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I DUNNO SPIDEY LOL
You got a New Super Power or two? Great! Can you use them? While the standard hero seems to instinctively know his or her way around every possible ability he or she can obtain throughout the story, some people have to flail and struggle, with everybody laughing at them.
Also applies when a character attempts to mimic or steal the abilities of a hero (like stealing their Empathic Weapon) and ultimately fails.
When he is successful, the newly acquired power is too unpredictable or costly in his opinion to use in the long run, since he may lack the time or experience to perfect it. It's doubly humiliating if he's defeated by the hero anyway. This is sometimes An Aesop that a hero's strength is his character, not his powers.
One would expect this to be a natural co-trope for a Puberty Superpower, which makes it strange that until recently this was rarely the case - most teen heroes seemed to know how their powers worked instinctively.
Nonetheless some are too stubborn to give them up, and may become a kind of Evil Counterpart.
The name comes from SomethingAwful's randomly renamed and incredibly nonsensical "FYAD" subforum, where it originated as a Spider-Man catchphrase quotable quote from somebody playing the Half Life mod 'Natural Selection' and trying to figure out the alien faction's special abilities. It got quickly transposed to Spidey because it's funnier when he says it. It has since spread wide across the Internet, as such things are wont to do.
Often follows up Powers In The First Episode.
Examples
- One opponent in Flame Of Recca's Tournament Arc managed to temporarily steal Recca's ability to summon his flame dragons. Setsuna, already a saucy and rather disobedient dragon, promptly asks why the hell he should listen to some new guy and fried him in annoyance.
- In Dragon Ball Z, Quirky Mini Boss Squad leader Captain Ginyu trades bodies with Goku. This is fairly ingenious, because he waited until he was weakened and nearly defeated by Goku before trading. However, he couldn't get full power out of Goku's body, because he doesn't know his powerup technique, the Kaio-ken. Unfortunately for him, Vegeta then shows up and beats the snot out of him.
- To be fair, for all Goku's talk about how he needed to combine body and soul (not too far off from a Evil Cannot Comprehend Good moment) Ginyu was doing a pretty good job figuring it out before Vegeta got to him.
- An example of a hero (but not The Hero) struggling to use her powers is Midorikawa Retasu/Mew Lettuce of Tokyo Mew Mew. She had immense raw power in her first appearance, but became incredibly weak after this, and she often seemed to completely forget that she had control over water and could breathe while submerged in it, panicking while anywhere near the ocean. Remember, boys and girls, Good Is Dumb.
- When Pist from Final Fantasy: Unlimited steals Kaze's Magun, the device that allows him to summon powerful being using special bullets, he tries to use it himself (including a bizarre subversion of the normal firing sequence) but the resulting summon turns on him.
- In Code Geass Lelouch knows the basic principle behind the Geass but not all of the specific rules (for example, when he first gains the Geass power, he does not instinctively know that he cannot use the Geass more than once on the same person until he makes the mistake of trying to use it on Kallen twice). Rather than acting completely stupid about it, he uses logical, scientific methods to deduce all of the available powers and restrictions of his new ability- such as commanding a girl to make a mark on a wall every day to see how long a Geass will last.
- Similarly, Death Note has a sequence involving Yagami Light learning the rules and limitations of the Death Note before he embarks on his great scheme of moral cleansing. He continues to experiment with its powers and devise loopholes throughout the series.
- The Yotsuba executives (or rather, just Higuchi) also learn some of its rules this way, for instance, giving someone an impossible death condition will result in that person simply dying of a heart attack.
- In GateKeepers, Ukiya Shun is blessed by the Gate of Wind. It took him several episodes just to even know how to properly summon the power again (which he did in the first episode by accident), and an episode testing a new technique (which he later perfects).
- The Rosario To Vampire manga has Tsukune kidnapped by a shapeshifter, who copies his form and goes out to fight Tsukune's Unwanted Harem. Unfortunately, the fellow runs into quite a few How Do I Shot Web moments as he tries (in vain) to kill them, not realizing that he's far, far weaker than they are in human form. When he wises up and copies Moka's Superpowered Evil Side, he's beaten for good when the power of the rosary manages to weaken him.
