People getting Cursed with Awesome in anime and manga.
- A downplayed version is The Power of the Titans in Attack on Titan. The power grants the user an amazing Healing Factor and the ability to generate a super powered Titan form to "pilot", with various special powers unique to each particular Titan. Sometimes the form you get is even attractive. The catch is that their powers will burn out in 13 years, killing them. In order to properly transfer the power to another, they must allow themselves to be Eaten Alive. While that is a heavy price to pay, actually being a Titan Shifter is extremely useful in battle and even in mundane tasks like road work or construction. Were it not for the oppressively dark state of the world the characters live in, more than a few would probably see the benefits rather than angst about it.
- Ayakashi Triangle: Shirogane turned Matsuri female out of spite, attempting to prevent him from romantically involving himself with Suzu. Matsuri then becomes one of Suzu's "girl friends" to act as her bodyguard, repairing his friendship with her, making other friends for the first time, and generally developing a more positive attitude. Suzu, meanwhile, is still attracted to Matsuri. And while Matsuri wants to change back, he's more worried about Suzu getting hurt or ending up distant from him in the process. In a more practical sense, the energy the spell uses puts a sort of Mana Shield around his body, which ends up saving Matsuri's life from an enemy's Vampiric Draining attack. Shortly thereafter, Matsuri outright admits living as girl was what made him realize he loved Suzu, though ironically that makes him less comfortable remaining that way, because he thinks he cannot act on it.
- The god of the Bakugan, Code Eve, decided to imprison Emperor Barodius in a suit of armor created from his own evil and seal him away in an alternate dimension for eternity for trying to destroy the peaceful planet of Neathia. This ultimately made him stronger than before. However, in her defense, Code Eve wasn't aware of the Psychic Link that Barodius had to Dan which let him become strong enough to break free. If it weren't for that, it'd probably have been an And I Must Scream fate.
- Battle Angel Alita introduces Dr. Desty Nova, who likes to experiment with the brains of people who are almost dead and can get the craziest results out of them ranging from pure Body Horror to some great examples of this trope. There is Makaku who is an all kinds of creepy monster that eats brains and steals powerful cyborg bodies to terrorize people with. Which is exactly what he wants since no one ever even noticed his existence. Jasagun is a motorballer who got his brain fixed by Nova after a crash that would normally have been fatal. He only has a few years to live but in the mean time he can be the unbeatable emperor of motorball since his brain developed some truly God-like fighting skills. And then there is Zapan who got humiliated by Alita so badly he only wanted power so he could kill her. And that is exactly what he got an infinite supply of even though the berserker body would inevitably consume him in the long run.
- In Black Clover, it's later revealed that Henry's illness is due to a curse. That said, he can use the mana his illness accumulates to transform the hideout into a giant bull that he controls. The potential harm he can cause the others with his illness is soon resolved with Charmy's Sheep Cook, making food that restores others' magic power.
- Bleach:
- Tousen claims that Komamura's Bankai has a huge weakness because damaging the giant which is brought forth by it automatically damages Komamura. Later on, Mayuri Kurotsuchi confirms that while it's true that this is the Achilles' Heel of Komamura's Bankai, it also gives Komamura an advantage over other Bankai-users: his Zanpakutou can be fully restored EVEN IF it breaks while in Bankai. It's just a matter of his own wounds healing, and his Bankai will heal with them. For any other Zanpakutou (except Hitsugaya's, whose Bankai only needs water in the atmosphere to repair itself), damage taken while in Bankai is permanent —and reduces the wielder's raw power permanently as well.
- The Hell Verse movie features the Togabito Kokuto, who is like any other Togabito chained to hell. However, despite wanting to get free from his chains, Kokuto uses his chains as weapons, offensively and especially defensively. And since the chains are invisible for the most time, his usage of the chains is unpredictable.
- Several of the Fullbringers suffer a lot of power-related angst and they express desire to give up their "curse" so that they can live out normal lives (especially Jackie). However, their powers have significant benefits with no apparent downsides and their use appears to be entirely voluntary. Also, most of them were willing to go along with the plan of stealing Ichigo's Fullbring in order to strengthen their own.
