Basic Trope: A superpowered individual is very vulnerable to a common substance.
- Straight: Captain Awesome is driven off by plastic forks.
- Exaggerated:
- The mere mention of plastic forks sends Captain Awesome into sniveling fits.
- Captain Awesome is reduced to a catatonic mess by someone looking at him.
- Captain Awesome gets motion sickness despite being in a boat that's tied up.
- Captain Awesome is weakened by corn, his least favorite food.
- If Captain Awesome so much as looks at a plastic fork, he will explode into nothingness.
- Captain Awesome has godlike powers. He doesn't know about them because they are disabled within the presence of air.
- Downplayed:
- Plastic forks are much better weapons against Captain Awesome, but it's not giving him any psychological or biological effects any time soon.
- Captain Awesome is vulnerable to a specific species of animal. His weakness would be laughable in areas where the animal thrives, but understandable in locations where such a species is scarce.
- Justified:
- Captain Awesome has a severe allergy to plastic in general and plastic forks are some of the most common forms of easily acquired plastic.
- Captain Awesome breaks down in front of plastic forks because it reminds him of how someone killed his family.
- Captain Awesome has Bizarre Alien Biology; the same way that arsenic is toxic to humans, plastic is toxic to him.
- Captain Awesome has a rooted fear of plastic forks that comes from before him gaining his powers, when his abusive step-father molested him with them.
- Captain Awesome was given his powers by The Great Gazebo, who thought throwing in a vulnerability to plastic forks would be hilarious.
- Captain Awesome gets his powers from an Ancient Egyptian magical amulet. Since petrochemical plastic didn't exist in Ancient Egypt, touching plastic disrupts the magic and strips him of his powers.
- Inverted:
- Captain Awesome draws his powers from plastic forks, giving him not a Weaksauce Weakness, but a weaksauce power source.
- Captain Awesome is totally immune to plastic forks (and only plastic forks) in any situation in which one could harm him, however rare such situations may be.
- Captain Awesome's weakness is Francium, one of the rarest elements in the universe which generally only last for 30 minutes before decaying into other elements.
- Subverted:
- Turns out the plastic fork was laced with cyanide.
- Captain Awesome deliberately spread rumors that he was vulnerable to plastic forks to distract his enemies.
- Captain Awesome isn't really vulnerable to plastic forks.
- It wasn't the fork...
- Double Subverted:
- But Captain Awesome can easily resist the cyanide, but not when he's suffering from the plastic allergy.
- Now that Captain Awesome's false allergy has been exposed, his enemies will no longer be distracted from finding out his true weakness: Bread.
- Well, at least he isn't vulnerable to plastic. Turns out he's vulnerable to the mere shape of a fork.
- ...but the corn on it.
- Parodied:
- Kryptonite Is Everywhere. Captain Awesome's secret identity works at a plastic fork factory, putting him a hair's breadth from death every day. All his villains have plastic in their armor, and they pointedly observe they are trying to uphold standards by only fighting/doing crime with non-lethal... plastic weapons. Oh, and his nemesis? Plastic Poseidon, who wields a giant plastic trident.
- Captain Awesome is weakened by exposure to oxygen, so his amazing powers are really useless.
- Captain Awesome treats his fork problems like a traditional allergy, complete with epi-pens and inhalers.
- Captain Awesome's enemy demonstrates Captain Awesome's weakness to plastic forks by sharpening them and shoving them down his throat.
- Zig Zagged: Captain Awesome freaks out at the sight of a plastic fork but does nothing to him. Thinking he is over his plastic allergy, he picks up a second one, but it turns out this second plastic fork was not hypo-allergenic, and he promptly has a severe reaction. But turns out to be instead a reaction to Plastic Poseidon's allergies-beam. But then it turns out that the plastic fork caused Captain Awesome's immune system to go crazy, making him vulnerable to Plastic Poseidon's allergies-beam.
- Averted: Captain Awesome is not driven off by any mundane, easily accessed substance.
- Enforced:
- "Crap, Captain Awesome is a bit too awesome. He's making all the villains look laughable. How do we bring him down to their level?" *frantically searches office, reaches into fridge* "A FORK!"
- The villain is made vulnerable to an ordinary substance so that the heroes have a chance to defeat him in spite of being much weaker than him.
- Lampshaded:
- "Geez, Captain Awesome, you can shrug off meteor impacts and eat plutonium, but a plastic fork makes you cower in fear?"
- "Of all the things that could weaken me, why did it have to be something as commonplace as a plastic fork?"
- Invoked: From the Diary of Senior Sinister: "Grr! All superheroes have weaknesses, and I know I can find Captain Awesome's. I'll try everything from Aardvarks to Zygotes."
- Exploited: Captain Awesome's enemy wears a suit made of nothing but plastic forks in order to defeat him.
- Defied: The villain menaces Captain Awesome with a plastic fork, and he cowers in fear and hears out the villain's monologue and plan. Once he knows how to stop it, he then casually slaps it out of his hand and asks if he really believed he would come unprepared. Turns out he's wearing his special hypoallergenic uniform that makes him immune to plastic forks.
- Conversed: "You know, it's a wonder there are any super powered people fighting or doing crime at all. They have so many weird allergies they ought to live in a bubble".
- Discussed: "No, there is no cosmic balancer or something bandying out random weaknesses to superpowered people. If you run into someone who about to toss a truck at you, do not pelt them with mistletoe, just run".
- Deconstructed:
- His glaring weakness causes him to become the laughingstock of the superpowered world and he is forced to retire from crime-fighting because he has such a glaring weakness.
- After his enemies find out that Captain Awesome's weakness is plastic forks, they decide to attack Captain Awesome with plastic forks.
- Reconstructed:
- After dropping out of supering, he realizes he can still make a difference, he just needs to account for his glaring weaknesses. So he develops a suit that protects him from the forks or helps with disaster relief.
- Captain Awesome's enemies have Weaksauce Weaknesses of their own, which he also exploits.
- Implied: Captain Awesome has a strange fear of plastic forks.
- Played For Drama: Captain Awesome is Driven to Suicide, and no one thinks anything of him buying plastic forks.
- Played For Laughs: Captain Awesome breaks into the Super Villain Lair to save the hostages from Captain Evulz. Evulz flinches while eating his gas-station pasta and instantly kills him with the fork. Evulz dejectedly goes to the scrap yard to sell his custom-made Death Trap.
No! Not Weaksauce Weakness! My only weakness... NOOOO!
