Blessed With Suck / The DCU

The DCU

Comic Books

Comic Books

• The Doom Patrol, a team that is based on Blessed with Suck.
  • Magnificent Bastard super-genius Niles "The Chief" Caulder assembles the team and acts as Mission Control because he's in a wheelchair. The story he gave was that his brilliance attracted the attention of an Diabolical Mastermind who manipulated him into horrible actions. Grant Morrison pulled a Retcon that made Niles a real Magnificent Bastard and granted him immortality... meaning he can't die, even as a Brain in a Jar!
  • Rita "Elasti-girl" Farr can grow or shrink to any size, and grow her limbs to be different sizes... but had zero control over it, wrecking her movie career. Though, given that Rita had gained control of her powers by the time she joined up with the team, she doesn't really fit this. This is the most commonly cited reason for why she was never revived until long after her teammates were; her status as a "freak" is incredibly dubious in comparison to what Cliff and Larry have to go through. Later incarnations of the character, however, firmly turn her into this by having Rita essentially be a Blob Monster in human form who has to constantly maintain her concentration or else she'll start to break down and melt. In the New 52, this had the side effect of making her walk around with a perpetual creepy smile on her face.
  • Hotshot test-pilot Larry Trainor gets exposed to cosmic radiation, and has a cool double (the Negative Spirit) that can teleport out of his body and phase through anything but lead... but if it's out of his body for longer than 60 seconds, it'll kill him, and he has to have every centimeter of flesh wrapped in specially-treated bandages to keep himself from dosing others with fatal levels of radiation.
  • Cliff "Robotman" Steele was an extreme sports athlete, adventurer, and race car driver who got himself into a fatal car accident. His brain was put in a robot body which is stronger, faster, and tougher than any human one... but it locked him out of doing the things he loved because his new body disqualifies him from competition. Worse, he outlives all of his teammates several times over... the poor bastard frequently wonders if it would have been more merciful for him to die in the wreck. It gets worse in the current continuity. Why is he a robot? A group of scientists (including Caulder) gave him an injection of nanites to protect his life, when they hired him to drive for them. When the superbike he was testing went out of control, the only thing they could think of to do to save him was to consume his still completely conscious body, and convert it into an indestructible robot.
  • Steve "Mento" Dayton enhances his telepathic and telekinetic abilities with a helmet of his own design... but between the loss of his wife and the helmet's unforeseen side effects, With Great Power Comes Great Insanity.
  • Karen "Bumblebee" Beecher started off as a Gadgeteer Genius who used a suit of Powered Armor, but her portrayal in the Teen Titans cartoon was so well-received that DC decided to make her shrinking abilities from the show canon in the comics. Sort of. She shrank alright, but she's unable to return to her normal size.
• The Flash: The interpretation of the Flash given by the song The Ballad of Barry Allen, by Jim's Big Ego. In the song, it is explained that because The Flash's perception is so much faster than normal, he is isolated from the rest of humanity, unable to form true connections with other people and tormented by the continual boredom of the rest of the world being so slow. As the lyrics say, "And I'll be there before you know it, I'll be gone before you see me, And do you think you can imagine, Anything so lonely?"
  • The song implies that Barry spends much of his time hoping for a disaster, because "when things change in an instant, it's almost fast enough for me."
  • Wally West has often expressed similar sentiments, and Bart Allen's hyperaccelerated childhood made the "slow" world almost unbearable for him for years.
  • Implied in Kingdom Come, where Keystone City is one of the safest cities in the world, patrolled by a permanently-accelerated Wally West.
• Power Ring of the Crime Syndicate has all of the powers of Green Lantern thanks to the Ring of Volthoom, which is not only verbally abusive towards him but is fusing to his hand and basically eating him alive.
• In one Justice League story, Power Girl was dying and needed surgery to save her life. But doctors could not operate on her for a simple reason: Her bulletproof skin made it impossible. There was no scalpel or surgical laser they had that was capable of cutting through her skin. Fortunately the rest of the League thought of something: they had former Green Lantern Corps member Kilowog put together a helmet that let Superman focus his heat vision like a super-powered laser, which was able to do the job.
• Superman:
  • The Death of Superman: After Superman's fatal fight with Doomsday, people kept trying to resuscitate him with zero luck: the Guardian tried mouth-to-mouth and realized his lungs were like trying to breathe into an iron lung, normal defibs did jack squat and a special set made by Professor Hamilton only blew Bibbo down the street when he tried to use it.
  • Kryptonite Nevermore shows that Superman's powers make him the world's greatest hero. His powers also set him apart from everyone else, make him feel an outcast and burden him with immense responsibilities that no sane person would want.
  • Larry Niven's essay, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", makes an argument that Pre-crisis Superman can never make love to Lois Lane (or any human, for that matter.)
