Sometimes superpowers are contagious: that is, exposure to someone who is super can result in the Super-Empowering of another.
Well, characters who are in love, or who make love, are exposed to each other quite a bit.
This trope doesn't necessarily involve a literal sex act, although it often does. The point is that a character gains superpowers through intimate contact with one who is already super.
Sub-Trope of Deus Sex Machina or The Power of Love, and Contagious Powers. May involve Sex Magic. Compare Superpowerful Genetics and Lamarck Was Right when superpowers are inherited from a parent (one hopes they do not overlap with this). Contrast Virgin Power, where power is gained or maintained by avoiding sex.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- DARLING in the FRANXX: Zero Two is a human/Klaxosaur hybrid. As she pilots her mecha Strelitzia with pure human Hiro, a process that involves a lot of romantic and sexual metaphors, Hiro starts to gain Klaxosaur traits himself. Justified: We eventually learn that he ingested some of her blood when they met as young children after they Escaped from the Lab where they were both created (their memories of the meeting were erased), and their piloting Strelitzia together is causing it to activate.
- In the Yuri Genre manga Seifuku No Vampiress Lord, one of the vampiric traits is that if a vampire ever experiences One True Love, the person they love acquires Ageless Immortality of a vampire without the rest of vampiric powers and drawbacks. Since this completely disregards the beloved's own free will, however, the vampire protagonist Yuunagi angsts for a while about accidentally making her childhood friend Nana immortal — until Nana sets the record straight that she is perfectly happy with spending an eternity with her, too.
- Inverted in Semelparous. Yorino's birth mother Mikoto, a pureblood mure, conceived her by taking her lover Maya's Aegis into herself. This caused Maya's powers as a Bulwark to weaken and eventually disappear by the time Yorino turned four.
- World's End Harem: Fantasia: Arc is empowered with the magic of a black dragon, Macht, by the dark elven sorceress Lati, who takes his virginity in a Sex Magic ritual to accomplish this. Subsequently, Arc can increase the physical and magical powers of women by having them consume his blood, the price for which is having to repeatedly consume his bodily fluids to survive and recharge, which has all the sexual aspects you'd expect from an ecchi manga.
Comic Books
- Doom Patrol: Coagula gained the power to turn solids into liquids and liquids into solids with a touch of her hand after sleeping with Patrol member Rebis, a composite entity created from the life forces of Larry Trainor, Eleanor Poole, and the Negative Spirit Mercurius.
- Empowered: Several supers got their abilities from having sex with superhumans/aliens/cyborgs. After Glorrp tells his story (finding a Green-Skinned Space Babe crashed to Earth, starting a relationship with her, only for her to cheat on him and later that night he starts dissolving into his current Clayface-like form,) a superheroine chimes in with how it's important to note that you're just as likely to catch a super-STD from men as from women. It's apparently pretty common among capes, though for obvious reasons they try to avoid this becoming public knowledge.
- God Is Dead: While moving across the world undercover, Ethical Slut Tansy sleeps with a variety of gods and supernatural creatures to keep herself alive. As a result, she gains the ability to detect gods and supernatural monsters even while they are disguised.
- Powers: In the "Undercover" arc, Pilgrim gains superpowers after coming into contact with a super's semen.
- Spider-Man:
- In The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott), Electro kissed his recently resurrected girlfriend... and dropped dead. His powers transferred to her.
- During the Spider-Island storyline, it's stated that the reason why Mary Jane didn't transform into a spider monster was due to "sharing a toothbrush" with Peter.
- Valérian: In the thirteenth volume, "On the Frontiers", the former Spatiotemporal Agent Jal seduces Kistna, an alien of a rare, unnamed race, in a cruiser in order to appropriate her amazing powers (breathing in the vacuum, Paranormal Gambling Advantage, and Hand Blast). Since he's dressed in armor like her, she thinks he's from her race. When she learns he's human, she refuses him because Interspecies Romance is lethal for her race; Jal desperately rapes her and uses his freshly-stolen powers to force the captain of the cruiser ship to give him an escape pod to Earth. He uses his gambling powers to become rich and lead terrorist operations, in order to cause a nuclear war that will restore the timeline and the future he and Valerian have come from. However, he is haunted by his memories of Kistna, and his stolen powers eventually wear off.
