Basic Trope: A superpowered or superintelligent character could easily solve real problems in the world where they live if they tried, but fails to do so.
- Straight: Amazing Girl, a brilliant superhero, could theoretically cure cancer for those living in the universe she inhabits, but does not do so.
- Exaggerated:
- Amazing Girl could cure all disease, ensure world peace, reverse all environmental damage done since the Middle Ages, defeat all evil, and create a utopia in her universe — and, in fact, everyone around her begs her to do so. She refuses to, instead using her powers for more trivial purposes.
- Amazing Girl is one of several heroes who have capacities that they don't use for the betterment of humanity.
- Downplayed:
- Amazing Girl could cure the common cold, but she only gets around to creating a pill that relieves coughing.
- Amazing Girl simply gives the existing scientists a push so they can come up with solutions while she fights crime.
- Her powers help with some problems, but they create new issues.
- Justified:
- Amazing Girl is from the future, and her bosses cannot let her technology become public in the era she's visiting, because of the great risk of it generating catastrophic changes in their timeline.
- The World Is Not Ready for the advances that Amazing Girl could bring to the world.
- Although seemingly harmless and beneficial, the advances that Amazing Girl could bring would require massive sacrifice on an unthinkable scale or would produce worse problems and suffering further down the line, results that Amazing Girl refuses to risk.
- Amazing Girl does not want the people of the world to become too dependent or reliant on her; she could solve every problem, but people would start demanding that she solve every trivial difficulty that they could easily resolve themselves, out of laziness, which would distract her from the more difficult problems she faces.
- Amazing Girl fears that interfering in society that much would put her on a slippery slope that would lead her to make herself a totalitarian dictator.
- Although Amazing Girl's powers and abilities seem limitless, there are certain limits which she has not managed to transcend.
- Amazing Girl must negotiate complex matters of international politics and diplomacy when dealing with some of these problems; national and international authorities would react with unease and suspicion if Amazing Girl tried to interfere too much in their affairs.
- There are simply too many hostile forces clogging up cities and wilderness alike at any given moment to pursue scientific advancement.
- Amazing Girl's creations are tied to her life force, or are otherwise restricted such that only she can make them, and they will stop working when she dies.
- If Amazing Girl's power is Super-Intelligence, no one can understand any of her attempts to explain her discoveries, or figure out how to work the technology she invents; it would be like trying to teach a chimpanzee how to perform brain surgery.
- It is simply infeasible to mass-produce her inventions, and solving that is beyond Amazing Girl's abilities—though she is leaving notes for when technology catches up enough.
- Amazing Girl notes that some problems are too complex to cure, e.g., cancer or the common cold, due to the nature of cancer or the fact that several viruses can cause the common cold, and they all mutate over time.
- Amazing Girl is so afraid that some bad actor will reverse-engineer her creations and either weaponize them or develop effective countermeasures that she doesn't even try. (See also Played for Drama, below.)
- Amazing Girl knows that the first thing people will do with any gadget she develops will be find a way to use it as a drug, source of porn, weapon or any other way to make the world just that more closer to a land of extreme debauchery.
- Amazing Girl is well aware of her inventions' potential and wants to mass-produce them. But bringing any new product to market is a slow and often expensive process.
- Amazing Girl lacks the manufacturing base, or other resources or marketing skills/know-how, to mass-produce her inventions.
- Amazing Girl just couldn't be bothered.
- Amazing Girl holds a very low opinion of civilization and the world they live in, and decides they don't deserve the results of her work.
- Amazing Girl has a mental disorder or disability that inhibits her mental ability/motivation to do so, despite her physical abilities.
- Amazing Girl’s inventions are Super Prototypes that can’t be feasibly mass-produced without sacrificing a lot of their wondrous qualities.
- Amazing Girl's inventions simply aren't useful in everyday life; the average household has little use for a spaceship or a time machine. Many already existing products offer similar functions but with more market familiarity and lower prices. New Tech Is Not Cheap after all.
- Amazing Girl knows that providing her inventions would stunt humanity's true potential. If she provided them now, technology would stagnate, which would lead to our extinction. Not interfering will cause much suffering for centuries but will make things far better on the millennium scale.
- Amazing Girl is simply that selfish.
- Amazing Girl's abilities and creations depend upon a replenishing resource. Too many attempting to use it would deplete it and leave everyone without it for a while. Worse, running low has additional dire consequences.