  • Post-Crisis, this is actually Superman's own viewpoint on his powers. Firstly, he's so immensely powerful that he has to constantly restrain himself, because he lives in fear of the massive death and destruction he could cause if he lost control. Secondly, as powerful as he is, he is not as god-like as many people believe him to be In-Universe, which means he lives with the constant guilt of not being able to help everyone as much as his help is wanted — his Clark Kenting, in fact, is actually to give himself a legitimate excuse to "be selfish" and take some private time, lest he undergo a mental breakdown from overwork and exhaustion. Finally, his Super Hearing means he's constantly able to hear people begging for his help... and even he cannot answer all of them.
  • Pre-Crisis Supergirl came to a point where she was tired of being Supergirl constantly instead of being her own person and she actually felt guilty for wanting to lead a normal life.
  • In Supergirl (1982), Kara thinks that having super-senses doesn't sound so cool when you can't take a break because you super-hearing tells you are needed◊.
  • In her Supergirl (2005) and Supergirl (2011) books, a lot of people tried to manipulate her or take advantage of her because she was so powerful, to the point she calls her formidable powers a curse in the Red Daughter of Krypton arc:
    Supergirl: This strength, this power — It's been like a curse. But I refuse to be a victim anymore!
  • In Bizarrogirl, Supergirl regards her powers as a dangerous burden due to her inability to save New Krypton.
    Lana: You're telling me you're not even going to go look? At all? What if someone needs your help? What if someone's hurt? Look around, Kara. People out there need you. You can use your gifts to —
    Kara: "Gifts"? These "gifts" make a target, Lana. They make me dangerous to everyone around me. And as you'll recall, the last time I tried to help someone, I got a planet full of my people blown up —
  • In that same story, Kara's super-senses can hear everything from anywhere. So she has to get her room soundproofed in order to be able to sleep.
    Supergirl: Not long ago, I installed mass-loaded vinyl throughout the walls of my room. Having Super-Hearing was keeping me awake at night. I couldn't escape the noise.
  • Death & the Family: The McDougal Clan turned Siobhan into the Silver Banshee, granting her immortality and powerful magic so she was able to undergo her clan's leadership test. Siobhan herself simply considers she has been cursed into becoming an ugly, restless wandering wraith.
  • In Superman & Batman: Generations, Joel Kent, after years of living without Kryptonian superpowers due to being prenatally exposed to Gold Kryptonite radiation, receives a formula from the Ultra-Humanite (posing as Lex Luthor) which gives him back his powers. Unfortunately, after using those powers to kill his sister Kara, Joel found out that the formula that gave him back his powers ended up killing him after a few hours' use, despite Ultra's original claim of the contrary - which turns out to be just what Ultra was expecting Joel to believe. Years later, though, Superman and his grandson Clark Wayne (Knightwing) discover that Ultra was able to come up with a formula that could restore Kryptonian powers without killing whoever drank it.
  • "The Super-Steed of Steel": Circe gave Comet a potion which granted him godlike powers, as well as immortality. The latter stopped to feel like a gift when Comet was banished from Earth by an evil wizard and spent several millennia trapped in a floating rock in the void of space.
• Multi-Man has two super powers. One is a relatively normal super power like flight, or x-ray vision or what have you, but temporary and based around his second power. The other super power is of the suck variety: any time he dies is killed, he comes back to life with a new super power. This leads to him being killed repeatedly by both villains and "heroes" until he has a super power that fits their current needs. What makes it worse for him is that he's not really a supervillain, he's only being held in Arkham because of the potential of his Blessed with Suck and is considered a "model prisoner". Played to comical effect in Joker's Last Laugh. Multi-Man is an integral part of The Joker's mass prison break scheme. There are almost two whole pages of the Joker's playing cards and engaging in other mundane activities while asking "Now?" over and over again, while various other henchmen murder Multi in the background, punctuated by an announcement of his new powers.
• Blue Devil was an actor in a superhero movie whose costume magically bonded to his body. Now he has superpowers, but he's also permanently blue and has big horns on his head, which is ... not so great for his career or social life.
• DC's Metamorpho the Element Man was a normal guy (Rex Mason) who got into a chemical accident that gave him the ability to turn his body into any element or substance, like iron or diamond, by concentrating on the element he wants to be. It also made him a colorist's nightmare, with differently colored (and oddly textured) arms and legs and a chalk-white head. (See also "Element Girl" below in the Vertigo section, as she's a female version of Rex.)
• The Golden Age Fury of the All-Star Squadron sequel series The Young All Stars has superhuman strength, speed, and leaping ability as well as magically-appearing bulletproof armor... but it comes at the cost of her at times being the host of Tisiphone the Blood Avenger (one of the legendary Greek Furies that gave her her powers) possessing her.
• The Superman villain known as the Parasite has the ability to drain the life out of anything, gaining their strength, speed, abilities, and even skills and memories. Unfortunately for him, this effect wears off over time, and he has to continually drain people to survive, as he can no longer gain nutrition from ordinary food and water. Most versions of the character have no moral issues with feeding on innocents, though.
• In Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons, Hera (as the Goddess of Women) as the ability to see all the suffering women have gone, will go, and are currently going through all at once. It's implied this, including Zeus' infidelities, are the reason for her sour demeanor.

