Superhero Origin

The Avengers as explained by Matt Cowan.

I got bitten by a radioactive bug
I tried an experimental drug
I went for a stroll on a gamma testing range
I found an enchanted Uru cane
I made a serum that made me small
I modified the serum so it would make me tall
I got a radioactive isotope in my eyes
A dying alien helped me accessorize

— Ookla The Mok, "Super Powers"

Every Superhero has an origin story, telling how they gained their powers and decided to fight crime. It may be revealed in their first appearance, or not until an eventual flashback. But once established, it sets ground rules for which tropes are applicable to that particular superhero.^note Superheroes that never get an origin story tend to be either a) not important enough to get an origin story, or b) intended as mysterious, a la The Phantom Stranger

The in-story explanation may be that the ultimate source of the hero's power is magic, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, or Weird Science. However, the actual origin tends to boil down to one (or more) of these:

1. Lucky Accident: A Freak Lab Accident, one-in-a-million malfunction, or what have you; e.g., Spider-Man, The Flash, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil or The Fantastic Four. This is one of the most common superhero origin tropes. Whether temporary or permanent, it may improve their lives significantly or have them angsting over becoming an Eldritch Abomination and reminiscing about the days when they Were Once a Man.
2. The Chosen One: Given powers by an ancient and wise being, such as an alien, one of the Powers That Be, or a being that's a combination of the two; e.g., Captain Marvel (who is not Shazam) or the Silver Age Green Lantern, or the previous wielder handed it down. They were probably granted these powers because they were deemed worthy to handle them or, maybe, as part of a prophecy. Note that the transfer of power isn't always positive as they may now be Blessed with Suck thanks to a Gypsy Curse; e.g., Ghost Rider.
3. Non-Human Hero: They're superhuman because they're not human at all; e.g., aliens like Superman or Martian Manhunter; after all, they're from space or they're from a mystical realm like Wonder Woman or Aquaman or they're deities/demi-gods like Thor. They might alternatively be genetically engineered, a cyborg (inevitably involuntary and Angsting over his condition), or otherwise a creation of science; e.g., The Powerpuff Girls. In this case, expect them to be a Phlebotinum Rebel. They may also be anthropomorphic creatures with human characteristics; e.g., Rocket Raccoon or even Sonic the Hedgehog.
4. My Own Creation: A scientist, engineer, or other makes-cool-stuff type invents something that gives them powers and uses it to help people; e.g., Iron Man; or experiments on himself and gets powers; e.g. Henry Pym (Ant Man/Giant Man/Yellowjacket/Goliath/Whatever he calls himself now). These types rarely sell their secret or use it to empower others, usually on the basis of "I can't trust anyone else to use X responsibly" or "The World Is Not Ready".
5. Applied Phlebotinum: Their powers may not directly derive from them, but rather from using a Magical Accessory, an Upgrade Artifact or even an Artifact of Doom they just happen to come across; e.g., Green Lantern, The Mask. It could also be a powerful substance that renders them impervious; e.g., Blankman. Naturally goes hand in hand with My Own Creation and The Chosen One and may overlap with Lucky Accident. Often invokes With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility as well as You're Nothing Without Your Phlebotinum.
6. Augmentation: Be it biological, genetic, physical, chemical or cybernetic, they achieve powers from implementing external enhancements of some kind whether it was of their own volition or done against their will. Perhaps, they participated in an experiment taking a Super Serum to become a Super-Soldier (e.g. Captain America). Maybe they suffered a near-fatal accident and were made to undergo an Emergency Transformation or to be used as a Human Weapon (e.g. Robocop or Inspector Gadget). They could also be Professor Guinea Pigs and decided to use themselves as test subjects with varying results (a Jekyll & Hyde scenario might come to mind). More-or-less often overlaps with The Chosen One, Non-Human Hero, My Own Creation or Applied Phlebotinum and, like Lucky Accident, may lead to Was Once a Man.
7. Pure Will: A suitably motivated mere mortal achieves a high degree of competence in crimefighting owing to a combination of extreme training and/or scientific/engineering ability along with native ingenuity; e.g., Batman, the second Blue Beetle (Ted Kord).
8. Evolutionary Levels: Sometimes, they're just simply born with superpowers maybe as a result of a Bizarre Baby Boom, a mere biological fluke of some kind or other mysterious circumstances. Who knows what the future holds in store for humankind. These powers could manifest at any point in their life, though many examples have them especially occur during puberty; e.g., the X-Men.
9. Superpowerful Genetics: They inherited their powers (whether the same or completely different) from, at least, one superpowered parent or ancestor; e.g., Spider-Man's daughter Spider-Girl, Violet and Dash from The Incredibles, Magneto's twin children Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch or the entire student body of Sky High. Tends to overlap with Evolutionary Levels.
10. Random Selection: Something totally random that nevertheless isn't an "accident"; e.g., any mutant character. Tends to be retconned into one of the others later.

