One of my favorite super powers: Prehensile Hair. It’s very underrated. This blog post is dedicated to it!

Also known as:

• Hair Manipulation
• Trichokinesis
• Chaetokinesis
• Comakinesis
• Animated Hair

Those prefixes for -kinesis were weird… Anyway. The basic definition, which I had to give to a group of people at work on Friday, is hair that moves independently like an extra appendage. Sometimes it is also imbues with super strength and/or the ability to grow rapidly (otherwise short animated hair would be pretty useless). Or! Even the ability to form their hair into objects they need (usually weapons).

Drawbacks:

• Limited by amount of hair (if without the secondary growing ability)
• Can be cut and limit power (if without secondary invincibility power)
• Keeps them in melee or at least short range
• Can be vulnerable to elemental powers (again minus invincibility) especially fire or ice based abilities

Those aren’t such back drawbacks. I mean, an awesome super power right?

I created a thief character once who could use her hair to pick locks. Much more pliable than lock picks right? She was an awesome character and I used Juno Temple for her avatar. Now that’s an actress who would definitely have prehensile hair for a super power if exposed to too much radiation/alien rocks. (Yeah that’s right, you just found out I played forum based RPGs growing up. What, now?!) 

What’s sad is that they usually give this super power to villains. I think it’s because Medusa gives it a bad name (the beast from Greek mythology not necessarily the Marvel character). 

Do you have any super powers you think are underrated? I’m thinking of doing a series of posts about underrated heroic abilities.