Disability-Negating Superpower

A character who had previously lost one of their senses, limbs, or the ability to use any of the above gains some Stock Superpowers that, as a side effect, negate their disability while they are active. The drawback being, of course, that once the superpowers deactivate, the character goes right back to being physically handicapped (if they deactivate, anyway). The character may be a Henshin Hero or have a Superpowered Alter Ego to explain why they are still disabled part-time.

Contrast Curse That Cures, where it's a negative effect (rather than a beneficial superpower) that also accidentally fixes a disability; Disability Superpower, where the character gains superpowers as a result of and/or in order to compensate for their disability; and Superpower Disability, where the character is actually disabled in some way by gaining superpowers. See also Disability Immunity, where a disability a character suffers actually protects them in some situations. See also Not Disabled in VR, where the disability doesn't exist in a virtual world.

Because characters being permanently crippled, gaining superpowers or being miraculously cured are all usually plot-changing events, expect heavy spoilers.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Tetsuo of AKIRA gets his arm destroyed, and uses telekinesis to make and operate an artificial arm made from scrap.
• Birdmen: When Karasuma became one of the eponymous Birdmen, his vision was cured, so he doesn't wear his glasses anymore.
• Bleach:
  • Inverted by the Blind Weaponmaster Kaname Tosen. He has the power to remove all light from a region around him, effectively making his opponents as blind as he is, only he has an advantage in being way more experienced at moving around blind than his opponents will ever be.
  • Temporary example: After Uryu Ishida is paralyzed by Mayuri Kurotsuchi's poison, he uses a People Puppets Quincy power to manipulate his disabled limbs telekinetically and hops straight back into the fight.
• Chainsaw Man: Yoru is faceblind and it's implied one reason she took Asa's body but has kept her original mind alive is so Asa can identify other people for her.
• Near the end of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, in a rather dark turn, Tanjiro turning into a demon immediately heals the most damaging injuries he got with fighting against Muzan: his lost right eye and lost left arm grow back good as new. However, when Tanjiro is cured of his demonic condition and becomes human again, his eye and arm's healing process is disrupted — not to the point of losing them, but it renders Tanjiro with disabilities. His sight on the right eye is very poor, and he can just barely move his left arm now.
• A secondhand example in Future Boy Conan: attempts to torture Dr. Lao for information rendered him blind and deaf, but he has a Psychic Link with his granddaughter Lana (she has other Psychic Powers, but only outright telepathy with him) that lets him use her as his eyes and ears.
• Yuri Kitajishi in Gamma is eventually revealed to be paraplegic as a result of the injuries she sustained during her tenure as a Magical Girl, but since even residual traces of her old power were enough to keep her legs operational, she had never realized that—until she uses up the remainder of her powers completely in the ending.
• In Hunter × Hunter, some of Gon's and Killua's opponents in the Heavens Arena received Nen powers at the cost of some of their limbs. To compensate, they use their powers to stay fully functional: The man who lost an arm learned to channel his life force into solid constructs and used it to make a substitute arm, the paraplegic boy in a wheelchair learned to emit his life force and uses it as a means of fast propulsion, and the man who outright lost his legs has learned to spin really fast on his single peg leg to stay balanced and move about.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run: Johnny Joestar regains the use of his legs through both Tusk Act 4 and the Golden Spin returning sensation to them.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, Hayate Yagami is paralyzed from the waist down but regains the use of her feet as long as she is in Unison with Reinforce. Luckily for her, she recovers completely in the ten years' Time Skip to the next season.
  • In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid, the Sainkt Kaiser, Vivio's DNA template, was born without arms. She ends up using her superior martial arts skills to make her prosthetics move.
• In MÄR, when Ginta arrived at world of Mar Heaven, he noticed he doesn't need his glasses anymore, along with general Super-Strength.
• One Piece:
  • After the Time Skip, it's revealed that Aokiji lost a foot after the battle with Akainu. He uses his ice powers to create a replacement foot.
  • Similarly, Eustass Kid loses an arm during this same time skip and uses his magnetism powers to create a prosthetic arm made out of scrap metal parts.
• In the anime adaptation of Parasyte, after Migi fuses part of his body with Shinichi's in order to save his life, Shinichi gains a number of superhuman abilities. His first sign of the changes to his body is his discovery that he no longer needs his glasses.
• Pretty Cure
  • In HeartCatch Pretty Cure!, Tsubomi and Yuri are shown wearing glasses and/or contacts as normal girls, but when transformed into Cure Blossom and Cure Moonlight, they disappear and implied they don't need them.
  • In Healin' Good♡Pretty Cure, Nodoka has low stamina due to a respiratory disease she contracted when she was younger. When she first becomes Cure Grace, she discovers she is no longer held down by it in that form.

