How Do I Shot Web / Western Animation

Characters struggling to figure out how their powers work in Western Animation.

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• In "The N Men", an episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, the kids almost destroy the entire town before they learn to control their newly acquired superpowers.
• The Adventures of Prince Achmed kicks into gear when Prince Achmed mounts a magic mechanical horse and pulls the lever that makes the horse fly. He does not know how to make the horse land.
• Adventure Time: In "Jelly Beans Have Power", Princess Bubblegum has no idea how to use her recently-discovered Candy Elemental powers because she's too analytical to accept her magic. It's not until she starts thinking about her powers scientifically — for example, rather than trying to create soda from nothing, she imagines the base molecules of soda and how they combine — that she gains control over them.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
  • The entire storyline of the series is fundamentally about Aang mastering Water, Earth, and Fire bending to become a "fully-realized Avatar". In particular, Aang demonstrates the most difficulty with learning Earthbending, since the philosophy behind its use (i.e., to face issues and obstacles head-on) is effectively opposite to his ideals as a native Airbender (which places greater emphasis on evasion and dodging).
  • Katara also goes from not being able to consciously control a few liters of water to being a waterbending master.
  • Behind-the-scenes info for Combustion Man states that he got his mechanical arm and foot after blowing them off while learning his ability to shoot explosions out of his forehead when he was younger.
  • In the Sequel Series The Legend of Korra, Aang's successor Korra spent the first season struggling with airbending due to its heavy emphasis on spirituality and emotional stability. Two things that she was incredibly lacking in as a sheltered teenager who had yet to meet a problem she couldn't easily solve via a physical altercation.
• When Scott Lang from The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes first tries to use Hank Pym's Ant-Man gear for a bank robbery, he finds out by chance that the helmet allows communication with insects. Also, when he tries to use Pym Discs to make the stacks of money pocket sized, he accidentally makes them shrink smaller than microscopic size instead.
• 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.◊
• The pilot of Batman: The Brave and the Bold is caused by Blue Beetle not knowing how his suit works and unintentionally creating a wormhole to the other side of the Milky Way.
• In the second season premiere of Beast Wars, Rattrap and Cheetor awaken to find themselves altered into Transmetals. Apart from the aesthetic differences, they also gained new movement capabilities (Cheetor gains jets and Rattrap can convert into a wheeled mode). But their first attempts at this caused them to crash around the Axalon.
  Rattrap: This... is gonna take some getting used to.
  • In Beast Machines, the Maximals initially have no idea how to transform into their more combat-capable robot modes after the Oracle alters their bodies to make them more technorganic. The on-board computers their original bodies possessed that handled transformations for them are absent, meaning there's more to it than simply saying "Maximize". It takes a Die or Fly situation for Optimus to figure it out. He later teaches the other Maximals how.
• Ben 10:
  • A recurring problem for Ben, 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. Reaches its ultimate conclusion in Ben 10: Alien Force with Alien X, which is seemingly omnipotent, but since Ben only gets to be one of its three personalities and the other two are constantly at odds with each other (the only thing they agree on is that they want Ben to provide tie-breaking votes for all their thousands of years worth of disagreements before they get to what he wants to do. And that they both hate Professor Paradox), it's nearly impossible to get it to do anything. (It just stands perfectly still, stiff as a board, completely unresponsive to anything. Ben later learns that this is a serious problem, because he can't turn back until he can convince the other two entities to agree on it, effectively trapping him in the nonresponsive Alien X form.
  • Same applies to Ben's Evil Counterpart Kevin 11, who instead of utilizing the full array of his Omnitrix powers (i.e. phasing, super-intelligence, super-speed, machine control) pretty much prefers to just either smash stuff or blast stuff. In Ben 10: Ultimate Alien Ben has to point out to him that he can phase through objects. He does get more creative in his power usage after realizing he's got so many different abilities, though.
