Blessed With Suck / Web Original

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• Craig on The Allen And Craig Show has the uncanny ability to throw up whenever he sees or talks to a girl. He attempts to supress it, but ultimately it rules his life.
• In the web-serial Ash & Cinders Cinder and Azoc can't catch a break. They just go from one horrible situation to the next. From their mother straight up being used for firewood, to an Wicked Stepmother, to various creatures across the land that want to kill them.
  • Azoc gets it even worse. Not only does he endure all that, but once he gets the Rot, he can't touch anyone directly without burning them from the inside out.
• According to Word of God, Anni of Coyle Command has such amazing abilities as...Poor Eyesight and Extra Pain Sensetivity.
• In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, multiple characters are given superpowers by a Mass Super-Empowering Event. However, some of them were given abilities that aren't quite so 'super':
  • Jenna was transformed into The Worm That Walks, an amalgamation of insects that are connected by a single hive mind. She, and most people around her, are horrified by her new appearance.
  • Katheryn is turned into a sentient mass of ink. She can't speak and has limited movement, having to practise for days before she's able to reliably communicate and move around. She urges her caretaker, Finn, to find a way to reverse her power as soon as possible.
  • Vivian was granted the ability to rewrite reality, which is already a volatile power without taking into account that Vivian is often high-strung and anxious. As a result, she's terrified at what she could potentially do, as are the people around her.
• The protagonist of the (extremely NSFW) story A Day In The Life has total immunity to every known form of mind control, mental manipulation, or mind-affecting drug. While this is a legitimate and highly useful power, it also comes with several annoying downsides.
  • First and most generally, being immune to mind control in River City, "the global capital for mind control and associated mental arts and crafts", means that she is constantly getting called in to resolve various mind-control related problems. And given the obvious Power Perversion Potential innate in mind-control powers, most of these situations are horribly embarrassing.
  • While mind-control powers don't work correctly on her, they do give her a splitting headache.
  • Having an immune system that fights off mind control viruses and nanites also comes with a side of asymptomatic-in-everyone-else nanites giving her a raging fever and convulsions.
  • Being immune to mind-affecting drugs includes being unable to get drunk or benefit from painkillers.
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Dr. Horrible's henchman Moist has the amazing power to, well, make things moist. His prequel comic reveals it was caused by a plutonium-powered humidifier accidentally making him, essentially, permanently extremely sweaty. All he's really useful for is... well... making things soggy. In his own words: "At my most badass I make people feel like they wanna take a shower."
• Doodieman. Just... Doodieman. Seriously, a guy who has a superpower revolving entirely around his fantastic ability to crap out amazing amounts of crap. His turds can leave his anus with enough momentum that he overcomes the force of gravity and flies. He stops robbers by aiming and firing small turds, keeps a guy from shooting by burying him with a giant turd, shoots turds with enough force to keep a car from falling off a cliff, and stops up a dam. Not everyone he saves is pleased with this.
• Brendon McKellar in The End receives visions of every nasty break-up and death of a loved one he will ever experience and can't do anything to change the events he sees.
• In Enter the Farside, Farborn and Fartouched don't get to choose what powers they have. Most powers seem to be singular powers with minimal Required Secondary Powers tacked on. Jolly and his crew are the best example. He's 9 foot tall and made of muscle, and just as strong and as tough as you'd imagine he'd be. The downsides are that he's extremely heavy, his skin is green and his hair looks like moss. Some of his crew have it even worse, but all of them are obviously changed by the Farside.
• Epithet Erased features Mera, who is Inscribed with the Epithet "Fragile," which lets her make anything as fragile as glass. However, there's also the side effect of it rendering her just as fragile, to the point that she could break her foot just by stubbing her toe.
• Flander's Company: A French webseries with lots of peopled blessed with suck: A man working at the NASA, who was cleaning a room when a jet blew above his head, who got cybernetics limbs, which enable him to... Move at slow motion. An other, who has the ability to censor the eyes of people in real life like it is done for many videos on the internet, and another who can, while dancing tecktonik, make others follow his moves.
• Heroes Save the World: Most of the Children have very useful powers, like being able to see how someone is going to die in the future, or control minds, or Body Surf. Others are lackluster: Hannah Johnson can make coins disappear. Zahra Ghorbani can make duplicates of herself, but they disappear if she's no longer touching them unless the duplicate dies first.