Comic Books

• In Avengers Arena and Avengers Undercover, Nico Minoru's magically generated Witch Arm compensates for the loss of one of her actual arms.
• Avengers: The Initiative:
  • Constrictor has both of his arms torn off by the villain K.I.A. Afterwards, the Initiative outfits him with new cybernetic arms that improve on his old abilities.
  • Another character, Komodo, uses a variant of the Lizard Serum to grow legs. She's absolutely terrified of being depowered, as it's the only way she can walk.
• Captain America is rooted in this — Steve Rogers wanted to join the Army and fight against the Nazis, but his sickly and frail body meant that he was rejected from the army. His devotion and patriotic nature, however, made him the perfect candidate to receive the Super Soldier Serum, which allowed him to become physically fit and the peak of human physicality.
• Daredevil: The same chemicals that blinded Matt Murdock also give him his signature radar senses, which let him neatly bypass many of the problems blind people experience in Real Life.
• Deadpool: Deadpool's Healing Factor keeps him alive despite a normally terminal form of cancer. Furthermore, the constant degeneration and regeneration of his brain due to his brain cancer and Healing Factor (respectively) is why he's out of his mind.
• The Incredible Hulk: In one storyline, Bruce Banner is shot in the head while turning into the Hulk. With the Hulk's Healing Factor, he survives (and even manages to remain in control of it) but, since the bullet remains lodged in his brain, has to refrain from turning back into Banner at all costs or die immediately. This continues until the Leader manages to remove the bullet.
• Iron Man: For a while, Tony Stark was completely paralyzed except when wearing his Iron Man armor. Earlier than that, Tony had to wear the chest plate that powered his suit, as it was the only thing keeping the shrapnel in his chest from reaching his heart.
• Shazam!:
  • Captain Marvel Junior is Freddy Freeman, who has an injured spine and leg, but when he is transformed into Captain Marvel Jr., his legs work just fine. It most pointedly does not permanently cure him, but at least having magic-based powers means his crutch and (where visible) leg brace simply re-materialize where they're needed when he powers down.
  • 52 introduces Freddy's counterpart in the Black Adam Family, Amon Tomaz/Osiris. Tortured by Intergang and rendered wheelchair-bound, Black Adam gave him some of his powers the same way that Billy gave some to Freddy, making him an able-bodied superhero. Unlike Freddy, Amon stayed in this form all the time, but he was rendered disabled again when he renounces his powers and is killed instantly by his friend Sobek.
• Spider-Man:
  • After a boxing match with Flash Thompson, Peter's glasses break, and he discovers that he can see perfectly; the spider bite that gave him his powers probably fixed it. He decides against using the glasses as a disguise.
  • Dr. Curt Conners designed the Lizard Serum with the aim of regrowing lost limbs as he had lost his in war. It worked way too well.
  • Flash Thompson lost both his legs in the Iraq War, but regrows them while he is bonded with the Venom symbiote. Since he is the first-ever person to actually control Venom, he narrowly averts a Curse That Cures.
• Trollhunters: The Secret History of Trollkind: When Bular blinds Deya with reflected sun, she is able to use the magic of the amulet to counteract it.
• In W.I.T.C.H., the Guardians learn that the Heart of Candracar is slowly fixing what it feels are imperfections, including Taranee’s eyesight. Taranee, already in a rebellious streak, is so incensed at this, she temporarily quits the team.

