Power Incontinence in Fan Works.
Crossovers
- In Amazing Fantasy, the Bakugou of Earth-2018.682 is bonded with the Venom Symbiote. While he manages having Super-Strength most of the time, his control slips when he's mad, punching through a window and a TV after hearing about Izuku and cracking a sidewalk while stamping the floor in frustration.
- As a child, Ragna in BlazBlue Alternative: Remnant struggled to control his Semblance, as when it first activated, he accidentally devoured the soul of his mother figure. Years later, after the battle at the docks, he starts struggling to control it again, as seen during his fight with Rachel in Chapter 32 where he loses himself to his anger a lot easier than normal. It gets to the point of him venturing out into the Emerald Forest alone in Chapter 33 to force himself to fight without relying on it.
- Child of the Storm has Harry develop this with his intermittently manifesting Asgardian Super-Strength meaning that he lives in fear of some day shaking someone's hand and squashing the bones within to powder and his Psychic Powers being potentially incredibly powerful due to the fact that Jean Grey's a maternal cousin of his. All they generally do, however, is sometimes give psychically sensitive people around him a Psychic Nosebleed or, if he tries to use his telekinesis and his focus slips, he's likely to end up breaking whatever he's holding - except for the Pensieve Incident, where a nasty case of a bad memory, unaddressed trauma, and Your Mind Makes It Real means that he nearly gets three other people killed and his mother has to intervene. Thankfully, he gets better with practice, but still has to keep himself in control-because when he doesn't, things get bad. Very bad.
- Akiza in Comic Book SNAFU has difficulty controlling her Psychic Powers. She accidentally hits U.S. Agent with his own shield and teleports herself and Gajeel to Fuyuki City.
- Hikari, the protagonist of the Fairy Tail and One Piece crossover The Dragon That Will Pierce the Heavens, suffers from this when taking on her Draconic Humanoid form, which turns her into a Berserker One-Man Army before literally leaving her unable to move for days.
- Jake is utterly unable to control the Transcended Light in Ultraman Moedari, causing a lot of trouble.
- Dungeon Keeper Ami has all individuals, youma or otherwise, trained in Dark Kingdom-style magic exhibit this as a teleportation side-effect. (Lishika is a special example — not only is her affinity lightning but it's strong enough that each teleport will shock any passengers she may be carrying, and once set her on fire!) Also featured are keepers themselves- whose dungeon hearts tend to leak corruption that, in sufficient quantity, takes on the aspect of whatever element/affinity is most closely attuned to the Keeper in question. Examples: Mercury's sleet storm, Zarekos' perpetual night.
- Empathy has Riley getting a bit of trouble with her new powers as The Empath, as not only are her own emotions distracting and hard to focus with, but feeling other people's emotions can either lead to conflicts or spikes in her own emotions.
- In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, Haruhi's powers were like this until Nagato started filtering them, though she has to get rid of the junk data every night. Later on, closed space stops being produced, removing the other incontinence Haruhi had.
- Lulu's Bizarre Rebellion:Wake the Snake was supposed to be a weak stand that could do nothing but switch users and make people slightly sleepy, but Sophie Wood did not have enough willpower to control it, causing it to go on a rampage.
- All Requiem stands traded a measure of control for a great deal of power:
- Hey Jude granted invulnerability and Mental Time Travel, but a single misuse of that power put its users into a coma.
- Almost Human's shapeshifting abilities grew gradually less precise and stable over time, causing Kewell's body to break down.
- The Truth was no more able to turn off Mao's mind reading geass than he was.
- All Requiem stands traded a measure of control for a great deal of power:
- A Man of Iron: When Arya Stark becomes the story's version of Kitty Pryde in the last third of A Clash of Thunder, her first use of her newfound intangibility powers to run through a wall accidentally leaves her clothes behind, to her mortification. Later, her first chapter in A Shield of Man has her mention how on at least one occasion she laid down for a nap and ended up falling through the bottom of the ship she was traveling on at the time.
