- A Meaningful Sacrifice: Joon-yeong hates his hambie abilities as they cause him to crave human flesh. He fears potentially biting and turning his loved ones, specifically his younger sister Soo-wi and his boyfriend Woo-jin. The superhearing is also quite unpleasant.
- The Lucky Ones: Cheong-san's hambie powers also lead to him losing control and leaving his friends in order to protect them. The fact that he got said powers in the wake of his friends Su-hyeok and Nam-ra's deaths only make it worse.
- A NSFW Aquabats fanfiction
does this with The MC Bat Commander, claiming his superpower is giving amazing blowjobs, making him quite literally blessed with suck.
- A Naruto/Negima crossover Fanfic, "Broken Faith" by Kur0Kishi has this in spades. Naruto inherited Kyuubi's core and powers before he came into Negima's era, giving him an extended and merged version of the red Kyuubi Cloak and the golden Kyuubi Chakra Mode from Canon manga with awesome horns and chains to boot, rendering him a literal God on the battlefield. The problem? It burns his flesh away every second unless he reinforces his organs liberally with Chakra first, to the point where people start to see his bones if he holds the mode up for anything longer than 5 minutes.
- Doubled in that using the power accelerates the breaking of the seal that's keeping him weak and stuck in Mahora. Sounds good doesn't it? It isn't, if the seal is released in a way it wasn't meant to ( i.e ; Breaking), both him and the tree go up in an explosion powerful enough to kill Divinity, taking everything in radius along with him at the same time.
- Happy Families Are All Alike (A Naruto/Negima crossover) has Naruto himself. He has superhuman senses and is physically outstanding. He has powerful regeneration... but the Kyuubi has, as of chapter 7, firmly planted its feet in the Eldritch Abomination category. And it can tear his flesh apart in his dreams.
- Child of the Storm has Harry who, true to form, finds his powers more of a trial than a blessing, usually because they tend to turn on and off pretty much at random. He is, for instance, often worried that his Super-Strength, which tends to activate when he's angry or scared and completely without warning, will lead to him one day shaking someone's hand and crushing their bones to powder. And then there's the Psychic Powers. Though he gets a handle on them relatively quickly after they manifest, he goes through one hell of a case of Power Incontinence.
- Taylor suffers this in The Last Daughter, owing to her nature as a Kryptonian. She constantly fears hurting friends and loved ones with her titanic strength.
- In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, Haruhi realizes her power and nearly goes into a Heroic BSoD when she realizes just how sensitive it is; her whims affect reality when she's unaware of her power, let alone after she finds out the truth and she starts to unintentionally trigger it due to stress or jealousy. Yuki helps subvert this trope by becoming a buffer to catch anything Haruhi tries to change, and Haruhi runs a Memory Gambit on herself to limit herself to more manageable Mind over Matter powers unless it's a dire emergency.
- The Harry Potter/Marvel Universe crossover A Third Path to the Future has Melody, a young mutant whose powers change anything she sees into music. While Melody can tell exactly what kind of person someone is by the songs she hears from them, her mind has been so warped that she has no concept of numbers and has little to no social skills. According to Xavier, she's one of the few mutants in The Vault simply because she's incapable of taking care of herself.
- The Three Kings: Hunt: The Mages who get magical powers which can be very powerful but are also very specific and limited; these same powers also cause mages to be hunted down and killed by wizards. Furthermore, according to the author, not all these magical powers are very useful (for example generating globes of light)
- Shirley Fenette in Justice Society of Japan has technopathic powers and a clockwork body. On one hand, this gives her total control over machines and super-strength. On the other hand, she can't heal naturally, frequently suffers Power Incontinence, and has these pink antenna things that make her look like a robot.
- In The Bridge, Aria Blaze manages to sing a melody that calms down the human transformed Kaizer Ghidorah. Pro? She avoids getting killed by Kaizer and siphons a large boost in energy from him that amplifies her own powers. Con? She did it right when another kaiju named Enjin was hunting Kaizer, tracking him via his energy signature. An energy signature Aria now shares, causing Enjin to target her too. Oops.
- In Overlady Jessica is half-incubus, not half-succubus. So if she loses her focus, she'll radiate immense manliness and appear incredibly handsome despite having a voluptuous feminine figure. According to her, it's murder trying to get a boyfriend when her manliness makes them all feel insecure.
