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Unstable Powered Woman
- 299 statements
- 56 feature instances
- 21 referencing feature instances
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This trope is about a female character who starts off in a pretty good place. She's surrounded by people and probably wants to do good. But then somehow, she comes into great power (political, supernatural, or otherwise) and proceeds to completely lose it. Maybe she cannot control this new power and winds up causing great damage. Maybe she was repressed and isolated from a young age, providing the foundation for her ensuing instability. Maybe the event that gave or awakened her superpowers was very traumatic, or she becomes Drunk with Power; either can make her mental health take a dramatic nosedive. Maybe the power amplified "feminine" weaknesses that were already there. Either way, she eventually becomes a danger to herself and others. The story mines great drama from contrasting this pretty young thing with her ensuing corruption and the mess that she inevitably causes. This trope has its roots in Women Are Delicate, particularly the Hysterical Woman — the portrayal of women as emotional and unstable, and thus ill-equipped to handle the responsibilities that come with their newfound power. Thus, many superpowered versions of this trope will explicitly tie the woman's destructive potential to her feelings, if not her very womanhood. While there are powerful male characters who fall from grace, the ways in which they do so are much more varied than a woman doomed to lose control due to her feelings or a lack of mental fortitude. Bonus points if it falls to existing male characters to clean up after the Unstable Powered Woman, often by arranging it so that she loses the power that she obtained. Compare the Good Girl Gone Bad, where a female character becomes nasty and villainous due to a tragic event, the Mystical Waif, a frail young woman with mysterious powers, and the Apocalypse Maiden, which also juxtaposes an often young and female character with mass destruction — the end of the world. Also compare The Ophelia, with which this can overlap if she is portrayed as lovely despite her insanity, and Puberty Superpower for another situation in which someone suddenly acquires a power and may find it difficult to control; in some cases, it overlaps with this trope if a female character acquires her powers during puberty. God Save Us from the Queen! and Good Princess, Evil Queen are related — a young, less powerful woman can be good and heroic, but a queen is probably nuts. See also Emotional Powers, With Great Power Comes Great Insanity, Angst Nuke, Unstable Powered Child. No Real Life Examples, Please! |
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| Unstable Powered Woman / int_10332de5 | type |
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Deconstructed in Iron Widow with Wu Zetian. She's the most powerful Chrysalis pilot currently alive, but her country's virulently misogynistic ideals (and the fact that she killed her co-pilot in self-defense) has her immediately painted as this. They try to kill her before realizing that she's too powerful to waste, then abuse and control her through various means. Once she's killed the two Emperor-class Hunduns for them, the government decides to kill her anyway, and mortally wound her beloved Shimin in the attempt. Zetian's Roaring Rampage of Revenge sees her kill the entire ruling class and become emperor of Huaxia by force. | |
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Sherlock: The final episode of Season 4 introduces Eurus Holmes, Sherlock's sister, an inhumanly brilliant criminal mastermind described as being able to gain complete mental control over others just by talking to them for a few minutes. The plot of the episode is set in motion when she enacts an escape scheme she has spent years planning, eventually gaining absolute power over the high-security prison she was previously being held in. It's set up to look like she's planning world domination. At the end of the episode, however, Sherlock deciphers her clues for him and tracks her down to her hideaway, where he finds her curled in a ball and sobbing, claiming all she really wanted was his brotherly love. Sherlock remarks that underneath all her brilliance, she was just a scared little girl after all, with the implication that she was unable to handle the power she thought she wanted. | |
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Tales of Legendia: The female lead, Shirley Fennes, is a Ferines — a race of aquatic people that have been at odds with humanity for centuries. Even more than that, she is the Merines, who has the ability to hear the voice of the Ferines' god and let him act through her. Later in the story, a group of antagonistic Ferines perform a ritual that revives the god in Shirley in the hopes that said god will wage war against humanity. Their plan nearly succeeds because around the same time, Shirley confesses her feelings to the protagonist Senel, who rejects her because he is still in love with her deceased older sister. After she runs away, her only remaining friend, Fenimore, is then killed by an army of attacking humans. These events push Shirley over the edge and make her much more susceptible to the god's influence, as her pain and rage is amplified. She spends the next portion of the game being one of the major antagonists, encouraged by the priest who had been plotting this all along. | |
