Obliviously Superpowered

Harry: I can't be a-a-a wizard. I mean, I'm... just... Harry... Just Harry.
Hagrid: Well, "just Harry," did you ever make anything happen? Anything you couldn't explain when you were angry or-or scared?

— Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

When it comes to superpowers, their wielders usually catch on fairly quickly: once they've started to leap tall buildings with a single bound or whatever, they know for a fact that they're different from most human beings and recognize their powers. However, there are exceptions.

For these few, there is no awareness of their powers whatsoever, even when they're in use. The reasons for this inability are many and varied: perhaps the powers are extremely subtle and can easily be mistaken for random chance, or perhaps the user is Obsessively Normal and in denial, or maybe they're the unwitting victim of a Nightmare of Normality... or maybe they're just really, really stupid.

Also, it's not uncommon for these individuals to be lumbered with Power Incontinence, leaving them surrounded by wonders and calamities every hour of the day but unable to explain any of it.

Needless to say, central characters with superpowers and no awareness of them rarely remain oblivious for long, especially if the powers are the key to stopping the Big Bad or some other plot-critical purpose. In some cases, the existence of the character's powers may even constitute a major plot twist.

May overlap with Oblivious Transformation if the power involves some form of shapeshifting.

May involve I Am Who?, where the character in question, in addition to not knowing his own powers, doesn't even know who he is. Compare and contrast I Thought Everyone Could Do That, in which characters are aware of their powers, but are oblivious as to how extraordinary they are by human standards. Compare to Forgot About His Powers, in which the characters have the powers but forgot to use it when needed. Contrast Mistaken for Superpowered, where they do know they have powers... even though they actually don't.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan: Eren was initially unaware of his Titan Shifting abilities until the Battle of Trost, where he is swallowed by a titan, the trauma of which caused him to transform into a titan. Later, it's revealed that he has the power of the Founding Titan, and his specific titan form is the Attack Titan, which can see the memories of its past and future holders.
• Assassination Classroom: Nagisa is a partial example. He's aware that he's skilled at reading others' emotions and masking his own emotions and presence. He's not aware that his skills are sharp enough to unnerve (if not terrify) professional assassins and military veterans.
• Castle Town Dandelion: Aoi Sakurada knew that as a royal, she would have a super-power — she simply didn't know what it was until she reached middle school, where she discovered through chance that the reason people admired and adored her was due to the fact that she had a Compelling Voice and thus most people responded to a simple request as an absolute order that had to be obeyed. Needless to say, Aoi was horrified, and from then on, always made sure to phrase any requests in such a way that it was clear a person was free to refuse.
• EDENS ZERO: Early in the series, Rebecca is The Team Normal, but gradually develops her own Ether Gear which grants her brief bursts of Super-Speed. Then comes the Belial Goer arc, when things go so badly that The Bad Guy Wins and her friend Shiki is executed in front of her. A week later, the trauma causes her to access her true power, and she suddenly wakes up in a time before everything went wrong. Later, Master Noah informs her that she had always had this power, and had been unconsciously using it every time her life was threatened to Set Right What Once Went Wrong without any memories of having done so.
• My Hero Academia: The original bearer of "One For All" was thought to be Quirkless. It wasn't until his brother All For One gave him a stockpiling Quirk that he found out his Quirk was the ability to choose who to pass his Quirk to, making him immune to his brother's Power Parasite abilities. His transfer and stockpiling Quirks merged into "One For All".
• One Piece: Luffy awakens to his Conqueror's Haki early on in the final pre-Time Skip saga and uses it by accident several times, most of the time with witnesses that make their incredulity known to him, sometimes saying exactly what he did. But he remains completely oblivious until Rayleigh explains it to him in the final pre-skip chapter/episode.
• Princess Tutu: Fakir has Rewriting Reality abilities he has suppressed all memory of since childhood, when one of his stories led to his parents' deaths. Prior to this reveal, Fakir finds himself drawn to Drosselmeyer's unfinished stories, and dreams the ending of one of them, foreshadowing that he and Drosselmeyer share the same power, by blood.
• The Seven Deadly Sins: Elizabeth is initially unaware that she has any magical abilities and only becomes aware of them when she unleashes her World-Healing Wave against a demonic Hendrickson during the battle at Liones Castle. Her older sister Veronica reveals that she's been clueless about her powers since childhood, to the point even when Elizabeth healed their father after falling from a tree when she was little, she was still unaware that she had done anything. This takes on a much darker tone later on, as it's implied that Elizabeth was subconsciously ignoring her powers in order to protect herself from her curse, which dictates that if she remembers who she really is, she will die in three days.
• Zatch Bell!: Amnesiac Gash/Zatch is this for the first few chapters due to blacking out whenever Kiyomaro/Kiyo casts their spells.

Audio Plays

• Big Finish Doctor Who:
  • In the climax of "The Holy Terror", it's revealed that the seemingly unimportant scribe Eugene Tacitus is actually an immortal Reality Warper and the Castle is his creation. However, due to a combination of Obsessively Normal tendencies and being trapped in the Castle for eons, he's completely forgotten his powers... even though he's still unconsciously steering the entire course of history. He's not even aware that he's immortal, assuming that he's just the latest member of his family to become the court scribe.
  • "Master" features the Doctor's long-time Arch-Enemy being stripped of his memories and deposited in a backwater human colony so he can have a second chance at a peaceful life. Now known as "John Smith", he believes himself to be an ordinary human being and is able to make a life for himself without knowing that he's an immortal psychic alien. Unfortunately, John's telepathy is still active and under the control of the Master's dormant personality, so people around him begin to demonstrate odd behaviour, the result of his telepathy encouraging them to act on their darker impulses. Of course, John doesn't realize this, and initially attributes the plague of weird outbursts to the "curse" supposedly placed on his house — up until the Doctor finally reveals the truth.

