Unstable Powered Child

Rainbow Dash: Aw yeah, just you wait! Once little Pound Cake gets his wings going, he'll be all over the place.

Twilight Sparkle: And be careful around Pumpkin Cake.

Rarity: Baby unicorns get strange magic surges that come and go.

— My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, "Baby Cakes"

Children Are Innocent. That's a common view on children universal to nearly every culture in the world. There are things that children are never meant to know until they are older because of how fragile and delicate their minds are and how easy it is to traumatize them. These children should be left to be immature children and never worry about a thing in the world.

These children are not so lucky. They've been granted great powers at such a young age, but their innocence means that they have no mental strength to wield these powers. The consequences of this are incredibly dangerous to the children themselves and to everyone around them. This deconstructs the idea that children are innocent because in this case, their innocence means they genuinely have no understanding of their powers, and understandably have no way to cope with the trauma that often accompanies this lack of control. Their young minds are incapable of processing these traumatic experiences, and thus causes even worse consequences in a Vicious Cycle.

If an unstable powered little girl never resolves her mental problems, she will very likely grow up to be an Unstable Powered Woman. In fact, many examples of that trope originated as unstable powered young girls who never resolved their problems. Unlike that trope, though, this one avoids the Unfortunate Implications by the fact that it is a very real concept that children's young minds are much less capable of handling stress and trauma like adult humans can. Contrast Little Miss Badass which is when the empowered little girl doesn't have (much) psychological damage.

But this is the worst-case scenario. Unstable powered children need not be lethally dangerous. If a child has powers over water and is constantly flooding his home with via tantrums, that qualifies as well. The point is that the child's instability (whether it be because of immaturity or trauma) causes them to lack control over their powers.

Many of examples of this trope will suffer Power Incontinence. So much power that they simply can't control, and it leads to consequences for everyone around them. Some of these consequences may be mild, but other times could be devastating.

Sister Trope to Goo-Goo-Godlike, where a god-empowered child is not unstable but just genuinely doesn't know any better. In fact, a Goo-Goo-Godlike child may actually become this trope if they have a tantrum that has consequences relating to their powers.

May overlap with Tyke Bomb and Child Soldiers.

