Super-powered protagonists are a lot of fun for a lot of reasons.
Not only can you explore the nature of their abilities and how they affect them as a person,
as well as potential consequences of how they use them, but from a practical standpoint,
you can also have those characters navigate some very high-stakes situations
without having to do any complex narrative acrobatics to justify them surviving.
Your everyman is gonna have real trouble living through a fistfight with a laced Rigonian giant,
but slap a healing factor on him and you've got an easy license for consequence-free spectacle.
Some media will take this to extremes, and basically set the stage for very flashy low-consequence combat
by giving most of their characters some degree of super durability or healing,
or just having the most tanky protagonist take most of the hits in any given fight,
while the lower-powered characters run support.
This lets your characters huck each other through
buildings or get punched into craters without having to deal with potentially tragic or upsetting consequences,
and it lets you keep the tone fairly light.
Now what this means is you wind up with a lot of threats that aren't actually very threatening,
because your designated brick can usually just take 'em down without that much real trouble or risk of injury.
But this can cause your writer problems if they want to do a dramatic storyline
where the heroes are genuinely at risk or on the run,
which can be fun for drama, angst, all kinds of good things.
And the potential gut-punch impact of a serious, scary, dramatic episode of a normally cheerful or upbeat show
is a very valuable writing resource.
So there are a number of solutions writers tend to implement to actually threaten their superhuman heroes.
Sometimes the threat of the week is power-proof, or has all the powers your heroes do,
or has some kind of ability or artifact that your supers are allergic to.
But by far the easiest way for writers to make this work is to just take those superpowers away for a bit.
So your normally super-powered character doesn't have their powers right now.
There are three ways this usually happens.
Option number one: It was an accident.
You did something wrong or stumbled into something and now your powers are on the fritz.
Frequently, this leads the hero to realize that they've become overly reliant on their powers,
and they have trouble navigating regular life without their super speed,
or indestructibility, or magical demon sword, or whatever.
They'll usually feel embarrassed about having lost their powers,
but will inevitably regain them before the credits roll.
Probably after a dramatically appropriate moment where they were liable to die without them,
but only after they've already done something heroic without having to use their powers.
Occasionally the hero considered their powers more of a curse than a blessing,
and they actually wanted them removed.
But the moral is usually the same.
The hero realizes they miss their powers and inevitably gets them back without too much trouble.
Option number two: It was a villainous plot.
Bad guy's smacked you with kryptonite and now your powers are gone.
It's probably not permanent, but it's definitely inconvenient,
and on top of that, the villain is taking advantage of your power loss to try and murder you and stuff.
You're almost certainly gonna have to navigate a high-stakes fight without your powers,
and it's gonna be annoying, and you're probably gonna break something important,
But on the plus side, when your powers do return, all the damage will be repaired,
and you'll be free to kick the bad guy's butt with your newly restored abilities.
Option number 3: It's entirely situational.
In this case, there are some situations where your powers just don't work.
Sometimes it's environmental. Sometimes it's based on your emotional state.
Sometimes it's a regular occurrence that you just have to deal with once in a while.
Whatever the case, it's definitely temporary and it usually has a concrete end condition.
When you leave the environment or you regain your chill or the Sun rises
your powers will return full force and allow you to kick the collective asses of those who have wronged you.
Because this power loss is a known factor,
It's slightly lower stakes than options 1 or 2, in which cases the characters don't
Necessarily have any reason to believe their power loss is only temporary. In this version,
Your characters can run out the clock or fix the situational issue and the power loss problem will go away on its own.
And there's a slightly funky option 4,
Which is more like a different way of looking at this trope from a more group oriented perspective.
Basically,
If you have a posse of protagonists and one of them is basically the team powerhouse, then if that character is incapacitated somehow,
or missing for some reason, the rest of the team essentially suffers from power loss and all its associated threats.
Problems the powerhouse can normally solve are suddenly threatening again,
and the rest of the team will need to work really hard to not get taken out by low-level threats
while they try and fix their powerhouse problem.
This is basically the story that arises when you examine how the power loss trope applies to a group of protagonists rather than an individual.
Now once your character is suitably depowered, a lot of story options open up to you.
There are a few classics to work from, but there are loads of possibilities.
The first classic story is "I am more than my powers", which is only really feasible with options 1 or 2,
When your hero has an identity crisis following their power loss but manages to pull off a victory even without their powers.
They inevitably learn to recognize that it's not their powers that make them special, but they'd still really like their powers back, please.
Frequently this story is used as a sort of karmic authorial punishment for the character's growing hubris
A way to remind them that they might be super-powered,
but that doesn't mean they should fully rely on those powers and risk losing sight of what really matters.
Sometimes, instead of being used as a way to humble the character,
It's instead used as a way for the character to prove themselves, either to themselves or some external judging audience.
This version is used pretty frequently when the characters powers take the form of a nifty high-tech supersuit.
Probably because it's a power set that can easily be separated from the wielder,
and an easy argument can be made that the powers contained in that suit don't really reflect on the person wearing it.
The next major use for the power loss plot is a fairly general one and shows up in a lot of forms.
"This situation would be easily resolvable if I had my powers, but unfortunately..."
Wherein in the author gets to drop the protagonist in a situation that wouldn't pose any sort of challenge normally,
But in the context is a potentially deadly threat.
