This video was sponsored by Campfire! Because every good smart guy needs something really
impressive on their screen.
Every character has strengths and weaknesses. Or, more specifically, every character has
a space of situations they’re good at handling and a space of situations they’re bad at
handling. Now, this makes sense - nobody’s good at everything, and most people are only
really good at a few things. And since most stories involve at least a degree of problem-solving,
it makes for a more interesting narrative if your character has some things they’re
good at and some things they struggle with. Now that’s pretty simple when you’re writing
a single protagonist, but when you’re writing a group of protagonists, it helps to keep
party balance in mind. Characters that work well together should probably have complementary
strengths. If one character has a weakness or a general space of things they’re not
good at, another character could have that as a strength so the team can handle that
situation even if the individual can’t. The concept of party comp mostly shows up
in games like D&D, where it’s common for players to balance the character they want
to play with the problem-solving role the party might need them to play. If the party
already has a tank who hits hard and eats damage for breakfast, it’d probably be redundant
to and unhelpful to play another tank, and it might be better to dust off the squishy
wizard glass cannon character to hide behind the tank and chuck fireballs.
A well-balanced party comp can take a lot of forms, but the most well-known example
in fiction is the five-man band. In the traditional layout, every character is defined by a single
character strength that makes them exemplary in the specific space of situations they’re
designed to handle. The leader leads, the lancer makes the leader more interesting,
the big guy hits hard and tanks damage, the heart handles the social and emotional stuff,
and the smart guy is smart. Together they can handle a much broader range of situations
than each individual character could alone. That said, some of these characters are more
self-sufficient than others. Leaders are most susceptible to this, since they’re frequently
also heroes, and heroes are usually the writer’s favorite character and thus often end up written
with flaws that are much more token than structural. It’s more common for the other team members
to be more specialized to the point that there’s a lot of situations they can’t really handle.
We touched on this back in the Powerhouse video, where we brought up that the team Big
Guy is usually extremely reliable in uncomplicated combat situations, but frequently ends up
shelved during any other plotline, or has to rely on a secondary skillset to run support.
Today let’s discuss the Big Guy’s primary foil and opposite - the smart guy. These two
roles are so complementary that big-guy smart-guy duos are very common outside the broader context
of the Five-Man Band. One’s the muscle, one’s the brains, one can hit stuff real
good, the other points them at the stuff to hit - it’s almost symbiotic.
Where the Big Guy is defined by their strength, the Smart Guy is defined by their brains.
The Smart Guy, sometimes also known as The Mastermind or The Ideas Guy, is the designated
Smart member of the team. Now, “smart” is an extremely subjective judgment that can
mean a lot of different things, so the Smart Guy is actually a surprisingly flexible archetype
depending on the genre and the story they’re in. The Smart Guy is usually not the only
character on the team who gets to use their brain, but they tend to do it more consistently
than the rest of the gang - much like how the powerhouse might not be the unconditionally
strongest character, but are more reliably powerful than their teammates. Other members
of the team might have bursts of brilliance or a lot of expertise in their very specific
area, but the Smart Guy is the character whose job is knowing stuff and putting the pieces
together. Now, like the Big Guy, the Smart Guy is a
very specialized character, and a very functional one - as in, they serve a narrative function.
And that means when they’re in a situation that doesn’t play to their strengths, they
often have very little to do. Big Guys and Smart Guys frequently end up on the shelf
while the rest of the cast handles the actual central plot stuff. Which I think is a shame!
Party comp is all well and good, but I tend to think that the characters who compose that
party should be able to stand on their own as characters. Doesn’t mean they need to
be able to handle any situation on their own, just that they should, you know, be characters
in their own right - heroes of their own story. And heroes of their own story don’t tend
to wait around in the toybox while the rest of the cast does the actually useful stuff.
Well-written smart guys have agency and initiative, and will find things to do even if the story
doesn’t need any exposition or technobabble. Now while the Big Guy is pretty simple conceptually
and tends to work the same way across genres, the Smart Guy covers a little more ground
and has a lot more functional variation. “Smart” can mean a lot of different things. In fact,
the smart guy usually covers so many thinky-based roles that it’s sometimes more efficient
to define the Smart Guy by what they can’t do than by what they can. If it involves being
clever, observant, well-educated, perceptive, technically skilled, inventive, etc etc… they
can probably do it. If it involves hitting something until it breaks… they probably
can’t. A Smart Guy is like a multitool - they can get you out of a lot of situations, but
usually not the same situations you’d fix with a baseball bat or folding chair.
