When you step the air under your feet turns solid so you have to go infinitely up
I find this amusingly humorous.
and not so much a superpower. More like a disability. Wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere and would have to resort to living in a wheelchair.
What if you sit down while in the air? Or do a backflip?
Hearing everybody else’s thoughts all the time, X-Men is probably the most popular example
EVERY superpower is a curse if you can’t turn it off.
Super speed. You’d have to slow down or die of heatstroke from air friction.
unless u use the speed force
I want to know what he writer was smoking when he came up with the ‘speed force’ idea.
Shape-shifting would almost certainly be agonizingly painful.
Only the first time. Then just leave out the nervous system going forward?
Ability to stop time.
As soon as you stop time, everything will go pitch black. The photons which refract off everything will be absorbed by your eyes instantaneously.
Assuming you could still see, it would be freezing everywhere as the heat would dissipate the moment you touched it.
Assuming you could still see, and wouldn’t freeze to death, if you were to unfreeze time, the human-shaped vacuum tube you created while walking from point A to B would collapse violently, killing you, and anyone else standing close to it.
This also assumes that with time stopped, you can push microscopic particles around. If not, then any movement at all will make every molecule around you act as radiation, and and dust will feel like tiny razor blades, ripping through your body.
Also, the ability to stop time doesn’t guarantee the ability to start it again.
Also, the ability to stop time doesn’t guarantee the ability to start it again.
That’s some Monkey’s Paw shit right here
Lack of light is something that does come up with the History Monks in Discworld. Although they only slow down time, so they can see things, just very dimly lit.
close to all of them if we take real physics into effect. Anything impractical can be made practical by just making its practicality part of the story.
Any sort of super strength without added toughness and motor control. You’d break your own body let alone everything around you pretty fast. Same for juggernaut movement. Or high jump type flight.
Also, forget picking up buildings or planes. Most things would break or crumble under their own weight as soon as you tried to pick them up.
Insert: >Superman is actually a psychokinetic
Pdf warning: https://www.qwantz.com/fanart/superman.pdf
Superman actually controls the inertia of matter he comes in contact with.
Or high jump type flight. Flashbacks to Morrowind. Poor Tarhiel.
Being able to turn into metal/sand/water/bats/lettuce or whatever without additional magic would destroy the structure and state of your brain immediately.
I think you guys are overthinking things too much. In a world in which some magical phenomenon can turn you into a lettuce, all of a sudden you draw the line in brain function?
Obviously the brain is just encoded into the lettuce DNA
Maybe it works like caterpillar goop in the cocoon. It’s goop, and not exactly a caterpillar anymore, but experiments have shown that there’s at least some persistence of being, even after the former caterpillar-goop has become a butterfly. E.g. If you train a caterpillar to react to a specific stimuli with a negative response, the resultant butterfly will respond to the same stimuli in the same way that the caterpillar did.
Disregard modernity. Embrace lettuce.
Forever War delved into the problems with super strength. The power armor took a humongous amount of training to be used finely enough in everyday tasks and not break something or someone. A simple handshake between someone in power armor and someone without could result in crushed bones or a ripped off arm. A great show of skill in using the power armor was the main character sitting down in office and writing a letter with pen and paper while wearing the armor!
Another great example of how dangerous superstrength is when dealing with non-superstrength people was in anime Beastars where one big carnivore accidentally ripped off the arm of his smaller non-carnivore friend. In-lore was said to be a very common thing to the extent that limb reattachment is a common medical procedure.
I had always wanted my supervisor to be flight obviously because life is the shit. I went to my local theme park after the Batman ride opened. I can hear what you thinking Batman doesn’t fly. This particular coaster, they put you in laying down on your back Lock you in and then the bat wing flips you over. Every negative G turn, unless you’re gripping onto things with your hands, you just rag doll. Even if you could magically work out flight it would just be a constant painful workout trying to keep your limbs from looking stupid while you’re doing it.
My Hero Academia deals with this
Teleportation. Unless truly instantaneous, you need to account for the fact that the earth moves 18 miles per second relative to the sun.