Vertigo Comics

• Crafty Coyote, a Captain Ersatz of Wile E. Coyote introduced in Animal Man, has the same powers you'd expect of a character like that to have: that being, a Toon Physics-induced ability to come back from any injury. However, when he ends up in our world, divorced from an aesthetic of cartoon slapstick and Amusing Injuries, we see his injuries are drawn realistically, making it clear just how unbelievably painful such a life might be like. He views his life as one of continual torture by an uncaring and cruel deity.
• In Fables, Bigby Wolf has to constantly smoke in order to keep his super-sensitive sense of smell from inhaling the millions of scents from all over Manhattan. Plus all the noise...
  • Another example from the third issue of the Spin-Off series Jack of Fables, in which Jack learns that his overbearing lust for adventure has cursed him with being the center of all stories, including the ''Sword in the Stone" — where he plays the stone, after getting Excalibur shoved through his chest.
• In The Sandman (1989), one story features a superheroine (a "real", albeit minor one) whose power is that her body can take on the aspects different elements in order to protect her (i.e., diamonds to deflect bullets, etc.). However this power is (naturally) involuntary and now she desperately wants to die, but can't. Enter Death of the Endless...
  • To elaborate, the superheroine — Element Girl — looks utterly inhuman all the time, having a chalk-white face, green hair, and orange and purple arms. Despite being able to copy any chemical compound on Earth, she cannot morph into her former human form naturally because any attempts at forming human skin or flesh rot after use. As a result, she is forced to simulate it by wearing silicate masks.
  • Also, any attempts to commit suicide by poison? Utterly ineffective, because her body just metabolises them. She's quite The Woobie.

