Magic Meteor

Asteroids Power Up!

Hego: It began when we were children. Lady Fate came a-knockin', and she knocked hard.
Kim: What was that?
Hego: A glowing, rainbow-colored comet that gave each of us special powers.

— Kim Possible

A certain type of Applied Phlebotinum in giving powers. Here new superpowers come from above, literally. A meteor falling from the sky gives powers to a person. Either they're hit by it or exposed to it in some way.

For religious imagery, sometimes this meteor is actually Wormwood, a falling star in the Book of Revelation. For a Historical In-Joke, it may be The Tunguska Event.

Compare Thunderbolt Iron, where meteor ore is forged into a weapon. Should not be confused with Colony Drop or Meteor-Summoning Attack, which cover (among other things) conjuring meteorites with magic and dropping them as an attack.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Futari wa Pretty Cure begins with a meteor shower that brings Mepple to Earth. Mipple came the same way a hundred years prior.
• The Apocalypse Virus in Guilty Crown came from a fragment of a meteor that landed in Japan. The virus immediately infected the first person who touched the rock, who was Ouma Mana.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, the arrows that grant Stands to people struck by them are revealed in Golden Wind to be made from a meteorite that crashed in Greenland circa 50,000 BC.
• The Original Life Fiber in Kill la Kill, which altered a certain group of apes when it landed to evolve to become intelligent enough to craft complex cloth and lose enough hair to need to wear clothing that it could hide its fibers in.
• A meteorite is the source of the Medusa Plague from King of Thorn.
• Meteor Strike, a one-shot by Nobuhiro Watsuki, has a boy's head literally impaled by a meteorite which grants him superhuman powers.
• A deadly example appears in Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam when an asteroid is found that contains a virus that can turn humans into black goo (and said goo is just a large amount of the virus).
• In one manga adaptation of Powerpuff Girls Z, the Girls have to deal with everyone in the City of Townsville getting powers from a meteor.
• In Saint Seiya Omega, the meteor of darkness Cosmo was summoned by Medea to Earth in the middle of the first war against Mars, upgrading everyone's Cloths and giving them Elemental Powers. Sadly, it also upgraded Mars's Galaxy, making him even more powerful than before. The incident also led to the infant Kouga and Aria inheriting their darkness and light Cosmo from the meteor and Athena, respectively.
• In Toriko, Gourmet Cells first arrived on Earth several million years ago on a meteor. Said meteor is a Planetary Parasite that now takes up 70% of the planet's surface as what is known as the Gourmet World.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh!, a giant meteor of orichalcum crashed near the city of Atlantis, which proved rich in mining and technology but slowly turned the inhabitants into most of the monsters that the Egyptians collected and Pegasus transmuted into Duel Monsters trading cards. There's also a special collector's card made from fusing a blank card with a piece of orichalcum meteorite, which has the power to activate a specialized playing field.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, certain powerful cards fall from the sky in meteor-like tablets, including the Meklord Emperors and Yusei's Shooting Star Dragon. These cards are later revealed to be sent by Z-one, the enigmatic Greater-Scope Villain of the series, and the meteor tablets are presumably his delivery system (when Z-one himself duels near the end of the series, he uses similar giant tablets in lieu of proper cards).

Comic Books

• In the Homage Comics comic book Ball and Chain, a fighting couple both get bathed in strange phlebotinum from a meteor and get superpowers.
• Big Bang Comics: The Superman Substitute Ultiman gained the superpowers that made him 'the ultimate man' when a meteor crashed into his car.
• Darna: The titular heroine found her Transformation Trinket stone in a meteorite (or rather, the meteorite is the stone).
• The DCU:
  • Adam Blake is a metahuman who was "born a hundred thousand years before his time" due to a comet passing overhead at the moment of his birth, hence his taking the name Captain Comet.
  • Vandal Savage gained immortality from sleeping next to a magic meteor.
  • Animal Man: One story features a fellow who got powers from a meteor only to find out it was the ability to kill with one touch. This echoes Animal Man's pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths origin panel-for-panel, as Buddy Baker originally got his powers from meteor radiation.
  • The Atom: Ray Palmer managed to work out his sizeshifting technology using the white dwarf star matter provided by a meteor made of the stuff.
  • Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!: The six Funny Animals in the Zoo Crew gained their superpowers from a meteor.
  • Freedom Fighters (DC Comics): Black Condor's origin from the 1940s consisted of him being raised by wild condors from a young age and somehow simply learning how to fly. When the story was retold in Secret Origins, writer Mark Waid added a panel showing a passing meteor, to at least give it some kind of explanation.
  • Green Lantern: Hector Hammond found meteor rocks and used their powers for evil.
  • Hawkman: Lionmane got his powers from exposure to a meteor.
  • Metamorpho: Rex Mason got his superpowers from a crashing meteor.
  • Scare Tactics (DC Comics): Grossout gained his powers (and became a giant walking tumor) from exposure to an exploding meteor.
• Marvel Universe:
  • The Avengers: Firebird got her (fire-based) powers from exposure to a meteor, that in a later story was revealed to be the dumped remains of a failed alien lab experiment which had accidentally landed on Earth.
  • Spider-Man: Meteor Man/the Looter's whole shtick is stealing meteorites for their power-granting ability.
• Rising Stars: 113 people (called "Specials") get superpowers from a mysterious meteor crash.
• Many powers in the WildStorm universe can be traced back to the Comet Effect, an event in the 1970s wherein the mysterious radiation from a comet passing close to the Earth caused widespread mutations.
• Zsazsa Zaturnnah pays homage to Darna — in Zsazsa's case, the stone actually has the name "Zaturnnah" on it. It's also much bigger than most Darna stones.

