The "Heart Is An Awesome Power!" Thread

Here we submit lame heart powers to be de-heartified! Begin!

:D

So Let Me Get This Straight.... She can create living mass anywhere she chooses?

In other words, she replaces existent objects, matter and molecules with puppies. I'm actually having a harder time making that power not broken than figuring out how to make it useful.

edited 13th Jul '11 6:24:44 PM by KingZeal

One of my characters can make people happy. He can use this to make people unable to fight, and basically do whatever he pleases because no one would object.

Are we actually going to post powers that need to be rescued from the heap at any point?

A character of mine started out with the ability to control which direction she falls in. Sounds useless, no?

Then she realises that that lets her control gravity, and it is broken as SHIT.

Allow me to explain. Controlling gravity means controlling space-time. In other words, she's got Write Permission on the Ricci Tensor. This allows her to do all of the following:

• Telekinetically tear people apart with tidal forces.
• Travel faster than light (by forming an Alcubierre drive metric around herself)
• Create highly localised areas of extremely powerful, directed gravity, to shoot things at people - usually at high fractions of the speed of light.
• Create WORMHOLES at will.
• Create huge amounts of sub-atomic scale black holes, so that the aggregate Hawking Radiation they produce manifests as a massive-scale Gamma-ray laser. Oh, and did I mention this has a MINIMUM energy output of One Megatonne (TNT) per second?
• Use Bullet Time properly - being able to move and act normally while everyone else is effectively frozen. Also due to the Alcubierre drive metric, used in a different way.
• Create shields that can nullify ANY physical or EM-radiation based attack. By essentially creating a 'wall' of anti-gravity between her and it.

The power to make things spin. Swirl your coffee. Keep a top spinning indefinitely. Wrench people's heads off and make whirlpools in their veins.

Hm. That basically sounds like an incredibly useful power, actually. Considering Everything Is Better With Spinning and When Things Spin, Science Happens. Basically, spinning is a very, very powerful thing in nature.

I've created quite a few parodic superheroes with lame powers, but perhaps the standout is Spontaneous Combustion Man. Just to be clear, he does not make other people spontaneously combust (then it wouldn't be spontaneous, would it?). He regenerates 5-10 minutes after it happens, and has no control over when he combusts (because, again, it wouldn't be spontaneous if he did). Is there any way this guy could do something useful with his powers?

If he can regenerate from Spontaneous Combustion, then he can regenerate from pretty much anything, right?

There's also controlling the flow of liquids, good for party tricks or diverting rivers into major metropolitan centers or flooding all the blood in the body into one place.

edited 13th Jul '11 9:10:50 PM by KSPAM

Fridge Logic: He would make an awesome interrogator.

"If I were you, I'd talk fast."

He'd also make a great terrorist...if he were disguised as a bum. Possibly a good method of contraception?

edited 13th Jul '11 9:12:50 PM by AtomJames

He'd make a great explosive device, period. No volatile materials to track, no way of seeing him coming, no timer, no manner of predicting the explosion.

The only problem would be figuring out how to STOP him from setting off when you don't want him to.

Are we talking about Liquid Flow Guy or Spontaneous Combustion Man right now?

Combustion Guy, obviously. The first priority would be making him functional.

You could just play it for laughs but no? He enters a booth in a public bathroom to do some business and BAM.

Incidentally, I created my Suenyaverse specifically with Heart Is an Awesome Power in mind. Every power, is useful, even if in a Mundane Utility sense. And some powers we as writers tend to consider more for their superhero value are valued more as mundane things. For example, one of the primary characters/recurrers is a prince who is An Ice Person. A lot of people think it's weird that he, the Prince, would choose to specialize in such a bland, ordinary power... because, given how intergrated magic is in their society, ice magic is most useful to them for food preservation, and ice-magic-users are usually working-class types.

However, there's one power given to one secondary character in the series that I can't figure out how to make cool: He changes the color of things. He's known for tinting his hair strange colors, and his room is obnoxiously loud, but I'm not sure how to make this power "cool."

I see your color-changing and I raise you invisibility - for himself or anything else that needs hiding. Or inducing blindness by making someone's eyes opaque. Or making someone's clothes transparent as a prank.

I had a guy in a now-defunct forum RP whose power was kinetic manipulation. Basically, he could essentially stop any existing force from acting on something and redirect it onto his own body. By itself this would already give him flight (gravity is a force), but combined with some specially designed gloves it lets him block punches and redirect them at the puncher with equal force, stop a moving car to propel himself at speed through the air, and do this to a Stupid Evil Omnicidal Maniac who was wrecking things for everyone else in said RP:

edited 13th Jul '11 11:02:26 PM by KyleJacobs

I probably should have specified that he can't do transparency. He could tint someone's lenses a strange color, but he can't change transparency/opaqueness—just general stuff.

Although I suppose camoflague is an option.

@Atom James: Spontaneous Combustion Man is played for laughs. I'm just trying to see if, in theory, there's anything useful he can do with his powers.

He could really mess with signalling flags? Or any sort of flag at all, to get identities confused.

If he can change color, he basically controls the ultraviolet spectrum. Technically, he should be able to blind people like a flashbang or disorient them with seizure-vision.

The ability to read and write backwards.

Like Riotous Rascal I also have a character who controls gravity, but she's a Person of Mass Destruction, so it's not lame.

However, one of my antagonists has the power to turn inorganic material into styrofoam. Not so useful... until he does that to a building’s supports and makes a skyscraper fall down.