Un-Sorcerer

Not even green hair can save him from utter mediocrity.

Witch Doctor: Well Pinyon, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is there is nothing wrong with you! No curses, no hexes, no ailments of any kind. The bad news is what this means. There is no reason for your magical shortcomings. Chances are you are simply a dud.
Pinyon: Wh-what? But my entire family are powerful witches! I can't be! I can't be...
Witch Doctor: Look kid, almost all witches find their familiar and powers before age 13. You've never even spoken to an animal before. There's just no way that you're a witch.

— Unfamiliar

A Muggle Born of Mages is someone born to parents with Magic and Powers and privy to The Masquerade, but entirely mundane himself. However, as the world is full of Muggles, he can simply become one of them.

This is not the world of the Un-Sorcerer. Here there is no Masquerade, because Everyone Is a Super... except him. Magic healing doesn't help, and neither does therapy. The kids at school tease him. He can't operate Magitek. He can't even claim to be a Badass Normal, because normal people have the Power! For practical intents and purposes, this lack is a Fictional Disability in a world with no way of accommodating it.

As bad as this sounds, though, there's often a silver lining: someday, it will turn out that his unique status is an asset to him. He may be immune to magical attacks, or to The Corruption. Maybe he really has a game-breakingly awesome power that takes a long time to manifest. Maybe there's an Ancient Artifact that only activates for someone with no magic. Or perhaps, lacking a crutch, the Un-Sorcerer develops a Charles Atlas Superpower in a world of Squishy Wizards. What's certain is that if they are the focus of the story, somehow the Un-Sorcerer will go far, and may even be The Chosen One.

An Un-Sorcerer can only survive by averting Hard Work Hardly Works. Essentially an in Inversion of the classic Super Hero trope. See also Muggles Do It Better. Compare I Just Want to Be Special, though in this case "special" is the new "normal".