Fan Works
- Child of the Storm: Something like this happens in the sequel between Harry and Carol a couple of times, though no sex is involved - despite the rampant UST, they're Just Friends (it's half Anchored Ship, half Courtly Love). However, both times are intensely intimate: She's kidnapped by vampires, this leads to her acting as a Willing Channeler for his consciousness and powers to protect her, and shortly after, he donates about four pints of blood to save her life. The magical chair used to donate the blood is designed for Super-Empowering, and with his injuries that much blood loss should by all rights have killed him, adding extra significance. So far, it hasn't done much that's obvious, but Unfinished Business reveals that it altered her enough to handle channeling a vast amount of energy (at least half the magic of the Earth through her Morph Weapon as a makeshift Green Lantern) without burning to a crisp.
- Force of Souls: Ichigo, by complete accident, literally fucks Shinigami powers into his girlfriends Orihime and Tatsuki.
Films — Live-Action
- Implied at the end of The Company of Wolves. Rosaleen didn't turn into a wolf by herself.
- Cool World: Holli Would is a doodle, a cartoon character living in Toon Town. Artist Jack Deebs is a human living in the real world. Holli wants to visit the real world and experience its delights. For that, she draws Jack into her Cool World, where she seduces him. The climax transforms Holli into a real woman capable of venturing into the human world.
- Discussed and Played for Laughs in Edge of Tomorrow: Cage awkwardly asks Rita if her ability to reset time can be transmitted through bodily fluids. Rita sees right through Cage's attempt to get in her pants, then explains that she tried it before and that it doesn't work. When Cage asks how many times she tried it, she decides to Change the Uncomfortable Subject by slamming a training robot into Cage's face.
- Modern Vampires: After she's attacked and tied to a bed by the Crip vampire hunters, Ulrike taunts them into gangbanging her (weirdly hilarious, as she's in her monster form at the time), before Van Helsing stakes her. She neglects to mention that vampiric sex turns humans into vampires, and the Crips use their new superhuman strength and ferocity to help Dallas against the Count.
Literature
- Alcatraz Series: The Smedry family have superpowers. Smedrys by marriage get superpowers that match their spouse's, as demonstrated by Folsom and his wife Himalaya.
- The Belgariad:
- The immortal sorceress Polgara falls in love with the mundane smith, Durnik... and coinciding with their marriage is the reveal that a mostly-unrelated event has turned him into a sorcerer as well, thus neatly avoiding the impending Mayfly–December Romance. (In this setting, simply being a sorcerer automatically bestows you with immortality - the general theory as to why this is, is because it's all about will and the most fundamental 'will' is the Will to Live.)
- A darkly amusing detail appeared in the Polgara the Sorceress prequel novel, which reveals that several hundred years ago she fell in love with a Knight in Shining Armor type, and seriously planned to settle down with him. When her father sarcastically asked what she intended to do when he grew old and weak while she stayed forever young, she just shrugged and said, "Maybe if we marry, he'll become immortal too." Needless to say, it wasn't meant to be, but that was still remarkably acute of her.
- Beware of Chicken: Jin's connection to the land is expanded to include his wife, on their wedding night. When she wakes up the next morning and finds that she has access to a pool of qi, making her a cultivator, she internally notes that she suspected something like that might happen.
- Inverted, in theory, in The Dresden Files: Blood Rites. The youngest Raith sibling, Inari, has yet to feed on a human to unlock her full power as an Emotion Eater White Court vampire. She also has a human boyfriend, Bobby, whom she leaves Chicago with at the end of the book. Harry theorizes at the end of the novel that, since White Court vampires are harmed by attempting to feed on someone in love, Inari might be able to become fully human if she has her first time within a loving relationship.
- JK Haru is a Sex Worker in Another World: It's eventually revealed that Haru gains the powers and XP of anyone she has sex with.
- Played for Horror in The Magician King; a group of magicians attempt to summon a benevolent demigoddess in the hope of learning from her... only to get the attention of a monstrous Trickster God who kills most of them. Then, as a sick joke, he gives one of the survivors all the divine knowledge the group wanted by brutally raping her, tearing her soul out for good measure. Once it's all over, the victim staggers away, naked and covered in blood... and then, drawing on powers unknown to her, takes flight. The victim is none other than Julia Wicker, Quentin's old friend.
- Mercy Thompson: Werewolf packs have something called Pack Magic that provides some benefits to all pack members. If a non-werewolf marries a werewolf, they can become part of the pack (though they must view themselves as such, which is why Adam's human ex-wife never had any sort access to it). A blind white witch who becomes the mate of the Seattle pack leader winds up gaining a limited form of sight when she's near her mate. Mercy gains access to Adam's Compelling Voice after she marries him and can also reach through the pack bond to do things like finding other members of the pack and pull silver out of pack members into her own body.
- Palimpsest: The ability to enter the city of Palimpsest always starts by having sex with someone who bears a tattoo of part of the city's map.