If an Unstable Powered Child's trauma causes them to lose their minds entirely and become monstrous, they may become an Enfant Terrible.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• AKIRA: The Espers are a group of children taken in by the Japanese government as part of a top secret research project on psychic powers. The children, Takashi, Masaru and Kiyoko, are denied all access to anything exciting, frightening or otherwise emotionally stimulating, lest their powers flare out of control. The most powerful of all of these children however, is the infamous Akira, whose psychic awakening annihilated Tokyo and triggered World War III.
  • Tetsuo Shima. A juvenile delinquent who develops god-like psionic abilities after Takashi causes him to crash by accident. His powers grows stronger and stronger until they have to manifest physically, leading him to eventually mutate into a hideous blob monster.
• E's Otherwise: Kai's little sister, Hikaru, is disturbingly powerful, unaware of it, and kept bedridden and spoiled by the Ashuram corporation in order to keep her older brother in line.
• In My Hero Academia, Quirks tend to develop around age four at the latest. As a result, there are a lot of superpowered kids who often have little control of their abilities until they're taught to at least control them enough to avoid hurting themselves or others.
  • Present Mic developed his Quirk, Voice, as soon as he was born. His first cries quickly burst the eardrums of everyone present at his birth.
  • Kirishima developed his Quirk, Hardening, when he was in the middle of rubbing his eyes, accidentally cutting himself on his hardened skin and giving himself a permanent scar on one of his eyebrows.
  • Izuku Midoriya uses this as his excuse for his struggles with using his newly gained Quirk, One For All, without hurting himself. As someone who hasn't had his Quirk for all his life, his body and mind simply aren't acclimated to using it like another limb, resulting in his bones breaking from using far more power than his body is able to handle. This covers up the fact that until recently, he was Quirkless.
  • Yuuga Aoyama's Quirk allows him to fire beams from his stomach, but if he uses it too much his innards will be cooked. For this reason, he wears a belt that regulates the Quirk, but he'll still suffer ill effects from using it. His case, as we later learn, is similar to Midoriya's in that he can't regulate his Quirk because it was never his in the first place. He was also Quirkless until his parents made a deal with the Big Bad All for One, so he could have a quirk in exchange for acting as his spy.
  • Eri developed a mutated Quirk unlike either of her parents that allows her to rewind the physical state of person she touches to how it was previously. But due to being so young, she has almost no control over it, resulting in her accidentally rewinding her father out of existence. This led her grieving mother to abandon her and leave her in the care of Eri's grandfather, which put her into contact with Overhaul.
  • Shoto Todoroki's older brother, Toya, had phenomenal fire power, but over time his body was unable to adapt to it and he burned whenever he used his Quirk. As it turns out, he acquired his mother's passive Ice resistance Quirk, but nothing resisting heat. Pair this up with his powers becoming stronger and more unstable the more emotional he gets, and you have a walking, self-destructive bomb.
• Inverted with Koichi, the protagonist of the spinoff, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes. He was actually much better at using his Quirk when he was an infant, going from simply gliding along the floor to flying into the air. But his mother was terrified of what would happen if he flew out the window and out of sight, resulting in her punishing him repeatedly until he forgot he could do it.
• In Princess Tutu, Fakir is revealed to have been this as a child. His ability to turn his stories into reality went horribly wrong when one story summoned a murderous flock of crows (who were attacking the village) to his home, as he wanted to be the hero and defeat them. His parents instead sacrificed themselves to protect him, so Fakir Forgot About His Powers until years later, when he was in a better place to responsibly harness the power. However, part of his Power Incontinence may have been due more to going up against a much stronger Reality Warper in the form of Drosselmeyer, whose story brought the murderous crows to the town in the first place, Downplaying the trope.
• Most Diclonii in Elfen Lied deal with this to some extent or another partially because they usually wind up locked away in a lab and experimented on, if they aren't killed outright. Silpellits (which most Diclonii are) get a double-dose of it, since not only do you have young children with psychokinetic powers, but since Silpellits age at twice the rate of most humans, the child is usually effectively only half the age she looks.
• Exploited in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Kyubey's species makes contracts with teenage girls and turns them into powerful witchhunting Magical Girls, knowing that teenage girls will eventually fall into despair and become powerful witches themselves. He says that pubertal girls have the most intense emotions of any humans, and it's a better energy source than his species has found on any other planet. All this to prevent the inevitable heat death of the universe!

Audio Drama

• Prosperity Island, one of BBV Productions' "Audio Adventures in Time and Space", is set on a planet where a geneticist developed a way to give humans psychokinetic powers. Unfortunately, the powers manifested in infancy, and chaos ensued as society struggled to cope with young children with powers they lacked the wisdom or restraint to control.