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Black Clover, Asta is the only person in the setting with absolutely no magic at all. Even among the commoners from his hometown with weak magical power, he is an exception. Fortunately, this also makes him one of the only people who can wield the Five-leaf Clover Grimoire, which manifests its power as an Anti-Magic BFS. Anyone who has the slightest bit of magic power can't even touch the sword without their mana being drained from them. Thanks to the years of physical training he did to make up for his magical deficiency, Asta is also strong enough to actually wield the heavy sword. In addition, because everyone else in the world of Black Clover has magic, its infrastructure and basic education assumes the ability to use magic. This throws some of Asta's adversaries for a loop when, for instance, they cannot track his location by detecting his magic aura because he has none, or how their magic defenses account for magic attacks but not brute physical power. Licht specifically is utterly baffled that he possesses the real Licht's grimoire and swords even though he has no magic, and assumes that he stole them.
• Rygart from Broken Blade is the Trope Namer, having no power over quartz and consequently being unable to operate any complex machinery,^note since everything in his world is run by quartz-power with the exception of an ancient and super-powerful golem that refused to respond to anyone else. It's heavily suggested that this is because he is the only person the golem recognizes as being actually human.
• In the setting of Cross Ange, everyone can use the magic known as the Light of Mana. The few who can't are called norma. Not only can't they use the Light of Mana, but any construct created with it shatters upon the slightest contact with a norma. Also, norma are persecuted to an insane degree, starting with being treated as less than human and getting worse from there.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Edward Elric ends the series giving up his ability to perform alchemy to bring Al's body back. Note that while most people in the setting aren't alchemists, this technically counts as an example because he is now the only human we know of who is physically incapable of alchemy rather than simply lacking knowledge of how to do it.
  Truth: You're willing to cast it aside? To lower yourself to a simple human?
  Edward: What do you mean 'lower myself'? That's the only thing I've ever been. Just a simple human that couldn't save a little girl. Not even with alchemy.''
• Toru Mizushima, the hero of Iris Zero lives in a world where most of the children are born with Magical Eyes and was once thought to have the power to tell what other people's powers are. He's really just incredibly clever.
• Labra is a Jewelpet who can't cast magic in Jewelpet Twinkle☆, resulting in resident douche Nicola accusing her of not being one at all. But then, Akari accepts her as a partner and Labra, in her happiness, reveals magic-amplifying abilities that no other Jewelpet has.
• Mash from Mashle: Magic and Muscles was born in a world where everyone is a wizard, and potential Muggles are purged with prejudice. However, his Charles Atlas Superpower allows him to overwhelm even giant monsters and the world's best mages.
• My Hero Academia:
  • The main protagonist is Izuku Midoriya, who starts the series as one of the minority of people in the world who never gained any kind of superpower or Quirk, a phenomenon known In-Universe as being Quirkless and crushed his dreams of being a great hero if his Quirk did manifest.^note Quirks first appeared about a century before the start of the series, and Quirklessness has been getting rarer and rarer with every generation. By Midoriya's time, 80% of humanity have Quirks, and the 20% who lack one are at best seen as physically handicapped, and at worst treated as lesser beings. Despite this weakness, he ends up impressing All Might, the world's greatest hero, when he tries to save his classmate from a criminal during an incident where other heroes including All Might himself were hesitating to act. All Might chooses to start training Midoriya to be his successor, and gives Midoriya his Quirk: One For All. Later it's revealed that when he was a teenager, All Might used to be Quirkless like Midoriya until his predecessor Nana Shimura gave him One For All. It's further revealed that All Might and Midoriya being Quirkless was actually a boon — One For All actually burns out holders that already have Quirks, causing them to die young. Of course, with Quirkless being a vanishing class, Midoriya might be the last holder of One For All.
  • It is later revealed that Yuga Aoyama, one of Midoriya's classmates, was also born Quirkless. Not wanting Yuga to be hurt by the stigma of being Quirkless, as well as worrying about their social status, his parents ended up going to All For One, begging him to give their son a Quirk. This is how he ended up with the Quirk Navel Laser; however, his body is ill-suited for the Quirk, and he needs to wear a special belt with a lens at all times so the laser won't hurt him. Yuga was just happy to have a Quirk at all, so he took it in a stride. Unfortunately, the real problem is that making a deal with All For One is a Deal with the Devil, and about a decade after Yuga receives the Quirk, All For One collects the Aoyamas' debt; he coerces Yuga to enroll in UA High School and feed him information on All Might and the other students, so he can defeat All Might and hero society once and for all.
  • Spin-off My Hero Academia: Vigilantes has Knuckleduster, a Quirkless vigilante who gets by on being built like a brick house and utilizing his Charles Atlas Superpower. He used to have a Quirk, but it was stolen from him.
  • The film My Hero Academia: Two Heroes has Melissa Shield, the Quirkless daughter of scientist David Shield. Since she doesn't have her own Quirk, she instead designs gadgets for heroes to use.
  • In the predecessor oneshot My Hero, Jack and Director Akahashi are some of the few people that don't have powers. While Akahashi's in a similar situation to Melissa (father was an inventor and she works for his company), Jack's just one of her salesmen.
• Rock Lee from Naruto was born without the ability to use ninjutsu or genjutsu, the magic of the ninja world. He makes up for it with Training from Hell which makes his taijutsu, physical combat, so powerful he can compete with the most powerful of ninjas.
• Touta from UQ Holder! is physically incapable of using magic apps. It turns out that he has an unnatural combination of Light (Magic Cancel) and Dark (Magia Erebea) magic within him that cancels each other out. It's why he can't use magic and it's how Past!Evangeline deduces that he's an Artificial Human.
• Iruma from Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun is the only human in a school full of demons. As a result, he can't fly, he doesn't have a bloodline ability that makes him unique, and can only use magic thanks to the Ring of Gluttony he mysteriously received at the ranking ceremony. His only Charles Atlas Superpower is that he is weirdly good at dodging and evading danger, which is strange among demons who tend to have the opposite strategy when it comes to fighting.

Card Games

• In the Scars of Mirrodin block of Magic: The Gathering, Melira is an outcast because, on the metal world of Mirrodin, she has no metal in her flesh at all. However, it also means she is immune to the taint of Phyrexia and can cure it from others.
  Once a pariah, now Mirrodin's greatest hope.