...each of which has its associated tropes. Any of these may be retconned into each other, whether in part or in full.^note "Yes, you had a lucky accident, but the only reason you were able to survive that accident is because you're actually half-martian!" Supervillains can also get their powers in these ways, though their accidents tend to be more unlucky, thus initiating their Start of Darkness. Occasionally, these can be compounded across several characters with a Mass Super-Empowering Event. Note also that sometimes these powers aren't always so "spectacular", if you will. They can be particularly unusual, or only occur under weirdly specific circumstances, or may even be ultimately useless leading to What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?.

That's how they get their powers; motivations to actually fight crime include:

• The Cape
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong
• Order Versus Chaos
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
• Blood Knight
• Boisterous Bruiser
• Because Destiny Says So
• Legacy Character
• It's Personal
• La Résistance
• Let's Get Dangerous!
• Small Name, Big Ego
• The Atoner
• I Just Want to Be Normal (e.g. if a scientist wants to reverse his Freak Lab Accident, or if the Chosen One has a task that's possible to complete.)
• Contrived Coincidence

Often, the hero to be gets both powers and motivation in the same event, wrapped in one neat package. They may also get a supervillain arch-nemesis to fight, motivated and empowered by that same event.

---

Examples

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball Super has Jiren the Grey of the eleventh Universe and strongest member of the Pride Troopers. In fact, he has one that wouldn't be too out of place for Batman. He was an ordinary child who came home to find his village destroyed and his parents murdered by an evil entity. He was taken in by a man who became his mentor and taught him how to fight. The same evil entity would later murder his mentor and most of his fellow students, and Jiren's intentions to avenge his fallen comrades caused the remaining students to abandon him out of fear. The hardships in his life would cause him to develop an obsession with strength as a means of attaining peace, leading him to join the Pride Troopers and become the strongest being in Universe 11.
• One-Punch Man: Saitama was your average Japanese salaryman until one day, when he saves a butt-chinned boy from a Lobster-Man, which reignites his passion to be a hero. After that, he trained every day, doing 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, and running ten kilometers, until all his hair fell out and he was strong enough to beat opponents with one punch.
• My Hero Academia has a mix of Types 1 and 2. Izuku Midoriya had wanted to be a superhero his entire life, but wasn't born with the powers to make it happen. He ends up meeting his idol, All Might, through sheer dumb luck (albeit not before nearly getting suffocated to death by a sludge villain). After being admonished by All Might for his unrealistic dream, Midoriya's selfless drive to help others, along with his bravery during an incident in which several heroes including All Might himself were hesitating to act, impresses him enough to decide that Midoriya was worthy of inheriting his unique and powerful Quirk: One For All. Setting him on the path to achieve his dream and become a Hero.

Asian Animation

• The first two episodes of Happy Heroes are a two-part pilot that provide the story of the origin of the Supermen (sans Careful S., who forms later). The evil general Big M. from Planet Gray tries to use all but one of his ultimate weapon, the Jixie Stones, but they don't do anything once they attach to vehicles floating in space. The vehicles plummet to Planet Xing, where the mechanic Doctor H. fixes them up; later, when a monster formed from Big M.'s remaining Jixie Stone rampages through the city, exposure to electricity turns the vehicles into Transforming Mecha containing the Supermen, and the heroes quickly defeat the monster. So, essentially, the Supermen had their powers from the moment they formed because they're robots.