- Due to the Halloween spell, Xander and Jenny Calendar gain the Starship Enterprise in Ship of the Line: Humanities Loss. The catch is neither can ever leave the ship. Jenny because she's a furry cat-like alien and would stand out too much and Xander because he's now the ship's Medical Hologram and as such is physically unable to leave the ship.
- Taylor Hebert's new friend in Snuggles the Symbiote is a mutant whose power amounted to super hormones that ruined her immune system and kept medication from working. Luckily, her symbiote "Snuggles" feeds off hormones and can keep her from getting sick, along with giving her the standard Spider-man powers.
- Hawthorne Isley from Deadly Nightshade inherited his mother's ability to secrete toxins by his skin, which knocks out or sickens anyone brushing against him. It certainly protected him from physical abuse when he lived with abusive caretakers, but he had to be homeschooled to not accidentally hurt another child.
- In Le Commencement du Diable Blanc, Remy's explosive power manifests when he's barely a kid and promptly worsens so much he starts suffering seizures. When he was brought to Professor Xavier, the older mutant had to perform Psychic Surgery on the eleven-year-old to dampen his ability.
- In The Marvelous World Of DC, the Super Serum that made Isaiah Bradley/Patriot a Super-Soldier was an imperfect one, and it gradually reduces his mental faculties, until eventually he will end up with the mind of a small child. Despite this, he still soldiers on.
- In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku Midoriya is Superman. Sure, he has every power he could ever ask for, but he can't turn his strength off. He has to treat everything like wet cardboard and he's haunted by the time he nearly killed Katsuki Bakugou with it as a child. Then there's the Sensory Overload he gets whenever he turns on his Super-Hearing.
- In the Assassin's Creed and Temeraire crossover fanfic Trade Winds, William Laurence turns out to have two Assassin ancestors, which allow him to develop Eagle Vision that lets him not only spot the true gravity of his beloved dragon's illness but also allows him to locate and secure enough of the cure to send home to England's dragons. Hooray! However, his manifestation of the ability also makes him The Empath, which causes him to immediately pick up on the pain, sickness, and suffering of those around him whenever he turns it on... which he also feels. Oh...
- In Fate: Gamer Night Shirou gains a blessing from Lilith that reduces the costs of his various skills and increases the growth rate of sex-related skills but he has to have sex daily or the costs of his skills are all doubled. When she upgrades the blessing, Shirou also gains a mana drain ability and further reduction of his skill costs but now going without sex makes skills cost five times as much. And because of Shirou's Gamer Body, he's never tired until he runs out of stamina and Lilith's blessing makes sex cost no stamina at all, leaving him perpetually sexually frustrated.
- My Heroes Reborn:
- Victims of the villain Priestess get access to their past life's memories and skills, and thus, by extension, their past life's personality and habits. 96% of those affected quit the hero life because they weren't warriors in their past lives and lack the drive to continue their hero career. Of the remaining 4%, one-fourth of them turn to villainy because their past life was evil. Those that remain still have to deal with having perpetual personality shifts for the rest of their lives.
- Of the five UA students affected by Priestess, the girls got off lightly. Izuku Midoriya, meanwhile, became absurdly overpowered in exchange for his past life's perversion, inability to hit women, and chain smoking. As bad as that is, however, it's nothing compared to Mashirao Ojiro, who got increased martial arts skills in conjunction with the worst sense of direction in all of anime.
- Katsuki Bakugou got absurdly overpowered swordsmanship in exchange for alcoholism and the second worst sense of direction in all of anime.
- Servants of Remnant: Since Antonio Salieri is an Avenger, he runs on The Power of Hate. Unfortunately for him, he attracts the Grimm (which are attracted to negative emotions) like moths to a flame, until even he is overwhelmed and almost dies.
- In Red like Blood, Ruby gains vampire powers a la Hellsing, but they're a lot more trouble than their worth. She's prone to Sensory Overload many times since she doesn't know how to work with her enhanced senses, sunlight hurts like Hell, she frequently struggles to keep her bloodlust in check, she now has many razor-sharp canine teeth that freak anyone out when they see them. Really, it's pretty accurate to call her powers a curse.
- The Secret Return of Alex Mack: Hanna, a.k.a. Action Girl, has no fear response whatsoever as part of the Super-Soldier mods she received in vitro. While this is very good for keeping a cool head in combat situations and lets her do things no one else can due to panic, it also causes her to severely misjudge how dangerous certain things are, and she needs to be constantly monitored (and on occasion physically restrained) so she doesn't try to do things like Colossus Climb Godzilla, wrestle a car-sized spider or go bare-knuckle against a mutant shark in waist-deep water.