  • There's also the ever-constant problem of the Omnitrix not giving him the alien form that he desires. Acting like a puzzle of sorts akin to a tumbler lock, at first, Ben would quite often be transformed into an alien that he didn't want to be. He does get a little better over time, discovering new aliens altogether and their powers, but it still acts against him. Thanks to some guidance from the Omnitrix's creator (much to his constant frustration), Ben eventually does gain full control over the Omnitrix in Alien Force, even being able to transform at will by speaking the alien name or thinking it. He ends up saving the universe at the expense of overloading the Omnitrix, forcing him to relearn EVERYTHING he learned over the past few years about unlocking its powers. Even in Omniverse, he has almost complete control over it, but it still likes to screw him over every once in a while. He pretty much lampshades it when he wanted to transform into an alien that excels in physical strength, and gets turned into a Galvan (a small, froglike alien known for its brains, not brawn).
    "Sometimes I think this thing just plain hates me."
  • However, in Omniverse, it's Flanderized to the point that he almost never gets the alien he wanted. When he finally gets to confront the inventor over the supposedly upgraded version never working as intended, Azmuth tells him that he's just too rough on the controls (apparently, the way he dramatically slams his hand down on it to activate it before a battle is the culprit).
  • Worse, each model has different ways of tormenting him:
    • In the original series, once transformed there was no switching aliens or changing back until the Hour of Power ended, and it would take quite some time for the Omnitrix to let him change again. Also, it sometimes gave him the wrong one.
    • In Alien Force, there are no mistransformations, and he can change from alien to alien! The bad news is mistransformations are how new forms were unlocked - ten means ten now, PERIOD. In Season 3, he tampers with it to unlock more aliens (Vilgax is returning, after all.) and ends up making it play by original series rules, for better or worse (sometimes worse). He can still change from alien to alien, though.
    • In Ultimate Alien, the Ultimatrix can make his aliens go Super Mode... but there's still mistransformations, and it lacks some features the Omnitrix had, which he finds out about by trying to use them only to find out, no can do.
    • In Omniverse, the new Omnitrix has every alien he's ever had! Too bad no matter who he tries to select, what he actually gets is apparently completely random. So is the time limit; he's stayed in the same alien form for extended battles, or had the Omnitrix last only a handful of seconds and not let him change again. Worse, when Khyber appeared who had a transforming alien dog with forms that were specifically geared to taking down some of Ben's specific forms, which aliens did the Omnitrix keep giving him? Yup, those forms.
• Code Lyoko:
  • In the 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 gets 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. Amusingly, Yumi-in-Odd can't quite get the hang of the Overboard either, and ends up sitting on it like a go-kart. Of course, we're not supposed to ask why they didn't just switch vehicles.
• Danny in Danny Phantom constantly gets new ghost powers, and as per usual, half of them are often hard to control; his Power Incontinence only exacerbates the problem. Among other things, duplication is a frequent issue for him and his Ghostly Wail started off as a Dangerous Forbidden Technique. He eventually got most of it mastered by the end.
  Danny: [creates shield] Awesome! How'd I do that?
  • In Memory Blank, Sam inadvertently created an alternate timeline and had to recreate the accident which gave Danny his powers. Danny, not having any clue how his newly-obtained powers worked, was having trouble with a simple ecto-blast and it came out of his rear instead of his hands. We got a cheesy line out of Tucker in response:
    Tucker: Watch where you're point that thing!
  • Valerie played it straight and then averted it. With her first suit, it took her a while to get the hang of it and it was pretty clear in her first few hunting ventures that she was new at the whole ghost-hunting thing. But, when she got the upgraded suit from Technus, she knew how to use all the equipment and what/where all her weapons were, despite most of it being drastically different.
• Darkwing Duck:
  • Negaduck manages to gain the powers of the Fearsome Five and basically goes One-Winged Angel. Fortunately for our hero, Negaduck has trouble dealing with the conflicting powersets of Megavolt and Liquidator (electricity and water) and the insanity he got from Quackerjack.
  • Come to think of it, Darkwing ("Arachnoduck", Spider-Man-style stuff), Launchpad ("Heavy Mental", psychic powers), and Gosalyn ("Slime OK, You're OK", ooze-based abilities) don't fare any better when they get superpowers.
  • Also multiple instances of people randomly getting suited in the Gizmoduck outfit by accidentally saying the command code "Blathering Blatherskyte". It doesn't help that the suit is also a unicycle. How many people that aren't wearing clown makeup can ride one? One apparently, and it took him some time to get used to it before he could actually protect Scrooge McDuck, Duckburg and St. Canard.