Comic Books

• Jack Hawksmoor of The Authority has a particularly odd origin: He was repeatedly abducted and altered by what he thought were aliens, who were in fact time-travellers from the 70th century, in order to use him as a weapon to fight a rampaging Kansas City by bonding with Tokyo. ...yeah.
• Deconstructed by the post-Crisis Captain Atom, whose actual origin was kept secret by the military, which "revealed" his pre-Crisis, Silver Age, Charlton comics origin as his origin to the public.
• DC Comics' Ambush Bug claims that his costume was sent to Earth by a scientist who predicted (wrongly) that his planet would explode; along the way the clothes were bitten by a giant space radioactive spider. Obviously, this is a send-up of both Superman's and Spider-Man's origins. Considering Ambush Bug is crazy, he likely made up the whole thing.
• Subverted in Krypton No More when Supergirl claims she and Superman are genetically-engineered humans and "Krypton" is nothing but Superman's delusion. Superman comes to believe it until he realizes several details don't add up, confronts Kara and she admits she was cajoled into lying to him.
• DC, at one point, had a lot of heroes with the "lucky accident" origins whose accidents had been rendered laughable as science marched on. To reconcile this, they introduced the concept of a "metagene", a dormant gene carried by all these characters that activated in the presence of these accidents that would have crippled or killed any other person who lacked the gene, thus transforming their "lucky accident" heroes into "random selection" heroes.
• In Johnny Saturn, most of the superheroes (called metaheroes) are modern versions of Greek gods. Many of the metaheroes have descended from higher dimensions, or are alien hybrids, or non-powered mystery men, such as Johnny Saturn himself.
• A running joke in Ed Brubaker's Sleeper (WildStorm) is that bored supervillains like to kill time by telling third-person, slightly hokey versions of their own origin stories. These are accompanied in the story by an Art Shift to brighter colors and a more traditional panel lay-out.
• The Powerpuff Girls origin is already established, but the comic book story "Everything You Know About The Powerpuff Girls Is Wrong" (issue #40, DC run) plays with this. The students of Miss Keane's kindergarten class offer up their own interpretations of how the girls came about, using the origins of Superman, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four as parallels.
• Robin (1993): The new hero Dodge's Heel–Face Turn is foreshadowed by his origin, which involved stealing a prototype teleportation belt from S.T.A.R. Labs. It's not a good sign for your superhero career if you kick started it by stealing from the good guys.

Comic Strips

• Parodied in Phil Foglio's What's New? with Phil and Dixie, in which a single hero-to-be is subjected to so many different origins that he's reduced to ashes by their cumulative effects.

Fan Works

• In Amazing Fantasy, Izuku turns down an alleyway instead of a shady underpass, getting bitten by a genetically-altered spider that gives him powers.
• In A Force of Four, Power Girl retells Jimmy her origin in the first chapter.
• Last Child of Krypton is an origin story detailing how Shinji Ikari gained Kryptonian powers and became his world's first and greatest hero.
• The first few chapters of Loud Heroes serve as the Superhero Origin for the Loud siblings, chronicling how they got their superpowers in the first place (a lab accident from Lisa that led to them being hospitalized), their motivation (Lincoln suggesting the principle of With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility) and the superhero identities they adopt (under the team name of the L-Crew). Quite coincidentally, the fanfic's first few villains (outside of mundane criminals) also show up around this time, with numerous other antagonists (including both characters who start off as evil straight away and those who initially begin as normal but later become villains) appearing over the course of the fic; most of their backstories are left vague, though.
• MCU Rewrites: Black Widow details Natasha Romanov's origins: from her training in the Red Room to be conditioned into a cold-blooded killing machine to meeting Clint Barton and being offered a chance at redemption.
• Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku's arrival on Earth and subsequent adoption is detailed in the first chapter. He doesn't learn about the Kryptonian side of things until he rediscovers his spaceship when he's 14.
• Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton details how Asuka Langley Sohryu finds out about her powers and heritage and becomes Supergirl.
• Supergirl (2015) fic Survivors is the origin tale that tells how Kara Zor-El and her cousin arrived on Earth, were raised by a family and became the first super-heroes.
• Discussed and Deconstructed in Tales of Karmic Lies Aftermath, a Recursive Fic for The Karma of Lies. Alya tries to invoke My Own Creation by getting genius classmate Max to make equipment for everyone, only for him to explain that they simply can't afford it or access the materials required. She then seriously considers trying to stage a Lucky Accident, with her friends pointing out just how unlikely it would be for that to turn out favorably. Nino specifically notes that it's more likely to end up like the start of a horror movie instead.
• In The Vampire of Steel crossover, one entire chapter is devoted to Supergirl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer exchanging origin tales after having a run-in with some vampires.