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X-Men: Rogue has to avoid any skin-to-skin contact. If she does touch someone with bare skin, she absorbs their life force, which can cause death if she touches them for too long. If she touches a mutant or other superhuman, she also temporarily steals their powers. In either event, she also absorbs the target's memories and personality, which has led to semi-regular mental health problems due to having so many different personalities, most of them hostile to her, in her head. Jean Grey was a heroic member of the X-Men up until the events of The Dark Phoenix Saga, where she is possessed by the Phoenix Force, one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel Universe. While she initially handles this new power well, Jean is targeted by the supervillain Mastermind, who shatters her control over them in a mental battle. This causes her to lose it and become Dark Phoenix, an intergalactic menace who casually indirectly kills billions of people by devouring a star, and by doing so paints a big target on her back. This storyline was extremely influential, and many comics storylines parallel or homage this directly. Polaris was in Genosha the day that Cassandra Nova launched a genocidal attack that killed nearly every mutant in the nation. This was the original start of her personality becoming unhinged. Later, when her long-time Love Interest Havok decided to leave her at the wedding altar to be with a woman whom he just met, she went completely off the deep end, adopted a costume similar to her father Magneto, and attempted to murder everyone there. Storm once went to negotiate with/distract Doctor Doom while the rest of the X-Men launched a rescue mission. Unfortunately for them, Doom was already onto their game and captures most of the team in sadistic deathtraps. For Storm herself, he encases her entire body in chrome, which has the effect of triggering her intense claustrophobia. As she panics, she unconsciously triggers a massive tropical storm that threatens to destroy the east coast. When the X-Men finally force Doom to release her, Storm has regressed into a savage, uncontrolled state that is called "Rogue Storm" — a character that both the cover and the story parallels to Dark Phoenix. In fact, Colossus uses their past experience with Dark Phoenix to calm Storm down enough that she turns back to normal and dismisses the storm. |
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In Suikoden V, Falenan Queen Arshhat becomes this after taking hold of the Sun Rune, one of the 27 True Runes, resulting in her destroying Lordlake before being put down so as to prevent her from potentially wiping out the entire nation of Falena itself. She's actually a Reasonable Authority Figure until the power of the Sun Rune corrupts her into insanity. | |
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The Vision: In The Vision (2015), Virginia Vision is based on the Vision (which means there's some Ultron tech within her) with a facsimile of the above-mentioned powerful-but-mentally-fragile Scarlet Witch. When her children are threatened, she becomes increasingly homicidal and ruthlessly murders anyone who might pose a threat to her family. This sets off a string of events that culminates in her murdering brother-in-law Victor Mancha, then murdering the family dog, and finally committing suicide. | |
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The biggest twist of Magic Knight Rayearth involves Princess Emeraude desperately trying to defy this trope. Her fear of becoming this is why she summoned the Magic Knights to kill her, as she doesn't want Cephiro to be destroyed due to her increasing instability as Pillar. When Zagato dies, she descends into madness and forces the Knights to kill her. | |
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Doom Patrol: The villainess Madame Rouge, who had Rubber Man powers, also had an evil split personality after an automobile accident. She grew increasingly unstable as the run went on to the point of almost literally tearing herself in two as her good and evil sides fought for control. Eventually she recovered, only for Captain Zahl to reawaken her dormant evil as a lead-in to the final story, which had her kill her old Brotherhood allies and join him in killing the heroes. | |
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In the anime adaptation of 11eyes, every single female character that has a romantic relationship with one of the male characters falls into this trope. Liselotte, Yuka, Superbia and Yukiko all go completely mad with grief the moment that their Love Interest seemingly loses interest in them or dies. In particular, Liselotte, an exceedingly powerful witch, becomes a completely Ax-Crazy Omnicidal Maniac bent on destroying the world itself after her lover is killed, and is thus the main antagonist of the series. | |
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Runaways: In the "Homeschooling" arc, Klara is caught in an explosion and suffers a concussion, causing her to mistake Karolina (who had activated her glowing alien form in order to use her powers) for a fire. Since Klara is deathly afraid of fire, her Green Thumb powers suddenly turn into Gaia's Vengeance in order to protect her, trapping her teammates in a dense forest of vines. And then Chase, upset because his beloved pet Old Lace died in the explosion, decides to take out his rage on Klara, which naturally just makes her more scared and causes her powers to lash out even more. | |
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Storm once went to negotiate with/distract Doctor Doom while the rest of the X-Men launched a rescue mission. Unfortunately for them, Doom was already onto their game and captures most of the team in sadistic deathtraps. For Storm herself, he encases her entire body in chrome, which has the effect of triggering her intense claustrophobia. As she panics, she unconsciously triggers a massive tropical storm that threatens to destroy the east coast. When the X-Men finally force Doom to release her, Storm has regressed into a savage, uncontrolled state that is called "Rogue Storm" — a character that both the cover and the story parallels to Dark Phoenix. In fact, Colossus uses their past experience with Dark Phoenix to calm Storm down enough that she turns back to normal and dismisses the storm. | |
