Quick- what do Yu-Gi-Oh!, My Little Pony Friendship is Magic, and the climactic fight in Captain America: Winter Soldier have in common?
Well, aside from catchy soundtracks and bright primary colors,
the answer is that they all run on the power of friendship, along with roughly 70% of all modern media ever.
Now, I've mentioned the power of friendship in a bunch of other videos for the simple reason that this trope is freaking everywhere.
But despite its prevalence and clout, this trope is so simple, it's almost hard to talk about.
The power of friendship is self-explanatory.
It's a power. That's gained from friendship.
You have friends? Congratulations. You can access the power of friendship.
You want to be friends with someone?
Maybe you should demonstrate the power of friendship to win 'em over.
The bad guy has no friends? Sucks to be them!
They should have learned that friendship as a power source is both sustainable and renewable.
Now the power of friendship is one of those tropes that really has to be used carefully. It's kind of like sugar;
it's simple, we like it, and it gives us a nice buzz,
but if you dump too much of it into something, the whole thing can start to feel cloying and unsubtle.
You either have to use it in moderation,
or you have to incorporate it into a more complex ingredient and use it that way.
Or you could just say screw it and make the literary equivalent of caramel where it's basically 100% sugar
and you don't care.
This is the My Little Pony or Yu-Gi-Oh! School of Friendship story writing.
Now in its most basic form, the power of friendship is generally used to resolve moments of crisis.
One character is isolated or alone in some way and facing a bad situation,
But the power of friendship is a hard counter to both of those things
and pulls them out of their funk by reminding them that they're not actually alone,
subsequently pulling them out of the situation by way of the friends in question.
In my Damsel-in-Distress Trope Talk,
I brought up how the power of friendship is frequently the driving force behind a damsel rescue mission,
but its uses are a lot broader than that.
For a simple related example, many villains have disproving the power of friendship as an explicit motivation,
especially the ones that are exceptionally misanthropic.
So they'll isolate one of the heroes, taunt them with how alone they are,
maybe even bring up potentially valid reasons for why their friends should have no interest in coming to their aid
or being their friends anymore,
and in these cases, the villain is almost always proven wrong almost immediately thereafter when the friendly cavalry arrives.
Basically the power of friendship in its simplest form doesn't actually have much power to it,
it'll simply be a lot of story focus placed on friendships,
and how special and important the bond of friendship is.
In these cases, the "Power" part of the "Power of Friendship" is mostly metaphorical,
representing the importance of friendship.
But in the most extreme cases, the power of friendship will actually grant unexpected super powers to use against the villain:
friendship lazers, friendship mind-reading prevention,
friendship power-ups, friendship giving you the power to fuse into a bigger scarier friend,
Et cetera. This one usually requires a modicum of justification,
but any slightly empowered universe can be bent in order to explain why liking somebody can give you telepathy.
In these cases, the "Power" part of the "Power of Friendship" is very literal.
Friendship is some sort of cosmic force that the act of being friends with someone allows you to tap into.
Or at the very least,
the deep platonic bond it lets you forge with someone allows you to combine your powers in ways nobody else can.
But these variants are basically just used to directly smack down a bad guy with the power of friendship.
Basically by aiding a friend in a moment of crisis,
and proving that the whole of your posse is greater than the sum of its parts.
Since most villains work alone, or at least feel alone,
they're vulnerable to this usage of the power of friendship.
But sometimes the power of friendship isn't an explicit slap in the face to one of the villains,
it's used as a wake-up call for one of the heroes.
In the simplest cases, this is a hero who's insecure about their friendships for whatever reason
being reminded in the strongest terms that their buddies would, quite possibly, actually die for them.
Sometimes these heroes are loners by nature,
sometimes they have some pretty deep-seated self-loathing problems,
sometimes they've got abandonment issues or actual plot reasons to suspect that any friends they have
will either inevitably leave or should leave for their own safety,
and in the worst cases you want to put some combination of all of the above.
Whatever the reason, they've got some reason to believe that whatever friends they have are fair weather at best,
and as soon as the going gets tough, not only with those friends leave,
but it might actually be in their best interest to leave.
And these stories almost always end with a friend or friends
fighting through nigh impossible odds and obstacles in order to reaffirm the strength of their friendship.
Now while these are all general store uses for the power of friendship,
the power of friendship also has a specific character that shows up.