Fan Fiction

• Inverted in The Ash, in which Equestria is hit with an Anti-Magic meteor.

Film — Animated

• Most of the animals in DC League of Super-Pets get their powers from an orange Kryptonite meteor that gives superpowers to animals.
• Ice Age: Collision Course: Geotopia, a settlement in the asteroid on the crash site of all previous collisions, keeps everyone who stays there from aging within city walls. After it is destroyed and its pieces used in a volcano to avert the asteroid, a piece of it lands in the geothermal vents of a hotspring, turning it into a Fountain of Youth.
• Susan gets her powers from a meteor in Monsters vs. Aliens.
• Straight Outta Nowhere: Scooby-Doo! meets Courage the Cowardly Dog: All of Nowhere's weirdness has been happening for millions of years due to a meteor that crashed in its prehistory.

Film — Live-Action

• In Black Panther (2018), this is how vibranium came to Earth — a whole meteor of it crashed in Africa in what is now Wakanda. It created Mount Bashenga, a mountain full of vibranium deposits that's been mined by Wakandans for generations.
• In Chronicle, a mysterious crystalline object found at the bottom of a crater gives three teenage guys telekinetic powers.
• In Creepshow, Jordy Verill finds a meteor which proceeds to turn him into a walking shrubbery.
• In The Curse, a strange glowing meteor falls near a farm and starts mutating the flora and fauna around it, causing everything to be infested with worms and disgusting boils.
• In Die, Monster, Die!, Mad Scientist Nahum Whitley experiments with a radioactive meteorite to mutate animal and plant life.
• A scientist becomes an insane Poisonous Person in The Invisible Ray after being in contact with radioactive meteorite for too long.
• Killdozer!: The energy entity arrives on Earth in a meteor and remains trapped there until a bulldozer smashes the meteor, releasing the entity, which proceeds to possess the dozer.
• In The Meteor Man, a guy named Jefferson gets hit in the chest with part of a meteor and gets powers. To be more precise, the meteor chases him around a corner and into an alleyway.
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend involves a meteor giving the titular character her powers. She also turns blonde and gets a magical boob job.
• In Night of the Living Dead (1968), a space probe carrying a "mysterious cosmic radiation" from Venus blankets said radiation over a third of the US, which then causes the dead to come back to life and, y'know, start eating people. Not a meteor per se, but close enough.
• In Super Mario Bros. (1993), the meteor that supposedly killed the dinosaurs sent them to Another Dimension and serves as a portal to our world.

Literature

• In The Colour Out of Space, the titular "colour" comes to earth in a meteor. Unlike most examples, it's not even remotely beneficial it slowly drains the life out of animal and plant life, which eventually turns grey and crumbles to dust.
• In Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the magic sword Thorn was made from a meteor that, according to legend, struck a temple that God disapproved of.
• In the book Meteorite Strike, everyone who isn't killed by an asteroid gets strange powers.
• Seven Stars: In the prologue, the jewel is said to have fallen from the heavens, already in its current form and possessing its powers. If it was deliberately created, nobody in this world knows by whom or for what purpose.
• "Trucks" (and its film adaptation Maximum Overdrive) uses a meteorite as an excuse for trucks coming to murderous life.
• This is the entire foundation of the Wold Newton Family, a massive case of Canon Welding by Philip José Farmer. In 1795, a meteor struck outside Wold Newton, Yorkshire. In our world, it was just another meteorite with no particular unusual properties (the stone can today be seen at the Natural History Museum in London). However, Farmer proposed a scenario where radiation from the meteorite changed the reproductive DNA of the passengers of a passing carriage. As such, their offspring were gifted with unusual levels of intellect and/or strength, resulting in extraordinary individuals such as Doc Savage, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow and other iconic characters from early science-and pulp fiction.

