r/Showerthoughts • u/MyUsernameIsAwful • Mar 23 '26
Musing The power of invisibility would make you blind when active, because light would just pass straight through your eyes.
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u/ConversationSea8530 Mar 23 '26
My favorite form of invisibility is just telepathy which makes everyone ignore you.
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u/Spackleberry Mar 23 '26
Vampires in the World of Darkness RPG work that way. It's harder for them to vanish if they're being observed, but if they're strong enough they can even make you forget they were there. It's like if you've ever walked into a room and then suddenly forgot what you were doing.
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Mar 23 '26
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u/Peripatetictyl Mar 24 '26
Stop inviting them in.
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u/CheckMateFluff Mar 24 '26
I keep forgetting not to man...
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u/agent_uno Mar 24 '26
This reminds me of the quote from a MTG Revised (3rd edition) card that said “In its world of darkness, it had no shadows to fear.”
Does anyone remember what the card was? I’m thinking Banshee, but it’s been 30+ years.
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u/littlebrwnrobot Mar 23 '26
There is no antimemetics division
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u/Ksenobiolog Mar 24 '26
An excellent book! I also recommend The 'Fine Structure', another great one from qntm.
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Mar 23 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
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u/Several-Action-4043 Mar 23 '26
In "The 3 Body Problem" they do the opposite. The bad guys manipulate every camera in the world to ignore them so people on camera look like they're talking to someone who isn't there and the videos won't corroborate their stories.
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u/enotonom Mar 23 '26
Interesting, what’s the title of that webnovel?
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Mar 23 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
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u/yonkerbonk Mar 24 '26
Air filtration systems
I read that as Air flirtation systems and was trying to figure out what type of succubi does that. lol
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u/CockroachTimely5832 Mar 23 '26
Or telepathy that controls perception itself. Invisibility is obsolete.
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u/DeathMetalViking666 Mar 23 '26
I once ran a shadowrun game where the 9 foot, cyborg troll brute took a load of points in stealth. It made 0 sense how this man could sneak.
So I justified it as he walks in somewhere, failing to hide behind plant pots, and staring guards in the face saying 'You no see me!'. And the guards going with it. Because what dumass guard is picking that fight?
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u/Mara_W Mar 25 '26
"I'm being stealthy!"
"And I'm not being paid enough to disagree. Who said that?"
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u/bittermctitters Mar 23 '26
I try to tell my friends I have superpowers, but they just don't listen and I don't have any friends
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u/derteeje Mar 23 '26
reminds me of the x-men character forgetmenot, his mutant power is to be immediately forgotten when you don't look directly at him
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u/taserian Mar 23 '26
I have a t-shirt covered in math equations (think high school trig upwards), which I call my "invisibility shirt", because people actively look away to avoid reliving their math class trauma.
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u/BloodthirstyGM Mar 23 '26
During the Calamity critical role episode (where people play a tabletop rpg), one of the players rolled so high on a spot check that he saw an invisible guy. The DM justified it by using this exact logic saying that the enemy was invisible but had left his two little irises floating in the air left so he could still see.
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u/IrishPrime Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
Not irises, just the
pupilsretinas. But yes, I was thinking of the same example.My Hero Academia, on the other hand, has a character (Lemillion) that can phase through matter, and he says that when he's using the ability, he can't see because the light passes right through his eyes. He, however, does not turn invisible while doing so (which he probably should).
Edit: Since multiple people are already asking me questions about Lemillion/Mirio, I'll just drop the wiki link.
While intangible, he experiences a falling sensation because he still has mass. Furthermore, everything passes through him, including light, sound, and air, meaning he can't see, hear, or breathe while his Quirk is active. This aspect of his ability also means that he has to keep at least one foot solid at all times while his Quirk is active, or else he will fall into the ground.
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u/sharkattackmiami Mar 23 '26
It depends how he does it
The Flash has had a similar power at points where he could vibrate at the same wavelength as an object to pass through it. This wouldn't render him invisible, he's just "meshing" with the object. It does bed the question of what defines his molecules vs the objects at that point and how he keeps them separate
If you shot the flash and the bullet stayed inside him would the bullet pass a barrier? How does his outfit pass through? Can he do it with a person?