• The Fairly OddParents!: In the Swapped Roles episode, Timmy becomes Cosmo and Wanda's fairy godparent and as a result gets fairy powers. It immediately becomes obvious that he has no clue how to use them, struggling to even shapeshift.
• In Iron Man: Armored Adventures, Tony's first controlled flight in his Iron Man armor has him ding a few buildings but manages to pull it together. Rhodey's first foray goes so badly he creates a crater in the ground when he crashes and swears never to get in an armor again; that same episode Happy Hogan finds the armor and manages to get the hang of it so fast that Tony can't stop gushing about how good he is with it.
• Averted in an episode of Justice League Unlimited, "The Great Brain Robbery". After inadvertently swapping minds with the Flash, Lex Luthor seems to fare pretty well in his new body, and the other League members have a hell of a time trying to stop him. This could be explained as Lex having studied the heroes over the years, as well as his advanced intellect.
• Kid Cosmic: It takes some time for the Local Heroes to get used to their newfound powers. Especially Kid, who has a difficult time controlling his flight abilities and frequently makes himself airsick.
• Kim Possible:
  • In "Go Team Go", the villain's power-stealing staff accidentally transfers Hego's Super-Strength to Kim. She accidentally breaks a few things before figuring out what happened.
  • Later, when Shego gets hold of the staff, she uses it considerably more effectively than the villain who built it, who hadn't realized that he could use more than one power at a time.
  • Ron Stoppable received an infusion of "Mystical Monkey Power" in a first-season episode, but was able to use it only sporadically (perhaps because he's afraid of monkeys). He didn't really master it until the final episode, when he cut loose against a couple of villains who were going to kill Kim and display her as a trophy.
  • In "Queen Bebe", Kim uses a pair of Super-Speed shoes, initially to help with her busy schedule and later to defeat the Bebes. After using the shoes a bit too much, she loses control, overshoots, and ends up on the Statue of Liberty grounds.
• In the animated series of Legion of Super Heroes, Clark Kent is still figuring out how to use his powers in the first episode.
• Martin Mystery: During the few times that Diana gets to use Martin's U-Watch, she might cause mishaps due to not knowing all the functions. Her attempt to use the laser beam gets her the Turbo-Bungee instead, which bounces off the door she was trying to cut open and tangles her in its wire.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • In the "Origins" two-parter, our heroes are taught only how to transform, untransform, and activate their special powers, on account of the situation being (very) urgent. They bumble through their first monster but by the end seem well acquainted with their respective powers.
  • Later in the show, we find out every Miraculous comes with a built-in user manual, perhaps Lampshading this trope.
  • In a Season 3 episode where the heroes end up having to use each other's powers, we get a variation on this — it's not a matter of knowing how to activate a power, or knowing what it does. It's that using it effectively is a lot harder than the one chosen for it makes it look. So when Mister Bug uses Lucky Charm, he gets the exact item he wants, to Marinette's annoyance — a giant mirror. However, deflecting the villain's Humongous Mecha's beam back at it doesn't actually harm it. When Lady Noir uses Cataclysm, it damages the machine but doesn't destroy it, and worse, fries its control system, sending it berserk.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • The Season 4 premiere starts out with Twilight Sparkle learning how to fly with her new wings with mixed results. Later in the two-parter, she is able to fly from one city to another with Spike as a passenger but not without him kissing the ground afterwards. This seems to contradict the ending of the third season finale when she flied perfectly after getting her wings within a few hours.
  • In "Power Ponies", the cast gets sucked into a superhero comic and receive super powers. When they first confront the villain they utterly fail to use their powers effectively. Over the course of their episode they learn to get it together.
  • In "Twilight's Kingdom Part 2", Twilight has to raise the sun and lower the moon now that she has Celestia's and Luna's magic. It's a bit shakey, but she manages.
  • In the Season 9 finale, while Cozy Glow is able to get a decent handle on her new alicorn powers courtesy of getting part of the stored magic in Grogar's bell, she finds herself completely out of her depth when she tries to use all of Discord's chaos magic, which completely refuses to obey her and causes her to beg Tirek and Chrysalis to take it back. Given that it was Tirek who mentioned no-one of them could properly control Discord's chaos magic, it seems this trope was the reason why he never bothered to use any of Discord's tricks after he stole it from him in the Season 4 finale.