- Sort of happens to the protagonist of Pretear, Himeno Awayuki — more of "How Do I Shot Wind". It is implied that she should know instinctively how her powers work, but the first time she is forced to fight a monster, she panics and can't figure out what to do. However, this wasn't enough to make her give up, and she actually demands to receive some training in order to learn to use her powers properly.
- Skuld gets this in Ah My Goddess when she tries to develop her water powers. It doesn't work out, and she puts herself in danger by trying to accelerate things, this danger being caused by her proclivity for Tim Taylor Technology.
- At one point, Padudu of Magical Play (aka Magical Witchland) saves two other characters from death via suddenly being able to fly. When asked by Pippin why she hadn't done that in the pilot, when she fell on Pippin and cost her a tournament, Padudu says: "Oh, that time, I forgot I could fly!"
- In Fullmetal Alchemist, Ed learns of his ability to transmute without a circle by clapping his hands in frustration then grabbing a basin of water, heating it through alchemy to boiling temperature.
- That, however, only happens in the anime. In the manga, he justinstinctively knows that he can do it, what with having seen the Truth and all.
- And he only does that in the old anime. Not the new remake.
- In Bleach, Ichigo Kurosaki accidentally sets off his Getsuga Tenshou attack immediately following his achievement of Shikai. He doesn't learn how to fire it at will until he reaches Bankai.
- Heck, much plot with Ichigo concerns the fact he has great power, but no real clue how to control it. His sword is mocked explicitly for being a "Big ball of fluff".
- Chad and Orihime aren't exceptions, either. They have to learn how to summon their powers at will (with fairly amusing results at first, especially when Chad tries to remember what Ichigo's younger sister Karin looks like), although Orihime manages to improve to the point where she can use her Shun Shun Rikka without calling their names. In the Bount Arc, Uryu has these issues with the artifact that he uses to fight without his powers.
- In Super Dimension Fortress Macross, whenever they figured out a new thing the ship could do, trying it always lead to embarrassing mistakes: The first time they tried to take off, the anti-grav units broke free of the ship. Using the fold system left them millions of miles off-course, surrounded by inhabited bits of the island they folded near, and the fold engine disappeared. The first time they transformed the Macross they destroyed the entire city inside the ship. The shield generator overloaded and destroyed Toronto. They just don't have good luck with the thing...
- In Zatch Bell, almost every time Zatch and Kio learn a new spell, Kio still struggles to understand that the spells are powered by emotion and will. However when they learn their third spell, which magnetizes their opponant, Kio tries several unseccessful attempts to test this spell (which he didn't know the effects of at the time), and eventually tried singing the incantation, very badly.
- In Yu Yu Hakusho, as Kuwabara is trapped inside Mitarai's water monster, he is determined to break free, and suddenly summons a special sword from his spiritual energy that can slice through dimensions, freeing himself and his friends and defeating Mitarai. The next morning, he tries to summon the same sword while fighting Sensui, but ends up getting his normal spirit sword instead.
- Nami with the Clima-tact in her fight with Miss Doublefinger in One Piece. Unfortunately for her, half of the functions on the device are party tricks (and they're listed first in the instruction manual), and the other half are abilities that are useful, but only if used correctly, and Usopp may not have known how good they can be (he suggests playing boomerang catch with the Cyclone Tempo). Despite this, once she manages to find the right functions to use, she manages to win once she identifies the good moves and learns how to use them. Nami's experience with the Perfect Clima-Tact is also like this to some extent.
- Even though he had it first, Yuuno of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha never was able to properly use Raising Heart, only being able to fight with its crystal-like Standby Mode and needing to say a really long activation phrase to do even that. One must wonder how he felt when the then beginner mage Nanoha was able to easily unlock a full Barrier Jacket, activate RH's alternate Modes, and do all of that without the need of the long incantation.
