Overpowered Protagonists

Recently reading WINTER LOST, the latest Mercy Thompson contemporary fantasy by Patricia Briggs, I thought about a problem authors often have in maintaining readers' interest with long-running series (aside from genres such as detective fiction, in which each installment can be relatively self-contained): The threats faced by the protagonist need to escalate over time. I once came across a piece of writing advice about the craft of series plotting -- I can't remember the commentator or what author he was referring to -- that mentioned this problem in connection with a hero who rose to the height of saving the solar system and, in the following book, saved his boss's job. One trouble with increasingly dire threats and more powerful antagonists, of course, is that the hero or heroine has to get progressively stronger to defeat them.

Consider the Anita Blake series, by Laurell K. Hamilton. In the first book, she's a necromancer who raises dead people temporarily so they can answer questions such as who murdered them or where they hid the will. She has a fraught, semi-antagonistic relationship with the local master vampire. Over the course of many novels, she grows in power while becoming ever more deeply entangled in supernatural politics and hostilities. I can't say what she's doing now, because I gave up on her a while back. Not only because of her multispecies harem, a reason numerous former fans stopped reading the series. I actually LIKE steamy paranormal romance, up to a point; I've written a fair bit of it myself. Yet I eventually found Anita's complicated sex life tedious, something I once wouldn't have thought possible. The other, more substantive reason I and many others got tired of her, however, was her constant acquisition of new powers. She seemed well on the way to becoming superhuman, like a Dungeons and Dragons character leveling up after every adventure. And I like D and D, too, but I found Anita becoming less and less believable.

Patricia Briggs handles her protagonist's response to escalating threats differently. Mercy is a coyote shapeshifter raised by werewolves, now married to the alpha of a werewolf pack. She doesn't transform into a ferocious beast capable of destroying almost any foe. She changes into a thirty-five-pound coyote. In that form, she has the animal's agility, speed, and keen senses, but no superpowers. She sort of possesses an ancient artifact, a magical walking stick, that comes to her hand when needed (usually). As a daughter of Coyote, the Native American trickster deity, she sometimes gets help from her father, but it can't be relied on consistently; after all, he's a trickster. After marrying the alpha werewolf, she gets the benefit of a psychic bond with him and, though him, access to the pack bonds. In short, although a paranormal creature, she isn't superhuman, just different. Yet, in an alternate present-day world that contains werewolves, other shapeshifters, vampires, fae, ghosts, and even minor deities, she does confront and manage to cope with increasingly dire dangers over the course of the series. In WINTER LOST, she faces the possiblity of Ragnarok, the end of the world. She doesn't avert it singlehandedly, though. The author gives her powerful allies -- balanced by formidable enemies. She relies on her intelligence, flexibility, and capacity to draw on friendships forged over time, not on inflated powers. Thus, she never becomes unsympathetic or unbelievable as a character.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer averts the overpowered protagonist trap in similar ways. She saves the world, or at least Sunnydale, so often she has to ponder the plural of "apocalypse." But her Slayer abilities don't change much over the seven seasons of the TV show. Rather, she gradually learns more about the background of her Slayer lineage and becomes wiser both in the use of her gifts and in dealing with the many nonhuman characters and entities, friend and foe, she encounters. Like Mercy Thompson, Buffy vanquishes evil with the help of many allies, including Giles, her Watcher; two re-souled vampires, Angel and later Spike; her best friends, Willow and Xander; and two other Slayers accidentally "called" in succession even though there's supposed to be only one at a time. If anybody in the series becomes overpowered, it's Willow with the expansion of her witchcraft in the concluding seasons, but she's a sidekick, not the protagonist. Moreover, she turns evil for a while toward the end, an antagonist who must be redeemed rather than an ally. Her final grand surge of magic that transforms all "potentials" into active Slayers provides Buffy with the support she needs to defeat the Big Bad of the last season.

The idea of multiple apocalypses reminds me of a scene from the beginning of Spider Robinson's CALLAHAN'S KEY. Callahan's Bar has been destroyed (it gets rebuilt later, naturally), and the narrator/protagonist, Jake, lives in straitened circumstances as his wife suffers through a difficult pregnancy. At a con where I was fortunate to be able to see Robinson in person, he read that scene, in which Jake's closest friends from Callahan's pay him an unexpected visit. They inform him, "We need you to save the universe." Jake replies in an exasperated outburst, "Again?!" That line got a huge laugh from the audience. Jake, of course, does save the universe, but like Buffy, not alone -- with his Callahan's Bar found family.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Superpower Pros and Cons

A new Marvel superhero TV series recently premiered, CLOAK AND DAGGER. Tandy ("dagger") can materialize a knife out of light. Tyrone ("cloak"), associated with shadow and darkness, can teleport. So far, the powers of both protagonists pop up spontaneously, with little or no control. Also, each can read minds, sort of, in a limited sense. With skin contact, Tandy sees visions of people's hopes; Tyrone sees people's fears. My initial thought upon watching the first few episodes (although I do like the series so far) was that these aren't terribly impressive superpowers. Teleportation does have versatile possibilities—once he learns how to control it instead of leaping from place to place at random when confronted with danger. Materializing light daggers, however, seems of limited benefit unless the character gets into a lot of knife fights or aspires to become an assassin. Moreover, her magical knives wouldn't do her much good in combat without training and practice in using them. The latest episode demonstrates, though, that the conjured blade can cut through anything, a potentially versatile feature. She would be even better off if she would develop an ability to create other kinds of objects, too. As for the empathic visions, because they transmit images of people's hopes and fears, they can't be counted on to convey factual information. It's an appealing facet of the story, actually, that discovering their paranormal gifts doesn't automatically and immediately make the heroes invincible.