- Mare of Steel: At first, Rainbow Dash does not have very good control over her superpowers, doing things like destroying a tree with Super-Strength or blowing up a pot of food with her Eye Beams. She learns to control her powers in the Fortress of Solitude, but still struggles with some more passive powers, like controlling her Freeze Breath while sneezing.
- My Hero Playthrough: David Cain has a motion sensing Quirk, which he cannot shut off. It also isn't especially fine tuned. He can tell a bullet versus person, but not if the person running at him is running up to hug him or running to attack him. Or if someone is tossing him a baseball or tossing a grenade at him. As an assassin, he generally tends to assume the violent option. Which has caused him trouble. That leads to him breeding a child with a more sensitive version of his Quirk.
- In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Hisashi Midoriya accidentally spits fire when he's agitated due to his firebreathing Quirk. His adoptive son, Izuku, had no idea how strong he was or how to control his Kryptonian Super-Strength until he nearly killed Katsuki Bakugou just a week after it manifested.
- In The New Recruit series of one-shots, Matt's powers sometimes activate involuntarily if he's scared or overly emotional. For example, when J.A.R.V.I.S. startled him one morning, Matt got so scared that he flew up to the ceiling before remembering who the A.I. was. Tony thought it was hilarious.
- Of Powers and Pie
is a crossover between Pushing Daisies and Heroes that features Ned learning that his ability to bring back the dead is another example of humans developing superpowers. With the encouragement of Doctor Mohinder Suresh, Ned learns that his power doesn't just allow him to bring back the dead, but also allows him to heal the injured, such as saving Elle's life and healing Mohinder's injured leg without falling victim to his usual issues. - The Secret Return of Alex Mack: This is a big part of why the heroes aren't just giving out GC-161 en masse, and why Terawatt is so valuable: the Superpower Lottery often results in poor control.
- Victor Cready has Flight, a silvery form, and fire powers. Except that the latter two can't be turned off, and his own fire causes him pain even though it doesn't injure him. All he wants from the heroes or the villains is more antidote.
- George Mack's Emergency Transformation gives him electrical powers that can't be turned off; he has to hold onto metal bars to avoid constantly shocking things.
- Marsha doesn't even know she has powers, but is unconsciously using them all the time to hurt and sabotage herself.
- A Shadow of the Titans: After Jade magically ages herself into an adult, she gets hit with this. While her Playing with Fire powers causing her hands to burst into flame at the slightest emotional high is annoying to her, it's most apparent when she tries to travel by shadow, and keeps overshooting her target. Which is to say, she keeps ending up on the wrong continent! Ultimately, she reverses her age to normal, due to being so sick of it all.
- On a more mundane level, her new height had the effect of completely throwing off her center of balance, so she couldn't walk properly, requiring her to use her telekinesis on herself to get around.
- Shinji And Warhammer 40 K. When Shinji's psychic powers first appear, he's reluctant to depend on them during battle since they interfere with his syncing capabilities. When he does it anyway to win a battle, he has no idea how to turn them off and as such, is booted from NERV. To solve the situation, he embarks on a pilgrimage to Javaal where he learns how to suppress his abilities enough for him to continue piloting and still have enough psychic power to vaporize a human-sized target from a few meters.
- Eleutherophobia: How I Live Now: Cassie morphs into a Yeerk and infests Tom. Since she's not used to mind-controlling, she accidentally opens too many of his memories as soon as she connects to his brain.
- Kyoshi Rising: Kyoshi can barely control her Earthbending. Justified in that she isn't very old, and thus hasn't had a chance to practice. Once she does get some practice, she becomes much more effective.