Comic Books

• The Boys:
  • Butcher's hatred for superheroes came about when his wife was killed by the superpowered Child by Rape fetus (fathered by the Homelander or rather his clone Black Noir) exploding out of her womb with its Eye Beams.
  • A recurring theme in the series is that nobody has Required Secondary Powers needed to effectively fight (the Homelander can fly, but he needs to push off of something to affect the trajectory of another flying object like the 9/11 airliners). One event for kids with superpowers (presented the same way as a Beauty Pageant) features charming scenes like a little girl holding her melted eyes in her hands screaming that she's sorry.
• Gen¹³ Ordinary Heroes: A two-issue mini-series where the team is facing a protean blob that can absorb any organic matter. Fairchild is immune due to her extreme density, and Grunge due to his body's ability to take on properties of whatever he touches. They learn that the "monster" is an infant born with his gen-powers active, which they learned when he instinctively absorbed his nurse, and, in short order, every living thing in the hospital. The situation is finally defused when Grunge, realizing everyone the child absorbed must have been terrified at the time, and as such, the only emotion the infant had experience with was fear. Focusing on feelings of warmth and love, Grunge leapt into the bio-mass to deliver the mother of all Cooldown Hugs, causing a feedback that caused the infant to retract all of its biomass into an ultra-dense form that resembled a newborn, but the shock killed the child in the process.
• Hellboy: Liz Sherman started out this way. Part of her backstory is that her powers manifested at age 11 when she accidentally killed a bully who had been messing with her pigtails. And then a dozen other people, including her family. She has some control of her powers as an adult but doesn't much like them.
• In the Marvel Universe, it was fear of this trope that caused the Molecule Man (Owen Reece) to act when the Beyonder entered a machine that he had developed that would allow him to be born as a human infant, but still retain his godlike powers. Prior to this, Reece had been badly frightened by the Beyonder speaking casually of destroying the entire universe because he wasn't happy with it. Realizing it was too risky to assume a child with that much power would grow into a benevolent adult, Reece destroyed the machine, killing the infant.
• The most recent Superboy, Jon Kent initially struggled with the usage of his powers compared to his father. He couldn't fly, manifested new abilities entirely at random, and demonstrated a generally lower power level than Superman. But this is Subverted when it's revealed that Manchester Black has been psionically stunting Jon's development as part of his scheme to turn Jon against his father. Once that blockage is removed, Jon develops all of his Kryptonian abilities at once. It's Double Subverted in the Super Sons of Tomorrow storyline, where Jon develops his father's Solar Flare ability in response to a future version of Tim Drake's attempts to murder him for possessing that same power in the future. When it looks like "Savior" has murdered Superman, Jon has an emotional meltdown that sends his powers out of control again, nearly destroying the Arctic Circle with an enormous blast of solar energy until the Teen Titans along with future versions of Conner Kent, Wonder Girl, and Bart Allen manage to contain it long enough for Savior to plunge it and himself into Hypertime.
• Sally Floyd had a daughter who was a mutant with the ability to reverse aging. Unfortunately, this power manifested as a young child, which meant that she can't control it and wound up de-aging herself to a point where she was a fetus that can no longer survive.

Films — Animation

• Frozen. Deconstructed. Elsa's powers are emotion-based, but in early childhood, had them under control, until she accidentally struck her sister in the head with them. Afterwards, her loving but misguided parents kept her isolated until she could control them, but the stress of what she did to her sister and the fear of it happening again, and the fact that There Are No Therapists that could help her cope with this caused her to suffer severe Power Incontinence that never went away until the end of the film.
• In Justice League: Gods and Monsters, Brainiac is a terrified Tyke Bomb with no control over his abilities after being made into a living weapon to use against Superman. After escaping the facility he was created in, Brainiac loses control of his powers, destroying an entire city in the process. By the end, Superman gives the boy a Mercy Kill at the boy's request to stop the destruction
• This was basically how The Powerpuff Girls started out in their movie after being created. Their reckless abandon while playing a game of tag rendered Townsville a holy mess and they became pariahs for it. After exiling themselves to an asteroid, they realized their capabilities and responsibilities when their creator/dad Professor Utonium is threatened.
• Turning Red: The main conflict of the film is the protagonist, 13-year-old Mei Lee, gaining powers that cause her to turn into a giant red panda under the influence of strong emotions. Since kids her age are frequently subject to strong emotions, Mei heavily struggles with this power at first. This is particularly evident when she manages to return to normal after her first transformation by calming herself down, only to get so excited that she turns into a red panda again. This ability is shared by her female family members, whose red panda transformations also manifest around puberty and were so hard to control that most of them had to perform a ritual to seal their red panda spirit away so that they cannot transform anymore. Ultimately, Mei subverts this when she learns that she can avoid Involuntary Shapeshifting by imagining her friends calming her down in intense situations, and by the end of the movie, has gained full control over her shapeshifting ability and even decides to keep it.