Comic Books

• normalman is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The titular protagonist is the only non-powered character on a planet where Everyone Is a Super. It turns out the local women are so into him to save their race by breeding non-powered children. The supermen are too busy fighting each other to have sex.
• In Supergirl series Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, a Red Kryptonite meteor has everyone in Stanhope Elementary suddenly gaining powers... everyone but Lena Thorul, who loudly declares she doesn't want superpowers and she hates super-beings anyway. It doesn't help her suddenly-metahumans schoolmates immediately put on costumes and act like jerks.
• A Superman comic in the 90s, pastiching the Silver Age, had everyone in Metropolis suddenly acquire Superman's powers and immediately buy a spandex costume with a cape. The exception was Dan Turpin, the only person in Metropolis who didn't want superpowers. He's therefore the only person not affected by Kryptonite when Metallo shows up.
• "President Thor", a story arc from Ultimate Fantastic Four. It details a world where the Skrull have given everyone superpowers; except Ben Grimm. Ben is actually totally happy with this, feeling that there's never been a more interesting time to be alive. Lucky for him, too: the superpower gift is revealed to be a virus that feeds power into the Ultimate Super-Skrull. It also can be activated to kill the carrier. The Skrull King activates the killer gene, but without any power source, the Super-Skrull is easily defeated by Grimm because the Super-Skrull is so used to fighting with stolen powers that he can't do anything on his own.
• Downplayed in White Sand — Kenton, raised in a society of Sand Masters, is by far the weakest one of them, to the point he's not even considered to be one: while the weakest Sand Masters apart from him can support fifteen sand lines, Kenton can barely master three. This earns him a lot of scorn from his father.

Fan Works

• Always Having Juice features a subversion of the usual aesop. Maria Robotnik was born with a genetic defect like her video game counterpart. However, her NIDS not only deprived her of having powers but the Nazo cells associated with them were also a large part in health, meaning Maria was a very sickly girl with thin skin and only lived as long as she did because of Gerald's work and living in the Space Station ARK. Much like her video game self, she dies from a gunshot wound during a raid, that may or may not have been like GUN. Despite this, she still served to be a very kind-hearted young lady who helped Shadow develop his moral compass. It's unknown if she ever would've been cured since Shadow's attempt at saving her with his time travel powers caused things to Go Horribly Wrong.
• In My Huntsman Academia, people can be born "Broken", or more poetically a "Moon Child", which means that they have such weak souls that they'll never be able to manifest an Aura or a Semblance on top of leaving them underdeveloped physically compared to their peers. Izuku falls squarely into this category, earning him no end of torment up to the point that he inherits One For All from Toshinori and attends Beacon.
• Triptych Continuum has a variation with Pinkie Pie. Whilst she does have her canon Wild Magic, it comes at the expense of having absolutely none of the traditional Earth Pony magic. She is, to those few who know this, effectively a deaf-mute in a society composed entirely of musicians. It's been theorized, based on what little is confirmed about "The Warped", that Pinkie has essentially been given Unicorn magic in place of Earth Pony magic, with her various tricks (Spider-Sense, conjuration, teleportation, etc) being the result of how she's able to deploy a magic that she has had to figure out by intuition rather than education.
