Writer's Workshop: Seven With One Blow! · 4:20am Feb 14th, 2016
One of my clients is writing a story where their main character is incredibly overpowered. I've cautioned them that I fear there won't be enough challenge for this character, that it'll all seem too easy. But, you might say, what if I want my character to be strong? I like to tell stories about talented adventurers, chosen heroes, people of great skill! And I say to that, you're absolutely fine. It just means you'll have to accommodate your story to reflect this power. Plenty of the greatest stories in the world have characters like this, characters so powerful that they dwarf any other character in the story. So how do we have any sense of conflict if they're that strong? Let's talk about it.
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One of the great purposes of stories is escapism. We are weak, puny, non-magical people, so we want to read stories about swordsmen, wizards, geniuses, and charmers. Read the old Greek poems, and you'll see a nigh-invincible warrior, the cleverest person ever born, an entire army literally blessed by the gods. Move forward in time, and you see noble knights, dashing pulp heroes, and Mary Sue teen romance novel characters who are just so totally cool, seriously you guys. When you read these stories, you want to be these characters, because they're just so capable and impressive.
But… well… narratology has come a long way since then, and we've started to tell better stories than that. Here's sort of the fundamental law of all tension in stories: We always root for the underdog. After all, if a strong character and a weak character fight each other, there's not much of a story if the strong character wins. That's basically what we expected anyway. But if the weak character manages, through surprising abilities or unexpected growth, to overcome the stronger character, that gets us sitting up in our seats.
So what does that mean for our strong characters? How do we make our readers empathize with the stronger of two characters if we always root for the underdog? As soon as I say this, it'll sound like a no-brainer. Attack them somewhere else. There's an old saying, “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” And Sun Tzu, the master of strategy, says, “You can defeat even the most fortified of troops if you attack somewhere else where they are obliged to defend.” In other words, if a character is strong in some way, you can't make the conflict about that. Okay, you can have that pop up from time to time, just to let the character prove how awesome they are, but you can't make the conflict of the story focus around that. Because as I just said, there is no conflict. It is massively predictable to let a strong character use their specialty as much as they want.
Let's do an example. Suppose your character is The Fastest Draw in the West. This character's central concept is that they are exceptionally good with guns, and particularly in duels. If that's the case, then having the bad guy challenge this character to a duel would be stupid. The story would be done very quickly. Now, you can, if you want to cheat, just make the bad guy even faster. But that's kinda boring, since 1) that makes your character look lame, 2) it's cheating, and 3) the most obvious way to solve the problem is to just get faster. Not very interesting, all told. Another option is to dump problems on your character faster than they can solve it. This character may be the fastest draw, but they can only duel one person at a time, so if they have to fight a whole army at once, they're not gonna win. This is basically the strategy that Worm takes: Taylor Hebert may be smart and skilled, but there's not a whole lot she can do when the entire city gets curbstomped by [insert one of about a dozen villains here]. Dump a big enough problem on the character, and it'll take them a novel's-worth of time to eventually get through it.
But the most interesting solution is to force them into situations where their abilities don't help them 100% of the time. This is taking the Fastest Draw in the West and forcing them to root out a criminal ring among the town. Sure, the character will have to shoot people now and again, but they'll need other skills, too, like tracking, conversation, criminal connections, speed, intelligence, you get the idea. This is where those other characters come in. (You do have more than one important character, right?) The Fastest Draw gets help from A Woman on the Inside, the guy with A Nose Like a Bloodhound, and the Gadget Guy to cover the rest of the bases.
Along with that, this is where your Influence Character comes in. Your Main Character may be a great fighter or a clever wizard, but if they don't have, say, love for other people, they won't be able to succeed. The Influence Character can teach your character some new ability that they didn't have before. If the bad guy can only defeated once the Main Character stops being such a self-centered jerk, the majority of the story will be about the Main Character being a self-centered jerk and failing miserably at making things better. Again, their power isn't enough to get them to the Goal.