• The Owl House
  • Because Luz is a human, she doesn't have the anatomy to naturally cast magic, and there's nobody on the Boiling Isles who can teach her a type of magic she can use. She eventually figures out she can cast magic using glyphs, but takes a while to get them right, and spends multiple episodes figuring out which glyph combinations do what.
  • Downplayed in "Eclipse Lake". Hunter gets into a Wizard Duel with Amity, but because he went to the lake undercover, he didn't bring his artificial magic staff as it would be too recognizable, and has to fight with his Palisman staff. The two staffs are similar, so he gets the hang of it fairly quickly, but there are enough differences — for example, reduced range for his Teleport Spam — to trip him up at the start of the fight.
    Hunter: Real staffs are weird!
• Princess from The Powerpuff Girls (1998) 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.
• In Project G.e.e.K.e.R., 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.
• In the old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special, the baby reindeer always had the ability to fly, but they still had to learn how to do it.
• She-Ra: Princess of Power:
  • The villain Catra has a magic mask that lets her transform into a powerful panther. Since she stole it from its rightful owner, she is unaware of the mask's other abilities like teleportation and communicating with cats. In a few episodes, she discovers these abilities.
  • In the 2018 reboot, Adora can't figure out how to turn into She-Ra at will and spends a good portion of Episode 3 trying to get her Transformation Sequence to fire by dancing around with the Sword and shouting her catchphrase. She manages to turn Horsey into a Winged Unicorn, who panics and trashes a refugee camp. While she eventually figures out how to transform, she is told She-Ra has Healing Hands abilities and tries to figure out how to use them at will. Light Hope tells her it will take several years of isolated training to use Healing Hands, so she decides to skip it since she can't leave her friends unprotected.
• This is the initial premise of Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Princess Star Butterfly inherits a magic wand, but she can't wield it properly so the effects are usually chaotic and disastrous. The wand's previous owners put together an instruction book over the years that she has, but it is so messy and disorganized that it is almost useless; it's almost more family history than wand-related info (and the magical being who inhabits the book is supposed to help in theory, but often is even less helpful than the book itself). As such, her parents send her to Earth so she can try to get a handle on things without destroying the kingdom.
• Steven Universe:
  • The title character has magical Gem powers, but being a human child, doesn't understand how to use them yet. At the best of times, they just don't manifest; at other points, they manifest in the worst possible ways, such as when his shape-shifting nearly aged him to death or turned him into a cancerous ball of living cats. In almost all cases, including his fusion abilities, discovery, access to, or full control over them is achieved completely by accident, and usually in an ultimately instinctive fashion whilst under duress or otherwise in a state of unthinking emotional excitement.
  • Though this is later shown to also be a problem for some whole gems, as Peridot initially appears, and believes herself to have no special powers, and therefore be entirely dependent on cybernetic "Gemtek" prosthetics to be anything other than a Gadgeteer Genius, somewhat more resilient but otherwise no more inherently powerful than a human child, thanks to being created on Homeworld during a huge resource crisis that led to substandard Gem production. Until, that is, Amethyst's frustrated attempt to break her self-imposed withdrawal into social media and the internet by throwing her Security Blanket tablet computer into the sea causes a minor Traumatic Superpower Awakening and the reveal of her rather unique purely mental, non-summon based ferrokinesis abilities, as she catches the device in mid-air by sheer force of will. Which can be seen as a parallel to Steven's own discovery of his bubble and hard-light shield powers, both of which were awakened only by a clear and immediate danger both to himself and one or more people he cares about, after a similar protracted and completely futile series of attempts to elicit said awakening deliberately ...although Peridot's focus was more on a threat to a possession instead of people.
  • It's also implied that the other Gems' control over their powers isn't entirely conscious and somewhat instinctive, matching the deliberately more animalistic nature Word of God states they were designed to express, as they can lose control over them, to either comical, poignant, or outright dangerous extents depending on the storytelling context. This extends not only to weaker and more juvenile-acting Gems such as Ruby and Sapphire, who end up respectively superheating and supercooling their immediate environment - despite the presence of both Steven and Greg - when unfused and mad at each other, but even the Diamonds, as Blue is shown as exerting an involuntary psychic effect (i.e. sympathetic crying) on everyone within a certain radius when deeply upset.
