Super-Cute Superpowers

"I was gonna say... let's use aggressive fist-to-face sparkles!"

— Glimmer, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

Some powers are cool, some are awesome, some are lame, some are strange, and some powers are made of pink faeries and glitter! This is a trope for any power that can be described as very, very, girly. Such as:

• Summoning cuteness
• Rainbow Beams: often associated with All Your Colors Combined
• Shiny glitter blasts

This doesn't necessarily mean that the user is a girl, just that the power(s) have a certain sort of girliness to them. Sometimes the super cute power is parodied in-universe by showing itself to be useless, leading the other characters to exclaim "What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?". However, if the cutesy power is useful for a creative user, then it falls under Heart Is an Awesome Power.

Just about any Magical Girl counts, even Magical Girl Warriors, with sparkles, love hearts, frills, and bubbles galore. Averting this tends to be the exception.

See also Heart Beatdown (which tends to look cute, but it's not really a subtrope, since its concept is "weaponized power of love") and Care-Bear Stare.

Compare with Fighting Clown and Campy Combat.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Black Clover, Mimosa's Plant Magic manifests as bright and colorful flowers, and she can even form a dress for herself made of flowers that boosts her healing ability. Her flower dress even has "Princess" in its name.
• Bleach: Riruka of Fullbringers has a power that focuses on trapping people inside things she finds cute. She can shrink people and trap them in dollhouses, or cutesy decorated fish tanks, or even seal them inside plush dolls. She also has a cutesy-looking squirt gun filled with cute-looking objects she's shrunk inside it that enlarge to their full size when fired, allowing her to shoot things like pink frilly wardrobes at people.
• Neko from K transforms into a little pink kitty (as her name implies), and when she uses her illusion powers, things tend to appear and disappear in a flurry of pink flower petals. She's also been known to summon giant kitties.
• Played With in the Lyrical Nanoha series: at the start of the original season, the eponymous protagonist is the Token Mini-Moe of her family and her powers manifest themselves in a pink-and-gold staff with a hot pink jewel that shoots pink beams. It then turns out that little Nanoha is a stone-cold badass and her pink beams-o-friendship are weapons of mass destruction.
• Pretty Cure, as you would expect, has this trope as its default setting. The only major instance where it deviates is for elemental attacks. Well, those and some of the more vicious pummelings and submission holds whenever the studio's Dragon Ball Z roots resurface. But they are performed by cute girls in frilly outfits.
• While most Puella Magi Madoka Magica characters avert this (Mami uses magically-created muskets, Kyoko uses a spear, Sayaka uses swords, and Homura uses real-life weapons, including grenades and missiles) Madoka plays this 100% straight, with arrows of pink light being her signature weapon. This is to illustrate her All-Loving Hero status, and later her Messianic Archetype status.
• in Re:CREATORS, Magical Slayer Mamika originated in a Magical Girl show aimed at elementary schoolers, so all her attacks are cutesy pink hearts. They still hit really hard, though.
• Sailor Moon: One power of particular note is the pink-haired Sailor Chibi Moon's "Pink Sugar Heart Attack" that's every bit as feminine as it sounds. In the '90s anime, it's also completely useless, though in the manga, it was equal to any other Sailor attack (but still cute).
• Tokyo Mew Mew plays with this. The girl's weapons look like pastel musical instruments, and like most Magical Girl Warrior shows, are activated by cutesy incantations. While Mint's and Ichigo's attacks are very feminine (feathery arrows and sparkly energy beams, respectively) the other three have powers like control over water, ground-based magic, and a glowing, ribbon-like whip. However, it becomes a little hard to ignore when the extremely powerful Mew Aqua takes the form of bubbles flying out of a pink wand. The villains completely defy this trope, though.