- Code Geass:
- Suzaku is Blessed with Suck in the form of the Geass command "live on", which subverts his Death Seeker mindset by forcing him to survive by any means necessary whenever his life is in danger ("Live by running away from whatever is trying to kill you."). This is flipped in Turn 22, when Suzaku has starts using the command to make himself a better fighter ("Live by destroying whatever is trying to kill you.").
- Nunnally, too. While she's blind, that also serves as Plot Armor against Lelouch's Geass which requires eye contact (her eyes are permanently closed)... When Charles' Geass loses effect on her in the last episode and she regains vision, Lelouch instantly Geasses her into giving up the FLEIJA controls.
- Coppelion: The heroines are genetically-engineered humans with various forms of Clone Angst, and many normal humans wax poetically on their tragic fate of being "puppets." This is hard to rationalize because they're exactly like normal humans, except they're immune to radiation, and many of them have additional powers like super-strength or super-animal-taming. They work for the military organization that created them, but they're treated with the same respect as normal human employees and they get to go on heroic rescue missions. Where's the downside? Courtesy of Clone Degeneration, they're expected to suddenly drop dead around age twenty.
- Allen Walker from D.Gray-Man was born with a deformed left arm that made his parents abandon him. After his adopted father died, Allen unknowingly had the Millennium Earl turn him into an Akuma, who then cut Allen's left eye and cursed him. Allen's arm can turn into an incredible weapon for destroying Akuma, and his left eye can see the soul bound to them, making him the only person on the planet who can tell which "people" in a crowd are Akuma. A few other Exorcists are Cursed With Awesome too, particularly Krory (who was bitten by a plant and started drinking the blood of what he thought were humans at first) and Miranda (a perpetual loser who can now stop time). Miranda started as full-fledged Blessed with Suck until she was able to control it, though.
- Remember, though, that when Lavi briefly saw an Akuma the way Allen always does, he declared it to be horrific and said he'd rather be looking over his shoulder all the time than have to deal with that. And when Allen sees whatever the soul of a level 4 Akuma has become, he immediately vomits in disgust.
- On the other hand, something else that Allen can see that no other exorcist can is the souls bound to the Akuma being released when the Akuma is destroyed. To everyone else, the Akuma can easily be seen as simply monsters that need to be destroyed, but Allen gets a truer idea of what's really at stake.
- Remember, though, that when Lavi briefly saw an Akuma the way Allen always does, he declared it to be horrific and said he'd rather be looking over his shoulder all the time than have to deal with that. And when Allen sees whatever the soul of a level 4 Akuma has become, he immediately vomits in disgust.
- Most of the Contractors in Darker than Black are either Blessed with Suck or Cursed With Awesome, largely depending on their remuneration. April can cause rainstorms and absolutely loves her remuneration (drinking beer). Louis, on the other hand, has gravity powers but has to break his fingers every time he uses them.
- And then there's Wei. His power is to destroy things using his blood, and his remuneration is to cut himself, which he'd have to do anyway to use his powers. He might as well not have to pay a price, like the unabashedly Cursed With Awesome protagonist.
- In Darwin's Game, Suzune Hiiragi absolutely hates her feral Sigil because it gives her cat-ears and a tail. The Sigil gives her the senses of a feral, meaning that she is faster than normal; stronger than she ever was before and managed to use a narwhal-like horn to sense an opponent from afar, despite having been blinded earlier. Oh, and it also healed her heart condition, leaving her completely healthy and not in need of an expensive surgery.
- Delicious in Dungeon:
- Izutsumi of was fused with a cat spirit at some point in the past, resulting in her being an unusually hairy Cat Girl (or maybe a Funny Animal cat with a human face and extremities). She has far better senses, reflexes, and jumping ability than the other adventurers in her party, which save her life on several occasions. But she still hates being a chimera, since it resulted in her being raised as a freakshow exhibit and treated as subhuman for most of her life, and is searching for a way to undo the curse.
- At the end of the story, Laios is cursed by the Winged Lion demon to be feared and avoided by monsters everywhere. Consequently, the area around him in a huge radius is completely free of monsters, and outside of that radius, they form a kind of protective ring—and as Laios has become king, his kingdom is now one of the most peaceful in the world. Laios, however, finds this to be one of the greatest curses imaginable, because he's a Nightmare Fetishist who loves monsters more than people, and can now never see them in their natural environments, only in captivity or as corpses.
- In Devilman Lady, Jun turns into a female Devilman, which grants her some badass superpowers. Unfortunately, due to the high tendency for Devilman to go Ax-Crazy Always Chaotic Evil, her powers have her nearly constantly suspected of going evil to the point even her allies are ready to turn on her at a moments notice, and even though she's one of the very few of her kind able to retain most to all of her humanity and remains one of the most moral characters in the Crapsack World that is the series, even she feels the bestial urges try to overwhelm her from time to time.
- Fruits Basket subverts this with the Sohma clan's Hereditary Curse, where thirteen members of the family turn into animals from the Eastern Zodiac (plus the Cat) when hugged by someone of the opposite sex who isn't cursed. At first the curse seems like more of an inconvenience than anything, since being able to turn into an animal seems fun on paper and those who are cursed have a minor Beastmaster ability. However, it's eventually made clear that it really is a curse with far more cons than pros; the cursed Zodiac members can't control their transformations and have to be very careful about it, many of them deal with parents who either reject them or are overprotective of them because of the curse, and as members of the Zodiac, they're all bound to be subservient to their "God" no matter how much the "God" abuses them. All of these factors keep them from forming meaningful relationships with anyone outside of the family. As Rin puts it, the bond between the Zodiac members and their God may seem like a beautiful thing to an outsider, but to them it's really more like a chain that restricts them.
- Fullmetal Alchemist:
- Hohenheim is an immortal human-shaped philosopher's stone. Admittedly, it is an actual curse, since living forever and knowing that the sole reason for that is entirely because a whole country died, that you helped cause it, and that over half a million murdered souls are still in your body keeping you alive would be horrible. But on the flipside, the awesome part comes in because he can completely ignore the laws of alchemy when transmuting and is bullet-proof.
- Played straight with the four ex-military chimera who join Ed's group in the second half of the series. Unlike the imperfect chimera seen earlier, they retain their human bodies, though they can transform into their animal forms at will to take full advantage of their abilities. Aside from having enhanced strength and heightened senses (plus a few additional powers depending on what animal they were spliced with), they're exactly the same as they were before. While two of them join the heroes to get their original bodies back because they feel they can't face their families as chimeras, the other two state outright that they aren't interested in returning to their original state, as they enjoy the advantages that their new bodies give them.
- Automail. While it has its drawbacks, having a metal arm and leg has saved Ed's life several times, and with his alchemy he can transform its outer covering into a sword at will. Other models come with integrated guns, blades, and other superhuman abilities.
- In The Hating Girl, the arrow through Asumi's head has caused her a lot of grief and pain (both emotional and physical), but is surprisingly useful at times. It's been used to reflect light, open things, and even saved her life once when she fell off the top of the school but was left hanging from the wall by the arrow.
- Inuyasha features Miroku, who is cursed by the series' Big Bad with the Wind Tunnel - essentially a gaping black hole in his hand that sucks in everything in front of it with phenomenal force. Eventually, we're told, it will rupture and draw himself in without warning, along with any friends or loved ones that might be nearby... but until then, he's willing and able to use it as a superweapon against his nemesis. Also subverted, since Naraku unsurprisingly comes up with a way to neutralize it via "hell bees" that can seriously poison Miroku if sucked into the Wind Tunnel, preventing it from becoming a Story-Breaker Power, and by the risk Miroku takes when using the Wind Tunnel on foes wielding sharp-edged weapons (or limbs); one episode had the edge of the Wind Tunnel get cut while sucking in a mantis demon, causing it to begin widening faster than it was supposed to.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Diamond is Unbreakable: In 4th Another Day, Takuma has an eidetic memory, but that doesn't mean he's a genius. It means that he cannot forget any bad blood between him and his former friends, and he cannot concentrate on anything because of a constant flow of memories resurfacing.
- Golden Wind: During the climax, Bucciarati switches bodies with Diavolo thanks to Chariot Requiem. As his original body already deteriorated to the point where he could no longer walk or even stand in it, this allows him to rejoin the fight as the gang pursues the Arrow. He dies for good once he destroys Chariot Requiem, but he considers it a fair trade-off, as he was pretty much dead anyway and only needed to ensure Diavolo's defeat before he passed on.
- Stone Ocean: Weather Report is revealed to have a subsidiary ability hidden in his Stand, one that causes The Virus to spread subliminal effects turning people in snails. This ability awoke when his vengeance towards Pucci extended towards everywhere else, and the effect is something that he doesn't have any control over.
- Jujutsu Kaisen: has Toji Fushiguro, who was born with a Heavenly Restriction that made it so that he has Zero Cursed Energy, which you'd think would make him completely useless as a fighter, as it leaves him completely unable to utilize the series' Magic System. However, in return for his lack of cursed energy, he is given a superhuman body capable of performing inhuman feats of strength, speed, and agility. Another benefit of his Zero Cursed Energy is that curses and jujutsu sorcerers alike can't sense his presence because there's no cursed energy there for them to sense. On top of all that, Toji's Heavenly-Restricted Body has Super-Senses that allow him to detect curses, even though, theoretically, he should be unable to do so without cursed energy. The only real downside to Toji's Heavenly Restriction is that his lack of cursed energy means that he can't deal any damage to curses, but this is easily compensated for with the use of curse tools, which have cursed energy and/or cursed techniques imbued into them. Put all this together, and you get a fighter capable of fighting and winning against even special-grade curses and sorcerers with ease.
- Subverted beautifully in Kajika, where young Kajika appears to have an awesome curse that grants him superhuman speed, strength, and toughness while giving him many special powers. Despite this, he works endlessly hard to break this horrible curse. Why, you ask? Because it's a downgrade from his normal form, which is even more powerful.
- Magical Project S: Sammy complains of being a magical girl because she has a lame outfit; this despite having reality-bending powers. Misao complains about having to transform into Pixy Misa (granted, it was an evil personality). However, at the end, both learn to enjoy their abilities.
- Mahou Shoujo Nante Mou Ii Desu Kara has this as more or less its central premisenote . Main character Yuzuka Hanami is able to transform into a Magical Girl with the ability to control water. The catch? Her magical girl outfit is a swimsuit. While it does serve a practical purpose — it stops her from getting wet while she's using her powers — Yuzuka finds it highly embarrassing and doesn't like transforming.
- My Hero Academia: Izuku Midoriya was born Quirkless in a world where 80% of the population has a Quirk, and he's been ostracized by his peers for it his entire life. After receiving One for All from All Might, it's revealed that this Quirk can drastically reduce the receiver's life force and cause them to die prematurely, unless they're Quirkless when they receive it, thus allowing Izuku to use the Quirk to its full potential without this drawback.
- My-HiME has a subversion. In most cases, the HiME really have some awesome powers, but some act like they are curses even before the real downsides come to light. However, once the truth is exposed, it's more of a case of Blessed with Suck... or just Cursed With Suck.
- Nabari no Ou: Rokujou Miharu was born with the ultimate ninja technique, the shinrabanshou, which basically gives you control over all the forces of nature plus the ability to learn complex ninjutsu arts in a snap...and he wants nothing to do with it. He doesn't believe in ninjas, he doesn't want to be a ninja, he definitely doesn't want to be the super high poobah of all ninjadom, and he wishes the whole deal would just go away and leave him alone. Which causes his mentor to do a lot of facepalming, since the only apparent drawbacks of being the shinrabanshou holder are that (1) every clan wants to recruit you and (2) everyone, but everyone, has a favor to ask.
- Unless you're watching the anime, in which case it has less and less of an impact on the plot the more of its powers are unlocked.
- Naruto has Rock Lee, who was cursed with the ability to not being able to use Ninjutsu, however he can use Taijutsu, and after his intense training, he became extremely powerful, and one of the fastest characters in the series.
- Negima! Magister Negi Magi has Setsuna, a half-Tengu demon girl with albinism. This made tengu "Bird Tribe" demons shun her as "unlucky" since she has... wait for it... white wings. Her friends think this is awesome. It's hinted that she's never shown anyone her wings, until the Kyoto trip... which makes a certain amount of sense: if you had a trait that had caused your own family to exile you, you'd try to hide it at all costs, right?
- Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion gets to pilot a Humongous Mecha and hang out with the hottest girls at his school, who also pilot said Humongous Mecha. Evangelion being what it is, it becomes evident what kind of stress comes with fighting monsters without any prior training. That said, that stress is one of his lesser psychological problems.