Sometimes it's best to just take fictional stories at face value and not try and apply logic to them
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u/IrishPrime Mar 23 '26
It would if they hadn't explicitly had the character say, "The power is difficult to use, because everything passes through me, even light. So I can't see when I'm using it."
Stands to reason that if the light is passing through his eyes and rendering him blind, that the light would also pass through the rest of him, rendering him invisible.
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u/sharkattackmiami Mar 23 '26
But then at that point the ground ALSO passes through him so either A.) gravity pulls him to the earths core, or B.) gravity also doesn't work on him now so the planet begins hurtling away from him at 100,000 miles an hour and he is left alone in the void until he eventually stopped thinking
So we loop back to "don't overthink it because it doesn't hold consistent logic"
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u/IrishPrime Mar 23 '26
You clearly haven't seen this character. He also starts falling through the ground towards the center of the earth when he uses his power.
They handle this by saying that when he stops using it, he's lucky that he doesn't wind up trapped inside of things, but rather is expelled out of them.
So he does start falling through the ground, but he gets forced back up out of it when he becomes tangible again.
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u/Apprehensive-Pin518 Mar 23 '26
actually they address that in the series. when he activates his power, he actually sinks into the ground. then when he turns it off he suddenly pops up above the ground because his power ejects him out of any object he is stuck in. He has actully used this power to perform uppercuts and the like through sheer training.
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u/Mage-of-Fire Mar 23 '26
Why do people talk so confidently about a character they’ve never even seen before lol
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u/NorysStorys Mar 23 '26
The planet wouldn’t zoom away from him. We all carry the same momentum as the earth as it careens around the universe. For us to just be left behind if intangible and immune to gravity it would require all that inertia to be counteracted.
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Mar 23 '26
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u/Kowery103 Mar 24 '26
Still don't understand why the creator made her be naked 24/7 while this guy gets a suit that stays on him even when phasing because it's made out of his hair
Give her a hair custome too
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u/FetaMight Mar 23 '26
And not necessarily the pupils, but the are of the retina where the image is forming.
Realistically, though, we manage fine with low light. If while invisible your vision dimmed 50% to reduce the visibility of your floating retinal segments you'd still see enough to manage... Unless you're already in a dark room, but then just make your retinas even less translucent to compensate.
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u/IrishPrime Mar 23 '26
It may actually have been just the retinas. The DM described it as spotting two grains of sand floating in the room. The player rolled like a 30+ Perception. He was not supposed to spot the guy, but the roll was so good he needed some way to explain how he succeeded.
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u/bigWeld33 Mar 23 '26
His quirk is wild because he has to choose to activate it or not for every point on his body in real time. Such a cool character.
I would love to see an offshoot series where Mirio was chosen to inherit One For All as was initially planned. He would have absolutely killed it.
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u/IrishPrime Mar 23 '26
Agreed.
Even just adding Danger Sense would have made his Permeation quirk that much more incredible. Float and Black Whip to give him even better spatial control would have made him damn near unstoppable. And then you start adding the other quirks that actually increase raw power and speed? Would have put the other heroes out of work.
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u/AndrewH73333 Mar 23 '26
If the pupils were letting light in then massive amounts of light should have been let through where the rest of the eyeball normally blocks light.
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u/archpawn Mar 23 '26
You'd need the entire eyeball to be visible at minimum. Anything less and light could reach the retina from the wrong direction.
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u/-release_candidate- Mar 23 '26
If he can pass through matter: what does he breathe and how does he not fall into the ground (or how does he even walk if he can't touch the ground).
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u/IrishPrime Mar 23 '26
what does he breathe
He doesn't while the ability is active. It's part of why he can't use it all the time to just be invincible.
how does he not fall into the ground
He does, unless he keeps the bottom of his feet (or more) tangible.
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u/Omnizoom Mar 23 '26
But wouldn’t his intangible body just pass through the tangible portion of his body
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u/TheRedAuror Mar 23 '26
His body still maintains cohesion, otherwise his atoms would just drift off into space.
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u/Linkandpie Mar 23 '26
That would be scary as shit! Imagine the first time trying out that power and accidentally phasing into the ground, just burying yourself alive...
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u/blippyblip Mar 24 '26
Just reactivate it and wait to pop out again on the other side of the world... or in the core of the Earth.