- Spider-X;
- Cyclops, Rogue, and Jamie all demonstrate this to varying degrees when it comes to their powers, since they cannot turn them off and have to be careful not to hurt others or expose their existence as mutants to the general public. However, after Peter Parker joins the Institute, he eventually develops a set of power nullifiers that allow the three of them turn off their powers when they aren’t wanted.
- Observed by Wolverine when the team are searching the sewers for the Lizard, Logan musing to himself that the kids are lucky they don’t have his senses.
- Hybrid Hive: Eat Shard? raises dangerous implications to Aisha's Perception Filter powers. Her powers make people forget her. Not just that she's there, but that she ever existed. And it takes conscious effort on her part to turn them off. This means she can't hold down a job because employers will forget that they hired her, she can't have a lasting relationship because her boyfriends will forget about her and move on to someone else, and if she's in an emergency situation, rescue workers will inevitably fail to help her because they won't even realize that she's there. Once it comes out that Taylor can remove powers, Aisha volunteers to give hers up.
- My Ideal Academia: Sasori hates his scorpion's tail Quirk, since it only makes him look like a villain to the public, making it impossible to find a better job and create a better life. He considers self-mutilation but notes that it is impossible, since his tail is part of his spinal cord, meaning that if he cut it off, he would be paralyzed for life.
- Elsa in Sons of Daughters of Sineya can't get emotional or she'll use her powers on accident. She learned the hard way that this includes anything sexual after she accidentally froze herself in her bathtub, requiring Anna to chip her out. Cordelia suggests building a shower so that any frozen water is washed away without causing any problems.
- In But Doctor, I Am Pagliacci, Inertia/Thaddeus Thawne (who's become the Flash), lacks one of the Required Secondary Powers that the original Flashes had- the ability to control how fast they perceive things. Regular Flashes can, say, run across a continent and experience it as taking a few seconds (they instinctively take a safe route), but if Thaddeus wants to do that, he's going to have to take the entire run at what seems to him to be normal human speeds, with everyone else looking like frozen statues. It's left him pretty burnt out.
- In Shazam! story Here There Be Monsters, the same magic that makes Billy, Mary, and Freddy powerful enough to move mountains or fly into the sun causes them to be eternally fifteen, which makes their lives harder.
- In the AU Lies On Light Yagami is revealed to be an incubus on his eighteenth birthday meaning he's really a super-powered immortal demon and that he can't go anywhere without someone trying to molest him. Also if he ever wants to pursue a relationship with anyone he has to take extra care not to suck out their lifeforce.
- In The Prince Of Death Light/Kira becomes the Prince of the Shinigami which means he's been powered up into a Flying Brick Physical God Invincible Hero. However this is balanced out by SEVERE Blessed with Suck: He lives in constant pain, because he's technically dead any wound he sustains will never heal, he needs to kill innocents to survive, and since he shares an empathic connection with the Death Notes if one is destroyed he slips into a Convenient Coma for a week. Also his powers are driving him crazy or more accurately even crazier and that is on top of the trauma of DYING. ALSO, as a Shinigami he is bound by their rules and naturally L ends up with the leash. Naturally since becoming a Shinigami he now has the Shinigami eyes but Light thinks it would be more useful not to be able to see the lifespan of a Death Note holder.
- In the Tamers Forever Series, as the vessel of Chaos, Takato is gifted with immense power, but that same power is slowly and painfully killing him from the inside out.
- Several fan comics drawn by Sarah Jolley aka modmad (author of The Property of Hate) paint Gladstone Gander's supernatural luck in an even worse way. Sure, it provides him great wealth and shields him from physical harm... but it seems to actively interfere with his romantic life, conspiring to prevent him from being with Magica De Spell, whom he loves. Moreover, his good luck comes with the drawback of turning into bad luck on the day of his birthday. In "The White Balloon", his one attempt to get rid of said bad luck seemingly causes the death of his parents, something that gives him PTSD and haunts him to this day.
- In Dragon Age: The Crown of Thorns, the dwarven noble protagonist is a Magic Knight because he harbors a tear in the veil. Unfortunately, while he did get some of the spirit warrior abilities from Awakening, this seems to have caused at least as many problems, some of them rather serious.
- Vow of Nudity: The same necklace that grants Spectra her warlock powers also prevents her from wearing any clothes, and can't be removed or suppressed by any means.
