How strong is strong?
How much power does a hero need, or a villain? It’s a question that I never get tired of looking at, both reading and writing… especially since I think many people look at the wrong side of it.
Hero versus villain! One man bringing the truth to a hostile world, or one woman facing a dragon! The thrilling power of one expose, or one punch, or weapon, or army—it’s easy for a writer to fall in love with a genre and the tools of conflict that it suggests. What we have to remember is:
Power and struggle are only as good as their context. What’s the world scale that conflict’s in? What other challenges could that action center on instead?
The Swamp around the Hydra
Superheroes are famous for their context. Superman launched the whole genre without real “supervillains” at all, just by being more powerful than locomotives. Of course these days the comics can barely describe anything he isn’t strong enough to lift, and that contrasts with Iron Man easily smashing a building and Spider-Man lifting cars but mostly going up walls instead of through them. But at each level, the scale is set by the modern environment—and how for all our pride in building skyscrapers, the newest titans can leap them in that single bound.
Compare that with epic fantasy. A quasi-medieval hero probably travels by horse, and half his quest is shaped by how the mountains slow his travel. He might have a magic sword that smashes through armor, but he’s still likely to sneak through forests trying to choose fights that are smaller than taking on armies. (Friendly eagles might exist, but it’s not often that they’ll show up to give him rides.) Mainly he’s a human (or elf) in a world that isn’t piled so high as today’s cities, and the world feels much bigger than him. –While the dragon or sorcerer at the climax is more powerful than most of that world.
That sense of scale matters, and it’s usually the environment and the characters’ variety of struggles that pin that scale down. Hercules is famous for fighting monsters, but he needed to move rivers and hold up the sky to remind the Greeks he actually had a demigod’s strength. Otherwise the audience would keep asking “He killed the hydra? What’s that mean, how big is a hydra?”
(Or consider the video games where you build your level from 1 up to 70, but the enemy stats balance out so you’re still fighting ogre-things you beat with three or four hits—not a proper sense that you’re facing demons with whole new levels of powers. And it’s still hitting things, not using your vast healing powers to help the victims of the invasion, or even getting rock-melting gear so you don’t have to explore the later beasts’ tunnels one turn at a time. Games like that feel more like refining your skill in the same basic niche of the world, even if you’re supposed to be becoming the world’s champion.)
For designing a story, that sense ought to be key.
Fight or Flight, and Other Anti-Hydra Tactics
Most genres come with expectations about what conflict will happen. A writer needs to see those clearly, and position the story right at the level—and form—of strength that works for them.
A middle grade story might have kids discovering a smuggler or child abuser, but it won’t have them punching out adult villains. In fact, it needs a sense of the kids’ quiet awe at how the adults drive around town and buy life-changing purchases on what seems like a whim. Of course the police could fix everything… which is why it will take the whole story to find a way to convince them to step in. And in different styles, that might put the focus on making friends with the victim, or snooping through old mansions hoping they aren’t spotted.
Or if the hero is a cop, the clash is gun versus gun and evidence versus coverup, and telling it right means depicting the limits on tactics and forensics. And if the concept expands into the CIA chasing terrorists, the action is similar… but the resources and risks are bigger, and flying across the world or locking down whole towns becomes a lot more likely.
Power defines the story. A werewolf isn’t a dragon, the thing may not be too much stronger and faster than the best human fighter—but it’s more likely to rip down doors or leap to the second-floor window, and of course it shrugs off ordinary bullets. That story could focus on humans just barely able to to fend one off, or were-on-were duels, or it could be a desperate escape or the search for who in town the werewolf is.
And again, which way the story takes that depends on how the writer builds it. Even with that werewolf, a reluctant action hero like my Mark from The High Road would probably center on gravity-powered fights and chases trying to get the jump on the beastie. And a detective—or someone with psychic senses like in Shadowed—would fill more pages trying to identify and trap it before anyone was hurt.
It’s all part of balancing the story out. A hero who can smash walls is really about whatever’s behind the wall that can still challenge him—or else the focus is on whether that smashing causes more trouble than it’s worth. (Even Superman is easy to write in the second mode.) A hacker or telepath will keep trying to pull out secrets that can win the day without any other risks, if the writer lets her.
One sign of a well-built story is that you can quickly sense what form and scale of conflict it’ll focus on. (Or that the twists and changes will use those patterns to surprise you.) If we don’t know how big the hydra is, and why it means they’re fighting or running, nothing else fits.
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