Comic Books

• Fantastic Four: In John Byrne's classic run on Fantastic Four (1961), there is one story where an absolutely ordinary middle-aged man is actually a nigh-omnipotent Reality Warper. He remains unaware of this throughout the story, never realizing that the small lucky breaks and coincidences around him are caused by his power. At one point, he even speeds up time so that the weekend will arrive sooner. In the climax of the story, he spends all his power to fix the Earth when it's destroyed in a battle between Ego the Living Planet and the Fantastic Four, becoming truly an ordinary man, while everyone (including himself) remains unaware that planetary destruction has been overwritten.
• Justice Society of America: As a baby, Johnny Thunder was bonded to an incredibly powerful genie who would follow his commands for a while after he said "Cei-U", pronounced "Say, you..." a phrase he used very, very often. He's not the brightest spark, so it took him literally in-universe years of obliviously using this power to finally cotton on to the idea that something might be up with that.
• New Mutants: Cypher didn't realize that his linguistic skills were due to being a mutant until the New Mutants had to recruit him in the middle of the night so they could talk to an alien life form they'd encountered.
• Rising Stars: Cathy Jean was conceived during the same Mass Super-Empowering Event as the rest of the Specials, but because of the nature of her powers (she can resurrect the recently deceased), she remained completely unaware of her powers until she was in her thirties.
• In Wonder Woman Volume 4/Teen Titans Volume 4 Cassie Sandsmark assumes all of her powers come from The Silent Armor and The War Bracelets. In reality The Silent Armor is trying to drain Cassie's life force and Sandsmark's innate demigoddess powers are the only thing keeping her alive.
• Wonder Girl (Infinite Frontier) Yara Flor is completely oblivious to her wonderful powers. This is best seen when she is dragged under a river by Iara for so long Yara falls asleep. Yara sees nothing strange about not drowning, about instantly recovering without medical treament, after sleeping underwater!

Fan Works

• In Facing the Future Series story "Trial By Fire", when Sam first manifests her fire powers, she was unaware that anything was happening to her do to the nature of her powers, to the point that even when Danny and several others point out that she seems unusually warm, she insists that she's fine. It gets to the point that they end up scanning her with Valerie's suit and discover that her body temperature is over three hundred degrees, which finally clues Sam in.
• It Gets Worse: Even when Taylor approaches Director Piggot to report the extreme coincidences that are happening around her, she still isn't sure it's actually her own power; she wonders if she might have a "guardian angel" of some sort. Director Piggot examines the events and concludes that it fits better with merely having a power beyond her conscious control. Taylor can't tell, in any case, even as the Humiliation Congas pile up on her enemies.
• The Secret Return of Alex Mack: Louis and Marsha's dates always seem to go catastrophically wrong, starting with a flat tyre that keeps them out way past curfew and going from there. Turns out that Marsha unknowingly has minor telekinesis, and when she worries about things that could go wrong, her mind makes them happen.
• Emily from Sixes and Sevens always knew she was a little stronger than normal, but it takes her kicking a werewolf across a room and healing severe injuries in a matter of days to consider that there might be something else going on. The story implies that she's a late-blooming mutant.