  • In Daily Equestria Life with Monster Girl, by the same author, Cerea has no magic whatsoever, something which is supposed to be impossible (it's repeatedly mentioned that magic always comes with sapience in this setting, that anything that can talk and think has some form of magic). This does have a slight advantage in that she is the only sapient who can touch her Anti-Magic sword.
• There are various My Hero Academia fanfics set in an AU where Izuku never received One For All, becoming a Badass Normal and the only student in his class (perhaps the entire UA student body) without a quirk of his own:
  • In Erased Potential, Izuku tracks down Eraserhead and asks him to train him to fight quirkless, eventually getting him into UA through recommendation.
  • The For the Want of a Nail Series by the writer myheadinthecloudsnotcomingdown is made entirely of stories where Midoriya is not born with a quirk, nor does he get offered One For All, nor given a quirk by All For One.
    • In Deku? I think he's some pro..., Izuku decides to give up being a hero after All Might tells him to and decides to help heroes by lending his analysis skills to various underground heroes. By the time he gets into UA (by the recommendation of over 15 different underground heroes, no less), "Deku" has become a popular name in the underground hero circuit and is even offered a quirk by the League of Villains if he joins them, All For One seeing his potential.
    • In Mastermind: Strategist for Hire, Fantastic Ableism towards quirkless citizens eventually leads Izuku to sell his analysis skills to help villains who want to kill pro-heroes, eventually becoming one of the most dreaded villains in all of Japan.
    • In Viridian: The Green Guide, Izuku decides to become a vigilante, taking advantage of the fact that the law defines vigilantism as "using one's quirk to perform heroics without a license" while he himself has no quirk.
    • In Cheat Code: Support Strategist, Izuku uses his knowledge of quirk theory and his skill in analysis to enter the UA support course as the personal student of Nedzu, along with becoming good friends with Hatsume Mei and Shinsou Hitoshi, whom he helps get accepted into the Hero Course.
    • In Shadows: The Horror Movie Heroes, Izuku initially gives up on becoming a hero, before deciding to become a Terror Hero after he saves Bakugou by scaring the Sludge Villain into letting go of him.
  • Nemesis (MHA), a fanfic by the same author that isn't part of the aforementioned series, also features a Quirkless Izuku - as Mischief, the fic's sole villain.
• Stupor Heroics is a The Loud House fanfic where superheroes and villains exist and anybody at any time can acquire superpowers through a variety of classic comic book methods ^note Exposure to toxic waste, from the radiation of a fallen meteor, etc known as 'empowering events'. While camping in the woods the Loud kids and their friends were close by when a meteor crashed near them and bathed them in radiation that gave them all miraculous powers...except for Lincoln, who had left the site to take care of business in the woods after his dinner didn't agree with him. In present day, he is in pre-law while the majority of his sisters are superheroes or villains.
• Fate Revelation Online: According to Kayaba, nearly everyone is basically a latent mage, but their magic circuits don't activate on birth, sort of like being born with a stunted limb. The first thing he does with his death game is release a thamauturgy patch to teach the players real magic in the guise of the game, including activating their latent circuits. Unfortunately, even with that, Argo still doesn't have any magic circuits. She actually has the Rare Element [Metal], which would normally make her quite powerful, but with zero circuits she simply can't do anything with it. Thankfully, Shirou, a real-life mage who once thought he had no magic circuits, teaches her how to make a fake circuit so that she can be a passable mage.