Fan Works

• In Son of the Sannin, Shisui relies on his Sharingan to maintain depth perception after one of his eyes is stolen. One of the things he's happiest about after getting the eye back is not having to do that anymore.
• In Waiting is worth it Izuku is paralyzed from the waist down and had to grow through years of physical to be able to stand on his own. With his leg braces and telekinesis, Izuku is able to walk and function independently.

Film — Animation

• Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero shows that Gohan doesn't need his glasses when he turns Super Saiyan.
• The Moon King in Kubo and the Two Strings is blind, but can "see" through the moon. This gives him incredible surveillance ability, but only for outdoor places at night, allowing Kubo to hide away for years by staying in a cave before sundown.
• In Turning Red, Mei doesn't need her glasses when she turns into a giant red panda.

Film — Live-Action

• The Amazing Spider-Man: Dr. Connors developed the cell-growing Lizard serum to regrow his missing hand, but it has a side effect of turning him into a lizard monster with Super-Strength.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Zig-zagged in the Iron Man Films — Tony doesn't use the same arc reactor to power his suit and keep the shrapnel from invading his heart, but it's nonetheless an integral part of being Iron Man. That is, until Iron Man 3, when he has the shrapnel and arc reactor removed. By the time he gets a new chest-mounted arc reactor in Avengers: Infinity War, it's not a medical implement (which is pointed out by Pepper) but housing for the nanobots that form his newest suit.
  • Captain America: The First Avenger has scrawny little Steve Rogers, an army wannabe with a list of medical conditions as long as he is tall. That is, until he takes the super-soldier serum and becomes Captain America, an extremely strong and fit superhero.
  • Although he underwent a similar super-soldier program, part of what makes the Winter Soldier so iconic and effective is his metal arm, given to him when he lost his previous one falling off a train.
  • As of Captain America: Civil War, Rhodes uses similar technology to the Iron Man/War Machine suits to allow him to walk after he was crippled while fighting Team Cap.
  • In Doctor Strange (2016), Stephen Strange is tipped off about the existence of the wizard monastery by a man who is revealed to use magic to overcome nerve damage that left him quadriplegic. Strange himself sought out the Sanctum in order to heal the severe damage done to his hands following a car accident.
  • In Thor: Love and Thunder, Jane Foster sought out Mjölnir in the hopes that it would cure her cancer. Upon getting it, she gets the same powers as Thor. Unfortunately, it's subverted, as while Mjölnir does grant her incredible powers, it didn't help with her cancer at all. In fact, using Mjölnir actually makes her cancer worse, because as a human, using its powers puts a great strain on her body, hindering her ability to fight off the cancer. Using Mjölnir basically changed Jane from a human with cancer to a superhero with cancer.
• Played with in The Mummy (1999): The recently awoken mummy, in order to regenerate himself, needs to harvest various organs from the people who opened the chest containing his original, mummified organs. As it happens, the guy whose eyes he takes had very poor vision, and the mummy consequently has very poor vision until he is able to regenerate completely to his original body.
• In My Super Ex-Girlfriend, the Magic Meteor that gives Jenny her superpowers also corrects her eyesight, changes her breast size and makes her more conventionally attractive in general.
• Oily Maniac: The titular monster in human form is a cripple, being a man suffering from polio since age 9, but when he gains the power of the Oily Maniac and transforms into a Blob Monster with a humanoid form, he's crippled no longer.
• Played with in SHAZAM! (2019) for Freddy Freeman. Rather than literally being un-crippled when using the powers of Shazam, this version of Freddy instead makes his still-useless leg a moot point through constant use of the Flight part of being a Flying Brick.
• Spider-Man Trilogy: In the first movie, when Peter Parker wakes up the day after being bitten by the genetically enhanced spider, the first thing he notices is that he no longer needs his glasses to see clearly. Played with in the second movie when his internal conflicts make him lose control of his powers and turns his bad eyesight back. It's only when he talks to Mary Jane and Doc Ock subsequently kidnaps her that his resolve, along with his eyesight, turn back for the better.
• Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over: Overlaps with Not Disabled in VR. Grandpa receives a powerup shortly after arriving in the game world that cures his paralysis and gives him super strong legs but only while in the game world. He is understandably hesitant to go back to the real world at the end of the film.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • Inverted in X-Men: Days of Future Past — the serum that keeps Xavier ambulatory suppresses his mutation. It's only when he stops taking it that his powers return and his ability to walk leaves.
  • Deadpool (2016): Wade's Healing Factor stops his cancer. When he's arrested and forced to wear a Power Nullifier in Deadpool 2, his cancer comes back.