Film — Live-Action

• In Constantine, it's eventually revealed that Detective Angela Dodson is psychic but unconsciously suppressed her abilities in childhood after seeing her twin sister Isabel being committed to a mental hospital after her own powers were dismissed as schizophrenia. In the present, Angela is still unconsciously psychic, but despite owing quite a few inexplicable successes at work to this power, she refuses to acknowledge it. However, after gradually learning that Isabel wasn't insane after all and that the supernatural is real, Angela asks Constantine to reawaken her powers — allowing her to identify the half-breed demon Balthazar as the murderer of Hennesy and Beeman.
• The Devil's Advocate: Kevin Lomax is legendary for having never lost a case in his legal career, even though he's also never used methods like plea bargains or picking deliberate winners. He often downplays this, attributing it to natural talent, lax judges, or being able to eavesdrop on juries — though Kevin is unable to satisfactorily explain how he just knows the weaknesses of potential jurors during jury selection. It's not until the end that he discovers that he's actually the son of John Milton AKA Satan, who gleefully points out that supernatural powers are the only possible explanation for Kevin's success.
• Halloweentown:
  • Exploited. While Sophie can do things like sense when someone is coming to the house or unconsciously levitate a cookie towards her, her mother purposely makes sure Sophie doesn't realize it's magic, either by hiding the evidence or insisting it's nothing, since she is trying to hide her magical heritage from the kids until the girls lose their powers permanently at 13. Also discussed — Marnie later learns from her mother that she used to use accidental magic without realizing it as well, since Gwen hid it the same way she is doing with Sophie.
  • Played straight with Dylan, who only realizes he has magic in the climax when Marnie points out his fingers are glowing.
• Jumper: As with the original book, David isn't aware of his ability until he instinctively uses it to escape a traumatic situation. Unlike the book, the film's traumatic situation is David falling into a frozen lake.
• Men in Black II: Laura turns out to be a Half-Human Hybrid of a human and an alien — the human most likely being Agent K — and the Light of Zartha that Serleena's been hunting for the entire film. K proves it by pointing out she doesn't get sad when it rains, it rains whenever she's sad — as it did after Serleena murdered Ben earlier in the film.
• The Power: Early in the film, Doctor Hoffman's anonymous intelligence tests determine that one member of the think tank is actually a psychic supergenius; soon after, Professor Jim Tanner and the rest of the team find themselves terrorized by an individual known as Adam Hart, the supposed supergenius. The climax reveals the supergenius that Doctor Hoffman's tests uncovered was actually Tanner himself, and Hart was an outsider attempting to eliminate potential competition. Jim has been subconsciously using his own powers throughout the film without ever knowing he had them, only realising his true capabilities in the final confrontation when he starts fighting back.
• Star Wars: Force Sensitives are often detected and conscripted by the Jedi in infancy, but it's not unheard of for Sensitives to occasionally slip through the cracks, especially in regions beyond Republic control or in eras where the Jedi are rare. As such, such Sensitives may unconsciously tap into the Force and never realize it — as was the case with young Anakin Skywalker, who didn't realize that his reflexes as a podracer were due to his connection to the Force until he met Qui-Gon Jinn. Both of Anakin's children had similar experiences: both developed Improbable Aiming Skills, while Luke had similar piloting skills to his father and had no idea it was unusual until Obi-Wan explained it to him, and Leia is implied to have had full-blown visions of the past that she misinterpreted as memories until Luke revealed their relationship.
• Unbreakable: David Dunn has preternatural levels of strength, resilience, and health, but because he's never had a reason to seriously push himself, these abilities have gone unnoticed for most of his life. It's not until finds himself as the sole survivor of a devastating train crash that he realizes that there might be something unusual about him — but even then, it takes a note from Elijah Price to make him realize that he's never been sick. It later turns out that he was aware of his powers, having used his strength to rescue his future wife from a car crash, but willingly forgot about them so he wouldn't have to continue his football career, even feigning a Career-Ending Injury to that end.