- Red Lightning gives us Jimmy, who is completely immortal. Unfortunately, this rendered him unable to sleep or fall unconscious, and did nothing to numb his sense of pain. The poor kid had to stay conscious while pulling himself back together as atoms in the air!
- Compared to Bruno's ability to talk to animals and Pepa creating flowers from nothing, Julieta in How Far Do These Roots Go Down? has a much harder time with her Super-Hearing. This also applies to her oldest daughter Isabela, whose future-telling ability has made her The Un-Favorite to Alma due to its unpredictable nature.
- In The Two Seers, Dolores and Oscar's abilities (Super-Hearing and Telepathy, respectively) are considered this by most of the family as they make privacy virtually impossible, to say nothing of the challenges for the Madrigals in question. It's when she sees how much the miracle makes Oscar suffer does Mirabel decide to end it all and snuff the candle out.
- Fate/Harem Antics: Hassan of Serenity is a Poisonous Person. While this makes her very deadly in battle, she can't turn it off, so she has become very lonely. Later, when she gets severely injured, Ayako Mitsuzuri tries to help her, only to be warned that she can't touch her without dying. Fortunately, Shielder is immune to the poison and is able to carry Serenity to safety and treat her wounds.
- The Cut of Your Love Never Hurts, Baby: Elsa has come to terms with her ice powers, but they still come with negatives. For example, her body temperature is too cold to bear a child.
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi / The Untamed
- In A Game for the Fool, Wei Wuxian has intimate knowledge of his and the world's future and knows exactly what they are all capable of. But he also knows how he and his loved ones will suffer in that future and knows from the very beginning he is going to die.
- In Gold Poisons, Jin Guangyao's eidetic memory comes across as this. It means he is incapable of forgetting any of the bad deeds he has committed. He has recurring nightmares as a result.
- In For What, For All For Myself, the corrupted River spirit gives these out, granting blessings in an unpleasant or even fatal way. In Jiang Cheng’s case, it’s definitely one of these: yes, he'll have an heir, after going through a painful, humiliating, and dangerous experience which he expects will kill him in the end. Even though he survives, it's clear he has some lingering issues with just how Jiang Xi ended up coming into being.
- In The Chosen Six, Trelawney laments how precognitive abilities come with the burden of potentially foreseeing something terrible and being powerless to prevent it.
- In Daphne Greengrass and the Boy Who Lived, Daphne discovers that she's a Seer, but comes to consider her talent more of a curse than an asset. Her initial prophecies were simply vague declarations that she only realised were predictions after the events she foretold had actually happened, her focused glimpses of the future are relatively limited, and when she attempts a more detailed vision she cannot understand what she is looking at because of the scale of what she sees.
- In A Different Dursley Family, while the Blood Wards protect them from Dark wizards, they are unable to leave Privet Drive for a place more affordable and tolerant.
- In Found Souls Harry has empathy so strong that he nearly attempts suicide at thirteen to escape from the onslaught of others' emotions. The fact that it includes magical creatures as well as sentient beings doesn't exactly help either.
- Death in On a Pale Horse automatically removes the soul of anyone and anything he makes skin contact with. Though he can put their soul back, doing so is unnatural and thus unbelievably painful (Death describes the agony as beyond mortal comprehension). By his own admission, he hasn't touched another living being in millions of years. Fortunately, it turns out that alternate versions of himself, even ones that are still mortal, are exempt, allowing him to hold Harry Potter's hand.
- Luna Lovegood in "When Is It a Contract?" can answer any question she's asked directly even if she doesn't know the answer (i.e. "Why are we required to have dress robes?" Or "How can I make sure I have a better year?"). However, since she also doesn't remember giving said answers, she often appears crazy whenever someone asks an indirect question.
- Mistakes uses the common Fanon that the nations can't be killed by physical means and can recover from apparent "death". This isn't necessarily a good thing when the fic starts with China being effectively gang-raped to death and being thoroughly traumatised on waking (particularly since up until it happened to him he thought rape was unimportant and murder actually fun since human morality doesn't quite work with immortals), and the Koreas trapped in Unit 731, where they get dissected again and again and again ...
- A Type 4 appears in Mad World. Lauren develops a rapid Healing Factor. While normally this would be really good, the sucky part comes in when she's captured and tortured by really sadistic Fae. Her wounds healing just means he can torture her again. He quickly abandons regular physical torture, in favor of doing something where even if Lauren could heal, her injury would only instantly reoccur. Her injuries are later compared to those associated with crucifixion. She, understandably, starts to lose the will to live.
