Basic Trope: A character manifests superpowers when put in a life-threatening situation.
- Straight: Alice summons a force field for the first time when a mugger shoots at her.
- Exaggerated: Alice becomes a Flying Brick while she is falling off of a cliff.
- Downplayed: Alice is in Training from Hell because her mentor believes she'll learn to use her powers if she thinks she's in danger; she can be saved if she doesn't fly.
- Justified:
- Alice could always create force fields, and has done so on many occasions , but she just didn't consciously know she did it.
- Superpowers like forcefield generation are caused by a dormant gene within the host's genetic code and will only awaken if the host experienced severe physical trauma or a Near-Death Experience.
- Inverted: Alice loses the ability to create force fields when the mugger shoots her.
- Subverted: Alice's parents had powers, too, so she throws herself off of a building, knowing that she would manifest something. She does not.
- Double Subverted: ... manifest the power of flight. A beat after she smashes into the ground, however, we discover she can Get Better.
- Parodied:
- Whenever Alice gets put in danger, she manifests a new power.
- Alice falls off a cliff. As she hits the ground, she exhibits the power to turn into rubber and bounces high into the air, with a very audible *boing* sound effect. She bounces into the stratosphere... and then demonstrates the ability to breathe in space. As she's coming down, the friction causes heat-related problems... causing her to exhibit immunity to burns. As she hits the ground, she's going at too high a speed to bounce... and instead demonstrates Nigh-Invulnerability. ...Or is that an exaggeration?
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Alice does not gain powers.
- Enforced: Episode 18 was planned to end with Badass Normal Alice falling off a building to her death because Alice's actor was leaving the show. At the last second she changes her mind and decides to remain on the show, so the writers change it so she somehow gets superpowers and flies away, only to have her powers Hand Waved away in the next episode and never mentioned again.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Alice's parents, who have superpowers, throw her off a cliff to see what her power is.
- Exploited: Alice, a Badass Normal Genre Savvy hero, mentions to her captors that she has an unactivated metagene. Her enemies try to figure out a way to dispose of her without triggering her powers, and this delays them long enough for her friends to arrive.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Alice's parents, who have superpowers, throw her off a cliff to see what her power is. It is not a power that can stop her from falling to her doom.
- Reconstructed: Alice's parents, who have superpowers, throw her off a cliff to see what her power is. It is not a power that can stop her from falling to her doom. Luckily, her mother, who oversaw the experiment, uses her telekinesis to save her.
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