Literature

• In Baccano!, Isaac and Miria fail to notice that they haven't aged since the 1930s. They finally take notice in 2001 and have a Freak Out. Being as ditzy as they are, they manage to come up with their own excuse for their immortality.
• Bernice Summerfield: In "The Ship of Fools", the Big Bad of the tale is a harmless little old lady who is a parody of the regular "old lady investigator" characters of Agatha Christie. It's eventually revealed that she has a psychic ability she did not know about that sent out commands for people to commit murders, which was the main reason she had solved so many in her career.
• Captain Underpants: Played with. For the first two books, Mr. Krupp's hypnotized persona Captain Underpants believed he had superpowers even though the former was just a normal man. He does gain actual superpowers starting in the third book, but since Mr. Krupp isn't aware of his alter-ego, he's completely unaware that he actually has superpowers.
• Ciaphas Cain: Jurgen is a Blank, and basically has a psychic hole in the Warp where his soul should be; consequently, Warp-based magic is greatly weakened or even nullified around him. It's a one-in-a-trillion gift, but although an Inquisitor tried to explain it to Jurgen, he didn't get it: all he knows is that he's never found daemons and psykers to be as big a threat as they were made out to be.
• The Daevabad Trilogy: Nahri was thrown out of every orphanage as a young girl for innocently revealing people's ailments, not knowing that it's unusual to be able to sense the state of people's bodies. As an adult, she learns that she's a half-djinn with rare healing magic.
• The Dresden Files: Special Agent Tilly claims to be able to tell when someone is lying. Tilly claims he's just good at reading people, but Harry immediately identifies him as a very minor magical talent.
• The Extraordinaries Series: After Nick's obsession with becoming an Extraordinary throughout the first book, The Stinger reveals he already was one, with his powers being suppressed by his ADHD drugs. He unconsciously saves himself with telekinesis while falling off a bridge in the climax but doesn't realize his abilities until the second book.
• Good Omens: Adam Young the Anti Anti Christ spends his childhood unaware that he's a godlike Reality Warper. With Good Parents and a happy life, all his Power Incontinence does is make his beloved hometown a bit more idyllic and transform a Hellhound into a cute Canine Companion. It's not until the apocalypse begins to heat up that Adam gets the slightest inkling of what he really is...
• Harry Potter:
  • Magical children have subtle magic throughout their childhoods, but no conscious control over it. Consequently, Muggle-borns and those raised among Muggles usually have no idea that they have magical powers, nor can they explain the weird things that happen around them — up until the Hogwarts letter arrives.
  • Harry Potter himself turned out to be a somewhat extreme case. Given that his aunt and uncle were Obsessively Normal, he was raised to be normal and shouted at for even talking about anything remotely fantastical, so when Harry started showing signs of magic, he remained oblivious to it even in the face of increasingly ridiculous "accidents" — like flying/apparating onto the school roof in order to escape Dudley and trying to excuse it as the wind catching him. The Fantastic Beasts films reveal that it is a very good thing that Harry was unaware of his powers; children who consciously suppress their magic risk developing an Obscurial, a parasitic magical force that typically kills them before their eleventh birthday and causes a lot of collateral damage.
• The eponymous main character of Haruhi Suzumiya possesses reality warping superpowers that she's unaware of — in part because her friends are afraid of what she'll do if she learns about them, though that doesn't stop her from using those powers unconsciously, however. Ironically, she founded a club for searching for espers and other supernatural entities, not knowing that she herself is one.
• Hidden Talents: Martin believes he's The Team Normal until his friends clue him in that he's actually The Empath. His social problems stem from intuitively lashing out at people's vulnerabilities when he feels threatened, but he becomes The Heart to his friends.
• In André Maurois' short story "The House", a woman repeatedly dreams of a house. One day she finds the house she's been dreaming of but the people who live there are frightened of her. Unknown to her she has been visiting the house as an astral projection and the inhabitants thought she was a ghost.
• Jumper kicks off with main character Davy unconsciously using his teleportation powers to escape being beaten by his father. However, because he only Jumped into the fiction section of his local public library, Davy initially thinks he just suffered a trauma-induced blackout and simply walked to the library before he regained awareness. He immediately follows this up by running away from home, so he doesn't realize the truth until two weeks later, when a truck driver he was hitchhiking with tries to rape him — and Davy instinctively Jumps all the way back to the library, well after closing time, making it abundantly clear to him that this wasn't a blackout.
• The Locked Tomb: Implied. Gideon is Made of Iron in Gideon the Ninth, bouncing back from several events that should have killed her. In Harrow the Ninth, she learns that she's the God-Emperor's daughter, suggesting that she inherited his near-immortality.
• Monster: Judy is a magnet for supernatural creatures and unwittingly capable of influencing them with her emotions. However, the fact that she's a Light Cog means that she can't remember anything supernatural, so she has no explanation for any of the accidents caused by her powers — leaving her in constant trouble with her parents, teachers, employers, landlords, and the police. Of course, it's a very subtle trait, so even when Monster gives her a memory rune that allows her to remember the supernatural, she still doesn't notice the power until Monster points out that paranormal creatures have shown up at every location they've visited in the last few days. It's eventually revealed that this particular power is due to Judy's nature as the universe's chosen weapon against Lotus.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • Before demigods know of their godly heritage, they already have supernaturally enhanced battle reflexes and an ability to read divine Ancient Greek, often diagnosed as ADHD and dyslexia by mortals. They may also get prophetic dreams.
  • Certain demigod children also manifest other unconscious abilities, depending on their godly parent. Percy, son of Poseidon, displays unconscious hydrokinesis twice in The Lightning Thief, once against Nancy Bobofit and once against Clarisse during Capture the Flag, not realizing he caused it until he was claimed by Poseidon.
• The Stormlight Archive: In Edgedancer, a curmudgeonly orphanage administrator often accuses the children of faking their ailments, unaware that she's become a Knight Radiant and has been subconsciously healing them. Radiants have Oathbound Powers but don't need to know the true significance of the vow as long as their intent is sincere.
• In the Torchwood novel Border Princes James Mayer is The Ace who has rapidly and effortlessly become an essential member of the Torchwood team, because he's a Reality Warper whose powers convince everyone including himself that he belongs there.
• Bella of The Twilight Saga starts off the series completely unaware that her mind is protected from the intrusions of some of the gifted vampires she would meet later in the series. Even once she is made aware of the fact that Edward can't read her mind, she usually thinks little of it until after she becomes a vampire herself, when she is asked if she can project her ability and protect others.
• The Wheel of Time: A minority of channelers can wield the One Power with no training, sometimes completely unawares. Unless they're taught, they tend to have limited Psychoactive Powers and a poor survival rate.
  • The protagonist spends the first book unaware that he's intuitively channeling to save himself from danger. He doesn't even connect the dots when a man threatening him is struck by lightning indoors.
  • Nynaeve first used the One Power to heal Egwene of a deadly fever. Since all she knew was that the fever broke, she didn't realize she was a channeller until years later.
• Wild Cards:
  • Gimcrack is a kind-hearted Manchild who is Literal-Minded and naive to the point of believing everything he sees in ads. However, as a result of his Wild Card mutation, his specialized Reality Warper powers causes this stuff to come true for him: for instance, his powers make it so the present he asked Santa Claus for actually appears on Christmas morning. It's also impossible to convince him that he is a superhuman: if you point out that penis enlargement products only work for him and nobody else, he'll just say that's because other people can't follow the instructions properly.
  • Tom Tudbury, AKA The Great and Powerful Turtle, has been an immensely powerful telekinetic since childhood. However, as a kid, he didn't realize there was anything special about himself, believing that his pet turtles could just fly on their own. He only figured out that he was a superhuman after a school bully's dog killed one of his turtles; one of his classmates saw him telekinetically throwing the dead turtle's body at said bully, and asked him "How did you do that?"
  • Dr. Cody Havero, Chris Claremont's main character in Wild Cards, is heavily implied to be a superhuman unaware of her own power. While ostensibly a Badass Normal, she seems to have a sort of superhuman luck that only kicks in when she is shot at, causing the bullets to miss her: even when she walks into a veritable rain of bullets, the worst that can happen is that she will have Only a Flesh Wound. Wild Card powers are manifestations of subconscious desires, and Cody was a Combat Medic in the Vietnam War, so being able to ignore bullets to help people seems to have been her heart's desire.
• Xanth: With a setting that runs on One Person, One Power, a character being unaware of their magic Talent crops up in several books.
  • A Spell For Chameleon is about Bink going on a quest to discover why seemingly he is the only person in Xanth without any kind of Talent. It turns out that he is a Reality Warper with a Talent that passively protects him from any magical harm. If he's in danger of dying, his Talent will create a Deus ex Machina to save him, which had been happening all throughout the book and his life.
  • Centaur Aisle introduces Arnolde, a centaur who has recently discovered that magic seems to be leaking past the borders of Xanth into Mundania. What he actually found is his Talent, which creates a narrow corridor in front and behind him where magic continues to work outside of Xanth.
  • Grey Murphy in Man From Mundania is a Flat-Earth Atheist that refuses to believe in magic even after arriving in Xanth. It's not helped by the fact that magic stops working around him. Truthfully, Grey has a Talent — he projects an Anti-Magic field around him. This is because he's the son of the Magician Murphy, who fled to Mundania after his defeat.