- A pair of Shinji's classmates certainly think Shinji is Cursed With Awesome. And then one of them is brought into the project himself. It ... doesn't go well.
- One Piece:
- Every Devil Fruit curses the eater with a total inability to swim or, indeed, function at all in water. At the same time, it gives the eater amazing superhuman powers that far outweigh the downsides. Except for a few of them.
- Word of God says that there are lots of Devil Fruits which either grant powers that are totally useless, or carry a negative side effect so harsh that they essentially ruin the user's life. Since there's no way to reverse the effects, and most Fruits' powers are unknown until after you eat them (unless you happen to have access to an encyclopedia of Devil Fruits... and some of them do not even have pictures), it makes eating a Fruit into a huge gamble. How badly do you want to be cursed with awesome?
- Another thing to note is that a Devil Fruit doesn't get stronger, the user gets more imaginative, which makes the "cursed" part eclipsing the "awesome" part a fault of the user more than anything. Brook is a perfect example, to his knowledge his Fruit let him revive from being dead, once. Post time-skip, he's learned to bend the rules on what "power over the soul" means to the point he can coat his sword in the cold flames of hell as his deadliest attack. Even his own screw-up of reviving too late and thus ending up a living skeleton has given him surprising advantages, mostly being so lightweight he's the fastest of the Straw Hats: able to even run across open water.
- In an aversion of the usual, many would consider being invulnerable to damage and death to be great, unless you're Kaido, so what was supposed to be a cursed with awesome is a very real case of Blessed with Suck for him.
- Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke gets cursed by a boar demon, which manifests itself in a gradually increasing nasty-looking scar which will eventually kill him, and turn him into a demon. (He comes pretty close to the deadline). The curse also grants him awesome powers, like super strength, which comes in very handy among all the hostility he gets faced with.
- In Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Puella Magi tend to consider themselves no longer human when they learn that the reason they can improve their physical abilities with magic is because their soul is inside their Transformation Trinket and controlling their body remotely. This revelation actually plunges Sayaka into a horrifying downward spiral. Make no mistake, being a Puella Magi can genuinely be considered as being Blessed with Suck, but this is not the worst part of it, and Kyubey notes that if it weren't for Soul Gems, the girls would not be able to fight as the pain from wounds would be too unbearable.
- As Kyubey points out, it's not a rational response, but it is understandable given that they've basically been turned into liches.
- The water-activated Jusenkyo transformations in Ranma ½ are generally considered undesirable, but some of the cursed take advantages of them, at least conditionally:
- Ranma vocally hates his Sex Shifter curse, but he has few qualms about taking advantage of his female form's looks (even if he is understandably averse to intimate contact) or just being able to disguise himself as a different person. In the anime, he also turns into a girl before eating ice cream to avoid looking unmanly.
- Though Ryoga turning into a tiny piglet is inconvenient, humiliating, and outright dangerous when he's frequently lost in the woods, it does give him a means to get close to Akane, who thinks that form is just her pet pig "P-chan".
- Shampoo doesn't mind turning into a cat except for how it deathly scares Ranma—and she's even used that for her own benefit a few time.
- Pantyhose Taro transforms into a sort of giant flying minotaur. He's had his curse since infancy, so he's completely used to it, abuses the extra power it gives him, and even exploits that cold water will make him stronger at the same time it makes others weaker. Later, he even deliberately adds on a Drowned Octopus curse for Combat Tentacles.
- Rouge fell into a Spring of Drowned Ashura, becoming a demon/goddess with three faces and six arms, a form in which she can fly, breathe fire, and hurl lightning bolts. The only downsides are that she needs to keep at bay the killer backache stemming from having six arms and turns murderously violent. She doesn't seem to mind the latter, and it's possible she isn't aware of her actions.
- In Re:CREATORS, Yuuya's curse manifests in the form of a JoJo-esque (or Shaman King-esque) spirit entity that gives him supernatural combat prowess and can be invoked seemingly at will. We're never shown any downsides of this.
- In The Shadowman, Takeshi Katagiri gains superhuman physical and recuperative abilities, to the point of being able to come back from the dead, so long as he isn't in direct sunlight. However, while his powers are active, his skin turns black as pitch and his hair turns white. He feels that his powers and appearance make him inhuman, that they will destroy his friendships and cause people to gawk at him.
