Blessed With Suck - Television Tropes & Idioms

Blessed With Suck is one of those tropes that comes in a few distinct flavours. Generally, this is a blessing to a character that seems to cause nothing but trouble:

In some cases, this is literal. By far, the most common variation is that the writers have seen fit to give you a special power that is, to be frank, stupid or useless.
In other, more extreme cases, your power is actually too dangerous to use.
Sometimes your power sounds really, really cool at first, but it turns out to have a lousey limitation, Weaksauce Weakness, control problem, or (in the worst cases) very dangerous side-effects.
Sometimes the blessing is actually beneficial - but extenuating circumstances (a superhero's family is always in danger, for example) have ruined the potential fun.

This blessing may take form of Applied Phlebotinum, privileges, or special abilities.

May be caused by a Literal Genie. May also result in With Great Power Comes Great Insanity either as part of the blessing or a result of its psychological effects.

Polar opposite of Cursed With Awesome, in which a "curse" actually is cool and helps the character, even if they refuse to believe it and just want to be normal. If the "blessing" is somehow removed via Aesop learning, then the Curse Is Foiled Again.

This is Older Than Dirt, since it's a perfect way to teach the Aesop of Be Careful What You Wish For. Can encompass Who Wants To Live Forever and So Beautiful, It's A Curse as well. The more general form of Ace Lightning Syndrome.

Compare Awesome But Impractical.

Examples

Anime and Manga

Borderline in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Shinji Ikari always believes that his job as an Eva pilot causes him nothing but pain, but many of the characters, most notably Kensuke Aida, believe that being a pilot of an Evangelion is really amazing, and can't understand how he gets so upset about piloting. Of course, those who do understand what's going on know otherwise.
Subverted in Ah! My Goddess: Keiichi Morisato is granted a wish by a goddess, which promptly gets him kicked out of his dorm, and leaves him with said goddess and her sisters as dependents and being harassed by everyone except the goddess and his sister. Despite all this, he is still happy with his wish, and makes this clear at several points.
At the very beginning of Bleach, it would seem that Ichigo is blessed with suck, because even though he can see ghosts and acquires a means to defend against them, the ability draws soul-devouring monsters, Hollows, to him, his friends, and family.
Several people in Mushishi appear to be genuinely blessed after being infected with mushi that gives them special powers (prophetic dreams, the ability to see while blind, etc.) Unfortunately, mushi has a nasty tendency to grow in power and get beyond its user's control, which usually results in disaster for the infected individual and the people around them.
Practically every Geass power granted in Code Geass starts off sounding pretty cool, but ends up developing drawbacks or limitations that make their owner's life a living hell. Examples:
- Lelouch: The power to issue absolute orders. Drawback: Becomes permanently active partway through the first season, meaning he has to cover his eye or risk affecting people with casual statements that could be interpreted as orders. And his followers abandon him when they learn that, thinking he has geassed them into obeying him.
- Mao: Telepathy. Drawback: It's always active, constantly bombarding him with the surface thoughts of everyone within 500 meters. In a slight subversion, rather than being angry at C.C. for giving him such a lousy drawback, he is obsessively attached to her and very grateful, which just shows how Ax Crazy he is.
- Rolo: The power to stop peoples' perception of time. Drawback: While active, his heart stops, meaning he can only keep it up so long and it shortens his lifespan. And it did kill him in the end.
- Pre-immortality C.C.: Makes anyone around love her. Drawback: Made it impossible to tell whether people honestly liked her or were just affected by the Geass; ended up making her jaded and cynical about love.
- Suzaku: Thanks to Lelouch's command to "live", whenever he is in a tight situation, it kicks in and helps him to fight and survive. On the downside, he wants to atone through death, making this the last thing he wants, and even worse, he ends up nuking millions of people involuntarily because doing so was an action which saved his life.
Kurau in Kurau Phantom Memory benefits greatly from her Rynax-powers in her job as an agent, but it causes her some trouble too. She gets separated from her father at a young age and goes through years of loneliness, because she has to hide her powers and the Rynax she merged with has to miss its "pair". Once her pair appears, she has to run from the authorities, while being more vulnerable as she has to defend her "little sister" as well. Still, flying, being able to phase through walls and disintegrate massive objects is pretty cool.
Gene and Jim of Outlaw Star inherit one of the most advanced ships in the galaxy after one of their clients kicks the bucket. This would seem like a good thing, until the two realize that it's going to cost them an arm and a leg to dock, maintain, and arm the damn thing. Not to mention that it effectively paints a big fat target on Gene's head for the Kei pirates to strike at. Gene puts it best when he says, "We sure inherited a big pain in the ass."
The titular heroines from Gunslinger Girl get saved from death and gain enormous strength and agility through cybernetic implants. Alas, this comes with severe mental conditioning (including enormous emotional dependence on their "Handlers") and an immensely shortened lifespan, so the girls will likely die before reaching adulthood.
In The Law Of Ueki, kids are granted powers by candidates gunning for the position of God, who must then fight in a tournament. One power in particular seems unbeatable (The power to turn ideals in to reality), until you find out that it takes away a year of your life to use it. An even worse example is the kid who can turn his forehead in to a diamond, but only when his hands are in his pockets.
Yakumo of School Rumble hears the thoughts regarding her from any guy who has any interest in her. Her being a Yamato Nadeshiko, that usually means all guys—it comes as a surprise when she can't hear anything from the male lead (because he's purely in love with someone else)—and people don't help her because she looks too perfect to need it. The blaring thoughts of the Stalker With A Crush don't help her situation, either.
Zelgadis Graywords from Slayers wants to become strong, so his great-grandfather makes him strong. By turning him into a 1/3 rock golem, 1/3 blow demon chimera with blue skin and wire hair. He then devotes his life to finding a cure for this condition.
- He's nigh invulnerable and his appearance doesn't seem to cause panic amongst the normal people. Where's the suck?
The five Signers of Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds consider their power to range from a mere inconvenience to a dire curse.
Wangan Midnight has the Devil Z, a heavily tuned Nissan Fairlady Z (known as the Datsun 240/260/280Z in the US). For a car from the 1970s, you'll be amazed at how fast this badass mother can go. The tradeoff? It's extremely hard to control, and thus has a long history of accidents involving the deaths of its past owners. In fact, it's believed to be possessed; one chapter has the protagonist Akio exclaiming that his foot is stuck on the pedal as if it was being pushed down.
Chise in SaiKano is turned into the ultimate weapon, which makes her invincible and she becomes absurdly strong as well. Comes at a very steep price: Using her powers hurts her directly, and its slowly taking away her humanity. Oh, and she can't control her powers very well, leading to her destroying several cities.
To Aru Majutsu No Index: Touma has what he calls "Imagination Breaker", a right hand that can absolutely cancel any esper/magic power it touches (even, according to him, miracles from the gods), which is useful considering the extremely powerful trouble he attracts starting with the first episode. If the power hits some other part of his body first, though, he's screwed. His hand also cancels his luck, meaning pretty much every day is a bad day for him and probably the reason why he's attracting such deadly trouble in the first place; causes him to be classified Level 0 because his power can't be detected; and isn't of any use in mundane situations, either.
For Kyon in Suzumiya Haruhi. Living with a cool Five Man Band, with Haruhi as boss, experiencing all sorts of crazy adventures.. Meeting nigh omnipotent alien hackers, time-traveling cuties and philosophers with psychic powers? Saving the world? Yea, that must be a really hard destiny, Kyon. Of course, the 4th novel shows that he really does like the 'crazy universe' more than a normal one.
The twelve members of the zodiac in Fruits Basket, who turn into animals when they become weak or are hugged by someone (outside of the Zodiac) of the opposite gender.