Live-Action TV

• Charmed (1998):
  • Prue in the pilot. After Phoebe discovers the Book of Shadows and unlocks their magic, Piper and Prue both dismiss the idea as impossible. When Piper's powers manifest, the entire room freezes, making it incredibly obvious, but Prue's telekinesis is more subtle, doing things like strangling her obnoxious ex with his tie while her back is turned. It isn't until later that she summons the cream for her coffee and watches it magically transfer into her mug that she acknowledges that something supernatural is happening.
  • Paige Matthews lost her adoptive parents in a car accident when she was a teen, spending years wondering why she was the lone survivor. In "A Paige From The Past", adult Paige discovers she had orbed herself out of the car before it exploded, even though she hadn't even known she had magic then. Leo tells her that even though she didn't know, she had the magic inside her all along.
• Farscape: "Infinite Possibilities Part 2" features John Crichton being given access to the unconscious wormhole knowledge in his head by the Ancients as an emergency measure to stop an incoming Scarran attack. However, Crichton's brain has trouble processing the impossible knowledge, and he initially believes that he doesn't have any ability to actually use it... but then, while Ancient Jack is building the Displacement Engine, Crichton hands him the next component he needs — without even knowing it was the exact one Jack needed.
• The Flash (2014):
  • In Season 1, after Barry changes the timeline for the first time, Cisco starts having dreams of the original timeline where he was murdered by "Dr. Wells"/Eobard Thawne. Cisco and the rest believe this is a simple side effect of the timeline change until Wells/Thawne realizes in the season finale that Cisco could have only seen the original timeline through powers gained during the particle accelerator explosion to "see through the vibrations of the universe".
  • Kristen Kramer was introduced as a crusader against metahumans and doesn't realize that she herself has temporary Power Copying abilities. Later on, she uses Super-Speed to save herself and Joe. She admits that she always wondered how she survived during an ambush in Kahndaq when her entire unit was wiped out and realizes that must've unintentionally mimicked her friend Adam's Healing Factor.
• Game of Thrones: Daenerys Targaryen has a unique ability to tolerate heat that ultimately extends to surviving total immolation — but spends most of the first season unaware of it. In the first episode, after getting felt up by her brother Viserys, she climbs into a steaming hot bath without noticing the temperature, apparently too intent on Scrubbing Off the Trauma to pay attention to the alarmed reaction of a nearby servant. In "A Golden Crown," however, one of her handmaidens burns her hands on a red-hot dragon egg that Dany had previously lifted bare-handed without suffering any discomfort, and Dany finally realizes that there might be something genuinely extraordinary about her.
• This is the basic premise of Haven. Haven, Maine, is a town full of families with hereditary superpowers, but they come and go in cycles (as part of the show's Myth Arc). They've been gone so long at the start of the series that many of the adults don't remember when they were around the last time, and have been convinced they were just stories meant to to scare children into good behavior. The formula for an episode usually goes: weird stuff starts happening, Audrey and Nathan follow clues to figure out who is making weird stuff happen, that person adamantly denies they're causing weird stuff to happen, they panic at the realization they are making weird stuff happens, that makes the weird stuff worse, and eventually they need to figure out a way to resolve the emotional trigger causing the weird stuff to happen and the person has to deal with the fact they're now Troubled and that (usually) they've killed someone.
• Heroes:
  • When Charlie first gains her ability of super-memory, she doesn't realize it has anything to do with the recent Mass Empowering Event, simply commenting that lately she's been "remembering lots and lots"—even though she becomes fluent in Japanese after reading a single language book and can recall the credit card information of every customer at the diner where she's a waitress.
  • Monica Dawson ends up with a specific form of Awesomeness by Analysis called "adoptive muscle memory"—she can perfectly recreate any action she sees and is physically capable of doing without even trying. At first Monica doesn't even realize that anything is going on even as she mimics a TV chef's cutting a tomato into a rose shape. Later, when a thief tries to break into the fast food joint where she works, Monica effortlessly defeats him with a wrestling move that she also saw on television, even though she's never wrestled in her life. Unlike most examples of this trope, though, Monica is Genre Savvy enough to realize something's up and eventually determines that she's become a metahuman.
• Played with/downplayed in Heroes Reborn. Tommy has the ability to teleport anything or anyone he touches to an unknown location. This is reminiscent of Stephen Canfield from the original series, who could create wormholes and force people and things through them — what happened to them after that was never revealed. However, Tommy actually has Hiro's powers of space/time manipulation — time travel, teleportation and freezing time — but he doesn't know that at first. His limited initial use of his powers teleports his target to the last location he was thinking about.
• I Dream of Jeannie: In "My Turned-On Master", Jeannie agrees to transfer her powers for 24 hours so that they have no problems of her being tempted to use them at the embassy dinner that night. However, she doesn't tell Tony that she transferred them to him. Thus, Tony spends the episode unknowingly granting wishes by expressing casual desires and observations i.e. accidentally supercharging a gardener's motorised lawnmower by remarking "it sounds more powerful than my car," causing it to shoot off out of control taking him along for the ride. When Tony finally starts to notice, he assumes it's Jeannie messing with him until she flat out tells him, by which point he's already accidentally given them to Dr. Bellows (who does quickly notice, but Tony is able to convince him it's all a hallucination from working too hard and manipulates him into giving them back whilst he's none the wiser).
• Misfits: Nathan spends much of the first season frustrated at his apparent lack of superpowers. After his death in the season finale, he's shown reawakening inside a coffin, and it's revealed his superpower is Resurrective Immortality. Unfortunately for him, his coffin is already underground, and he remains Buried Alive until the gang come to dig him up in season two.
• The Sandman (2022): Rose Walker has no idea that she's actually a dream vortex, even though her powers are already active by her first proper appearance in the series. Given that being a vortex only makes her a Dream Walker (at first), she naturally chalks up her experiences to jetlag-induced dreams. After Rose accidentally transports herself into Dream's throne room, Morpheus explains the situation to her, but it's not until she meets Matthew the Raven in the waking world — where he's just as capable of speech as he was in her dreams — that she's finally able to confirm that everything she's discovered in her dreams, including her power, was real.
• Smallville: In one episode, Zatanna casts a spell on Clark that makes him forget he has superpowers. It takes Chloe quite a while to convince him otherwise, despite taking increasingly drastic measures to prove it to him.
• Supernatural: In "The Heroes' Journey", Sam and Dean discover that they have unknowingly benefited from Plot Armor and Required Secondary Powers their entire lives and all previous 15 seasons of the show, courtesy of God himself. When this ability is removed, their Arbitrarily Large Bank Account (through stolen credit cards) is suddenly taken away, they can get hurt or sick even from tiny scrapes or a poor diet like Dean's, their Cool Car breaks down regularly because it's 50 years old, and even casually picking a lock becomes next to impossible.
• The Umbrella Academy (2019):
  • A major reveal of the first season is that Viktor Hargreeves (AKA Number Seven) possesses superpowers of his own but is unaware of them due to a combination of brainwashing and suppressant medication. Halfway through the season, the drugs are stolen, but his sonic powers return so subtly that Viktor doesn't even notice them in action at first. Even after he notices that his bad mood has bent every single streetlight on the block out of shape, he's reluctant to acknowledge what happened and needs to be carefully coaxed into accepting his powers before he can be trained in how to control them.
  • Happens again in Season 2: suffering amnesia in the wake of the cataclysmic previous season finale, Viktor is once again unaware of his powers. This time, though, he retains the training he developed in the previous season, so no accidental uses tip him off even after several weeks spent living with the Coopers. It's not until the Swedes attempt to assassinate him that Viktor instinctively uses his powers to deflect a bullet, revealing his powers — and making them very hard to deny, given the resulting crop circle. Thankfully, Number Five shows up soon after to help him come to terms with what just happened.
  • Played with in season 3: Klaus Hargreeves (AKA Number Four) is already aware of his ability to contact and conjure the spirits of the dead. However, he's rather surprised when — after Stanley accidentally shoots him with a harpoon gun — he realizes that he's also had the power of Resurrective Immortality his entire life: Klaus has actually died on no less than fifty-six occasions, but never acknowledged any of them because he was usually too high to make sense of what happened. When asked about this, he remarks that he always thought he was "one of those lovable rascally Looney Tunes characters."

