Logical Weakness / Literature

• Animorphs:
  • The Animorphs are only as strong as whatever morph they're in at the time. While a tiger, a gorilla, a bear, a wolf, and a hawk can be dangerous, they're not immune to gunfire or laser weapons, which is why they avoid open combat. Morphs also come with animal instincts, which can overwhelm any logical reasoning a morpher might have.
  • Morphing is not quick or pretty. This means that being mid-morph is when a morpher is at their most vulnerable, as all the shifting limbs and organs don't allow for good movement, or even breathing.
  • The Inspector is a Garatron Controller, and his host body has the Super-Speed needed to run down cheetahs. As a result, his metabolism is equally fast, which works against him after Marco bites him as a king cobra. He dies from the venom in under a minute, whereas a human would last ten minutes at minimum.
• In Anpanman, the bread-headed superheroes have water and mold as their weakness, seeing as they both make bread soggy and inedible. Baikinman and his Kabirunrun, being an alien bacterium and mold spores respectively, have soap and cleanliness as their weaknesses, with Mushibakinman, a cavity germ of the same species as Baikinman having a weakness to toothpaste. Also, the donburi-headed characters, being bowls of rice with a topping, lose all their powers if their bowls are emptied. Finally, Kurayamiman and the Ice Queen, being darkness and ice incarnate, both are weak against the sunlight.
• The Asterisk War: During the Phoenix Festa semifinals, Julis goes one-on-one against Doroteo Lemus, a Dante who materializes a horse, lance, and suit of plate armor that covers the badge she has to break to knock him out of the match. The armor regenerates each time it's hit, so she can't simply brute-force it, but she quickly realizes that armor traps heat, so instead she just keeps shooting fire at him until he collapses from heat exhaustion, letting her walk up and deliver a Coup de Grâce.
• Bazil Broketail: Witch spells are spoken usually, so some people counter this by using earplugs, keeping them from being affected.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Accelerator is practically invincible due to his power — changing any vector he wants. He can easily deflect bullets, kill someone by reversing their bloodflow, turn air into plasma bombs, et cetera. However, he has to actually mentally perform all the relevant calculations to do any of this. Brain damage all but cripples his abilities. He has also learned not to stand in the middle of gigantic explosions, as the fire tends to consume all the oxygen around him. This is also true in regards to fighting an enemy who uses electricity and could therefore, in theory, turn all the air around Accelerator into ozone long enough for him to suffocate, as one Misaka-imouto figures out. After all, complete invincibility to external attacks doesn't mean much if you can't breathe. Although, he says he could get around this by simply carrying around a small air canister. As of New Testament, he cannot deflect Hollywood Voodoo because there are no vectors to redirect.
  • Subverted with Touma's Imagine Breaker annihilates anything supernatural it comes into contact with... quite a Game-Breaker when up against sorcerers and psychics. However, the power is confined to only his right hand. Therefore, his enemy reasons that if one were to sever his right hand, the ability would be nullified. Subverted because it turns out the Anti-Magic is merely a side-effect of Imagine Breaker's real purpose, which is to be the lock on some sort of Eldritch Abomination within Touma that is released if his hand is ever cut off. Said being is also one of the strongest entities shown so far. Chances are, if you were having trouble with a magic-cancelling right hand, you're not powerful enough to deal with that. Imagine Breaker is also of no use against people and items that are not supernatural; he often has to run away when he faces opponents with guns. Touma also tries to avoid fighting multiple people; since he only has one Imagine Breaker in his right hand, if he blocks one attack with it, he could be open to being blasted in the back.
  • Vento of the Front can make anybody who feels hatred or hostility towards her to fall unconscious, and it works on people on the other side of the world. Her power doesn't do anything to people who ignore or are unaware of her, and it also doesn't work on people with no hatred in their hearts, including the homicidal maniac Amata Kihara, who thinks killing people is the same as pulling out weeds.