Comic Books

Despite the perks of his powers, Spider-Man has always viewed them as a burden and responsibility, rather than a blessing, because of the bad guys who've been pulled toward his family and friends because of them, and the problems that have cropped up when he chooses not to use them.
Likewise, mutants (especially X-Men) in the Marvel Universe are Blessed With Suck, thanks to the outcast status that their power brings, even if they look and act completely normal. Besides the social issues, many mutants have little or no control over their powers, especially right after they first manifest. Force-fields that don't turn off, energy powers that lash out randomly, involuntary telepathy, etc.
- Rogue gets a double-whammy. Yes, technically the ability to copy other mutants' powers by touching them makes her very adaptable, but draining people's life energy whenever she touches them is about as sucky as it gets. Not to mention being affected by her victims' memories, in one case permanently.
  - Not to mention the fact that she's incapable of not draining whoever she touches. That's always been portrayed as the ultimate suck for her: she can never touch another person without running the risk of killing them.
  - This troper confesses to immediately thinking of Rogue when she read the name of this trope, and finding it semi-hilarious that in her case it's literal.
- Unus the Untouchable, a villain in the X-Men books, could repel objects. Beast built a gun to amplify it in order to defeat him, in an example similar to Midas. His powers eventually grew so strong they repelled air and he suffocated to death. Yet somehow he managed to father a child with similar powers beforehand...
  - Maybe Unus masturbated and his powers "repeled" his seed into a waiting woman once it left his body?
  - Beast built the device so that its effects could be reversed - he was using it to blackmail Unus into surrendering in order to save his own life. Henry Mc Coy is fricking hardcore.
- Cypher from the original New Mutants line-up had the ability to understand any language, written or spoken. That's it. He was Killed Off For Real. It looked like he might have come back combined with Warlock as Doug-Lock, but Warlock was just pretending because he missed his friend.
- There is a character in New Mutants Vol. 2 who is called Wither. Guess what his power is?
  - And when his power manifested, he happened to be touching his father at the time, thus killing Dad and turning Wither permanently into an Emo Teen who tends to Wangst quite a lot.
- Cyclops is another classic case, with his destructive eyebeams that, again, don't turn off without special glasses or shutting his eyes. His brother Havok has sometimes also needed special equipment to control his own powers.
- Chamber of Generation X has energy powers allowing him to gank anyone this side of Juggernaut. The catch? His powers first manifested themselves so violently, they blew his upper torso and lower jaw off, leaving a glowing maw of energy and burnt flesh. So naturally, he gets doubly screwed on M-Day when his powers get permanently turned off. He doesn't fare much better in alternate realities: In the Age of Apocalypse universe he had a hole drilled into his chest to allow his power to vent.
- There's a guy in one issue of Ultimate X-Men whose entire mutant power is the dissolution of all living tissue within a ridiculous distance of him. He kills 385 people the day he hits puberty, and has to be taken out discreetly by Wolverine because if his existence ever got out mutants would be rounded up and stuck in camps faster than you can say Franklin Richards.
The specials in Rising Stars all get treated pretty badly over the course of the series due to the public's fear of them, but a few of them have especially sucky powers.
- Peter Dawson is almost completely invulnerable due to an invisible shield that lines his skin and the inside of his lungs and stomach. The shield let things like oxygen through, but kept out anything toxic. However, because nothing can actually touch his skin, he's completely numb. He can, however, taste things, so he eats a lot and becomes very obese. This disqualifies him from any law enforcement job where his power might be useful, and he ends up working a minimum wage job at a service station.
The Incredible Hulk is another Marvel example (they really seem to love this trope.) The difference here is that it might be more justified as a lot of people do hate and hound him (especially the army), and having multiple personalities is never fun. All that, and his wives keep on dying.
- Plus he's not even incredible enough to completely shred those godawful purple pants. At least he didn't have to go through the pain of divorce and having to hear all the gossip his ex-wives would spread about Hulk Jr.
And let's not forget Mister Immortal, Craig Hollis. His one and only power: he can't ever stay dead. He discovered it by trying to commit suicide when his girlfriend did the same. And while all the loved ones around him died. And continued to die. He will, according to reliable sources, outlive things like stars, planets, and Galactus.
- On the upside, the guy who was killing his friends was fired by Death. Now the guy in charge of the whole "prepare you for an eternity alone" bit is one of his closest friends. Yay?
  - One panel of him standing alone in a ruined landscape, surrounded by silhouettes of the corpses of his friends, is unusually bleak in a series that tends to play death for black humour.
Jukko of Stormwatch: Team Achilles has powers which literally cause him nothing but pain— he can feel the pain of every being within a four mile radius.
Deadpool had terminal cancer so he turned to the Canadian government's Weapon X program for help. Good: He won't die of cancer. Bad: His cancer is now supercharged on healing factor and constantly destroys and rebuilds his entire body, including his brain, leaving him with a face that... has the consistency and appearance of a hamburger patty, and made him just plain crazy, and very, very funny. At least his fans love him. Moral of the story? Canadian healthcare ain't all it's made out to be.
While most of the Fantastic Four embraces their powers, the Thing genuinely believes that his superpower is a curse, and who can blame him? Even though he possesses super strength and near invulnerability, it doesn't change the fact that he's been turned into a hideous rock monster that scares the shit out of anybody who sees him, and destroys his chances of living a normal life. He was also forced to quit his job as a test pilot because he was too big and heavy to fit in a plane. Oh yeah, and did we mention that he was turned into a hideous rock monster?
- He seems okay with it now. It did take a while...
The Boulder, who made one appearance in Avengers: The Initiative (which, again, is a Marvel Comic, demonstrating just how much they are in love with this trope), has the superpower of total Invulnerability. He's impervious to harm, can't be worn out, and is otherwise invincible. Sounds great, until you realize he's forever stuck in the body of a slow, weak, overweight teen who's incapable of losing weight or getting any stronger, making him pretty much worthless as a superhero.
