Super Sliding

Slime for sticking and for sliding!

Why walk when you can slide with style?

Super Sliding refers to when characters are able to use their superpowers or technology to move quickly by sliding, gliding, or skating around. This is typically accomplished by creating a slick surface to ride upon. After all, if speed is reduced by friction, reducing friction will make you go faster!

The difficulties of remaining upright under these conditions are usually given a Hand Wave by Required Secondary Powers or simple practice given what some professional athletes do while skating on extremely slick ice.

An Ice Person will frequently be seen using Super Sliding because of how easy it is for them to produce a slippery surface to glide on. May overlap with Rollerblade Good, in which characters get around on skates and rollerblades, and Hover Skates, in which characters use equipment that lets them hover and slide just above a surface. Compare Super-Speed, when characters simply move extremely quickly, Elemental Speed, when a particular element is used or associated with high speed, and Grind Boots, when characters slide down inclines with nothing but their shoes on. Contrast Slippery Skid, when something slippery is laid out to make someone stop moving by tripping them up, and Sticky Situation, when an adhesive is applied to keep someone stuck in place.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• A Certain Scientific Accelerator: Seike's Esper ability, "Stick Slip", enables her to manipulate the friction coefficient of anything she's touching. She can use this to get around by reducing the friction of the ground to zero while shooting a Hand Cannon behind her for a Recoil Boost, propelling her at high speeds as there's nothing to slow her down.
• Fairy Tail: Lummy's Slippery Curse enables her to glide along any surface, even the surface of water. She's so slippery in this state that even bullets simply slide off her while she's in motion.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: Ghiaccio's Stand, White Album, is able to rapidly freeze its user's surroundings. He combines this with the Elemental Armor generated by his White Album Gently Weeps ability to freeze the ground and skate quickly enough to keep up with cars on a highway.
• My Hero Academia:
  • Mina Ashido is able to emit a low-concentration acid through holes in her shoes, allowing her and anyone with her to quickly slide forward on the resulting slick surface.
  • Koichi Haimawari, the protagonist of the spinoff series My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, has the Quirk "Slide and Glide". It allows him to glide along the ground at the speed of a bicycle so long as he has three points of contact with it. While it initially seems like a lame power, Koichi's continual use of it as a vigilante allows him to move more quickly and discover more applications for it. He eventually discovers that he's not restricted to gliding at all and can in fact fly under his own power once he gets the hang of it.
• One Piece: After Alvida eats the Sube Sube no Mi (Smooth-Smooth Fruit), her skin becomes so smooth that it no longer has any friction. Hence, when her feet are bare, she can slide along the ground at incredible speeds, especially with a ramp to boost her speed.

Comic Books

• Champions: Icestar, from the tie-in comic book, being a rather shameless Expy of Iceman (see below), tends to get around quickly by icing the ground in front of him.
• Spider-Man: The villain Slyde has a chemically-treated, frictionless costume that allows him to slide with great speed. (Also, Spider-Man's webs are unable to snag him.)
• X-Men:
  • Long-time X-Men regular Bobby Drake, aka Iceman, is known for his ability to instantly freeze the moisture in the air to generate ice. This means he can often get around by creating slides and platforms made of ice that he generates under his feet, enabling him to slide around at speeds far faster than he can run as well as maneuvering himself through the air.
  • Fellow mutant, occasional X-Factor member, and sometime Agent of SHIELD Sally Blevins, AKA Skids, has this as her mutant power. She generates a full body forcefield that, among other things, negates friction, causing her normal locomotion to be skating around at high speed.

Fan Works

• Reap the Whirlwind: Viktor Krum, outnumbered, gains an edge by conjuring a field of ice and transfiguring his boots into skates, making him much more agile and hard to follow. Only one of the five attackers has enough skill to follow suit.

Film — Animation

• The Incredibles: Frozone is able to generate ice from both moisture in the air and the water in his own body. In ideal circumstances, he can create entire pathways of ice that he can skate across to rapidly traverse long distances. Accordingly, his super suit's special boots can turn from ice skates to skis to a snowboard-like disc.

Literature

• The Stormlight Archive: The Surge of Abrasion controls friction, allowing users to skate on any surface without ever losing momentum, even from wind resistance. The Artful Dodger Lift incorporates this into her Confusion Fu with great effect as she learns to control her powers.

Tabletop Games

• Monte Cook's World of Darkness: Demons, being otherworldly spirits projected into temporary physical shells, can learn to control their "stickiness" at will, zig-zagging the trope — one could slide frictionlessly across the floor and then switch to a Wall Crawl.
• In the Sentinels Comics tabletop RPG (based on the Sentinels of the Multiverse board game), superhero Headlong has the ability to control his own friction. He uses this to imitate true Super-Speed by rendering the ground frictionless to move incredibly quickly.