- The Last Firebender (sinistercinnamon): Towards the end, when the characters return to the Fire Nation and pray to Agni for guidance and forgiveness, he returns firebending to everyone in the group — including Ursa, Ty Lee, and Mai, who had not been benders before. Since they have no practice in controlling bending and Sozin's Comet is currently overhead and greatly strengthening firebending, they have a lot of trouble keeping their flames in check.
- Dominoes: Played for Drama in three different ways during Part 1:
- Firstly, the kidnapped children are injected with experimental drugs that dramatically boost their powers while also making them uncontrollably strong.
- Secondly, the inferior nullifier is turned into an airborne agent that, when unleashed, prevents anyone who inhales it from using metahuman abilities.
- Finally, the superior nullifier, known as the "Silver Bullet", can permanently prevent anyone whom it's injected into from using metagenic powers.
- Lelouch of the Apotheosis: Nunally's Geass takes the form of scrying to see anything and everything within a mile of her and once it evolves, she can also see the future to some extent. However, she can't turn it off and has to take sedatives to sleep.
- New Girl (mortimermcmirestinks): Because of Polaris's Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, Jesse sees images from the canon-game's story. Unfortunately for her, these visions come to her at random, and with no personal context for what any of it, it has a profoundly negative effect on her psychologically.There was a mirror. An anchor. A cell with "P6" printed across it. A floating corpse. Every time she saw someone eating an orange, she shuddered. Someone had turned on an old Justin Bieber song and she'd almost collapsed. She couldn't look into dark places anymore – not since her star had shown her that thing with the twisted antlers. She'd walked past a refrigerator and suddenly been overwhelmed with the image of a gigantic, bulging, pulsing, glowing, staring eye. And, for some reason, panini.
- In Adoption Nightmare, Brina, unlike Danny who had problems with intangibility the most, the former has problems with invisibility. This leads to some interesting situations...
- In A.A. Pessimal's Bad Hair Day, Watchwoman and Gorgon Yuri has her sunglasses broken after being punched by a troll. The Medusa proves herself prone to Power Incontinence as she blinks in a stunned unfocused way at several people. with interesting results. As one is a Troll and already made of stone, therefore he should be immune. He isn't... That is only the beginning of her woes as Medusas have other involuntary powers which aren't as well known as the turning-to-stone gig.
- Elsewhere in the Pessimal Discworld, normally mild-mannered and nerdy Wizard Ponder Stibbons discovers, in the heat of a battle with a native magic user in Howondaland, he can throw spells with the best of them and that it takes a restorative slap in the face from his concerned girlfriend note to bring him down to Disc again. And when later on, he marries the said girlfriend and settles down to family life, it is anything but humdrum. When the marital home is invaded by thugs with a grievance against his wife, Ponder views his home and pregnant wife as his version of the inviolable High Tower. He loses it completely, and behaves like an old-time Wizard: indiscriminate spells are flung out that not only kill, but vapourise, several of the attacking gang. The fact they also blow large holes in the fabric of the family home has the normal everyday Ponder Stibbons re-emerging, and fretting that his wife is going to kill him for this...
- While Bruno and Mirabel in The Two Seers can activate visions at will, it usually happens at random times, their eyes glowing green and freezing up whenever it happens. They also have trouble discerning visions from regular dreams and nightmares when they have nighttime visions.
- In Drafted!, Harry has issues with controlling his newfound angelic abilities."Oh, oh, right, that! Shit! Uh, hang on a minute, I always forget how to do this –" I concentrated fiercely, and after a few minutes I was pretty sure I had the majority of the Glow dimmed down to a mortal-friendly level. "Better?" I asked, a little nervously. So sue me. I'd like to see you blunder through your first week of Ascension without a bit of performance anxiety.
- In Just Add Water (Akela_Victoire), Mirabel's mermaid tail appears whenever she touches water whether she likes it or not, so sometimes it makes keeping it a secret really difficult. Considering her aunt could make it rain instantly doesn't help things.