  • Terra of the Left has the ability to alter the "precedence" of objects, which in practice allows him to make something like grains of flour strong enough to cut through solid rock or make himself intangible. But to use his powers, Terra has to declare one object higher and one object lower, and the resultant precedence only applies to those specific items. During their fight, Touma blocks one of his attacks with a discarded shotgun, something Terra didn't include in his new precedence. He can also get hit by surprise attacks.
  • Acqua of the Back is a monstrously strong fighter, due to being simultaneously a Saint (someone born with a similar body to Jesus, granting them incredible power through the Law of Similarity), a member of God's Right Seat (meaning he has altered his body to similarly invoke the Archangel Gabriel), and a skilled user of magic. These powers would normally be mutually exclusive if not for his particular saint traits also including a connection to Mary, the Saint of Mercy. However, this status as a "double saint" means that when struck by the experimental Saintbreaker (a spell which replicates the Crucifixion), his conflicting powers go out of control and he explodes.
  • Fiamma of the Right's power, the Holy Right, gets its strength from the malice of his opponents. This means he is powerless if no one around him feels hate and is weaker when facing people with goodness in their hearts, something Touma points out when he realizes this is the reason why Fiamma couldn't simply wipe out the human race; humanity isn't as wicked as Fiamma believed.
  • Leivinia Birdway's method of casting spells centers around movements she makes over and over again until the movements themselves become magical symbols. While this means that every movement she makes would increase the power of the associated spell, it also means Leivinia can't vary her tactics or improvise in any way, since the resultant spell would be weaker than the ones she has already.
  • Almighty Thor can automatically teleport to avoid his opponent's attacks and place himself in the optimal position to strike them. The teleportation only responds to one opponent at a time, so Touma defeats him by tricking him into the path of a train while he was focused on Touma as his opponent.
  • Kakeru Kamisato's power, World Rejecter, allows him to banish anyone who feels weariness, doubt, and/or dissatisfaction with the world to a pocket dimension. He's powerless to affect anyone who is happy and satisfied with the world. Also, when he eventually feels negative about the world, World Rejecter ends up banishing him.
  • Misaki Shokuhou has unspeakably powerful telepathy. However, it turns out that she's actually a hydrokinetic of incredibly precise power; she reads and controls minds by manipulating fluids in the brain. Which means she's helpless against robots and magical constructs, because they don't think using fluids. Likewise, she can't control animals because they're too alien to her.
• Codex Alera:
  • Furycrafters can manipulate various elements and their powers are generally disabled through simple application of the opposite element. Aircrafters are covered in dirt, earthcrafters are suspended off the ground, watercrafters are dehydrated (and often placed in hot areas near fire), firecrafters are placed in small spaces (so any fire cooks them alive) or placed in pools of water, and wood/metal crafters are canceled out by covering the person in question in the opposite material. Disabling someone with multiple elements is trickier, but doable, but powerful crafters with reasonable power in all 6 elements are virtually impossible to contain as anything that cancels one element will simply empower one of the others.
  • The Vord Queen specializes in these, to the point where at any point where her enemies seem to be winning, she improvises (or already planned) a solution that nullifies her foes' advantage. At one point, when Araris goes full-on Chrome Champion on her, she figures out a rather simple weakness, and coats him in ice, making the metal that makes up his skin extremely brittle and excruciatingly painful.
• Cradle Series: Sacred artists are trained to control their power through specialized breathing exercises. This means that any situation where they can't breathe finds them unable to use their techniques as quickly as they would like. Lindon has a great deal of difficulty while fighting in an underwater world. There is apparently some way around this, as plenty of sacred artists use water madra, and there are even underwater cities, but Lindon never figures it out.
• Date A Live: Miku Izayoi's voice won't be able to brainwash someone if they can't hear it. Likewise, since her powers comes from her vocal chords, she would be rendered helpless if her mouth is covered, as shown when one of Kurumi's clones dragged her into the shadow during their battle.