- Amazing Girl's inventions are so revolutionary that they would destroy the global economy, which risks a second Great Depression turned up to eleven.
- Amazing Girl needs Applied Phlebotinum to make her inventions but doesn't remember the material or technique.
- Amazing Girl places a heavy premium on custom-tailoring every device to fit its user's needs perfectly. As a result, many of her devices function in oddly specific manners that are not quite user-friendly to the mass market.
- Amazing Girl is NOT an Omnidisciplinary Scientist, so she's uncertain of how or unable to apply her abilities, methods, or tools in different situations.
- Whatever Amazing Girl has created will have less effect or may even become dangerous when used multiple times.
- Amazing Girl is a Hero with Bad Publicity; so many people hate her that they'd reject her contributions out of spite, so she thought it futile to bother advertising herself.
- Amazing Girl knows she could use her inventions to make the world better, but she doesn’t care about that because she is primarily motivated by a desire to get revenge for something terrible that happened to her in the past. As such, every invention or gadget that she makes is just another tool in her arsenal to get back at those who wronged her, and she’s too consumed by anger and focused on her big Roaring Rampage of Revenge to give a damn about using her genius to improve the world.
- Inverted:
- Amazing Girl actively devotes herself to solving everyday problems, with the intention of transforming her world into a utopia.
- Amazing Girl slowly causes her inventions to bring about more social progress.
- Amazing Girl focuses on the everyday problems until events force her to repurpose her tools. This leads her to getting involved in the traditional way.
- Amazing Girl attempts to solve such problems despite her own intelligence and abilities being inadequate.
- Awful Girl, the Evil Knockoff of Amazing Girl, deliberately provides technology with the goal of worsening real-life problems as a side effect.
- Awful Girl creates things that would cause or worsen a lot of real-life problems, but she never actually inflicts them on the world.
- Amazing Girl starts by solving serious problems and not only gets no respect but becomes an outright Hero with Bad Publicity as everyone who lost business blames her for misapplication of broad inventions, however innocuous.
- Subverted:
- Amazing Girl initially refuses to meddle in everyday concerns, but after much soul-searching changes her mind.
- Amazing Girl hasn't done anything because she is a fraud.
- Amazing Girl’s creations are revealed to exist only in her imagination and aren’t real.
- Amazing Girl's critics suspect she won't release whatever she has created, but then she does.
- Double Subverted:
- Amazing Girl's efforts result in more harm than good, and she swears off such meddling in the future.
- Amazing Girl creates all the things she says she was going to create, or that she imagined creating ... but she still doesn't make them available to everyone else.
- Amazing Girl's creations have Gone Horribly Right for one reason or another, so she recalls them, buries them, and never makes them available to anybody else.
- Parodied:
- People begin demanding that Amazing Girl do ridiculously trivial things for them, such as mowing their lawn or giving them a back rub, and berate her when she refuses.
- Every time Amazing Girl thinks about using her inventions to cure society's ills, a future version of her appears warning of the Bad Future that will result from her actions. Amazing Girl always agrees not to do so, her future version always vanishes, and Amazing Girl always has trouble building a time machine.
- Amazing Girl doesn't use her creations for public benefit because it would lead to implausible but harmless consequences like inverting the colours of the world.
- Amazing Girl benefits from the fact that Clothes Make the Superman—clothes she made, no less—yet she doesn't realize how she could give powers to all her friends and relatives.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Amazing Girl is selective in what she supplies owing to her odd ethos. She refuses to provide conventional weaponry to others even in dire circumstances due to a belief that it is morally wrong to wield weapons not developed by oneself. She is however completely fine with biological weapons, oddly enough considering them pacifism. She freely shares her powerful technology to provide abundant, safe, climate-friendly energy. While she gives cures for bacterial and viral illnesses and cybernetic technology, she considers fighting cancer in others a morally wrong interference in the collective of cells.
- The story occasionally branches off into good endings where circumstances are right to make major positive changes in mundane circumstances, then goes on to show how it goes in the continuing timeline to ensure that it resembles our world. Alternatively, a few bad endings also show up where things get out of control.
- Averted:
- Amazing Girl is merely a Badass Normal or otherwise limited superhero; while she does have abilities that place her above most other people, she's by no means in a position where she's able to use her gifts to effect massive societal change on the scale this trope demands.