Film — Animated

• Deconstructed in The Incredibles, where the Big Bad Syndrome created the Omnidroid with the express purpose of staging his own debut as a superhero, being the only person that could defeat it on account of having a remote to control it. Unfortunately, in order to make it the ultimate threat, he gave it an artificial intelligence that can learn from its opponent, causing it to rebel and disarm him, leaving the actual superheroes to save the day.
• Interestingly, both Metro Man (a Superman Substitute) and his arch-nemesis Megamind have the same initial origin mirroring Superman's - they're both from neighboring planets that were sucked into an Unrealistic Black Hole. The difference is, Metro Man looks human but has Superman's powers. Megamind has a large cranium, is completely blue, and is devilishly smart (he can also survive a Megaton Punch but otherwise has no powers). Also, while Metro Man was raised by loving, rich parents, Megamind was raised by (also loving) convicts in prison.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse affectionately plays with this. Every Spider-Person gives their introduction via a comic-book-styled flashback showing how they got their powers and highlighting various moments of their lives since then, with each flashback beginning by having its respective character's comic being added to the pile of the previous Spider-People's. This is all done with a knowing wink; it starts with Peter Parker outright admitting in his introduction that the audience probably already knows his origin story, and by the time SP//dr, Spider-Man Noir, and Spider-Ham join the team, their origin retellings are all shown at the same time, ending with Peter getting impatient and cutting their flashbacks short. However, when Miles Morales's own comic is shown being added to the pile, it becomes clear that Into the Spider-Verse is actually Miles's own origin story, and the film ends with Miles giving his own introduction after finally proving himself capable of carrying the mantle of Spider-Man.
  "Alright, let's start at the beginning one last time..."

Film — Live-Action

• Deconstructed in Batman Begins: Mook Joe Chill kills Bruce Wayne’s parents. Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop Gotham police cannot deliver justice to him. The Mafia Don Carmine Falcone gives Bruce Wayne a "The Reason You Suck" Speech that forces him to begin The Hero's Journey, then he is trained by the League of Assasins and outsmarts Corrupt Corporate Executive Earl to become Batman. A possible explanation is that Gotham was a Cornered Rattlesnake and it is trying to produce a superhero to survive: Notice that all of the forces oppressing Gotham were Threshold Guardians that created the Superhero that will fight them.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Man of Steel is Superman's origin story in that universe.
  • While Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice mostly averts the trope as redoing an origin story was felt redundant following The Dark Knight Trilogy, there's still a flashback of the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents and their burial, along with Bruce overcoming his fear of bats. The film and Zack Snyder's Justice League also elaborate on how Victor Stone/Cyborg got his powers.
  • Wonder Woman tells the story of Diana of Themyscira, how she acquired her uniform and other equipment, how she received her mundane name, how she came to be involved in the world of man and how she found out about her divine parentage.
  • Aquaman is Arthur Curry/Aquaman's origin story and the story of how he came to reclaim the throne of Atlantis.
  • SHAZAM! is the story of how Billy Batson and his Family of Choice got empowered by the wizard Shazam.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Most of the films in Phase 1—namely, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger—act as this for their titular characters, who are the four "super-powered" members of the Avengers, so the audience will know who they are and how they became who they are when they all come together in The Avengers. Iron Man 2 is the sole exception, continuing Iron Man's story (though it does introduce Black Widow, another future Avenger, but she doesn't have superpowers and doesn't receive an origin story). As with their comic book counterparts, Iron Man is Type 4 (he made his original Iron Man suit IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!), Hulk is Type 1 (lab experiment gone wrong), Thor is Type 3 (an Asgardian, whom the Norse gods are based on in this universe but are really Sufficiently Advanced Aliens), Captain America is Type 2 (was chosen to be made into a Super-Soldier by the scientist in charge of the program).
  • This also holds true with other characters who are introduced in their own movies and have their own adventures before meeting others from the MCU, including Ant-Man (the original, Hank Pym, being Type 4, and his successor, Scott Lang, being Type 2), and Doctor Strange (also Type 2).
  • The MCU version of Spider-Man notably averts showing the titular hero's origin, likely because there were already two major film series (Sam Raimi's Spider-Man Trilogy and The Amazing Spider-Man) that went into Spider-Man's origin story. In his first appearance in Captain America: Civil War, Peter has already been Spider-Man and had his powers for some time, and his own subsequent solo movie, Spider-Man: Homecoming, doesn't deal with his origin at all outside of a brief mention of the radioactive spider that bit him. Presumably it's the same as his origin in other versions. Eventually, the MCU would explore the origins of their Spider-Man with a Prequel animated show, Spider-Man: Freshman Year.

