Basic Trope: A blessing turns out to be not so great.
- Straight: Bob gets superpowers... and with them, a list of weaknesses as long as his arm, and has Power Incontinence.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is given super powers, but they all cause more harm than good.
- Bob is given omnipotence, but then has to monitor every move he makes; one angry thought will instantly vaporize the planet he's walking on.
- Downplayed: Bob's weakness isn't crippling, but it's everywhere and very irritating: he's never comfortable.
- Justified:
- "The magic Alice was using prevented her from cursing Bob directly, so instead she gave him exactly what he thought he wanted."
- Bob got a superpower, but none of the secondary abilities necessary to protect himself.
- Inverted: Cursed with Awesome.
- Subverted: Bob gets superpowers... and Power Incontinence, which he eventually figures out how to fix.
- Double Subverted: ...but his family are now all targets for those seeking to control him, and if he's caught by the government, they'll take him apart to see what makes him tick.
- Parodied: The blessing allows the hero to channel his now-constant flatulence to violent ends, leading to both a comical superhero career and his inability to keep a girlfriend.
- Zig Zagged: The Fair Folk give Bob powers that are too strong to control. So he gets the help of a friendly fairy, that bestows him control when she is present, only she is unreliable. So the hero learn to control them by self-control, until he is asked to help in the Fairy World, where his powers are raised exponentially by environmental magic. So he have to remove most of them to keep them under control... until he come back to the real world, with now-lame powers. Luckily he learned enough magic skills to use conventional magic, at the cost of his vital energy.
- Averted: Curses are bad. Blessings are good.
- Enforced: We can't have a Boring Invincible Hero—let's put some crippling limitations on his greatest powers!
- Lampshaded: "Okay, does this so called 'blessing' come with a return policy?"
- Invoked: The Big Bad arranges for the hero to be "blessed."
- Exploited: The hero tricks his antagonist to bless himself with suck, and thus saves the day.
- Defied:
- Bob refuses any magical boons from a fairy on the logic that she doesn't seem to understand what constitutes a "blessing" and what constitutes a "curse" for a mortal.
- Alternatively, he refuses to become the new bearer of any ancient, sealed-away magical artifacts on the logic that if this were a good thing, they wouldn't have been sealed away.
- Discussed: "If you want to be a hero, son, take the path of Batman. Superpowers are a trouble."
- Conversed: "For a specific target audience, you do expect the hero to be have some problem."
- Deconstructed: The Fair Folk genuinely don't understand humanity, and all blessings come from so alien a perspective that they suck if you're a mere mortal.
- Reconstructed: The blessing results in terrible Power Incontinence, but this is also a feature of the blessing intended to keep the hero humble and disciplined. It works.
- Played For Laughs: Bob is "blessed" with the ability to make accidentally funny comments.
- Played For Drama:
- Bob's blessing to have turn things into Skittles when he touches them lead to him wrecking things and killing people by accident, diabetes because all he can eat is Skittles, and maybe even abduction by evil chocolate men who want him to produce Skittles "for free".
- Bob eventually kills himself because being The Unwitting Comedian 24/7/365 can be a pain on the psyche (ex. Bouncy Normo).
- Played For Horror: The drawback that causes the "Suck" leads to mass death, possibly even including The End of the World as We Know It.
- Implied: We never get to see Bob's true powers, but we do know that he does feel disappointed at himself.
Back to Blessed with Suck