Comics
- The Super-Skrull is a recurring Fantastic Four villain who can use all the super-powers of that team, plus has a native alien ability to shapeshift. Nevertheless, he is always defeated, usually by the Four's ability to work as a team.
- He only loses to the FF, whose powers he copies. Face someone else and he uses the FF powers better than the FF. How many times has Reed Richards used his stretch power to make razor thin wire? Admittedly it depends on the writer I guess.
- That's because the Super-Skrull is either a villain or an Anti Hero, depending on the story. Either way, he's willing to use his powers in ways the Fantastic Four wouldn't, as he's not bound by "Thou Shalt Not Kill".
- It's been explain in canon that one of the reasons he loses to the FF is that some of them have gotten upgraded (either explicitly or via Power Drift) since he was created.
- Xavin, another skrull with similar abilities, can barely use more than one power at a time.
- In the Secret Invasion tie-in, it was shown that while Xavin can only use one power at a time, he became better at using them individually than his teacher could.
- In the current "Secret Invasion" storyline, it is revealed that the Skrulls now have the idea to copy any superhuman's powers, appearance, and memory perfectly. As revealed in the sub-series 'New Avengers'. (written by the same dude), they really, really worked very, very hard at it.
- In JLA: Year One, everyone's powers are stolen by a villain, but the villain only relies on Green Lantern's ring, allowing Aquaman to whoop his ass.
- Subverted in the current origin story of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, Emerald Dawn. In this story, Jordan stumbles about with his newly bestowed power ring, barely defeats a powerful villain and realizes that he is out of his depth with the weapon. To solve that problem, Jordan asks the ring if there is another member of the Green Lantern Corps he can talk to for help. The ring whisks him away to meet Tomar-Re, who recommends that Jordan come to GLC headquarters on the planet Oa for the optional training program. Jordan, naturally, takes that advice.
- This appears to have been retconned somewhat in the new Secret Origin of Hal Jordan. Hal gets the ring and uses it to fly and make a few constructs without much difficulty, but is not aware of the full functional capacity of the ring. He is then forcibly brought to OA for mandatory training.
- Was actually a major theme of the original 1960s X-Men, and still appears at times.
- The trope is very logically subverted in X-Factor when the team tracks down Alchemy, a mutant whose Puberty Superpower is the ability to transmute any matter into a simple element like gold. He was kidnapped by trolls and had to defend himself by transforming their leaders. He then couldn't change them back because he has to imagine the totality of the matter he is changing something into, and organic matter is so complex on a molecular level that he can't do it. So, he goes off for the advanced education in biochemistry needed to cure the beings he has affected.
- By the time Alchemy reappeared in the pages of Excalibur, he had gotten enough education and control over his power that he was able to restore the humans he had inadvertently transformed after the trolls had kidnapped him again to try and force him to change their leaders back to normal.
- This trope is used occasionally in the Ultimate Spider-Man comic: most egregiously, when Peter Parker startles out of daydreams in school and breaks his desk–multiple times without anyone becoming unduly suspicious about it.
- Public school chairs...
- The most hilarious use of this trope is when Wolverine and Spider-Man switch bodies. Wolverine's attempts to learn how to websling must be seen to be believed.
- Spidey however, had no trouble figuring out how to shoot webs because it isn't actually one of his powers! That's right, Peter Parker actually designed some web fluid and shooters using his awesome powers of nerd-nerdiness and if you didn't know that, despite how many times he mentions running out of web fluid as an obstacle, you are an idiot.
- Subverted, perhaps, in Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin is standing around trying to get his butt to light up like a firefly, and attributes his lack of success to "not even knowing what muscle to flex".
- In the 1990s Marvel Comics Sleepwalker comic series, Rick and Sleepwalker end up accidentally switching bodies after an encounter with one of Sleepwalker's enemies, and Rick has to try and figure out how to use Sleepwalker's abilities, in between being attacked by supervillains and demons from the Mindscape.
- Spider-Girl didn't exactly have problems learning to use her powers, but she needed training from her father and his friend Phil to really be able to master them and become a more experienced fighter.
