Chores Without Powers

"From now on you are forbidden to use your 'super powers'! You will do things like NORMAL LITTLE GIRLS!"

— Ima Goodlady (actually Sedusa in disguise), The Powerpuff Girls (1998), "Mommy Fearest"

A character has a superpower or magical ability that would make doing a mundane chore easier but ends up doing it the old-fashioned way. This is usually doled out as a punishment, with a parent/teacher/boss/general/other authority figure in charge sentencing them to perform a tedious or physically demanding task (mopping floors, washing dishes, digging holes, Peeling Potatoes, etc.) without using their powers. If the person in charge is especially strict, the hero may get a Power Limiter, Power Nullifier, or Restraining Bolt slapped on to prevent them from cheating their way out of it. If they do try to cheat by using their powers, expect things to go hilariously wrong and the episode to deliver An Aesop about not taking shortcuts to success.

It's not always a punishment; sometimes a character with powers chooses to do something by hand as a way of dealing with their emotions through hard work, to put themselves on equal footing with a companion who doesn't have powers, out of curiosity about how the local Muggles do it, or just to make sure that they can do tasks without having to rely on their powers.

The "chores without powers as punishment" version may involve a little Break the Haughty and provide some Character Development if the character has been getting arrogant or careless with their powers lately, especially if said powers can be used to destructive effect. (Remember that With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.) A bit of hard work may give them time to reflect on the thing they did wrong and help them gain more appreciation for their powers when they're allowed to use them again. On the other hand, it can be unjustified when it's used by a Sadist Teacher or other unpleasant authority figure to make the character's life harder.

Overlaps with Punishment Detail, related to Brought Down to Normal and Misery Builds Character, and a subversion of Mundane Utility and Utility Magic. Compare We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future, where a science fiction setting features manual labor despite the presence of labor-saving devices like robots or Matter Replicators. If the Kid Hero complains about having to do this, it may overlap with Kids Hate Chores. If these chores are part of physical training, it can overlap with Wax On, Wax Off. This is a prime opportunity for Chore Character Exploration.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ah! My Goddess: While her powers aren't stripped away, Belldandy is punished for using her powers without permission and restricted from using them for a week. Any use of her powers at that time would see a permanent ban, no matter the justification she used. This doesn't really affect her day-to-day routines, as Bell typically does the household chores without her powers anyway (Keiichi in the early days was fearful she'd be found out and asked her not to use them unless it was an emergency, so she is accustomed to doing things in a mundane way). However, when a device Skuld created to make a storeroom Bigger on the Inside malfunctions and turns the room into an infinite space with Bell and Keiichi in the middle, Bell fears that Keiichi might starve in the slotted week. Fortunately, Keiichi remembers that Skuld's device affects width and breadth, but not height. He and Bell are able to exit by removing a floor panel.

Comic Books

• Douwe Dabbert: In "De kast met duizend deuren" ("The Closet with a Thousand Doors"), wizard children Pief, Kijfje, and Domoli get into an argument that quickly escalates into a huge Food Fight. As a punishment, their fathers have the kids clean up all the mess without using magic. It keeps them up all night.
• One The Powerpuff Girls (1998) comic had the Professor feeling the girls had been putting off cleaning their room for too long, and telling them they couldn't go outside until they had finally cleaned it. The girls first try cleaning it with their powers, but when they try to show that they've cleaned their room to the Professor, it has mysterious wound up just as messy as it was before. Confused, they try cleaning it again without their powers the second time, but the same thing happens again, and they figure something is up. Turns out HIM was making their room messy again every time they cleaned it for his own amusement and to make it so the girls wouldn't be able to leave the house to fight crime.
• Superman (Phillip Kennedy Johnson): In the Warworld Rising arc, Kal-El gets enslaved, and ends up fighting as a gladiator. He's depowered as long as he remains on that planet, as it's under a red sun.
• Thunderbolts: After Jolt has a stroke, part of her physical therapy is to perform mundane tasks without switching over to her lightning form in order to strengthen her physical body.