- Us and Them: As a teenager, Sephiroth had a tendency to have his hands suddenly burst into flame. He took to wearing fireproof gloves to prevent himself from burning the town down. On the occasion he gets sick, he worries the same thing will happen.
- In Barefoot, Harry learns the nature of anything he touches (and anyone to a lesser extent if they're magical) but can't turn it off. The more magical something is and the more it's used, the more he learns; when Harry first touched his parents wands, the information overload sent him into a coma for a few hours.
- Later chapters have Harry Squicked out upon realizing he also sees all the people who've had sex there. When he enters Bellatrix's old room at Grimmauld Place, he mentions that he can't seem to touch anything without seeing an image of her "doing her thing".
- Harry in The Rigel Black Chronicles inadvertently gives Draco an uncontrolled emotion sense with a potion that was just supposed to reveal gifts. Draco has to regularly take magic-suppressing potions to reduce the disorientation and headaches of being out in public, which in turn impacts his class work (because he doesn't have much magic available), and being in crowds is difficult, especially if they get agitated. He does want to adapt and master it, though, rather than try to get rid of it.
- Also applies towards Harriet herself, at least in the early story, where her poor control of her magic leaves her spells extremely unpredictable. This varies from failing to do magic at all, to having her magic undo a set of rope bindings...until they revert back into straw. Eventually, this culminates in her magic simply detonating any potion she decides to work on, unless she wears a magic suppressor, though she gets better by the end of the story.
- four titles interprets Rose's "mind" powers as giving her permanent, uncontrollable telepathy:There's no way for you to ignore a complex and varied stream of input save doing it consciously. Unfortunately, you can't ignore it consciously; the thoughts of others reach into your mind and fill it with thoughts, tales, ideas.
- In Miracle Child, Gamzee can't control the fear-producing chucklevoodoos well because his lifelong habit of sopor slime consumption stopped them from developing normally. This does not endear him to the other trolls.
- Baby Mine: Valentina doesn't know about Stands, but unknowingly has a Stand that seems to be able to act by itself. It starts the plot by accidentally turning Giorno into a newborn baby, forcing his team to look after him until he turns back to normal.
- Diamond Eyes: Even seven years after the events of Diamond is Unbreakable, Shizuka Joestar has no more control over her Stand Achtung Baby compared to when she was a baby. She requires makeup and contacts so she can head out in public.
- The Worst Possible Sitch: Kim becomes a fugitive after she unlocks the influence of the Murder Fist. She has no control over it and is considered one of Global Justice's greatest threats.
- Pure Light: Purple dragons are channels for so much elemental power that they cannot fully bear the strain of it all. Over time, they become increasingly more physically unstable as their bodies begin to give in to the strain.
- Project Delta: A major plot point is Jane getting severe problems due to being unable to bleed off excess energy. Apparently, it is a rare but not unique problem, and if left untreated, the results are... not nice.
- The main characters suffer this in The Legend of Royal Blue and La Sylphide. Outside of their hero identities, Emilie can still "hear" negative energy as off-key music and Gabriel experiences clairvoyant visions, which give clues to the bad guys' next move but come at inconvenient times. Duusu explains to Gabriel that his Miraculous belongs to a group of five, wherein four are pairs that act as each other's opposite. Since the Peacock Pin's counterpart is not active at the time, the power is out of balance and unstable. This is likely the same case with Emilie's Miraculous.
- Tikki suffers from this in Scarlet Lady. While she can use her powers without a partner, doing so causes her Creation magic to run wild — Lucky Charm would keep creating objects endlessly, and Miraculous Cure unleashes a massive wave of ladybugs... from her mouth. She's also left incredibly ill afterwards. This explains why she can't just ditch Chloé and help the heroes out on her own.
- In Dead on Arrival, this is a common issue amongst the first generation of meta-humans. Many wind up dying when their Quirks activate for the first time.