- Similarly, Phil Urich himself had a number of problems figuring out how to use the Green Goblin's equipment when he moonlighted as a superhero in the short-lived Green Goblin series Marvel published in the 1990s.
- Later, in Runaways, he knew how to fly the ship the mysterious benefactor gave Phil's group because it was based on the Goblin equipment.
- Darkhawk received a cool amulet that turned him into an armored android with super-powers, but unfortunately it didn't come with an instruction manual. As a result, teenage Chris Powell ends up discovering many of his abilities by trial and error, and otherwise practicing to determine the limits of his abilities.
- In an issue of the Avengers, the villain Absorbing Man absorbs the android Vision's ability to become intangible. He promptly falls through the pier he's standing on and into the water, due to a lack of control.
- Spider-Man's ally and generally loveable loser the Fabulous Frog-Man. Stealing the fully automated frog-suit of his father, the villainous Leapfrog, Eugene Patilio wholeheartedly attempts to make a difference while being utterly clueless about how the suit works. This proves to be his greatest strength, however, as his frequent misfired jumps tend to knock out waves of bad guys and make him look like a real hero who knows what he's doing. Pretty much the only person who knows that Eugene is a bumbler in person is Spidey himself.
- Liz Sherman from Hell Boy can't control her fire powers at a young age, accidentally killing several people, including her parents. She joins the BPRD because they can teach her how to use her powers, or at the very least have ways to keep her from hurting people again.
Films
- Happens literally in the first Spider-Man movie.
"Go web go!... Fly!... Up, up, and away!..."
- Ditto with the Iron Man movie when the hero was working out the kinks in the software.
- Ironically subverted by
His Dudeness Obadaiah Stane, the film's villain, who is able to match Iron Man blow for blow when he gets his own suit of armor, despite having never been shown to have any training of his own. However, he cheats by using a targeting computer; when Iron Man disables that, he quickly proves unable to hit him with missiles from about ten feet away. Nor does Stane know about the dangers of his armor freezing up if he flies too high, a problem Iron Man had already dealt with earlier in the film and that he now exploits when Stane makes the same mistake he did.
- Stark didn't have much trouble operating his original "escape" suit either, despite not having much — or any — practice with it. Since Stane's suit is just a bigger and beefier copy of Stark's original plans, presumably there was something about the original design that made it fairly idiot-proof. Meanwhile Stark's couldn't stop himself from constantly adding upgrades and modifications that certainly would have made his own suit more complex and fiddly. (Not to mention Permanently In Beta.)
- The entirety of the Mk.0 suit's armaments were a flamethrower, a manually-fired missile, and fists. The flamethrower requires next-to-no aiming capacity and the missile missed...thank goodness for Splash Damage.
- Even Wolverine isn't immune, spending the first few hours after he got his adamantium claws accidentally cutting things up.
Literature
- Covenant in the Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant spends a remarkable number of pages not having a real hang of his own Wild Magic. Most of it is pure instinct, even without his knowledge early on. It's not until the second trilogy that we see him directing it toward definite purposes, complete with a training regimen... he uses his wild magic to shave, precisely to teach himself control over it.
- Say what you will about the length of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, but it does allow the magic-wielding characters a realistic period of time to get a grasp on controlling and developing their powers. Notably, none of the characters become instant experts, but have a learning curve of three or four books before they gain consistent control. Nyneave takes a full seven books to overcome her block.
- Learning to use saidin without a teacher is so difficult that Rand finally has to trap a Forsaken to keep from getting himself killed. Later, Nynaeve and Elayne hold another one hostage in order to learn lost techniques that have stayed lost for a good three millennia.
- Vladimir Taltos has no freaking clue what he's doing with his new Empathic Weapon, Godslayer and has gotten himself in a lot of trouble with such screw-ups as accidentally destroying a sorceress's soul in the process of blocking something nasty she threw at him.
- Richard from Sword Of Truth never learns how to use the vast majority of his abilities... except, of course, the ones that are absolutely necessary to allow him to save the day.
- Richard's magic appears to be keyed to strong emotion; a big deal was made of whether or not he could actually use his anger in the first book, as opposed to simply keeping it locked inside himself.