- Bucky Barnes Gets His Groove Back & Other International Incidents: Sure, Barnes now has access to a cool semi-sentient Nigh-Invulnerable spaceship with powerful enough weapons to qualify it as a WMD, but the mental piloting style and later mind-meld wreaks havoc on his brain, and would probably majorly suck even for a pilot that doesn't share Barnes's poor mental health. Every flight leaves Barnes reeling and exhausted, and his taking the spaceship honestly puts a bit of a halt on his mental and physical recovery.
- Carol Danvers from A Prize for Three Empires was granted incredible powers that make her a target to very nasty people who have been known to kidnap her in order to try to "harvest" her DNA.Carol Danvers: I won the super-power lottery twice, maybe three times. Now I almost wish I hadn't.
- In Project Delta, Jane's implants. Her Super-Senses keep her in near-constant pain. She gets constant nightmares from the memories in her implants. And, due to her increased body density, she cannot swim.
- In Prince Charming, Prince Adrien is blessed at birth with the gift of charm... which means that anyone he interacts with is brainwashed into his adoring slave within minutes.
- This is a major theme in The Powers 'Verse, expressed among the characters as 'Downside'. d'Artagnan's empathy is useful on missions, but also makes it hard for him to cope in busy, crowded Paris; Aramis can heal injuries and illnesses but is compelled to do so if he's near the injured party; Porthos is a very accomplished thief because people not only don't see him, they actively ignore him, but the longer he stays hidden the more people forget he ever existed; and Athos is very likely immortal and will have to watch them all die. Some other Downsides are discussed at different times.
- God Help the Outcasts: While the monsters aren't shy about their opinions that Susan's new size and strength are incredible, she considers it a curse. Along with all of the new difficulties that come with being bigger than most average buildings, she's imprisoned by the government and can't contact her family, friends, or fiance unless she finds a way to return to her normal size. By the end, though, she's decided that she likes herself more as Ginormica.
- A Green Dragon's Hoard: Izuku has Super-Strength, Nigh-Invulnerability, and can turn into a massive dragon. The former two caused him to break a lot of objects growing up, including several cars that struck him when he wandered into the streets. The latter is so big as to be near worthless for most activities. It also paints a massive target on his back for people looking to steal powerful Quirks.
- Heroes Never Die: Izuku's Quirk causes him to revive at a predetermined point whenever he dies. While it does give Izuku infinite attempts to get things just right, he also has to be careful not to give out information he shouldn't have. Also, because Izuku doesn't know what point he'll revive at beforehand, he can be tripped up if he revives later than expected, such as when he kills himself early in the villain attack on the USJ, only to revive just a few minutes before he died, still trapped inside the USJ.
- On top of that, his Quirk has given him serious psychological trauma both from being unable to prove it's real, even to himself, and from being forced to die and repeat a loop too many times. It's made worse by the fact he can't afford to get professional help since not only would he sound crazy, but the level of danger needed for a hero/hero-in-training to have their psychological history released is considerably lower than it is for normal civilians, meaning speaking to a therapist would tank his career.
- Toward A Bright Future: The main character Y/N's Quirk of seeing the future counts on many levels. She has no control over what triggers her visions, she gets a splitting headache if she tries to tell anyone else anything important that she learns from them, any pain from any injuries that she manages to butterfly away is instantly inflicted onto her, and she has never received any visions of her own future. Other characters have commented that they've never seen a Quirk with that many drawbacks.
- The White Stuff: Izuku's power turns him into a super-intelligent Lightning Bruiser, but only when he snorts cocaine. Furthermore, it doesn't actually negate any of the effects of being high on cocaine. He discovered how his quirk works by accident when he turned to drugs to deal with how lousy his childhood was.Izuku: I don't get any less high, either. I'm just... high and superhuman.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- The Elements of Harmony and the Savior of Worlds: In a Recursive Fanfiction of The Conversion Bureau, Megan Richards gets transformed into a powerful alicorn by the Conversion Bureau potion, instead of a "newfoal". That would seem like a dream come true. Unfortunately, the potion also had the added side effect of allowing TCB!Celestia to brainwash her if she gets too close. Megan spends much of the story trying to shield her mind from TCB!Celestia's influence.