And that's the friend that never gives up.
This character is the character that will come to your rescue no matter what,
that'll never accept any reason for why they should abandon someone, etc, etc.
They're, in essence, the perfect friend, whose friendship you'll never lose.
Now, to get real for a second, the thing is, in real life, friendships are...
complicated. People gravitate towards each other and people drift apart.
Circumstances change, people change, and when people you like drift away from you,
it can be hard not to take it personally or internalize it in weird, self-destructive ways.
There are all kinds of ways for friendships to end or peter out or to just get so low-key as to make it weird to try and revive them.
Friendships are great, but I think most people know that even the best friendships aren't indestructible.
It's a rare friendship that lasts beyond individual circumstances,
and even in those cases, it doesn't mean that friend means everything.
It's cold, but it's true. People have complicated lives,
and it's very rare for one person to be proportionately that important to someone else.
Or maybe I'm jaded, but either way,
this is why the story of the unbreakable friendship is so compelling.
the friend who comes to help you no matter what bad stuff you might have done, even to them,
the friend who tells you that it doesn't matter how complicated your life gets, they'll stand by you regardless,
the friend who physically destroys themself in order to help you resolve your own problems,
the friend who potentially declares war on the entire world if that's what it takes to help you.
Not to make this pun too awesome, but this is basically the platonic ideal of what a friend should be.
It's the person you can rely on literally no matter what you've done or what your circumstances are.
It's a friendship you can rely on to be there against all odds.
We see this, and we're like, man, it'd be cool to have a friend like that,
or, Man, it's great that I do have a friend like that,
or in some cases, Bah! Such notions are for children,
And I, an extremely sophisticated adult, have no time for such childish notions as healthy relationships or trust.
Now, I shall away to the Internet,
whereupon I shall inform preteen cartoon fans that joy is fleeting, friendship is communist propaganda, and death comes for us all.
But the short of it is, this trope gives rise to the almost entirely fictional character,
the friend who never gives up on you and would do anything for you,
as the ideal friend one could ever have.
A friend whose friendship one need never maintain,
because no matter how evil or dickish you are they will never give up on you,
and no matter how terrible your situation is and how uncooperative you're being,
they will never stop fighting to help you.
Frankly, I wouldn't ask this kind of unconditional loyalty from anyone, but the appeal of the fiction is obvious.
It's a support in your life that you never need to worry about losing. Also, unsurprisingly,
This kind of unwavering loyalty is frequently interpreted by the audience as shipping fodder.
But then, what isn't these days?
Now, the friend that never gives up on you, demonstrating their unwavering friendship,
gets taken to its logical story conclusion when the object of that friendship becomes evil.
And this happens surprisingly frequently in friendship-based media.
Now, usually this becoming-evil thing happens because they've been explicitly mind-controlled or brainwashed,
and is almost always the result of an overcomplicated villainous plot specifically designed to pit friend against friend.
Although, sometimes, it's just a remarkably contrived coincidence.
Now this almost always results in the famous "I know you're in there somewhere" fight,
wherein the friend spends the entire fight attempting to snap their brainwashed buddy out of it,
and said brainwashed buddy spends the entire fight alternatively tossing out highly personalized jabs to try and antagonize their friend,
being a stone-faced emotionless zombie, or vocalizing their inner struggle between the brainwashing thing and the friendship thing,
and while this can be done with any character,
the part that makes this work is that whatever character is on snapping-out-of-it duty
has to have that never-give-up nigh-unbreakable bond with the person they're snapping out of it,
because otherwise there are about a million reasons to just take the easy way out and give up on them.
So in order to make this work, you need some kind of unbreakable bond between the characters.
Sometimes this is a romance thing, sometimes it's a parent-child or mentor-student thing,
but sometimes it's raw friendship, and in those cases the power of friendship is on full display.
Interestingly, this is actually easier to pull off than the much more unconditional, unwavering friendship against all odds,
because although the character frequently is close friends with the brainwashee,
for the purposes of this trope,
they technically don't even have to like the brainwashed buddy most of the time in order to want to snap them back to normal.
There are all kinds of reasons to want to dropkick somebody back to the side of good,
and refusing them to take no for an answer,
and personal unwavering friendship is only one of them.