Literature

• Captain Underpants's origin story is told in one of George and Harold's comics - he was born as "Little Baby Underpants" on the planet Underpantyworld, which was under attack by the Wedgie Warlords. Little Baby Underpants's father, Big Daddy Long Johns, created an amulet intended to prevent the planet's destruction from the spray starch the Warlords were using, but it ends up in his son's underwear. Big Daddy Long Johns and his wife, Princess Pantyhose, reluctantly decide to save Little Baby Underpants instead, and they slingshot him (using his underwear) to Earth, where he is adopted and renamed "Captain" by an old couple. Captain's birth parents eventually appeared to him in a dream, revealing his origins and inspiring him to become a superhero. Outside of the comics, Captain Underpants was created when George and Harold use a 3D Hypno Ring on their mean principal Benny Krupp and can't properly undo the hypnotic trance as they lost the instructions. Resorting to breaking the trance by dumping water on his head, Krupp can be put back in the trance at the snap of a finger. He later gains superpowers as Captain Underpants when given superpower juice, though wearing clothes as Mr. Krupp keeps these powers dormant.
• In the book Superpowers the character telling the story directly refuses to explain what happened to give the students their powers. Partly this is to keep the information out of the wrong hands, but mostly it's to avoid an avalanche of snide letters telling him his science is all wrong.
• An odd retroactive example in the Leviathan trilogy by Scott Westerfeld turns the entire trilogy into one for a couple characters due to the ending. The main characters Deryn and Alek make a career change from, respectively, a bio-zeppelin midshipman and Prince-in-exile to agents under the employ of the powerful Zoological Society. Some cryptic remarks in conjunction with the skills they learned throughout the trilogy and the experiences they've had would seem to suggest that they were recruited to be international espionage or diplomatic agents of some sort. However, we're never actually shown what the Zoological Society has planned and the trilogy is done at that point. Whatever the case, after the trilogy they are set up to become powerful and professional figures in the field of political intrigue, whereas they were competent but ragtag amateurs working off limited resources during the trilogy.
• The titular hero of the pulp detective series Black Bat was a DA who was blinded by a criminal during a hearing. One day, a woman came to him and offered him a surgery that would cure his blindness. After the surgery he had super-human traits, like better hearing, due to his time as a blind man. He decided to become a masked vigilante to stop people more personally than he can with his day job.
• In Worm and Ward, there are generally two ways to acquire powers, each a mix of Superpowered Genetics and one of the other methods. In order to have the potential for powers, you must be born with a novel brain organ called a Corona Pollentia. Most people who have one then acquire powers by undergoing a trigger event, an experience so physically or psychologically traumatic that the source of powers gives you superpowers in order to deal with it; however, it seems impossible to determine in advance who will be born with a corona, nor does it appear to be possible to intentionally force a trigger event to occur, so there's an element of Chosen Ones here as well. Superpowers can also be acquired by purchasing them from the amoral secret conspiracy Cauldron, in a form of Applied Phelbotinum. Of course it turns out that both of these methods rely on the true source of powers—giant, inter-dimensional aliens called entities who grant powers to "lesser" life forms as a means of testing power interactions and gaining data as a part of their reproduction cycle, which is why trigger events can't be forced: the entities only grant powers to people they think will use them in interesting ways. Cauldron's power-granting vials are derived from material harvested from a dead entity, and imbibing one basically "forces" the connection that would normally occur "naturally".