Films — Live-Action

• Brightburn: Corrupted Superman Substitute Brandon Breyer plays this trope dead straight. As he develops his power, he gradually becomes more and more selfish and violent and using his powers for more perverse purposes. It turns out to be more of an invocation of the trope because the ship Brandon arrived in corrupts him and becomes the primary reason that he turns into the monster he becomes, despite telling his mother he wants to do good. There's an incredibly Ambiguous Situation in this regard, but it's undeniable that had the ship not been corrupting him, he probably wouldn't have turned into this universe's first major supervillain.
• Dark Phoenix: Jean Grey's status as an Unstable Powered Woman in her adult years is foreshadowed in a flashback scene showing her as a young girl. Her loss of control starts innocently enough with her inadvertently changing the radio, but it then very quickly deteriorates when she accidentally makes the car crash when her telepathic powers cause her to freak out.
• A major factor in the plot of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is that the young America Chavez has the power to send herself and/or other people to other universes - but she can't control it. She's being hunted across multiple dimensions for her power, and even many of those to whom she's turned for help have tried to take it (which requires killing her) in a misguided effort to control it. She is, rather understandably, terrified of herself.
• Looper: Early on, Joe learns of a One-Man Army in the future nicknamed "the Rainmaker", who singlehandedly massacres the crime syndicates and begins closing all the loops. He's stunned to find that in the current time, the Rainmaker is Cid, a young farmboy with serious anger issues and a powerful telekinetic ability, who often destroys everything near him when he gets upset.
• Man of Steel: As a child, Clark is overwhelmed with sensory input as his powers start to kick in during middle school. His mother is called and he tells her "the world's too big". Thankfully, he had Good Parents, and a good mother in particular, to help him "make the world smaller" and he grew out of this.
• Anakin Skywalker of Star Wars inverts the trope. As a child in The Phantom Menace, he's at his most stable and has no trauma behind him. It's only when he matures into an adult that his instability begins, and he starts to fall towards the dark side — due both to him being separated from his loving mother (whose later death at the hands of the Tuskens would leave him wracked with guilt, grief, and anger) and falling under the influence of Palpatine.

Literature

• A major plot point in Breaking Dawn, when Bella and Edward's daughter Renesmee is assumed to be this. This book reveals exactly what happens when a very young child is turned into a vampire, what's called an immortal child. The results are not good to say the least. Immortal children's development is frozen at the age they were turned, and thus they have little to no self-control. They feed whenever hungry, and a single tantrum could annihilate an entire village. The problem with this was so bad that the Volturi understandably forbade the practice. Vasili is the only one mentioned by name (or shown in the film adaptation) and plays this trope lethally straight. Renesmee's immediately thought by everyone, including the Volturi, to be an immortal child. She isn't, but this mistaken identity drives the final plot of the book and film series.
• The eponymous Carrie White in Carrie straddles the line between this and Unstable Powered Woman given her age as a teenager. She leans closer to this trope because she's still in school and still suffering mostly traumas associated with children that have noticeably stunted her mental health and maturation, notably parental abuse and severe bullying by her classmates. She was already mentally unstable and had inadvertently used her powers as a child, most notable when she was three years old and suffering abuse at her mother's hands and had inadvertently summoned a storm of rocks all over the house, and accidentally threw the dining room table through the window. And this only built upon itself as she grew into a teenager, resulting in the infamous prom bloodbath after she finally reached her breaking point.
• Firestarter: Charley starts out this way, initially unable to control her powers. But after she burned her mother during a tantrum, her father determined that they had to get her under control or they'd both be killed. He shoves her burned teddy bear in her face, pointing out that she was the one who burned her bear and she was the one who burned her mother. Though she still wrestles with control until the climax of the novel, she consciously works to constrain them, now.