• In Deltora Quest, the legendary level-3 Ols can mimic something so perfectly it's impossible to tell them from the real thing, and they lack the tells of other Ols. However, they shapeshift so deeply into whatever they're impersonating that they also gain its weakness, and a human-shaped level-3 Ol can be killed by anything that would kill a human. The level-3 Ol Prandine, who was masquerading as a human adviser to Deltora's royalty, fell for a trick that led to Destination Defenestration. His killer didn't even know he was an Ol; she just thought he was a human Quisling.
• One of the main limitations on magic in The Dresden Files (at least magic preformed by humans, as magical creatures like faeries seem to instinctively understand their abilities) is that you really have to know what you're doing for something to work. You can't transform someone into a frog without knowing an awful lot about the anatomy of frogs... and if you don't want to destroy someone's mind in the process you have to really know neurosciences. So, essentially, it's impossible, as well as being against the Laws of Magic because it's so dangerous.
  • There do seem to be some exceptions, as the Werewolves Harry hangs out with turn into beasts that look like wolves to the casual observer, but wouldn't fool, say, a zoologist. They don't seem to fully understand the details of everything they should need to know for this trick, but that's probably why they are limited to exclusively changing themselves into wolves and back and no other form of magic. Most werewolves also get help from some outside source that does in some manner know exactly how wolves work.
  • Another of magic's major rules is that effects called by magic, once out there, will follow the laws of physics unless your spell explicitly includes controlling them. So sure, you can call up fireballs... but you'd better be prepared for the fact that you just set the entire room on fire. Shielding spells can block whatever you want, but they have to be specifically made to block any one thing. Harry ends up with his hand badly burned when he goes up against a Renfield with a flamethrower, as his shield blocks the physical material, but does nothing to stop the heat it throws off, a mistake he later corrects by ensuring his shield will block heat as well. He also takes advantage of this against the Genoskwa,^note Basically an evil bigfoot. which has powerful magic resistance (described as grounding magical energy that reaches him). Harry lands several hits on it by creating slivers and balls of ice and throwing them at the Genoskwa with magic. Once the magic to produce the ice and propel it have been applied (which the Genoskwa can't stop because it isn't targeting him), it's just ice with a lot of kinetic energy, so magic resistance is useless.
  • Nicodemus Archleone is protected from pretty much all harm because he wears the noose Judas used to hang himself around his neck like a tie. However, the Noose doesn't protect him against one thing — itself. Harry tries to throttle him with it twice, and the second time comes damn near to actually killing him. When we see him again, his voice is rougher, showing that the choking did permanent damage to his throat.
• Deflector Shields are prominent throughout the Dune series, including personal ones. The catch is that a shield that keeps anything from touching you also keeps oxygen out of your lungs, meaning you have to calibrate it to let slow-moving objects in. This obviously includes knives.
• In The Elminster Series, casting spells requires making hand gestures. Elminster having his fingers cut off by a rival mage thus renders him unable to do so, and temporarily helpless.
• Grimoire's Soul: Since Ceyda needs to speak to use Yore magic, shutting her up works pretty good for stopping it.
• In Guardians of the West, first book of David Eddings' Malloreon, Garion takes the precaution of blindfolding a captured Grolim sorcerer. He reasoned, correctly, that a sorcerer cannot safely teleport without knowledge of his location. This proves true when Beldin removes the blindfold...and he promptly vanishes.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry possesses a unique and legendary Invisibility Cloak passed down from his family that never fades with age and is impervious to damage and summoning charms, unlike other invisibility cloaks. The wearer will still be affected by spells cast upon them because only the cloak itself is impervious, however, and methods of detection that don't rely on optical sight can't be fooled by it — the cat Mrs. Norris is able to detect Harry under the cloak several times because she can smell him. Moreover, the cloak only renders the parts it cover invisible, the space it covers doesn't grow alongside its user, and anything it doesn't cover is exposed, so in the later books the main trio must crouch whenever they hide under it together, as they grow in size over the years to the point that their feet are not covered by the cloak and are thus visible to others when they don it while standing upright.
