles, since he was pretty quick relatively shortly after receiving his adamantium, or a combination of that and training while lugging around so much weight.
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* [[Fantastic Four (Comic Book)|Human Torch]] not only has the fireproof skin secondary power, but he also has the power to absorb energy to a degree, converting it to flame. He can also suck up heat from things, and once froze up Hydroman this way.
** However, he doesn't seem to hold much knowledge as of how fire itself works. There was one instance (in the animated version, admitedly) where Mr Fantastic gave him a watch which was in fact a special torch capable of lighting underwater (which actually exists in real life, the olympic torches of 2008 were known for that). He then uses such fire to light himself while underwater, which he ought to be able to do anyways without the watch, or not do at all. Unless it was [[A Wizard Did It|magic fire]].
** Not necessary for being the Human Torch per se, but certainly necessary for doing many of the things Johnny does, is magic fire. He creates specific shapes from fire that maintain their shape (and of course keep burning, as do his own flames, with no perceivable fuel). He creates cages of fire that are hot but do not burn, and in fact can keep fire from burning things. I guess it might be an example of [[Convection, Schmonvection]].
* In [[Ultimate Marvel|The Ultimates]], mutant [[Super Speed|Quicksilver]] had a [[Required Secondary Powers]] battle against Hurricane, an enemy speedster who'd got her powers from advanced surgery, and who wore a reinforced suit designed to resist friction. He grabbed her and started accelerating. Her skin burst into flames around Mach 4 or so, and she completely disintegrated moments later. So much for the suit. Quicksilver, whose mutant power includes all required secondary abilities needed to move at an acceptable fraction of the speed of light, reminded her smoking body that he'd been easily hitting Mach 10 since he was a teenager. The moral of the story: if you fight someone with the same primary power set as you, make sure your [[Required Secondary Powers]] are up to their standard.
* Sometimes, the [[Required Secondary Powers]] pop up when the writer wants to find some way for a superhero to make up for their [[What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?|somewhat less satisfying powers]]. [[Aquaman (Comic Book)|Aquaman]]'s lifetime in the sea leads to an increased strength, agility, and resilience on land that would help him to survive and move easily in the ocean depths.
** Technically, Aquaman always ''had'' superstrength and durability, at least in his first [[The Golden Age of Comic Books|Golden Age]] appearances, that were forgotten during the [[Dork Age|Superfriends era]]. On the splash page of his very first appearance, ''More Fun Comics'' #73, he's shown deflecting an artillery shell with his hand.
** [[Grant Morrison]] also gave him the ability to essentially induce seizures by telepathically touching the part of the brain that humans share with fish. It's a shame that he doesn't do that more often.
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** Alternatively, there is a minor meme going around, which proves Cyclops can fly. The eyebeams produce kinetic kickback, but he is immune to this kinetic energy. If he only held his hand in front of his eyes, then WHOOOOSH.
*** [[Memetic Mutation|PUNCHES FROM THE PUNCH DIMENSION.]]
** Something similar happened with Bouncing Boy from ''[[Legion of Super-Heroes]]'', a rare case where the required secondary powers actually became more prominent than the primary one. Because of the impressive ricocheting moves he pulls off, the writers reasoned he must have an innate knowledge of geometry & mathematics, so he became one of the Legion's main science guys & rarely used his [[What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?|primary power]]. [[Dork Age|Thankfully]].
*** And he was a great billards player- he knocked three balls into the nets with one strike!
* Colossus in ''[[Ultimate X Men|Ultimate X-Men]]'' can turn his body to steel. It was recently revealed that he has no natural super strength to compensate for the added weight of a metal body and instead dopes with a power-magnifying [[Super Serum|super steroid]].
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** Subverted in a ''JLA'' story where Superman encounters a new superhero while rescuing some firemen from a collapsing building. The newbie has super strength and is able to hold up the falling ceiling long enough for Superman to evacuate the firemen. Unfortunately he discovers that he does not possess invulnerability and is killed when a gas main blows up in his face.