• Anthony from Jerome Bixby's 1953 short story "It's a Good Life" has essentially godlike powers. Unfortunately for everyone around him, he has had these powers literally since birth, and at the time of the story is still only three years old. The result is an unending nightmare for his family and their neighbors in a small town in Ohio. (Among other things, Anthony has completely cut off his hometown from the rest of the universe...Or possibly he has destroyed the rest of the universe.) When Anthony gets angry (as young children often do) very bad things happen to people. When Anthony tries to be helpful to people, it's often even worse.
• Subverted in Matilda: Matilda Wormwood discovers that she has telekinesis and starts practicing with it. She uses her powers for good.
• Worm: Capes who trigger at a very young age (Most often second or third gen capes) tend to have their passengers influence their personality to a greater degree compared to those who trigger in their teens or early adulthood, which can lead to greater instability.
• In My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, most magic users have their magic manifest at around five years of age^note There are cases as late as 12, though, and would sometimes manifest as Power Incontinence. The localized nature of most magic, however, avoids serious damage. In Keith's case, however, his magic involves creating and controlling earth golems, which means his case involved large pieces of earth falling from the sky and cratering the ground, as well as causing multiple impact wounds and even broken bones across his siblings. He was immediately given the Madwoman in the Attic treatment until Duke Claes adopts him as heir...for exactly this reason, as this story occurs in a magocracy, and training can improve a person's control over their magic.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Inhuman child Katya Belyakov was subjected to Terrigenesis by her mother against the orders of their leader, Jiaying, who had sensed a "darkness" within the little girl, and developed the power to sense and manipulate the feelings and emotions of anyone she touched. Having not been properly mentally prepared, and unable to control her new power, Katya went insane, and developed a love for others' pain. Taking control of her mother, Katya forced her to bring her victims to enslave, torture and kill. S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Melinda May was eventually forced to kill Katya to end her rampage, an act which would haunt her for years afterward.
• Being Human (US): Turning children into vampires is strictly forbidden by the vampire society because child-vampires have no self-control of their new instincts whatsoever. This is demonstrated when Rebecca turns a boy named Bernie: he tries to attack a girl he meets at a playground within moments of sensing her body-heat, and he throws an increasingly violent tantrum while refusing to drink bagged blood because it "tastes like barf".
• The Umbrella Academy:
  • Subverts this trope with Viktor Hargreeves. Raised as The Team Normal, he actually is the most powerful one of them all. At four years old, he had a knack for killing the nannies hired to care for him, until a robot one, Grace, was made that could survive his powers. However, once he realized he couldn't kill Grace, he actually seemed like a relatively normal little boy (closeted gender dysphoria discounting). Once Reginald saw just how powerful he was becoming, he decided that he was this trope or too close to becoming it, and he chose to lock him away and then suppressed Viktor's powers with medication and using Allison's mental powers to strip his memory of his powers.
  • Played straighter with Klaus Hargreeves. Klaus, who can talk to the dead, struggles to turn the ability on and off. Because Reginald attempted to teach him control by locking him in mausoleums overnight, Klaus was traumatized and became terrified of his ability. He eventually turned to drugs and alcohol to numb the ability rather than properly harness it. The adult Klaus also felt guilty that he kept his brother Ben from moving on, since Klaus used his ability to summon Ben's spirit soon after Ben's death when they were 17, and Ben hasn't left his side since. Ben later confesses, however, that he was actually afraid to move on and chose to stay with Klaus — he asked Viktor to assure Klaus it was never his fault.