- Mendacity: The Bugul Noz explains that Discord created the Fae this way, as a cruel joke, by giving them immense power while making them fatally vulnerable to the most common metal in the world and subject to various weaknesses and bans from a variety of arbitrary and common animals, plants, objects.
- The Powers of Harmony:
- Rarity's insomnia inspires some of her best work, but leaves her very weak (due to denying her magic font time to recharge). Turns out, Harmony engineered this as part of her master plan.
- Twilight's Power Copying ability works by making her more sensitive to magic, which makes it easier to understand how spells work. However, this also makes her more vulnerable to corruptive magic, which leaves her weak and sick.
- Discord made the Princesses immortal and linked them to the Sun and Moon because he knew that eventually they'd snap from the pressure of maintaining the world and succumb to the Chaos magic inside them. This is what led to Luna becoming Nightmare Moon.
- Triptych Continuum: A Mark of Appeal kicks off when a character supposedly "blessed" with ludicrous sex appeal comes to Luna with a simple request: to destroy her Cutie Mark, magic, or both, and damn the cost. Her "talent" has been growing stronger as she's aged, starting from simply inspiring look-here-first interest in her classmates. It's currently at the point where it crosses gender and species barriers within minutes, creating infatuation, arousal, and then steadily strengthening both. Anyone she tries to speak with will eventually attempt seduction — or worse — and she can't turn it off. In effect, the "talent" offers the character a life of being sexually assaulted or being a hermit avoiding literally everyone until she dies. However, the act of directly changing or destroying a Mark is beyond even alicorn magic... It ultimately turns out that she fell afoul of a naturally occurring Fantastic Drug that has kicked her Mark magic into overdrive, and once a specimen is found, a cure is derived from it.
- In A Growing Affection, Kohaku's status as a living Perception Filter is this. Her parents forgot her when they went on vacation a couple of times (doesn't help that it's a big family), and she gets passed over for promotion because no one can remember what she did in the Chunin Exams. But as a ninja being functionally invisible and easily forgotten is a very useful ability.
- In Shinigan Naruto gains the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. While his power has a surprising amount of versatility (such as removing Sasuke and Anko's Cursed Seals with a senbon), for a long time anything he looked at with his Shinigan on would fall apart along the lines. Seeing walls and furniture randomly collapse in pieces freaks Naruto out but seeing people falling apart nearly drives him insane. Naruto had to learn the Bringer Of Darkness technique to temporarily blind himself to save his sanity.
- Quistis in Eroninja has a kekkei genkai much like the Sharingan in that it allows her to learn any jutsu. The problem is that she has to be hit by said jutsu first.
- The Rinnegan is treated as such by both Obito and Sasuke in I Am NOT Going Through Puberty Again!. The plus side: you're practically a god in human form. The downside: shared vision with people in sexually active relationships.
- In Pareidolia, Kyuubi hates his power as The Empath since he can only sense hatred with it. No matter where he goes, all he can sense is hatred. According to him, this is what caused his Face–Heel Turn.
- Played for Laughs in Advice and Trust. Thanks to Rei invoking Magnetic Girlfriend, Kensuke ends up becoming a Chick Magnet... and ends up running out of money from having to pay for all of the dates. Although that suck part goes away when he starts going out with just two of the girls (their idea, not his).
- In In-Tents-ly Sick, Jetybory complains that her super hearing isn't that great of a power when she can't sleep at night because of Noonbory's loud snoring.
- Always Visible: It may seem that Delia has good immunity in exchange for the fact that she cannot have children in principle (due to a strange disease in the uterus).
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
- Hayden from the Percy Jackson fanfiction, Riding the Waves. As a daughter of Thetis, she has water manipulation powers similar to Percy’s. But her powers as a legacy of Pluto made twice as vulnerable.
- The Bradan Feasa/Salmon of Knowledge in Son of the Western Sea possesses all the knowledge in the world, including being able to see the prophecies of others but excluding exact knowledge of the future, but being unable to use it (due to being a fish) and being sought after to be eaten to gain that knowledge. By the time Percy runs into the Salmon, it is so depressed that its existence has been almost forgotten and that it cannot do anything meaningful with all of that knowledge that Percy is concerned that it might Fade. When the Salmon tries to convince Percy that the prophecy means Percy would have to eat it to gain that knowledge, Percy states that he wouldn't want all the knowledge in the world, because then what would be the point of traveling?