Live-Action TV

• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer Buffy is explicitely referred to as The Chosen One (though, even when we finally get told how Vampire Slayers came to be, who or what does the choosing is still left vague) and fights evil mainly Because Destiny Says So and, with great ass-kicking ability, comes great responsibility.
• Angel, meanwhile, had its main character be of non-human stock (namely, a vampire) who fights other demons because he's The Atoner who, if he plays the right role in the coming apocalypse, might get to become human again.
• Doctor Who gradually revealed the Doctor's identity and backstory over the course of the show. In 1969, "The War Games" established the Doctor as a Sufficiently Advanced Human Alien called a Time Lord, and revealed that the Doctor stole his TARDIS. In 1973, "The Time Warrior" gave the Doctor's home planet a name: Gallifrey. In 1976, "The Deadly Assassin" introduced Gallifrey as a once-great world that fell into decadent corruption, and explained that the TARDIS was a decommissioned "museum piece" in a government stockpile before the Doctor swiped it. In the late eighties, showrunner Andrew Cartmel planned to establish the Doctor as one of the original founders of Gallifrey, but the show went off the air before this "Cartmel Masterplan" could come to fruition. And starting in 2005, the Time War is part of the new series backstory, taking Gallifrey out of the picture and leaving the Doctor as the Last of His Kind.
• Gotham initially starts out as an origin story for Commissioner James Gordon from Batman, having recently moved to Gotham and struggling to deal with the corruption in the police force, while also showing the origins of iconic Gotham villain like the Penguin and the Riddler, with Bruce Wayne himself attempting to deal with the loss of his parents.
• The Incredible Hulk (1977): The original pilot movie recounts the gamma radiation experiment that Dr. David Banner does on himself which causes his transformations into the Hulk. He is unaware that the machine he used was labeled incorrectly, so he gives himself a substantially higher dose than he intended. A shot of him using the machine is included in the series' weekly opening sequence, and the narration refers to the accident as well.
• Merlin (2008) is intended as this, featuring a much younger version of the famous wizard as he attempts to master his magical abilities. However it also played fast and loose in regards to the original myths, such as having him be the manservant to the future King Arthur, who he must protect from many threats.
• Pennyworth proposes an origin story for Alfred Pennyworth, the future butler of Bruce Wayne/Batman, and also features Bruce's parents. The only thing is, it's very much Alternate History, and it gets weirder from there.
• Smallville is an origin story for Superman, with the first half of the series showing him trying to learn more about his origins and gain better control of his powers while dealing with many Monsters of the Week and doomed friendship with his future Arch-Enemy Lex Luthor. The second half moved the setting to Metropolis as Clark started working at the Daily Planet and had him deal with many of his iconic enemies, essentially being a Superman show without having Clark being Superman.

Tabletop Games

• Obscure d20 System superhero game Deeds, Not Words lets players mix power origin, race, and class to make their own Super Hero Origin, with a Point Build System to help custom-build to fit whatever the player wishes. Most of the origins listed above specifically correspond to power origins you can take, such as supernaturals, mutants, avatars, or channelers. Class choice is the go-to for origins such as "My Own Creation" or "Pure Will" types, however.
• Truth & Justice encourages players to outline their character's Origin, but it doesn't automatically have any kind of mechanical relevance — it's there for the Game Master to mine for plot ideas. A player can choose to make it matter mechanically by basing their Weakness on their powers (such as a Superman character listing "Kryptonite"), or if the player takes a Meta-Power for their character, a package of shared powers and vulnerabilities based on that Origin.

Video Games

• In City of Heroes, the above 5 origins are organized thusly: Magic, Kheldian/Natural, Science, Technology/Natural^* Natural can be "you're just that tough" OR "this is normal for your species", and Mutant.
• Sonic the Hedgehog': Early on, localizations attempted to give Sonic multiple, inconsistent origin stories to explain his Super-Speed. These were all dropped when Sonic Adventure brought the original Japanese storyline into the western territories, which keeps Sonic's past vague and it's assumed he was always just fast:
  • The internal Sonic the Hedgehog Bible was the original American backstory behind Sonic. Despite this, it was quickly abandoned in North America but was commonplace in Europe (where it was featured in Sonic the Comic). In it, Sonic was a brown hedgehog who met a human named Dr. Kintobor. Eventually, a freak accident gave Sonic super speed, fused his spines, and turned him blue. The same accident turned Dr. Kintobor into the evil and gonky Dr. Robotnik.
  • At one point the American Sonic the Hedgehog website listed a backstory. It described Sonic gaining his abilities from playing with the Woodland Creatures he rescues:
    Sonic the Hedgehog grew up with his forest friends in the Green Hill Zone of the planet Mobius. Orphaned at an early age, Sonic fell in with a clan of rambunctious animal friends who taught him a variety of skills and tricks that you'll see him use in his video games today.
    Johnny Lightfoot, a rabbit, showed Sonic how to outrun every creature in the forest, while Sally Acorn, a squirrel, taught Sonic how to jump incredible distances. A bluebird Flicky, influenced Sonic with his happy fearless approach to life: Joe Sushi, a walrus instructed Sonic on how to dive and swim, while a penguin, Tux, taught Sonic how to breathe underwater. With the help of his many friends, Sonic developed cleverness, speed and a certain amount of "forest smarts."
    Perhaps the most important lesson of all was from Chirps, a chicken, who inadvertently helped Sonic develop the Super Sonic Spin Attack. You see, as Chirps was learning to fly, he tumbled head over heels out of his nest. Sonic teased Chirps by imitating him as he tumbled. Soon Sonic had gathered so much speed from imitating Chirps' tumble that he became a blur of quills and fur.
• In South Park: The Fractured but Whole the in-game tutorial for the various classes takes the form of Cartman dictating your character's in-universe backstory of how you gained your powers and you changing classes is him deciding to revise it. They all involve a group of burglars breaking into your house and you walking in on your parents having sex, though as the game goes on Cartman adds in such details as a baby and an alien. Eventually you travel back in time to learn that the burglars are just your social media followers desperate for a follow-back and your parents were arguing rather than having sex.

Web Animation

• The Most Epic Story Ever Told in All of Human History: The third episode shows that Epic-Man got his powers because... the Epic Narrator bestowed them on him.

Web Comics

• "One day, at the scene of a fire, the cop found the perfect fireman axe. That was the day he became... Axe Cop." Yes, that's his whole origin.
• Parodied in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, when Bob ends up randomly stumbling through five different super hero origins in the space of a few minutes (alien ring, radioactive spider bite, cosmic rays, sadistic Canadian scientists, etc.), resulting in his becoming so powerful that he can barely move without destroying his surroundings.
• Ciem Webcomic Series. Stan Flippo was experimented on by aliens, who fused his genes with those of a mutated centipede. His daughter gets superpowers.
• The current story arc of M9 Girls! is their origin story: the Girls get their powers at the scientific job they are working as interns.
• Elliot of El Goonish Shive reminds◊ why most try keep their origin secret.
• Appears in this Comments on a Postcard strip. Allegedly.

