http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThisLooksLikeAJobForAquaman

Yahtzee Croshaw, describing the darkness- and forest-centric design of Alan Wake "It's like a crime drama about a detective who can only concentrate when he's around pastry, so every week the crime has to conveniently take place in a bakery, or within walking distance of a pie shop."

Basically, a situation where a hero's relatively useless abilities turn out to be phenomenally useful because everything's contrived specifically in order to make them useful, even though realistically there's no reason to expect everything to be so convenient. Often involves Locking MacGyver in the Store Cupboard. May be used regularly or as a one-off as part of A Day in the Limelight.

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Take Aquaman, for instance, since he mainly swims and talks to fish. But wait... the villain's doomsday machine is powered by telepathically controllable sea plankton? Wow, this guy's a great addition to the team!

The backlash against this trope may well be the biggest reason Only the Pure of Heart has started to fall out of favor. It doesn't help that so many examples of it treat the pure-of-heart character as the most vital team member of an otherwise robust cast, so you've got good guys who are worldlier, stronger, smarter, better at strategic thinking, etc., but all of them pale in importance next to the character who is... the most innocent. Because lessons.

Compare Plot Tailored to the Party, where the same contrivance is used to make the members of a team seem equally useful, rather than to make one specific hero look powerful on his own. Benevolent Architecture overlaps with either this or Plot Tailored to the Party.

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If the character constantly uses a power to solve all his problems, but it generally makes sense (if you have a big sword, and fight monsters, it's not exactly contrived that a lot of monsters can be hurt by a big sword), see When All You Have Is a Hammer....

The exact opposite of this would be Kryptonite Is Everywhere, when it's a hero's weakness that is far more commonly available than it makes sense. Compare Heart Is an Awesome Power, when the power seems uselessly specific but turns out to be useful in many situations; and Lethal Joke Character, who might have only one or two strengths but is unmatched in those areas. Compare and contrast What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?, Handy Shortcoming.

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Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Comedy

Comedian Dara O'Briain had a bit about various actors who'd played the Milky Bar kid (one of whom actually was in the audience, or so they say). He asked the audience what superpower a hypothetical Milky Bar kid superhero might possess, to which they provided a series of bizarre answers such as "super-taste", "the ability to turn people into chocolate", etc. O'Briain promptly mused that, if the hypothetical superhero possessed such a superpower, each episode of the hypothetical TV series would consist of this (and then provided an example of how absurd a crime for which "super-taste" would be necessary to solve it would be).

Comic Books

Comic Strips

In one The Far Side comic, the town's karate club are excited to see a group of plank-shaped and wall-shaped aliens invading Earth.

Fanfiction

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Tabletop Games

In the Pokémon Trading Card Game, this is the card designers' standard response to when some particular cards run rampant in the competitive scene. Notable examples include: Heatmor (Dark Explorers) , who has one attack, Hot Lick, that does a measly 10 damage but does 60 damage if the target is Durant—and was released at a time the Durant Mill deck was making short work of most other decks. In particular, Hot Lick needs only 1 Energy of any type to use allowing Heatmor to fit into any deck, including other Durant Mill decks. Not long afterward, the major force in the tournament scene were Pokémon SP, Basic Pokémon with decent strength that were augmented by a pretty large amount of supplementary cards. The result was decks centered around Pokémon SP having blinding setup speed and maneuverability, able to shift and adapt to anything any non-SP Pokémon can throw at it. Anything except for Machamp (Stormfront) , who has an attack that will immediately KO any Basic Pokémon it targets. Machamp decks aren't designed to do much except end Pokémon SP decks, but there were so many Pokémon SP decks at the time that Machamp decks became an equally common scene in tournaments.



Video Games

Web Comics

Web Original

DSBT InsaniT: Fire Guy has his uses, like being a great campfire.

Parodied in Harry Partridges Dr. Bees skit. After the titular superhero goes about making everything worse with his bees, we finally see a situation clearly tailor made for him to solve (a bee convention that has no bees). Dramatic music swells... and Dr. Bees doesnt show up. Smash cut to his corpse in the middle of the desert.

Western Animation