Tabletop Games

• Adventure: The game features three types of "Inspired" from a Mass Super-Empowering Event. Two types, the Mesmerists and Stalwarts, have clearly developed greater than human capabilities but the third type, the Daredevils, are instead unconsciously altering probability to allow them to improbably survive and succeed in their Two-Fisted Tales approach to life. Only a few people have concluded that something paranormal is going on and most Daredevils are just chalking it up to being Born Lucky.
• Exalted characters don't always receive their Exaltation in dramatic moments, or even while they are conscious — one Dragon-Blooded character Exalted while having a spiritual dream. Since he was just a kid in boarding school at the time, he thought he was sick and got up to ask for a teacher's help. Fortunately, other students noticed the whirling winds around him before anyone got hurt.
• Warhammer Fantasy: Some Randomly Gifted people spontaneously channel the Winds of Magic, causing paranormal activity that they can't explain. The lucky ones are found and trained before they cause a dangerous Magic Misfire.
• Warhammer 40,000: Usually averted as Randomly Gifted people are often detected very early due to the Imperium's attitude towards psykers. If they aren't lynched by their fellow citizens, they are tithed off to the Black Ships for further processing. A very small number of psykers either aren't aware of their powers, somehow manage to keep them under enough control not to be noticed, or manifest them in ways that aren't obvious, such as being "lucky" or having sudden intuitions.

Theatre

• Blithe Spirit: Edith, the Condomines' maid who acts as comic relief through most of the play, is revealed to be a true medium who unconsciously brought Elvira and later Ruth back as spirits.