Video Games

• Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key: The Wind Shoes, rather than simply increasing your running speed like in previous games, now allow Ryza to slide around at high speeds by holding the jump button after landing. You can reach very high speeds if you go downhill, but it's slower than walking normally without a large enough incline to get momentum.
• C2: Judgment Clay: Nanaman is a human-size living banana that joins other Clayfighters and having banana-like powers, like banana slices as projectiles and he slides into the stage for special kicks with his own body.
• Destroy All Humans!: The usual mode for boosted movement in the series is using the main character's alien technology (or maybe it's the psychic powers?) to hover his feet slightly above ground and speed along.
• Genshin Impact: Ayaka and Mona can slide with their elements instead of sprinting, which also inflicts their respective elements on enemies. This can be used to drive the Elemental Reaction system that informs much of Genshin's combat gameplay - for instance, one could rush a group of enemies with Mona, and then change to an Electro user to attack them, creating an Electro-Charged reaction.
• Heroes of the Storm: One of Mei's basic abilities lets her coat her boots in frost and slide across the ground, ending with a blast of ice that slows and knocks away enemies.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts II: Rather than walking or running, Sora's Wisdom Form lets him magically skate along the ground.
  • Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-: Aqua can cast Blizzaga on a flat surface to create a sheet of ice that she can slide upon to get around more quickly via Flowmotion.
• Kirby:
  • In Kirby Super Star and all mainline games from Kirby's Return to Dream Land onward, the Ice copy ability allows Kirby to slide along the ground instead of running thanks to the form's ability to produce ice at will. He can also skate and pirouette to spray his freezingly cold breath all around him.
  • In Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, a few combinations grant this. Ice and Stone turn Kirby into a curling stone while Ice and Cutter give him ice skates.
• In League of Legends, Zeri's electric powers allow her to slide just above ground level by enveloping her feet in electricity, giving the impression of rollerblading everywhere. She can also grind on terrain like she would a rail.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: The Hover Boots (a.k.a. the sacred feet) found in the Shadow Temple. The primary function of the boots is to allow Link to cross large gaps by defying gravity for two seconds. A side effect of wearing them is that, after Link stops running, the boots' effect causes Link to keep sliding on the ground by inertia.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man Powered Up: Oil Man's Oil Slider weapon shoots a glob of oil that pools on the ground if it doesn't hit anything. Jumping on this puddle will allow Mega Man or Oil Man to ride on it like a snowboard until they collide with a wall or an enemy.
  • Mega Man X: X can charge Chill Penguin's Shotgun Ice weapon to produce a sled made of ice that he can ride until it crashes into a wall or an enemy, upon which it shatters.
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: The bounty hunter Rundas uses his ice powers to create surfaces he can quickly slide on. He's able to do this in midair and even ice-surf up a vertical tunnel.
• Mortal Kombat
  • Ever since the first game, Sub-Zero has used his ice powers to slide along the ground at speeds greater than normal movement speed. In later games, icy FXs are seen meanwhile Sub-Zero makes this Signature Move.
  • Mimicking Sub-Zero since the first game as a Secret Character, Reptile is a ninja that follows Shao Kahn's order as one of his mooks. He has a sliding move similar to Sub-Zero's. But Reptile's version involves sliding on his own acid secretions instead.
• One of the new mechanics of Portal 2 is Propulsion Gel, a frictionless orange goop that makes things slide at high speed over surfaces on which it's applied. Several puzzles depend on slathering it around to build enough velocity to hurl the player over gaps and heights.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Shadow the Hedgehog wears Hover Skates which let him quickly slide across the ground. His debut appearance in Sonic Adventure 2 shows that this lets him move as quickly as the title character, whose own Super-Speed granted him the title "fastest thing alive."
  • A whole category of Extreme Gear in the Sonic Riders spin-off series is dedicated to Hover Skates. Skates are weaker than standard Extreme Gear but have better maneuverability stats. In the first game, they also consume less Air than typical Extreme Gear, while in Zero Gravity, they enable the wearer to use Grind Rails regardless of their Gear Parts.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Sunshine: If Mario dives onto puddles on the ground, he can slide quickly and indefinitely until he jumps or hits an object. This includes puddles generated from F.L.U.D.D., allowing Mario to rapidly move around by just spraying the ground in front of him and then diving onto the results.
  • Super Mario Galaxy: By grabbing an Ice Flower, Mario is able to temporarily generate ice platforms on the surface of water with each step, allowing him to walk across. As with all forms of Mario on regular icy surfaces, Ice Mario can spin while walking to skate across these platforms, speeding up his movement considerably.

Web Animation

• RWBY:
  • Weiss can use her Semblance to create a series of glyphs on the ground that allow her to slide swiftly across any surface as if she is skating. She often combines this with Ice Dust to make it seem as though she's ice-skating, and the glyphs even allow her to skate across air.
  • Octavia possesses a Semblance that allows her to move swiftly across the surface of sand as though she is skating. This gives her the dual advantage of being able to move very fast without becoming bogged down in the sand.

Webcomics

• The titular superhero in Huckleberry has many plant-based abilities, including the power to slide on hard surfaces at high speeds via generating banana atoms beneath his skis.
• In Jupiter-Men, Quintin is able to emit a slippery version of his slime through the soles of his shoes, letting him slide around quickly enough for the art to use Speed Lines even while grabbing flaming objects with his slime hands.
• Sleepless Domain: Undine, a Magical Girl with the power to control water, frequently gets around by manifesting water at her feet, allowing her to "surf" along the ground.

Western Animation

• In Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, Iceman creates surfaces and slides made of ice to slide upon when he needs to get around quickly just like his comic book counterpart.
• She-Ra: Princess of Power: Empress Frosta uses her ice powers to create platforms of ice to slide on, exactly like X-Men's Iceman.
• In Wolverine and the X-Men (2009), Iceman regularly uses his ability to create ice to get around, generating slides and fire poles for his teammates to slide down with him.

---