* The [[Eternals]] are powered by cosmic energy flowing through every cell in their bodies. This makes them able to do things like fire [[Eye Beams]] and use [[Super Strength]], as well as powering their [[Psychic Powers]], but dispersing all the resulting waste heat is quite a problem-- they tend to stick to cold places like mountaintops and the middle of Siberia for just that reason. Gilgamesh even went into a coma once fighting a lava monster-- and before that, he had to go into a motionless trance just to survive in a hot cavern while guys like [[Captain America]] and Black Panther just stood around and sweated. The laws of thermodynamics are a harsh mistress.
* Chamber from ''[[Generation X]]'' is a [[Zig Zagging Trope|triple subversion]]: he doesn't need to eat, breathe or drink thanks to the pure-energy furnace within his chest, which is a fortunate thing since the same furnace blew off his jaw and a good portion of his chest when his powers first surfaced. With no lungs or mouth, he can't talk normally but then he develops a secondary mutation of [[Telepathy]] to communicate with others. As it turns out, he doesn't need telepathy; he has the potential to reconstitute his missing parts [[How Do I Shot Web?|but isn't skilled enough in his powers to do so for long]]. He nearly died in ''Decimation'' when he lost his powers and suddenly needed things like food, water, and oxygen again.
* [[Irredeemable|Plutonian]], being a [[Flying Brick]], should need several of those to be able to use his super stengh the way he does, like lifting ships without them breaking apart, but {{spoiler|he doesn't, because he doesn't have primary powers either - he is a [[Reality Warper]] who subconciously alters the fabric of spacetime around him. When he punches something, he changes the density of his fist and the objects he punches and breaks Newton's laws to not outright kill his opponents. He isn't even aware of it, he just thinks he is very strong.}}
** Max Damage, from [[Irredeemable]]'s sister title, has super strength and invulnerability which proportionally increase the longer he's been awake. Unfortunately, a side-effect of the latter is that he loses all sense of touch, taste and smell after a couple of hours - he describes it as being numb instead of being tough, like God didn't know when to stop with the Novacaine. He also suffers from the normal effects of sleep deprivation, which is sometimes necessary to get his powers up to a certain level, so the stronger his body becomes the weaker his mind gets.
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* Directly stated in the ''[[Wild Cards]]'' series of novels with the beautiful (and [[Winged Humanoid|winged]]) character of Peregrine. When a boyfriend tells her he hates mutated "Jokers", she explains to him that she is one. After all, her wings are large deformities that are not the source of her [[Flight|flying ability]], she does that psychically.
** The ''[[Wild Cards]]'' criminal Fadeout bends light to become invisible, and is effectively blind while doing so. He can only see by making his eyes visible.
** There's also a [[What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?|Deuce]] with the ability to produce flame from his hands. Normally this would make him an Ace... except for the fact that he's not immune to his own fire.
** And then there's [[Shape Shifter|Kid Dinosaur]], who can change into any dinosaur he wants...but he can't increase or decrease his body's mass. So he can become a T-Rex, but the T-Rez is only 4 feet tall.
* ''Heretics of [[Dune]]'' sees {{spoiler|Miles Teg}} gain [[Super Speed]], but needs to become a [[Big Eater]] to compensate (several characters lampshade his Big Eating). He also gets his hands badly bruised and torn from hitting his enemies at such speeds.
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== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* The [[Sy Fy]] show ''[[
* ''[[No Ordinary Family]]'' includes a few examples of imperfect powers. In one episode, Jim tries to stop a moving car, but his super strength and invulnerability are not enough to overcome a car's inertia. This results in him getting run over repeatedly. Stephanie is depicted as consuming huge amounts of food to fuel her super-speed. She also trips and tumbles for hundreds of meters when she tries reading a text message while super-running. There's also a bit of lampshading going on, with Stephenie's assistant spouting the number of laws of physics that are being broken (why doesn't the friction burn off her clothes? Shouldn't the sand destroy her corneas at that speed?).