Uh, you make your best guess on that one...
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u/bwmat Mar 24 '26
Assuming no friction while intangible, I think you'd 'yoyo' from one side of the earth, through the middle, and then back to where you started
Forever
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u/KuroTheWeirdo Mar 23 '26
"Even if its smaller than a pinprick, you need just enough of your eyes visible to see out of them And you've been trained to spot these because they always move in two"
Im paraphrasing, but its such a cool description
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u/feor1300 Mar 23 '26
Something's wrong, and on a 31, you're not alone in this room. Invisibility is a pretty beloved power. It's easy to get, even very junior mages can master it. The problem with invisibility is light is very important for a number of functions. No matter how cloaked you might be in it, you can't make your whole self invisible. Even if it's smaller than a pin prick, you need just enough of your eyes to stay visible that light can hit them and you can still see. Now, perceiving a fraction of a pupil hanging in space, smaller than a grain of sand, would be beyond most people, but you've been trained to look for them because they always move in two.
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You look up in a mirror in the chamber and you can see behind you, smaller than grains of sand, there are two pupils.
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u/yup_sir28 Mar 23 '26
I remember reading this novel where the mc gains a spell that makes him invisible by incasing him in a bubble, pretty much, and he could only see by making a slit in it. So to make himself less likely to be found he’d crouch when making said slit so his eyes were out of most people’s line of sight
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u/biggus_baddeus Mar 23 '26
I think of this series several times a week, often this exact moment, along with Cerrit looking through his home while it's all collapsing. An amazing collection of storytelling.
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u/SiIesh Mar 23 '26
The thing my group often quotes is "are you weakest, do you feel, at the elbow or the shoulder?"
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u/kermityfrog2 Mar 23 '26
So the old video game Quake had an invisibility powerup for multiplayer PVP. If you got it, you were largely invisible, but your opponents could see a pair of floating eyeballs running around.
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u/menwithrobots Mar 23 '26
Rolling a Nat 20 on an ability check isn't supposed to allow someone to do the impossible, but that is a clever way to justify it
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u/feor1300 Mar 23 '26
It wasn't a Nat 20, the character was just level 15 with batshit perception & investigation bonuses (he was effectively a cop trained to investigate wizards) and rolled a 31 on a DC28 perception check to be able to spot them. The description of the retinas was how the DM justified him spotting this invisible assassin in a room that would normally not have the typical telltales (marble floor so no footprints, clean so no dust being disturbed, etc).
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u/lapbro Mar 23 '26
It isn’t impossible to succeed on a perception check to spot an invisible creature.
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u/menwithrobots Mar 23 '26
You can spot an invisible creature but can't see them iirc. You can know roughly where they are with your other senses, i thought, but not actually see them
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u/lapbro Mar 23 '26
Fair. He does have blindsense though, and I think seeing the 2 grain of sand sized specks is a fine way to flavor why he could still get sneak attack, while still not really being able to see it. To each their own though, if that’s too much sight for your table, I understand.
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u/MundaneFacts Mar 23 '26
I totally agree with this too many PCs get away with shenanigans this way.
But in 3.5e invisibility is treated like The Predator's(y'know from 'the predator' and 'predator 2' and 'alien vs predator') invisibility cloak and i like that.
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u/RutzButtercup Mar 23 '26
This assumes that invisibility works by allowing light to pass through. But in the real world it works by bending light around. So if it were set up to allow a certain amount of light through and bend the rest it can (probably does, but I am no expert) work without blending the user.
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful Mar 23 '26
You could do the same with the pass-through version of the power, but in both circumstances you’d have to sacrifice some level of invisibility in exchange for levels of vision.
You could let a little light in and retain most of your invisibility, but then only a little light reaches your eyes, giving you dimmed vision.
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u/Dennis_TITsler Mar 23 '26
Maybe the power just includes the backs of your eyes re-emitting identical light?
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u/CaptainDudeGuy Mar 23 '26
You'd have to emit that light in all directions so no matter which direction you look at the sensory bits, the active camouflage would still hide them.
That'd mean the light you're creating would interfere with the light you're receiving too, and you're back to reduced vision.