Comic Books

• Dagger of the Cloak and Dagger series can fling "light-knives" at foes, which can pierce armor and act like scalpels to "cut" the wickedness like tumors from her targets. These light-knife attacks appear wrenching and painful on impact, however.
• Julie Power from Power Pack, like Karolina, flies leaving a rainbow trail, except colors are not as pastel, and form lines. In Avengers Academy Julie came out as bi and kissed Karolina flying in the sky with rainbow tails. In the all-ages version, the rainbow does not form lines and the colours blend together, like with any normal rainbow.
• Relative Heroes: Damara "Allure" Sinclair's powers visually manifest by surrounding her with sparkles, making her hair float in a non-existent breeze, tinging her hair ends pink, and giving her a pink aura. Her powers themselves are a mash-up of Compelling Voice, Emotion Bomb, Glamour, and Living Aphrodisiac which she hates as they leave her unsure of anyone's true feeling for her and because of how dangerously people can respond to the desire she inspires in them.
• Karolina Dean of the Runaways turns glittery and rainbow-colored when her powers are activated, and she can fire projectiles and make shields of the same color. She's fittingly the most traditionally feminine of the team. She is also eventually revealed to be gay.
• Marvel Comics' Squirrel Girl is a cute teenager with a fluffy squirrel tail, the ability to talk to squirrels (who will come to her aid if asked), and proportionate strength and agility of a squirrel. And if you don't think that's terrifying, ask Dr. Doom, Deadpool, Thanos, Ego the Living Planet, Wolverine...
  Squirrel Girl's Marvel Heroes bio: You'd think that young Doreen Green's mutant power was Super-Adorability, but her abilities go far beyond simple cuteness. Her semi-prehensile tail allows her to display amazing feats of agility...well, yeah, that tail IS pretty adorable. How about the empathic bond she shares with squirrels? That's a good power! But, yeah, it's also kind of adorable.
• Wonder Woman and the Star Riders: The tagline is "Sparkling Super Heroines!" and their powers include Light 'em Up powers that are tinted pink, creating shimmery bubbles, and making flowers bloom.
• X-Men
  • "Dazzler: Disco Queen", whose mutant power is effectively to make shiny bright sparkling lights in time to music. In reality, her ability is turning sound into light and vice versa, which has staggering implications. She once absorbed the sound of a supernova to power up enough to retrieve something from a black hole. ...Just go with it.
  • Jubilee's powers have been described as "sparkles" or "fireworks". When she gets good and pissed they can make explosions, making her an energy-blaster to rival Cyclops. They still look like cute fireworks.
  • Pixie can release blasts of hallucinogenic dust. The resulting hallucinations are always cuteness overload, usually adorable animals (sometimes singing and playing musical instruments), and rainbows.
  • The X-Men comics are just as likely to subvert this trope by featuring beautiful young women with grotesque powers:
    • Husk can turn her body into various substances but has to shed her outmost layer of skin to do so.
    • Angel Salvadore has lovely gossamer wings...and has to eat by vomiting acid on her food and slurping it up (though this acid can also be used in combat), among other insectoid traits.

Film — Animated

• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls:
  • The movie series has inherited from the parent show its tendency for demonstrations of magic from the protagonists to be glitzy, sparkly, and rainbow-themed.
  • In Rainbow Rocks, before unleashing their Rainbow Power attack on the Dazzlings, the Rainbooms battle the Dazzlings' spectral avatars with magical blasts depicted as showers of rainbows, diamonds, butterflies, and sparkles. The only reason these aren't enough to defeat the Dazzlings is because the movie's real protagonist hasn't yet joined the battle. The final blow is a giant sparkly alicorn made of light, with flowing rainbow hair, blasting with a massive beam of light.
• Spies in Disguise: Walter definitely seems to be In Touch with His Feminine Side when it comes to his work, as most of his gadgets involve glitter, stuffed animals, kittens, or the color pink. This initially causes embarrassment towards Lance when he's forced to use them in battle, although he learns to embrace it after realizing their efficacy.

Literature

• E-Claire's primary power in Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain is to fog people's minds with cuteness. She's not altogether happy about this, since she really wanted her mother's power (fogging men's minds with lust), but it's actually surprisingly powerful.

Video Games

• Maria Renard in the Castlevania series starting with Castlevania: Rondo of Blood uses her animal friends to attack, she just throws or directs their movements, contrasting with the usual Vampire Killer whip, she uses doves instead. Rather than crosses, holy water, or stopwatches as her subweapons, she has baby dragons, a turtle shell, and even sings off-key to make notes that damage enemies. Her adult incarnation in the PSP port of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night rounds out the cuteness with owls instead and new Item Crashes, but she still looks somewhat girly doing so.
• Copy Kitty parodies this with Zerynex Omega, the Hard Mode version of the Zerynex boss. Zerynex is an unholy Frankenstein monster made of dozens of other monsters and looks the part, but the Omega version is colored pink, launches heart-shaped energy blasts, fires bouncy missiles that squeak upon exploding, and replaces the BGM with cute-sounding noises. The in-game heroine is just as confused by this as the player likely is, while her mentor claims that Zerynex is trying some sort of "intimidation tactic".
• EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: Magical Girl Ruritia fires rainbows out of her sword, as part of her Pretty Cure Expy design.
• Sonya Blade from the Mortal Kombat has a Kiss of Death fatality where she blows a kiss at her opponent. Sometimes the kiss takes the form of a floating fireball, but other games have it be a little pink heart that flitters toward the opponent, and once it hits, the enemy explodes bloodily.
• Pokémon: The Fairy type tend to have a mix of moon-based moves, such as Moonlight and Moonblast, and cute moves that invoke this trope, such as Charm, Sweet Kiss, Baby-Doll Eyes and Disarming Voice.
• Annie in Skullgirls has an impressive suite of star-based superpowers. Magical beams of light filled with cartoon stars, a rainbow-colored Super Mode that adds stars to her attacks, conjuring nebula-like clouds, and all sorts of other Magical Girl Warrior classics. There's a distinct contrast between Annie's powers and matching public persona, and her true Knight in Sour Armor personality.
• Whenever Amy Rose is playable in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, it typically looks cute. Her Piko-Piko hammer is an oversized novelty toy, but she can nevertheless smash robots to bits with it. She can hover by spinning it around into a copter-esque motion, creates heart tornadoes, and her Team Blast has her join Cream and Big in an explosion of twirling, hearts, sparkles, glitter, and lots and lots of pink that cracks the game in two. While it's just one combat move, the similarly adorable Cream can launch her pet Chao Cheese to home in on enemies. She can also fly by flapping her bunny ears, which is as comical as it is precious.
• Princess Peach of Super Mario Bros. when she's not the Damsel in Distress usually goes for this. Her special moves usually involve some sort of association with love and Heart Beat-Down magic. She also wields a beautiful Parasol of Pain as her signature weapon and also uses other Dainty Combat weapons like a Frying Pan of Doom. Most prominently in Super Smash Bros., with each version adding new prettiness to her deceptively dangerous arsenal: most prominently heart-shaped blasts, pink ribbons, and rainbows.
• Parodied in Team Fortress 2 with Pyrovision, where with the right items the Pyro can appear to shoot people with a rainbow bubble blower and hit them with a giant lollipop, causing them to "bleed" balloons and laugh in joy, while in "reality" the Pyro is still burning people to death.
• Koishi Komeiji of Touhou Project uses a lot of hearts and roses in her attacks. However, because of her heavy psychological theme and her own state of mind, they can turn out to be more unnerving than cute.
• Transistor: Since heart symbols are cute, this is mixed with Heart Beat-Down due to wielding the power of love as a weapon: Switch() tosses out Cardiovascular Love-type pink-colored Heart Symbol projectiles that Charm Person enemies to Red's side, but they only deal damage when upgraded with Switch() or Purge().
• Virtual-ON The Fei-Yen series of Virtuaroids are Humongous Mecha modeled after a Magical Girl with a Chest Blaster that fires a burst shaped like a heart. According to the backstory, the designers wanted a regular beam, but the Sentient Phlebotinum kept turning it back into a heart.