* Both ''[[The Six Million Dollar Man]]'' and ''[[The Bionic Woman]]'' would rip their bionic arms right off when trying to lift a big enough weight, unless their entire skeletal structure were augmented to support the stress of heavy lifting, not to mention their running speeds. Acknowledged and gently [[Hand Wave|handwaved]] away in the 1987 TV movie ''The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman'', where Rudy Wells mentions adding such augmentation "just as we did for you and Jaime" to Steve's now-bionic son.
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** Hiro has been shown to slow time to a crawl when his powers were going whacky, so it's implied he never actually stops time, just slows it down to the point where objects and such are effectively frozen, but extremely fast things, such as photons, aren't. Their wavelength should still change, however.
*** Supported in season 3 when Hiro gets a rival who has [[Super Speed]]. He can slow time down to a "stop", but she's so fast that it merely brings her down to normal speed. She [[Lampshade Hanging|even says to him]] "You must not stop time completely, or we wouldn't be talking right now."
** Peter and Hiro, who both have time-travel powers, seem to be immune to the effects of [[Temporal Paradox]], their memories [[Ripple
** Hiro avoids the "flung off the planet" side effect because his powers explicitly affect ''space''time, not just time. It also makes for handy teleportation-- into the ladies' room, but hey.
** DL, the [[Intangible Man]] of the show seems to affect the objects he phases through, rather than affecting himself, given the wavy effect of any object he goes through. His intangibility is also selective, apparently instinctively; he can reach through a door, then reach back with the same hand and unlock it from inside.
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* The ''lack'' of said required abilities - specifically, the ability to filter input from [[Super Senses]] - is a crippling problem for ''[[Firefly]]'s'' [[The Woobie|River Tam]]. Since she cannot filter incoming stimuli due to her [[The Empath|empathic]] abilities, being in contact with the minds of other people is debilitating, and when others suffer sudden physical trauma it can render her catatonic.
* In something of an aversion of the pyrokinetic version, ''[[Charmed]]'' has offered any number of witches, demons and warlocks who are completely vulnerable to their own fire-based powers, most notably {{spoiler|Christy, who is burned to death by her own flame-throwing ability when she tries to use it against her telekinetic sister Billie.}}
* The [[Doctor Who
** The energy is referred to multiple times by the Doctor as [[Light Is Good|''healing energy'']], rebuilding and restoring damaged cells as much as slightly rewriting their DNA to modify appearance and personality. They don't just call it [[Exactly What It Says On the Tin|regeneration]] because it sounds cool.
** Also understand that at least in the Doctor's case, it shouldn't take a massive rewrite of his DNA for his appearance to have varied to much. Remember the Doctor has always appeared externally as a caucasian male human would. Even his hair colour was only blonde in two regenerations out of the current eleven he has been through. The rest of the time he has had dark hair. His first had white hair due to physical age, but would otherwise have been dark in his youth (like William Hartnell's real hair colour was dark), and his third was probably forcefully made to look aged with white hair by decree of the time lords at his trial. The Doctor even joked many times about possibly regenerating into a truly bizarre appearance, perhaps with two heads - or maybe no head (and don't say that's an improvement). However apart from his disturbing dress sense, the Doctor has always looked like a dark haired caucasian male human.
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** Recurring series villain Ridley is a [[Giant Flyer]], with all the logic problems that implies. ''Prime'' mitigated it somewhat by giving him forcefield wings, which would essentially be massless, aside from the physical parts by which they are generated.
* In ''[[Quake (Video Game)|Quake]]'', the Ring of Shadows power-up makes your character invisible, but lacks the appropriate secondary power. End result? You appear to others as a pair of small floating eyes.
