Fantasy Gold Vault

“Can I get anyone a cup of coffee? Apparently I got nothin’ better to do here.”
—Agent King Faraday, Justice League Unlimited (May not be exact)

Okay, imagine this: you’re writing a new fictional series about a super hero. He’s a secret identity hero, and he has non-superpowered friends. You haven’t fleshed out his enemies just yet, but you have some ideas that you can theme their powers around. It looks like you have everything you need to start writing. Right?

I have two questions for you before you begin.
1) Do you realize what you’re about to do?
2) Are you sure you want to do that?

What’s more epic to watch, a small-scale fight between the detective hero and a handful of thugs, or a massive-scale cosmic blowout between Superman and an army of super robots? At first glance, you would think it’s the super fight, wouldn’t you? But ask yourself this: how well can you figure things out as the heroes get more and more powerful? Does it make sense when Superboy Prime (an evil, stronger, alternate universe Superman) throws a punch that alters reality in convenient bizarre ways? Or why Amazo (Justice League Unlimited) did not simply will his adversaries out of his way? Or how about anything involving time travel?

It might not be obvious at first, but the higher up the power scale the characters go, the more distant from the common folk (and therefore, the viewers) it gets. To keep an audience who can understand your work, you need to be as consistent with yourself as possible (but that’s a topic for another day). When standard (heroic) characters reach the point that they can break the planet by thinking about doing so, it becomes difficult even to imagine new abilities that fit the power scale, let alone keep them consistent any more. There are a few solutions to this, but they’re not very pretty. You ready?

1) Make it up as you go along—Screw Consistency, I Have Imagination!
2) Give all the villains the same powers. Since it’s hard to tell what powers are balanced with the hero’s, why not use his?

And for reference, here’s a non-exhaustive list of villains who have a near carbon-copy of Superman’s powers:
- Bizzaro (“reversed” powers – i.e. freeze vision, heat breath)
- Black Zero (2nd incarnation)
- Darkseid (basics are the same)
- Doomsday (essentially a physical god)
- General Zod
- Imperiex (had the “power of the big bang”)
- Metallo (another physical god, but with a kryptonite core!)
- Mongul (stronger than Silver Age Superman)
- Mr. Mxyzptlk (essentially omnipotent, from the “5th dimension”)
- Superboy Prime (oh, and kryptonite doesn’t hurt him)
- Ultra Man

This isn’t necessarily saying Superman is bad—just that more power doesn’t always mean more coolness. But of course, in the above example, you wouldn’t let your character become that powerful. Superman is one thing, but why go that high? You can be perfectly content with a superhero who’s bound by the atmosphere and the sound barrier just like the rest of us. He’s just way more powerful.

Well, you’re closer, but there are some pitfalls you still need to avoid. To elaborate better, let me show you some advantages of the low-powered hero.

Fans of Danny Phantom: do you like Bullet?  You know, Bullet? He only had one appearance, but it was in a big episode.

Officer: “You’re using the collar? Walker said—”
Bullet: “Walker isn’t here!”

Yeah, that guy. What did you think of him? What about the officer who spoke to him in that quote? Or that rabid one who overshadowed Paulina? There isn’t much information given about these characters… but they’re there.

In particular, look at the last one. There are moments in which the way he moves is so creepy, you have to wonder if he’s thinking rationally or acting on instinct alone. He consistently (and mercilessly) pursued Danny in combat, keeping the pressure high. For the viewer, he makes combat more exciting and adds to Walker’s awesomeness just by the fact that Walker sucessfully commands him!

…For those who have no idea what series I was talking about, the Continuity Lock Out ends here. We’re looking at a concept of an underling who is well-defined and noticable (though you may need to watch their appearance(s) more than once to really get them down). For easy reference, let’s call him the Major Minion. Another good example of this is Frankie from Batman (appears in Two-Face and Second Chance). Frankie is the leader of a group of hired thugs working for the local crime boss, Rupert Thorne. He’s stronger than he looks and smarter than he sounds. He’s an expert on firearms—everything from a machine gun to a rocket launcher. But he’s not “just another thug”; in Second Chance he spoke briefly about the importance of being kind to Mother Nature. He wasn’t being sarcastic either.

This is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with a low-powered hero? These kinds of characters will naturally appear when the hero fights small groups of minions. If the hero is fighting five tough guys who keep getting back up when they’re knocked down, you can start to recognize them and gauge how tough they are. Some of them may even be developed into important figures—as long as they aren’t made complete jokes out of, they tend to be awesome. If the hero is fighting 100 identical-looking minions in groups of five or so, taking them down with one hit each (or several with each hit), they become as meaningless—both to the fight and as proof of the hero’s strength—as Cardboard Obstacles. An important character will almost never rise out of this crowd.

It is possible to effectively mix the two types of minion groups. The “hard-core five” should probably have starring roles in this case. Also, if fighting just a handful of minions is normal, then when more of them do finally show up, it makes the appearance that much more effective.

So, your hero has his powers and villains who can roughly match or challenge him. What can his friends do?

All too often, it seems, when there are heroes with superpowers in the world, their non-powered friends quickly fall by the wayside, finding themselves unable to do anything more than shout, “Look out, Captain Obvious!” when a projectile (that seems to be moving slowly…) is coming the hero’s way. Even if they start out having some kind of ability that is helpful, it may not be long before the power scale increases enough that their ability becomes useless. Alternatively, they may be “helping” in the fight, even though they’re not doing anything the hero couldn’t have done if they weren’t there. This false helpfulness doesn’t really add anything to the situation. The police force (or even the army) is in the same boat. And if the hero is so strong that they’re above and beyond the police force, who are they relating to anymore?