- Oh, it gets worse. When one of his team-mates offers to have sex with him, he tells her that there's no point - his invulnerability not only prevents him from feeling pain, but from feeling pleasure, too. Pretty damn rough when you consider that he's going to remain a teenager forever...
- Another character in Avengers: The Initiative who fits this trope is Trauma, who possesses both telepathic and metamorphic powers, and can therefore transform into whatever a person is most afraid of. Often, he will give this attack a nightmarish twist; if you're afraid of death, he'll morph into a mutilated corpse, if you're afraid of spiders, he'll turn into a spider about the size of a T. rex, and so forth. He started off with a horrible case of Power Incontinence, as his powers are triggered by strong emotion. If someone near him was upset or scared, he would spontaneously transform into something horrible. Unlike most people on this list, Trauma did eventually learn to control his powers— but the damage, sadly, had been done. A recent issue of Avengers: The Initiative revealed that his family does not want anything to do with him. Even worse, in the very first issue, we're told that his mother is in a mental institution...
Yet another Marvel character who belongs here is Black Bolt, king of the Inhumans. This guy can produce a destructive force with his voice. If he so much as whispers, he'll destroy the landscape around him. Black Bolt has a bad case of Power Incontinence— and the only way he can avoid destroying everything around him is by not vocalizing (talking, laughing, crying, etc.). An old Fantastic Four comic revealed that Black Bolt had spent his childhood in an isolation chamber until he had learned the discipline to stay forever silent.
- Also, the reason why Bolt's brother Maximus is an insane supervillain is that BB used his vocal powers too close to him once, and that shattered his sanity.
And yet another Marvel character, Adam Warlock, whose Soul Gem gives him various spiritual powers, up to and including the ability to rip someone's soul from their body. As the souls taken then go to a miniature paradise dimension contained within the gem, this doesn't seem too bad...until you learn that the gem is sentient and has a nasty tendency to try and break free of his control to steal souls on its own. Also, during the soul stealing process, Warlock has to relive every single one of the victim's memories. Now think about the fact that at one point, the only way to save the universe was to soul steal about 10,000 or so enemy black knights at once.
An (apparently) rare DC example is the interpretation of The Flash given by the song The Ballad of Barry Allen, by Jim's Big Ego. In the song, it is explained that because The Flash's perception is so much faster than normal, he is isolated from the rest of humanity, unable to form true connections with other people and tormented by the continual boredom of the rest of the world being so slow. As the lyrics say, "And I'll be there before you know it, I'll be gone before you see me, And do you think you can imagine, Anything so lonely?"
- This view of the Flash was actually used (via a Captain Ersatz) in the series Common Grounds. Aside from moving at incredibly high speed, he views the world that way, which essentially makes his life hell. (As an example, he had to learn lip-reading to understand movies, and he can't enjoy them because they last about five seconds to him.) The only thing that makes life worthwhile is the thought that as a superhero, he can improve the lives of others and make a lasting impression.
  - You actually have it reversed; Speeding Bullet was unable to enjoy movies because they were far too slow for him, essentially a series of still frames. He learned to lip-read so that he could fast-forward them with the sound off. That led to the problem of him having read every decent book and seen every film ever made to the point of boredom, and being unable to even enjoy sex due to it taking a subjective week or two for him if slowed down to human speed - and friction burns being involved for his partner if he actually allowed himself to move at a comfortable pace. Yeowch.
- It's basically a canon interpretation for Marvel's Quicksilver, who once told someone they would be short-tempered too if everyone else was like that one slow person in the checkout line.
Another DC example, though not cannon, was Larry Niven's essay, "man of steel, woman of kleenex", in which he makes a convincing argument that pre-crisis Superman can never make love to Lois Lane (or any human, for that matter.)
- Unfortunately for Larry Niven fans, his essay was rather short-sighted. It's been established in multiple continuities (including Pre-Crisis) that Superman's powers can be temporarily taken away by depriving him of yellow sunlight and/or by flooding him with red sunlight, easily allowing him to engage in, er, "marital relations". And of course, since any hypothetical Kryptonian child would be totally deprived of sunlight while growing in Lois' womb, there's no way the kid would pose any threat to Lois in utero.
Vertigo example: in Fables, Bigby Wolf has to constantly smoke in order to keep his super-sensitive sense of smell from inhaling the millions of scents from all over Manhattan. Not to mention all the noise...
- Another example from the third issue of the Spin Off series Jack of Fables, in which Jack learns that his overbearing lust for adventure has cursed him with being the center of all stories, including the ''Sword in the Stone"- where he plays the stone, after getting Excalibur shoved through his chest.
The title character in Empowered derives her powers from a hypermembrane that grants her superhuman strength, invulnerability, the ability to generate powerful energy blasts, various optical enhancements, and other abilities not yet shown. Unfortunately, it tears easily, at which point much of her power goes away. She's also incredibly self-conscious, and the hypermembrane doesn't work if she's wearing anything over it. Considering it fits like a coat of body paint (but thinner), this is a definite problem. And to top it all off, it's all but stated that the suit's faults and frailties are all her own creation, her poor self-image and chronic self-doubt sabotaging her powerhouse potential.
- And to top it all off, she is the only one for whom the blasted thing works at all. A more selfish soul would ditch the thing in a heartbeat rather than deal with the problems it has, but Emp....
- Another character called Cinderblock is implied that his current form a (man with cinderblocks for his head and hands) that he doesn't have the normal functions, and well his ability is to manipulate concrete and stone - but he doesn't like using it because of the massive collateral damage it causes.
Gwen Raiden (see Angel below) gets a mega-massive dose of this in Angel After The Fall when having found a cure for her electrical...ness, she uses the opportunity to get close to another person for the first time. Then everything goes to Hell and the electrical doohickey keeping her powers suppressed breaks... and she deep-fries her new friend.