  • The Elder Wand is believed to be so powerful as to be nicknamed "the unbeatable wand", so how exactly does one overcome an "unbeatable" wand and earn its allegiance? It should be noted that while Antioch allegedly wished for the wand to be "unbeatable" in a duel, the wand's master is still as squishy as ever, and the wand doesn't discern between being defeated in a fair fight with falling victim to a sneaky Combat Pragmatist. The story itself has Antioch die because someone who wanted the wand slit his throat in his sleep, and most other potential masters do something similar. Of the known masters of the Elder Wand, Dumbledore was the only one to beat his predecessor in a fair duel; Grindelwald stole it from Gregorovich, Draco took advantage of Dumbledore being distracted to disarm him, and Harry wrestled Draco's personal wand out of his hand (neither knew the Elder Wand existed at that point, so its power was not a factor in said fight).
• In the Heralds of Valdemar series, someone comments that since it's difficult to cast spells without gesturing, the best way to disable a mage without risking killing him is to break his arms. He then demonstrates.
• Many of the heroes of High School D×D have logical drawbacks to their powers:
  • Issei's Boosted Gear will double his power every ten seconds — that means it usually takes at least a minute of combat before he's up to snuff. Additionally, particularly at the beginning of the series, his base power is no greater than an average human, and his body can't handle a huge amount of strength at once, placing a limit on how much he can power up before killing himself. He's able to increase this limit through training.
  • Kiba also relies on technique to make the most of an incredibly flexible Sacred Gear, making attacks to his legs a glaring weakness.
  • Koneko is incredibly strong and nearly indestructible, but not particularly nimble. Anything that can fly can avoid her easily, especially if there's nothing around to throw - this is a problem when most of her enemies have wings.
• Honor Harrington comes from a line of people genetically engineered to be stronger and faster than baseline humans but it also increases her metabolism. In normal circumstances this isn't a problem, but when she's trapped in a situation where her team is forced to rely on emergency rations for an extended period of time, what would be sufficient for a normal person continue functioning normally is barely preventing her from starving to death. A novel set earlier in the universe's timeline demonstrates this is a problem in general for Heavy Worlders, as one military recruit, limited to eat the same amount of food as the other (baseline human) recruits due to a bureaucratic policy, is essentially suffering from malnutrition.
• Idlewild:
  • The students are genetically engineered to have superhuman immune systems to protect them from disease. Those same immune systems go berserk when they encounter any unusual material. Considering how long the students spent in suspended animation, pretty much everything merits that allergic reaction.
  • In the sequel Edenborn they discover that between the super immune response, Black Ep, and the drugs to treat it, women are incapable of carrying a fetus to term, although this doesn't explain how the sperm fertilized the egg in the first place.
• InCryptid: The Johrlac are believed to be physiologically related to insects, though they appear human. In Imaginary Numbers, Artie threatens one they've captured with a can of Raid.^note It's unknown if it would be effective against them, but none of them are eager to find out (plus, even humans don't do well when someone sprays roach killer in their face).
• Inheritance Cycle: Elva can deliver breaking speeches due to her knowledge of what pains everyone... so Galbatorix just uses a spell to stop her from speaking at all.
• The original The Invisible Man pointed out a lot of these in regards to invisibility. For example, to actually be completely undetectable Griffin has to strip down until he's naked since his clothes don't turn invisible with him; this makes exploiting his invisibility more treacherous than ever when he ends up in a snowy mountain town as he could easily freeze to death. Griffin also notes that it's incredibly difficult to move around without making any noise, so the invisibility only works best when he remains completely still, and doing that carries the risk of someone bumping into you. Also, the food he eats is not invisible, so it can be seen digesting in his stomach. This is taken advantage of near the end, when Griffin is chasing someone with murderous intentions. The person, who had heard Griffin's entire story and thus heard of all his weaknesses, takes care to run over the most broken, sharp, littered areas of ground he can find, since he has shoes to protect his feet and Griffin has nothing.