Fan Works

• Address Unknown (Remedy): Pegasus mailponies are sometimes punished by being forced to deliver mail on hoof, which they see as humiliating. However, this allows Derpy to prove she really is good at her job.
• Aftermath of the Games: In Integration, Sunset Shimmer remembers when she was still Princess Celestia's apprentice, and still arrogant and power-hungry. When she was caught trying to learn forbidden knowledge and then argued that she deserved to rule as her mentor's equal, Celestia suspended her magic lessons and made her wash dishes in the royal kitchen by hoof, and told the guards to put a horn ring on her if she resisted.
• In the Darkwing Duck villains-centric fanfic Back to Basics, after their latest (off-screen) screw-up, Negaduck kicks Quackerjack and Megavolt out of the Fearsome Five. To get back in and stay alive, they have to steal something big worth his notice and deliver it to an old abandoned ammunition factory by midnight the next day without their gimmicks. So they choose to recruit a few non-superpowered criminals to help them pull off the heist, and use the internet to intercept F.O.W.L.'s latest scheme and get there first. And end up hounded by not only Darkwing but eventually others as well.
• In Bastard (Harry Potter), when Gil blows up a cauldron at home, his stepfather orders him to clean up the mess without using magic or the house elves' help.
• one day at a time (Nyame): During their visit to the Kent farm, after Jon and Damien end up fighting, Jason punishes them by having them clear all the manure out of the barn without Jon using his powers. However, he didn't say no to using the manure vacuum...which Jon figures out. Since Jason had been listening in on them and knew they'd learned their lesson and become friends before Jon came up with this idea, he congratulates them on their clever thinking.
• Pony POV Series: Sparkler is a unicorn, while her mother Derpy is a pegasus. One time, when Sparkler was a filly, Derpy took her along on her mail-carrying job to show her how hard it was and had her carry filly-sized mailbags. When Sparkler complained that it was easier for Derpy since she could fly, Derpy came down and walked the rest of the route with her on hoof.
  Sparkler: ... Momma... why did you walk all the way?
  Derpy: Because, muffin, you were bright, it wasn't right for me blue fly while you bad to walk. I'd never take my muffin do something I wouldn't do myself.

Films — Animated

• Bartok the Magnificent: Baba Yaga casts a grounding spell on Bartok the bat just before sending him to fetch a magical feather hovering above the ground. He succeeds after building a tower made out of iron scraps.
• Sleeping Beauty: When the three good fairies go into hiding to raise Princess Aurora, they put away their wands, disguise themselves as humans and do everything the old-fashioned way for the next sixteen years, so Maleficent won't find them. When the time is almost up, however, two of them try to make a cake and a fancy dress and fail so miserably that they resort to magic after all, catching Maleficent's attention.