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In the backstory for Naruto and Boruto, we learn of Kaguya Otsutsuki, the instigator of nearly all of the story's events. There are a lot of conflicting stories and ideas about exactly what type of person she was beforehand (even in-universe), but it's generally believed that she was a caring person until absolute power went to her head. She comes from a race of "celestial beings" that travel to planets in search of a "God Tree", an alien plant form that lands on a planet and drains its inhabitants of their blood and life force. The fruit from the tree grants those who eat it a power that comes to be called "chakra". Originally, she and another relative came to take the fruit for the benefit of their clan, but she decided to protect the Earth and its inhabitants instead, eventually falling in love with a human emperor and becoming his concubine. While she was pregnant, an invasion from another nation led to the death of her friend and attendant, and Kaguya lost all faith in humanity, decided to eat the fruit, and create peace by force. She became worshipped as a goddess, and this eventually went to her head, where she became so power-hungry that when her sons manifested the ability to use chakra, she tried to take it backnote At first, she tried to do so without killing them, but her methods became more ruthless the longer they resisted. under the belief that chakra should belong to her alone. | |
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The Flash: In one 1970s story, Barry Allen's lab partner, Patty Spivot, was nearly struck by similar chemicals that gave him his powers. Barry immediately hypothesized a scenario where the unstable chemicals she was bathed in meant "Ms. Flash" caused more problems than she solved, and therefore moved her out of the way before they struck. Note that his reaction when the same thing happened to a teenaged boy had been to immediately recruit the kid as a partner. This was something of a Recycled Script from an earlier story involving an extradimensional female speedster whose lack of control was only in our dimension, and a Johnny Quick story in which his secretary accidentally duplicated his formula to become Joanie Swift, until he eventually convinced her she didn't want to be a superhero by using her fear of mice. | |
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The Witcher (2019): In the season 2 finale, Ciri — a waifish teen with mysterious powers — gets possessed by Voleth Meir, a being from another dimension, unleashing chaos and monsters upon Kaer Morhen and resulting in the deaths of several witchers. Vesemir wants to kill her but Geralt staves him off enough to bargain with Voleth Meir. | |
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X-Men: Evolution: Jean Grey starts to lose control of her psychic powers in the season 2 episode "Power Surge". Notably, unlike the previously-mentioned examples in the "Comic Books" and "Films - Live Action" folders, the Phoenix Force is not involved at all in this situation. When she loses all control, Rogue needed to drain her power to get them back under control, and she resumes training with Professor X in order to keep them that way. A montage of future events in the finale shows that in this continuity, Jean will struggle with the Phoenix Force as well. Rogue undergoes one of her own in the Season 3 episode "Self Possessed", all the various personas and their respective abilities she's absorbed over the course of the series activating within her at random. An accidental absorbing of Mystique's powers while in her disguise as "Risty" causes Rogue to use her shapeshifting powers to literally transform into those personas and run amuck through Bayville before the other X-Men are able to get her to calm down. Scarlet Witch as well, who was even committed to a mental hospital because she couldn't control her powers. Or rather, Magneto felt she couldn't. Once Mystique breaks her out and has her train with Agatha Harkness, Wanda seems to be in complete control, albeit wanting to kill her father as revenge. While she does occasionally lose control of her powers in a fit of rage, she proves herself a hero at heart when she's the only member of the Brotherhood to join the X-Men in the fight against Apocalypse. The aforementioned finale montage confirms she had a full Heel–Face Turn afterwards, |
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Gender-inverted in Claymore. While all Claymores are vulnerable to The Corruption, female Claymores can restrain themselves long enough to be useful before faltering, while male Claymores Awaken uncontrollably. After the first generation of men was entirely corrupted, the Claymores became an Amazon Brigade, with most of their members unaware that male Claymores even existed. | |
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Knights of the Old Republic: Played with when it comes to the female Jedi in the party. Juhani already came from a traumatic background before her Force Powers manifested. Even with her notoriously hot and cold temperament, she can be seen as an inversion, as it's the Jedi Code and training that's keeping her from lashing out. Bastila will spare no opportunity to point out how ever-present the Dark Side's threat is and while she does fall at the game's climax, it's less due to anything gendered and more Being Tortured Makes You Evil. | |
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Katarina Waters portrayed a supernatural character called Winter in TNA, where she initially appeared as a reflection that only Angelina Love could see and speak to. She had some kind of powers of hypnosis, and was convinced that she and Angelina were destined to be together, eventually brainwashing her to turn on Velvet Sky and join her. | |
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Green Lantern: Gender-inverted with Hal Jordan in the Emerald Twilight storyline, where his response to Coast City being destroyed by Mongul was to use his Power Ring to mentally recreate the city down to every living thing, including his dead parents. When the Guardians of the Universe told him to stop, he stole every Power Ring but one, killed every other Green Lantern, including his old enemy Sinestro, and would eventually try to remake the universe as he saw fit in Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!. | |
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Subverted in Captain Marvel. Carol Danvers, unknowingly indoctrinated by the Kree, is told her energy powers have to be tempered by restraining her emotions, lest she lose control. Once she realizes this is just a lie to keep her their prisoner, Carol lets her energy run completely loose, becoming magnitudes more powerful and still in control. | |