- In the Tortall Universe, it can work this way with gods. Daine's mother used to be an ordinary midwife in a remote village until she happened to have an encounter with the God of the Hunt during one of his visits to the mortal realm. It didn't kick in right away, but after she "died", her erstwhile lover essentially helped her soul Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, making her the brand-new Goddess of Midwives. So now they're married. In heaven. And neither one of them considered it worthwhile to inform their daughter of this arrangement until several years later, leaving her to blunder around and nearly drive herself insane with her half-god powers in the meantime. Okay, so they were both on probation due to the whole new-goddess-and-guarantor thing, but you'd think they could've at least sent the kid a note, eh?
- WIEDERGEBURT: Legend of the Reincarnated Warrior: After his partner Kari was murdered in the original timeline along with their daughter, Eryk gained access to her light element. He assumed at the time that Kari somehow gave it to him in her final moments, but in the new timeline he eventually figures out that it's a combination of 1) him being a half-"godling" who 2) has sex with someone with a different elemental affinity and 3) ingests their blood — the latter of which he did when he kissed her as she lay dying. Drinking a cup of one's partner's blood also happens to be part of the traditional Nevarian marriage rite, which he and Kari never underwent in the original timeline; Eryk suspects the tradition comes from "godlings" who fought in the previous war with the Sekbeists thousands of years ago. Meanwhile, his lovers in the new timeline start to regain their memories of the Bad Future in their dreams through sleeping with Eryk, which Kari gets the best of since she survived the longest: by volume 12 she's begun to re-learn rune crafting, a lost art in Nevaria.
Live-Action TV
- In The Magicians (2016), humans can temporarily gain the raw power of gods by being exposed to their semen, either orally or through coitus. Alice is simply given a jar of semen to drink, while Julia is raped by a god and gets the boost as an unintended consequence.
- The Outer Limits (1995). Used for Cruel Twist Ending of "The New Breed". In the final scene, the cut on Judy Ledbetter's finger is healed within seconds, indicating that her fiancée Dr. Andy Groenig passed the nanobots onto her while they were having sex and that she will experience the same transformation that he went through.
- Star Trek: Enterprise: "Bound" reveals that Vulcans are immune to Orions, who usually make everyone fall in love with them at first sight unless there's an Incompatible Orientation, and if a human has slept with a Vulcan, they gain this immunity (though it's implied this may be due to the mental link established rather than anything physical).
Professional Wrestling
- A.J. Lee invoked and then subverted the trope during her feud with The Bella Twins when she told them that "talent is not sexually transmitted". For context, Brie's couple is Daniel Bryan, and Nikki's at the time was John Cena.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition: The Book of Vile Darkness and Book of Exalted Deeds sourcebooks for 3.5E had the feats "Lichloved" and "Nymph's Kiss", both of which provided some minor magical benefits in exchange for maintaining "friendly" relationships with an intelligent undead or fey being, respectively. While technically neither one required the relationship to be sexual, it was very obvious that it was expected to be.
- In Mage: The Ascension, the character template "Shapeshifter" was Awakened when she lost her virginity to a Verbena mage, mimicking his own shapeshifting talents perfectly over the next few hours of sex until she emerged on the other side as a fellow mage.
Video Games
- In the "True Freedom" ending of Catherine, Vincent marries the Succubus, Catherine, and after a Time Skip, he's turned into a demon himself and becomes the new King of Hell.
- Ky Kiske from Guilty Gear somehow ended up becoming a human/Gear hybrid by the time of Guilty Gear Xrd. Exactly how this happened isn't explained, but the fact that he is married to a Gear and fathered a child with her probably has something to do with it.
- The Episode story The Clumsy Super Girl is about a girl kissing her crush and stealing their powers on accident.
Webcomics
- In Grim Tales from Down Below, Mandy (of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy fame) winds up marrying The Grim Reaper himself after growing up — and even before then, the fact that he's in love with her grants her virtual immortality simply by virtue of the fact that he refuses to reap her. It's never made entirely clear how powerful she's gotten since then, but she's widely regarded as the single most feared entity in the netherworld...
- The pornographic webcomic Peter Is the Wolf reminds us that lycanthropy can be a sexually transmitted disease as well. For added amusement, the couple in this case is Peter, a runt of a werewolf, and his accidentally infected girlfriend, who turns into a large-breasted gargantuan superwolf. Thus making it one of the few cases where the liaison makes the newly superpowered individual stronger than her benefactor.
Western Animation
- Rick and Morty: In "The ABCs of Beth", Jerry has a new alien girlfriend, and briefly gains telekinesis by sleeping with her.