- The Heroic Chronicles of a Young Man: Tenya Deguchiya and the other boys from the Hero Course share stories about accidentally activating their Quirks. Since Tenya's Quirk causes various effects via mathematical formulas, he took quite some time to learn how to do math without activating his Quirk, mentioning breaking several pencils. Manga, who's Quirk relies on onomatopoeia, mentions that when his Quirk first manifested, he couldn't speak three sentences without triggering it.
- Izuku in My Iron Giant develops the ability to manifest a Humongous Mecha around himself. Even after a serious upgrade that gives him far more control of it, the robot's systems will act on their own and he cannot leave the robot. Though the last part is largely because its systems are attached to his organs.
- In Raindancer, Izuku has a tendency to vomit up massive quantities of water when he's worked up, easily flooding rooms or even entire buildings. Because of this, every school he attends has to be outfitted with a drainage system to keep everyone from drowning. His father Hisashi suffers from similar issues, but on a much smaller scale.
- Izuku in Reflex has a combination of Super-Reflexes and Spider-Sense but it activates whenever he's in some form of danger. From his perspective, the ten minute UA Entrance Exam lasts several hours because his Quirk is almost constantly active.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- Mindset in "Ask Mindset and Tinker" has this, along with *ahem* regular incontinence.
- Taya almost kills Navarone through this in Diaries of a Madman. Trixie also loses her horn after a homemade spell blows up in her face.
- The Many Deaths of Rainbow Dash: As a result of a curse put on Twilight, all her spells become overpowered and uncontrollable, with teleport spells that transport her to the middle of the sea instead to the next city over, and magical beams which are more like Disintegrator Rays.
- In The Meaning of Harmony this happens because of the nightmares Sunset and Twilight have. On the first night of their journey, their exploding magic completely obliterates the top floor of the inn they're staying at. To prevent something like that from happening again, they take to sleeping within a shield spell from that point onwards.
- In the Pony POV Series, Twilight normally has no problem with this... except if she gets drunk. Last time she did, she lost control of her powers and Ponyville had to be reassured that Discord hadn't returned.
- RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse: In the non-canon story Nightmares Yet to Come, the tiny probably-an-alicorn Thesis has severe problems casting magic at first - just trying to lift something like an apple causes destruction (which the apple's owner had expected to happen). After some training, she gets better, at least in regards to apples, but whenever she gets emotional (which she does, being a child), things still get destructive, losing Trixie a table.
- The Triptych Continuum has her. Due to something going wrong during an attempt to become an alicorn, she is constantly cycling between the three major pony races. Among the results is that she has the raw strength of a Princess for each aspect — and no experience in directing or controlling it. When fear hits, things happen. Some of them can be lethal.
- The Twilight Child: Twinkle has repeated problems throughout the story with teleporting, with it usually kicking in whenever she's terrified, and with no control over where she goes. A common element is also that it never corrects for elevation, meaning Twinkle usually falls out of the sky wherever she appears.
- She also has a briefer, much less harmful case when she catches a cold, with her magic causing her voice to change every time she sneezes, starting with that of Princess Celestia, then Luna, then Cadance, then Twilight Sparkle.
- Twilight's First Day has this happen a couple of times, most notably when Twilight is straining too hard at trying to perform telekinetic magic, and winds up giving her mother a moustache, her father rabbit ears, and her brother a bunch of flowers in place of his mane.
- Demon's Curse: Half the reason Naruto doesn't use his magic (Combination of Vampiric Draining and Dem Bones necromancy) prompting him to ignore them as best as he can. His inexperience at using his magic (and reluctance to use/train said powers) really ends up biting him on the ass when he accidentally transfers a bit of his power to a monster and when a villain made his necromancy go haywire and used him as a conduit to summon a never-ending army. Luckily after the latter incident, Makarov and Mirajane train him to control it.
- What You Knead: After awakening his Sharingan, Sasuke initially struggles with keeping it turned off. As a result, he finds himself unwillingly memorizing various random moments whenever it activates itself.