- In Treasures, Lawrence Fletcher is kind to an old woman who turns out to be a fairy and turns up at Ferb's birth to grant him the classical "gems and flowers fall from their lips when they speak" blessing. Unfortunately, the most common flower Ferb coughs up is roses, which have thorns (plus all the other flowers are scratchy anyway) and all the gems have sharp edges so eventually his biological mother tries to kill him because she can't take the screaming and random passer-by actively try to injure or at least trip the poor kid so they can grab the gems that come of him crying, leading to Ferb's The Quiet One personality and the move to America out of desperation to find somewhere Ferb's "blessing" doesn't work, which fails. Fortunately the Flynns turn out to be exactly the kind of people who make it all worth it but dang...
- All of the hybrids in Morphic to a greater or lesser degree (it is a Deconstruction after all), but Gabriel, a half-Slugma really takes the cake.
- Doubled. Not only is he half a blob of magma, but if he absorbs mud or stone, he begins to heat and get fire powers, which is awesome... until you realize that, as his body temperature goes up, major tissue and organ damage would result. He's only (part) human. Special mention also goes to Mia Kerrigan, the Scyther morph, who has bladed arms, lightning reflexes, accelerated growth, and is probably the strongest of the cast... but does not understand empathy, limits, or self-control.
- Note that in a superhero story, Mia would be Cursed with Awesome. But given that this is a Deconstruction fic where Anyone Can Die, Mia easily falls to guys using guns and bullets.
- Also of special note is Katherine, who was mixed with a Roselia. She ages even faster than Mia and is considered the smartest and most mature of the hybrids... But apart from the fact that she actually dislikes aging so quickly, she also has roses for hands, which makes even simple tasks like holding a pencil difficult. She also gets tired easily if she's not near sunlight.
- Doubled. Not only is he half a blob of magma, but if he absorbs mud or stone, he begins to heat and get fire powers, which is awesome... until you realize that, as his body temperature goes up, major tissue and organ damage would result. He's only (part) human. Special mention also goes to Mia Kerrigan, the Scyther morph, who has bladed arms, lightning reflexes, accelerated growth, and is probably the strongest of the cast... but does not understand empathy, limits, or self-control.
- The dampener removal in Poké Wars. Its removal greatly augments a Pokémon's abilities. Unfortunately it is extremely painful and results in Power Incontinence until they learn to control it. Even then, their attacks are always lethal and extremely destructive. It is especially magnified for Pokémon like Heatran or Magmar whose body temperature rises to such an extent that being near them is lethal.
- In Pokemon: Shadow of Time, it is suggested that basically the entire Garchomp line have to deal with a version of this, as the species are naturally very affectionate but have to be careful showing that affection after they evolve in case they seriously hurt their trainers.
- Weiss's Passive is this in Forged Destiny. Passives are unique abilities given to people at birth in addition to what Skills they gain over time. Weiss's makes it mandatory for her to use a sword, a weapon that, unlike a staff or wand, is never enchanted toward enhancing a Mage's stats. This means that she can't Min Max like everyone else and will almost always be objectively weaker than any properly equipped mage at a similar level.
- A Semblance of Failure is set in a support group for people with useless Semblances. One guy can tell exactly how much salt there is in his proximity; another can grow her nails at an accelerated rate. One can bend spoons with his mind, one can grow her hair really fast, and one can end stories instantly, which he does.
- Black Rose Blooms Silver: Powerful as Ruby is, her abilities do have a few downsides. For instance, her empathic abilities have a range of several miles and can't really be turned off. Also, her shape-changing abilities don't let her turn back into a human, with the closest she can get being looking like a faunus with dog ears and a tail.
- Guardians and Cambions in Goddess Reborn Chronicle, whose very transformations can leave them utterly inhuman in mind and body. Not to mention they can transform others into being like them if they like it or not.
- Little Hands, Big Attitude: Blaze can generate flame in a world where everything has already been burned down to ash. When Sonic asks her if she has powers, she lies that she doesn't, and Silver refuses to tell what the are because that's her business. The closest Blaze comes to mentioning her powers is when she tells Rouge that she has a power she "does not care about" when giving her a You Are Better Than You Think You Are speech.
- Tails gets infected by Shroud in Sonic X: Dark Chaos, which ends up giving him a Lovecraftian Superpower and makes him immune to the influence of Dark Tails. Except he still feels the corrupting influence of Dark Tails at every moment, and he starts to gain Bizarre Alien Biology by the bucketload. And his temper gives him the chance of losing control of said superpower at any moment - he nearly destroys the Blue Typhoon and devours his friends at the end of Episode 73.