Films

Films

• Given an unusual treatment in Batman: Gotham Knight, in which an anime-looking Bruce Wayne tests out a personal force-shield as part of his Batman gear. When it deflects a ricocheted bullet into the body of a gang thug, putting the man in the hospital, Batman decides that the shield is Blessed with Suck and discontinues using it, rather than risk having deaths on his conscience.
• In Man of Steel, when young Clark's X-ray vision and super-hearing first manifest, he freaks out from sensory overload and locks himself in a closet.

Live-Action TV

Live-Action TV

• Batman (1966): The Bookworm suffers from a bad case of this. He's an Evil Genius with Photographic Memory and Super-Speed Reading skills, and boasts that he's studied every single novel ever written. The problem? He can't come up with any original ideas because his brain's so crowded with the books he's already read. As a result, he suffers from massive Creative Sterility; all of his crimes borrow from literature, and he's self-aware enough to know that he'll never be more than "a master of stolen plots"
• Watchmen (2019): As with the original comic, Doctor Manhattan's Reality Warper powers are insanely awesome. However, their very nature makes him a Non-Linear Character who experiences his entire timeline simultaneously, meaning that he can never get away from traumatizing or painful events because they are always happening to him. At one point, he mentions to Angela that because of his unique perspective on time, he is always experiencing his body being painfully disintegrated in the intrinsic field generator in 1959. It also means that, for him, the future is fixed as long as it's observable: no surprises, no free will. These are all very good reasons for him to seal away his memory and powers and live in a "tunnel of love" for ten years as "Calvin Jelani" with Angela.

