- Superheroes like to present themselves as these high and mighty, untouchable, godlike, yeah-I’ve-vacationed-on-the-sun-it’s-real-nice-up-there, beings. There are, I guess, a bunch of reasons for this kind of attitude: people are more afraid to mess with you, people feel more secure with you around, it’s a huge confidence booster. But most of the time it’s a flat-out lie. Superheroes are, for the most part, human, or close enough. They can be hurt, damaged, beaten, demoralized. Sometimes their costumes ride up and that’s uncomfortable. They have fears. They have doubts. And many of them, have weaknesses.
Now, the average costume-wearing, crime-fighting adrenaline junky has dozens, if not hundreds of weaknesses. A lot of superheroes, for examples, are weak against bullets. Or knives. Or feral canine teeth. Other popular superhero (and supervillain, so take note,) weaknesses include: not having enough oxygen, having their heads blown up, being dropped from real high up, tanks I guess. Having their powerful amulet or battle armor or whatever external power source they use stolen is another pretty common one. Some superheroes however, have more individual or specialized weaknesses.
Some superheroes, this one applies mostly to aliens, are adversely affected by certain substances from their home planets. Others have powers that won’t work against certain colors. Others can only use their powers when experiencing certain emotions and so an opposite emotion (do emotional states really have opposites? I feel like they’re all so nebulous, what’s the opposite of happiness? Is it sadness? Anger? Hunger?) might cause their powers to be negated. If you’ve got a specific, unusual, physiology it’s very possible that something that doesn’t negatively affect normal humans might, for whatever reason, negatively affect you. So be aware of that. You might lose your lightning powers or slip into a coma if you eat chocolate. You might lose your power to summon mythical monsters to do your bidding if you use the wrong laundry detergent. Talk to a super-physician or someone with a similar dealio to you before doing anything. Anything. You never know when you might discover what you weakness is. Especially if you’re a newbie superhero.
Now, many regular normal people, in addition to being weak against obviously dangerous things like clowns with tommy guns or toilet gators (those are alligators who swim up your toilet and eat your butt and I assure you they are a very real thing,) have allergies to certain harmless things like peanuts or grass or kitties. If you’re a superhero who has a bad nut allergy you might feel a need to assure people that it is not merely a lame old allergy but actually a super cool, super legit, superhero weakness. Don’t do this. You’re a loser. Just carry around your epipen with you, you’ll be fine. Your weakness is not sesame seeds. Come on.
At the same time, just as different heroes have different weaknesses, different weaknesses have different effects. While the vast majority of superhero weaknesses serve to, well, weaken, the hero, sapping them of all strength and slowly but surely, killing them; other weaknesses merely negate a hero’s power, weakening them to the state of a mere mortal. Now, there’s a common debate amongst the super-community (that is, the community of superhumans, para-folk, aliens, non-powered superheroes, etc. Not a community that’s like really good at communitying {communing?}) regarding which of these weaknesses is worse. There are those who are of the (wrong) opinion that a weakness that merely saps strength and slowly but surely kills the hero, while still leaving them with access to their powers, is the better kind of weakness (nope). Their (dumb) rationale is that even if you’re dying you can still defeat the villain with the last of your powers thereby performing the noble (stupid) heroic sacrifice. I (the expert) on the other hand am a firm believer in the fact that a weakness that just negates your power is the better kind of weakness because if you’re in the room with an object that negates your powers and an evil bad guy doing what evil bad guys do (evil bad guy things) then you’re not even close to being out of the fight yet. For starters you can just regular-person punch the bad guy. Or, and really this is where my entire line of reasoning shines through here, you can just pick up the whatever that’s negating your powers and toss it out a window. Then you can use your powers to save the day. Like you always do. This is by far a better plan than heroically sacrificing yourself. It is always bizarre to me how infrequently members of the super-community think to just toss things out windows. It’s such an obvious solution to so many of life’s problems. (There’s even a word for it! Defenestration. That’s how you know it’s a better solution than heroically sacrificing yourself. There’s no one word that means heroic sacrifice in the english language.)
Once you’ve ascertained what your weakness is you need to keep that noise (mostly) secret. You can’t have that information getting into the wrong hands! But at the same time you wanna make sure your super-pals and civvie-friends and maybe foreign dignitaries (if you’re one of those heroes who is frequently invited out to brunch with foreign dignitaries). You wouldn’t want your friends and colleagues to accidentally kill you because they didn’t realize incredibly pleasant dinner parties were your one superhero weakness. (Looking at you Primordial Panther, more like Party-Pooping Panther amiright?)
Additionally, you can totally play the “oh that’s most definitely my superhero weakness” card to get out of things you just don’t want to do. Don’t wanna take out the garbage? Turns out garbage cans are your weakness! Or scenarios where you’re likely to get attacked by a garbage loving raccoon (burglar cat.) Not really feeling this opera your pals invited you to? Turns out loud Italian music is your weakness, whoops sorry. Not in the mood to go out and save the world because you literally just got home and just sat down and were just about to eat some ice cream? Guess saving the world is your one weakness! Oh well! Sorry world! (Ok that last one might not work because you are a superhero but really this is a neat little trick.)
If you’ve got one of those really weirdly specific weakness like, say, rock fragments from this one green meteor that crashed to Earth this one time; or the black liquid that keeps leaking from that one doll from the 1830s that you found in your basement; or the first eight pages (and just those pages) of a thirty page terms and agreements contract for a toaster, you can probably try just having all of those things gathered up and either destroyed or launched into space. This way you effectively have no known weaknesses and then you can fight anyone anytime ever. Destroying them is probably a safer bet in this case. The last thing you’d want is for a crack squad of alien invaders to find the big ball of your weakness that you launched into space and then invade and then use it to depower and murder you. That would suck. So instead maybe launch it into a volcano (but make sure it’s a volcano where there are no secret evil volcano monsters hiding). Or just blow it all up. (Yeah you’re also gonna wanna make sure the volcano isn’t currently being used by supervillains as some sort of lair. A lot of volcanoes end up being used as supervillain lairs at some point. Which seems weird to me. Because why would you want to live in a volcano. I feel like it would get hot. But who am I to judge. What do I know about supervillain lairs.)