Webcomics

• Angel Moxie has this at your generic Magical Girl Warrior level for its protagonist Alex, in that her outfit has been described as maxing her look like a "Polly Prissy Princess" and her wand looks more like a plastic toy than a mage's weapon, but her actual powers are mostly just energy blasts. Villainess Candi Shugari on the other hand, in keeping with her persona and look, is dripping in this; she brings with her outbreaks of pleasantry, plagues of rabbits, a demonic boy band, and ultimately a giant killer bunny called Cottontail (who is the result of the merging of the aforementioned plague of rabbits).
• One Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic has a little girl guarding Fort Knox who has the ability to make puppies appear. Which she uses to deadly effect. Because she never specified where the puppies will appear from. Such as from inside the villain.

Web Original

• In Dimension 20 during the Misfits and Magic campaign one character's magic all manifests pink and sparkly, and their familiar turns out to be an adorable talking chipmunk wearing a little jacket. They wanted to be a dark and sinister spellcaster with a serpent and are mortified that this keeps happening.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs (2020) has The Cutening where Dot eats a cupcake that gives her the power to "make everything cute" after which she quotes the trope word-for-word.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • The Elements of Harmony, the most powerful magic in Equestria, are powered by friendship, manifest as jewellery, and their powers manifest as a giant rainbow World-Healing Wave. They're the main cast's ultimate trump card and the only reliable way to defeat them is to prevent them from firing in the first place.
  • The Sonic Rainboom, a legendary flight move that creates a rainbow explosion◊ as it breaks the sound barrier.
• In an episode of 'The Penguins of Madagascar, Private gets the power to become so cute, he makes people who see him pass out. Unfortunately, Skipper sees this as an opportunity to weaponize his power to his advantage and get what he wants.
• The Phineas and Ferb episode "Meapless in Seattle" has Meap and Mitch attacking each other with what Phineas describes as "really cute death rays." The same episode reveals that Isabella herself is a weapon of mass cuteness, single-handedly defeating Mitch by hitting him with her cutest Puppy-Dog Eyes while saying "What'cha doin'?" in her cutest voice.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power has Glimmer, who teleports and can fire sparkly pink light blasts.
• In SheZow, SheZow's powers will not activate if Guy is wearing any colour other than pink. And these powers include the ability to generate hurricane-force winds by fluttering his eyelashes.
• In South Park, Kenny of all people gets powers like these when he dresses up as a pretty princess. In the show, he becomes a Kawaisa anime girl who instantly charms other men with her extreme cuteness, while in the video game he uses rainbows and unicorns to attack. Subverted, in that said unicorn can impale him rather brutally if he fails his commands.
• In Star vs. the Forces of Evil, the magic wand wielded by the titular Princess Star emits blasts that could be described as weaponized cuteness. Her enemies face an onslaught of sparkles, rainbows, puppies, unicorns, narwhals, and just about anything else the Genki Girl Star finds adorable. Nevertheless, the spells are plenty powerful. The magic takes this form because the wand reflects the character of the wielder, meaning it gets much less cute in the hands of evil.
• Pink Raven from Teen Titans Go! is made of this trope. Down to farting on garbage and turning it into unicorns!

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