History Main / HeartIsAnAwesomePower

** "Cabbie" allows you to summon a taxi (or equivalent, like a rickshaw) anywhere, with the main catch being that the driver can request weird forms of payment like keepsakes or memories. On paper, it doesn't seem much - until you realize that, since the taxi can be summoned anywhere, it can also ''go'' anywhere, including inside other people's minds. Additionally, the driver loves to chat about various topics, occasionally offering valuable information.

** Entropy Level 1: Sense Fate And Fortune. Go to Vegas. Play slot machines. [[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome Get blacklisted by every casino from Shanghai to Los Angeles.]] [[DeconReconSwitch Use any number of disguise spells to evade the ban.]] Repeat. Wipe your ass with hundred-dollar bills.

* ''Series/Warehouse13'': The Regents, who oversee the titular warehouse and its [[ArtifactOfDoom vast collection of empowered historical artifacts]] are specifically recruited because they have a seemingly-useless skill that proves extremely useful in their line of work. The group's recording secretary, Theadora Stanton, is a waitress in a diner, meaning that her ability to quickly and accurately write down complicated information in shorthand is second to none. Other Regents include a kindergarten teacher (whose status as a FriendToAllChildren makes her able to bond with any kid) and a man with a master's degree in American history (since the artifacts all belong to famous people from the past, he's able to track historical figures' lives with extreme precision).

• ''Series/Warehouse13'': The Regents, who oversee the titular warehouse and its [[ArtifactOfDoom vast collection of empowered historical artifacts]] are specifically recruited because they have a seemingly-useless skill that proves extremely useful in their line of work. The group's recording secretary, Theadora Stanton, is a waitress in a diner, meaning that her ability to quickly and accurately write down complicated information in shorthand is second to none. Other Regents include a kindergarten teacher (whose status as a FriendToAllChildren makes her able to bond with any kid) and a man with a master's degree in American history (since the artifacts all belong to famous people from the past, he's able to track historical figures' lives with extreme precision).

* ''Myth/ClassicalMythology'': Hestia was the goddess of hearth fires. Sounds boring, but it meant that she was the [[TheHeart metaphorical]] and literal center of all homes and cities (and even the Earth itself, as the Greeks believed there was a fire at its center), and her favor was important because none of the fancy stuff mattered if you had no home to return to. She was also generally considered to be the nicest goddess and the only one who never got involved in shenanigans, and if you didn't show her proper respect, her ''entire family'' would be lining up to smite you for daring to upset their favorite CoolAunt. In Rome, her temple famously contained a fire which was never allowed to go out, because if it did then Rome was considered to have lost her favor, which was a very, ''very'' bad thing indeed.

** Cendrillon has the power of ''Literature/{{Cinderella}}''. This gives her incredible speed and agility to casually dodge a cluster bomb strike (based on Cinderella's dancing and the pumpkin carriage) and lets her ''remotely [[BodyHorror mutilate the feet]]'' of anybody with a different shoe size than her. After all, she can do anything that has to do with the story of Cinderella.

* ''ComicBook/CaptainAmerica'': Some of the Falcon's powers include talking to birds and seeing what they see. It doesn't sound too promising until you realize that these birds can aid him in battle and act as his spies from ''everywhere''. It's been implied that between Comicbook/NickFury and all of the resources of ComicBook/{{SHIELD}}, and Falcon with all of the pigeons in New York, Falcon has the better intelligence network. His powers also affect other creatures that have some sort of avian ancestry. An issue of ''ComicBook/TheAvengers'' has him rescuing the team from a group of raptor-like aliens by using his abilities to force the creatures to flee. People also forget that his wings are pretty powerful melee weapons. This is {{lampshade|Hanging}}d in ''[[ComicBook/UltimateGalactusTrilogy Ultimate Nightmare]]'' when ComicBook/BlackWidow jokingly says that Falcon wouldn't impress Unicorn by flapping his wings, only to retract her statement when he uses them to eviscerate the villain.

* Somewhere in ''Fanfic/TheInfiniteLoops'' is [[Manga/RanmaOneHalf Ranma]]'s first ''Franchise/XMen'' loop, in which he gained the mutant power to change the temperature of water. As in, raise it from 1° Celsius to 99° Celsius, never being able to freeze or boil it. Professor Xavier is solemn when explaining this to him, expecting him to be as disappointed as the other mutants who got unimpressive powers, but Ranma is overjoyed now that he doesn't need a kettle or a thermos to control his Jusenkyo curse. He then goes on to defeat Magneto by raising his body temperature and making him pass out from hyperthermia.