Film — Animated

• A somewhat recurring theme in a number of the Barbie movies.
  • Main character in Barbie Fairytopia is wingless fairy Elina. Other fairies tease her because of that. But a lack of wings comes in handy when she has to face Enchantress' Evil Twin and her magic substance making every flying creature weak. Later Laverna even tries to pull a "Not So Different" Remark and We Can Rule Together offering her wings, but Elina rejects her. At the end, her dream comes true anyway and she is given a pair as a reward.
  • In Barbie in a Mermaid Tale, despite being of royal blood, Eris can't spin Merillia. This drove her to kidnap her sister and fool everyone into thinking she could.
  • In Barbie and the Secret Door, Malucia is the only person in the land of Zinnia without innate magic, so she uses her wand to steal others' magic.

Literature

• Touma Kamijou of A Certain Magical Index is this in a world where literally everyone can technically perform something supernatural. Even Level 0s have a minuscule capability to warp reality, and everyone who has not undergone the secret procedures that turn them into espers can perform magic, as evinced by Komoe who did so barely five minutes after having had it revealed to her. His "Imagine Breaker" means that he has absolutely no psychic abilities, no ability to do magic, and no luck (which is a supernatural phenomenon in A Certain universe), and while he has an ability, his ability is actually to negate anything supernatural. He was officially ranked as a Level 0, but only as a technicality because his ability is impossible to scan and defies classification.
• Tavi in Codex Alera is the only Aleran to not be able to command any furies. Mostly he's an Action Survivor, but he's had to be very, very clever to prosper without any furycrafting. And then it turns out that his powers were deliberately locked down by his mother, to keep enemies from finding out that he's the lost heir to the throne, Gaius Octavian. Once she stops, he quickly becomes one of the most powerful furycrafters alive — and his previous experience working around difficulties makes him one of the most inventive, too.
• Cradle Series: When Lindon was tested as a child in the Sacred Valley, it was determined he had no affinity for the sacred arts. He was named an "Unsouled," a cripple to be spat upon and ignored. He wasn't allowed to learn any of the sacred arts beyond some basic breathing exercises. By the time Lindon was sixteen, he was only barely strong enough to fight children. As it turns out, the Sacred Valley is full of idiots who have no idea what they're talking about. Lindon's "disability" is so minor that most cultures don't even have a name for it; he has to train a bit harder, but not that much harder.
• Joram of The Darksword Trilogy. There are some people in the world with so little magic they can't do anything useful with it, but Joram is unique in having absolutely no magic whatsoever. He narrowly avoids being executed for his powerlessness as a newborn and has to spend the rest of his life faking minor magic through sleight of hand. Lucky for him the eponymous weapon can only be properly wielded by the Un-Sorcerer, as it constantly absorbs any magic near it.
  • Turns out he isn't the only Dead person, once Humans from Earth find the planet the wizards all fled to centuries ago.
  • In the sequel novel, a united humanity ends up fleeing an alien race to another planet where magic is even stronger, so much so that even Joram and the other previously Dead Humans have powers. He still refuses to use magic on principle.
• The entire purpose of The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy is to showcase how a character like this can be a hero in their own right, and essentially plays the trope as straight as it can get. Ordinary Boy may be powerless, but he's a lot cleverer than most of his peers and has the Heroic Resolve to save the day three times, even becoming an Empowered Badass Normal temporarily thanks to his jetpack and time travel shenanigans. The third book suggests that Ordinary Boy may have had a power all along after all, but because the series was Left Hanging, this possibility remains a Riddle for the Ages.
• Louise the Zero from The Familiar of Zero developed an enormous ego and hair-trigger temper to compensate for her inability to successfully perform magic, something that defines nobility in her world. It turns out she actually has a very rare and powerful magical ability: Void Magic, the legendary Fifth Element...which happens to be explosion/energy-based magic. At the end of the series, with the disappearance of Void Magic from the world, Louise has instead gained the same type of Wind Magic that made her mother so famous.
• Genaa in Green-Sky Trilogy is considered a bit odd because she has no psionic ability whatsoever. ^note  This makes her the most difficult option to play in the tie-in game as she has to hit all of the spirit-boosting options to get strong enough to rescue Raamo Most Kindar retain some degree of empathic or telepathic ability. It's even stranger since she was Chosen to the Ol-Zhaan priesthood, and it was widely believed that Ol-Zhaan have to have a high degree of Spirit Skill to be considered. It's the first big hint that the priesthood is covering up a large pile of unpleasant secrets.
• In Hart's Hope by Orson Scott Card, there's a Chosen One created by the gods as a natural magic sink. He can't benefit in any way from magic, which in this world comes from blood sacrifices, but he eventually serves as a living Reset Button for centuries of enchantment.
• Inkmistress: Nearly all Zumordens do magic. Those that can't are shunned and treated as second-class citizens.