- Amazing Girl actively uses her abilities to achieve world peace, cure cancer, reverse climate change, restore biodiversity, oust authoritarian regimes, abolish all forms of discrimination, end poverty, etc.
- Amazing Girl lives in a world that has none of these problems. All problems in her world are so qualitatively different that they really would need a superhero's intervention to solve them.
- Lampshaded: "For all the fighting you do, Amazing Girl, what good are you, really? When you can't stop the real suffering that these people you claim to love so much are going through?"
- Invoked: The beings who granted Amazing Girl her powers established certain limits precisely so that she would not get too Drunk with Power and try solving problems she was not ready/able to solve.
- Exploited: Amazing Girl's Arch-Enemy Elliot McWealthybucks turns the public against her by pointing out all the problems she could have solved.
- Defied:
- Amazing Girl actively attempts to solve everyday problems and make her world a better place.
- Amazing Girl makes inventions for the other heroes on her team.
- Discussed: "Yeah, if Amazing Girl's so great, how come I don't see her dealing with the everyday crap you and I face?"
- Conversed: "Why don't the superheroes in these books ever try to make a real difference?"
- Deconstructed:
- Amazing Girl's refusal to help solve everyday problems indicates that she doesn't really care, and is no real hero; she focuses on the 'beat-something-up' problems because she's just too cowardly and selfish to share her gifts where they'll do the most good.
- After one too many accusations of uselessness, Amazing Girl decides to help with everyday problems, and things escalated until she was about to Take Over the World.
- Amazing Girl is tormented by guilt by her refusal or inability to use her gifts in such a fashion, and begins to question whether she is any use at all.
- She acquires a nemesis, Bad Bob, who was a law-abiding citizen until he went mad as a result of barely surviving a plague she could easily have prevented if she hadn't been so focused on fighting crime. He's still sane enough to rub her nose in his origin story, and the number of infected who didn't survive.
- Amazing Girl is shown what lies beyond the Fourth Wall by the Author Avatar of Matt Garrison, her current writer. While observing our world, she reads a story by one of Garrison's contemporaries, Greg McGuinness, where he castigates superheroes who could, in-universe, solve 'real-world' problems but don't. Then she reads an interview where McGuinness denounces the idea of superheroes solving 'real-world' problems as trivializing and cheapening them. Realizing she's faced with a Catch-22, Amazing Girl becomes deeply depressed.
- Reconstructed:
- It's not that Amazing Girl doesn't care; she's really afraid that her gifts make everyday problems too easy to solve and things will just get boring for everyone. She doubts if that makes her a real hero.
- Amazing Girl's friends remind her that she still makes a difference; there are millions of doctors researching cures for cancer, but only she can deal with the superpowered madmen, Evil Overlords, and alien conquerors who threaten her world regularly, and no one can solve all the world's problems singlehandedly.
- Amazing Girl took over the world because she was and is legitimately improving it for the better; everyone agrees that having her in charge is the least unpalatable option.
- Amazing Girl is a Badass Normal who shares her inventions, but avoids becoming redundant because (A) most of the inventions she shares are unique and are tailored to other superheroes' existing powers and (B) for the inventions that are copies of her own loadout, she is still the most skilled user of those devices.
- Played for Laughs: Amazing Girl isn't all there despite her talents. While her heroic inventions work perfectly fine, all her attempts at converting her technology to civilian use end predictably in hilarious disaster. Other scientists interviewing her are stymied by her unique mind. Her inventions are based on collections of kludges and hacks, which makes it hard to analyze them.
- Played for Drama:
- A member of Amazing Girl's Rogues Gallery makes a point to weaponize whatever she comes up with and use it to stigmatize the technology with the intent of forcing sweeping bans on things that could fix the world's problems.
- Amazing Girl doesn't share her cure for cancer because so far, she's only managed to develop something that will cause it instead.
- Played for Horror: Amazing Girl tried to create something with positive consequences for humanity, but it would have to be Powered by a Forsaken Child.
- Implied: When somebody asks why nobody has invented a device to perform Task X that would make life easier, Amazing Girl looks away guiltily.
- Plotted a Good Waste: Amazing Girl was counting on her enemies getting their hands on one of her creations to show why The World Is Not Ready to explore their possibilities further.
Back to Reed Richards Is Useless