- Venus the Seedrian gains nearly divine power from a literal Deal with the Devil. Except she's slowly being turned into a robot - and she's been rendered nearly immortal.
- What You Already Know opens with Daniel Jackson acquiring powerful mental abilities, such as telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and precognition, but overuse of his powers makes him physically ill, with escalating headaches to the extent that he could cause himself brain damage if he pushes himself too far. As a result, Daniel spends the early parts of the series frustrated by his powers even as he uses them to try and help his friends, only accepting them as a good thing when he is able to explicitly save someone's life from their predicted death in a manner that would have been impossible without his abilities.
- In Hellsister Trilogy, Kara feels her great powers isolate her from normal humans and are a hindrance to having a normal life.Mentally, she kicked herself. All this incredible power, she thought. The ability to fly faster than light, to exist in the vacuum of space, to pierce the time barrier and reappear whenever she wanted to, and most of the time she took that for granted. No wonder that so often, life was stupid, dull, and boring to her.
No wonder that she'd never really managed to fully give her heart, or her body, to anyone yet. How many potential mates could understand the power and needs of a Kryptonian?
- Superman and Man has Christopher Reeve exchanging bodies unwillingly with Superman. After spending years unable to move his body from the neck down, he can walk. He can walk on the Sun, unharmed. And yet he doesn't care because he wants to go back to his universe and family.
- Light of the Moon: Varian was born with the power of the Moonstone, and thus has a streak of naturally teal hair and he makes black rocks appear near him when he's angry. This power has very few benefits, as it can be destructive if he doesn't keep his temper in check, he's viewed with scorn or fear by everyone in Old Corona, and his father basically kept him locked up the first eight years of his life in the hopes that this would protect him (it didn't). Oh, and then there's the fact that he was kidnapped by Mother Gothel and raised in the tower alongside Rapunzelnote until he was fourteen. At the end of the story, he laments to his father that, unlike Rapunzel, cutting his hair doesn't remove his power.
- With Strings Attached:
- John has complete control over water and the body of a winged god; but he also has to eat constantly, has ears so sensitive that he folds up in pain at shrill sounds that don't bother other people, and, worst of all, is no longer human, so he's no longer sexually attracted to human women.
- Paul is so ridiculously strong that he can barely move without causing chaos. He has practiced day and night to get to the point where he can walk around, but he has to keep constant watch on himself, keep his arms at his sides, etc. To revert to his more manageable lower level of strength, he has to explode, creating a large glassy crater and wiping out everything around him. Even at his lower level of strength, he has to fiercely regulate his behavior. In neither case does he dare have sex. Oh, and neither of them can go home as is...
- George: He's got a ring that lets him become anything... but it also sticks once in a while, filling him with terror that he might get stuck permanently as something else.
- In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, Ringo discovered during the interim between Strings and Keys that he was also Blessed with Suck because he had become intensely addicted to his mindsight—which could not return with him to Earth.
- Bird features this as an ongoing theme; whether it's Mimi, or Elle, or Charnel, or Sveta. In fact, one could argue that every patient in Alchemilla falls into this to some degree.
- An S Class Of Her Own: Taylor's sole power is that everyone's convinced she's an S Class threat and the most powerful being in the world. While this means that even Hookwolf runs away rather than fight her, she's confined to her house because of how terrified everyone is of her. Besides her father, who still fears her at times, Taylor's only form of human interaction is Dragon, who's immune to her power as an AI. Notably, Dragon apparently has tried several times to make people realize Taylor is completely harmless, only to fail every time.
- Wyvern: Taylor has a very powerful Changer ability, but it's stress-based and not fully under her control — not only does she end up transforming when she doesn't want to (which happens several times), but she has to deliberately recall the pain and humiliation of her bullying in order to change on purpose. Better yet, it's difficult for her to turn human again on command, requiring her to be completely calm and relaxed — something she's really not used to feeling. Further, since Taylor's transformation involves changing size and shape, she tends to shred everything she's wearing when she transforms. She goes through three pairs of clothes the first day.
- In Tales of the Emperasque the Emperor merges with Tarrasque, giving him phenomenal psychic power, resilience, and physical strength, but first, he's really, really large, which carries its own batch of problems, and second, a Tarrasque is a daemon in this setting, causing panic and multiple friendly fire incidents nearly everywhere he appears.