It’s not intrinsically hard to avoid this—make sure the hero’s friends and the armed forces have useful abilities. A successful example is Richie Foley from Static Shock. Starting out, Static is smart, and so is Richie. While Static is hard at work on the battlefield, Richie is inventing devices and researching information online. As time went on, though, one of the show’s creators, Dwayne McDuffie, admitted in an interview that it was getting harder to work him into the story. To make up for it, they took his intelligence and inventiveness to a new level, making it a superpower. Since he could get right out on the front lines himself, there was no reason to leave him behind anymore. What’s nice about this example is that fans loved the change. Also nice is the fact that they offered a plausible explanation for the change, but left it something of a mystery.

While a low-powered hero is easier to follow along with and can relate more closely to a common person, a well-done combat with high-powered characters can be spectacular to watch. Because Sam, my partner in crime, is more of an expert on this topic than I am, he’ll walk us through this section.

High power can do some things that are fail with low power. In Dragon Ball Z, the monster named Cell was more powerful than anyone. He just beat the main hero, Goku. He then created miniature monsters, called Cell Jr.s, and had them defeat all of Goku’s friends. Goku’s son, Gohan, who thus far could do nothing to help his friends, and just failed to beat Cell, then had his full power unlocked by getting fearfully hateful of Cell. He destroyed all of the Cell Jr.s. Gohan’s allies where massively shocked, and I mean it. Cell was impressed. He then went on to use his full power, enough to (literally) make the planet shake. Although Gohan had just increased in power to a level that stunned everyone, Gohan’s allies didn’t think that Gohan could beat Cell. It looked bad. Cell attacked Gohan, and was utterly shocked when he couldn’t touch—not hurt, but touch—him. Cell was then furious that he took so much damage from two of Gohan’s counter punches.

"That can't happen!"

In low power, this doesn’t work. Physically peak-human gangster, Two-Face, and his two henchmen face off with Marty Stu. Two-Face sends his boys at Marty, and they lose horribly. He fights Marty, and is shocked that he can’t hurt him. That doesn’t work for two (heh, two) reasons: 1) Why would Two-Face have men that can be beaten with such ease? He will be stronger than them, so he can control them, but still, it makes no sense to have useless men with him. Logically, he’d be very impressed to have his guys owned, and not so much stronger that he thinks he could do something better. 2) In low power, you don’t just go to your full power. It doesn’t work like that, 99.9% of the time (Bane is the .1%). So if Two-Face and Marty fight, it has the real results of the fight. If Two-Face lost, he can’t be later shocked; if he won, then he can’t be later shocked.

Also, high power can have really, really epic fights that low power just can’t match. Take a look at this fight between Tien (bad guy student to later turn good) and Master Roshi (epic martial arts master, his last ever battle).

I instruct you to watch for these epic parts:

1:30; Cool after image attack, high power only.
1:50; Visible power up, low power need not apply.
3:15; Double beatdown. In low power, this never happens, someone gets knocked away.
4:20; Awesome energy struggle, high power exclusive.

[Note: The times listed above may not be quite exact.]

A fight like that doesn’t happen in low power. They use techniques that only work in high power, and have a really close, fast-paced, yet drawn-out fight. I think it’s the best in DBZ. By far. Look at the blows landed, the movement in the battle. The clear power up. This is for high power only. It is made of total win.

You can still be important once your power has become lower-tier, by the way. Look at Tien, he helps later when he’s anywhere from 10% to .00001% (depends on who you ask) the power of the main characters. He stops the villain, Cell, when he’s still become super powerful, buying the heroes needed time. He later deflects a blast from a much more powerful villain, Super Buu, saving Gohan, and other useful characters, without whom, they couldn’t have beaten the final villain. Buu complements him (e.g. “He was pretty strong. A legendary warrior even!”) for this. Tien is the best example from the show of someone staying useful, even after they fall way behind in terms of power.

Simply put, high power can do things low power can’t do, and still keep bit characters helpful. Now how much will you pay?

High-powered characters and low-powered characters are not mutually exclusive, but mixing genres can be tricky business. In his original show, Batman was clearly human, vulnerable to light and heavy blows and susceptible to being surprised. When Justice League came around, he was scaled up so that he could work with heroes as powerful as Superman, which meant no more crippling blows and no more surprises. The following video serves a two-fold purpose: 1) what happens when a high-powered character fights a low-powered character, and 2) proof of concept—that is, low-powered and no-powered characters can meaningfully aid a battle with high-powered characters in it.

In the red corner:
Superman (disguised as Batman)
Robin (well-trained, but small)

In the blue corner:
Bane (his strength could be argued as a superpower)
Riddler (no special combat ability, but extremely intelligent)
Mad Hatter (has mind control technology, but plays no real role in this fight)

(For the record, I don’t like the way Riddler and Hatter look in the new animation style compared to their original portrayals.)

So, here’s the take-away from all this—high-powered fights are spectacular to watch, but low-powered characters are easier for the audience to connect with. It seems to be a good idea to write to the highest level of power that 1) you’re capable of writing comfortably, and 2) you’re willing to write. The latter is probably the bigger factor here. When in doubt, don’t be afraid to start with low power and work your way up (but don’t forget the little guy!). Even as the scale of power rises, resist the urge to have the hero take down a thousand normal people effortlessly.

Oh, and remember the example I told you to imagine at the beginning? It’s pretty close to Danny Phantom. His friends were the type to lend false helpfulness to combat. (Early on though, they kicked down a thick steel door, which was either a joke or a really bad attempt at adding action to the fight; 14-year old children lose to thick steel doors.) Bear this in mind as you create something new.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 1:00 am and is filed under Helpful Hints. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.