• Jonathan of Gull Mountain is about a boy born without wings, in a society where everybody has them. Anvilicious Aesop about life with a physical handicap ensues.
• Godo (Gun God) from Notes is presumably the last unmodified human alive in the post-apocalyptic world where Everyone Is a Super. Worse, he must regularly take medications just for daily survival. He's Blessed with Suck though as only "untainted" humans like Godo can wield the Black Barrel, a gun that can kill even the Aristoteles.
• The Lightlark Saga: It's common for everyone in the setting to have access to magic powers, but Isla was born without magic; she's not affected by the Wildling curse but she can't use any Wildling magic either. This is a problem because she's the ruler of the Wildlings yet can't even use their abilities and because all the other rulers are incredibly powerful when it comes to magic. She hopes that once the curses are broken she'll be able to use magic and has to fake having powers during the Centennial. She can also use magical items, which helps her get around some of the limitations and hide her lack of magic. It later turns out that Isla always had magic, but she has the magic of both Wildling and Nightshade, so they were cancelling each other out.
• In Lirael, the second book of the Old Kingdom series, the protagonist Lirael is born of the Clayr, seeresses who live in the cold glaciers in a mountain valley and can See fragmentary glimpses of the future. Most girls are expected to gain the Sight around the time they hit puberty, and it marks their coming-of-age, but as Lirael enters her late teens, she still shows no sign of it and agonizes over being considered still a child and a social misfit. She turns out to be a Remembrancer instead, able to See the past with the help of a special mirror, because of her mixed Clayr and Abhorsen lineage. Notably, Seeing into the past is much more controllable and comprehensive than the future, allowing her to clearly view even the creation of the world — albeit she has to travel to the final district of death and face the temptation of the Ninth Gate in order to do it.
• Outcast: The Un-Magician focuses on a boy who is the only one in his society to have no magic at all. It turns out that his presence cancels out magic, which makes him pretty powerful in that world.
• The Salvagers: Boots Elsworth has a condition called arcana dystocia, meaning that unlike nearly the entire human population of the galaxy, she cannot use magic. This has inconvenienced her significantly, both due to many pieces of Magitek not working for her and people with "dull fingers" being treated as invalids. Mother's time manipulation magic breaks down when it targets Boots due to her condition.
• Shattered Continent: Low potentials in The Empire used to be virtual pariahs for their inability to benefit from magic. And then Cardenas arrived on the scene and showed the world what a low-potential with a belt-fed machine gun could do if they caught a unit of Imperial knights out in an open field.
• Minor example in Larry Niven's The Smoke Ring: occasionally a "dwarf" is born whose growth isn't distorted by the zero-gee environment — in other words, a normal human. They're considered ugly, but if your clan happens to own one of the ancient space-suits, guess who's the right size to wear it?
• In the Towers Trilogy, there are many people with very little magic, but Xhea is the only person who has no magic whatsoever. This poses a number of problems: since magic serves as the currency of the setting, she is perpetually impoverished; and since her lack of magic causes pain to anyone who touches her, she is a pariah.
• In The Witling, Azhiri who are born without Psychic Powers are uncommon, and are considered mentally deficient "witlings". One of the main characters, Pelio, happens to be both a witling and the firstborn son of a king, which makes him a highly unusual combination of being both a Muggle and having a great deal of political power. Even so, he desperately wants to be like everyone else—whether that means having Psychic Powers like the rest of the Azhiri, or going to a place where everyone is a Muggle.
• In the A World of Wonder books, this is called achromism and is treated like a genuine medical condition. It stops people and Civilized Animals from using their Imagination-Based Superpower and turns them monochrome. Gabriel, the male protagonist, suffers from this, but it's actually a result of his depression. The more he comes to terms with his mother's death and lets love into his life, the more colour and power he gets.
• In Xanth, everyone has exactly one power, although that power's strength and utility can vary. Bink alone has no such power, and the culture demands his exile. It turns out that his power is that he can't be harmed by magic, and his talent automatically sets up coincidences to protect from magical threats, up to and including dragons getting laryngitis right before breathing fire, and polymorph spells hitting his skin microbes instead.
  • Interestingly, his power is hidden because it interprets mundane harm that would come to him as a result of other people knowing his talent, as harm that would result from magic. In other words, his talent even protects Bink from itself. If it didn't use subtlety, spells would just fizzle when they hit him, and then people might realize they just needed to punch him. A punch that would never have come if not for his talent. So it also sets up coincidences to prevent people from learning or being told what his talent is, even if Bink wants to tell them unless it deems it okay for that specific person to know. If people attack him non-magically of their own accord, however, it does nothing.