Now there’s a few broad roles it’s fairly common for the Smart Guy to fill - and they’re
not mutually exclusive. Smart Guys can play a lot of roles, even in the space of one story,
so they often conform to a grab bag of Smart Guy roles rather than specializing in one
above all others. In modern and sci-fi-adjacent settings you
might find The Techie, the character who’s good with tech. Computers, robots, spaceships,
basically anything electric is under their purview. They could be a gadgeteer genius,
a mad scientist, a hacker, an actual robot, or basically anything with a proficiency for
keyboards and blinky lights. If a problem is technology-based in any way, this character
is the designated solution. In superhero media these guys usually run around in robot suits
- unless they’re villains, in which case they might turn their attention to building
space-lazers and volcano lairs and stuff. In space-based sci-fi they’re usually the
engineer who keeps the ship working. Broadly, this archetype gives the audience an inroad
into a segment of the setting they’re probably not familiar with. In a futuristic or otherwise
unrealistic setting, future tech and sci-fi shenanigans are basically whatever the writer
wants them to be, and worldbuilding-wise they’re a lot more inobvious to the audience than
things like “space gunslinger” or “desert planet” that are basically familiar real-world
things repackaged for Space. For similar reasons, fantasy settings will
usually make the Smart Guy The Mage. This depends on genre limitations, but the gist
is that this smart guy has unusual powers by the standards of the setting. In sci-fi
they’re usually psychic instead, but in fantasy and urban fantasy they’re typically
a wizard, generally physically weak but highly skilled in their specific powerset. Sometimes
they’re born with their abilities and hone them through practice, but in other cases
they earn their powers through book-learning and study, or craft their powers by making
things like potions or magic artifacts. This archetype is also very useful from a writing
standpoint because if your setting has a magic system this gives you a character who knows
everything about it and can explain worldbuilding details as needed.
This ties into the next big role, The Encyclopedia. This one has no genre limits and is, frankly
speaking, one of the most common roles for the smart guy to fill. It’s also one of
the easiest to mess up. The point of The Encyclopedia is to know stuff. They’ve usually got worldbuilding
book-learning so they’re up-to-date on basically anything that the heroes might need to have
exposited at them - typically things like history, politics, in-universe lore, monster
identification, etc. In the less well-written cases, The Encyclopedia has very little personality
beyond this, and serves the largely functional role of getting the characters and audience
up to speed on what’s going on in the plot - instead of having motivations or dreams,
this character’s sole role in the story is to tell the other characters and the audience
what the story is. The Encyclopedia also has rare crossover with more combat-oriented archetypes,
since sometimes the character is a walking encyclopedia because of their extensive life
experience, like a grizzled monster hunter who’s earned an encyclopedic knowledge of
the monsters they fight. This has some overlap with a more unusual
smart guy role, the Street Smarts Guy. This character is smart because they’re jaded
and clicked into how the world really works. They’re frequently cynical, and might be
slightly older than the other characters. This is basically what happens when you combo
The Smart Guy with The Lancer as a foil to a more naïve Leader character, or with The
Big Guy to produce a very effective heavy hitter, or with The Mentor to provide worldly
guidance to the rest of the team. This character usually has more naïve or inexperienced teammates,
none of whom fill the more traditional Smart Guy role, making them the smart guy mostly
by process of elimination. Another somewhat unusual role for the Smart
Guy is as The Tactician. This smart guy’s job is coming up with plans for how the team
as a whole is going to solve whatever situation they’re in. They might be masterminding
a heist or something, but even in less heist-y situations their job is to basically understand
their teammates’ respective strengths from the top down and figure out how to best utilize
them. These guys frequently play chess. This is rarer than some other Smart Guy archetypes
because it’s a lot more central, and is often what happens when The Leader and The
Smart Guy roles are merged into one character. The Tactician doesn’t usually take a hands-on
combat role, but they’ll usually be the one who lays out the plan for how the combat’s
gonna go. Now there’s plenty of other archetypes the
Smart Guy can play into, but there are limits. The problem is, if the Smart Guy is good at
too many other things, they kind of stop functioning as the Smart Guy and take on a more structural
role, like The Lancer or The Mentor. Part of what defines the Smart Guy is the role
they play in party balance. Now I’ve seen some confusion about this, because while the
Five-Man Band is a very useful trope classification and it’s very tempting to slot characters
into the five color-coded roles, it’s very rare for characters to be defined by only
single traits, even in ensemble casts. Very few stories have fully clear-cut Five-Man
Bands where each party member exclusively fits into only one role. Big Guys frequently
share traits with The Heart, Leaders are often heavier hitters than Big Guys, Lancers are
typically the most street-smart and observant party members which has shades of the Smart
Guy - they’re not just one-dimensional archetypes, they’re characters. Their title doesn’t
define everything about them - but it does define their role in the group. Even if the
leader can hit harder than the Big Guy, it’s still the Big Guy’s job to hit stuff. So
while the Smart Guy can fill a lot of roles, if they have too much going on they can stop
fitting into the Smart Guy space. Like, is it accurate to say Batman is The Smart Guy
of the Justice League? I mean……… yes, but there are more accurate ways you could
describe him. Like The Lancer to Superman’s de facto Leader, or “The Ace”, the tvtropes
term for a character who’s good at everything. “Smart Guy” isn’t technically wrong,
but it’s not fully right either, cuz it doesn’t have the right implications.