Film

In X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, the main character grants himself x-ray vision. While he obtains some benefits from it - including the ability to cheat at cards - his vision gradually increases in power until he can see through his own eyelids, through reality itself and into the swirling madness beyond.
- That by itself is Nightmare Fuel. What cranks it to the next level is the deleted ending. At the very end of the movie, the protagonist rips out his eyes to save himself from the pain and suffering. The movie ends abruptly—because the last line was deemed too horrific. What was cut? The protagonist, screaming out, "I CAN STILL SEE!" Still gives this troper the shudders thinking about it...
In The Butterfly Effect the protagonist gains the power to go back in time and change key events in his childhood. But whatever he tries to fix he just ends up messing up his life and that of his friends even more.
This is basically a theme found in all four Indiana Jones films, but most notably in The Last Crusade. In Crusade, drinking from the Holy Grail grants the drinker immortality, but the power is limited to the cave it is stored in, the Grail cannot be taken out of the cave, and even though they are immortal, the drinker will still age to the point of becoming a walking skeleton.
- Hey now, that knight was old but I don't know if I'd call him a "walking skeleton".
  - Plus I think he was already pretty old when he found the grail, The Holy Grail only seems to stop aging, not reverse it.
In The Ring, Sadako Yamamura was born with extraordinary psychic abilities, which gave her clairvoyance, psychography, and astral projection that enabled her personality to endure after death and in the books, her abilities are powerful enough to allow her genetic manipulation of people and viruses. Her mother was also shown having similar abilities. Instead of fame and recognition, these powers led to both of them being scorned, driven away and persecuted by society, leading to Sadako's mother throwing herself into a volcano, and Sadako herself being killed and thrown down a well, where her spirit will linger forever.
- The American remake posits that Samara Morgan had the innate ability to imprint images and visions in the minds of other living things; unfortunately, the power manifested at birth, and she was never able to control it, leading both her mother and adoptive mother into complete madness.
One Word: Godzilla. It's his own radiation that Ends up being the cause of his own death in one movie. Yes, we're talking about the SAME radiation that allows him to spew nuclear plasma and destroy his enemies.