Video Games

• Dragon Age: Mage children being unable to control their powers or understand the consequences are a very real danger, which is why they are required by law to be taken to the Circle of Magi immediately when discovered. Unfortunately, the fact that mage children are supposed to be denied any further contact with their families leads to a Vicious Cycle where families hide their mage children for fear of losing them, which prevents these children from getting the training they need to control their powers. Some of these children go on to cause disasters with hefty body counts that are then used to justify the current system that gives parents incentive not to hand over their children. Magic is also viewed negatively by the primary religion of the setting, so wealthy or aristocratic families often hide their children's magic for fear of their family's reputation being sullied; the Amell family lost much of its prestige when one of its members gave birth to five mage children in a row.
  • Connor Guerrin in Dragon Age: Origins is described by his tutor Jowan as too inexperienced to use actual spells, but still powerful enough to tear the Veil, leading to his possession by a Desire Demon that unleashed an army of undead on Redcliffe Village because he didn't understand what the demon was or the danger it presented; he just knew that it was promising to help his sick father.
  • A very similar case happened in Chateau d'Onterre in Dragon Age: Inquisition, though we only see its aftermath. The daughter of a noble family began to develop magical talent; her parents were unwilling to lose her to the Circle and feared that having a mage child would ruin their family's reputation. They bribed the templars to look the other way, and the girl was eventually possessed by a powerful demon, killing her entire family and the estate staff.
  • The case of Amelia Stannard was a direct contributor to the outbreak of the Mage-Templar War. Amelia's parents feared she wouldn't be able to handle the Circle and hid her away, but she was eventually reported and when the Templars were literally on the family's doorstep to collect her, she allowed herself to become possessed. The only survivor of the resulting massacre was Amelia's younger sister, Meredith, who joined the Templar Order herself. Meredith overcorrected for what her sister did and as Knight-Commander made the Kirkwall Circle the harshest in Thedas, which turned it into ground-zero for the Mage Rebellion.
• Inverted in Déraciné. The younger someone is, the better they are at handling the power of faeries, because it is obsessing about past regrets that makes someone lose control of their powers and go dangerously insane.
• Pokémon's Pichu, the pre-evolved "baby" form of Series Mascot Pikachu, is unable to store electricity effectively and often ends up shocking itself if it is surprised. In Super Smash Bros., this carries into Pichu's gameplay, as it causes damage to itself as it uses various electrical attacks.
• Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Eveline is a Tyke Bomb who was engineered as a fetus to be a Tyke Bomb with powers over a mutagenic mold-like substance as an infiltration bioweapon. Her dark upbringing and as revealed in Resident Evil Village abandonment by her "mother" Miranda, combined with her natural instability already turned her into a bloodthirsty sociopathic murderous little girl with an obsession with having a family. Her powers over the mold gave her the power to infect and control anyone she wanted. While she is a physically old woman by the time the game actually happens, she still presents herself and acts like the little girl seen throughout the game.
• Shin Megami Tensei has the recurring Dark Magical Girl Alice. Back when she was a mere human, she befriended Belial and Nebiros, a pair of powerful demons who were smitten with her and imparted some of their powers to her as a present. Unfortunately, that same power drove her insane, killed her, and revived her as an Undead Child who has the innocent mentality of a little girl and an incredibly lethal black magic which she uses to murder people so that they can become her friends by never leaving her ever. Even worse, her signature phrase, "Could you die for me?", is not a demand so much as it is a request; she genuinely has no idea that asking people to die is not how you're supposed to make friends.
• Tales of Xillia 2 features Elle, who is a Key of Kresnik, allowing her to transport herself and people around her between universes. However, her powers are also triggered if she's frightened, and she spends several chapters of the early-game accidentally dropping the party into Alternate Universes. It's eventually revealed that her father invoked and exploited this at the very start of the game, setting up an elaborate assassination attempt on his own life just to traumatize her into teleporting herself into the Prime Dimension.
• Wild ARMs: Million Memories: Rudy Roughnight has his ARM abilities awaken after he's had a vision where he betrays everyone and destroys the world. A combination of their newness, and not being able to remember anything about his past means he's not entirely sure how they work or what he's capable of. This only gets worse towards the end where it's discovered he can teleport in and out of the Memory Maze, and he ends up cornered by one of the most manipulative villains in the series, leading to the vision coming true.

Webcomics

• My Impossible Soulmate: Starseers have to seal away a newborn's magic until they are older due to numerous incidents of young children unknowingly causing house floods or setting their parents on fire.

Websites

• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-239, "The Witch Child" is actually a little girl who can't control her Reality Warper powers, so the Foundation keeps her in a medically induced coma for her and everyone else's protection.
  • SCP-2241, "Cameron the Crusader" is also a little boy who can't control his Reality Warper powers... at first, until the Foundation trains him. However, their training results in the boy becoming more powerful and angry, so a conflict between the Ethics Committee and the trainers occurs. The trainers win due to their belief that the explosive tracking chip they implanted in his head will kill him if he tries anything, but his gaining of telekinesis powers leads the readers to believe otherwise.

Western Animation

• Teen Titans (2003) has Terra, a girl unable to control her geokinesis powers. Slade teaches her how to control them and also gets her on his side, thus defying the trope. The trope is then outright averted when Terra is reborn as an ordinary high school student with no powers.
• Justice League: Gods and Monsters Chronicles: The second episode depicts Brainiac as a genetically engineered weapon created as a contingency against Superman. When Brainiac loses control over his powers, Superman comes in to end the threat and we see Brainiac as a crying, scared child who has no idea how to control his powers and begs Superman to kill him so he doesn't cause anymore harm.
• Kid vs. Kat: Millie in "Mind Games" gets access to Kat's weapon of the week, a telekinetic helmet. After gaining its power, she starts wishing for everything that she wants, and when she doesn't, she throws a tantrum that causes an earthquake and creates an active volcano.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Baby unicorns and alicorns have Power Incontinence, which causes them to involuntarily cast random spells.
• The Owl House: The Collector may be a millennia-old entity, but they act like a young, playful child that sees the entire world as a game. They also have the power to do things like moving the moon with a casual gesture, so when they lose their temper, they can get very destructive.

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