Live Action TV
- Peter Petrelli in Heroes, both in season one (where he learned how to control his empathic powers from Claude) and in season two (where he got amnesia and forgot which powers he had and how to use them). This seems to be one of the recurring problems which always almost brings about an apocalypse of some sort. There is also serial killer Sylar, who can use powers better than the person he stole from due to his supernatural ability to analyse how things work, including brains.
- Hell, in the beginning of Season One Peter didn't even know what his power was, having spent his life around
exactly one person precisely two people three people five people with a power he could copy.
- Arthur Petrelli doesn't seem to have this problem. He has a pretty good handle on how to use the powers he stole from Peter despite not having seen him use them.
- However, Sylar seems to need a fair bit of training when he learns to take powers without examining the brain. Of course, we're still not sure how this works.
- Well, he could have just been flirting with Elle.
- This is the entire premise of the show The Greatest American Hero.
- Happens frequently to the witches in Charmed.
- Used in Smallville a number of times as Clark's emerging powers make themselves known, most notably with his heat vision and x-ray vision.
- In Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, Kit's first attempt to transform into Dragon Knight includes multiple inflections of his transformation phrase ("'Kamen Rider!' 'Kamen... RIDER'? 'Kamenrider'?"), similar to the Spider-Man film.
- There was a scene cut from the first episode of Power Rangers Ninja Storm where the rangers try to figure out how to activate their morphers, which was a send-up to the first Spider-Man movie. At least, I think.
Tabletop Games
- The Roleplaying game Scion has the character channeling their divine power through Birthrights — gifts from their god-parents. If someone were to steal a Birthright, they could use all the real owners powers that it channels — but the chance of failure, and the penalties, are significant though, meaning most players who try this end up dying to this trope.
- It takes La Resistance around a year to figure out how to pilot an ANIMa without killing themselves in Bliss Stage. It's still very unintuitive even with proper Anchoring.
Video Games
- Rumia can generate a field of darkness to protect herself from light, which hurts her, but she can't see through her own field of darkness. She has bumped into trees in midflight before.
- The backstory to the NESTS saga character Nameless in The King of Fighters reveals that he had a number of problems controlling his pyrokinetic abilities. Most of his time after testing was spent in the infirmary recovering from severe burns, and on his first real assignment he killed somebody just by tapping them on the shoulder.
- Shirou of Fate Stay Night not only doesn't know how to shot web, he doesn't even know it's web he's supposed to be shotting!! Ahem. At first, he thinks he's supposed to be using strengthening magic, which he sucks at. Eventually, he figures out that he is much better at projection (magic that involves creating temporary replicas of real objects) and, although it's immensely taxing, picks up on that and becomes very good at it. During Unlimited Blade Works Archer reveals to Shirou that it's not projection he's good at, it's visualizing the exact nature of an object and creating it from his mind alone, which Archer eventually developed into a Reality Marble that turns him into a pure badass. At the end of that route, this allows Shirou to tap directly into his full potential. In Heaven's Feel, Shirou gains a more instinctual knowledge of his true powers through a Dangerous Forbidden Technique and being coached by Ilya, but the aforementioned technique causes brain damage and eventually kills him because that's the It Got Worse route.]] Oh, and in all cases Shirou still has a hard time projecting things accurately, which means they break easily.
Web Comics
- The full capabilities of the Monster in the Darkness from Order of the Stick have never been revealed. The in-comic reason is speculated to be that he's too...childlike to know his full potential.
- Even though she gained her alternate form some time ago, Mye from Charby the Vampirate
 doesn't know most of the forms abilities. While she did suddenly learn she could teleport during a fight, and apparently has much greater strength, she still hasn't gotten around to learning to fly and mentions the fact to herself every time she gets stuck in a situation where flight would get her to safety.
- In Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki, the main character Yuuki is selected to be the next Valkyrie, and is flung into several fights with no idea how to use her new powers. She's forced to more or less play it by ear early on. That's not the least of her problems, though...