Literature

• The Belgariad:
  • Belgarath is forced to help his daughter and son-in-law build their house without using magic since they want it done "honestly." It doesn't stop him from resorting to using magic whenever their backs are turned, though.
  • Polgara often does domestic work like cooking and mending without sorcery because she enjoys it or it gives her some quiet time to relax from shaping the fate of nations. When Garion questions her about it, she repairs a torn garment with a word, tears it again, and goes back to sewing it. As a bonus, millennia of practice have made her the world's best chef.
• Discworld: Witches and Wizards are constantly warned to not use magic for personal tasks. A common admonition is that the hardest thing about magic is not doing it. This isn't as a punishment as it is a warning, as magic is inherently unpredictable and dangerous. Tiffany Aching once stated that if you tried to sweep the floor magically, the hard part would be to not rip up the flagstones as well.
• Epithet Erased: Prison of Plastic: As part of a test for becoming one of Giovanni's minions, Lorelai is made to make cookies without using her Epithet. However, Lorelai repeatedly cheats out of paranoia, becoming so stressed she wastes most of her time and does very little work without magic. The cookies end up being absolutely terrible and everyone is well aware she didn't bake them normally, resulting in her failing the Secret Test of Character, as she cared too much about winning.
• In the children's story Everella's Wand, Everella is a fairy in charge of filling the meadows with flowers and the trees with singing birds. She gets bored with her job and starts using her wand solely to make herself dresses, jewelry, and candy, becoming indulgent and lazy. When her wand stops working, she is told by the fairy queen that she has to live as a human and work for Dame Malkins the baker as penance. She doesn't get her wand and wings back until she's worked for a long time and passed a Secret Test of Character by letting Dame Malkins use her wand as a walking stick when the baker is feeling too ill to get out of bed.
• Harry Potter: Misbehaving students at Hogwarts are frequently punished by having to do chores without using magic.
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: When Harry and Ron get detention for crashing the Weasley family's car into the Whomping Willow, Harry has to help Lockhart answer his fan mail, while Ron has to polish the silver in the Hogwarts trophy room using elbow grease. Harry comments that he'd gladly switch, as he's had lots of practice cleaning while living with the Dursleys. This later gives the Trio a vital clue: Tom Riddle's name is on one of those trophies.
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: When Snape calls Hermione a know-it-all in class and makes her cry, Ron stands up for her. Snape punishes him by sentencing him to scrub out the bedpans in the hospital wing by hand.
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:
    • During Christmas break, Harry and Ron aren't old enough yet to use magic outside of school, so they have to peel a mountain of sprouts for Christmas dinner with a sprout knife. Fred and George are old enough that they could do it with magic, but being the trolls they are, they prefer to stand there and tease the younger boys.
      Ron: Can't you help us with these sprouts? You could just use your wand and then we'll be free too!
      Fred: (seriously) No, I don't think we can do that. It's very character-building stuff, learning to peel sprouts without magic, makes you appreciate how difficult it is for Muggles and Squibs —
      George: — and if you want people to help you, Ron, I wouldn't chuck knives at them. Just a little hint.^note Earlier in the conversation, Ron threw a sprout knife at Fred for asking if his new girlfriend Lavender had gotten brain damage before agreeing to date him.
    • After Harry uses the Sectumsempra curse on Malfoy and ends up hospitalizing him, he is punished by being sent to the school's archive where he has to copy out the records of crimes and punishments from years ago without using magic.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: When Dobby is killed by Bellatrix in the process of saving the lives of Harry and his friends, Harry refuses to use magic to dig his grave, and digs a hole in the ground with a spade for him, as a way of dealing with his grief. The narration comments that "he dug with a kind of fury, relishing the manual work, glorying in the non-magic of it, for every drop of his sweat and every blister felt like a gift to the elf who had saved their lives." When Ron and Dean come out and see him digging the grave, they don't ask why he's not doing it with magic, and help him dig until the hole's deep enough.
• Star Wars Legends: Early on in the Hand of Thrawn duology Luke makes a conscious decision to limit the amount he uses his force powers when a group of aliens tell him that he and other Jedi are too reliant on them, and do more things the old fashioned way.
• The Testament Of Solomon: the Archangel Michael grants King Solomon a magic ring with the power to enslave demonkind and coerce them in building The Temple of Jerusalem. Each demon in the story is stripped of their powers and relies on their physical body (or a fraction of their original power) to complete menial tasks, but Asmodeus' punishment is noteworthy for being both physically humiliating and psychologically distressing. After refusing to serve Solomon and defying his orders, the king commands the demon to make clay for the entire construction of the temple and carry beams with ten jars of water tied on them. The catch? Water is Asmodeus' Weaksauce Weakness.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • Students of the Aes Sedai contribute to all the White Tower's menial work to enforce general discipline, with extra chores assigned as punishment. It has the side benefit of keeping them too busy to try any unsupervised Channeling.
  • Inverted with their male counterparts, the Asha'man, who are forced to do all their chores with the One Power in the belief that quick battle-readiness is worth the attrition rate. If an Asha'man trainee can't channel heat to cook his food, he eats it cold.
• In the Frontier Magic books, where magic has many mundane uses, the protagonist's sister has married a man who belongs to a movement that disapproves of magic. Out of loyalty to him, she does chores manually; as they're living in a prairie settlement, this is very hard work and she is driven to betray her no-magic principles when it comes to protecting her children from mosquitoes.
• Circle of Magic: In Daja's Book, Niko orders the children to only use magic under supervision after realizing they had taken to using magic as a shortcut for mundane tasks (for example, stoking the flames in a forge) and for eavesdropping on conversations not meant for them.

Live-Action TV

• A self-inflicted example in Bewitched. Samantha Stephens, a witch married to a human, chooses (for the most part) to do housework without using her magical powers out of respect for her husband Darren's wishes for a "normal" home life.
• Smallville: In "Leech," Clark inadvertently loses his abilities to a fellow teen named Eric and has to face being Brought Down to Normal. One of his biggest struggles is doing chores around the farm: he remarks that while his Super-Strength usually allows him to finish his tasks in five minutes, it's now taking him two hours. Having to do things the human way also gives Clark a newfound respect for his father Jonathan, who's been doing manual labor without superpowers for decades.
• The Flash (2014): When Barry is coping with being Brought Down to Normal after his run in with Zoom in the episode "The Flash 2014 S 2 E 19 Back To Normal", he is faced with doing all his lab work at the speed he had before the explosion. When he knocks his coffee cup off the table, all he can do is look at it fall and break, when, had he his power, catching it unbroken would have been a reflex reaction.