And isn’t the solar system moving at like 500000 miles an hour around the milkyway too?
Teleportation and timetravel both have this issue where you have to take a fuckload of moving parts we don’t even completely understand yet, into account.
Why would you teleport relative to the sun or the center of the milky way? Wouldn’t it be easier to teleport relative to the nearest surface?
The universe doesn’t care what you think is easier.
It moves, you moving from one point in the universe to another needs to take into account where all the moving parts are going.
Only instant teleportation, where nothing has had time to move, would work. But that would be akin to traveling back in time.
The Universe doesn’t give a damn about the Sun or the Milky Way, either, idiot. There is no defined central point for all coordinates. Everything is relative to something else or might as well be staying perfectly still for all intents and purposes.
Time travel would have to imply teleportation as well. If teleportation is actually instant or ftl, it would also be at least some level of time travel as you would be able to move outside your causal envelope.
Inertial systems are all equal in a certain relevant here sense, if there is no need for account for your movement relative to Sun, Galaxy, CMB, or anything else. Yes, in this sense, Sun also rotates around Earth.
On top of that you need to account for the fact that the earth’s surface is moving at different speeds depending on latitude and elevation. Even if you can do the calculations to hit your mark, there is most likely to be some energy mismatch that needs to be accounted for.
Very nicely addressed in the Jumper novels by Steven Gould.
This doesn’t make sense. The earth moves at very different speeds depending on what you compare it to. The only thing that makes sense is for the teleportation to be relative to the teleporter. Maybe it would still require taking into account rotation, instead of linear momentum. idk, still seems complicated.
But if it takes time, there’s a moment where you’re not there, and thus, the reference is lost.
Instant teleporting no problems though. I would even be okay with nightcrawler/Minecraft nether-like teleport where you travel through another locked in dimension.
mind reading. it would make you super sad super fast, because you’d always know when you’re being lied to.
I remember one of the tidbits I picked up from a psychology textbook was that people who were worse at knowing if their partner was lying were in happier relationships. Turns out that white lies are important.
Russia
Super strength is something I could see being problematic.
The movies always show the super strong hero picking up buses or trains with one hand, but in reality you have to lift such vehicles in specific places, or they will be damaged. Youtube is full of videos depicting cars falling from mechanic’s lifts due to improper lift point placement, or just old fasioned rust. Imagine Mr. Incredible going to pick up a bus in a state where the roads are salted, and just breaking off a handful of the frame.
This is the kind of gritty reality I’d like to see in a movie. Stuff is constantly breaking when the hero tries to pick it up, he has to go through a montage of classes on structure and how to choose the best place to grab onto things.
Also leverage. Unless the super strength comes with stability, lifing a boulder from the edge would just make the hero’s feet slip out from under them. He has to lift one side straight up until he can fit underneath to balance the thing. Then he has to hope that the ground below can withstand all the weight of the boulder pressing on the soles of his feet.
Invisibility. It would also make you blind.
Assuming that the invisibility is based on a physical property. You could also be psychically invisible where you manipulate others minds so they don’t see you.
But that would me more like “imperceivability”.
There is a character in My Hero Academia that can phase through objects, but when he activates his power he can’t see or hear anything as a result.
I think this is really the only thing there is, without assuming there isn’t “complete control” over it. You either sacrifice total invisibility to be a floating pair of eyes (or at least 1), or you’re blind but totally invisible. Making it truly impractical even if you have full control over the ability.
If everything but your pupils were invisible, and your pupils were 90% invisible, it’d probably be fine. Most humans can comfortably see with 10% of the light.
Great take on this in a D&D setting where a players character was able to roll incredibly high to notice an invisible person. The DM came up with this solution on the spot and made fantasy and logic weave together for a believable solution and an awesome situation:
What if light is just refracted around you. You would be able to see, but it would look all rainbow like.
Invisibility, imagine trying to get a license
Who needs a license when you’re invisible?
So are you just walking everywhere?
They can’t see me, they can’t stop me.
Laser cock.
my first thought was laser eyes. i pop in to see the comments and this is a way better answer