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u/Dennis_TITsler Mar 23 '26
If the eyes only absorb light from the front they'd only have to emit it out the back
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u/treeonwheels Mar 23 '26
Additionally, we only see something if the light reflects off of it and into our eyes. Someone with magical invisibility powers could allow the light to r absorb into their retinas (granting them vision), but not scatter/reflect light off of it towards any other viewer. Bam!
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful Mar 23 '26
But since they’re there absorbing light but not scattering it, they’d appear as a comparatively dark patch. Though idk if it would be enough to be detectable.
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u/Daktic Mar 23 '26
When light hits your retina photons are absorbed. So you wouldn’t actually see the eye, the same way you wouldn’t see a black hole, there’s nothing bouncing back for you to see.
So assuming you could let through 100% of the photons required and no more, other observers would only see the light bounced back from behind whatever the eye is blocking.
Right?
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
Anything that absorbs light is opaque to that wavelength. So they’d at least be able to see a floating mass of photoreceptors blocking light.
Edit: Now that I think about it though, the mass would probably be to some degree translucent since not all cells absorb all wavelengths of visible light. I wonder what color it would look.
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u/Redundancy_Nemesis Mar 23 '26
I’m not sure what would freak me out more. A completely invisible person or only seeing the blob of receptors pointed at me… I’m thinking the latter.
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u/Daktic Mar 23 '26
What I’m saying is if it is absorbing light, nothing is reflected off it so you would never see the photons that are absorbed by the eye.
There’s nothing to see, you can’t see the absence of light, you see?
The question then becomes what happens to the photons reflected off whatever is behind the eye, like a wall. Do they get blocked by the eye from that direction? If so, maybe you’d be right and it would manifest in reality like Vanta black. But if it passes through, as it is not needed for absorption, you would just see those photons and that would make the eye functionally invisible.
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u/M3atboy Mar 23 '26
I think it more assumes that the invisiblity works by using or manipulating physics and not being magic.
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u/RutzButtercup Mar 23 '26
Yes it does also assumes that, and without that assumption my point is invalid.
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u/Drekor Mar 23 '26
Bending light around still makes you blind. Light needs to hit your eyeballs to see... that will either reflect allowing your eyes to be visible or the light will be absorbed causing your eyes to appear black.
If you allow a "little" in then your eyes are still become visible, roughly in proportion to how well you can see. The better you can see the easier your eyes are to spot. And at that point we are just talking camouflage which already exists and is pretty good.
From a strictly visible standpoint bending visible light while seeing via something like infrared would work but you'd still be plainly visible by someone looking through an infrared camera... which are much easier to obtain than a selectively-permeable invisibility thing.
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u/Mc_Shine Mar 23 '26
Please show me a "real world" example of invisibility achieved via light bending.
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u/Positive_Chip6198 Mar 23 '26
Similarly, if you used the spell time-stop (dungeons and dragons). The world would go black because no photons would reach you from outside your spell bubble.
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u/Accomplished_Ant5895 Mar 23 '26
Well then in the same vein wouldn’t it be absolute zero and you’d be unable to move through the giant matrix of frozen molecules?
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u/metamorphosis___ Mar 23 '26
Well if you think about it that way ? (And let’s assume you can still walk)
Wouldn’t walking through let you see and stopping make you blind? As you walk the photons that are there hit your eyes allowing sight.
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u/DuckyBertDuck Mar 24 '26
The photons would not have enough energy to interact with your eyes due to them being slowed relative to you.
If the photons could interact: the light is frozen in space, it is not traveling. It will not be properly bent (or at least in any useful fashion) by your lens anymore. As you walk forward, you would be physically pushing your retina through a static field of photons. They would hit your eye in straight, parallel geometric lines based purely on where you shoved your face. The image you would see would be white noise with no patterns.
There are a couple more problems I can think about
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u/snakeravencat Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
Would it even affect photons?
Because if we're approaching this from a proper physics perspective then you have to take special relativity into account. If we assume time stop is essentially just maximum time dilation, and we know that approaching the speed of light causes greater and greater time dilation, then photons and all other massless particles are either always at maximum time dilation, or aren't subject to it. Otherwise all photons would be stopped all the time relative to us.
*Edit: Wanted to add that if they are in fact frozen in place there's a big question about if you'd even see them at all based on the fact that they'd have no frequency. Can't have a frequency without a time component and our eyes only pick up a rather narrow band of the spectrum as it is, so it's unlikely they'd be able to pick up a null frequency.