Literature

• Tragically inverted in The Ables. It's mentioned that one of Phillip's classmates was born with Super-Hearing but has since gone deaf.
• Akata Witch: As an albino, Sunny has a debilitating sensitivity to sunlight. When her juju powers awaken, she's overjoyed to find that they protect her completely, without any active effort on her part.
• Animorphs:
  • The auxiliary Animorphs are recruited among permanently disabled teens. Since morphing is based on DNA, this means that they can turn into completely healthy animals (or people), and if their disabilities aren't congenital, then they're healed once they resume their normal forms. Most of their disabilities actually are congenital, but their leader, James (who was hit by a car) is perfectly able-bodied after his first morphing.
  • One of the Auxiliaries, Timmy, struggles to gasp out the simplest sentences. In morph, you have Telepathy. He loves this.
    <You want to know what hell on Earth is? [...] Having a large vocabulary, an encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater, and a speech impediment.>
• Mantles of power in The Dresden Files generally have this effect. Harry Dresden breaks his back in Changes and has to make a deal with a powerful Fae, trading his service for such a mantle, which seemingly cures him. When the Fae temporarily takes the mantle away, however, he discovers that his back is still very much broken, and the mantle only negates it while he wears it.
• Guardians of the Flame: Although not a superpower per se, this is why James Michael loves This Side, where he's his character, who's an able-bodied dwarf, whereas on Earth he has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair.
• In The Lost Years of Merlin, the title character is blinded in a fire early in the first book, but later develops "second sight." It's basically the same thing, except that sometimes he can also see things that are invisible to others.
• "Shellpeople" in The Ship Who... books start off as babies and young children with severe disabilities, mostly congenital. When they're installed into their shells, they're entirely immobilized and lose most of their own sensory input, instead perceiving and responding to the world entirely through mechanical pickups. They come to process information differently and can draw on recorded memories without effort. After schooling and graduation, they're installed as the "brains" of spaceships and hospitals, cities, or space stations, which they come to regard as their bodies and can control in depth, including using robot arms. Thanks to conditioning, they regard "softshells" as having pitiful limitations, but they do still partner with "brawns" for things that really need a human hand.
• In Worm, Skitter spends a large chunk of the Echidna battle blinded. However, her ability to see through the senses of the bugs around her is so acute that nobody else realizes she's blind until another parahuman uses Empathic Healing on her.

Live-Action TV

• Daredevil (2015): The same accident that blinded Matt Murdock also gave him heightened senses that grant him perception in many ways better than sight (though with their own drawbacks).
• Heroes has a girl named Daphne who has the ability of Super-Speed. We later learn after her powers get disabled in one episode that before she had her powers, she needed crutches to walk, and the superpower allowed her to walk normally.
• Legends of Tomorrow: Nate's hemophilia is "cured" an episode after he's introduced by getting injected with a Nazi Super Serum.
• M.A.N.T.I.S. is about a wheelchair-bound man who creates an exoskeleton suit that gives him super-strength as well as the ability to walk.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "The New Breed", experimental medical nanomachines fix a test patient's health problems, including his poor eyesight. Unfortunately, the nanomachines were never programmed to stop, and start inducing mutations to correct perceived flaws. Drowning? Add gills. This being The Outer Limits, things get progressively worse from there.

Roleplay

• Of a sort in Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues. Edward remains disabled from the waist down after he receives his superpower, but the clones that he creates don't necessarily have to share his disability. He first discovered this when he found an injured Nurse Dini and created a clone that could walk over and pick her up.