Literature

In The Inheritance Trilogy, the main character, Eragon, literally blesses a character with suck. He blesses a baby with a spell that he thinks will shield her from harm, but a grammatical error in the magical language makes her a shield for everybody else from harm - a trouble magnet. (The author has said that he hadn't planned for the child to have such a major role in the plot. This editor suspects it was a Ret Con when he caught the mistake. Really, who else was going to notice?)
The Invisible Man is a classic example. A power many dream about becomes a terrible burden without an off switch. In most film and TV adaptations of the book, the titular Invisible Man goes crazy.
- In the original H.G. Wells story, he was already a sociopath before he was invisible. In fact he set out to become invisible so he could wreak havoc and dominate the world. But this still fits the trope. The very first invisible day he has to strip naked to become totally unseen - in London in wintertime. And as he's freezing to death, the usual crowd of Londoners going about their winter shopping business almost trample him to death, since they don't realize that he's there.
The Picture Of Dorian Gray is an arguable case, as while Dorian actually gets something desired by most people, eternal youth, he misuses it so badly that it eventually becomes a torture for him.
Ella Enchanted is based entirely on this, as a fairy - who believes she is giving a blessing - curses Ella with complete obedience. Said fairy, despite everyone else's horror, never understands that she has blessed Ella with suck.
- That is, until the fairy is tricked into blessing herself with suck.
Stephen R. Donaldson seems to love this trope, judging from the cases of several characters in the Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant:
- Lord Mhoram's precognition serves mainly to give him horrible dreams about the future he can do nothing about.
- The Healer of Morinmoss can heal practically anything, but she has to share the pain of her patient. She became a hermit for the reason of not being able to take it anymore.
- Later on, Linden's health-sense means that she's in pain whenever her surroundings are warped by evil magic, which is the case pretty much constantly for long periods of time.
- Seadreamer has a very powerful second sight type ability that cannot be turned off, but he has trouble communicating what he sees, since the horror of it has struck him permanently mute. This results in other people being worried because Seadreamer is so miserable, but continuing on their doomed course anyway, since they don't know what trap they are walking into. Seadreamer's tragedy is that he never took a level in mime.
- As for Covenant himself, he has trouble using his own power of wild magic while it makes him central to the machinations of a superintelligent Evil Overlord.
In JRR Tolkien's Middle-Earth stories, human mortality is described as "the gift of death". Err, thanks?
- Actually, this was a gift because it meant that humans could fight fate. Although it still seems like something of a cop-out.
  - This editor thought that it meant human souls were able to leave Middle Earth and travel somewhere else after death, while the immortal elves were cursed to live for all the ages of the world, but slowly fade away; when finally the world was destroyed and remade, the elves souls would be destroyed alongside it. If they died before that time, they could return to Middle Earth from the halls of the Valar (like Glorfindel did). Even sailing into the West to Aman/Valinor will not change that eventual fate. Elrond Half-Elven's children were given the Gift of Choice: to remain immortal, or to become mortal. Although that last one didn't work out so hot for Arwen after all, according to the Appendices.
  - Yeah, the movies kind of fucked this up because they interpreted the elves as having a more pop-culture form of immortality whereby they would die if they were killed. This isn't the case in the books, so those slow shots of Haldir and his dead friends at Helm's Deep intended to make you think "wow, they gave up eternal life..." don't mean anything.
  - Elrond and his brother were also given the Gift of Choice, because their father was human and their mother was elvish (hence, half-elven). Elrond chose elvish immortality, his brother chose human mortality, (and was Aragorn's great, great, great, etc, etc, great, great, etc, Grandfather. So Arwen is actually his first cousin many, many times removed. She's also almost three thousand years old).
- This troper wonders if The One Ring can be a form of Blessed With Suck; sure, you can turn invisible, but then you will go insane.
  - This also applies to the Rings of Power, in particular the nine given to men which turned their wearers into Ringwraiths.
  - The rings were deliberately designed to corrupt and enslave. They're more like Schmuck Bait.
In the Dragonlance series, Raistlin Majere was "gifted" with metallic golden skin by Fistandantilus during his Test. Though simply meant to be a cool appearance trait at the time, it was later retconned into providing some measure of protection against fire magics. Before the Test, Raistlin was described as fairly handsome, if frail; afterwards, the strange appearance makes him nigh unapproachable by anybody except his brother and closest ~~friends~~, err... ~~companions~~, err...tolerated company. Not that his winning personality helps matters any.
- Not to mention the hour-glass pupils he received during his Test of Wizardry too. They allowed him to "see time as it affects all things". While it may have helped him view the time streams in his later role as "The Master of Past and Present", it meant that Raistlin was constantly forced to see everyone grow old and die before his eyes; food would rot, trees become leafless and bare, even stone would slowly crumble and erode if viewed long enough. Needless to say this didn't improve his mood or mental health. (The Hourglass Eyes were indeed initially meant as a sort of curse by the allegedly good archwizard who gave them to Raistlin, to "teach him humility". Raistlin later took revenge on him for that.)
One of our favorite examples comes from the later Oz books by L. Frank Baum. One of the books assures us that while you are in the land of OZ, you can't die. This information comes after characters in the books have been chopped into pieces, beheaded, melted, and so forth and it's mentioned that you could be transformed into an inanimate object, turned into sand, and buried. Even so, you'd still be alive and presumably conscious. Forever. Thankfully the series never goes in that direction, but this troper read that idle speculation decades ago, and is still shuddering.
- This plot point was later retconned into the Tin Man's origin story. After his cursed axe cut off his own head, he replaced it with a tin one. The original head is still alive and very bitter about it.
- In some of the later Oz books, (such as The Magic of Oz) the villainous Nome King considers chopping up the denizens of Oz, then tossing the pieces into a powerful river in order to scatter them forever. Baum was aware of at least some of the truly dreadful applications this immortality could have.
Every single character in Xanth has a power. Naturally, not all of them are going to be winners. The first books gives us a doozy in the form— forms, rather—of a woman named Chameleon. Sometimes she's ugly, nasty, and smart (She goes by "Fanchon" when she's like this). Other times, she's pretty, sweet, and dumb (And she goes by Wynne when she's like this. In the middle stage she goes by Dee). (And since the obvious implication is that smart women aren't pretty or nice—and the transformation happens on a monthly schedule—at all times she's offending the heck out of the female readers.)
- In a later book, after Bink marries Chameleon, it mentions that while she always has qualities he finds attractive no matter what stage she's in, he prefers when she's in her "Dee" stage because she's attractive enough to still be a physical turn on, but smart enough that he's not turned off by the fact that she can't tie her shoelaces without a map to find her ass. Still a bit sexist, but surely better than the obvious answer.
