Containment Clothing

Q: What happens when a radioactive teenage girl's containment clothing is breached?
A: Nothing good!

"That isn't armor. It's restraints."

— Ritsuko Akagi, Neon Genesis Evangelion

Some powers cause their users to become too dangerous to be in the vicinity. Instead of others wearing Hazmat Suits or other more or less fantastic protection, the person with the dangerous power wears a suit to prevent it affecting others. Said suit may also function as a Power Limiter or Powered Armor if that helps control the power.

Clothing Damage is an issue of which the user ought to be aware. Hence, Containment Clothing is often made quite rugged, which may in turn enable it also to serve as armor for the wearer. Other features are optional, such as vents which enable the uncontrolled power to be released in controlled, directed bursts.

If the suit isn't solely to protect the world around them, some characters may slip into a full Super-Power Meltdown if their clothing is breached.

The suit may also serve as a variant of Sealed Evil in a Can or Sealed Good in a Can.

Might be a wardrobe choice for a Walking Wasteland, Poisonous Person, Nuclear Mutant, or someone suffering from Power Incontinence. Contrast Phlebotinum-Handling Equipment. See also Clingy Costume.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• My Hero Academia: Yuga Aoyama has a birth defect which causes his beams to involuntarily leak out from his navel, which explains why he needs to wear a special belt all the time. It's later revealed that he was actually born quirkless, so his body wasn't adapted to the quirk he was given.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The armor that every EVA unit is plated with isn't to protect it from harm. It's to protect everything else from harm. The moment it gets stripped off is the moment it starts going apeshit.

Comic Books

• In Avengers Academy, Hazmat constantly emits harmful radiation from her body. As a result, she is forced to wear a protective suit at all times when around others. The suit is not simply meant for containment, however, as it allows her to focus her radiation into energy bolts and other forms.
• Professor Radium from Batman #8 constantly wears a containment suit to prevent him from melting walls and killing everyone he touches as a result of his failed revival with radioactive material. The suit is quite heavy, which causes him to drown when he's knocked into water during his final confrontation with Batman.
• Doom Patrol: Negative Man needs to wear special bandages over his body to prevent his radiation from affecting others.
• The Freedom Fighters (DC Comics) superhero the Human Bomb has the power to blow up anything he touches. He wears an asbestos suit to keep his powers in check.
• Hellboy's ally Johann Kraus, a member of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), is a German medium who was reduced to his ectoplasmic form in the present after a séance gone wrong. He now has to stay inside a special containment suit to interact with the world.
• Legion of Super-Heroes has Wildfire, whose body is all energy. The suit is to protect others from his energy but also to prevent him from dissipating.
• In Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt (2019), Nucleon, a superhero with nuclear powers, usually wears something resembling a Hazmat Suit, but sheds it to unleash her powers. Presumably, she suffers from low-level Power Incontinence, and hence emits enough radiation to make long-term exposure dangerous for normal humans.
• X-Men:
  • Due to Power Incontinence caused by brain damage and/or a mental block (depending on who is writing the current storyline), Cyclops wears special glasses and visors to prevent his Eye Beams from firing out all the time.
  • Cyclops's younger brother, Havok, originally needed a specially-designed suit to contain his energy blasts. Unlike his brother, Havok eventually developed the ability to control his powers without the suit's aid.
  • Rogue, whose ability/memory/draining powers activate on skin contact, has to wear gloves to avoid affecting people. On the other hand, Clothing Damage is a much bigger issue for her.
  • Multiple Man's power of Self-Duplication is triggered by physical impact. His father created a suit that would absorb kinetic energy so that Jamie wouldn't keep making dupes every time he bumped into something.

Films — Animation

• Frozen (2013): Subverted; Elsa wears gloves during her coronation ceremony to prevent her ice powers from inadvertently working. Later, Hans puts her hands in metal shackles/"gloves" seemingly to prevent her using her ice powers, but her powers easily work through the metal and blast it away, which in hindsight makes it clear that the gloves never really contained her powers either and were purely a placebo for Elsa.

Literature

• Chum: Radioactive supervillain Ilya Fedorov, a.k.a. Chernobyl, wears a self-made suit of Powered Armor that helps contain the worst of his radiation. Any hero attempting to fight him has to damage the suit first... which, in turn, leads to increased levels of exposure, with deadly results.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The ethergaunts are Humanoid Abominations who wear featureless masks because their faces, "a horrifically alien morass of facial organs and orifices", are Brown Notes that can break the mind of anything that sees them.
  • Pale Night, the Mother of Demons, is an unspeakably ancient evil deity who appears as an alluring female shape wrapped in wispy strands of pale white fabric. However, what appears to be "fabric" is actually the reality itself rejecting Pale Night's true form and attempting to conceal it, as any normal being who witnesses it either goes mad or dies on the spot. In other words, the reality itself creates a containment suit around the deity, which she can, however, lower at will to punish mortals.
• Warhammer 40,000: One Chaos Space Marine is essentially Nurgle's Rot in human form and wears his armor less to protect from damage and more to avoid destroying the environment when surrounded by allies. He only has to remove his helmet and breathe out to unleash his miasmas.

Video Games

• Body Blows: Puppet and Phantom, gaseous-like creatures that are among the only survivors of a meteor impact that destroyed all other life on their planet, inhabit a suit of armor and a cloak respectively in order to take part in fighting and other physical activities.
• Resident Evil: The Tyrant series of B.O.Ws wear special bulletproof trenchcoats, because while restrained in them, they can be programmed for control, and look at least (roughly) human. If the coat is damaged too much, a Tyrant's body will start to undergo further mutations, and the resulting mental degradation this brings means the Tyrant will end up attacking anything in its way. To make matters worse, upon mutating, most Tyrants gain foot-long razor-sharp claws on at least one hand, along with more muscle mass. For context, a restrained Tyrant can punch through walls and bend steel, lift a helicopter with one hand like it was tissue, and dash forward very fast for something their size. A mutated Tyrant is able to throw train cars.
• The Nox from Warframe is a Grineer unit clad in a heavy suit of armour that contains noxious gasses they breathe. This suit also has a glass helmet that you can break to score headshots, but this will also let out these gasses which Nox will be more than happy to share with you. When Nox gets killed (with helmet intact or not), their body and armour will burst, leaving behind a poisonous cloud that lingers for a few seconds.

Webcomics

• In Kill Six Billion Demons, angels are Energy Beings from the Void Between the Worlds who need to wear specially enchanted armour to manifest in the physical world. If it's breached, the cold white fire of their bodies goes off like a bomb.

Western Animation

• In the pilot of Batman Beyond, Derek Powers is mutated into Blight due to a combination of exposure to his own deadly mutagenic nerve gas and the radiation treatments used to save his life. He has to wear a special synthetic skin to appear normal and to contain the radiation. However, the skin doesn't last long, especially when Derek loses his temper. It gets worse as his condition deteriorates, since he's becoming even more prone to anger and his radioactive powers are increasing. By the end of the first season when he's exposed as Blight, his skin can't even last a day and he no longer has a reliable means of securing the materials to make it.
• Ben 10: Ultimate Alien: N.R.G. and the alien from which he was sampled, P'andor, wear armor to contain their radiation powers. While P'andor's suit was sealed and required help to break himself out, N.R.G. can open his own suit at will.
• In Justice League Unlimited, Captain Atom is composed entirely of unconstrained nuclear energy, so he has to wear a humanoid full-body suit to contain it and to protect those around him from harmful radiation on the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

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