Tabletop Games

• Games which use Point Build System character generation generally assign negative points to disabilities, effectively providing additional points to buy enhanced powers. The rules in such games generally note that the Game Master should not allow players to use this trope to abuse the system by gaining negative points for a disability and then buying a power that renders the disability moot (e.g. you don't get points for being unable to walk if your powers let you fly and levitate instead).
• Princess: The Hopeful: It's not unknown for Princesses to have a disability in their civilian form, while their idealized Transformed state lacks this disability. These Princesses are particularly likely to seek out the Court of Mirrors, whose Practical Magic lets you remain Transformed indefinitely.
• In Rogue Trader, Astropaths are blind as a result of the ritual that mentally binds them to the Emperor, but their psyker powers allow them to act like they can see anyways.

Theatre

• In Noah Smith's stage version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll has a deformed and paralyzed hand, while Hyde doesn't. Depending on the production, Jekyll also wears glasses that Hyde doesn't need.

Video Games

• Blue Reflection: An accident caused the protagonist's legs to be damaged, to the point that she cannot jump very well anymore. Pretty bad for someone who performed ballet. But when she transforms into her magical girl self, she's ecstatic to learn that she can jump and run just fine.
• Devil May Cry 5:
  • In the beginning, Nero loses his Devil Bringer right forearm to the mysterious hooded stranger Vergil who arrived in his garage. At first, he only used the Devil Breakers to compensate, which have different abilities of their own; however, this trope fully comes near the finale, where Nero's desire to stop his long lost father and uncle from killing each other awakens the demonic power within him, causing him to regrow his right forearm with said demonic power.
  • Short-ranged teleportation and assistance from summons help V compensate for his otherwise limited mobility.
• Psychonauts 2: One of the Psychonaut interns, Morris Martinez, can't use his legs but uses his psychic levitation to float in a lawn chair.

Webcomics

• MoringMark - TOH Comics: Downplayed in one comic centering on the character Eileen from The Owl House. She technically isn't disabled in any way, but the fact that her particular species of demon lacks a mouth makes all her attempts to talk come across as muffled noise. In order to help her get around this, Gus tutors her in illusion magic so she can turn her words into readable text.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has Handi-man, who is quadriplegic but has the power to move his arms and legs... or so he claims, anyway.
• Sleepless Domain: It seems to be common for magical girls' powers to compensate for significant physical disabilities when they transform. For example, Vedika's glasses vanish upon her transforming into Mindful Eye, and Steffi's prosthetic leg is replaced by a pink magical construct when she transforms into Pop Blitz.

Web Videos

• This trope is parodied in The Nostalgia Critic's review of Daredevil (2003), when a joke character named Angst first claims that he's deaf... and then immediately adds that his superpowers have given him Super-Hearing. The Critic promptly lampshades this.

Western Animation

• Played for Laughs in American Dad! with the Show Within a Show Mind Quad, which is about a man without limbs with psychokinetic powers. (His limbs weren't blown off, they were blown in—into his mind!) He is capable of riding a quad bike and his sidekick is a paraplegic boy in a wheelchair with a speech-generating device.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Earthbending in Avatar: The Last Airbender can be used to sense tremors and vibrations across solid objects, including the earth. Toph Beifong, blind since birth, discovered that she could "see" through these vibrations when she learned to earthbend. This crosses over with Disability Superpower, as anyone can be taught how to do this, but Toph's blindness was what led her to discover it herself. Toph can't "see" things that aren't touching the ground, or on non-earthen surfaces like wood.
  • In The Legend of Korra, villainess Ming-Hua, who was born without arms, uses her waterbending to create prostheses — and she's not limited to just two, either.
• Inverted by the Hal Seeger cartoon series Fearless Fly, in that the near-sighted housefly Hiram attained Super-Strength when he donned a pair of square glasses. The opening narration explains that these glasses "magnify the thousands of tiny muscles in his head". Hollywood Science at its finest.

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