  - Of course, it does mention this alongside pointing out that he's trying to keep his head down at the moment because right now she's A) Fanchon, B) pregnant, and therefore C) excessively aggressive and moody, and literally chewing the walls of their cottage cheese.
Quite a few of the aliens in Animorphs have powers. Taxxons have a pretty twisted take on the Extreme Omnivore ability: their ability to eat nearly anything stems from their instinctive and nearly psychotic hunger which can almost never be sated. Everything they can eat, they will eat, no questions. Which is to say, if you are a Taxxon and you get a paper cut in front of your crewmates, goodbye.
- The Animorphs themselves qualify. They are given the power to turn into any animal they touch, but with it they are given the responsibility to use it to fight against the Yeerk invasion (not to mention the risk of losing their shapeshifting power and being stuck in animal form forever if they go over the time limit). The war ends up being very traumatic for all of them.
  - Not to mention the Yeerks themselves (some of them, at least). Such is the curse of the parasite with the ability to grow a conscience.
Will Parry in His Dark Materials may be the king of this trope. He is destined to be the bearer of the Subtle Knife, which can slice through the barriers between worlds. Gaining it mutilated his left hand, the "sign of the Bearer". On top of this, every single time he uses it, for good or ill, he creates a hole into which Dust drains out of the world, and through which more Spectres are unleashed.
Henry in The Time Traveler's Wife is another very extreme case, sitting very comfortably in the realm of Deus Angst Machina. Sure, he can time-travel - but he doesn't have any control over it. His ability targets the most memorable places, people, and events in his life - the traumatic ones as even more so than the positive ones. For every time he gets to visit his wife as a teenager or his infant daughter as a ten-year-old, he has to watch his ex-girlfriend kill herself over him or see his mother die for the fiftieth time. And on top of all this, the story takes place in an Eternist Universe. Basically, everything that has ever happened, good and bad, was supposed to happen the way it did, and Henry can't do a damn thing about it. It doesn't take him long to wonder if the Universe is actively f***ing with him. (Indeed, the only way his time-traveling would have been more Blessed-With-Suck-worthy would have been if the author had remembered to factor in the different positions of the Earth throughout time.)
A very strange short story in one of the Flight anthologies centers around a little girl who constantly hovers about a foot off the ground. The tale recounts all the myriad ways that she is made miserable by this power, building towards the finale where a massive flood leaves her the only person alive!
In Hyperion by Dan Simmons, Jesuit archaeologist Father Dure is... given a "cruciform" parasite by the aboriginal Bikura tribe, which grants them the ability to regenerate from death. The bad news is that it gradually turns the host into a genderless moron, and punishes them with crippling pain the farther they go from the Bikura village.
A story in Ursula Le Guin's Changing Planes describes a race of humanoid aliens called the Gyr in which about one in every thousand sprouts wings in young adulthood, which carries several disadvantages. Firstly, the wing-growth process takes a year and is very painful and incapacitating. Secondly, winged people develop lightweight hollow bones which make them more vulnerable to injury. Worst of all, those who attempt flight have a tendency to suddenly lose control of their wings and crash — if it isn't fatal, they're stuck with useless, cumbersome wings. And trying to remove the wings surgicially causes slow, painful death. Hence, most winged people don't even try flying, and those who do are considered eccentric and foolish.
Floyd Jones, the driving character (though almost never the viewpoint character) of Philip K Dick's The World Jones Made can see a year into the future. Too bad his future sight is actually made of memories broadcast by his future self to his past self, essentially stripping him of free will.
Stephen King's The Green Mile: John Coffey blesses Paul Edgecomb with an extremely long life (He's 104/108 at the time of the book/movie) and immunity to most diseases. Which sounds really, really, great...until you realize that almost everyone he's ever loved has died before him.
- Making it even worse, though, is that a mouse similarly blessed by Coffey lived at least fifty years, and the average lifespan of a lab mouse is about two years. If Paul similarly lives at least 25 times an average lifespan, he might have upwards of 2000 years of increasing physical decrepitude in a lousy nursing home to look forward to.
The short story "All You've Ever Wanted" by Joan Aiken concerns a girl living with her aunts and getting a nice birthday card each year from her fairy godmother with a greetings card type little wish. Problem was they always came true. When it said 'Each morning make another friend / Who'll be with you till light doth end', that year turned into a gruelling social whirl with not one single day sitting quietly at home. When it wished she could enjoy fresh air knowing her friends were nearby, she was forced to go on hours long hikes, watching her new friends flash past in cars, never offering her a lift. When it wished that flowers might follow in her footsteps, flowers literally grew up after her, and she had to move into the shed and ended up with a permanent cold. She spent her entire youth looking forward to her 21st birthday when she could meet her fairy godmother and ask her to please stop.
In A Fistful Of Sky by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Gypsum LaZelle finally comes into magical power...and she inherits the power of curses. She has to curse people, FREQUENTLY, or she dies. She manages to work out solutions to this pretty well, though.
Several different characters in the Whateley Universe, sometimes for very different reasons. Tennyo has unbelievable powers of regeneration, and powers so awesome that she seems unstoppable. In the story "Christmas Crisis" she really cut loose to save her parents from a group of madmen. Her powers not only killed them all in horrific ways but irradiated the entire area and warped reality to the point that the U.S. Government had to nuke the place to seal off a rift in space-time that might have eventually destroyed the planet. Ick. Then there's Antenna, who has awesome lightning powers.. which he can't turn off. He constantly gives off lightning bolts that would kill a normal human (and most mutants), and has to go around in a big 'baby walker' thing with energy drains on it, just so he can leave his room without electrocuting everyone around him. At Whateley Academy there's a girl with the power bestowed by the spirit of the hamster. Not only is she mocked by everyone else in school for having one of the lamest powers around, but she grew fur and cheek pouches so she can't pass as normal either.
Ben and his dog Ned in Castaways of the Flying Dutchman are given eternal youth and the understanding of all Earth's languages so they can be agents for the side of good on Earth. Unfortunately, they constantly have to move on as soon as they've finished this book's adventure to avoid people getting suspicious, they're always haunted by nightmares of the Flying Dutchman, and there is the risk that the ship will actually find them. And that's not even getting into the fact that Ben was fourteen at the time he was granted this "blessing". Eternal youth is fine, but eternal puberty?
Doli of the Prydain Chronicles comes from a family with the power of invisibility and is infuriated by the fact that he cannot do it. When he finally is granted the power by Prince Gwydion, he is called to use it so often by his companions that he becomes sick of it. Then again, he complains about everything.
In Feast of Souls by C.S. Friedman, Kamala's powers as a Magister end up being Blessed With Suck considering what it takes to fuel them.
In The Stars My Destination, there are naturally born human telepaths. However, Mother Nature is a fickle bitch and so just as many are both with the opposite ability: they constantly involuntarily broadcast their thoughts to everyone around them, and are unable to hear others' thoughts in return.