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u/TommyGilfillan Mar 23 '26
Probably something more trippy than that, as when you move you would be able to see the photons as they were at that moment of time they were stopped but only while moving to get them to interact with your retinas. The fact that oxygen would be frozen in place would be problematic too I think.
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u/DuckyBertDuck Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
Even if you could interact with those photons, you would only see white noise, since you would be pushing the photons into your eyes with perfect parallel lines.
If you isolate a piece of space, the photons in that space travel from left to right, upwards, downwards, etc etc
If you stop those and walk through them, you would lose the directional component of the photons. They would carry no useful information anymore. (you would see photons from all directions all at once)
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u/Tkappae Mar 23 '26
Id guess the word 'power' is probably the answer here.
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u/Curiosive Mar 23 '26
The power to walk through walls doesn't apply to instantly falling through the floor.
The power to read minds somehow translates to fully comprehensible sentences despite the fragmented chaos in which thoughts manifest.
Yeah, there's no shortage of inherent contradictions that are best ignored.
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u/mike_b_nimble Mar 23 '26
Yes, the physics-defying superpower of invisibility wouldn’t work because of this one particular rule of physics.
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u/GaidinBDJ Mar 24 '26
Right.
The answe to this, and every other "shower thought" about magic powers is the same. Since you're making up whatever makes you invisible, just also make up that it allows you to see.
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u/AardvarkOkapiEchidna Mar 23 '26
The character Mirio in My Hero Academia doesn't have invisibility powers but, he does have the power to phase through objects.
And it DOES make him blind when his eyes are phasing. He also can't breathe while phasing because the oxygen phases through him.
Luckily, he can phase different parts of his body separately at a time if he wants, it's not all or nothing.
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u/Primebongs7455 Mar 23 '26
There's a Solar Opposites episode on this. Then they can't find the invisibility ray to become visible again.
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u/VaporCarpet Mar 23 '26
The power of invisibility is fictional and does not need to adhere to rules of real life.
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u/pgn674 Mar 23 '26
TVTropes has this covered. It's called a Required Secondary Power. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/RequiredSecondaryPowers
"Invisibility: You need: A way to actually see..."
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u/BiDiTi Mar 23 '26
The Invisible Woman analogue in Planetary needs to use special goggles to let her see!
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u/cybercuzco Mar 23 '26
The ability to stop time would also make you blind because no light would travel to hit your retinas. Also moving would be problematic since your atoms would be smashing into time stopped atoms at effectively infinite speed.
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u/Loud-Difficulty7860 Mar 23 '26
Well then I want the power to slow time instead!
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u/cybercuzco Mar 23 '26
Sure but everything is relative. The slower you go the faster you appear to outside observers. Eves slowing down time so that 1 second equaled 1000 seconds would mean that you were producing a shockwave as you moved through air equivalent to a fighter plane moving at Mach 3.
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u/Morvack Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
I always just assumed super powers were just like magic, completely immune to the rules of logic and reason. Otherwise most super powers would be lame.
Most of Supermans and Wonder Womans powers would be useless without their endurance.
Aquaman would be a lot more lame if he had to breath oxygen.
Batman would become just as bad as the criminals he fights, if it wasn't for his super human mind.
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u/Aristotallost Mar 23 '26
Tbh from a writer's perspective I like that as a superpower. It can work but it can also produce many more problems. I wrote a book about kids getting superpowers and one of them could make him and/or them invisible, but with the caveat that they couldn't move a muscle. People could unknowingly bump into them, which can help push the story forward.
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u/Miss_Panda_King Mar 23 '26
No the power takes in the light and projects it back out with a duplicate light signal on the other side. Like if you connect your camera to a screen now both the camera and screen display the same image.
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u/Southern-Ant8592 Mar 23 '26
This is stupid, it depends on how it works, realistically the power of invisibility would kill you simply because every atom of your body stops having electromagnetic interaction.
All superpowers are lethal depending on how you assume they work. There is a reason they only exist in fiction.
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u/AerialSnack Mar 23 '26
This is one of the reasons I love the Saga of Recluce series so much! There are wizards who can use invisibility, but when they do they have to rely on their other senses because they can't see! Very detailed world.