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InCryptid: When Sarah overexerts herself by rewriting the Covenant team's memories, it damages her mind for years, to the point that it's only in Imaginary Numbers, five years later, that she's healed enough to go back to Oregon. And then the Johrlac hive finds her and forces her to start her metamorphosis into a Johrlac queen (read: Apocalypse Maiden). | |
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Marvel Universe: Fantastic Four: The Invisible Woman was once subjected to a villain's mental manipulation and developed a dark personality called "Malice", which caused her to dress in darker, skimpier, bondage-themed clothes and a more evil, sinister personality. Infamously, she is literally freed from the villain's control by her husband Reed slapping her across the face. Runaways: In the "Homeschooling" arc, Klara is caught in an explosion and suffers a concussion, causing her to mistake Karolina (who had activated her glowing alien form in order to use her powers) for a fire. Since Klara is deathly afraid of fire, her Green Thumb powers suddenly turn into Gaia's Vengeance in order to protect her, trapping her teammates in a dense forest of vines. And then Chase, upset because his beloved pet Old Lace died in the explosion, decides to take out his rage on Klara, which naturally just makes her more scared and causes her powers to lash out even more. Scarlet Witch: The Scarlet Witch, despite being one of Marvel's most powerful magic users, has had a variety of storylines where her fragile mental state has devastating consequences for the universe. It started when she was forced to forget a Deal with the Devil where she and The Vision have their idealized Nuclear Family. Suddenly remembering them starts a psychotic break that triggers Avengers Disassembled and later feeds into House of M, and it often falls to her father, brother, or occasionally Doctor Strange to keep her in check. The Vision: In The Vision (2015), Virginia Vision is based on the Vision (which means there's some Ultron tech within her) with a facsimile of the above-mentioned powerful-but-mentally-fragile Scarlet Witch. When her children are threatened, she becomes increasingly homicidal and ruthlessly murders anyone who might pose a threat to her family. This sets off a string of events that culminates in her murdering brother-in-law Victor Mancha, then murdering the family dog, and finally committing suicide. X-Men: Rogue has to avoid any skin-to-skin contact. If she does touch someone with bare skin, she absorbs their life force, which can cause death if she touches them for too long. If she touches a mutant or other superhuman, she also temporarily steals their powers. In either event, she also absorbs the target's memories and personality, which has led to semi-regular mental health problems due to having so many different personalities, most of them hostile to her, in her head. Jean Grey was a heroic member of the X-Men up until the events of The Dark Phoenix Saga, where she is possessed by the Phoenix Force, one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel Universe. While she initially handles this new power well, Jean is targeted by the supervillain Mastermind, who shatters her control over them in a mental battle. This causes her to lose it and become Dark Phoenix, an intergalactic menace who casually indirectly kills billions of people by devouring a star, and by doing so paints a big target on her back. This storyline was extremely influential, and many comics storylines parallel or homage this directly. Polaris was in Genosha the day that Cassandra Nova launched a genocidal attack that killed nearly every mutant in the nation. This was the original start of her personality becoming unhinged. Later, when her long-time Love Interest Havok decided to leave her at the wedding altar to be with a woman whom he just met, she went completely off the deep end, adopted a costume similar to her father Magneto, and attempted to murder everyone there. Storm once went to negotiate with/distract Doctor Doom while the rest of the X-Men launched a rescue mission. Unfortunately for them, Doom was already onto their game and captures most of the team in sadistic deathtraps. For Storm herself, he encases her entire body in chrome, which has the effect of triggering her intense claustrophobia. As she panics, she unconsciously triggers a massive tropical storm that threatens to destroy the east coast. When the X-Men finally force Doom to release her, Storm has regressed into a savage, uncontrolled state that is called "Rogue Storm" — a character that both the cover and the story parallels to Dark Phoenix. In fact, Colossus uses their past experience with Dark Phoenix to calm Storm down enough that she turns back to normal and dismisses the storm. |
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Marvel Cinematic Universe: Like her comics counterpart, Wanda Maximoff is not exactly the most stable person. The death of her parents caused her and her brother Pietro to join HYDRA, and even after her Heel–Face Turn, she is still one of the most dangerous and unstable members of the Avengers. Her botching a mission in Lagos sets off the events of Captain America: Civil War. Come WandaVision, her lifetime of grief, loss, and sorrow has caused her to finally snap, retreating into a fantasy world of her own creation and sucking countless innocent bystanders in with her. Fortunately, she eventually regains her bearings and control over her powers... only for her to snap all over again under the influence of the Darkhold in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Subverted in Captain Marvel. Carol Danvers, unknowingly indoctrinated by the Kree, is told her energy powers have to be tempered by restraining her emotions, lest she lose control. Once she realizes this is just a lie to keep her their prisoner, Carol lets her energy run completely loose, becoming magnitudes more powerful and still in control. |