As I see it, many superpowers that seem cool at first glance wouldn't, by themselves, turn their bearers into superheroes. There was a TV series I never watched (so I may be misjudging it) whose protagonist couldn't feel pain. I got the impression that this trait was presented as a gift. No, it would be a handicap. In real life, people with defective pain perception live in constant danger of getting badly injured. Immortals in the "Highlander" series come back to life within minutes of getting killed unless they're decapitated. Living for centuries has its appeal, and if you work in a dangerous occupation or devote yourself to rescuing victims and protecting the innocent, immunity to most modes of death would confer a definite advantage. The gift has downsides, though. Like vampires, Highlander immortals are frozen at the age they'd reached at the time of their first death, so there are a few children and adolescents stuck with centuries of life in which they never grow up. Immortals aren't necessarily any more intelligent or ethical than ordinary mortals; whether they learn anything over the course of their extended lives depends on their individual characters. And even though they heal fast and can survive horrible injuries, getting killed still hurts. Furthermore, an immortal trapped at the bottom of the ocean or locked in a dungeon with no drinking water will die and revive over and over indefinitely.

Flying would be impressive but wouldn't make a hero invincible by itself. He or she could get to the scene of a crisis in a hurry, especially if the power included being able to fly faster than normal human running speed. But once the flying hero got to the site of the trouble, if he or she didn't have any other paranormal gifts, the success of the ensuing fight or rescue would come down to ordinary human strengths. Super-strength alone would seem pretty useful, once the hero learned to use it efficiently, but if that were his only power, he could be wounded or killed like anybody else. Flying and super-strength together would make a better combination, yet the hero could still get hurt—unless he or she were also invulnerable. Now you're approaching the qualities of a multi-gifted superhuman such as Superman himself. Spider-Man, with his leaping, climbing, and web-spinning, also has the capacity to travel quickly to otherwise inaccessible places; however, his ability to trap villains in webs probably needed to be honed through practice.

What about invisibility? An invisible character can sneak into places, explore without getting caught, and (if so inclined) steal small objects. Unless his or her powers include walking through walls and closed doors, though, the invisible man or woman still needs to access enclosed areas in the normal, physical way. Furthermore, invisibility in the strictest sense has obvious drawbacks. Do your clothes disappear with you? If not, you have to endure the discomforts of nudity. In H. G. Wells's classic novel, anything eaten by the invisible man remains visible until digested, so the time periods during which he can be truly unseen are limited. More effective might be a gift for clouding the minds of observers, like the Shadow; in that case, cameras would still reveal the hero's presence.

The most versatile type of superpower might be a multifaceted psychic talent such as the ability to read and control people's minds (provided you could shield against the thoughts and emotions of others at will). There we get into some deeper ethical problems, though.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Real-Life "Superpowers"

Here are three lists of real-life extraordinary human anomalies from the "Cracked" website:

DNA Mutations That Make Ordinary People X-Men

Personally, I wouldn't classify genes for adventurousness and happiness as superpowers, simply normal variations. The Argentinians who have a supernormal tolerance for arsenic and the Inuit who process dietary fats differently from the rest of us, though, strike me as bona-fide extraordinary.

A sample of abilities everybody has in infancy but loses as he or she grows up:

5 Superpowers We All Had as Babies

A recurring theme of these infant "powers" is that growth requires pruning and focusing so that some abilities get lost as a necessary part of adjustment to the needs of adult life. For instance, pre-verbal babies can hear and produce all the sounds possible to the human vocal apparatus; when they learn to talk, however, they "forget" how to process the sounds their native language doesn't use. Reminds me of the scene in MARY POPPINS where we're told all babies understand the language of birds, yet as they learn human speech, they lose that gift.

How about a man who can touch live wires with impunity because he has seven to eight times greater resistance to electricity than the average person? Or the autistic savant with perfect visual memory, who can draw a whole city in accurate detail after seeing it once? The man who can control his autonomic body functions so well he can sit almost naked on ice without freezing and the man with reflexes faster than the human eye can follow also fit credibly into the "superpower" category:

6 Real People with Superpowers

If the environment changed radically enough in some distant future era, could one of these traits become so important to survival that it spread widely through the population, making individuals who carried that gene an elite group? In the back story of Tanith Lee's SABELLA, a human-like species evolved a form of gender dimorphism in which women fed on the blood of their mates, so that the population could survive dire, long-term food scarcity. How great a change in the environment would be required to generate alterations in human biology this extreme? Or the tendril-bearing, telepathic mutants of A. E. Van Vogt's SLAN or the Simes and Gens of Jacqueline's far-future Earth?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt