Meta Origin

Back when Super Hero comics started in The Golden Age of Comic Books, there were no "universes" at first. Each character's adventures took place in their own little bubble. This came to an end with the first team-ups, such as the Justice Society of America, or the "war" between the original Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. Slowly, individual characters became part of a greater whole.

This, however, led to a few questions. While it might make sense that a Freak Lab Accident could increase someone's natural strength and speed to superhuman levels, the fact that million to one chances had independently gifted fifty or sixty different people (all on the same planet, no less) with different powers started to stretch Willing Suspension of Disbelief. And as the comics started appealing to an older target demographic, they started noticing such things more and more.

Thus, certain retcons were set up, changing it so that there was a reason why so many people were suddenly receiving super-powers. Essentially, this was the origin of the origins; thus, the Meta Origin.

Lightning Can Do Anything and similar tropes tend to be explained away by showing that the dangerous experience really just activated something latent, or brought one to the attention of an extradimensional force.

On a much smaller scale, this can also refer to the effect of a Retcon or reinterpretation that directly links individual character origins in ways not present in the original formulation.

This tends to be built into the world when new Super Hero worlds are created from the ground up.

A related concept is the Magnetic Plot Device, which could be considered the meta origin of all the weird stuff that happens to you. In many cases, the Meta Origin will become the Magnetic Plot Device for that particular story, although the two concepts aren't always the same.

Contrast with Fantasy Kitchen Sink, All Myths Are True. See Mass Super-Empowering Event for non-Retconned starting events providing everyone's superpowers and thus linking everyone together. See Randomly Gifted for a similar setting-wide explanation for the random appearance of powers. Can lead to Doing In the Wizard. Frequently used as part of Adaptation Distillations, as it can also simplify adaptations by tying the origins of several characters together.

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Examples:

• Comic Books
  • The DCU
  • Marvel Universe

Anime And Manga

• In Naruto, everything remotely powerful can be traced back to the Sage of the Six Paths. Ninjutsu? Created by the Sage’s oldest son. The powerful Uchiha and Senju clans? Descendants of the Sage. The Tailed Beasts? Was originally the Ten Tails but split by the Sage. Rinnegan? Eyes of the Sage. The Uzumaki clan? Related to Senju. The only exception is the Byakugan and the Hyuga clan, which are originated from the Sage's younger brother, Hamura, and both of them descend from the Otsutsuki clan.
• In the Stars storyline for the Sailor Moon manga, the Galaxy Cauldron essentially functions as this.
• In Claymore, all of the various superpowers in the series can be traced back to the dragons allied with the Organization's nation's enemies. The youma were created through experiments performed on a pair of captive dragons' flesh, and the Claymores are merely humans with youma flesh implanted in their bodies.
• In Hellsing, almost every supernatural being seen in the series is related to Alucard. All of Millennium's vampires are simply knockoffs created with the remains of Mina Harker, one of Alucard's past victims who still retained a bit of his vampiric power. The Captain a werewolf is one of the few exceptions.
• In Kill la Kill, every superpower is caused directly by Life Fibers, which are Starfish Aliens that feed off their hosts and want to destroy Earth so that they can spread to other planets.
• The The Powerpuff Girls anime adaptation Powerpuff Girls Z, among other liberal changes to the source material, made it so that the Powerpuff Girls, their Rogues Gallery, and several one-shot antagonists were created when Professor Utonium's son Ken fired a ray of Chemical Z at an iceberg in an attempt to fix the city's weather problem, which resulted in rays of white light striking the girls and several people, animals, and inanimate objects being exposed to black light, changing them all and giving them their powers.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stands have gotten this treatment not once but twice:
  • Following their introduction in part three, in which they were just sort of there, part four introduced the Stand Arrows, ancient metal arrows that granted Stands to anyone they pierced; it was strongly implied that most of the stand users encountered up to that point got their Stands from an Arrow.
  • However, there were still a few outliers, like Noriaki Kakyoin, who is stated to have had his Hierophant Green from birth, and Tonio Trussardi, who was confirmed by Word of God to have acquired his Pearl Jam through pure passion for his cooking and never encountered the Arrow at all. A second reveal in part five showed that Stands originate from an alien virus that arrived on Earth from a meteorite tens of thousands of years ago. The Arrows were made of metal extracted from that meteorite, while Stand users who had never been touched by the Arrows are descended from humans infected by the virus.

Fan Works

• A Brief History of Superheroics by Lois Lane begins by explaining how in this version of the DC Universe, all the Amazons left Themyscera to aid the Allies against Ares and the Axis. After the war, the surviving Amazons became the ancestors for all the magic-based heroes and villains, while super-science was derived from studying magical artifacts used during the war.
• More Than Enemies: Several secondary characters are descendants of Tobirama Senju, ranging from those who nearly turn Sakura into a Supporting Protagonist to those who are key parts in backstories, subplots, or both. They also owe their more outstanding skills to him and his Uzumaki wife. And that's not even counting how his status as Danzo's beloved sensei prompted the latter to track them down, thus intertwining the fates of several people.
  • Touka, his youngest daughter who was abducted by Suna in the Second Shinobi War to get their hands in Fuinjutsu and land a blow in her father. Later, they sealed Shukaku into her and renamed her Rasna. At some point during the Third Shinobi War, she was betrayed and sent to kill but survived thanks to Tsunade's teachings and Orochimaru coming to her rescue. She then moved to Konoha where she changed her name to Yuna. Several years later, she befriends Sakura. More shockingly, she is hinted to be one of Orochimaru's several moles in Konoha.
  • Chihiro, his granddaughter whose family hid in Tea Country as farmers. She inherited his grandfather’s intelligence, pragmatic lethality, and potential seeing she engineered very efficient terrace-based irrigation systems for their rice paddies and made chunin with little training and sheer determination when she moved to Konoha. She did the latter so the stuck-up Yamanaka Clan Elders would allow her to marry their heir. She mothered two daughters.
  • Charca, his grandson though a lot younger, who tried to make a living by terrorizing and stealing from Rain Country’s peasants and farmers after his mother’s demise. He recruited a gang of orphaned children and together they disguised themselves as a menacing black bear. He proved to be a prodigy in Fuinjutsu by applying his mother’s teachings to control wild animals through cloth-made seals. Shibuimaru found him and forced him to join ROOT, where he would later attempt to seize Danzo’s power.
  • Río, his grand-granddaughter and Chihiro’s daughter and originally called Inoue who was kidnapped at a young age to be trained into a ROOT agent but had a rather convoluted story with the foundation. Several escape attempts, at least twice times she was Left for Dead, an infiltration into ANBU, the grueling survival training of an entire ROOT division, and getting to be Danzo’s dragon are some of her more notable exploits. She inherited her ancestor’s knack for Water Release, stubbornness, and most of his out-of-the-box but genius thinking. Finally, she got to interact with Shibuimaru, Minato, Kakashi, and Shishui at different points in her life.
• The Secret Return of Alex Mack: Alex's father hypothesizes the existence of a master "can acquire powers" gene that regulates if you can get powers and what those powers are.
• The Transcendence AU has the Transcendence as a world-altering cataclysm that causes all the events of the AU, and blames a previous attempt by Bill for Gravity Falls' previous state as an Eldritch Location.