Video Games

• Dragalia Lost: Renee is the youngest of her sisters, all of whom inherited an ability from their father, and believes that she's the odd one out. In reality, she has the power to magically enhance the water she uses to cool the weapons they forge — it's just that she thought she was simply pouring a normal bucket of water. When Renee eventually complains about the apparent unfairness of the situation, her sisters have to explain that regular water can't cool weapons forged in Ramona's magically enhanced flames, acknowledging how impressive it was that she'd been using her powers unconsciously.
• Knights of the Old Republic
  • Early in the game, the player character experiences a variety of strange dreams and visions, while also managing the herculean task of helping a stranded Jedi escape a City Planet occupied by the Sith. The latter sounds like standard fair for an RPG protagonist, but Bastilla reveals that it's because you're actually an undetected Force Sensitive. More specifically, you are the amnesiac Darth Revan, and your powers are starting to reawaken.
  • The protagonist's first companion, Carth Onasi, is an Implied case. He infamously has uncannily accurate Gut Feelings that leave him constantly Properly Paranoid, has a better on-screen piloting record than confirmed Jedi candidate Atton Rand, and can see and understand Force Ghosts. There is a wealth of evidence that Carth is a Force-Sensitive who evaded detection both because of the political consequences of taking a child from Telos, where the Jedi traditionally send their failed candidates, and because they were too busy with the Exar Kun War to focus on identifying potential students. Carth's son was identified, and since Force-Sensitivity is In the Blood, Dustil could have inherited it from either or even both of his parents. Carth shows slightly more awareness when he appears in the second game, indicating he "would know" if someone he cared about was dead or being aware of the Exile's Force wound.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
  • Mira's success as a bounty hunter is at least partly due to the fact that she's another undetected Force Sensitive, allowing her to track down her targets no matter where they might be hiding — to the point of finding the Exile ahead of all the other bounty hunters on Nar Shaddaa. Mira isn't actually aware of this power, describing her intuition in too vague a sense for her to recognize anything overtly supernatural about it. As such, the Exile has to help her consciously attune herself to the Force before she can begin training as a Jedi... or a Sith.
  • Indeed, many of the Exile's companions fall under this heading. Brianna the Handmaiden has heard her Mistress's holocrons talking (something that is a sign of strong Force Sensitivity in lore). Bao-Dur's Machine Empathy turns out to be the way his Force gift manifests. And Atton knows he's a Sensitive by the time he meets Exile the way he found out was because he was very good at masking himself in the Force with strong emotions and a talented Jedi killer/torturer. His last victim warned him that his superiors were on the cusp of discovering it. Atton manually strangled her to death and ran.
  • Played with in the final levels of the game: the Exile is aware that they're an ex-Jedi that's only just managed to regain their powers, but it's not until the end that it's explained why they got their powers back. It turns out that all the usual RPG mechanics — levelling up, relationship values, even experience points — are the result of you being a Force black hole thanks to your experiences at the Battle of Malachor V, and you've been unconsciously draining power from your allies and encounters in order to regain your power — and increase it tenfold.
• In The Legend of Dragoon, it's revealed that the legendary Moon Child has the unconscious power to indoctrinate everyone around it into its worshippers — hence why the Black Monster kills not only the Moon Child but everyone around it at the time of its birth. In the present, the current Moon Child is unaware of this power and her true nature, even as complete strangers fawn over her with increasing frequency. She's none other than Shana, Dart's friend and fellow team member, and everyone on the team likes her — including Rose, the Black Monster herself.
• Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners: Near the end of the game, Kyosuke gains the power to shape reality via thoughts, which causes a few additional problems. The character is completely unaware that they even obtained powers in the first place until they're asked to levitate a hat and promptly do so.
• At the beginning of Persona 4, the protagonist is given the ability to enter the TV World and unlock his Persona by the True Big Bad of the game. He didn't know he could do either until his first encounter with the Midnight Channel and first fight against the Shadows respectively.
• In Pokémon, a Psyduck exhibits amazing psychokinetic powers whenever the intensity of its headache peaks, but is unable to recall using these powers. This is said to explain why it has a vacant look on its face.
• Resident Evil Village: In the climax, it's revealed that Ethan Winters was actually killed by Jack Baker early in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and brought back by the Mold, hence why an ordinary civilian with no military training has somehow been able to defeat Mold-empowered superhumans and reattach lost limbs with just a splash of first aid fluid. Throughout both games, Ethan attributes his feats of survival entirely to the first aid fluid, never realizing the truth even in the face of increasingly unlikely victories. It's not until he survives having his heart ripped out by Mother Miranda that Ethan belatedly realizes his true nature.
• Second Sight:
  • At the very start of the game, John Vattic is unaware of his psychic powers thanks to his amnesia when he first awakens at the Osiris Medical Facility. Even after he instinctively uses telekinesis to release himself from his restraints, he's so disoriented that he isn't aware of what he just did and doesn't believe that he did anything psychic until the player uses his TK power to unlock his cell door.
  • In "Experimentation," John finds himself trapped in a corridor with an oncoming guard and is left cowering in the corner, praying that he won't be noticed. As such, he's a little bit confused when the guard fails to notice him, completely oblivious to the fact that he just pulled a Jedi Mind Trick on the guy.
    John: ...did I do that?
  • One of the big revelations of the flashback chapters is that John was a latent psychic all along, but as a professional debunker of psychics, he doesn't believe in his own powers. Even after he somehow detects bombs without even seeing them and notices the astral projections of the Zener Children (which are Invisible to Normals, by the way), he doesn't acknowledge anything supernatural about himself. It takes having his latent powers awakened by one of the Children and having to rescue Colonel Starke with them to get John to finally admit the reality of his own talents.
  • In the final level, it turns out that John's ultimate power is precognition - it's just that he's gotten his perception of time so muddled up that he doesn't realize it. The chapters of the game set in the "present" are actually his visions of the future, and the chapters set in the past are real, hence why he's somehow able to change history. It's not until the second-last section of the level that John is finally able to get to grips with what's happening and harness his powers to stop the Big Bad.