Like I said earlier, part of what defines the Smart Guy is what they can’t do. Most
commonly, the smart guy can’t fight, or at least can’t fight as well as the rest
of the group. For instance, in Avatar: The Last Airbender, check it off your bingo cards,
Sokka is the team Smart Guy and also the only main character who can’t bend. Over the
course of the series he does learn some pretty solid combat skills, but that’s not what
he brings to the team. Sokka’s a startlingly good tactician, and very good at maintaining
a big-picture perspective, making him pretty much the only main character who consistently
notices when they’re being tricked or manipulated. He’s even called out in-story as “the
idea guy” because it is consistently his job to come up with the plans. And Sokka’s
a fast learner who undergoes a surprising amount of character development - the one
thing he can’t do is bend. No amount of training or study will change that. As a result,
everyone else on the team can dish out way more damage than he can, so even though he
does learn to fight better, he never fills the role of team damage-dealer, and while
he can hold his own okay, what he brings to the table is tactics and military intelligence.
Now this is very common - smart guys are frequently non-combat, at least relative to the rest
of the cast. Superhero smart-guys aren’t strictly non-combat because nobody in a superhero
setting is fully non-combat, but they usually don’t have powers - they’ll either use
tech they built themselves or they’ll have some kind of power that’s not automatically
super useful in a fight like telepathy or being really stretchy, forcing them to be
tactical. The general term for this subtrope is the very on-the-nose “Weak But Skilled,”
which describes characters that don’t have much brute-force power but are very good at
using what they do have, whether that’s technology, magic, basic social skills, whatever.
In some stories where the average team power level is pretty high, the smart guy being
the Token Normal Human frequently means they eventually get left behind by power creep.
Of course, in other stories, the Smart Guy’s unique skillset often ends up turning them
into a bit of a powerhouse. This is most common in fantasy settings where the Smart Guy gets
to be a wizard and book-learning literally lets you bend the laws of physics, but it
also shows up in sci-fi and sci-fi-adjacent stories where the Smart Guy either is a robot
or is running around in a really sweet robot suit. Arguably the best thing about building
your superpowers is you can always build yourself more superpowers.
But some smart guys basically don’t rely on brute force at all - or if they do, they
rely on other people using brute force for them. And frankly, these guys can be uniquely
hard to write. This is partly because smart characters in general are hard to write - for
self-illustrative reasons. If the character is in a seemingly impossible situation and
needs to figure out a cunning plan to escape using nothing but their wits and this paperclip
they found, the writer has to do exactly as much intellectual legwork to figure out how
the hell they’re gonna do that. And if it were easy, it wouldn’t be impressive when
the character did it. We discussed this back in the Magnificent Bastards video - there’s
a difference between a character figuring stuff out and a character knowing whatever
the author needs them to know, and the audience can tell which is happening. A smart guy with
a fallback skill is simpler to write because they have simpler, easier ways to solve things
than their brains. A character whose only option is coming up with a clever plan is
going to overtax the writer’s clever-plan-inator and make things difficult. It’s well worth
it if done right, it’s just tricky. But Smart Guys often have at least one other
skillset they can rely on in a pinch. Relying on gadgets or magic is all well and good,
and some have at least a little combat training or a taser or something, but some smart guys
pull double-duty as the party face - the social one who handles the charisma checks. In fact,
when a Smart Guy is good enough at talking to people, they sometimes end up in the Leader
role, since technically speaking all a leader needs to be good at is handling their team,
which can be presumed to be a corollary of being good at social stuff in general. This
is frankly somewhat rarer than the converse trope, the socially inept Smart Guy, an archetype
that is probably grounded in decades-old stereotypes about what nerds are like, where the Smart
Guy is so focused on being smart that they don’t do anything fun like punching things
or talking to girls. This ties into a whole space of tropes where the Smart Guy is frequently
neurodivergent, either coded that way - potentially accidentally - or explicitly stated in-canon.