Film

• The Transformers Film Series established the AllSpark as a mystical artifact responsible for the creation of Cybertron and Cybertronians, including other artifacts like the Matrix of Leadership. The AllSpark itself is a composite of various items like the Matrix of Leadership and the supercomputer Vector Sigma, and helps explain multiple transforming robot species in the galaxy that were apparently unrelated to Cybertron, such as the Junkions and Unicron (whose original origin was rather bizarre, created by a monkey scientist). The films and later incarnations of the franchise, such as the Transformers Aligned Universe, have followed suit by establishing that everything is connected to the AllSpark, or at the least the AllSpark itself is tied closely with the power of Primus, a mechanical deity.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), Eric Sacks' experiments lead to the geneses of both Shredder and the Turtles, as he apparently designed Shredder's armor in addition to synthesizing the mutagenic chemicals that mutated the Turtles.
• Godzilla:
  • In the rebooted Heisei continuity, Rodan is explicitly established as a surviving Cretaceous-era dinosaur (well, pterosaur...) mutated by nuclear radiation, just like Godzilla and Anguirus. The Heisei version of King Ghidorah is also born in the same nuclear explosion that created Godzilla (via Time Travel), and the Heisei version of Mechagodzilla is built by the UNGCC from the remains of Ghidorah's mechanized body (long story...).
  • In the Alternate Continuity film Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!, Mothra, Baragon and King Ghidorah are reimagined as a trio of supernatural "Guardian Monsters" tasked with defending Japan through the ages. Mothra is the Guardian of the Sea, Baragon is the Guardian of the Earth, and Ghidorah is the Guardian of the Sky.
• Mortal Kombat (2021) explains that most of the superhuman special moves displayed by the characters in the games (Liu Kang's fireballs, Kung Lao's teleportation, Sub-Zero's ice powers, Sonya's energy rings, Kabal's Super-Speed, ect.) are arcanas, special abilities granted to those who bear the dragon mark on their skin.

Literature

• In Hero.com and Villain.net by Andy Briggs, the six Core Powers qualify, all other superpowers in existence being only twisted and weakened descendants of the Core Powers. One is a Time Master ability, one is a Gravity Master power, and the third known gives power over life and death.
  • On a lesser level, the titular websites for Downloaders, since they don't have powers permanently like Primes, and have to absorb them through the internet.
• In Salman Rushdie's Magic Realism novel Midnight's Children, 1001 babies born at midnight on the day that India achieves its independence gain low-level superpowers. One can reverse gender, another can teleport through bodies of water, and the main character can smell disaster and other things no one can smell. They're also all able to maintain telepathic contact with one another, and try to form a sort of national congress (it fails miserably).
• In the classic pulp horror novel Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson, all the monstrous creatures of worldwide myth and legend (and most of the evil in the world) spring from Homo lycanthropus, a werewolf-vampire species of "witch men" who have lived secretly alongside "real men" since prehistoric times and can interbreed with Homo sapiens.
• Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton Family concept posited the Wold Newton meteorite as a source of mutation, which, while generally not producing metahumans, produced an extended family including Tarzan, Doc Savage et al.
• Christopher Stasheff's Warlock of Gramarye series reveals that the existence of so many mythological creatures on the world of Gramarye is due to the presence of "witch-moss," which can be psychically shaped.
• In the Wild Cards book series, all human supers get their powers via infection with the Wild Card virus. This also explains why so damn many of them live in New York City; that's where the virus was originally released.
• In Wearing the Cape, all superhumans are "breakthroughs"—individuals who's powers manifested in response to great physical stress or emotional trauma. Superhumans themselves began appearing in the aftermath of the Event (a worldwide phenomena where every living person experienced complete sensory deprivation for 3.2 seconds), but neither the Event nor the source of superhuman powers is ever explained.
• In Dark Life, living at the high pressures of the undersea homesteads gives people "Dark Gifts".
• In The Grimnoir Chronicles books by Larry Correia, all powers come from a vast cosmic entity known as ...well, The Power.
• In Perry Rhodan, while humanity has branched into environmentally adapted strains (usually making people stronger, hardier or even smaller), there also exist people with psionic powers called mutants, as they literally are just that. In the early years, most known mutants were born in 1946 with the implication that they were a result of the nuclear bombs used in 1945. Later, after they finally died off, an evil overlord tried breeding super-soldiers, but was thwarted and removed from power. Several generations later, the descendants of the test subjects showed a high chance of being totally color-blind (unable to discern colors at all), while exhibiting mutant powers as well. Unfortunately, after just one arc, most of these were killed off again by a power trying to take a shortcut to becoming a super-intelligence.
• In The Cosmere, everything ultimately boils down to the planet Yolen and its god, Adonalsium, which got shattered by sixteen Yolenians. Those eventually took up pieces — Shards — of Adonalsium, becoming divine themselves, and evacuated humanity (or started it anew) to other planets. Shards' magic then mixed with local supernatural "climate", creating Cosmere's various magic systems — not to mention that Shards themselves are initiators of most of Cosmere's plots.
• In Sanctioned, there are genetic markers that indicate a person might develop super-powers. Not everyone who has those markers develops powers, but no one can develop powers without them. In Scotland, potential sixteen-year-olds are taken to a state-run school for the government to try and unlock the powers and then teach the youths to control them. So far, there seem to be two theories about the origin of the powers: the Harrington theory (God did it) and the Benoit theory (we don't know the science, yet, but we know it wasn't God).
• The Weerde was a series of two books by the Midnight Rose Collective, in which most supernatural beings were actually members of a race of shapeshifters called the Weerde (a sort of play on "weird" and "were").
• The Star Trek Novel 'Verse revealed just why the Star Trek universe is filled with arsehole godlike reality-warping aliens. A race called the Manraloth tried (to cut a long story short) to foster universal peace and accidentally forcibly ascended the entire sentient population of the galaxy, all at once. Most died, and many of the survivors weren't ready for the experience and developed Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• In Worm, parahumans gain their powers through a process called a "trigger event," where the individual goes through a highly traumatic experience and gains superpowers from it. The reasons for this, and for disruptions in the pattern (such as Case 53s, or inhuman parahumans, and extremely powerful parahumans such as Scion and the Endbringers) are major plot points later in the story.
  • All superpowers (include the Super Serum variants created by Cauldron) come from pieces of vast extra-dimensional beings often called "passengers" or 'agents'. One of these beings is Scion, the first "parahuman" to come into existence; the other one giving powers to humans has been harvested by Cauldron for the power-giving shards to turn into their Super Serums.

