Consider, too, the Blue Beetle twist: dying superhero Dan Garrett chooses Ted Kord to carry on in his place, Ted swears he’ll live up to his idol’s ideals – and right as Dan goes to pass him the enchanted scarab, a cave-in rockslide separates them, leaving Dan buried way the heck underground and Ted out on the surface, powerlessly fighting crime after coming, like, this close to being The Greatest American Hero.
I disagree. Shakespeare had a remarkable paucity of original ideas, and yet he’s the greatest author the English language has ever known. How you tell the old stories matters a lot more than coming up with new ones.
Well the theme is generally with great power comes great responsibility, whether you want it or not.
I’d like an origin in which the superhero-to-be understands that and does her best to cover up and run away from the dohickey she has found and only once she realizes she cannot does she … with reluctance … accept the mantle. She did not want the responsibility of having the power but she understands that since she could not avoid the power she cannot avoid the responsibility. “Damn,” she thinks, “this is what I get for skipping class and going on a hike instead.”
This is what I get for asking smart people for assistance-My brain is stuffed with good ideas! 
That has to be her super power, then: Librarylass, she will bring you to your knees by bombarding you with more knowledge than you can cope with at one time!
The doohickey could have been designed to imprint upon its owner when activated, like a baby duckling on its mama. The craft is defective in that it has imprinted upon her but it is still intelligent and very powerful (in whatever special ways are specified). It has personality of sorts (likely best noverbal though, no need to go Kit), one that is slightly damaged now, and considers the hero as a preverbal toddler considers a parent … initially one who is trying to abandon it. Which sets up some trust issues as the relationship develops.
If you want to add another layer to that (and possibly be meta at the same time), once she gets the abilities/powers, she doesn’t want to use them. She gets pressured into it initially (her boyfriend guilts her into it by suggesting that if she doesn’t, he could end up being Uncle Ben), then discovers that she actually likes it.
Not to belabor the point, but origins are frequently more interesting after we have become invested in a character.
Batman
Wolverine
Everybody from Watchmen
The Shadow
Others I am too busy to look up.
Origin stories spend too much time on normal schlubs and not enough time on superheroes doing super stuff.
That’s what Star Trek ended up doing. They posited that many of the “alien” races in the region had been seeded there from other worlds by some weird hyper-powerful (and truly alien) race, to increase the chance of survival of at least some of them. Thus, American Indians in space, and also Vulcans and Romulans.
(There’s also some wank, either fanwank or canonwank, that advanced medical techniques, such as gamete manipulation, were used to make things work. This is alluded to in some of the novels.)
True. In dramatic terms, it’s often more effective to give us scenes of the character doing characteristic stuff – being heroic, fighting monsters, whatever – and only then going outside of his standard behavior.
“Crippled by angst” stories only work once we know the character in his normal mode.
(Star Trek: Next Generation messed up very badly by having the “everybody gets drunk” episode very, very early in the first season. How can we judge them as drunks when we don’t know them yet when they’re sober?)
Here, you hit a big dividing line in fandom. Some of us like stories involving normal schlubs – like recent Supergirl and Batgirl stories involving them finding ordinary human roommates – but other fans find those stories boring as hell, and want to see the fight scenes. For the writers, this is an eternal Scylla and Charybdis dilemma: how much “soap opera” and how much “Cage Wrestling” should there be in the stories?
I was so glad to see this. As soon as I saw the thread title, I thought of Green Lantern, who has my all-time favorite origin story. Along with the later addition to that story that Guy Gardner was (likely) the ring’s first choice, but Hal Jordan was closer and time was of the essence.
As somebody else already mentioned, a TNG episode explained why humans, Vulcans/Romulans, Klingons, and Cardassians can interbreed.
A couple references for the OP:
The webcomic, “Grrl Power”. The main character, Sydney, gets her powers from some apparently alien artifacts, and she’s still learning what the artifacts do: http://grrlpowercomic.com/
Then there’s one of my favorite book series, “Greywalker”. Not a “superhero” story; it falls into the “urban fantasy” genre. But that first book starts with the protagonist being straight-up murdered in the first few pages. She’s revived … and now has some interesting “powers”.
Likewise, think of Captain America. I mean, sure, super-soldier serum instead of an alien artifact, but as analogies go the kid from Brooklyn still parallels better to that than to no, you’re not now, and never were, human; you’ve actually had inhuman powers all along, and failed to notice.
I’d never heard of this; I’ll look into it! Thanks!
In comic books, “Ghost” (Elisa Cameron) has a similar origin. (I call it a “superhero” book because of the combination of powers, an “origin,” and a costume. If she only wore jeans and a sweater, the assignment to the genre would be much weaker.)