Live-Action TV

• Arrowverse: In The Flash (2014) and Legends of Tomorrow, Hawkman and Hawkgirl got their Reincarnation and Winged Humanoid mutation from an Nth metal meteorite that fell at the moment of their first deaths in Ancient Egypt. Vandal Savage also became immortal from the same meteorite. In Legends of Tomorrow, it's revealed that the meteorite, and others like it, were sent to Earth by Thanagarians in order to prepare the planet for an Alien Invasion.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The fall of a mysterious meteor is witnessed by King Gil-galad in Lindon and it subsequently comes down in Rhovanion near the Harfoots' camp. There it turns out to actually be a mysterious man with powerful magical abilities.
• Power Rangers: Dino Thunder:
  • It turns out that the meteor that killed the dinosaurs was one of these. Presumably, it would have given them superpowers had it not destroyed their entire ecosystem first with the impact. Pieces of it are the Mineral MacGuffin that give the Rangers their powers.
  • A later meteor wackily rearranges the Rangers' personalities. Trent seems normal when affected by it, but the next time the White Ranger powers overtake him, he remains himself and helps the other Rangers defeat the Monster of the Week. It doesn't last.
• Raising Dion: Years before the events of the series, a meteor shower interfacing with an Aurora Borealis in Iceland gave everybody who was there to watch it powers, including Dion's father Mark.
• Superman himself may not count, but in Smallville, the Monster of the Week is often a "meteor freak", i.e., got their power from exposure to Kryptonite.
• That's So Raven has Eddy get powers for one episode by a meteor passing that only does once in a while.
• In Van-Pires, the four teen heroes get the power to transform into cars by a meteor.

Mythology and Religion

• In Islam, the Black Stone inside the Kaaba of Mecca is presumed to be a meteorite that fell from Heaven, and forms an important part in the pilgrimage ritual.

Tabletop Games

• The Dungeons & Dragons book The Complete Arcane features a prestige class called Green Star Adept, which is basically a living being transforming into a living golem by consuming pieces of a comet.
• The Mutants & Masterminds book Mecha & Manga offers a setting where a comet deposited crystals on Earth that are the source of all of the world's super powers.

Video Games

• The cause of the battling in Clayfighter is a meteor that crashed into Mudville, turning everything into clay.
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series: Tiberium came from a meteor that landed near the Tiber River in Italy. Tiberium Wars eventually reveals that it was intentionally aimed at Earth by the Scrin to support their Tiberium addiction.
• The meteor that starts Ness' adventure in EarthBound (1994). Not only is the time traveler Buzz Buzz riding in it, but the meteor contains a material needed for time travel, which makes sense in retrospect.
• Since the Zodiacs of Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City gain their magical abilities through studying the stars, it's hardly surprising they can learn a Meteor spell. Simply learning it takes a lot of investment, however, and the spell itself is the most expensive one they can learn.
• In Final Fantasy VII, if Sephiroth lived to see his gigantic rock crash into the Planet, the massive damage it would cause would have granted him the powers of a god. This trope is only averted because the heroes stopped him.
• In Gadget: Past as Future, several devices in the Empire are powered by a meteoric ore that seems to provide near-infinite energy. But it also causes strange hallucinations when used in the Sensorama. The tie-in novel The Third Force explains that the ore emits a strange radiation that distorts time.
• The Temsik Meteor from Ghost Trick:
  • You die next to it: Your spirit gains super powers like telekinesis, teleport-swapping similarly-shaped objects, the ability to instantly travel anywhere via telephone lines or the ability to turn back time for brief periods.
  • You are killed by it: Additionally to the former, your body turns immortal and indestructible by being timelocked at the moment of your death, but you are unable to feel any kind of sensation, exhaustion or pain and can leave and reenter the body at will.
• The Chaos Comet from Illusion of Gaia apparently gives off a type of magical radiation. Being bathed in the comet's light had been known to give people anything from psychic powers to horribly mutating them into demons. At one point, it's mentioned that "The Ancients" had enough understanding of the comet's powers to outright create living things, like camels and the Dark and Light Knights. The comet also ended up causing these civilizations to fall, since "evolving too fast brings destruction". It seems to return once every 800 years, however.
• In Inazuma Eleven 2, the superhuman abilities of the supposedly alien members of Aliea Academy are actually the result of exposure to a glowing space rock called the Aliea Meteorite.
• The plot of Inca II is kicked off by an asteroid entering the solar system that contains an enormous energy source. The majority of the game is centered on El Dorado finding a way to destroy this asteroid before Aguirre uses its energy to expand his reign.
• The cause behind all the trouble in Maniac Mansion.
• Meteor G from Mega Man Star Force 3. While it doesn't grant powers directly, the Noise generated by it and its effect on electronic beings causes some positive battle effects.
• Metroid Prime Trilogy: Phazon meteors hit various planets, corrupting the various lifeforms thereon, either killing them outright or mutating them into stronger forms while eventually robbing them of their will. One in the second game creates a whole new Dark World. In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, these "meteors" are actually giant living creatures called Leviathans.
• The early Penvellyn alchemists from Nancy Drew: The Curse of Blackmoor Manor believed that a meteor found by their ancestor had magical powers. More recent generations may not have believed this but kept up the tradition of guarding it as a family secret.
• In Pokémon Sword and Shield, Dynamaxing is powered by energy radiated from what's called Wishing Stars, which true to their name are meteors. One drops right in front of the player and Hop near the beginning of the story and the fragments are used to make their dynamax bands just like everyone else's. It's eventually revealed the Wishing Stars are actually shed pieces of Eternatus' body.
• In Poptropica, Super Power Island's objective is to capture six villains after the prison is hit by a glowing green meteor. The meteor powered up the criminals, who are now running around with superpowers.
• The beginning of Shounen Kininden Tsumuji shows the game's main villain having a meteor fall near him; as soon he gets close, it enters his body and grants him demonic powers.
• Every night in Terraria, Fallen Stars will crash down like meteors in random places. You can collect them and craft them into an item that will permanently increase your maximum Mana pool (which is the only way to get a Mana pool in the first place), and if you're lucky, they can also hit enemies while falling and do 999 damage to anything, including bosses that you can fight outdoors. They can also be used as ammunition for a special type of gun, and do the most damage of any type of ammunition in the game. Actual meteors have 50% chance of falling offscreen after the next midnight whenever you destroy a Shadow Orb and 2% chance of appearing every midnight afterwards and any location that has at least 50 meteor blocks in close proximity spawns unique flying enemies. The resulting meteor ore can be crafted into various items, including the aforementioned star-shooting gun and a rapidly-firing laser pistol which gains infinite ammo with a full set of meteor armor.