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The Stormlight Archive: Queen Aesudan became regent of Alethkar when her King went to war, but soon began living in hedonistic excess while abandoning the common folk to starve, abetted by sycophantic priests. By Oathbringer, the capital is in chaos and Aesudan has become a Willing Channeler for Yelig-Nar the Unmade, who ultimately consumes her. Of course, while she was certainly a flawed and power-hungry woman on her own, she was also under the influence of two Unmade. | |
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Halo 5: Guardians: When Cortana is given access to the virtually infinite Forerunner network the Domain, she turns from a friendly companion to a ruthless AI supremacist with goals of galactic domination. This is in complete reversal to her depiction in Halo 4, where even when collapsing due to the AI equivalent of Alzheimer's she remained good-hearted and devoted to her loved ones. | |
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Frozen plays with the trope. Elsa had repressed her ice powers since childhood, so they are an additional stressor when she is crowned queen. Not knowing how to handle them in public, she keeps the castle closed off from the rest of the world until her coronation day. When she reveals her powers to the court while arguing with her sister, who has had the powers hidden from her, over Elsa's decision to close off the castle again, she is branded a monster and runs away to the wilderness. In doing so, she embraces her powers but inadvertently plunges Arendelle into an Endless Winter for which she is demonized. However, thanks to The Power of Love and The Power of Family, she is able to rein in her powers and comfortably settle into the role of a Benevolent Mage Ruler by the film's end. The movie also gives reasons for her difficulty handling the situation besides her natural character; her parents also didn't know how to handle it and started the isolationist "Conceal, Don't Feel" strategy in an attempt to protect her. | |
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Jean Grey was a heroic member of the X-Men up until the events of The Dark Phoenix Saga, where she is possessed by the Phoenix Force, one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel Universe. While she initially handles this new power well, Jean is targeted by the supervillain Mastermind, who shatters her control over them in a mental battle. This causes her to lose it and become Dark Phoenix, an intergalactic menace who casually indirectly kills billions of people by devouring a star, and by doing so paints a big target on her back. This storyline was extremely influential, and many comics storylines parallel or homage this directly. | |
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On I Am Not Okay With This, Sydney's powers are tied to her emotional state. She tries to suppress her emotions and just chill out so that she doesn't unleash them, only for Brad to ruin that at the High-School Dance by reading from her diary in front of the whole school, causing him to explode his head. As she puts it: | |
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A frequent occurance in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls when girls in the human world get access to Equestrian Magic they weren't granted like the protagonists. In the first film, Sunset Shimmer puts on Twilight Sparkle's crown, and the Elements of Harmony corrupt her and cause her to turn into a demon that tries to conquer both worlds. On being turned back, she has a Heel Realization and is left in the human world to learn about friendship the same way Twilight did in Equestria. Sunset Shimmer is on the other end of this in Friendship Games when an alter ego of Twilight from the human world unleashes Equestrian Magic sealed away in a device she created. The magic overwhelms her and turns her into a demon named Midnight Sparkle, who tries to destroy the human world to get to Equestria, and steal that magic too. Sunset by contrast turns into a good counterpart thanks to having the magic of friendship, and is able to bring her back to normal. In Legend of Everfree, Gloriosa Daisy has been absorbing Equestrian Magic over a period of months, and her instability isn't helped when it's revealed that Camp Everfree may be taken over. She transforms into a Plant Person called Gaea Everfree and tries to trap everyone in vines until Twilight, who had spent the film worrying that she would become like this again, overcomes her fear and uses the magic of friendship to save the day. Downplayed in Mirror Magic. Juniper Montage gets a hold of a powerful mirror and uses it to trap people she doesn't like in another dimension, the magic having a clear affect on her sanity too. |
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Terra in Final Fantasy VI. A mysterious woman with magical powers, her story arc in the game revolves around her trying to master her powers and to learn her identity. She starts to fit this trope fully when she discovers that she is half-human and half-Esper, at which point her powers go completely out of control and she flies off uncontrollably into the horizon. | |
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Teen Titans (2003): In addition to Raven's powers being derived from her father Trigon being brought over to this series as well, this ends up being part of Terra's Adaptational Heroism, wanting to do good, but her inability to control her powers resulting in causing multiple natural disasters and her becoming a runaway in order to avoid hurting others, eventually turning to Slade when he promises to be able to give the control she so desperately wants. | |
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The Wheel of Time: Elaida seizes control of the Aes Sedai in a coup, styling herself an Iron Lady and the only one who can lead them in the Last Battle. She proves to be unstable, paranoid, and cruel; her reign causes a major schism and a war, with even her loyalists distrusting each other; and she does more harm to the Aes Sedai's international reputation than any leader in a millennium. It doesn't help that she's got The Mole within her inner circle who is trying to bring out the worst in her. | |