* In the ''[[Condemned]]'' games, protagonist Ethan Thomas has the primary superpower of [[Make Me Wanna Shout|super shouting]]. Sadly, he doesn't find out about it until two thirds of the way through the second game, and doesn't learn how to use it [[Eleventh
* ''[[Halo]]''... insofaras the [[Powered Armor|Mjolnir armor]] can be considered a "super power". It's mentioned in the books that the Spartans are the only human beings capable of wearing it, because their enhanced durability (particularly their harder bones) is what allows them to survive the armor's incredible strength. An ordinary human was killed when testing the armor because even the slightest movement shattered his bones.
** To go into detail, the "[[What Measure Is a Non Super|normey]]" tried to move, and broke something. He then spasmed due to the pain, and broke something else. This pretty much repeated until death. The liquid-crystal matrix that was used to enhance the strength of the user could not actually be scaled back for the existing models, and since the suits were being designed for the Spartans anyway, no one bothered re-engineering the suits for normal soldiers.
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** Parodied with [[Urine Trouble|Jarate]]: the Sniper regularly takes medication that [[Rule of Funny|triples the size of his kidneys so he can piss a lot, and dulls pain, so he can't feel his organs shutting down]].
* Rumia, a darkness-generating character from ''[[Touhou]]'', cannot see through her own cloak of darkness, which results in her aimless wandering being constantly interrupted by collision with trees.
** Not even [[What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?|lame powers]] are immune to this trope. [[The One Guy|Rinnosuke]] has the power to identify the name and purpose of any object, but that doesn't mean he understands its actual ''function''. He deduced a Game Boy that had fallen through the Barrier was for the purpose of destroying large amounts of enemies, but is unaware of the existence of video games and so concluded that it was a powerful weapon.
** On the other hand, it's been theorized that this trope is the reason [[I Love Nuclear Power|Utsuho]], otherwise a huge birdbrain, [[Genius Ditz|is well-versed in nuclear physics]] in ''Hisoutensoku''.
** Mokou seems to be safe from her own flames, but her ''clothes'' apparently [[Clothing Damage|are not]]. That's the reason she has all those ''[[Ofuda]]'' attached to her clothes: they grant immunity to fire.
** ZUN himself points out that Sakuya's power to stop time would require her to be able to manipulate space as well, so she can do things like move or breathe in stopped time. This explains why the Scarlet Devil Mansion is so much [[Bigger On the Inside]], as well as [[Hammerspace|where Sakuya keeps her knives when she's not fighting]].
* Alex Mercer from ''[[Prototype (Video Game)|Prototype]]'', much like Mystique, is technically naked all the time. His "clothes" are just shapeshifted tissue that are still part of his body. This explains why none of his footwear is instantly ruined when he jumps off a skyscraper or heck, even when he's on a stroll considering he actually weighs at least a ton due to [[
** That last is explicitly shown - Mercer spends the first few minutes of the game with bloodsoaked clothing riddled with bullet holes. After you consume your first victim, and regenerate your first chunk of health, his clothing is repaired.
** Being a wad of nothing but biomass also explains how Mercer can hip-drop a tank from the top of a skyscraper and walk away uninjured - he had no bones to break or organs to rupture.
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** Scorpions are immune to the venom of their own species, and often their entire genus.
* The human body has a limit on the severity of the G-forces it can withstand before going into blackouts, physical injury and eventually death. Until this physiological limitation can be overcome (probably by [[Inertial Dampening]], as cyborgification has any number of moral-ethical issues, though achieving this would also create its own issues), having a [[Cool Plane]] that is agile enough to have a turning radius small enough as to be literally turning on a dime is worthless as no pilot would survive using its full potential. One possibility is to make it a UCAV, but if the military-industrial complex has any [[Genre Savvy|Genre Savviness]] about [[AI Is a Crapshoot|AIs in control of weapon systems]]...
** Or just have the best of both and make it remote-piloted like the [
*** Even if the vehicle is unmanned, if the UAV was too agile, the pilot's reaction couldn't keep up.
* While it has been well documented that falls from heights of less than a few meters can result in severe injuries, the Required Secondary Powers of tumbling, falling properly and weight distribution is the basis for the sport of parkour.
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[[Category:Magic and Powers]]
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