Basic Trope: A power which seems weak at first glance, until you consider the creative applications of it.
- Straight:
- Robed Ranger can make people deliriously happy with a touch: to the point where they can no-longer fight back.
- Occlusion can turn invisible, but his real talent is that he can turn anything invisible, which he can use to set up sneak attacks by his allies, seemingly pull tools or weapons out of nowhere, or just cause foes to run headfirst into a telephone pole they didn't know was there. There's also no way to know when he's using his powers, and he's not above abusing this fact for the sake of paranoia-inducing mind games.
- Raining Color can use his powers to change the colors of an object. It at first appears useless, but it becomes useful when the powers are used to create decoy replicas to fool his enemies.
- Pepple can teleport objects but only if they fit in the palm of his hand and only a few feet. Only one of two things can happen when he teleports a dagger or a bomb into his opponent's skull.
- Rainblast can change the color of an object close or near to him. While the ability to grab attention or sneak away is rather nice, changing the color of something rapidly tends to cause headaches and seizures. Not to mention that he can do things like blinding an enemy by turning their corneas opaque or erasing and rewriting text.
- Star Girl has the power to "reveal the true heart" of people. Sounds useless, until you notice that villains tend to have a Heel Realization before they can attack her, hero teams function better when she's around, she can instantly recognize traitors or villainous spies, bad guys she fights are more likely to join the side of good, and her mere presence forces people to drop the Conflict Ball and avert Poor Communication Kills. She may not have a very offensive power, but she's an invaluable teammate.
- Plushie can soften any object. With it, she can render any weapon useless, bring entire structures down by making their supports too soft to hold anything up, break her fall by turning whatever she lands on into a giant cushion, and, if she's feeling particularly nasty, make a person soft enough to pull apart by hand.
- Toy Soldier has elemental control over plastic. People often forget just how common plastic is in modern society, and many varieties of it are surprisingly strong.
- Exaggerated:
- Monkey Master has the power to telepathically control monkeys. This extends to apes, humans, and thus 80% of all earth’s superheros and supervillains, not to mention any Killer Space Monkeys that come by. Then, to everyone’s surprise and especially Monkey Master's, one of the gods is an ape and is promptly put under his mental dominion.
- Occlusion has the ability to form an invisibility sphere around himself . While the invisibility is somewhat useful, the real application of this power is to deflect ALL the electromagnetic radiation of any kinds away from himself, making Occlusion completely immune to Frickin' Laser Beams, Shock and Awe, Playing with Fire, radiation, both of the normal and crazy-space kinds, and Cosmic Doom-Blasts From The Very Gods Themselves
- Thunder-dragoon has the power to control electromagnetism. Seeing as the four fundamental forces are controlled by such, he eventually becomes a Reality Warper.
- Star Girl has the power to "reveal the true heart" of people. Sounds useless in direct combat, until you notice that she can also use her power to literally "reveal" someone's heart by simply willing her victims to rip out their heart from their chest. It's not limited to human hearts and animal hearts either, she can "reveal the true heart" of anything with a "heart", be it a machine's CPU, an atom of any matter, or even the core of a planet...
- Ignidious can only control fire that's already present, not create it out of thin air. This means he can draw fire from the sun to immediately incinerate his enemies to a crisp.
- Toy Soldier has elemental control over plastic, and fine enough control over it to manipulate microplastics, i.e. tiny specks of plastic detritus that are basically everywhere, including inside your body.
- Downplayed:
- Clara Chandelier's power of turning metal into glass is mildly awesome. She can break your gun, break your car, break your computer, break your shield, break your robot, break out of prison, make you noticable through walls... she can turn out the lights, or improvise a weapon... It still doesn't measure up to more normal special abilities, but creatively applied it has a variety of uses.
- Occlusion can briefly turn invisible. This is surprisingly helpful in melee combat, as it means that even if his opponent knows his general direction, he doesn't know what attacks might need to be dodged, blocked, or countered, allowing Occlusion to land blows unimpeded.
- Magmabather's ability to survive and swim through magma, while nothing to sneeze at, doesn't come up very often, since most hero business takes place far away from active volcanoes (well, except for the odd traditionalist villain looking for a volcano lair). However it also means being super strong, capable of resisting the heat and pressure of molten rock, and Super Senses good enough that he can still navigate, and those are almost always useful.
- Star Girl's power to reveal the true heart of people is useless in direct combat, but its support potential means that she can help her team, just not in the field.