Webcomics

• At Arm's Length: This is what uplifted the original Enchanters from "Unga-Bunga" mortals to four-armed magic goliaths. The villains' main goal is to find the planet that the shard came from.
• League of Super Redundant Heroes: Parodied by Distractarella, who gained her distraction power from being struck by "a sexy meteor".
• In the webcomic Super Frat, fratboys gain powers from a meteor striking.

Western Animation

• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sozin's Comet is a celestial object which passes close enough to the world to become a huge and powerful source of fire every 100 years, providing an enormous boost of power to Firebenders. The fact that it heralded the genocide of the Air Nomads and attempted genocide of the Earth Kingdom also marks it as a Comet of Doom.
• Ben 10 starts with the protagonist finding an alien shapeshifting device crashed to Earth like a meteorite.
• In the Camp Lakebottom episode "The Superfantastic Mega-Buds", the Lakebottom campers and Buttsquat gain temporary superpowers from a glowing meteorite that lands in the middle of the camp.
• An episode of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers begins with a meteor falling to Earth, splitting into two crystals, one of which goes to the hero, the other to the villain, giving them both Rubber Man abilities.
• The origin of Team Go in Kim Possible involves a rainbow comet hitting Shego and her brothers as children. The comet gave them all special powers and coloring to be more technicolor.
• In Loonatics Unleashed, a meteor strikes Acmetropolis, but instead of destroying the city, it gives everyone strange superpowers.
• In the Mighty Max episode "Tar Wars", it's learned that a meteor fell to Earth a million years ago and gave immortality and super strength to both a caveman and sabretooth tiger.
• PJ Masks: Meterorites with special powers are a common phenomenon in the show. The first main example is the hero Newton Star, whose powers come from six asteroids that he named "Ajax, Velo, Lumino, Kino, Nova and Zihamba". The hero Ice Cub also got his powers from a supernatural asteroid when it shattered and a fragment got embedded into his onesie. Unfortunately for the heroes, the other fragments ended up giving the various nighttime villains a power boost.
• In Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa, one meteor as such gave rise to the mesa and mutated all the animals.

Real Life

• On the night before a decisive battle during a civil war in The Roman Empire, Constantine the Great had a vision of a cross in the sky, which inspired him to convert to Christianity after winning the battle against great odds and seizing the imperial throne. From this point on, as emperor, Constantine tolerated and eventually promoted the new faith. Scientists have proposed that the cross Constantine saw may have actually been a meteor, a theory also detailed by the good folks at Cracked. In a way, a meteor may have increased the power of Christianity within the Roman Empire and eventually the rest of the world.

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