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u/groundhogcow Mar 23 '26
That depends on how the power works.
What if the power allowed the light to register as it passes through your eyes.
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u/NotYourReddit18 Mar 23 '26
I can't remember which book series it was, but one fantasy series I read had a spell called "Invisibility with Eyeholes" which was specifically created to address this issue of the common invisibility spell by creating two small holes in the invisibility effect where the casters eyes would be while standing up.
This allowed the caster to see while being invisible, but everyone else could also see their eyes, or two black circles if the caster ducked down to avoid light reflecting from their eyes, through those holes.
Within the setting this spell was still regarded as being superior to simple invisibility because you could see your surroundings while using it.
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u/Ok_Honeydew180 Mar 23 '26
Vision works by rods and cones in your eyes absorbing light, not reflecting it. So if we say allow all light to bend around us except what is absorbed by our eyes then we’re all set.
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful Mar 23 '26
The fact that they absorb light means that, at least on paper, an observer would note less light traveling through the areas occluded by the cells. Whether it would be enough of a difference to be detectable by a human, though, I don’t know.
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u/Ok_Honeydew180 Mar 23 '26
This is true. But this would only be detectable if we had some very sophisticated imaging equipment.
Though since magic is at play, a cool concept could be another wizard checking for abnormal drops in light magnitude from open spaces to see if they’re being spied on.
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u/stopeverythingpls Mar 23 '26
There’s a reason it’s an illusion spell in DnD, a trick of the mind, so you could argue it’s tricking everyone else’s mind to not see you
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Mar 23 '26
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful Mar 23 '26
Well, if I must be mistaken, I’m glad to be correctly mistaken.
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u/bitchin_bauhaus Mar 23 '26
The comic Planetary addressed this 20 years ago with the Invisible Woman analog, Kim Süskind. It's a great book, I highly recommend it.
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u/eeke1 Mar 23 '26
You can always make up an explanation for a magic power though.
Let's say invisibility works by bending light. You could say that's the wielders power.
They then see and still stay invisible by scattering the image, then recombing them piecemeal at their eyes, which let's them stay invisible.
Even better if you give them light sensitive eyes or equivalent equipment.
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u/ieatpickleswithmilk Mar 23 '26
unless it only lets light through into your eyes but not back out. From behind you would look like 2 floating slightly shadowy orbs but still invisible from the front or sides
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u/Malcopticon Mar 23 '26
This was a plot point in an early Star Wars expanded universe novel, Heir to the Empire. No one thought cloaking devices were worth worrying about because they leave you blind, but Grand Admiral Thrawn found clever ways to use them, such as cloaking the cargo hold of a freighter, allowing his assault ships to Trojan Horse a starbase.
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u/HerpankerTheHardman Mar 23 '26
That was if you were invisible & intangible. If you were just invisible, you'd still be a physical presence in the room and your body would work like normal, just that no one else can see you.
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u/BraveLittleTowster Mar 23 '26
They almost address the in Hollow Man. Kevin Bacon complains that he can still see with his eyes closed and he's told "that's because your eye lids are invisible. In reality, the shape of your eye is responsible for how you see and without it, your retinas would be getting hit with light from every direction. Your vision would just look white.
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u/crightwing Mar 23 '26
While scientifically true with physics and stuff I’d like to think that you are invincible due to some kind of magic which would also allow you to see while invisible.
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u/jchowdown Mar 23 '26
Wrong. Whatever power made you invisible would be much smarter than that. They'd make it so your eyeballs aren't invisible, so you can still in fact see.
And if you think that sound stupid, keep in mind that the power that made you invisible is much smarter than you, and know how weird a floating set of retinas would look, so they'd also give you some sunglasses to wear over them.
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u/whiskeytango55 Mar 23 '26
It depends on how the mechanic works
Are you transparent or do you bend light?
Most likely this would be resolved with a secondary power.
Like how speedsters have increased padding for their brains as stopping after going light speed would scramble things
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u/AnAnonymousSource_ Mar 23 '26
Most characters with invisibility powers are still physically able to be injured so it's most likely a light bending power rather than a matter transference. They still have matter and can manipulate objects like open doors.