Now this is kind of a minefield, but it is not inherently a bad thing depending on how
it’s handled. There’s nothing wrong with writing your Smart Guy’s attachment to their
area of expertise as something like a hyperfixation, or their technobabble as an infodump, or giving
them insecurities about either or both of those things - there’s just a lot of iffy
stereotypes connected to the space of neurodivergence that it’s very easy to stumble ass-backwards
into, like how when writers decided to start explicitly coding Sherlock Holmes as autistic
they did that by breaking from the original canon and making him a selfish asshole with
no friends. So original! No-one’s ever thought of making the genius a jerk before!
In fact, there’s a whole space of tropes around the Smart Guy being an antisocial jerk,
and a lot of them are rooted in this space. Smart Guys frequently get written as emotionless
and uncaring. While this might be drawing inspiration from the stock character of the
Annoying Know-It-All well-actually-ing their way through life, some of it probably has
its roots in the broadly negative perception of the space of neurodivergence, where someone’s
most natural, comfortable habits can come across as antisocial or disruptive to the
neurotypical people around them, creating a perceived correlation between “this person
is very focused on one specific area of expertise and really likes learning and talking about
it” and “this person is weird and I don’t get them so they’re probably just not trying
hard enough to socialize with me which makes them a bad person.” It’s no bueno. This
part of the trope has been fading in recent years, which is a relief, but it’s still
a bit of a minefield when writing Smart Guy characters, since it’s easy to use tropes
without examining them too closely first, which means if the trope has some problems
baked-in, they can end up getting repeated without the author meaning any harm by it
or even realizing. For instance, it’s not uncommon for the Smart Guy’s teammates to
make fun of their interests or try and convince them to be less of a nerd and/or more “normal”,
which can make sense for them in-character - and even sometimes gets used for character
development if the Smart Guy’s interests end up saving the day and causing the rest
of the team to re-evaluate their judginess - but sometimes it feels like the characters
are only making fun of the Smart Guy because the writer thinks that’s the appropriate
way to treat someone you don’t understand, or someone who has niche interests like…
the entire field of computer science, or the entire space of video games. I dunno, man,
I feel like the Stock Hollywood Nerd is working off a definition of what was niche and nerdy,
like, thirty years ago at this point. Even D&D’s gone mainstream. Wait, what IS niche
and nerdy these days? Now one thing about the smart guy we haven’t
mentioned yet is that smart guys can be evil. Evil smart guys are usually mad scientists,
chessmaster manipulators or generally evil geniuses. Like heroic smart guys, evil smart
guys don’t tend to work alone, and will usually ally themselves with strong or powerful
bad guys who they can manipulate into helping with their evil schemes. This does frequently
backfire, though. Evil Smart Guys sometimes suffer from the ol’ hubris problem, which
undercuts their smartness a little bit by giving them a massive blind spot for their
own vulnerabilities. As discussed back in the Magnificent Bastards video, the really
scary Evil Smart Guys are the ones without glaringly exploitable character flaws. It’s
actually about as common for evil Smart Guys to be the main villain as it is for them to
be the villain’s right-hand minion, and either way they’re usually a pretty dangerous
threat. If they’re the right-hand minion, they might conclude that their evil boss is
too dumb to live and backstab them before taking over, which is the kind of thing heroes
never need to worry about.
So the Smart Guy is kind of a tricky archetype to write. They’re very… functional in
most stories, which means it can difficult to give them an arc of their own, especially
if the writer doesn’t really relate to them and treats them like an exposition machine.
They’re also typically balanced on the razor-thin line between being useless and being overpowered,
because being smart doesn’t do you much good if you can’t do anything with it, but
if you’re smart and powerful you become ridiculously dangerous, so any kind of development
or powerup risks tipping them over the edge into rendering the rest of the team redundant.
But they are potentially very fun, and it’s always neat to watch a clever character figure
things out and potentially save the day in the process. So… yeah!
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