Live-Action TV

• Extraordinary (2023) is set in a world where literally everyone develops a superpower when they grow up ... except the main character, Jen.
• In the first series of Misfits, the character of Nathan is apparently without superpowers even after his mates discover theirs. However, in the final moments of the finale episode it is revealed that not only does Nathan indeed have a power, but his power is Immortality, seemingly the most powerful power yet.

Video Games

• The main character in the Awakening series was born completely without magic in a world where every other human had at least some, which made her unable to be affected by the villain's attacks. Didn't hurt any that she was a princess, either.
• The protagonist of Black Sigil is at a particular disadvantage—a previous non-magical character in this setting was guilty of terrible deeds, so almost nobody trusts him.
• Nortrom the Silencer from Dota 2 was the product of seven generations of careful breeding among powerful magi. He never displayed any magical prowess of note until he joined his peers in a series of magical duels. It then became apparent that Nortrom wasn't lacking in magic. Lacking magic was his magic.
• Final Fantasy XIV
  • The Garlean race are biologically incapable of manipulating aether, unlike the vast majority of living beings on Hydaelyn. In the past, they were harried for this weakness to the point of being chased into the harsh north. It was there that they discovered vast deposits of ceruleum, a fuel source they used to industrialize their nation with Magitek, becoming The Empire bent on conquest and retribution. Alternatively, a few Garlean farmers made pacts with voidsent to compensate for it, as demonstrated by Endwalker's Reaper job.
  • Thancred Waters, one of the player character's closest allies, ends up losing his ability to use magic entirely after a Teleporter Accident nearly kills him at the end of A Realm Reborn. Despite this, he has talent as a rogue and still has enough strength to approach a Charles Atlas Superpower (when compared to other Jobs all requiring aether) that it doesn't slow him down much. In Shadowbringers he turns into a Gunbreaker, which for the most part doesn't require aether manipulation, though he can have the magically-oriented party members charge the bullets for him to use the attacks that do require magic.
  • Cocobusi, a major character from the Thaumaturge Questline, is the only member of his family of wizards unable to use magic due to being born with cripplingly low aether reserves. His desperation to become a thaumaturge leads to his Demonic Possession by a powerful Voidsent. The rest of the questline involves trying to find a way to save him.
• In Fortune Summoners, the main character Arche is the only one in her school who can't use magic (partly because her parents can't afford an elemental stone to cast with, but also because she's a Book Dumb Idiot Hero and also prefers to fight with a sword and armour, which get in the way of casting magic). Near the end, it turns out that a legendary elemental stone's "chosen" her in some way and when it's unsealed she gains the ability to fuse with the Team Pet Air Elemental for a massive stat increase.
  • Even so, in the epilogue, it turns out that the unique nature of said stone means she still cannot use regular magic, and thus still has to watch during magic class.
• Unblessed in Infinite Undiscovery. Unable to use Lunar Glyph powers, but quite conveniently also immune to transformation into Vermiforms.
• The protagonist of Mage Gauntlet: magic can't affect her in any way, being around powerful magicians makes them both nauseous, and anything magical she touches explodes. Even after obtaining the titular weapon and losing these properties, she can't produce her own magic and must absorb spells from other entities (enemies and magic vessels, in practice) to cast them.
• The Angelic Buster class in MapleStory lacks the magical abilities that the rest of her race has. She later finds a weapon called the Soul Shooter which allows her to use special abilities, although she lacks the MP system used by every other class.
• In SaGa Frontier 2, almost everyone can use Anima; however, young Gustave XIII cannot, which costs him the throne and leads to him and his mother being exiled. But Gustave eventually discovers that, while weapons made out of materials like wood and stone are used by everyone because they channel Anima so well, Steel-based weapons, which dampen anima, are far stronger. And since he lacks the ability to channel Anima anyway...
• Twisted Wonderland: The Player Character is an ordinary person from our world who ends up in a magical world by accident and is granted shelter in a Wizarding School.
• Puyo Puyo
  • Rulue is the only character in the main Compile-era cast who's not a magic user, instead using martial arts to get by. She did, however, attend magic school with Arle after the events of Madou Monogatari 3, but that seems to be mostly forgotten by this point as she calls herself to this day the "Fighting Queen".
  • Raffina from the Sega-era cast is implied to be this due to using martial arts just like Rulue but actually uses magic that comes out of her pouch instead of just knowing actual magic.