Web Original

• Takotsubo: The story of a superhero is a Deconstruction of this: Cord Cai is an unassuming Asian-American young man, who's trying to be good after a life of street gangs and homophobia. After his fiance Roland gets shot, the police barely manage to help, and Cord attempts to jump off the Golden Gate, but gets spotted and taken to the hospital. Desperate for justice, Cord tracks down the murderer... and then shoots him. And then starts a gang instead of becoming a superhero, because he thinks he's not good enough to get out of the streets. Of course, this will clearly be a Reconstruction since his alias is the Tin Man, his gang works with the police to clean up civilian crime, and the story's tagline states that this is "the story of a superhero."
• Several episodes of Society of Virtue including "Choices", "Adopted Son" and "The Impressives"
• Whateley Universe: While super-powered mutants are the primary focus of both the titular Superhero School, Whateley Academy, and the series as a whole, examples of damn near every other possible origin can be found in the series as well. This has been lampshaded multiple times. For example, when a superhero team with no mutant members find out that they are pretty much the only ones who had been kept in the dark about Whateley, everyone else was surprised to find out they didn't know about the school already. Since most of the other teams had had at least one mutant who had been a Whateley student, it never occurred to anyone to mention it to them. Conversely, others suspected that the reason that SPECTRUM didn't have any mutant members was because they were all bigoted against mutants, so they didn't want to spill the beans, though most figured they would have heard about it anyway.
• Deviant: The very first scene shows the main protagonist discovering her powers, somewhat disastrously.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender lays it out in the Opening Narration before every episode. ^{All together now:} 
  Katara: Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them. But when the world needed him most, he vanished. A hundred years passed and my brother and I discovered the new Avatar, an airbender named Aang. And although his airbending skills are great, he still has a lot to learn before he's ready to save anyone. But I believe Aang can save the world.
• Harley Quinn (2019): Harley explicitly decides to redefine her Origin Story from the day that she choose to jump into the same vat of chemicals as Joker in order to prove her love to him, to the day Harley broke up with him and decided to be her own villain.
• The origin of Shego's powers are given in the Kim Possible episode "Go Team Go". Shego and her four brothers were hit by a rainbow comet as children, giving them superpowers and changing their overall colours. Shego and her brothers were a part of Team Go, but Shego broke off when she decided to become a supervillain.
• In Miraculous Ladybug, the protagonists combine The Chosen One and Applied Phlebotinum. The Season 1 finale reveals that after the villain Hawk Moth began a one-man war on Paris, the Guardian of the Miraculous chose Marinette and Adrien to wield the Ladybug and Cat Miraculouses in the city's defense. Later episodes have Marinette choose people to wield more Miraculous; Chloe adds Lucky Accident because she got a Miraculous Marinette dropped and was only chosen later on.
• The Powerpuff Girls were created by Professor Utonium in an attempt to make "the perfect little girl" through artificial means. He intended on only using sugar, spice and everything nice, but accidentally added a fourth ingredient named Chemical X (the source of the Girls' superpowers) to the concoction, courtesy of a lab monkey named Jojo shoving him.
• The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Mermaid Man Begins" has the titular hero tell SpongeBob and Patrick his origin: Mermaid Man was a normal human who took a nap while on the beach. A wave drew him into the ocean, where he was sucked into a whirlpool. Luckily, mermaids saved him. They gave him a magic sea-star mask that allowed him to breathe underwater. He eventually became lonely with no one to talk to under the sea, until one day when he encountered a young boy scraping barnacles off the underside of a ship. Worried that the boy might drown doing this, Mermaid Man used his telekinetic powers to replace his lungs with barnacles. Seeing as both would spend the rest of their lives breathing underwater, they team up to become superheroes. Then a TV marathon reveals the real origin: Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy were just roommates who got caught in a Techno Babble-filled Cliché Storm of superpower sources (radioactive bug bites, falling into a vat of acid, etc.)... which amounts to nothing. Then, while having a movie night, they ate popcorn that got slightly overcooked while those clichés were taking place, becoming superheroes as a result.
• Young Justice (2010): Several of the young heroes have different origins than their comic counterparts.
  • Roy Harper/Speedy in this continuity is actually two people, regular Roy and a clone Roy. The clone Roy who takes up the identiy of , Red Arrow, is the one we see in Season One who is later revealed to have been a Manchurian Agent for The Light. The real Roy had been kidnapped by the Light to create the clone and was kept cryogenically frozen for Eight years. In Season Two, clone Roy manages to finally rescue real Roy after Five years of searching, real Roy then takes the identity, Arsenal, to differentiate between himself and clone Roy. And in Season Three, clone Roy changes his name to Will to establish his own identity.
  • Static along with several Superfriends expies were kidnapped by an Alien race known as the Reach. Who then preformed horrific experiments on them and other kidnapped teenagers to research the "Metagene" and create Metahumans.
  • Geo-Force and Terra who are siblings in this contiunity, were the victims of a Superhuman Trafficking Syndicate who kidnapped them and forcefully turned them into Metahumans.
  • Halo also gained her powers after being victimized by the same Trafficking Syndicate. Later its revealed that Halo is not a Metahuamn, but the soul of a living machine known as a Motherbox fusing with the dead body of a young girl, bringing her back to life and granting her a wide array of powers via New God technology.

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