* Comicbook/{{Aquaman}} receives this trope in the animated medium as well. ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeague Unlimited'' and ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheBraveAndTheBold'' in particular use it to great effect and make him one of the most powerful characters in each series, while in one episode of ''WesternAnimation/SuperFriends'' he uses microscopic aquatic organisms to control ''water itself''. In ''The Brave and the Bold'', he's weak primarily because he's by far the most relentlessly positive do-gooder GentlemanAdventurer and has very definite ideas about how a hero should behave, and most of those ideas involve faces and the punching thereof (not really where he shines, though he's reasonably strong). This leads to some rather hilarious sequences where he turns aside from a hopeless fistfight to casually stop a large-scale natural disaster or weapon of mass destruction or other "non-heroic" issue in a matter of seconds, then returns to losing the fist-fight against the villain.

The character decided to play the SuperpowerLottery and ended up at the bottom of the [[SuperWeight superpower scale]]. In the world full of {{Reality Warper}}s and ElementalPowers, [[WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway they won a heart.]] [[MyNewGiftIsLame Lame, right?]]

* ''[[http://www.tthfanfic.org/Story-27501-32/JoeHundredaire+Blue+Belle+Director+s+Cut.htm Blue Belle]]'': Brittany has PrehensileHair that she can also change the length, color, and style of. She stakes an entire church full of vampires by using her hair to fling pencils at them, acting like a human [[MoreDakka minigun]]. [[Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer Buffy]] decides to check her email while she waits for Brittany to finish.

* ''[[https://archiveofourown.org/works/16139546 Izuku's Catsuki]]'': [[Manga/MyHeroAcademia Izuku's]] quirk is the [[ForcedTransformation ability to turn people into ordinary house cats]], which many people, including All Might himself (though that was just the result of him being stressed and tired), didn't see as particularly useful for hero work. Sure, Izuku's quirk isn't as flashy or as physically powerful as Bakugo's [[HavingABlast Explosion]] or Todoroki's [[AnIcePerson Half-Cold]] [[PlayingWithFire Half-Hot]], but it turns out that being able to disable a person and nullify their quirk with just a touch is pretty much a StoryBreakerPower.

** One of their first recruits was Triplicate Girl, with the ability to transform from one ordinary teenage girl... to ''[[SelfDuplication three]]'' ordinary teenage girls. [[MundaneUtility Useful for doing chores]] and [[PowerPerversionPotential pretty fun in bed]], but not much good in combat. At least, not until she became [[WeakButSkilled a master of Tri-Jitsu]], a martial art based around the fact that you have six arms, six legs, and three potential points of attack to coordinate from. She is also an expert infiltrator. Go somewhere and be seen to walk back out... after leaving ''two'' of your selves hidden somewhere, have them gather information, and then reunite to share and correlate. To top it off, splitting in two or three is a pretty handy way to dodge attacks.

** In the WebOriginal/ElfslayerChronicles, a game of D&D played over an IRC chat, an illusion-mage PC decided to go OffTheRails [[ScrewYouElves in response]] to the DM's [[CantArgueWithElves blatant elf fangirlism]] (with her being a YaoiFangirl adding fuel to the flames) and start strategically murdering elves, using his illusion magic to give himself alibis and incriminate those who he wanted to. He ended up almost singlehandedly throwing the nation into chaos and pushing the elves into a war they couldn't ever hope to win.

* ''WebVideo/CriticalRole'': Fjord's homebrew Paladin class gives him access to Marine Layer, a 30-foot radius sphere of dense fog centered on Fjord that obscures the area entirely, becoming see-through when standing within 5 feet of Fjord. It created ''far'' more problems than it solved in the fight againt [[spoiler:Avantika]] since it essentially made half the ship impossible to navigate and provided cover for enemies too, and the party quickly wrote it off as a useless power. Fjord casts it again during the fight against [[spoiler:[[FinalBoss Lucien]]]] and even jokes about how much of a waste of a turn it is... only for it to turn out to be ''incredibly useful'', since [[spoiler:the Eyes of the Somnovem]] are useless in melee range and all except one need a direct line of sight with their targets. Fjord was able to use Marine Layer to get cover from [[spoiler:the Eyes and Lucien]] while sniping them down with Eldritch Blast, Veth was able to stand next to Fjord and get her Sneak Attack damage without having to spend a bonus action to hide, and Jester and Caduceus, the party's only healers, were able to hide inside Marine Layer when both were at 1 HP.