  • Furthermore, in an example that overlaps heavily with I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, the events in Monster Reunion, although not fully confirmed in-universe or by the creators, heavily imply that the main effect of the Diamonds' rebellion-destroying superweapon was to cause every Gem in the path of its beam to permanently lose control of their inherent abilities. Including, not only shapeshifting, but control over the shape of their physical form altogether. Although this left their minds largely intact within the gemstone itself, the extremely protracted and nearly incurable case of How Do I Shot Web that then applied to anything they tried to do, and even their own appearance, which profoundly conflicted with their inbuilt self-image, combined with their natural immortality (now arguably a massive disadvantage), caused them to progressively go insane over the succeeding millennia and thus appear as the Corrupted Gem Monsters that Steven and the Crystal Gems battle in the earlier series of the show.
• Teen Titans:
  • "Switched" has Raven and Starfire body switched and having to figure out how to use each others' powers. Starfire and Raven's learning experiences, interestingly, are about attitude rather than the powers themselves. They both have powers tied to their emotions, but while Starfire's only work when her emotions are allowed to flow free, Raven has to keep her emotions under strict control lest her powers go off unexpectedly and wreak havoc.
  • Terra had trouble controlling her powers, as well. It became a serious issue...
• In Ultimate Spider-Man, one episode has him switch minds with Wolverine. Wolverine has no problem with Spider-Man's agility, but doesn't try to use his other powers. When he tries using the Webshooter gadgets, he fails, however. Spider-Man needs to use Wolverine's powers, but claws are essentially extra limbs so they just go wild as he's trying to process how to use them, and ends up stabbing himself just offscreen. (The cartoon cuts ahead citing technical difficulties.)
• In Season 3 of Voltron: Legendary Defender, the paladins end up shuffling lions (Keith moving to the Black Lion, Lance moving to the Red Lion, and Allura becoming the new pilot of Blue Lion). The means that the pilot of a Fragile Speedster is now piloting a Jack of All Stats, the pilot of a Jack of All Stats is now piloting a Fragile Speedster, and Voltron's lesser Jack of All Stats is now being piloted by someone whose previous piloting experience concerned capital ships rather than fighters. As a result of this, they do so badly in their first fight against Lotor that he concludes that his father killed half the original pilots and they're still breaking in a new flight roster.
• W.I.T.C.H.:
  • In the very first episode the new Guardians have a powers practice that is the definition of how How Do I Shot Web?. None of their Elemental Powers are under control yet, flying is... iffy, even for the naturally inclined Hay Lin and when the girls try to Caleb from Cedric Will attempts to do an All Your Powers Combined attack and hits everything but Cedric. They do pull it together in the second episode and are seen practicing some more in later episodes.
  Will: [after their first practice] ...I think we've destroyed enough of Heatherfield for today.
  • In the second season finale, Cedric falls victim to this trope after devouring the Big Bads of Seasons 1 and 2, 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.
• 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. That's because they were being trained specifically to control their powers, and other characters (Cyclops, Jean, Nightcrawler) had been using their power for years but still had trouble getting it right from time to time.
• Young Justice (2010):
  • Superboy, being a clone of Superman, has some of the older hero's powers, but does not know how to use them. This sets up tension between the two as Superboy wants to learn from Superman and sees him as a father while Superman is (understandably) disturbed by Superboy's existence and wants nothing to do with him.
  • In Season 2, Blue Beetle Jaime Reyes has powerful suit of Adaptive Armor capable of creating just about anything he can imagine and even has Universal Translator capabilities. Too bad he has no idea how to use any of the Scarab's powers at first, and the Scarab's Artificial Intelligence hurts more than it helps since it always suggests the most violent and destructive approach to solving any problem. In "Salvage" the Scarab doesn't inform Jaime that it can communicate with the monster that's kicking his and Superboy's behinds until Jaime rhetorically asks if it can do so because the Scarab sees peaceful communication as a sign of weakness.
  • The Reach abductees have just about as much trouble with their new powers as you'd expect. Even after a couple of months, Virgil has trouble levitating a trash can, and Tye can't even turn his power on until the end of the episode.

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