For example: being able to turn anything into food but anything can include living things such as humans

  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Avatar covered water bending including blood. My hero academia does a really good job with covering pretty big disadvantages to powers.

  • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    X-ray vision is horrible for cancer rates (though one could argue that, since it doesn’t work like normal x-ray in many comics, that it’s some other magic with the name x-ray for convenience).

    • 768@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Dark taught me that time travel will change something, but you won’t know because the time machine and it’s idea will be destroyed in its process.

  • Khrux@ttrpg.network
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    11 months ago

    A lot of people have read this question to mean the accurate scientific implications of everyday superpowers which isn’t really in the spirit of superpowers. I’ll try to say powers that feel generally altruistic or built for cute characters that have cruel implications.

    Healing us the classic cute superpower, but if the user of the power chooses to overheal somebody they could probably cause basically mega cancer.

    It’s pretty easy to imagine the the implications of controlling animals, and it’s a pretty good power to sit in the background as a utility power until the user decides to have every insect, rat and pigeon in the city bombard somebody.

    The ability to share memories is hard to be used villainously but two fucked applications would be to beam somebody’s traumatic experience I to somebody else’s head (or an experience that happened to one person that could trigger someone else’s PTSD), or if the user has trained themselves to be able to alter their memories to fictional events on demand, turning what is basically a truth finding superpower into an abuse of perceived honesty.

    Finally the superpower of using Reddit and Lemmy your whole life and generating a very standard way if responding but having the cruel and unusual twist of always sounding like fucking ChatGPT.

    • Chetzemoka@startrek.website
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      11 months ago

      The power of healing could be used to infinitely torture someone without killing them. Definitely has a dark side.

      All power must be applied ethically

  • kescusay@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Super speed. So… Let’s say you can move at light speed, and let’s just hand-wave away the problems like turning everything in front of you into an exploding ball of superhot plasma or shattering the Earth’s crust with every step. We’ll just take as a given that you can actually use this power.

    Would you want to?

    Let’s be clear… This isn’t teleportation, this is being able to move at super speed. That means you still experience all the motion between point A and point B. That could go one of two ways:

    • Your mind can also operate at super speed. Great! You’re running across the United States? You get to experience every single footstep. You get to experience the subjective time it takes to walk or run ~3000 miles - five to seven months. Depending on how much control over your subjective experience of time you have, maybe you can make it feel like you’re going at the speed of a car on a highway or something, but you’re still looking at a week or so of subjective time. Hope you like time alone, because you’re going to have millions of years of it, from your perspective, if you use your power a lot. But that’s still better than the alternative…
    • Your mind operates at normal speed. You are now the most dangerous thing on the planet. Every time you use your super speed, the landscape blurs around you and you have no idea where you are, how far you’ve gone, or how many people you’ve exploded into red mists without even realizing they’re there along the way. You could easily plow through a line of buses filled with orphans and puppies, and never even notice the trail of carnage behind you, because they were in New Jersey, and you stopped in San Diego.

    That’s why the comics always gloss over what it’s like to have super speed. The dark side of it is that for it to be anything but terrifyingly destructive to the entire planet, you have to have control. And in order for you to have control, you have to be capable of seeing where you’re going and reacting to obstacles. That means sped up perceptions, and thus the subjective hell of experiencing every single step you take at super speed.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      If you have the power of super speed you can control when it’s active. Likewise you can adjust the speed your mind processes things to always ensure you’re 1:1 with your frame of reference.

      • kescusay@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Being 1:1 with your frame of reference is actually one of the problems.

        Say you’re Barry Allen and you’re running from Los Angeles to New York city. Given the nature of your powers, you arrive there basically instantly as far as anyone else is concerned.

        But for you? You experience every single footstep you took along the way. You arrive bored out of your mind and possibly going insane after running across the continental United States in, for you, months of being absolutely alone in a world of utterly still statues and an unmoving sun.