Live Action TV

River Tam from Firefly (and its sequel movie, Serenity) is an obvious case. Government experiments gave her vaguely portrayed mind-reading abilities and Waif Fu ... the side effect? She's traumatized and schizophrenic.
Non-superpowered example: In New Tricks, Brian 'Memory' Lane is a brilliant detective with an instant-recall photographic memory that allows him to rattle off not only the details of long-unsolved crimes but also the full career histories of the investigating officers involved and makes him a near-flawless investigator... if not for the crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that it stems from, which if he doesn't adequately medicate himself leaves him a manic depressive and obsessive paranoiac who is almost entirely unable to function, and even when fully medicated at the best of times renders him an anti-social and anal (if essentially decent) pedant.
Very similarly, Adrian Monk from Monk is a brilliant detective, but suffers a moderate case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Unlike Brian, he does not need medications to function normally, but must overcome or circumvent issues that directly interfere with his need for everything to be clean, sanitary, and perfectly arranged by shape, size, and color. Monk fulfills the Blessed With Suck trope in that, if he does take medication to suppress his OCD, his investigative brilliance goes with it.
- Not to mention his brilliant detective skills made him an enemy, resulting in the death of his wife, the only thing in life that ever really made him happy.
In Buffy The Vampire Slayer being the Slayer has granted Buffy incredible levels of physical strength and endurance to the point where she's almost a superhero at times - however, the duties that come with being the Slayer have destroyed any chance she has of living a normal life and almost guarantee that she will die a premature and most-likely painful death at the hands of her enemies.
- In the Buffyverse, the soul can be seen as a form of meta-Blessed With Suck; its acquisition is the cause of Badass Decay, after all.
- Willow's magical and sexual empowerment is what leads her directly into becoming a Psycho Lesbian. After all this time, this troper is still sick about it.
If you consider the superpowers in Heroes to be blessings (which, given the almost divine nature of evolution in the series, may very well be literally true), a lot of people get the short end of the stick:
- Nikki/Jessica is possessed by a Super Powered Evil Side.
- Ted uncontrollably emits deadly radiation when feeling emotion, which results in the death of his girlfriend. He could also destroy an entire city, the aversion of which becomes the main plot of season one.
- Peter is one of the few (well, two, the other being Hiro) Heroes who knew how his power had the potential to help people...until it's revealed that being able to absorb so many powers could make him unstable and explode. He then becomes another Blessed With Suck believer.
- Heck, having any superpower means that it's only a matter of time before either Sylar or Primatech Paper tracks you down, so anyone without truly awesome powers to fight them off has been royally Blessed With Suck.
- Speaking of Sylar, you'd think that someone who got to pick their powers would be able to avoid this, but no, he saddled himself with super-hearing, giving him a crippling weakness to loud noises. Despite the fact that the woman he took it from told them what a nuisance she found it, he still chose to blow his cover stealing it.
- In Season Two, we meet Maya and Alejandro. Maya's ability is, essentially, to kill everyone within ten feet of her if she gets upset. She once kills a whole town when he power first manifests. At a wedding. Alejandro's ability somehow reverses this... sometimes. A few fans have therefore dubbed them the "Blessed With Suck Twins".
- Adam's power seems to be Blessed With Suck as well given that he's immortal and can't die, and in the second volume finale Hiro left him inside of a buried coffin, despite the fact that Hiro originally planned to chop off Adam's head (which would have killed him for real). Just more proof that you should Beware The Nice Ones.
- Season 3 reveals that Sylar's original powers fit here as well. It turns out that his power to instantly understand how something works also comes with a hunger to understand things. For Sylar, this means being obsessed with Mega Manning as many powers as possible, fitting right into With Great Power Comes Great Insanity. Seems just about every power has some Suck to it.
- Or how about Hiro himself? In the first season, he can handle freezing time okay - but takes an insane amount of concentration or a good motivation, but he was unable to teleport WITHOUT accidentally travelling in time as well.
Jack Bauer of 24 could qualify despite not having a superpower (other than the power to be Badass). He's an incredibly talented CTU agent, the best in the field, the goto guy for every problem concerning National Security. At the cost of his family, friends and co-workers getting killed, being a wanted man by terrorists and foreign nations, and virtually having no chance at a normal life because when he tries, he always gets sucked back in.
James Heller: "You're cursed, Jack. Everything you touch, one way or another, winds up dead."
Speaking of touching and death, the main character of Pushing Daisies has the power to return the dead to life with a touch...but, he can't ever touch them again if he doesn't want them Killed Off For Real. Of course, since he brought his true love back from the dead, this is sort of problematic...
- And if Ned doesn't re-kill someone again with a second touch within one minute, someone else nearby has to die in their place.
Sam from Reaper started out Cursed With Awesome, but after the first couple of episodes wound up Blessed With Suck.
Sam Winchester from Supernatural could be considered Blessed With Suck. As one of a group of psychic children, some of whom have powers such as super strength, mind control, telekinesis, and the ability to electrocute people with a touch, he gets uncontrollable, painful visions of violent deaths. As one of the other psychics put it: "Dude, sucks."
The fact that Telepaths are Blessed With Suck is a major plot point of Babylon 5.
John from New Amsterdam saves the life of an Indian woman, who in return grants him eternal life and youth until he finds his soul mate, who he will know by feeling it in his heart. Unfortunately, this means he suffers a heart attack that would normally be fatal once he gets near her.
In the first season of Power Rangers, Tommy Oliver joined the team as the Green Ranger and was considered the strongest ranger at first. However, due to manipulation of his powers by the villains, his powers were weakened and had to be constantly recharged.
Gwen Raiden of Angel has a massive dose of this. Sure, her ability to manipulate electricity makes her a fearsome weapon, gets her in a lot of places she could never otherwise go, and makes her oodles of money as a professional thief...but at the expense of even the smallest human intimacies and any semblance of a normal life. Not to mention the trauma of getting regularly struck by lightning and accidentally injuring and killing people who are actually nice to her.
In Early Edition, a TV series where a magical mysterious (but otherwise normal) cat delivers tomorrow's newspaper (a Chicago Sun Times) today, Gary Hobson views it as a curse rather than a blessing. He feels morally obliged to stop tomorrow's bad news, and similarly morally obliged to not to look up tomorrow's lottery numbers and stock tips. Subverted in one episode where a man from New York who gets tomorrow's newspaper from a parrot lives rich and happy, and has employees doing his work for him.
Some of the returnees in The 4400 are Blessed With Suck. While some get cool abilities like healing and seeing the future, others get lame powers (talking to plants) or horrible afflictions (Sherilyn Fenn's character grows toxic spores all over her body which kill everyone who comes near her.)
The Greatest American Hero had a comical example of Blessed With Suck. Granted, it's technically Ralph's fault for losing the instructions to his supersuit in the first place. Just imagine having unlimited power at your command... and you can't even figure out how it works! There's this, and also the embarrassment of having to wear what looks like red pajamas out in public.
Ralph: I mean, I could kill the guy that designed this suit! Why couldn't it have narrow lapels and a cutaway jacket? Why'd it have to be long johns and a cape?
Stargate SG-1 has Daniel Jackson who gets ascended to a higher plane of existence. Tha catch? He is not allowed to do anything to interfere with our level so he must sit by and watch the series' actual Big Bad (actual because the show takes Evil Power Vacuum to its extreme logical conclusion) destroying his home galaxy. He decides to get better (worse?) then.
Tommy Dawkins from Big Wolf On Campus falls under this trope. Sure, being a werewolf does have its benefits...but not when one also has to deal with cravings for chicken, transformations for reasons OTHER than a full moon, and the fact that everyone else (Save for his two best friends and a few monster allies) thinks he's an evil monster.

Mythology

One of the earliest examples is the Greek myth of King Midas. Everything he touched turned to gold. When he tried eating, he discovered the downside.
- Turning his own daughter into a gold statue was pretty sucky, too.
  - That wasn't part of the original myth, though.
  - If you think that's bad, when he tried to get a drink of water, it turned into liquid gold. As in "molten." Ouch.
  - Wow! That's infinite energy? Too bad they didn't know it back then... Also, did the story mention inflation? If not, and with some creative ideas, it could've been Cursed With Awesome...
  - At least until he starves to death.
  - He could have worn gloves, I think.
  - Not exactly. It still touches his throat, larynx, stomach...
- Good thing he never went in for a day at the seaside. Ice-9, anyone?
Cassandra got the power of prophecy as a gift from Apollo... but when she spurned him, he declared that—though she was always right—no one would ever believe her.
- And it never occured to her to lie... Poor girl!
  - It's implied that she didn't have a choice...which makes it even worse.