Live Action TV

• Where The DCU has the Speed Force, Power Rangers has the Morphing Grid. In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, the series' first incarnation, it was a term frequently tossed out in technobabble but never defined. Dusted off over a decade later, it seems that all Rangers, whether their apparent power source is magic, technology, Green Rocks, or some combination thereof, are actually powered by a connection to the Grid. The Grid is potentially explained in Power Rangers RPM (that's season seventeen) to be an energy field produced by the bioelectricity of living beings, but RPM never acknowledges it by name (it was described as a "grid" so we're assuming it's the Grid) and takes place in a separate universe from the rest. In any case, it's still not explained how the various apparent power sources and the Grid interact with each other.
  • Fanon suggests that the morphing powers tap into the grid to access the uniform and weapons, it is sort of a canon Hyperspace Arsenal. The Grid doesn't necessarily supply the power to the morphers but it instead channels that power into what they need. That's why the different teams with wildly different power sources can all use the morphing grid, you just need to figure out how to channel the grid abilities. This also explains why in team-ups, the power-ups and weapons are easily compatible with other teams. There are other characters within the franchise that can "Morph" without being called Rangers, such as Masked Rider and (debatably) the Magna Defender.
• All the superpowers on Heroes supposedly come from certain people evolving a sort of "superpower gene," like in X-Men. However, a few scenes, as well as some Word of God comments, suggest there might be a quasi-religious aspect determining which people are granted which powers.
  • A two-parter in season 3 attempted to retcon an explanation that an eclipse was what caused the characters' latent powers to emerge, with another eclipse taking those powers away. Completely neglected is the fact that many characters had been using their powers before the first eclipse.
    • Word of God has suggested that an eclipse just marks some sort of significant event for people with powers and that this happens with every eclipse.
• Similar to the Morphing Grid concept, the Crisis Crossover Grand Finale of Kamen Rider Wizard introduces the Cross of Fire, which is stated to be the literal embodiment of the powers and Phlebotinum Rebel status granted to each of the Kamen Riders throughout the franchise's history.
  • This is in fact a Development Gag, as in early production the original Kamen Rider was going to be called "Cross Fire", and was a superpowered wrestler.
• The superhumans in the TV version of Painkiller Jane were all either "Neuros" who shared a neurological aberration, or were empowered by a Neuro.
  • Also, all Neuros are, apparently, rejected test subjects of the corporation investigated in the pilot, and their powers are unintended consequences of messing with the brain. Jane, with her Healing Factor, is an advanced Neuro who can't be chipped.
• In The 4400, everyone's powers are due to everyone getting a fifth neural transmitter, promicin, when they were kidnapped by the future.