• In The Laundry Files, the entities that create zombies possess people via conductivity — skin contact is enough to get possessed, and the zombie can turn others by touching them and inviting one of his spectral buddies into the new flesh. However, as beings that map themselves onto the body's circuit board, a sufficient electrical charge — like, say, a taser — is enough to exorcise them.
• The Lord of the Rings: The One Ring can corrupt anyone who uses it and make them fall to The Dark Side. This corruption is directly proportional to the target's ambitions: something with grand intentions — even noble ones — will be easily tempted to use the ring, and they will be corrupted fairly quickly; while a Humble Hero like a Hobbit will be very resistant to the Ring's corruption. Then there's Tom Bombadil, who has zero ambitions whatsoever and is therefore completely immune to the Ring. Ironically, Tom's purity is precisely why the heroes choose to not make him the Ring's keeper: since he doesn't care at all about the Ring, he would probably lose it somewhere and then forget about it.
• The Misenchanted Sword: Valder rescues Iridith from a couple street thugs. Despite her power as a wizard, the pair took her by surprise, having prevented her reaching her components for magic with a knife to her throat. Valder distracts them enough that she can, burning one to a crisp with a spell.
• Mistborn has Allomancy which follows a very strong Magic A Is Magic A system, so many powers come with obvious weaknesses as a result of their effects.
  • Burning tin gives Super-Senses which is great for lookouts and scouts, but leaves you vulnerable to loud noises or bright lights. Pewter gives you Super-Strength and durability, allowing you to shrug off potentially lethal wounds, but continuing to push your already injured body is incredibly dangerous, particularly if the pewter ever runs out. Bronze can be used to sense people using Allomancy nearby, but Copper blocks it from detecting them. However many types of Allomancy will be incredibly obvious to anyone looking at the person, so if you can see someone using Allomancy but not sense it, you know someone is using Copper nearby. Iron and Steel (telekinetic control of metals) require a really good understanding of elementary physics — relative weight of the object you're Pushing or Pulling will determine if you or it goes flying, and Pushing or Pulling at the wrong angle could very easily send you flying into buildings at high speeds, and how well-secured the item is has an effect as well (if you Push a coin, for instance, it'll fly until it hits a wall, at which point you're getting Pushed instead). It's also not a coincidence that most metals work best when combined with their matching pair; tin might normally leave you vulnerable to bright lights and loud sounds, but the pain suppression of pewter lets you ignore that, and in turn the increased pain sense of tin helps counteract the problem of pewter burners failing to notice their own injuries. Mistborn (the only people with the power to use all the metals instead of just one) learn to balance their metals to take advantage of their strengths and weaknesses.
  • Zinc and Brass allow the user to influence emotions. However, if the target is paying attention, they can detect its use even without Bronze. Vin is almost killed at the start of Final Empire when she tries to use Brass on someone trained to notice its use, which tips him off that she's scamming him.
  • Allomancy is also powered by consuming metals. Vin, one of the most powerful Allomancers of her time, is rendered powerless after drinking a cross between a knockout drug and a laxative, forcing the metals to pass through her body when she's not awake to burn them.
  • Steel Inquisitors are humans who greatly enhanced their Allomancy by having metal spikes pounded in them, the most visible being the ones inserted point-first into their eyes. The tips of those eye spikes jut about an inch out of their skulls to show that they're not wearing monocles. Kelsier uses this to his advantage by cornering an Inquisitor against a wooden structure, and hammering the eye-spikes into the wood with a brick. The Inquisitor is immobilized long enough for Kelsier to cut off his head. And if you can get a decent grip on the spikes, pulling them out saps their powers, and pulling the "lynchpin" spike in their neck will outright kill them.
  • In the sequel series Wax and Wayne, Miles Hundredlives is considered unstoppable due to his insane Healing Factor, but doesn't have superhuman strength or speed. While he's essentially immune to bullets, he's easily restrained by dozens of constables all tackling him at once. Of course, this is after Wax caught him in a net and he responded by blowing some dynamite in his pocket. He was aware of his weakness, he just ran out of countermeasures.