Tabletop Games

• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition: The spell "Protection from Cantrips" stops any and all cantrips. The spell description even acknowledges a primary purpose of the spell is to make wizard apprentices do chores without magic.
• Warhammer:
  • Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000: The War God Khorne's domain has vast forges where enslaved sorcerers and cowards are forced to create magic weapons for his worthier champions to use.
  • Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Apprentices in the Colleges of Magic are often assigned mundane chores when they're not studying, not least to keep them too busy to attempt unsupervised magic. Trainee astromancers have been known to clean their masters' labs with Utility Magic, then add flaws to hide the act.

Video Games

• Inverted in Genshin Impact. Some daily commissions require the player to perform chores for various residents, such as cleaning dirt away from buildings or watering some plants. There is no way to complete them without using either Anemo or Hydro powers. Thankfully, every account will have both since the Traveler starts with Anemo abilities and Barbara is obtained for free after completing the game's prologue.

Western Animation

• Ben 10:
  • Ben 10: In the short "Survival Skills", Grandpa Max makes Ben start a campfire without using the Omnitrix. After trying unsuccessfully several times, he turns into Heatblast to do it, but Grandpa Max and Gwen come back before he can de-transform. They use him as the campfire and roast marshmallows over his head until he figures it out.
  • In the episode "Under Wraps," Max makes Ben and Gwen stay at a farm where they have to do some hard work as punishment for their inability to do their chores, Ben tries to go XLR-8 and finish quckly, but is stopped when Max tells him he has to do it without the Omnitrix.
  • Ben 10: Alien Force: The episode "Grounded" features Ben's parents discovering his secret, and grounding him for it in order to keep him from getting seriously hurt.
  • Ben 10: Omniverse: Ben destroy's Mr. Baumann's car and is forced to make deliveries for him, "alien-free" deliveries, as he's fed up with Ben destroying his things with the Omnitrix.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Winter Wrap-Up", Twilight participates in Ponyville's annual Winter Wrap-Up, where the ponies clear away the snow, awaken the animals, and plant crops to make way for spring. Since Ponyville was founded by earth ponies, it is tradition to do the event without magic. Twilight is a unicorn who relies on magic to do most things, so she struggles to find something she can do without magic. When she sees everyone arguing over the disorganization of the event, it hits her what she can do — coordinate all the tasks and ponies so that everything gets done correctly and on time. At the end, she is awarded the special title of All-Team Organizer for her efforts.
• The Powerpuff Girls: In "Mommy Fearest", the villainess Sedusa becomes the girls' Wicked Stepmother and forces them to clean the house. The heroines accomplish the task in a split second thanks to their Super-Speed, but Sedusa retaliates by thrashing the living room and ordering them to clean it again as "normal little girls". Forbidden from using their powers, the girls become unable to answer the city's calls for help, as they only manage to finish the job by nightfall.
• Superman: The Animated Series: Mister Mxyzptlk is punished in the Fifth Dimension for invading the Third Dimension (and bothering Superman with his antics) by making him stay in the Third Dimension without his powers for 90 days, during which he must perform a good deed for the beings he tortured there.
• Teen Titans Go!: After Robin's physical attacks prove useless in a fight against the Hive while the other Titans effortlessly defeat them with their powers, he challenges them to go a full day without using their powers just to prove that it's not so easy as they think. He even orchestrates an obstacle course with them thinking that he's in serious danger, goading them to use their powers and lose the challenge. Cyborg, Beast Boy, Starfire, and Raven all end up passing the course and seeing through his ruse, ultimately proving that he really is as useless as they assumed.
• Winx Club:
  • In the season 1 episode "Grounded", the main heroes are punished for sneaking into Cloud Tower in the previous episode by having to clean the whole school without their magic. They even have their powers temporarily taken away to make sure they stick to the punishment.
  • In season 1, headmistress Faragonda orders a librarian in Alfea to fix a mess that took place in the library with no magic, which seems to her like a hard thing to do.

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