- Diana "DJ" Jowski has the ability to broadcast music into the minds of people nearby. This can be used to inspire allies, calm down a crying child... or used to play music so painfully awful that the bad guys agree to surrender if she'll just stop playing it. She later realizes she can use this ability to play tunes she knows will get a reaction out of people, such as a national anthem making a spy stand at attention]].
- Gaea can make plants grow ten times as fast. This has no real crime-fighting potential (as ten times the regular speed is still way too slow to trap enemies), but she can make money hand over fist running a nursery, and then use the money to support charitable causes.
- Geyser can create a continuous stream of water, but it's not a powerful stream, coming out in about the same speed and quantity as water from the faucet. He generally acts as a utility hero in drought-stricken areas where any water is a good thing, but if the situation gets desperate, this can also be used for waterboarding.
- Justified:
- Even if a power is useless, the Required Secondary Powers behind it could be quite powerful.
- The ecosystem where Monkey Master evolved had Big Creepy-Crawlies where most ecosystems would have vertebrates, and thus his ability to control monkeys is much more useful here than there.
- Even if it's only a weak power, it may still be more than normal people can do.
- A ridiculous/seemingly useless power is very easy to underestimate or dismiss outright. Any villain worth their salt will be ready to deal with Super-Strength, Flight, and Eye Beams, but who'd expect someone with the power to summon their own theme music to be an actual threat?
- Inverted:
- Captain Awesome has a conventionally powerful super power, but it's on the level with your normal What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? because he's too dumb to think of any ways to use it.
- JakeEbony can melt people's faces with a guitar riff. Turns out it's a lot more survivable than you may think.
- The Overseer has nigh-unlimited Reality Warping powers. However, every time he uses them, Game Breaking Bugs start appearing into reality's fabric, and he has no way to correct them; thus rendering useless his otherwise awesome power.
- Subverted:
- What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?
- Monkey-Master comes up with the idea to use his powers on humans, gorillas, and other apes. He finds an unsuspecting sap to use as a test subject... only to find out his powers only work on Old and New World monkeys, not any other kind of primate.
- Double Subverted: Then he's possessed by Legion, who upgrades his powers to horrifying effect.
- Parodied: Out of all the Flying Bricks and Reality Warpers running around, it is the man who can make fish fall from the sky who is the most feared.
- Zig-Zagged: The usefulness of Robed Ranger's power varies from episode to episode: sometimes he can utterly annihilate an Eldritch Abomination with a friendly glance, sometimes he can only make StabLockey feel really, really happy at getting to chop him up.
- Averted:
- Monkey-Master never thinks to use his powers on people or giant space gorillas, despite the fact they are within the limits of what is defined as a primate.
- Every power on the show is as initially useful as it looks.
- Enforced: It's an Aesop about making lemonade when life gives you lemons.
- Lampshaded: "Beaten... by the power to turn into a HAMSTER? MY EXISTENCE IS NOTHING BUT SHAME!!"
- Implied: Daisygrower is the top superhero in the roster. Veteran villains will surrender at the prospect of his arrival. He and his powers are never shown but either he has one major case of Atrocious Alias/Fluffy the Terrible or this trope is in effect.
- Invoked: Balthazar the Cruelly Inventive seeks out a spell to heat enamel, knowing his foes will be surprised when their teeth suddenly explode.
- Exploited:
- Everyone underestimates the abilities of Robed Ranger... once.
- Emperor Evulz sends his right-hand man Gragus out to fight Robed Ranger, in order to teach him a lesson in humble pie.
- Defied: Pepple is an Actual Pacifist who decided to specialize in transportation rather than use his powers to kill, primarily because he knows what he can do with them.
- Discussed: "The more obscure and seemingly worthless the power, the more dangerous it inevitably becomes when you look back over it."
- Conversed:"Wait, he can make people happy? How's that going to help him?"
"Just keep watching and you'll see..." - Plotted A Good Waste: The main themes on the show revolve around creativity and imagination, and use of powers like this form its main foundation.
- Played For Laughs: As it turns out, even without the ability to control humans and super-apes, Monkey-Master is feared worldwide... merely because monkey poop is nigh-impossible to wash out of a costume.
- Played For Drama: Rainblast's power to change color really quickly makes him a walking seizure risk... to friend, foe, and innocent bystander alike. He seems weak because using his powers to their full effect runs the risk of massive collateral damage, and when he does cut loose, it's not pretty, and he's definitely not happy about it.
- Played for Horror: "Pebble" is a serial killer who kills his victims by his power of inducing annoyance and anger within them.
Well, it seems like the link to Heart Is an Awesome Power was useful after all.
