Afternoon guys,

I’ve seen the idea of useless powers come up in a few different forms of media. Comics, obviously, but anyone who watched season 2 of Misfits might remember a character named Brian who had the very odd power of lactokinesis. Thats right, he could manipulate dairy products with his mind. On the surface, this is a bit laughable and despite some initial media interest the character quickly became quite risible. However, taking a dim view on this he used his powers to become a serial killer and actually succeeded in murdering most of the main cast before it was undone by a deus ex machina plot twist.

The picture I’ve attached here shows one of Doom’s more infamous defeats – losing a fight to Squirrel Girl. Again, a character who has seemingly useless powers but who uses them to devastating effect. In this case her squirrels pretty much dismantled Dooms armour by chewing the circuitry, I believe because it never occurred to the good Doctor that he might be attacked by a swarm of tree dwelling rodents. Funny that.

The last example I’ll give is a generic concept from a series of novels called Wild Cards. This series was initially established as sort of a shared universe for various authors but the best known is probably Game of Throne’s George R. R. Martin.

The basic premise of the books is that around the 1920’s an alien accidentally seeded earth’s atmosphere with a mutagenic agent. Although the vast majority of the population were unaffected various mutations did occur and were graded in accordance with a deck of cards to reflect the random nature of the changes, hence the name of the series. Aces were traditional superheroes, anyone who drew the Black Ace died from their mutation, Jokers were anyone who suffered a disfiguring mutation but no powers whereas Deuces were effectively aces with silly powers.

Now I’ve not read much of the series (the earlier volumes are out of print and very difficult to come by) but examples I am aware of are the ability to grow your hair at will and levitate 2 inches from the ground. There was another character who was technically a Deuce but was considered a Joker – she could turn the surface layer of her skin invisible but everything underneath was clearly visible.

Anyway, its got me pondering… is there really such a thing as a pointless powers or just bad applications of those powers? Oh and what are some of the silliest that you’ve ever heard of?

Let us know.

The writer of this piece was:
Stuart Duff aka (Stu)
Article: Mug of Duff
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