Writing Overpowered Characters
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.
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