Basic Trope: A Badass Normal gaining superpowers.
- Straight: Alice, a black belt martial artist, gains the ability of superhuman strength, speed, and Shapeshifting.
- Exaggerated: Alice can turn her body into any weapon, though she hardly ever needs to and even carries swords and knives of her own.
- Downplayed: Alice, the kung fu master, gains the power to strike intangible foes a Badass Normal could never deal with, but she still Fights Like a Normal.
- Justified:
- Though Alice is already awesome, she was not yet in Badass Normal territory and needed the extra power to take down super powered foes.
- The formula which gave her powers requires peak physical fitness and absolute loyalty in the imbiber in order to work: she had to be badass to GET her powers.
- Her foes cannot be fought by normals, period; the powers just even the playing field.
- Inverted:
- An Unskilled, but Strong super takes Boxing Lessons for Superman.
- Brought Down to Badass
- Subverted: Alice was a badass soldier but the process that gave her powers also took her memory so she lost the skills she once had.
- Double Subverted: She remembers them later.
- Parodied:
- Alice starts out as the Badass Normal, then gets a bunch of useless powers, like Meat Vision.
- Alice is a Parody Sue who starts being the world's best martial artist, and then she gains ridiculous amounts of super powers!
- Zig Zagged: Alice started out as a Badass Normal, and seems to go through empowerments and depowerments of various sorts at least once a week.
- Averted: Alice never obtains any superpowers.
- Enforced:
- "Alice is awesome enough as she is, but we can make her even more awesome."
- "Alright, Alice might be pretty badass for a muggle, but she's getting outshined by her super-powered partners. Time to give her an upgrade"
- Lampshaded: "This guy was already a martial artist, but now she has superpowers?"
- Invoked: Alice injects herself with The Virus in order to make herself more powerful.
- Exploited: Alice is part of a Super-Soldier program created by the government. The idea is to take people who are already badass, highly-skilled soldiers and give them powers.
- Defied:
- Alice never uses her newfound powers.
- Alice never wanted her powers to begin with.
- Alice avoids getting powers out of fear of becoming mad with power.
- Discussed: "Even with the powers, Alice can still kick the crap out of us."
- Conversed: "Alice is my favorite character in this comic, not only is she a badass martial artist but now she has powers!"
- Implied: Alice warns the Big Bad that she is not superpowered but spent years in the military before gaining said powers.
- Deconstructed:
- How Do I Shot Web? occurs as a result of new powers that Alice has no idea how to use or deal with.
- Alice finds herself dealing with unexpected side effects of her powers and dealing with the reaction of others.
- Alice is accused of relying on her powers over her skills the longer she has them.
- Reconstructed:
- Alice trains her powers and they become a part of her the same way her skills are.
- Alice still Fights Like a Normal, using her powers only against enemies against whom conventional tactics would not work.
- Alice's powers do not augment her fighting capabilities (at least directly), but do empower her in other ways that benefit her, such as allowing her to fly, meaning she can rescue people easier or she has an artifact that lets her physically hit nontangible enemies such as ghosts.
- Played For Laughs: The Big Bad openly admits how cool it is that Alice had martial arts training before gaining powers and gets a little too excited before calming down.
- Played For Drama: Alice was a seasoned war vet with years of experience. she tries to leave her violent life behind, only to be captured by a Mad Scientist and given powers, once again forcing her into violent conflicts.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Alice handles namely equal forces on similar forces, but ends up coming across a one-in-a-lifetime event such as aliens or a supernatural foe, meaning she temporarily is augmented to fight on their level before the threat is finished and she no longer has the power.
Back to Empowered Badass Normal.