New Media

Just how pervasive is this trope? Well, recently on Homestar Runner, StrongBad got an email asking what he would do if he had the ability to transform. StrongBad immediately assumes that he'd have to somehow be Blessed With Suck:
"If comic books, cartoons, and Sci-Fi Original Movies have taught me anything, it's that shapeshifting comes with a bunch of boring rules and restrictions that limit its potential Turn-Into-A-Bulldozer-Whenever-I-Wantity. You can turn into a machine gun but not bullets, contemporary jazz turns you back to normal, you can only turn into presents your grandma's knitted for you. Crap like that. For example, let's say I could turn into any species... OF BALLOON ANIMAL!!??"
The trait positive girls from lonelygirl15 have a significantly longer lifespan than the average person due to the number of ribozymes in their blood which catalyse their own synthesis. Unfortunately, there are some people would like to take that blood for themselves, so, essentially, to be trait positive is to be forever on the run from people who want to kill you.

Tabletop Games

Paladins in Dungeons And Dragons are sometimes depicted as being such Slaves To PR as to have little free will. Thus, they must do the most obvious "lawful good" action to any situation, even if the end result will obviously be bad, or else lose their powers or worse. Many have called this interpretation "Lawful Stupid."
- 4th Edition averts this by only requiring that Paladins hold the same alignment as their parton deity, which opens up the door for Unaligned or even Chaotic Evil Paladins (Though good luck finding Channel Divinity feats for your unholy warrior of Vecna in the Player's Handbook).
The Harrowed in Deadlands fit this to a proverbial "T". Not many people get a second shot at life, even if it is in the "crawling your way out of the grave" sort of way. Being harder to kill (again) and manifesting some of the game's strongest powers sounds great...until your personal demon takes over, often resulting in deaths among your posse. The only player character type that has more power has even more suck: vampires.
Psykers in Warhammer 40000, especially amongst humans. The fate of the overwhelming majority of psykers in the Imperium is to die at their hands of their fellow humans, who hate and despise them. And if they're lucky, said death will just be a bullet through the brainpan or being burned at the stake. And if they aren't caught and killed (or controlled by the Imperium, not a nice fate either), they usually go insane.
- Similarly, the followers of Nurgle get all sorts of "gifts" from their patron, that often take the form of diseases. They prefer to see it as Cursed With Awesome, however, as because they are permanently in pain, they can't feel any other pain. So they keep fighting until you kill them.
- Mages from Warhammer don't get off much better, the people generally fear and hate them but at least the government isn't out to get them. This is really only the case in the Empire though, in most other regions mages are honored and respected; especially the Elves and Lizardmen.
- Actually, just going insane is pretty lucky for a 40K Psyker (and Warhammer Mages, for that matter); the reason the Imperium is so hard on psykers is because, if they're not trained properly, they get their soul eaten by a Daemon, who then borrows the body for a bit of a rampage. There are occasional references to whole worlds being destroyed because of one unportected psytker- either because of a daemonic infestation, or because the Imperium used Exterminatus (destroying all life on the planet) to halt it.
Being a supernatural creature in the World Of Darkness is quite often a blessing with suck:
- Vampires have great power, but they're also locked in an eternal war with their Superpowered Evil Side, which they almost all lose eventually. This along with the blood-drinking and the sun burning you to ash. Oh, and boredom. Lots and lots of boredom.
- Werewolves are brutally powerful... and locked in a war with the spirit world and half of their own race. Not to mention the Unstoppable Rage that, even when successfully directed away from innocents, causes a subtle aura that creeps out/drives off Muggles... and the consequences of mating with their own kind.
- Prometheans define Blessed With Suck - despite their supernatural strength, their mere presence turns the world miserable and drives humans insane, they're hunted by Pandorans (twisted entities made when an attempt to create a Promethean fails) that long for their flesh, and the only way out is To Become Human.
- Changelings in the new World of Darkness are the only group that have it worse - magical abilities are a cold gift when you can never be sure The Fair Folk won't show up one day and drag you back into Arcadia to serve the wretched life of a slave.
- Being a Mage isn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. The world the Awakening opens up, however, is a different matter. The world you knew was a Lie, created by dark gods. Its rulers want the world's magic all to themselves. There's a gaping hole in the universe that's inimical to all existence. And then there are the Banishers, mages who blame magic for everything that's wrong with the world, and seek to eliminate it whenever they can...
- At this rate, God help the Hunters.
  - The Hunters, oddly enough, might be considered to have it easiest; most of them are ordinary mortals without any superpowers. The catch? They get to go up against all of the above supernatural creatures... without any superpowers. Then there's the toll hunting can take on an ordinary life. Oh, and there's the risk of turning into the antagonist in a Slasher Movie, too. Those few Hunters who /do/ get superpowers often find things don't get any easier...
  - And, of course, Hunters can be used as antagonists in order to further outline the Blessed With Suck side of being a supernatural...
In White Wolf's other RPG, Exalted, the entire world is blessed with suck. While every imaginable wondrous phenomenon is a possibility there, the presence of so many strong, unswavering wills with different opinions is destined to break out in a devastating conflict. 1st ed canon has this conflict resolved in the creation of the above-mentioned World Of Darkness, and that's one of the best possible outcomes.
In the world of Paranoia, this is used on a number of levels. Firstly, due to problems in the cloning vats everyone in Alpha Complex is a mutant, with powers ranging from super-strength and the like, to the truly sucky like having a perpetually runny-nose. However, because the crazed-computer that runs the complex refuses to accept that its methods cause mutations, being a mutant means you're assumed to be a spy and are subject to immediate termination from the computer or (more likely) your teammates (who, as mentioned are also mutants), if ever someone notices that you are using your power. Machine Empathy is a particularly suck to be blessed with, as the computer immediately notices it, and execution is immediate. Finally, for every mission in the game, you are assigned equipment to use including futuristic weapons such as tangler guns and plasma rifles, but also crappy things such as Heisenberg uncertainty projectors, personal force shields working on a fusion reactor kept stable by a hand crank, robots with obnoxious personalities, and small useless boxes with loads of different buttons, dials and LE Ds. These items are usually very valuable, and financial responsibility, of course, falls on the clone the equipment is assigned to. Characters are frequently denied access to documentation for the devices with the explanation that the character is not of a high enough security clearance to view the manual. The purest-essence of Blessed With Suck comes when the team is given a mutant-detecting device... since everyone is a mutant, the only thing that results is non-stop beeping and a heightened chance of being shot.

Video Games

Tsukihime's protagonist has this, as he has the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, which allow him to perceive the nature of death itself in the form of lines and dots on everything. Which, despite being able to kill literally anything with a fruit knife, has the side effects of causing homicidal insanity and vastly shortening his lifespan - the human brain is not meant to comprehend death, thus creating

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