History is Full of Ridiculous Exploits Committed by Overpowered Characters

Whether it's in writing groups or RPG forums, a discussion that I come across time and time again is the discussion of whether a particular character is too "unbelievable" or too "overpowered" for the story they're in. Generally speaking this criticism is vague (often deliberately so), and may often be used in conjunction with a claim that a character simply isn't "realistic" enough for this story to be believable for them.

I submit that truth is far stranger than fiction in this case, and that if you just look at a handful of examples of real people and the actual feats they've accomplished throughout history that it might add a little perspective as to what "realistic" might actually mean.

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History is Often an Undiscovered Country

And it is full of bizarre facts.

Most people think of Dolph Lundgren as merely an actor. However, as I pointed out in this old article he's also a Fullbright Scholar with two masters degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering, a world-champion martial artist, and a rock star who once put a fellow actor in the ICU for a week because of a single blow to his chest (if you've seen his performance in Rocky, it was the one that lifted Stallone off his feet).

If you tried to write a novel about a character who was a movie star, martial arts champion, and a genius, people would say it was totally unrealistic... despite a real person with those qualifications doing his thing in the world as I write this.

And that's far from the only example I could cite. Joe Greenstein was a Jewish strongman who beat 20 American Nazis to a pulp with only a bat and his martial arts expertise in the 1930s. Harriet Tubman was a black woman that was born a slave who conducted daring nighttime raids on plantations, and who was a scout for the Union army who led the biggest raid in American history against slave holders, freeing over 700 people in a single swoop. Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer, and the president, but he was also a freakishly strong man who was known for bodily flinging hecklers through the air earlier in his career. He's also the only president in the wrestling hall of fame. Most of the unreal exploits we assign to James Bond as a character were inspired by the operations of real-life secret agents, including author Ian Fleming and his cousin Sir Christopher Lee (not shitting you, those two shared a distant relation, and a close friendship).

These are just a handful of real people who possessed bizarre sets of skills, accomplished amazing feats, and who might seem larger-than-life. People who, if the things they did showed up in a movie, or in a novel, would make the audience scoff at how far-fetched this all is.

Ability is Only One Measure of a Character

While our actual history is full of amazing figures, it's not a one-to-one comparison if you're creating stories in worlds that have angry gods, bizarre monsters, fantastic creatures, magic, super science, and more. However, there is another, equally important point that's worth keeping in mind.

It's not how powerful a character is that makes them good or bad. It's whether we can empathize with them, whether there are stakes in their stories, and whether we want to follow them to the end of their journey.

Ahem

Morpheus. Dr. Who. Superman. These are all characters who have large followings of fans. Characters who, when viewed at arm's length, are obscenely powerful. And they're far from the only examples I could name. But despite all these many abilities and skills, we still love them, and we still enjoy their stories.

Why?

Well, in some cases it's because these characters are facing off against odds that are on their level, and battling against foes and threats who are equally powerful. These stories can feel more like mythology, with gods and monsters far beyond mere humans. However, other times it's because these characters are trying to deal with situations that they can't just wave away. Problems that need to be handled delicately, or which cannot be solved with the flash of a sci-fi screwdriver, or a beam of heat vision.

But a lot of the time it is the actual character themselves that wins an audience's heart. The connection we feel to them, the way they touch us, and the relationship we form with them over a journey. It's the way they hook our attention and draw us in, not because of their rippling thews or infinite knowledge, but because they're interesting  in ways that other characters aren't.

Those are the two things I wanted to talk about this week. That "realistic" is often nowhere near what people think it is in terms of the sort of people who've lived in our world and the things they've actually done. And even if you're creating characters in an impossible world, you don't need to boil them down in order to make them digestible... readers are fully capable of latching on and loving them as long as you hook their interest, and take them on a ride they want to be part of.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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