- A Gamer In South Blue: Whenever Jack unlocks superhuman abilities, there's a trial and error period before he gets the hang of them.
- The Six Powers are measured from Level 1 to Level 50 and start with a failure rate of 80%, which only drops to 0% at Level 17 (5% less per level).
- The first time he uses his [Seimei Kikan] powers, he literally gives himself a heart attack, and the second time, he increases his arm's size...without knowing how to reverse it.
- In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, it's not uncommon for bloodliners to lose control or use accidentally their powers sometimes. This can happen for different reasons, including illness, traumas or strong emotions such as rage or excitement.
- Dampener removal in Poké Wars results in firing off attacks at random. After control is learned, the attacks are always lethal. In addition, pokémon whose bodies are on fire will start radiating massive amounts of heat uncontrollably.
- Paul in With Strings Attached. At his highest level of strength, he's so powerful that he can barely move without causing chaos. He has practised literally day and night to get to the point where he can at least walk around, but he has to keep constant watch on himself, keep his arms at his sides, etc. And to revert to his more manageable lower level of strength, he has to explode, creating a large glassy crater and pretty much wiping out everything around him. But even at "low" strength he has to fiercely regulate his behaviour.
- Downplayed in Patience. Right before a very agitated Pyrrha forcefully kisses Jaune, he notices the metal in their vicinity begin to rattle.
- Through Her Eyes: Ruby has this pretty bad. She can summon any Grimm she wants, but she can't control them even a little, or even keep them from attacking her. On the rare times that she even uses her Semblance, she'll limit it to their limbs (arms for grabbing or blocking, wings for flying, ect.). Part of the reason Ozpin lets her attend Beacon is that he hopes he and the other teachers can help her learn to control it.
- In this doujin, Momo gets too excited while helping Yumi learn how to swim by holding onto her hands and enters "Stealth Mode" by accident (although, in canon, she can't control it and has gone unnoticed for much of her life), terrifying Yumi as she thinks Momo is no longer there.
- In Always Having Juice, Cream doesn’t know how to control her powers of Super-Imagination. Vector does and is trying to teach her.
- In The Measure of a Titan, Raven is suspicious of David because he doesn't suffer from this despite his claims that he is inexperienced with his powers. According to all research on psychokinetic powers, all psychokinetics have to deal with this, especially if they haven't specifically trained themselves to control their powers. David's powers are almost a complete inversion: he can't use them at all if he loses control of his emotions. This is the first big hint that David isn't really psychokinetic.
- Played for Laughs in Teen Titans: Call of Blood, where Superboy bemoans his invulnerable skin can't be turned off (not without kryptonite, which his grandparents forbid,) because he wants to get a piercing.
- Isaiah in Sacrifice (Ravenshell) was a regular kid who, after being hit with mutagen, became a psychic with Telepathic and Telekinetic powers. Due to the age and the traumatic nature of his mutation, he is stuck Hearing Voices and is kept away from the rest of the mutants kept in containment because of it. Donnie being near him nearly drives him crazy due to the many thoughts bombarding him, creating a telekinetic whirlwind of objects trying to keep him away.April: He can hear every thought of every person and every mutant in this place. Mostly it's just jumbled noise, but it's so loud to him that he can't stand it... plus he's got other powers that he can't understand and can't control, like the telekinesis.
- In Touhou Tonari, this is a serious problem for Yuyuko due to her power to invoke death on others and forced her to isolate herself.
- The Undying: After being empowered by her own determination, Undyne is unable to stop emitting magic from her left eye.
- In the Better Bones AU, the cats in the afterlife of StarClan are capable collectively of great supernatural abilities like casting a Bolt of Divine Retribution, but this is based on their emotions and not something they can control or do on purpose.
- Bird features this as a running theme, with many of the parahumans at Alchemilla exhibiting dangerously uncontrollable powers.