Web Comics

• Apricot Cookie(s)!: Apricot's unfortunate situation, being the only girl in Japan who isn't a Magical Girl....at first. It turns out she is very much one, just not one fighting for the side of light, much to her dismay.
• Two of the protagonists of Atomic Laundromat. He owns the eponymous laundromat and comes from a family of supers and is okay with not being super. She's a lawyer who defends supervillains, who's seemingly fine with being normal but has been shown to court shady dealings in hopes of gaining superpowers.
• Dex from Dominic Deegan. He has immunity to magic, which is very useful for taking on rampaging mages. Unfortunately, magical healing doesn't work on him either.
• In El Goonish Shive, the average person has at least some capacity to get spells of their own but Tedd does not have any. However, this later turns out to be a product of winning the Superpower Lottery. Tedd is, in fact, a rare type of wizard called a seer. Seers don't develop spells of their own but can learn how any spell works just by seeing it in action and then copy it into a wand that anyone with magic can use. They also such high resistance that spells can't do much to them unless they allow it, which is why Tedd was thought to have no magical potential; the wand used to test for it was so loud and scary that baby Tedd instinctively resisted it.
• In Harpy Gee The eponymous character is one of these, due to her magic being eaten as a young child. She can't use her previously powerful plant magic, nor can she be healed through magical means. However, she is also immune to negative magic such as hypnosis charms.
• Ayzee, the OC daughter of Luz and Amity from Moring Mark's The Owl House comics, was revealed during the Grom Factor story arc to have had her bile sac, which grants witches their magic power, surgically removed after she developed a potentially life-threatening medical condition. It is strongly implied that this is because the magic bile sac is attached to the heart, but while witches have smaller hearts than humans to make room for the extra organ, Ayzee, a half-human half-witch hybrid, had a human-sized heart, making it and the bile sac press against each other in her chest.
• Tyler from PS238 is the only kid in a school for superheroes that has no powers whatsoever. He actually would have been happy in a normal school, but his superpowered parents refused to accept that their son was just a normal kid and forced him to go to hero school. He eventually learns to be a hero through cleverness and gadgetry.
• The priest Brother Linnaeus from Tales of the Questor is mage-blind, one of very few Racconans who can't sense or manipulate lux. It's considered a disability in his species, but then he finds a group of potential converts, who are eager to learn but have a bad history with lux users and religion.
  Linnaeus: I cannot use my powers to deceive you because I have none. I come to you with nothing but the words of God. If they are not enough to persuade you, then nothing else will be.
• unOrdinary:
  • John is a level 1, meaning that in a world where almost everyone has powers ranked at strength levels from 1 to 10 he has none. He's actually faking after being mentally broken by the Authorities for failing to fall in line and is one of the most powerful characters around, ranked at 7.5 and capable of copying up to four powers at once.
  • John's father is likewise a "cripple", as those ranked at a true 1 without any powers whatsoever are so rare that they're seen as crippled and called thus.
• Unsounded: All humans have the potential to become rited and cast spells through their connection to the Khert, except Coppers. They are modified by the Khert to have unnaturally long lives but their connection to it is so weak that attempts to rite them usually fail outright. If they are successfully rited their weak spells can only be cast with physical contact and are prone to fatally backlash.
• In The Wotch, a magic shop owner is unable to use magic, but also unable to be affected by it. This makes him perfect for handling items of power and artifacts of doom that would be dangerous for anyone else. The downside? The Wotch can't heal him when he's wounded by the teeth and claws of magic beasts, and she tends to attract those. Then again, he's immune to lycanthropy too.

Western Animation

• In the Darkwing Duck episode "Planet of the Capes", Comet Guy takes DW to his home planet of Mertz, where Everyone Is a Super... with one exception, "Ordinary Guy," the only "normal" on the entire planet, whose job was to be constantly rescued from peril by the superheroes since superheroes need to have ordinary people to rescue or else they wouldn't be superheroes. In practice, this amounted to all of them constantly beating each other up over who got to "help" him do utterly mundane tasks he didn't need help with in the first place. One day he goes missing, so Comet Guy brings in DW, who assumes he was recruited because they needed his detective skills to find Ordinary Guy. Turns out, they recruited him because his lack of powers made him a perfect replacement for Ordinary Guy. After quickly getting fed up with the constant smothering by the superheroes, DW decides to track down the original Ordinary Guy so that they'll all go back to bothering him. Turns out Ordinary Guy wasn't any happier with his job than DW, having willingly gone into hiding so he could become the planet's very first supervillain, building gadgets to fight the heroes with as revenge for making his life miserable. His first gadget turns out to be a Power Nullifier, which makes DW the one person on the planet able to stop him.
• The Owl House has a few examples.
  • The most prominent one is the main protagonist, Luz Noceda. Due to being the only Human on the Boiling Isles, with the exception of Emperor Belos, Luz stands out from the rest of the Isle's inhabitants by lacking any sort of natural magic. A major part of Luz's journey in Season 1 is finding a way around this in order to achieve her dreams of becoming a Witch, which she finds in the form of Glyph Magic, though that magic has its own limits in that it is unusable in the Human Realm due to the lack of Titan's Blood to power the Background Magic Field that powers the Glyphs.
  • Eda and Lilith Clawthorne both lose all of their magic at the end of Season 1, due to Eda's magic blocking curse being split between them. From that point onwards, they have to rely on Glyphs, just like Luz.
  • Both the Golden Guard, Hunter and Belos himself are also examples of this, due to being a clone of a Human, and a 17th-Century Human Witch Hunter respectively, and accordingly lack bile-sacks. That said, Belos downplays it somewhat, due to his consumption of Palismen turning him into a magical monster, along with carving Glyphs onto his skin in order to give him the ability to use magic more effectively.

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