Web Original
- A common problem in the Whateley Universe. Fey couldn't do magic at first, and kept accidentally firing off hobgoblins — the psychedelic squirrel hobgoblins wrecked her whole school. Phase at first couldn't keep from change density, couldn't control his strength when he was extra-dense, and couldn't keep from sinking into the floor when he was intangible. At first, Generator could only cast a single PK charge into an inanimate object for a short while. They've all gotten much better at it.
Western Animation
- In Lilo And Stitch The Series, Experiment 625 is recruited by villains because he possesses nearly all the abilities Stitch does. Unfortunately, he also has a lazy, casual apathy that makes him useless. He is, however, very good at making sandwiches.
- Princess from The Powerpuff Girls acquires powers like the heroines' several times over the course of the series, by various means. She fails to beat them every time, but never learns a lesson about it.
- The X-Men Evolution animated series used this a lot in the first season introduction stories, most notably for for Kitty Pryde and Rogue, but it virtually disappeared after that.
- Back when she was a super-villain, Emma Frost made the mistake of stealing Storm's body, and discovered too late that while starting a storm was easy enough to do without even trying, stopping one was hard, as it had its own momentum. Similarly, Storm barely avoided being driven mad by her telepathy once she escaped her psi-shielded cell and almost fried the brain of the girl she tried to rescue.
- In the second season finale of WITCH, Cedric falls victim to this trope after devouring the BigBads of seasons one and two, consequently gaining their powers, as well as gaining the powers of all five heroines. Despite having by far the most raw power of any villain in the series, he is unable to utilize his new skills to anywhere near their full potential. This, combined with new transformations for all five heroines, led to Cedric's defeat in a little more than five minutes. Anticlimactic, yes, but it did preserve the show's flawless record of subverting the Sorting Algorithm Of Evil.
- A recurring problem for Ben in Ben 10, especially prevalent when he gains a new alien form and has no idea what it does. The first time he turned into Cannonbolt, not only could he not figure out how rolling up into an armored ball was useful in combat, but he kept losing his balance and falling over backwards when he tried to stand.
- In Project Geeker, the eponymous character Geeker has almost limitless power as a genetically engineered cyborg. However, Becky stole Geeker before he could receive the programming which would allow him to control those powers (and allow the antagonist to control him). Thus, Geeker generally discovers his powers by accident, and has difficulty controlling them.
- Danny in Danny Phantom constantly gets new ghost powers with some conjunctions to Puberty Superpower every so often and as per usual, half of them are often hard to control. Duplication is a frequent issue for him and his Ghostly Wail started off as a Dangerous Forbidden Technique, among others. He eventually got most of it mastered by end.
- In the Code Lyoko prequel "XANA Awakens", on his first materialization on Lyoko Odd discovers his power to fire Lazer Arrows quite by accident, almost hitting Ulrich with one.
- There is a repeat incident in episode "A Fine Mess", where Odd and Yumi exchange bodies and Odd-in-Yumi has to explain to Yumi-in-Odd how to fire the weapon — and almost got hit in the head for his effort. Meanwhile, Odd-in-Yumi requires quite a bit of practice before getting Yumi's Precision Guided Boomerang fans down.
- One episode of The Batman centered around The Penguin obtaining The Green Lantern's power ring, and his efforts to figure out exactly how it worked. When he obtained The ring himself, The Batman also had to learn how to use its powers.
- Which he did almost immediately, just the ring started running out of power shorty after he got it. There's a reason for that.◊
- In "The N Men", an episode of The Adventuresof Jimmy Neutron, this kids almost destroy the entire town before they learn to control their newly acquired superpowers.
- In Darkwing Duck, Negaduck manages to gain the powers of the Fearsome Four and basically goes One Winged Angel. Fortunately for our hero, Negaduck has trouble dealing with conflicting powersets (electricity and water) and the insanity he got from Quackerjack.
- One episode of Teen Titans had Raven and Starfire body switched and having to figure out how to use each other's powers.
- Terra had trouble controlling her powers, as well. It became a serious issue...
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