• In The Morbidly Obese Ninja, Crow's signature move is to grab a target with his chain sickle and yank them off-balance. When he tries this on Basu at the climax, it doesn't work — Basu weighs 700 pounds (he's the morbidly-obese ninja of the title), so Crow isn't even close to strong enough to budge him. In fact, Basu uses it to yank Crow off-balance.
• In Night of the Assholes, the only weak point the assholes all have is their assholes (anatomically speaking). A stab in the ass and they die instantly.
• Overlord (2012) has Entoma Vasilissa Zeta. Since Entoma uses insects to fight and is herself part insect, insecticides and such are extremely effective against her. It also has archer ace Peroroncino, who is logically really weak in narrow, cramped passages.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Percy's sword Riptide cannot be lost as it will always return to his pants pocket in pen form. He still ends up getting stuck without it when he's attacked while in a school gym uniform, the pants of which don't have pockets.
• Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain: Penny's mom is the superhero the Audit, who uses statistical analysis to predict behavior and stop crime. When Penny becomes a supervillain, she is constantly worried about her mother finding her out. What is the Audit's weakness? Penny's Spark of Genius is so powerful (it's implied that she's the most powerful Mad Scientist in the history of the human race) that it defies all statistics and predictive models. Working through all the odds and numbers, it makes far more sense that Bad Penny is just some jealous tech thief who also happens to be good at small-squad tactics. Several times Penny overhears her mother going over all the most likely possibilities (Bad Penny might be a robot, or getting help from more experienced supervillains, etc.), but never getting close to the truth. It just so happens that for once, the truth is the least likely possibility.
• In Qualia the Purple, Hatou has a cellphone implanted into her left hand. She can use it to call people, including parallel universe versions of herself, but because it uses her body's energy it makes her physically tired. She takes to eating sugary snacks a lot to keep her energy up, as she's managed to lose some weight after a week of overusing it.
• The Reckoners Trilogy: Every Epic has a single Kryptonite Factor that negates their powers, but these are often too well-hidden to take advantage of. Instead, the protagonists will try to take advantage of ways their powers function. Light-bending illusionists have to leave their eyes visible so that they can see, people with automatic defensive teleporting can't choose not to teleport while in danger, and Epics who can see the future can still be caught in an inescapable trap with no way out.
• RWBY: Before the Dawn: Umber's Semblance requires her to maintain eye contact with her target, meaning that she cannot use it on multiple targets at the same time. Forcing her to change targets will release her previous victim. This also means she cannot use her Semblance on blind people, making them automatically immune to her power.
• The fact that the Church of God Awaiting doesn't know how the Charisian protagonists of Safehold stay one step ahead of them so consistently does not stop them from developing countermeasures against it. The Empire of Charis has access to technology far beyond the planet's Medieval Stasis, letting them spy on just about anyplace they want. While simply assuming Charis just has damnably good spies, the Church works out their Temple is a blind spot and give their troops fake orders sending them one place before changing at the very last second to throw off the Charisian response. Zhaspahr Clyntahn also organizes a network of agents who have no direct contact with one another to prevent spies from learning anything by an overheard conversation. The Church is also unknowingly aided by a self-imposed weakness of the Charisian leaders: they can't reveal their technology, so even if they do get wind of something before it happens, in many cases they can't respond to it much faster than they could if they were really dependent on a spy network and mundane communication and transportation technology, nor reveal that they know things that would be utterly impossible for normal spies to ever discover.
• The Witch Art of FootFollowing in Septimus Heap, which works by allowing the witch to follow her quarry's exact footprints, has the drawback of the witch being unable to deviate from that path until she's caught up with her target — the narration notes that if the FootFollowed were to, say, fall off a cliff, then the FootFollower wouldn't be able to stop herself from doing the same.
