Viewpoint
So there's a guy whose super"power" is supreme psychic empathy.
When he looks at someone, he becomes them, mentally. His own internal persona is pushed mostly aside at first. If he's in a crowd he'll have a mild seizure if he keeps his eyes open.
He remains this person - more or less - until he looks directly at someone else.
Slowly, if he doesn't swap again, he becomes a gestalt persona between himself and "who the last person he looked at would be if they got sucked into his body and then realized they weren't the original."
This happens over and over. For a while he tried to stay out of trouble, pretending to be blind.
Then he almost got run over and, in the course of administering first aid, a superhero forced his eyelid open.
Now he's got all the muscle memory and secrets of a superhero. Batman, maybe. And as the gestalt sets up, he thinks through his own memories and recognizes breaks in the power, and exploits the best of them: He doesn't become someone from viewing video footage of them. He sets up a pair of glasses with a forward-facing camera that plays to the inside of the glasses, and regains his vision. It's the pair of glasses that made me think to call him Viewpoint instead of something like Mirror.
A super like Viewpoint would be almost instantly fatal to a villain like Purple Man.
Viewpoint accidentally sees Purple Man. Becomes Purple Man. Copies his psychic powers.
And a man like Purple Man, on determining he there were two of himself, would immediately use his powers - and knowledge of said powers, and element of surprise - to kill the other, less-informed copy.
A few days later, a man like Purple Man would get frustrated with his inability to see his victims and would look at one of them.
Just like that, both copies of Purple Man are dead. Not that Viewpoint comes out of that exchange unscathed. Because in the course of those two days the Viewpoint/Purple Man gestalt has access to the knowledge of everyone Viewpoint has ever been. So as the new person begins to realize they're Viewpoint and not who they believed they were, they also begin to remember that when they were Purple Man they wreaked untold havoc on the world.
When he looks at someone, he becomes them, mentally. His own internal persona is pushed mostly aside at first. If he's in a crowd he'll have a mild seizure if he keeps his eyes open.
He remains this person - more or less - until he looks directly at someone else.
Slowly, if he doesn't swap again, he becomes a gestalt persona between himself and "who the last person he looked at would be if they got sucked into his body and then realized they weren't the original."
This happens over and over. For a while he tried to stay out of trouble, pretending to be blind.
Then he almost got run over and, in the course of administering first aid, a superhero forced his eyelid open.
Now he's got all the muscle memory and secrets of a superhero. Batman, maybe. And as the gestalt sets up, he thinks through his own memories and recognizes breaks in the power, and exploits the best of them: He doesn't become someone from viewing video footage of them. He sets up a pair of glasses with a forward-facing camera that plays to the inside of the glasses, and regains his vision. It's the pair of glasses that made me think to call him Viewpoint instead of something like Mirror.
A super like Viewpoint would be almost instantly fatal to a villain like Purple Man.
Viewpoint accidentally sees Purple Man. Becomes Purple Man. Copies his psychic powers.
And a man like Purple Man, on determining he there were two of himself, would immediately use his powers - and knowledge of said powers, and element of surprise - to kill the other, less-informed copy.
A few days later, a man like Purple Man would get frustrated with his inability to see his victims and would look at one of them.
Just like that, both copies of Purple Man are dead. Not that Viewpoint comes out of that exchange unscathed. Because in the course of those two days the Viewpoint/Purple Man gestalt has access to the knowledge of everyone Viewpoint has ever been. So as the new person begins to realize they're Viewpoint and not who they believed they were, they also begin to remember that when they were Purple Man they wreaked untold havoc on the world.