• Jet Lag: The Game: Happens to both teams in Arctic Escape E4.
  • Both teams attempt to run a drunk mile, but Ben & Adam win by one minute. This lets them board a direct flight from Seattle to Denver... which then gets stuck on the tarmac for two hours, letting Sam & Michelle (who are in Salt Lake City) complete challenges, including one that lets a team steal a ticket from their opponents' hand.
  • Sam & Michelle steal a ticket that lets them fly to a neighboring state, planning to fly to Denver... but then the flight is sold out, and there are no other flights that arrive before the rest period, so they are forced to rent a car and drive to Colorado instead.
• The premise of Yahtzee and Gabriel's weekly videos, Let's Drown Out, is that they each take turns to play a relatively boring to watch games and after they ran out of interesting thing to say about said games, they got through a list of topics podcast style. Sometimes they picked games that are awesome to watch but they added boring stipulations to keep it in the trend, though half the time it failed miserably.
• The trait positive girls from lonelygirl15 have a significantly longer lifespan than the average person due to the number of ribozymes in their blood which catalyse their own synthesis. Unfortunately, there are some people would like to take that blood for themselves, so, essentially, to be trait positive is to be forever on the run from people who want to kill you.
• Robynne Darling of Magical Girl Policy has a very powerful "empathokinetic" sense. The blessing? Her ability to read emotions and auras gives her a solid edge against opponents and renders her magically-enforced bangs irrelevant. The suck? She has to deal with a high level of psychic and emotional "background noise" (pure torture for an introvert) and has to constantly guard against others' emotions and auras invading her mind and affecting her behavior. (Her cutesy name is a sucky blessing of a different sort.)
• Noob:
  • Using Real Money Trade. Characters seen doing it get their avatar permanently banned so soon after that they don't even get to enjoy their purchase.
  • The Ashentäk Oracle had the biggest future predicting ability in a city where everyone had this capacity to an extent. She ended up becoming The Hermit and going to live in the local Bubblegloop Swamp because her co-citizens kept harassing her.
  • Töne Förk. Born with an extremely rare predisposition to be a magical Master of All and rightful heir to the Coalition leadership. However, that meant that everyone who wanted that leadership for themselves had an interest in killing him or making him into a Puppet King. A Face–Heel Turn quickly started looking like the Lesser of Two Evils. The side to which he turned happened to have the way of making him an extreme case of Magically Inept Fighter and he gladly underwent the procedure.
• Phelous, resident Meta Guy at Channel Awesome is unkillable. That is to say, he dies all the time, but comes back. The downside? He dies all the time. And comes back...to watch crappy horror movies which have left him pretty deranged.
• The Thrice-Cursed, featured in Polyhistor Academy, are born with innate magical powers, at the cost of a host of negative symptoms.
• The characters of Re Evolution experience this with their mutations, which are either useful but have awful drawbacks, such as Dawn Fraser's ability to freeze everything she touches (including her clothes and the food she eats), or are interesting but more or less useless, such as Katie Sharpe's ability to produce pheromones.
• Scootertrix the Abridged deconstructs the Fourth-Wall Observer trope with Pinkie Pie, who is anything but happy knowing that their world is nothing more than an Abridged Series on YouTube, that can be destroyed by a simple Cease and Desist order. And though she does make great use of her Fourth Wall powers for the convenience, she has to be very careful not to ruin the masquerade and creating Plot Holes, which can have devastating consequences.
• In the world of the SCP Foundation, manifesting any kind of paranormal trait, no matter how innocuous, is a one-way ticket to spending the rest of your life locked up in a Foundation cell if you are discovered (and you will be discovered). SCP-1364 probably has the worst "power" imaginable: super-vulnerability. Everything hurts it severely, even bright light. It can't even eat or drink without hurting itself (fortunately it doesn't actually need food or water). Most SCPs have containment procedures meant to protect the world from them; 1364's are entirely to protect it from the world.
• In Strip Search, the winner of the competitive challenge has to pick who goes up for elimination that night. While in many reality shows, this would be the best thing to happen, the artists dread this, since they all became fast friends, and don't want to send their friends home.