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u/Oiggamed Mar 23 '26
I read this in a fantasy book many years ago. Been telling that to people ever since. Been blowing minds since 1983.
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u/Than_Or_Then_ Mar 23 '26
Yes, its turns out all superpowers include side powers
Invisibility: Ability to still see
Super strength: Usually something to do with magically keeping the things you touch whole, or that prevents the ground from crumbling underneath you.
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u/hornedCapybara Mar 23 '26
There's a book called The Library at Mount Char, where it works exactly like this. The character in question has to figure out the path they're gonna take ahead of time, memorize the exact amount of steps and everything to get there without being able to see.
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u/Malrottian Mar 23 '26
I loved the Bloodlines crossover event in DC where spinal fluid drinking alien monsters accidentally created tons of new superheroes with their attacks. There's one who plays the trope straight of the invisibility power who can't see because his retinas are also transparent. His amazing comic book solution? Use some off the shelf goggles . . that he also turns transparent when he uses his power.
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u/MrNosco Mar 23 '26
A really cool LitRPG called Beneath the Dragoneye Moons has several different solutions to this. The most basic one is invisibillity-with-eyeholes, and the most powerful ones erase even you scent and tracks you leave on the ground
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u/carlcast Mar 23 '26
Just like a superhero catching a person falling from the sky. Physics will kill them
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u/dubesto Mar 23 '26
If you had the ability to freeze time you would be torn to shreds by all of the dust and microscopic debris floating in the air
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u/Casiquire Mar 24 '26
That would depend on how the invisibility works. If light is just passing through but all other functions are fine, there's either magic or sufficiently advanced technology at play. This line of thinking no longer really applies
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u/awbattles Mar 24 '26
That’s like saying that wearing shoes would cripple you because shoes are size 6 and you have size 10 feet.
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u/RowdyB666 Mar 24 '26
Invisibility isn't affecting light, its affecting perception. Like the invisible chick in Hero's, not invisible, but able to stay in everyone's blind spots.
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u/AbbyJaneSunshine Mar 24 '26
SO I’ve concluded the power of invisibility would require at least a “pin prick” of visibility when active to both eyes to see. BUT what if you were already blind?… Like, If DAREDEVIL could make himself invisible?! But he never figured out he had a superpower beyond enhanced sense perception because he could never see himself actually be invisible?
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u/Fluffy_Respond_7405 Mar 24 '26
No. Because any fantasy worth having would override things as these.
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u/Commentator-X Mar 24 '26
That all depends on exactly how the invisibility power worked. If it somehow bent light around your body then it's not making your cells transparent. So your eyes would still be able to absorb light and your power itself could potentially direct enough light to your eyes to still have effective vision.
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u/NecRobin Mar 25 '26
Imagine you pupils are exempt and you were just two tiny parallel floating holes
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u/Craftycat99 Mar 25 '26
What if all of you is invisible except your eyes so you look like floating eyeballs?
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u/Cold-Jackfruit1076 Mar 25 '26
And faster-than-light travel means you can't see where you're going. You're faster than the light that's heading in the same direction.
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u/bad-gamer35 Mar 27 '26
There's a book called The Secret Keepers that actually has invisibility that functions exactly like that!!! It's a wonderful read if you are interested
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u/AnonymousFriend80 Mar 23 '26
The large majority of super powers work effectively because it's never just one single power, but many abilities working in unison to get the effect with minimal drawbacks or adverse effects.
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u/a_human_male Mar 23 '26
Not really…
We don’t see something because light hits it, we see it because the light bounces back to us.
Stealth bombers get hit by radar waves they just reflect the away. So the source of the radar doesn’t get it back.
Something could be bending the light behind it to you. So you see whats behind it.
I could be “invisible” by holding up a screen plays the camera feed of whats behind me.
So magic invisibility could be projecting an image at you a mirage or illusion of light. Rather than making me transparent, which would make more sense because that would require changing the properties of my matter.
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u/archpawn Mar 23 '26
Not just that. Even if you had some magic way to have your retina detect light without absorbing it, it won't matter because your lens isn't focusing light there and everything around your eye isn't blocking the light coming from all directions.
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u/CountHonorius Mar 23 '26
Never gave that much thought. Huh. Not a power I'd want anyway (teleportation or no dice)
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