This came from reading a recent X-Men related comic.

Characters are captured and fitted with inhibitors, shutting off their powers.

But how would this really work? Does it merely STOP the powers, or regress them to a normal human state?

What I mean is, say your power is intelligence/memory retention. What happens if your powers are inhibited, do you stay as smart, but simply unable to retain every new fact like a normal human, or would you LOSE all that additional info you already knew, and be taken back to an average regular level of intelligence?

Uggh, I'm depressed by what I wrote. Makes me sound really nerdy.

I'm just bored, damnit!

Um. Your avatar is Optimus Prime dunking a basketball.

You wrote that.

You ARE very nerdy. Ain't nothing wrong with that.

As to the question at hand.

I really couldn't care less.

Touche.

Super-powers can be lost in a variety of ways which are viable. Heck, look at Spider-Man 2. Spidey lost his powers for part of that movie due to what amounted to a lack of desire to be Spider-Man and it worked for the purposes of that movie. Storm lost her powers in the 1980s due to getting hit by a weapon Forge designed specifically to remove a mutant's powers. Gamma-negative rays used to cause the Hulk to revert back to Bruce Banner. There's no right or wrong way to do it, methinks.

Savage Dragon has a character called "Negate" that takes powers away by reverting you back to your natural state -- so it depowers characters who got their powers through external means but doesn't affect Gods or alien species who naturally have powers as part of their DNA.

I usually don't care how it "works" because it's just a story device used by writers, but if they try to get in pseudo-science, I think they should be specific -- this "depower ray" works on the mutant x-gene, so mutants would be powerless but not other superheroes or it affects radiation based powers, so it would work on the FF or Spider-Man but not Thor or the Flash.

I don't think there can be a "loses all powers" device. If Forge used his Storm/Rogue depowering ray on himself, for instance, I could see it failing. That would be like saying that a single medicine could be invented that could cure everyone of everything.

The Panacea Potion from The Squadron Supreme?

Okay, I was trying to be all nerdy but I realized I have been IMWANIAN longer than some of the people in this thread yet have less than ten percent of the posts. Iam instead going to go and feel shamed.

I want to be a nerd too.

I'm not following you.

That makes sense. They don't all get them the same way, so there shouldn't be one simple way to lose them all.

I think normally, it would drop you down to "normal" levels. Some cases are weird though. How can Rogue steal Thors power? But she has..

Rogue was also able to steal some of Juggernaut's power too. Not all of it, since he has infinite power. Even after Rogue had stolen some of his power, and he had shrunk to near normal size, he was regaining more power and getting bigger again while Rogue still had her power intact... because Juggernaut's power continuously flows from where ever it comes from. I thought that was neat. As far as Rogue stealing Thor's power... well, I can see her stealing his strength, but that's it. She doesn't steal power from objects, just people.

I think it should "work" however the writer wants it to.

I agree, but it does at least have to make sense on some level. For example, the earlier idea of Rogue stealing Thor's power. It would make no sense if she also gained the power to manipulate the weather since that power comes from Mjolnir and not Thor himself. If a writer had Rogue touch Thor and Thor fell unconscious and suddenly Rogue was flying through the air manipulating lightning and making it rain, I would cry foul. Even if she did so by using Mjolnir, that wouldn't work, since whether or not someone can use Mjolnir has nothing to do with Thor's physical power.

Yes, I'd agree that there have to be some kind of "plausible" guidelines which govern how it works, as well. The way it's used has to follow the "internal logic" of the fictional universe that the story takes place in. So, unless Mjolnir is somehow mystically "alive" (and Rogue touches it and is able to duplicate/absorb some of its power), I agree with your point, Darin.

I remember a similar thing happening back when Kurt Busiek was writing Iron Man with Sean Chen doing the art chores. There was this superhero costume party and the people there were given a drug that gives them the powers of established Marvel characters (based upon psuedo-science). Well, one guy manifested the Absorbing Man's powers and I wrote Busiek and told him that a scientific formula couldn't give anyone the Absorbing Man's powers because Absorbing Man's powers were magical in nature. Busiek replied that he had forgotten about that and I kinda felt like a jerk... so I stopped doing that kind of thing.

To Busiek, yes.

To pros.

They should just kill the heroes if they capture them.
The only reasons to bother developing ways to shut off their
powers is if you need to do so to kill them, or you need to
study them (in order to kill the others you haven't captured
yet, or for trying to figure out how to give other people
these powers), or becuase you want to convert them over
to your side.

Just kill 'em, and dice 'em up later on. It never seems to work
the other ways.