* ''WebVideo/CriticalRole'': Fjord's homebrew Paladin class gives him access to Marine Layer, a 30-foot radius sphere of dense fog centered on Fjrd that obscures the area entirely, becoming see-through when standing within 5 feet of Fjord. It created ''far'' more problems than it solved in the fight againt [[spoiler:Avantika]] since it essentially made half the ship impossible to navigate and provided cover for enemies too, and the party quickly wrote it off as a useless power. Fjord casts it again during the fight against [[spoiler:[[FinalBoss Lucien]]]] and even jokes about how much of a waste of a turn it is... only for it to turn out to be ''incredibly useful'', since [[spoiler:the Eyes of the Somnovem]] are useless in melee range and all except one need a direct line of sight with their targets. Fjord was able to use Marine Layer to get cover from [[spoiler:the Eyes and Lucien]] while sniping them down with Eldritch Blast, Veth was able to stand next to Fjord and get her Sneak Attack damage without having to spend a bonus action to hide, and Jester and Caduceus, the party's only healers, were able to hide inside Marine Layer when both were at 1 HP.

** ** Marinette thinks the Woodpecker Miraculous is a very strange power, but she cannot argue with the results. The power of Alleviation involves the odd use of the Woodpecker's tools, a spout and receptacle, to basically tap a person like a tree for harvesting raw syrup. In this case the 'sap' is the target's fatigue and ill health. The first result of this strange concept is reinvigorating any target and curing them of ills, with this power being among the ones that can remedy dulled Soul Gems even at the brink of turning into a Witch. The second part of the power is then having someone consuming that fatigue, purified into a golden syrupy substance from its original gray. In doing so the person is powered up by however severe the fatigue, illness, and pain the tapped target had been. This very strange set up results in Lady Miraculous, having used it on herself after a long and brutal fight with Homura, more or less entering a SuperMode state that very quickly defeats Homura in combat.

 ** It doesn't come up much, but Sayaka Maizono says her Ultimate Idol talent comes with a surprising level of agility and endurance because she dances a lot on stage. [[spoiler:It also makes her a ''amazingly'' good at faking her own innocence; if she'd been just a little more ruthless or had chosen a better target, she would've succeeded in committing murder and framing Makoto for it.]]

* ''Franchise/DanganRonpa'': In a school filled with people who have nigh-supernatural talent in their field, Makoto and Nagito have Luck as their talent. Neither of them think all that much of it, Makoto because all he did to get in is win a lottery, and Nagito because his extreme luck is [[BlessedWithSuck way more trouble than it's worth]], but their talents come in ''exceptionally'' handy during their killing games; Makoto avoids getting framed and finds some evidence [[spoiler:and survives his execution]] due to luck, and Nagito is so lucky he can win Russian Roulette with only ''one'' chamber empty (which gets Monokuma to give him crucial information), and [[spoiler:his plan to expose TheMole by getting them to accidentally kill him and thus graduate relies [[GambitRoulette entirely on luck]] to succeed; anyone else would have one of the plan's many moving parts and wild assumptions come back to bite them, but he pulls it off perfectly and nearly succeeds, with the plan only failing because he didn't realize that TheMole was actually on the students' side all along and blew the plan herself]].

** We have Fiamma of the Right, one of the most powerful characters in the series, outclassing monstrosities such as [[spoiler:a fully-awakened Accelerator]]. His power? [[HolyHandGrenade "The Holy Right"]], the ability to use all other Biblical abilities relating to the right hand. Lame? This is the ability that allows him to ''destroy an entire city'' in one fell swoop, teleport instantaneously to another location, and create a {{Flaming|Sword}} {{BFS}} '''''forty kilometers in length'''''.
** Similarly, we have Terra of the Left, whose ability "God's Medicine" lets him... change any object's precedence. Which he uses by raising the precedence of grains of flour until they're sharp enough to cut through any substance and raising or lowering his own precedence so that he can be invulnerable or intangible respectively. Aside from a few kinks to work out, it is ''very'' useful.

** Kaibi Gosukai can regulate the distance between peoples' hearts. Which she can use to confuse enemies by making her distance identical to someone else's. For example, when [[spoiler:Shiage points a gun at her, she makes her heart identical to Rikou's, causing Shiage to hesitate pulling the trigger. Objectively, Shiage knows Measure Heart is different from Rikou, but his heart is telling him he's targeting Rikou]].

*** The Graviton Bomber has the power to accelerate the gravitons in aluminum. He gets his name from his habit of turning aluminum cans into ''black hole bombs''.

* ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJI8tPJAV9M Death of the Red Mask]]'', a live-action adaptation of the ''[[ComicBook/AnimalMan]]'' story, changes the titular supervillain's lifelong desire to fly to being able to breathe underwater indefinitely.

* The villain Cat-A-Pult from ''[[Webcomic/LeagueOfSuperRedundantHeroes League of Super Redundant Heroes]]'' has the power of telekinesis... except it only works on cats. Naturally, he gets a metric buttload of pet cats and attaches useful items to them with tape. His powers apparently also get him some figurative pussy, as one strip shows him getting a letter from Cat Lady, seductively stating: "You ''[[JustForPun move]]'' me"...