Tabletop Games

• The entirety of Exalted is one big Meta Origin, with the various types of Exalted having been literally Chosen By The Gods to receive their powers.
• The Mutants & Masterminds setting Paragons has everyone's powers emerge in the past few years due to one source; however, that unified source is left deliberately vague, though the book heavily hints that the world of myth is leaking back into reality.
  • The setting Shards: Unsung Destiny, featured in the sourcebook Mecha & Manga, has all powers come from special crystals deposited on Earth by a comet.
  • In the Emerald City setting, despite being set in the same 'verse as the Superhero Kitchen Sink of Freedom City, most of the local metahumans had their powers activated by the Silver Storm (before then, Emerald City had the lowest meta population in the US, for sinister reasons). "Stormers" are broadly similar to Milestone's "Bang Babies".
• In the Trinity Universe (White Wolf), Novas and Psions both have the same latent genetic potential that is later activated by some outside stimulus, particularly the presence of existing Novas or Psions. In Aberrant, a large number of Novas were activated by the explosion of the Galatea, and in Trinity, most Psions are activated by dunking in one of the psi-orders' Prometheus Chambers.
• International Super Teams, the official super hero roleplaying setting for GURPS, traces powers back to the Seeders, Precursor-like aliens who uplift dead-end species by adding the potential for sapience and a racial super power (to be determined by its evolution and environmental stresses) to the species' genetic code. In the case of Earth, humanity's engineered ancestors suffered a solar radiation event which suppressed most of the Seeder genes; only intelligence evolved until another radiation event in the late 1920s reactivated the "power genes", which then began to express themselves more or less randomly from individual to individual.
• Warhammer 40,000 ultimately traces everything back to the War In Heaven between the C'tan and the Old Ones, two races with powers bordering on Reality Warping. C'tan uplifted Necrontyr into robotic Necrons to fight for them, while the Old Ones created the Eldar and Orks to counter that. Furthermore, the war led to disturbance in the Sea of Souls that would lead to Chaos forming, which in turn led to Earth shamans deciding to band together for protection, thus creating the Emperor. Add to that the implications that the Eldar have uplifted the Tau, and the War In Heaven is behind all of 40K's factions.
  • With the exception of the tyrannids.

Theatre

• In Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the members of the Sinister Six have their comic origins completely ignored. Instead, they're all researchers who end up Bound and Gagged and mutated by their former employer, Norman Osborn.