• Snapshot: The police have the ability to investigate murders by creating the titular Snapshot, a recreation of a previous day that police officers can be sent into to investigate. However, in order to create a Snapshot the police have to know which day they want to investigate. The serial killer known as the Photographer uses a variety of forensic tricks to obfuscate the time his victims were killed, so the police have difficulty pinning down when to set the Snapshot.
• In C. S. Lewis's The Space Trilogy, the Un-Man is pretty much the devil incarnate, and his rhetorical skills are basically unassailable, which is a problem since he's trying to convince the Queen of Perelandra (Venus's version of Eve) to embrace sin. However, he's the devil incarnate in the body of an unfit middle-aged man, and thus has no real defense against physical attacks. So Ransom just beats him to death.
• Split Heirs: Clootie tries to fend off an angry mob by turning many into animals. They observe he needs to make gestures though, grabbing his hands and tying them so he can't cast the spell. Additionally they gag him, so he can't speak incantations.
• In The Stars My Destination, human teleportation is a reality, where people can "jaunt" wherever they want, provided they can clearly picture the location in their minds. Thus, in order to protect certain areas, people create No Warping Zones by having rooms and floor constantly shift, resulting in "jaunting" people ending up partway in another object.
• Super Powereds:
  • Vince has Energy Absorption powers, allowing him to absorb, store, and emit any amount of any number of energies (fire and electricity are the most common ones he uses). Unfortunately, his first opponent in Year 1 is Michael, An Ice Person. Since cold is the lack of energy, Vince can't absorb Michael's ice blasts, and all he brought with him to the fight is the fire he absorbed from a single lighter.
  • Hershel has a Superpowered Alter Ego named Roy, but he can only trigger the change with some whiskey (which is why he always carries a flask with him). Naturally, an easy way to keep Hershel from becoming Roy is to take away his access to alcohol.
  • Coach George turns into a powerful humanoid robot, but that robot runs on electricity, meaning Vince can drain him pretty quickly.
  • Dean Blaine is a Power Nullifier (and a retired Hero), making him the perfect person to keep order in a campus with dozens of Super students. However, this still means that he can be taken down by someone from outside his range or by someone good at hand-to-hand combat even without powers.
  • Telekinetics can only affect physical objects. Thomas's energy tentacles cannot be affected by them. The exception is Alex, who keeps insisting that he's not a telekinetic but a Jedi and that he controls his power through the Force.
• Larry Niven's "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation" is full of these; one of the obvious-in-hindsight yet rarely-used is that teleporting into "thin air" would fill your body with lethal embolisms. Answer: Switch places with whatever's sitting wherever you're teleporting to. Of course, that "whatever" could be someone you're pursuing...
• Villains by Necessity: Mages need time for concentration, chanting and making magical gestures, thus Robin can distract Mizzamir with an attack, stopping him completing a spell long enough so they can get away.
• Whateley Universe: If you can hear through your force field, you're vulnerable to sonic attacks. Regenerators quickly build up immunities to toxins, but also to painkillers. They also face complications with surgery, painkiller-immunity being just one of them.
• In the Wild Cards books, Philip "Fadeout" Cunningham can turn invisible, but he can't see unless his eyes are visible (as, like anyone, his vision depends on light contacting pigment molecules in his retinas). Fortunately (for him) he can turn parts of himself invisible while leaving others opaque, so he counts on the fact that a pair of floating eyes are hard to spot at a distance, especially in dimly lit areas (plus, he can always make his eyes vanish if hiding is more important than seeing his surroundings).
• The Witch of Knightcharm is set at an evil Wizarding School where the students are encouraged to duel each other. Most of the students specialize in specific types of magic, those types generally have at least one logical weakness, and a big part of winning the duels is learning how to identify and exploit those weaknesses. For example, one duel between a witch who uses water magic and a potions expert is made trivial when the water magician just controls the liquid in the alchemist's flasks so it doesn't flow out of the bottles. This makes it impossible for the alchemist to actually drink her potions, and she's defeated shortly thereafter.