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The Japanese film adaptations of The Ring depict Sadako Yamamura as a naive woman who inherited powers far more than she could handle, who was then subjected to trauma after trauma until she snapped and lashed it out against the world. By contrast, she's far more stable in the books, where she knows full well what she can do with her powers (although recognizing that they will bring misery to the world). | |
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Shazam!: In Countdown to Final Crisis, Mary Marvel loses the powers originally bestowed upon her by Shazam, but a dying Black Adam grants her his own powers, which leads to Mary taking on much greater power with a new darker costume to go along with it. The villain Eclipso (herself once the wife of superhero The Atom) uses this to rapidly seduce Mary to evil, only for Mary to turn against her once she realizes she's gone too far. Almost immediately afterward, though, Mary receives a visit in her home from none other than Darkseid himself, who correctly guesses that despite her temporary reluctance, Mary is still addicted to the evil power and tempts her into receiving it once again. | |
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The Empirium Trilogy: As Rielle becomes more and more connected to the empirium, her mental state deteriorates. It gets to a point where Corien- the genocidal angel- worries after her health, often having to remind her that she's not immortal and has to take better care of her self. | |
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A Song of Ice and Fire: After her husband King Robert's death, Cersei Lannister rules Westeros as Queen Regent for her son. While never the best person, she is at first kept in check by her father Tywin and brother Tyrion, who are both noted for their intelligence and strategic skill, as much as she resents it. After Tywin dies and Tyrion goes on the run, Cersei is left unrestrained and quickly goes downhill — she starts stress-drinking and becomes more overtly paranoid, cruel, and incompetent in her determination to keep the crown. | |
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The Craft plays with this trope: Nancy becomes increasingly unhinged and Ax-Crazy when she invokes the spirit to gain more power. However, it's indicated she wasn't the most stable girl to begin with and she's fixated on gaining power right from the start; it's her belief that having magical powers means she can do whatever she wants that makes things worse rather than her just having powers. When Sarah expresses reluctance at invoking the spirit herself because it "made Nancy crazy", Lirio states that it's actually all down to the individual witch and Nancy takes her power to "a dark place". After her powers are bound, Nancy completely loses it and is confined to a mental hospital, insisting she can fly. Inverted with Sarah. She starts out as anxious and depressed, but becomes a lot happier when she starts practicing witchcraft. When she invokes the spirit and achieves her true potential, she goes from despairing and hysterical to calm and confident. She ends the film in the best place she's been in years, possibly ever. |
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The DCU: Happened with Mera in Aquaman (1989), where after her toddler son was killed by one of Aquaman's villains and she failed to save him, her mental state grew more and more unstable until she hated Arthur for his part in her son's death. She's no less dangerous with her hard-water powers, as Aquaman learns. Later runs would attempt to explain it by revealing Earth's different physiology wore on her mind over time, and have her eventually recover from her trauma and reconcile with Arthur—though her singleminded anger became a major part of her character afterward. Doom Patrol: The villainess Madame Rouge, who had Rubber Man powers, also had an evil split personality after an automobile accident. She grew increasingly unstable as the run went on to the point of almost literally tearing herself in two as her good and evil sides fought for control. Eventually she recovered, only for Captain Zahl to reawaken her dormant evil as a lead-in to the final story, which had her kill her old Brotherhood allies and join him in killing the heroes. The Flash: In one 1970s story, Barry Allen's lab partner, Patty Spivot, was nearly struck by similar chemicals that gave him his powers. Barry immediately hypothesized a scenario where the unstable chemicals she was bathed in meant "Ms. Flash" caused more problems than she solved, and therefore moved her out of the way before they struck. Note that his reaction when the same thing happened to a teenaged boy had been to immediately recruit the kid as a partner. This was something of a Recycled Script from an earlier story involving an extradimensional female speedster whose lack of control was only in our dimension, and a Johnny Quick story in which his secretary accidentally duplicated his formula to become Joanie Swift, until he eventually convinced her she didn't want to be a superhero by using her fear of mice. Green Lantern: Gender-inverted with Hal Jordan in the Emerald Twilight storyline, where his response to Coast City being destroyed by Mongul was to use his Power Ring to mentally recreate the city down to every living thing, including his dead parents. When the Guardians of the Universe told him to stop, he stole every Power Ring but one, killed every other Green Lantern, including his old enemy Sinestro, and would eventually try to remake the universe as he saw fit in Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!. Shazam!: In Countdown to Final Crisis, Mary Marvel loses the powers originally bestowed upon her by Shazam, but a dying Black Adam grants her his own powers, which leads to Mary taking on much greater power with a new darker costume to go along with it. The villain Eclipso (herself once the wife of superhero The Atom) uses this to rapidly seduce Mary to evil, only for Mary to turn against her once she realizes she's gone too far. Almost immediately afterward, though, Mary receives a visit in her home from none other than Darkseid himself, who correctly guesses that despite her temporary reluctance, Mary is still addicted to the evil power and tempts her into receiving it once again. Teen Titans: Raven is infamous in-universe for the number of times she has manifested a Superpowered Evil Side and betrayed the Teen Titans, often at the bidding of her father, Trigon. There have even been instances in the comics where people have regarded her as akin to a ticking time bomb, who is always at risk of being corrupted, controlled, or seduced into betraying her friends. |