- In She Becomes a Tree, Kisaki has Woodman Syndrome, a Fictional Disability that allows her to sprout tree limbs out of her body. This makes her very good at her Office Lady job, due to being able to type on multiple computers at once, but it also results in her coworkers shunning her and spreading rumors about her. Her difficulty controlling her powers when she was younger caused her to injure other people by accident, which helped contribute to her being ostracized.
- The "yaka" in Sola closely resemble vampires minus the need for blood: immortality, super strength and agility, regeneration, ability to resurrect people by turning them, and sometimes other awesome unique powers, with only the vampire-like extreme weakness to direct sunlight (and the 'curse' of immortality) as a drawback. Another character has a unique body that overcomes even that, but he spends all his time angsting over not being a real boy. The ending highlights how unappreciated these abilities are by those who have them.
- Jun in Special A laments about his problem with girls, which explains why he stays away from relationships. When Sakura kisses him, he wakes up - Turns out his shameful secret is that he's got The Casanova Split Personality inside him. The split personality realizes how awesome this is, but the "outer" Jun fails to see this.
- Tenchi Muyo! GXP plays with this trope. Protagonist Seina Yamada is cursed to be a Weirdness Magnet, with his mere presence causing accidents to harm himself and anyone else in the general area. His curse seems to reach new heights when he gets shanghaied into the Galaxy Police, and attracts a horde of Space Pirates almost as soon as he leaves orbit. But when he's rescued, it's brought to his attention that his curse led to one of the biggest blows against piracy in history — and he becomes determined to take the chance to have his luck serve a purpose for a change. Of course, the curse also leads to an Unwanted Harem... 'nuff said.
- Pretty much anyone who is an Accidental Pervert on a regular basis, particularly if they have an Unwanted Harem. Probably the most outrageous example is Rito Yuuki of To Love Ru, known as the "God of Falling" for his seemingly supernatural ability to trip and end up with his face in a girl's cleavage or crotch, somehow removing their clothes, or both.
- Seemingly, nothing. The resident Omnidisciplinary Scientist (who is also a gorgeous woman) tests it and notes that a) the "curse" appears to be the will of the universe and b) his constant accidental groping has given him an ungodly talent at it, and any girl he used it on would fall for him. Including her.
- In Toriko, Midora's curse is an insatiable appetite due to his futile attempts to eat away the pain of causing the death of one of the only people he ever loved. His ultimate attack is fueled by this appetite, giving him an "Instant Death" Radius.
- Ataru Moroboshi of Urusei Yatsura seesaws somewhere between this and Blessed with Suck in regards his Accidental Marriage to Cute Monster Girl Lum. On the one hand, she is a beautiful alien princess who genuinely does love him and sees his better qualities, and a lot of his protestations seem to be rooted in his being a particularly lustful example of the Casanova Wannabe who doesn't seem to realise how lucky he is. On the other hand, Lum does have her legitimate bad points, including having a bad temper and little tolerance for jealousy, being somewhat ditzy, enjoying higher levels of food spice than humans are comfortable with, and, of course, her ability to generate electricity... not only does she use this to discipline him when he goes skirt-chasing, but she sometimes loses control of this when trying to cuddle him, giving him a painful shock (particularly early on, when she is the unofficial villain). And, on the meta-level, there's the fact he was originally supposed to marry Shinobu Miyake (who ended up crushing on Mendou after he was first introduced, then hooking up with Inaba, anyway), until Lum became the Ensemble Dark Horse.
- In Witchblade, Masane hates the eponymous implant / symbiont that transforms her at will into a Stripperiffic death machine capable of ripping tanks apart and surviving its explosion. There are implications in the anime that it is a Deadly Upgrade, unlike in the comics.
- In ×××HOLiC, Watanuki constantly bemoans the fact that he is always stuck with Domeki Because Destiny Says So. Considering that Domeki has saved him from falling to his death (badly injuring his arm in the process), spent ten hours in the rain trying to pull him away from the brink of Hell, saved him from getting mauled by a possessed girl and her box cutter, gave his blood to save his life, and keeps him from being mauled by spirits on a daily basis just by being around him, you would think Watanuki would be a little more grateful — even if he does have to make Domeki lunch once in a while.