Video Games

• The backstory of City of Heroes involves the original Super Hero and his Rival Turned Evil opening Pandora's Box, unleashing the last four millennia of humanity's stored creativity. This was in the early 1930s, again paralleling The Golden Age of Comic Books. In the novel Web of Arachnos, it's claimed that the last time the box was opened, it led to the gods of Greek myth. But it's also said specifically that not all beings of legend were born of its power...
  • There's also "the Nuclear 90", "90 children from around the world all born in one year with an unusual mutation that gives them natural magnetic nuclear fusion reactors for hearts, and the ability to channel energy from their internal reactor for a variety of super powers." The only one of these who's currently a character in the game is the NPC Fusionette.
  • A story arc included in Issue 12 notes that the first mutants appeared after 1938, corresponding to the earliest human-controlled nuclear fission.
  • There's also the Meta Origin of the Origins themselves, and the apparent web that connects and entangles all super-powered beings — meaning that there is, apparently, a reason that going through Training from Hell doesn't give everyone superpowers, or that scientific accidents don't always cause powers...
    • Many players prefer to ignore that explanation, especially with it being shoehorned in after several years of having no explanation for how origins really work. Plus many didn't like the implication that all origins, even the Natural and Technology origins, were really all due to magic.
• Lionheart had King Richard the Lionheart's aggressive hoarding of holy relics during the Third Crusade result in an explosion of magical energy, the "Disjunction", that caused human beings to begin manifesting magical powers, significantly altered the geography of western Europe, and turned ordinary animals into mythological beasts.
• Most of the characters in Freedom Force got their powers from a mysterious form of energy imaginatively called "Energy X". This energy is explained as the "secret weapon" of the multiverse-spanning empire known as the Domain. Their leader, Lord Dominion, thinking that Earth, the only place he hasn't conquered, won't prove to be a challenge, orders his underlings to give Energy X to the most evil people on Earth in the hopes that they will destroy Humanity and each other. However, a rebel named Mentor steals all the Energy X canisters and tries to bring them to Earth, so he can give them to the most heroic people on Earth... only to be shot down by the pursuing fleet, causing the canisters to rain down on Earth, and giving powers to those who happened to be in their vicinity.
  • This is taken even further by the sequel, Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich. At the end, it is revealed that Energy X is actually a sentient being. This was probably planned to be further explained in another sequel, but at this point that seems pretty unlikely.
  • A few of the origins are questionable. Eve may or may not get her power from Pan, for instance. Another may be getting it from a Wiccan goddess, the origin video is actually ambiguous on that point but she thinks so. And it's never explained exactly who Blitzkrieg is and where he got his powers.
    • Pan himself is an example of a character who appears to have had powers long before the Energy X spill happened.
  • Amusingly enough, the company that created Freedom Force would later go on to create Bioshock...
• With the Alpha series, Super Robot Wars began handling this trope surprisingly well, especially when there are so many series in each Continuity which requires balancing to prevent Story-Breaker Power. Most involve Human Aliens, Ancient Astronauts and so on, but a few games will mix the different varieties of Applied Phlebotinum as manifestations of some greater, overarching power in the universe. For example, Alpha establishes that Getter Rays, The Power, Beamler, Psychodrivers, the STMC, Anima Spiritia and the Ide are all aspects of the Akashic Records, better known as fate.
  • In fact, the final Alpha game reveals the Greater Scope Villain was behind every original villain in the previous installments; additionally, all the Big Bads from the licensed series that appeared were directed into the path that led them against the heroes of Alpha.

Webcomics

• Many characters from Mindmistress have connected origins. Mindmistress and Forethought gained their intellect from the same source. Moodswing and members of Venegance Inc. mutated because of the same thing. Moodswing's belt and tsunami-causing rod of sea people were both created by Miraclemaker. And there's bunch of character created by mindmistress actions

Web Original

• In the Whateley Universe, people with the "meta-gene complex" may just manifest as a mutant (typically around age fourteen) for no known reason. However, at least a sixth of everyone on earth has this genetic structure, and yet there are only thousands of mutants. The roughly 600 mutants at Whateley Academy represent by far most of the high-school age mutants on the planet.
  • The story, "Razzle Dazzle," has villain Mephisto explain that the "meta-gene complex" almost never showed up until after governments started giving vast numbers of people "allergy shots" that were actually supposed to create super-soldiers and suggests that the "meta-gene complex" were the results of people who didn't react to the serum initially, but passed it on to their children. Then again, he also implies at the end of his story that he made much of it up for his audience of one...
• Academy of Superheroes has the Magene, which gives one the ability to, essentially, break the laws of physics. The original holders in prehistory were powerful wizards, and the most powerful became the gods of mythology. In the modern day, the gene is far more diluted, resulting in superhumans. There are highly-detailed classifications detailing what kind and how powerful a particular individual's physics-violating abilities are.
• In the comicbook-styled Omega universe, all superpowers (be they magic, psychic or even chi), come from the same source i.e. all humans are at least latent psychics. Omegas generally activate with a single power while mages use rituals to temporarily access their dormant psychic talents. The gods in the setting didn't create humanity, it was the other way around.
• Some of the proposals for the SCP-001 article of the SCP Foundation are about what's caused the Foundation universe to have so many paranormal entities and phenomenon. Two of them also provide origins for several of the groups involved in the paranormal, including the Foundation itself.

Western Animation

• The Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated episode "Heart of Evil" reveals that Blue Falcon and Dynomutt were originally a security guard and a guard dog (respectively) at the facilities of Quest Labs, and that Dynomutt got his robotic enhancements as a life-saving measure from Dr. Benton Quest after he nearly died defending the lab from Dr. Napoleon Zin. Though never outright stated, it's heavily implied that Blue Falcon's gadgets were also originally Quest Labs hardware.

Other

• This is the basic premise of the Friends and the High Council WMG.

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