Basic Trope: A woman comes into power, but is unable to control it.
- Straight: Claire gains the power of telekinesis and telepathy, but she ends up losing control of this power making her a danger to herself and everyone around her.
- Exaggerated: Every woman that comes into any kind of power ends up losing their minds with it.
- Downplayed:
- Claire is elected mayor of a town and becomes Drunk with Power.
- Claire can control her own power, but the result is rather messy.
- Justified:
- Claire's powers are emotional and thus are tied to her mental health. She's suffering a major mental health episode, and it's showing through her dangerously unstable powers.
- Claire was originally a normal human before she gained telepathy and the emotional power of telekinesis. The resulting combination of the stress of hearing everyone's pain mixed with her own causes her to completely snap under the pressure and become violently destructive and uncontrollable.
- Claire wasn't just a normal human Touched by Vorlons, this was a power she was never meant to have in the first place. She is literally not meant to have this power, and thus has no ability to control it.
- This power cannot be controlled period. It's similar to how a person cannot stop themselves from sweating when their body temperature is high.
- The power is sentient and has a bestial instinct.
- The power requires very professional training to use it stably.
- Inverted: Claire's power boost grants her stability instead of instability.
- Gender Inverted: Charlie gains the powers of telepathy and telekinesis and proceeds to lose his mind, making him a danger to himself and everyone around him.
- Subverted: Claire seems to be going in this direction, but she just loses her powers instead of losing control of them.
- Double Subverted: But when the emotional stress reaches a boiling point, her powers finally start wreaking havoc on everything around her.
- Parodied: Claire becomes an ice cream truck driver and starts to act like a Card-Carrying Villain, cackling that she now has the power to lure children into her "evil" clutches, with the power to...give them brain freezes.
- Zig Zagged: Claire's powers are independent of her emotions, but sometimes they can destabilize when she does. Sometimes, she's perfectly healthy with unstable powers, or she can be out of her mind with stable powers.
- Averted:
- Claire's powers are not affected by her mental state, so even when she naturally has weak moments, she never becomes a threat.
- Superpowers or political power are not present.
- Enforced:
- "We need to give Claire an interesting arc. Let's imitate what they did with Jean Grey in the "Dark Phoenix Saga".
- "We need some Heroic BSoD for our heroine, having mental breakdown is a good idea".
- Lampshaded: "Keep an eye on Claire. If anything happens to her, it will have drastic consequences."
- Invoked: Emperor Evulz using his psychic powers to deliberately destabilize Claire until she loses all control of her powers, effectively turning her into a walking nuclear weapon to take down her own former allies.
- Exploited: Emperor Evulz notices Claire's natural instability, and starts to sow fear of her among her own people to try and get her to snap completely.
- Defied:
- Claire sees that her powers rely on her mental health, and thus she regularly goes to therapy to ensure that she will never suffer this.
- Whatever entity seeks people to empower in this universe refuses to empower Claire (or any other unstable individuals, period) and if that leads to accusations of it being sexist, then so be it — the absurd body count Claire would create was bound to give it a bad name anyway.
- The entity that gives powers to people in this universe includes a little safeguard in which everybody who becomes mentally unstable is immediately killed by their powers. There's of course ways to bypass said safeguard, but they still show that they were a good investment when Claire — the most powerful user in history — becomes hysterical then begins to go all "Dark Phoenix" and suddenly drops dead.
- Discussed: "Are you sure Claire's okay? Why is the entire house shaking?"
- Conversed: "Oh God, is it me, or are the
Unfortunate Implications senses in my head telling me that Claire is a Hysterical Woman stereotype?" - Deconstructed: Claire lost her mind independently of her powers, but the fact that she had powers at all are what made her psychological breakdown so dangerous. It triggers suspicion of not just her, but every woman, or even every person who has Emotional Powers and the risk they pose to the public if their mental health suffers a nosedive. Claire and everyone like her in the world become a pariah with people terrified of them, which only further fuels the Vicious Cycle as the public's actions towards their kind only fuel their instability even further.
- Reconstructed: The public realizes their mistake and welcome Claire and her people back with warm arms which helps to mend the rift and gives Claire and her people a lifeline by which they can stop stressing and losing control of their powers.
- Implied: Claire's superhero team declines to take her on a mission that would take her back to her war-torn home country. The New Meat to the team asks them why, and they reveal that Claire had lost her entire family and nearly had been raped by the invading army. It never is examined beyond that, but Claire's powers are explicitly mentioned as being tied to her emotional state, and the New Meat immediately suspects that this trope might be in play.
- Played For Laughs: Claire has the power to create bubbles. When she loses control of this power, she creates a huge field of bubbles all around her that the kids all love.
- Played For Drama: Claire's instability and lack of control over her powers causes her to accidentally kill one of her own friends. This action is the catalyst for a divide in her team over what to do about it, and she's exiled from both groups as they fight, leaving her vulnerable since she has no team to help her.
- Played for Horror: Claire casually slaughters half a million people because she was given a coffee two degrees too cold, another half a million people because she didn't liked the way they were looking at her, a third crowd of half a million because they couldn't shut up their children, a couple of dozen children who weren't allowing Claire's son to play soccer and everybody else in the city because murder felt fun.
Don't let the Unstable Powered Woman keep her power. If she does, it will be hell on Earth for everyone else.
