The only thing worse is when the character themselves forgets they can do that (or similar). (Though, I will admit, there is a hilarious subversion I encountered in Ar Tonelico 3 in which a Character A does an elaborate thing to neutralize Character B's powers, confronts her gloating about how she's helpless and alone and yadda yadda... and then she just fucking stabs him).
As the ancient Dragaeran proverb goes: No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
This is my favorite thing. I've seen it in a few other pieces of media but not enough. It's so incredibly infuriating when a character gets depowered by the baddie and then just... goes "oh :(" and sits there? I get it's usually setup for a friend rescue but like. C'mon at least try. Like yeah, Supes got kryptonite'd and is weakened but weak for him is about average for a human you can still at least try to punch Lex in his dumb smug face.
I'd argue that even "average for a human" is underselling that Clark Kent is a slab of solid muscle well over six feet tall. He probably gets away with minor feats of superhuman strength all the time because the person whose desk he's moving at the Daily Planet office goes, "Just look at him, he probably grew up carrying a hundred-pound hog under each arm uphill both ways to kindergarten."
I was definitely lowballing there, I just hate him suddenly turning into a fucking noodle because he isn't superhuman anymore. Like the only options are ridiculous strength or barely able to pick up a pen.
I thought kryptonite doesn’t just take away his powers, it also gives him basically acute radiation poisoning, so he’s powerless and also trying very hard not to throw up.
I've seen it be pretty inconsistent depending on the writer, but I'll absolutely give him a pass when it's making him sick/killing him. It was just one I see the most where the gloating is "hah you're weak like a normal human now." But I definitely see it with others and it's equally annoying there too.
I think the X-Men comics Lifedeath and Lifedeath 2 are some of the best explorations I've seen of a superhero losing powers. Storm gets accidentally depowered and has to come to terms with how much of her identity she just lost. She's nearly catatonic at first. She's just lying in bed wrapped in sheets and it's so scary how not okay she looks. "Once upon a time, there was a woman who could fly." But one of the reasons so much of her identity was wrapped up in her powers was because of what it meant to have her emotions tied to the weather. If she let herself take risks and have wild feelings, it could kill a lot of people, or at least cause a great deal of property damage. Losing her powers was not a positive thing, but it did allow her to grow as a person. It also prompted her to examine other ways in which she'd become separated from her identity and her roots. She's a black woman immigrant who is definitely written as queer in this era, so there's a lot there. (Somehow they manage to write a complex and haunting take on colonialism while still doing the Africa Is A Single Place thing. It's not perfect, but it's still damn fucking good.) While she was without her powers, she challenged Cyclops to one-on-one combat, he could use his powers, for leadership of the X-Men. She won. Storm became the leader of the X-Men while powerless. She's quite good with a knife, as it happens. So it is possible to write someone who absolutely collapses when they lose their powers while still writing an amazingly strong person who's a hero through and through. Just if you're gonna do that, maybe the emotional arc should be timed to the length of power loss? I dunno. (Side note: the weapon that depowered Storm was meant for Rogue. Whenever I see the movie meme that goes, "'There's a cure?!' asked the girl that kills everything she touches. 'Hey shut up we're perf' replied the girl that makes clouds," I think about this. The totality of this hits me like a train. I am completely demolished by this.)
Spoiler: nsfw, gore I'm not sure if a female character still masturbating with bad genital injury is a sign a story was written by a cis man or just by someone with no concept of biology, since most cis men could probably extrapolate that they wouldn't want to masturbate with a badly injured dick either.
tfw u see a fanfic that describes a really cool concept in its summary but then you look at the word count and it's like less than 1k words, which is barely enough even to scratch the surface of the concept the summary is proposing
Mild gripe, lovely fic, everyone just speaks in the same way (stilted? Formal?), it is a tad maddening
this happened a long time ago but i just remembered it today: one of my favourite fanfics got abandoned by the author because the fandom was using tropes the author wasn't comfortable with. Like, the author herself didn't use those tropes at all. But she still dropped the work over it and yeah that's her right but god i am bitter
All the new fics for my OTP are heat fics. please just write them in love without robot hormones forcing the issue
Everybody's got their own reads on the nuances of a character and that's whatever, but every once in a while you see somebody's take on a character you like that's just so wildly, objectively wrong that it's a little offensive. Like, I dunno where you even got that from, but feel free to put it back.
when an author clearly knows horses enough to vividly describe bad riding posture, but somehow missed the fact that adults riding double on a small pony is usually a Bad Plan
Dear author; if you write an elaborate bash fic and part of the reason is the original material's awful attitude towards queer people, maybe not showing an awful attitude towards queer people of your own would be a good idea.
when the summary and tags makes it look like a redemption fic based on Standard Tropes but it's actually characters in a mutually toxic destructive spiral
dear fanfic author: I realize Jon Sims has the emotional intelligence of a grilled cheese sandwich but there is only so much totally obvious mutual pining I can take before I actually explode. please. please just make the boys kiss. or alternatively write an actual slow burn where they don’t speedrun the first part and then spend 90% of the fic in the very last stage of relationship development before it evolves into Romance.