Western Animation

Western Animation

• Batman Beyond
  • An accident involving a nerve gas he created and a radiation treatment turns Derek Powers into Blight, a humanoid pile of radioactive waste, but he doesn't have a problem with that. What he does have a problem with is that said transformation makes him a green glowing skeleton, and it's a bit difficult to be a Corrupt Corporate Executive when your business partners can get sick just from you being in the room. He uses a synthetic skin to contain the radiation and look normal, but it's a temporary fix at best.
  • The Terrific Trio from "Heroes" get this, too. While their powers are great, their DNA is slowly decaying codons at a time, at least one of them has been rendered so monstrous in appearance that everyone is afraid of him.
  • Ian Peek from "Sneak Peek" uses a belt that induces intangibility to phase through matter, which, as an opportunistic reporter, he uses to discover Batman's secret identity and thus gain fame. Unfortunately for him, the more he uses it, the more it affects him, and eventually, his body becomes intangible without the belt. So intangible, in fact, that he can't stand or hold onto things, and he eventually falls through the ground to presumably die of either a fiery death in the earth's mantle, or asphyxiation... or not.
• Justice League:
  • Thanagarians like Hawkgirl have innate psychic defenses... which the team finds out in "Only a Dream" when Hawkgirl has been trapped in her worst nightmare (being Buried Alive), and the team's resident psychic J'onn J'onnz can't enter her dreams and save her. In "Starcrossed", when J'onn desperately needs to learn how to pilot a Thanagarian craft, the poor mook he mind-scans gets his mind broken along with the defenses; when we next see him in "Hunter's Moon", it turns out that he's basically brain-dead if not using a special life-support suit.
  • Ace is one of the most tragic examples. She has incredible Psychic Powers and is basically unstoppable; when she appears in "Wild Cards", Batman is only able to save the day by reasoning with her. However, she inadvertently drove her parents insane as a toddler and spent her childhood with a Restraining Bolt headband on while being subjected to experiments with her powers. By the time of "Epilogue", she's basically a Reality Warper... but the mental strain has given her a brain aneurysm which soon kills her. The only bright spot is that Batman not only agrees to stay with her until she died but convinces her to take his hand and holds it until she dies peacefully.
• Lampooned in a Cartoon Network ad starring the Wonder Twins from Superfriends. It ends with Zan complaining how his only power is to turn into "a wave or a puddle" and how he could easily be defeated by a sponge; wouldn't even have to be an evil sponge. After Jayna leaves, he is accidentally used to mop a floor by the janitor.
• Both Terra and Raven of Teen Titans (2003) have incredible kinetic abilities. The downside of this is that the actual control of each character's power is directly tied to their current emotional state, so when rage or panic overtakes them, chaos inevitably erupts. This was such a large problem for Terra that she eventually opted for high school instead of heroism.
  • It gets worse for Raven... when she loses control, she's liable to turn into a reasonable simulation of an Eldritch Abomination (just ask Dr. Light, if you can get him to put his experience in words). And, oh yeah, she was born to be a tool through which her demon lord father can kill everyone on Earth, then take it over. Luckily, she gets better after that.
  • This trope seems to be the main reason Jinx picked villainy at first; with her powers of bad luck, at least as a villain she could be respected by her peers for destroying things. Considering the sheer, mindboggling amounts of collateral damage the Titans can do (Cyborg using a building as an Improvised Weapon, anyone?)...
  • To a lesser extent, Starfire's powers are also emotionally based and thus can fail to work at unfortunate times. There's been at least one instance where relationship drama has caused her to lose her ability to fly. While she was flying at a high altitude.
  • And Red Star, from the episode "Snowblind", who's basically the Hulk, but a nuclear bomb instead of a rage monster. The more he uses his power, the more radiation he gives out, and the more dangerous he is to be around. He eventually experiences a Super-Power Meltdown and willingly throws himself out into space so his explosion wouldn't harm the earth.
• The Batman: When Firefly became Phosphorus, he gained the ability to generate intense heat. However, he had little to no control over it, leaving him unable to interact with anything without burning or melting it.
• One Static Shock villain gained the power to absorb non-living matter in lieu of eating regular food. Unfortunately, the mass just accumulates (without a regular digestion system, he body wastes nothing) without actually increasing his size, and he eventually becomes so dense that he's incapable of moving.
  • And while Static's powers are usually just fine, there's one episode where sunspots mess with his powers and make them particularly strong. First it's kind of cool, but then he finds that he can't control them and the extra electricity is causing problems. Then they go very weak. Then a bad guy needs a beat down.
  • There's also Time Zone. Her powers caused her to randomly slip back and forth through time. Gear built a belt that stopped the random travelling, and enabled her to mechanically control her powers -with a remote control. Time Zone was then at the mercy of whoever had the remote.
  • Permafrost was An Ice Person with the power to generate massive snowstorms and totally freeze over anything she touched...trouble is, she was a homeless teenage girl with schizophrenia ("the voices in the dark" gave her the name) and general mental health issues. And her powers were tied to her emotions—seeing other people happy and content while she starved on the street was enough to trigger a blizzard. Thankfully, she eventually seeks out the help she needs.
  • Talon has the powers of flight and a sonic scream...but they come at the cost of her looking like a bird-human hybrid.
  • Mirage, who has the power to manipulate light to create realistic illusions, lampshades this trope when her criminally-minded brother suggested that their abilities were a blessing: "You call this a gift? We're FREAKS!"
  • Some Bang Babies have interesting powers that come with serious physical alterations. Hyde has super-durable skin...that makes it look like a rhinoceros's back was grafted onto his body. Ferret has superhuman smelling powers...which emerge from his decidedly inhuman nose. D-Struct can generate powerful ionic blasts...but looks like a massive giant made of pure white energy.
  • Tying into the above, a quartet of bang babies became physically hurt by light at the cost of their powers in comparison to others who didn't have that drawback.
  • Heck, just being a Bang Baby has its own problems. Not only do people in general fear and distrust you (much like mutants in the X-Men universe), but the government is secretly working to experiment on you, and it's eventually revealed that the mutagenic gas which granted people their abilities has a tendency to make them go crazy, which is why so many of those exposed to it turn to a life of crime.

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