When I started Girl in Red, I knew Rose was overpowered. That was the point, to have fun with her solving problems in unnecessarily complicated or violent ways. As it went on, I wanted more drama, more tension, and that was difficult with her being so powerful. This is a problem that I’ve seen come up in various media – mostly anime – so I’m going to discuss the different approaches to this problem I’ve seen.

Remove Their Power

The first approach is removing the power of the character, temporarily or permanently. I find that, unless done with subtlety and care, the direct approach is often the wrong approach in writing. Like using adverbs over and over, it’s lazy, and there are better approaches.

The example of this going poorly in my mind is the show Heroes, a show that ran back in the late 2000s about a group of people that discovered they had superpowers. One character could copy the powers of people around him, but as the series progressed, he was stripped of his powers. This isn’t necessarily bad, but the way they did it was. In the span of an episode, they took him from being one of the nicest characters to being one of the meanest, using that as the justification for taking his powers. When you make a drastic change like this, it risks alienating your audience. I still enjoy the first season, but if I had to pick a point where the show started going downhill, it’d be that moment.

An example of doing this well was in the book series Earthsea. Early on in the series, it’s established that it’s possible for a wizard to lose his power if he overuses it. Sure enough, this happens to one of the main characters later in the series. While this was a drastic change, it came at the end of one of the books, and wasn’t done in a way that felt like the author was just trying to get rid of this character, whereas that’s exactly how it felt in Heroes. Such a change should feel natural, inevitable, even if takes the reader by surprise.

Remove Them

Another approach that can get old is removing the character entirely. Removing a main character for any reason, even if it makes sense for the plot, also risks losing part of your audience (I lost half of mine when Rose left Girl in Red for a few books). Like removing the character’s power, it should be done well, and not look like you’re getting rid of them because you don’t know how to handle them.

An instance of this being done both poorly and well is in Dragon Ball Z. The main character often drops out of the show, leaving the other characters to bide their time waiting for him to arrive and handle the newest big bad for them. It goes poorly because this happens so much in the franchise. It goes well because at the time, it’s not obvious that this is being done intentionally. Characters are fighting all the time; the franchise is known for that. Thus, characters are knocked out of the fight. Once again, it feels natural until you look back and think “have you been doing this the whole time?”

Throw More Obstacles at Them

The series Scorpion focuses around a team of specialists solving problems “only they can handle”. The writers used this next approach on almost every episode to keep the plot moving, rather than having them solve every problem in minutes. That is, they kept having something else go wrong. When someone is actively fighting against the main characters, this is understandable. When bad luck happens over and over again, you can only hold onto your audience so long until you lose suspension of disbelief.

Apart from not doing this all the time, a better approach is to hint at the oncoming problems early on. For example, having someone mentioning that a door keeps sticking, then having it jam shut later. Or that the roof’s been leaking before it breaks apart from a torrential downpour. Otherwise, something’s just going to go wrong out of nowhere, and while it will work for the first 50 times, your audience will get tired of it eventually.

Improve the Antagonists

Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t be nearly as interesting without an opponent like Moriarty, someone who can challenge him on his level. When you focus around one central character, improving the antagonists to match their talent or power is a good way to go. It creates good conflict.

This can be a problem when there are other central characters that aren’t as talented. This is a problem I have with Dragon Ball Z, in that the other characters become irrelevant to the plot because the villains are so powerful so that they challenge the main character. That’s opposed to the franchise One Piece (another anime/manga), where not only the main character is improved, but so are the other characters.

If they’re not going to be improved to the level of the antagonist, then they need to have something else to do. In the finale of Girl in Red, while only one person could challenge the main antagonist, the others weren’t all sitting on the sidelines cheering her on. They were all busy doing something else important. This was something I always did for the finales; everyone had a part to play.

Challenge the Protagonist Outside Their Expertise

In my opinion, this is the best solution. In Maniac in Maroon (book three), there were Dementors at Hogwarts. Rose could’ve destroyed them easily, but Dumbledore reminded her that it wouldn’t help, that this wasn’t a problem she could solve with brute force. Rose had to work to find another solution, forcing her to think outside her normal approach.

This is commonly used in horror stories. It wouldn’t be exciting if the protagonists could fight the serial killer. Instead, they have to find another way to survive, while they keep getting picked off. They might all be smart or talented in other ways, and that could serve them well in their fight for survival.

Of course, eventually the audience will probably want to see a character break out of their shell and fight back. At the end of Maniac in Maroon, that’s exactly what I did with Rose. Especially when the audience knows how talented this character is, they’ll eventually want to see them use that talent.

Conclusion

As with every approach, there are ways to do it right, and ways to do it wrong. No one solution is perfect. If you’re going to make a drastic change to the story to manage the power imbalance, it should be surprising, but inevitable. If you’re going to improve the antagonists, don’t forget about the other protagonists. Challenge the characters on different levels, rather than throwing more obstacles at them without consideration for how challenging it’ll be. Many things in life require finding the right balance, and writing is no exception.

#Essay #Characters #Drama

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

As I enjoy a good action scene, there are several fight scenes throughout Girl in Red. Having no experience with writing them, they started out so-so, but improved as I got more practice. This is a common issue with writers, so many others will give you different advice. What I’ve got here is just what I’ve learned.

Before writing the fight, ask yourself if it needs to be there at all. If the main character is a spectator, then minimal detail is sufficient. The important part then is how the character reacts to the fight, not necessarily who wins or loses. If she has no investment in either side, then make sure there’s something else for her to be doing. Whether it be finding a way to stop the fight, or walking away because it’s beneath her, she should have something.

When you decide the fight’s going to take center stage, start by listing everyone involved. The easiest fights are – of course – between two people. Even then, the next step is to make a map of the area in which the fight is taking place. Make sure you know everything in the area that could possibly be used as a weapon. Characters shouldn’t be pulling a table out of nowhere (unless magic was involved). The same goes for powers; never have your characters pull powers out of thin air because you wrote yourself into a corner.

It gets vastly harder when there are multiple combatants. I’ve ran into this multiple times, but the big two were the Triwizard champions vs. the Adamantine Clockwork Horror in Cherry Champion, and the Hogwarts heads of house vs. Rose in Villain in Vermilion. In both cases, I drew a grid, drew a letter for each character, and started writing out each combatant’s actions turn by turn. Arrows would indicate where they moved. Of course, that’s not how it ended up in the final draft; that’d be dull. But it helped me organize the entire scene before writing it up.

When writing the scene, I also learned not to overdescribe the action. As a reader, I don’t need to know absolutely everything each person is doing. That goes for any description in the story. Leave some room for the reader to imagine it. And as with any action scene, the focus should be on the action when the main character is directly involved. If they’re watching, as Hermione did when Rose fought the heads of house, then they should be feeling something. When Hermione entered the fight, I toned down the emotion.

When it’s over, remember to give a breather. Let the readers catch their breath before going into another scene. The characters still standing can take a moment to recover, since they are people (not necessarily human, though). And know when to end it too.

Fight scenes can be tricky to write at first, but like anything, practice makes perfect. I wouldn’t say I’m perfect at it, but certainly a lot better at it than I used to be. It’s important to keep trying if that’s what you want to do.

Remember, this is for your writing. It’s worth the effort.

#Essay #Drama

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA