Superheroes have endured as a genre for decades, and they only keep chugging on as strong as ever. The superhero genre is the perfect vehicle to tell stories about hope, adversity, and standing up for what you believe in no matter the cost. Superheroes can transcend time because they are our own ideals given form and unleashed upon a world, and those types of stories will always be important. Of course, one of the other major reasons they’ve survived so long is because they’re just plain cool. Everyone wants to have superpowers, from little kids hearing about them for the first time to grizzled adults who reminisce about what they’d do with powers. However, as awesome as superpowers are, sometimes they can only work in comic books. Some of the most popular powers in comics have side effects so disastrous that they will tear your life apart, and no benefit could ever match the anguish they bring you. So why don’t we take a look at seven of those powers that seem really cool on the surface, but fall apart when you think about them for too long.
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1) Body Alteration
Whether this is in the Plastic Man stretching sense, or the Ms Marvel being able to make herself look like anyone else sense, the ability to fundamentally alter your own body is a terrifying concept. It obviously seems cool, because turning your body into any shape or size like your name is Monkey D. Luffy is an awesome creative exercise, and who hasn’t wanted to make themselves look a certain way? Of course, the catch is that you run the risk of losing your real self along the way. If you spend all your time forcing yourself to be one thing, you stray more and more away from who you really are, and that creates a dissonance between your mind and your body. Either you always have to return to your original form and you grow to hate its imperfections, or you can permanently alter yourself, but then you lose your real self along the way. Imagine the horror of being able to permanently change yourself, and then waking up with horror to realize you look nothing like how you think you should. This power comes with the downside of self-inflicted body dysmorphia to the degree of no longer knowing your own general shape, and that just sounds like a bad time.
2) Immortality
Nobody wants to die, so the idea of living forever sounds great in theory. Of course, as characters like Vandal Savage and Hawkwoman have shown us, infinite lives only serve to separate you from the people you love. You have to watch as all of your loved ones fade away into dust, and know that you can never join them. Over and over and over, you will meet people only to watch them age in what to you must feel like the blink of an eye. It’s not as if cutting yourself off from people is the answer either, because humans are social creatures, and we need each other. You either have unending grief or infinite loneliness. Of course, the other option is that you become so detached from humanity that you see yourself as separate from them, like Ra’s al Ghul, which carries its own sets of problems, the first among them being insanity. People are not made to be set apart from their fellow person, and immortality is the ultimate separation. You’re close enough to be with other people, to get to know them and love them, but you live knowing that they are going to die and you never will. You will have to keep going forever.
3) Super Strength
I’m not talking about being able to lift cars like Luke Cage or Spider-Man, though they will feel the problems to a lesser extent, but I’m talking about the absurdly strong characters. People like Superman, Thor, the Hulk, all of these characters live in worlds that will crumble if they so much as step the wrong way. We’ve all heard Superman’s world of cardboard speech, and if you haven’t you definitely should go watch it. These characters have to have insane levels of self control and restraint, and can never let themself relax or they’ll smash their thumb through their phone when they’re trying to text. Imagine trying to flush the toilet and needing to specifically focus on not snapping the handle off every single time. Now think about doing that with everything. That’s not even getting into how interacting with other people would look. The anxiety of shaking someone’s hand and accidentally turning it into a strawberry and bone chunk mush would be enough to drive me insane. It’s just not worth it, even if benchpressing buildings would look awesome.
4) Reality Warping
Who doesn’t want to have whatever they want, whenever they want? You shouldn’t, trust me. Just take a look at just a few reality warpers; Sentry, Jamie Braddock, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Molecule Man, Gwenpool. None of these people are anywhere close to any kind of stable, and that’s true for most reality warping people and beings. Legitimately one of the only mentally sound reality-warpers I can think of is Franklin Richards, and that’s only because of how he was raised. The fact is that being able to bend the laws of everything to do whatever you want fundamentally separates you from it. If your imagination dictates the world around you, then everything and everyone becomes less real. Imagine accidentally erasing someone from existence, or just becoming so detached from humanity that you see everyone else as as malleable as a rock to you. And then there’s the mental toll getting everything would take. You would slowly drown in an ever increasing pile of things and experiences that fail to fill the gaping hole of boredom and stagnation inside of your chest. Simply put, if you never have to work hard for anything, nothing ever feels rewarding.
5) Enhanced Senses
Being able to see, hear, feel, etc. leagues better than humans should be able to sounds really awesome until you realize what an overstimulating nightmare it would be. The human brain is only built to take so much information at once in certain ways, so when you first develop these powers even the slightest noise or touch could make an earthquake go off inside your skull. But let’s assume you get used to these powers over time, in which case it still sucks. The slightest non-smooth material would feel like sandpaper on your skin. You taste every chemical and preservative that goes into all of your food. Someone farts ten feet away and you’re choking like it’s tear gas. And what if your senses are on Superman’s level? Can you imagine hearing everything in the world at the same time? All of that pain and screams, which would always be shouted louder than the happy moments. This power is either incredibly inconvenient or mind-shattering, and I want neither of those things.
6) Telepathy
The ability to always be able to know the thoughts or deeply held secrets of other people is very, very dangerous. It would be so tempting to take small peeks every now and again, maybe unintentionally or because you’re trying to help, but at the end of the day it would be massively invading their privacy. It fosters distrust between you and the people around you, where they can never be sure you’re not looking inside their head. This power is a hundred times worse if it comes with the ability to control other people’s minds. Even if you never choose to use this power to influence others, the people around you may forever be suspicious of you, and you would be able to feel their suspicion as if it were your own. This is the type of power that can so easily corrupt, and it’s understandable why so many previously virtuous telepaths, like Charles Xavier, eventually take a trip down the villain road. Those types of villain stories are easy to tell with this power, so maybe that should be a warning about how dangerous reading other people’s minds can be.
7) Super Speed
The final entry on our list, but definitely the one that arrived here first. Even ignoring the physics-shattering issues of running anywhere close to the speed of light and what that would do to your body, let’s just examine the biggest issue about super speed. You can move so fast that the world around you looks like it’s standing still, but you also think that fast. One of the biggest issues for speedsters like the Flash and Quicksilver is that they are living in a world constantly moving forward one frame at a time. To us they blitz across the globe in a blur, but to them they just ran around the entire circumference of the world, one step at a time. To have super speed is to live in a frozen world populated by statues. In the comics, these characters usually handwave these effects, but even they occasionally reveal how exhausting and boring it is to live like this. Imagine you, in our very real world, unable to push aside those side effects. Every sentence would be a year-long torture.
So there we have seven superpowers that are definitely awesome in concept, but unfortunately fall apart when they meet real life consequences. A lot of superpowers are unabashedly awesome, it’s just that these ones come with serious side effects. As a piece of advice, if you ever find a genie or wizard that offers to grant you any superpower, first make sure it’s not a monkey’s paw situation, and then think very, very carefully about the implications. Maybe pick one like flying, that seems good all around. But either way, which superpower do you think is the worst, or at least deserves to sit on this list? Let us know in the comments below!
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(Photo by Bruce Glikas/Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic)