This is one of those things that's easy on the author since it lets them come up with a dramatic plotline
without having to also figure out how this plotline couldn't just be solved in five minutes by the resident superheroes.
The threat can be as simple as a really strong bad guy or even garden-variety mugger, depending on how humiliating he wanted to be for your heroes.
It's so relaxing to write.
Depending on the exact circumstances of power loss, there can also be additional stakes involved in the fight.
Maybe the bad guy hasn't figured out that the hero has lost their powers and the hero is trying
to keep them in the dark and get by on menace alone because they can't win in a straight fight.
Maybe the scenario is option 4, and the team powerhouse is totally incapacitated
while their friends have to play hide and seek avoiding all the usually non-threatening antagonistic forces gunning for their currently helpless buddy.
There's one version of this trope that's so specific I'd call it a subtrope on its own.
The structure is as follows:
Your protagonist has temporarily lost their powers, either to options two or three,
and although they know the power loss is temporary, the main threat is that they're basically
cornered for whatever reason and have no other option but to desperately try and hide or hold out until their powers switch on again.
In the meantime,
They might be trying to protect some or all of the less powerful protagonists from whatever threat is stalking them
and the odds are pretty good that they'll wind up injured in a suitably dramatic fashion before the installment is over.
As the plot progresses,
They slowly run out the clock with the situation getting progressively more desperate,
Until at the last possible moment, their powers come back and everything gets fixed.
If getting their powers back acquire something physical like a suit of power armor or a magic artifact or something,
They'll usually be trying to work their way over to wherever the power MacGuffin is.
But in cases where it's just a matter of time, all you have to do is wait it out.
It's good tension, easy drama potential, shipping fodder if you like that sort of thing,
There's a lot that can be done with this plotline.
Now of course, one thing to consider when writing this is how your powered characters would actually react to losing their powers.
The ones who are used to it happening on the regular probably won't be that fazed.
And the Iron Man types who built their superpowers aren't likely to freak out.
But characters with ingrained superpowers that might be gone forever can display a wide array of emotional responses.
Almost none of them pleasant.
Consider the character who was born with powers that they've just lost.
They're not gonna have any frame of reference for how their life should work without them.
Indestructible characters will frequently marvel at feeling pain for the first time in their lives,
and characters with physical tells for their powers that might cause them to be shunned in polite society
will often be pleasantly surprised with how well they're treated when they look fully human.
Your flight equipped character might have some pretty dangerous muscle memory with regards to jumping off of high places,
while a character whose superpower is some sort of magical choosey artifact might have a
full-on existential crisis upon being unchosen by the artifact in question.
Some characters might respond very poorly to losing their powers
Especially if they only recently got them and especially especially if their quality of life improved significantly after getting them.
It's hard not to be at least a little bummed when the superpowers that turned your life around vanish without a trace
leaving you in your eyes exactly the same loser you were before your life got better.
Then again, some characters can pleasantly surprised you by handling the crisis better than you expected.
Maybe they cope quietly or focus on more important things or in more high-stakes situations wind up being surprisingly competent even without their powers.
I mean if your super powered character had to do any sort of training after they got powered up,
It makes sense that at least some of that would have stuck,
and it's a nice easy Moment of Awesome to have your allegedly helpless depowered hero pull out some surprise
jujitsu out of nowhere and land a few hits on the equally surprised bad guy.
Now overall, most of these pot lines follow a very simple structure:
Character loses powers, character faces an array of problems as a result of this power loss,
character optionally experiences a few scattered benefits of their power loss,
threat level increases until the character regains their powers and the status quo is restored.
This is one of those story formats where the beginning disrupts the status quo and the end restores it,
which means you can go pretty crazy in the middle so long as everything gets reset in the end.
It's like the thing I talked about in the Five Man Band video where at the beginning of the arc is the band splitting up
you can go totally wild in the intervening character arcs so long as the band gets back together in the end.
Like all stories that restore the status quo in the end,
This format is an easy conduit for good clean creative fun.
But there's a more permanent version of this trope that's a lot less fun.
Sometimes your character really does lose their powers and it doesn't just go back to normal at the end of the episode.
Regardless of whether they eventually regain their powers or get different powers or just stay depowered forever,
this version involves this character and the audience essentially fully coming to terms with that power loss.
And this version can be weirdly upsetting.
I'm not 100% sure why that is, but something about a cool super-powered character
with awesome super human abilities getting turned into a normal human character is kind of literary gut-punch.
Now, obviously this still doesn't have to be permanent,
but it does have to last beyond the initial story the power loss takes place in,
And as a result, it lends itself to a very different kind of story.
Instead of our hero doing a few token heroics without their powers and subsequently regaining them,
Our hero has to figure out who they are without those powers.
This has all the difficulties of a normal self-discovery story with the added tragedy that your hero used to know who they were,
but doesn't anymore because they've lost a fundamental part of themselves.
Even stories where the character wasn't super-powered can follow this format.
Normal human superhero Batgirl is famously paralyzed in The Killing Joke,
Which forced her to give up the identity of Batgirl for a while and become the tech based guy in the chair superhero Oracle instead.
Your maybe permanently depowered hero is going to have a heck of a character arc
figuring out who they are and what they can and should be doing with their lives.
So basically, overall this trope is very good for short-term and long-term angst and character development,
and has a lot of fun uses even in the non serious cases.
So... yeah.