I used to play the MMO, City of Heroes, before the bastards at NCSoft shut it down. One of my favorite things in that game was coming up with the origin stories of my superhero characters. I created 93 unique characters in that game. Most of those characters, I didn’t even play. I just created them for the sake of creation. And a lot of them didn’t even have superpowers. They were just incredibly skilled in one way or another, and used those skills to become heroes (or villains).
I created a team of superhero women, called “Solar Angels”. They were led by “Mother Sun”. Mother Sun was a middle-aged scientist who developed a method of instilling superpowers in ordinary people. I never got as far as describing her method in scientific terms, but the gist was that, sometimes her procedure had no effect, but othertimes superpowers resulted. When her “successes” resulted in superpowers, Mother Sun dubbed each participant with a name that reflected her newfound powers, and also had a relation to our solar system (Mother Sun herself had heat and radiation powers). Her team consisted of:
Girl Mercury (English girl. Superspeed! Unsurprisingly!)
Venus Lass (a former “Miss California” who manifested powers over earth and gravity)
Erdmadchen (A German girl who manifested the ability to control plant life. Her name is possibly suspect; computer translation gave me “Erdmachen” when I input “Earth Maiden”)
Ms. Mars (An actual Martian. No superpowers; she did not undergo Mother Sun’s process. Well, she did, but the process had no effect. But she was already skilled with the sword and shield.)
Fille de Jupiter (A French girl who gained the ability to grow to gigantic proportions, combined with invulnerability and super-strength)
Saturn Signal (an African-American girl who manifested telekinetic powers; the name was a play on “satellite signal”)
Princesa Urana (A Mexican girl whose powers I cannot currently remember. Damn game shut down 3 years ago.)
Neptune’s Niece (a Canadian girl who claimed to be a descendant of Neptune himself, and just so happened to manifest the power to control water after undergoing Mother Sun’s process)
Notta Planet. (She was going to be called “Plutonium”, but shortly after she underwent the process, Pluto was declared to no longer be a proper planet, and, since she was a natural smartass, she picked a new name. Powers over darkness.)
Subsidiary members:
Lunagetic (named for the moon, and with “darkness” powers, but via ranged attack, vs. Notta’s melee attacks)
Haylee Comet (she shoots fire!)
Here’s the whole team, minus Lunagetic and Haylee Comet:
BTW, the OP may draw any inspiration he wishes from that (not that I find it inspirational). I consider everything I post online to be “open source”, to be used in any way other people desire.
A twist on that: liking the powers but not wanting to depend on them, or having the kind of powers where it is relatively easy to go from “use” to “abuse”, and going through the process of working out how and when to limit them. I think this shouldn’t be something that gets trotted out every other page (did I mention I have adamantium-laced bones? Oh, and my claws go snikt!) but either can produce interesting history arcs and limitations.
I’m sure we’ve discussed this before, Mister Rik, but I was a huge City of Heroes fan. First MMORPG I ever played.
The Mother Sun concept would be the ideal approach to offsetting the “chosen one” issue: you could have a central superhero who has no other inherent ability but to imbue others, ad hoc, with the transient superpower needed to accomplish a given task. This of course makes it challenging to establish the manner in which your central character is herself heroic, you have to delve into the complexities of her choices and the problems that arises when she chooses poorly, perhaps even endangering herself by them.
Figure out what the dramatic core of your story is. Most superhero fare is power-fantasy. The origin flows from that. Spiderman is a geek with super-powers, so it makes sense to have it a fortuitous accident. But you can also have gods like Thor. I would worry less about what is heroic and more about what you want to do with the story.
Step outside the superhero genre, and power fantasy falls away. The first arc of Naruto was about a goof-off’s struggle for acceptance by his village. Most shonen manga is about hard work and high spirit leading to some sort of accomplishment.
This takes a while but one method is to watch a ton of movies and keep a journal about it. Write down what worked, what didn’t work, and what really really worked. Mix and stir the elements and you have grist for a strong series. I understand Naruto’s Masashi Kishimoto and Quentin Tarantino did something like this.
Coming up with an original way for a character to get powers is hard, if not impossible. What makes a character interesting is the motivation. Why do they choose to use their powers for good?
Back in the eighties, Mayfair’s DC Heroes roleplaying game broke down heroic motivations into five categories. Maybe you can come up with an original one, or an original variation on one of the five.
Upholding the Good: The hero had a strong moral upbringing (e.g., Superman)
Responsibility of Power: The hero was selected or charged with using the power for good (e.g., Green Lantern)
Seeking Justice: The hero feels a need to avenge a wrong (e.g., Batman)
Unwanted Power: The hero feels like an outcast, and does heroic things in an attempt to fit in (e.g., Metamorpho, Cyborg)
Thrill of Adventure: The hero is out for kicks and excitement, and enjoys the cheers of admiring crowds (the game gave Green Arrow as an example, but I dunno… Elongated Man or Booster Gold might be better choices)