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Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: Played With. Atton Lampshades in his opening conversation by referring to Revan as a Dark Side female, the opposite of the "canonical" alignment and gender, but it becomes clear in hindsight that he was saying that in an attempt to misdirect the Exile. Atris turns out to be corrupted by her self-righteousness, but not all that powerful. Female party members like Visas, Handmaiden, and Mira are no more or less corruptible than the male party members. And out of the three Sith Lords in the game Darth Traya (aka Kreia) is the most in control of their mind and their powers. | |
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My Super Ex-Girlfriend: After becoming G-Girl, Jenny becomes a selfish, possessive, and controlling jerk. | |
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Parodied in Garth Marenghis Darkplace: Liz snaps and goes on a psychic killing spree, but all is forgiven because she was experiencing PMS. | |
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For most of Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryens shows that while she's not a perfect leader, she knows the horrors of the downtrod and is willing to listen and compromise with her advisers. Come season 8, when the Iron Throne is within her grasp, she snaps and razes King's Landing after the deaths of two of her beloved dragons, causing the deaths of thousands of innocents and forcing Tyrion and Jon to kill her. | |
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Happened with Mera in Aquaman (1989), where after her toddler son was killed by one of Aquaman's villains and she failed to save him, her mental state grew more and more unstable until she hated Arthur for his part in her son's death. She's no less dangerous with her hard-water powers, as Aquaman learns. Later runs would attempt to explain it by revealing Earth's different physiology wore on her mind over time, and have her eventually recover from her trauma and reconcile with Arthur—though her singleminded anger became a major part of her character afterward. | |
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One episode of Transformers: Animated involves Sari Sumdac gaining immense power from the Allspark, turning her from an otherwise harmless child into a significantly more capable teenager. However, she ends up unable to control the power given to her, resulting in her attacking everything in her vicinity while she can't stop it. It takes an EMP blast to finally stop her rampage. She ends up stabilized by Ratchet when he rewires the systems of her body, letting her gain proper control over the Allspark energy within her. | |
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My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Season 7 reveals that Princess Celestia, who is basically a Physical God with the power to raise the sun and moon, fears becoming this. She's Willfully Weak, out of fear that losing control of her magic will turn her into an evil alter ego called Daybreaker - who appears in a nightmare she gets trapped in. | |
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Teen Titans: Raven is infamous in-universe for the number of times she has manifested a Superpowered Evil Side and betrayed the Teen Titans, often at the bidding of her father, Trigon. There have even been instances in the comics where people have regarded her as akin to a ticking time bomb, who is always at risk of being corrupted, controlled, or seduced into betraying her friends. | |
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Like her comics counterpart, Wanda Maximoff is not exactly the most stable person. The death of her parents caused her and her brother Pietro to join HYDRA, and even after her Heel–Face Turn, she is still one of the most dangerous and unstable members of the Avengers. Her botching a mission in Lagos sets off the events of Captain America: Civil War. Come WandaVision, her lifetime of grief, loss, and sorrow has caused her to finally snap, retreating into a fantasy world of her own creation and sucking countless innocent bystanders in with her. Fortunately, she eventually regains her bearings and control over her powers... only for her to snap all over again under the influence of the Darkhold in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. | |
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Witchblade the series, the cloneblades can make someone Ax-Crazy due to Phlebotinum Breakdown. Worse, just like in the comics, the Witchblade and the Cloneblades are Clingy MacGuffins. | |
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When Once Upon a Time did a re-telling of the Frozen story, it provided two counter examples to Elsa. The Snow Queen is the season's antagonist; Elsa's aunt, born with ice powers like her and only able to control them thanks to her bond with her two sisters. She accidentally killed one sister with the powers, and was imprisoned in an urn by the other (Elsa's mother). Upon being released from said urn, she plans to cast the Spell of Shattered Sight; which will basically turn the entire town of Storybrooke against each other, with only Elsa and Emma being immune from the magic. Emma herself begins to lose control of her own magic, due to unresolved issues about being abandoned as a child. The Snow Queen recognises this and intentionally triggers her to lose control of her powers, and she isolates herself from her family after her father is accidentally hurt in the crossfire. Elsa is naturally the one who offers her guidance on how to control her powers. |