• Tez from Unexpected Diversions. He's an elf that is invisible to the God of Death, who can neither see him nor seems aware that he exists, despite being the oldest living thing on the planet by about 350,000 years. Which sounds great except when he goes mad from boredom, or is injured or tortured horribly, and the universe seems warp reality to the point where he can't even commit suicide.
• This is a Running Gag on Villain Source (Your Online Source For Everything Evil) which sells awesome superpowers then lists all the unfortunate side effects in the small print.
• Quite a number of characters in the Whateley Universe. Power Incontinence is more common in the Whateley Universe than in other superhero universes — as are Body Horror side effects of powers. So you might gain the Most Common Superpower — but at the same time, you might shift into a Half-Human Hybrid, something out of a horror movie, or a perfectly ordinary human — of the wrong gender. Or you might gain some stock superpower... but be missing the Required Secondary Powers.
  • The titular school has a residence set aside for students whose powers make them dangers to themselves or others, such as the most powerful psychic in the world — who looks like something Lovecraft would have thought up during an absinthe bender. Or maybe the kids who constantly emit toxins, or Love Potions, or radiation. Or how about the cute little girl who has so much Super-Strength that she could probably juggle the Hulk — but can't control it at all, meaning a casual hug could destroy steel. And that's assuming they even survive long enough to have their powers start to suck — "Burnout," fatal or near fatal side effects of superpower use, is common enough that it's a constant threat even for fully grown, trained mutants.
  • There's also the societal drawbacks — the Anti-Mutant version of the Ku Klux Klan in the Whateley Universe are Villains With Good Publicity, and while there's no internment camps for mutants (yet) they are required to register with the government — did we mention the government body that handles mutant registration is corrupt, has been infiltrated by the aforementioned KKK-alike types, and generally not a nice group of people to be around? There are other problems, as well — mutants tend to have "tells" such as really weird eye color (violet, red, etc — most mutants' eyes do change, not always notably out of the norm but often enough to be a signature trait; eye color changes are widely known to a be the first sign for an ongoing mutant manifestation) which means even the most normal looking of them can be found out. Ultimately, even if they look normal, have no side effects, and all their Required Secondary Powers... mutants rarely are allowed to have a normal life.
• In this web skit, two slackers go to a doctor who gives people superpowers, and ask to get Wolverine's powers. The problem here is that as the doctor explains it, "Wolverine" has TWO mutant powers, adamantium claws, and a Healing Factor. Since they can only afford one of the powers, they pick the claws. Unfortunately, the doctor neglected to mention that the only reason that Wolverine can survive with adamantium claws is because of his healing factor, something these guys find out the hard way as they cut themselves and each other up each time the claws comes out, and they die asking why they didn't go with the mutant healing.
• This is pretty common in Worm:
  • On a broad level, most powers have some element of this. First, there's the fact that in order to get a power at all you have to undergo some sort of severe trauma (gaining powers naturally produces far more villains than heroes as a result). Then you have the actual powers, which often have an explicit drawback (Rachel's ability to "read" dogs displacing her normal body-language processing so she can no longer read human expressions, or Scapegoat below), or the psychological trauma that triggered the powers and their use amplifying the already negative elements of their users personalities (like Regent's mind-control power reinforcing his already prominent sociopathy). Or, of course, powers that can easily have unintended consequences (Canary, below), or, while being largely very useful and practical, are just plain weird and gross (like Skitter, who's power to control bugs is both VERY effective and VERY gross).
  • In Chapter 19.2, we meet Scapegoat, a hero with a power that allows him to manipulate people's injuries — sorta-removing them from his target and gaining them himself. Oh, and he doesn't get a chance to pick and choose, or even an explicit warning of which injuries he's picking up.
  Grace: Problem, S.g.?
  Scapegoat [rasping]: Hate my power, hate my power, hate it, hate it, hate it.
  • Of particular note is Canary, a singer whose power makes people who hear her song malleable to her suggestions. An accidental use of it (turns out telling a jerk to go fuck himself when he's suggestible isn't a good idea) leads to her getting thrown into a maximum security prison for villains, unable to even speak in her defense at trial out of fear her power.

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