That reminds me of another trick you can use to prevent a character from seeming overpowered. Create a situation where two valuable things are put into conflict, then force the character to choose one at the cost of the other. No matter how powerful you might be, you can't win that. If achievement of the Goal requires the Main Character to, say, give up their guns to someone else, either choice is interesting. They could give up the guns, but then struggle in the following situations, or they could refuse to give up the guns, but torpedo their progress towards the Goal. Here's the thing, though: you have to follow through with this. This choice is not interesting if the character, say, has a gun hidden in their boot. Then you've given them all the positives of their choice without any of the negatives, and frankly, that's just not how life works. It feels fake, like you swooped out of the ether and saved your character out of nowhere.
All right, here's another tool that might help you, especially if your overpowered character is the kind that has a variety of different skills. Consider splitting your character up into two separate characters! This is one of the problems my client was facing. Their character was an extremely powerful magician, and also a charismatic diplomat for the changelings. As I told them, either of those ideas alone would be extremely interesting, but together, it just seems like too much. Truth be told, the diplomat part was the most interesting, as the story was about trying to create peace between pony- and changelingkind, and the “charismatic diplomat” represented a compromise between the two. Thus, my recommendation was to keep that part as the Main Character and have the other part be a supporting character. It'd be much more interesting, and we'd be able to sympathize more with a character who's perhaps a bit weaker magically but has this connection with the changelings than with somepony who is both changeling-themed and magically powerful.
One more point, and then I'm done, I promise. When you make a character powerful in some way, try not to make them “special.” Try to show that other characters could potentially be as powerful as this character, but they aren't due to some character flaw. This may be low-hanging fruit, but consider the difference between Bella Swan and Katniss Everdeen. Bella Swan is important to the story because her mind can't be read by Edward. (Yes, I have read all four books, in case you were wondering.) This creates that horrible “special snowflake” feeling that grates on you while you read. It's also, in a sense, the root of why she's such an uninteresting character. She didn't earn her uniqueness; she just got lucky… somehow. Now Katniss, on the other hand, is unique because she did what nobody else would do: volunteer as tribute for her sister. What gives her the ability to win the Games and come out as victor is her sheer desire to protect her family. This naturally flows out to the rest of her character: her resilience, her cleverness and creativity, even her skill with her bow. Katniss isn't special; you could be Katniss. But she has that strength of character that nobody else has, and that's why she's the Main Character. So when you make your overpowered character, show that it isn't something that they got through fate or good luck. Show that it's something they've earned.
I think that covers a lot of ground. As you design your overpowered characters, keep in mind that balance. Show their weaknesses, put them in lose-lose situations. Make them learn a lesson, or fight and struggle through hardship to bring their lesson to the rest of the world. Shoot, look at Twilight Sparkle. She's one of the most powerful unicorns ever born, but most of the time, do you ever get the sense that she's too powerful? No! The pilot itself demonstrates that power isn't everything. She needed friendship, something she didn't have at the start of the story, to achieve victory. You get the most interesting stories when you back a character up against the wall, show that their strengths and skills won't help them, then force them to figure out another way on their back foot. (Or hooves, as the case may be.) Conflict, in short, is about the struggle. Demonstrate that, and you'll make a story that will really entrance your readers.
There's a semi-relevant quote from Yudkowsky (though the sentiment likely isn't original) that, at least when writing fan fiction, "you can't make frodo a Jedi without giving sauron the deathstar".
Certainly nothing especially additive to what you expressed in this blog post, but it's certainly catchy.
I'd be curious to see what you think of Saitama from OnePunch-Man in this context. He's written to be an unstoppable, indestructible force, but he struggles with finding satisfaction in his work as a hero after training so hard to become strong.
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Yup, you pretty well nailed it. Saitama's martial talent isn't what makes his character interesting; that's not really what creates conflict in the stories. It's his ennui, his lack of purpose, that makes him such a comedic character.