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow Rosenberg's power as a witch increases over the seasons, and her arc in the last two seasons is chiefly devoted to this. She becomes increasingly reckless and arrogant in her use of magic in the early part of the sixth season and briefly becomes involved with a form of black magic that acts directly as an addictive drug. As a result, she impulsively swears off magic completely, but when her lover is murdered she "falls off the wagon", kills the man responsible and tries to kill his associates, attacks her friends when they try to take her down, and ends up trying to destroy the entire planet out of depression. The final season has her continuing to struggle to get on an even keel, constantly worrying that using magic to any powerful degree will drive her insane again. Her girlfriend Tara was an aversion, as she was a natural witch who already respected the balance between the forces and knew better than to meddle with them like Willow was fond of doing. Drusilla in her human life received visions and, being very religious and it being Victorian London, she feared she was cursed. However, she appeared to be finding a use for it by opting to become a nun...until Angelus killed her whole family and then tortured her to insanity before making her a vampire. So now she's evil and psychic, in addition to being Ax-Crazy. |
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Firefly: River Tam is a Teen Genius from a wealthy family who gained powerful Psychic Powers after being experimented on. Specifically, she wound up with a damaged amygdala, which affected her ability to properly filter, feel, or control her emotions — as her brother and caretaker Simon points out, "She feels everything; she can't not." As a result, she's highly unstable and prone to psychic freakouts and tantrums that potentially hurt the other characters, although she has stabilized a little by the end of Serenity due to the companionship of the crew. | |
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Dark Phoenix, a retelling of Jean Grey's transition into Dark Phoenix. Jean is manipulated into becoming an incredibly powerful but still unstable young woman by the alien Vuk, and when her powers go haywire and kill Mystique, the X-Men start gunning for her. This film adds the context of Professor X suppressing Jean's powers when she was a little girl, which Beast calls him out on. | |
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Fantastic Four: The Invisible Woman was once subjected to a villain's mental manipulation and developed a dark personality called "Malice", which caused her to dress in darker, skimpier, bondage-themed clothes and a more evil, sinister personality. Infamously, she is literally freed from the villain's control by her husband Reed slapping her across the face. | |
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Charmed (1998): Prue Halliwell is otherwise level-headed, but her final episode "All Hell Breaks Loose" sees her and her sisters being exposed as witches to the world, and their lives invaded by the media and Loony Fans. When her sister Piper is shot fatally by a crazed stalker and her driveway is blocked by the crowds as she tries to drive to the hospital, she snaps completely and uses her telekinesis to get them out of the way. It's implied several people were killed, and she even duels with a SWAT Team sent to bring her in later. While time is reset so the exposure never happens, she's killed by the demon who'd attacked at the start of the episode. In the Season 3 episode "Primrose Empath", Prue is tricked into absorbing magical empathy a demon had been cursed with. It overwhelms her within a day, as she wasn't meant to receive said power, and the stress of feeling everyone else's emotions causes her telekinesis to go haywire. The empath who cursed the demon however gives her advice on how to channel it, and she's able to do so to fight the demon, and vanquish him by making him feel all the emotions again. The vanquish does get rid of the empathy however, so she's fine again. This is averted when Phoebe receives magical empathy three seasons later however as, although she struggles with Power Incontinence, she gets a handle on it because she was meant to have this power. In the Season 5 finale, the Charmed Ones are given powers that turn them into the Greek Goddesses. The powers do affect their sanity, but Piper as an earth goddess is able to ground them...until she learns that her husband will have to leave her to become an Elder. In her misery, she conjures up a horrible storm, and has to really be talked down by Leo. Christy Jenkins had power of telepathy, with the result that she was Hearing Voices as a child. After being kidnapped and raised by demons, she has been brainwashed into serving evil, and becomes ruthless in trying to destroy the Charmed Ones because she believes it's her destiny. She convinces her sister Billie to join her as the Ultimate Power, and doesn't care who she kills in the process of trying to achieve that. When Billie has a Heel–Face Turn and tries to get Christy to do the same, Christy tries to kill her too! |
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Subverted in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, when Bruce Banner's cousin Jennifer ends up with the same radiation that turned him into the Incredible Hulk. Although she will turn into She-Hulk when she gets angry or distressed, she's able to stay lucid and at the same level it took Bruce over a decade to reach. It turns out that she's already so adept at controlling her emotions in day-to-day life, and thus is able to keep her mind when she transforms. | |
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The 1976 and 2013 adaptations of Carrie take this up to another level by depicting Carrie as a very sweet, borderline angelic character who shows kindness to everyone... until she discovers telekinesis and uses it to push back at anyone who hurts her, burning down her school, house, and entire town. | |
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