Web Comics

• El Goonish Shive:
  • Tedd Verres was identified as a child as having no magic potential, which was particularly unusual and disappointing for the child of two spellcasters. This caused him to experiment with Magitek in his teens. In spite of this, other characters and readers noticed Tedd glowing when having a particularly strong emotion or insight, which he was oblivious to. He later discovered his ability to see and understand magic at a glance, which he had been using throughout the comic, was not normal and that his Magitek watches were actually wands that only work under his own power. His magic potential was misidentified because his abilities were rare and his spell resistance was too strong as a child for the detecting device to get an accurate read.^{note, also spoiler}Said device being vacuum-cleaner noisy didn't help, as it's the reason Tedd was instinctively raising his magical defenses in the first place... which he still reflexively does whenever he hears it.
  • Diane discovers she has been unconsciously using magic to enhance her own charisma for years, due to her half-elf heritage. She also doesn't initially realize she can sense magic, which manifests as a taste of pancakes, until Tedd mentions hearing her elf father could do it, and has yet to discover her ears turn pointy when she does this.
• Saitama of One-Punch Man is so comically overpowered that he can defeat any opponent with one punch. He attributes this to his training regimen: 100 pushups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, and a 10k run every day for a year and a half. While this is a fairly intense (albeit unbalanced) routine, it's nothing a normal human couldn't do if they build up to it. Certainly not enough to account for what Saitama is capable of, but he steadfastly refuses to believe he has superpowers.
• Yamara: After a story arc in which she temporarily gains godlike power, Yamara wishes 1)for Blag to fall off a cliff after he annoys her, 2)for the followers who'd started a new religion around her to have "the best things in life" and 3)for Blag to return from wherever he's disappeard to so he can pay back the money he owes her. All these things occur behind her back. Then, she finds out that she'd been granted three wishes...

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: SCP-7949 AKA The Calamity Tourist is a Reality Warper that uncontrollably induces random outbreaks of violence and destruction wherever he goes, with the twist that the power only takes effect once he leaves his hometown. Despite a ludicrous number of accidents, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and other catastrophes occurring in every single city he's visited, 7949 remains clueless to both his powers and the violence it induces, to the point of mistaking a mass shooting incident in Cairo for "a local tradition."

Western Animation

• Amphibia: The “Calamity Trio”, Anne, Sasha, and Marcy, gain brief surges of power in times of stress thanks to their connection to the Calamity Box, signaled by their eyes changing color for a split second, though none are conscious of it until the second season finale, "True Colors", when Anne’s Super Mode is triggered due to her anger and grief at seeing King Andrias drop Sprig out the window.
• Batman: The Animated Series: In "Feat Of Clay Part 2," after being force-fed Renuyu by Dagget's thugs during the previous episode and turned into a gigantic lump of clay, Matt Hagen is convinced that he's just been horribly disfigured instead of superpowered, loudly proclaiming his career to be over. However, as he muses over framed production shots of him in past films, his face automatically changes to match each depicted role; Matt doesn't even notice until Teddy points it out to him.
• Downplayed in Danny Phantom episode "Urban Jungle" when Danny finds himself inexplicably cold for some reason, to the point that it hinders him in battle and that he causes nearly everything he touches to freeze. It's only when he goes to an ally ghost of his, Frostbite, that he learns he's actually manifested a new ghost power.
• Dexter's Laboratory: In the short "World's Greatest Mom", Dexter accidentally shoots his mother with a laser that grants her superpowers (hyper speed and strength and such) but she never seems to notice (or care) that she has them, only using them to perform her household chores in a split second.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Kipo's first onscreen activation of her Mute powers is when her eyes transform so she can see in the dark. Since she has no clue at this point in the series that she is anything other than an ordinary human, she reasons that living underground her whole life allowed her eyes to adjust to the dark.
• Static Shock: In "Gear", Richie is initially oblivious to the fact that his recent inventions have gone beyond high school-level tinkering and that he is suddenly able to compute complex math equations in seconds. It takes Virgil pointing this out for Richie to wonder if he's having a mental breakdown, before Virgil realizes he's likely a late bloomer Bang Baby, infected after being around Virgil, whose Super-Intelligence has only gradually made itself known.
  Virgil: (after catching a rogue invention) Richie, this is too much!
  Richie: You're right. The rear boosters are overpowered.
  Virgil: Not the skates, you. [...] All of a sudden you're Brainiac the Maniac!
  Richie: So I'm a little smarter than most people, what's the big deal?
  Virgil: A little? The Department of Defense couldn't think up most of this stuff!
  Richie: Well, they don't have to. I already thought it up for 'em!

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