Sometimes that feeling of friendship is tempered and boosted by a feeling of personal responsibility,
sometimes the brainwashed friend is your romantic rival,
but you know it's breaking your mutual love interest's heart to see them like this,
and sometimes, it's really simple.
You might not get along normally,
maybe you take cheap potshots at each other and make fun of each other's suffering
or just plain don't like each other much,
but that doesn't mean you hate them or want them trapped in their own head forever.
Normally, you're not that close, but this situation isn't normal,
and until things do go back to normal, there's no way you're gonna give up on them.
Basically, while this character does need the total unwillingness to give up,
they don't need to have that characteristic all the time.
It can be highly situational or personalized,
or even feel out of character if they're normally kind of a loner asshole.
All you need is for this character to decide in this situation that the situation is absolutely unacceptable
and they're gonna snap their buddy out of it no matter what,
and while this generally boils down to the power of friendship,
it doesn't always have to manifest in the standard remember-that-we-are-friends monologue.
Now for the practicalities of the "I know you're in there somewhere" fight,
there are a few traditional ways for your hero to snap everybody out of it,
but they almost never go well for the hero.
See, usually brainwashing or mind control rules are such that they can only be snapped out of it
by doing something so heinously antithetical to who they are that they snap themselves out of it.
In fact, brainwashed or mind-controlled heroes almost always have to snap themselves out of it,
and they only gain the ability to do that when the hero either
manages to find the specific trigger phrase or action that reminds them of their personal characterization
and relationship with the hero,
or when the hero gets the crap kicked out of him
and the brainwashed buddy runs into a line that they are absolutely unwilling to cross,
usually moments before the coup de gras.
This one's more common because it's more dramatic,
although frequently both versions will be combined into one maximally friendship-affirming combat.
On top of that the hero is almost always unwilling to actually fight their brainwashed buddy for real,
giving said buddy the distinct combat advantage.
Although in cases where the snapping-out character and the brainwashed character normally don't get along,
this can be hilariously subverted while still staying totally in character.
But anyway, in the "I know you're in there somewhere" fight, the power of friendship is invoked on both sides.
The hero will basically be relying on it
and deliberately bringing it up in an attempt to talk their brainwashed buddy back to sanity.
The brainwashed buddy will almost always be fighting from the inside,
and will be gaining power from the power of friendship that the friend is slinging at them.
Without the friend doing the fighting,
the brainwashed buddy likely wouldn't have the proper motivation to snap out of it,
but with that friend both cheering them on and getting totally stomped on,
said brainwashee will most likely find the strength to not murder their friend
just in time. Or slightly after just in time, but don't worry, the friend almost always survives this,
usually by being rescued by the newly un-brainwashed other hero.
Basically, the short of this version is,
it takes a true friend to deliberately let you kick the tar out of them in order to snap your brain back to sanity.
Might be worth designating one of your friends or family members as an emergency contact
specifically for that purpose.
So we've talked about how the power of friendship can be used to help friends and allies and scare or confuse enemies.
The bottom line is, friends affirming their friendship with other friends is heartwarming on a very deep level,
and can also freak out misanthropic bad guys.
But there are a few other ways the power of friendship can be used to interesting effect.
For example, it's fairly common, especially in cartoons,
to have a single episode where the heroes are having teamwork problems
and the villains are working together flawlessly.
This always causes the heroes to lose the first encounter,
because their own power of friendship is in need of a tune-up.
They'll then work through their problems, learn a few life lessons,
and inevitably come back even better at friendship than before,
subsequently destroying the bad guys and usually causing them to dissolve into chaotic bickering,
since it's simpler for the writers if the villains are bad at teamwork.
It's very rare for the villains to have the power of friendship if the heroes don't,
but sometimes it'll be used for a single episode gimmick.
Also, do be worried if your villains do have the power of friendship, because it can make them terrifyingly effective,
especially if one of them gets put out of commission or killed
and the other gets the corresponding, power of friendship-induced
"you hurt my friend, and now you must pay" power up that's normally restricted for heroic use only.
This can be especially effective against loner heroes,
and just like the single-episode villains-have-better-teamwork plot,
it emphasizes the fact that the heroes are at a significant disadvantage
until they can work out their friend problems.
Oddly enough the anime Inuyasha does this fairly frequently.
It happened as a one-shot in an early episode,
and the bad guys squad of season 4 was explicitly friendship fueled,
countering the protagonist, who was isolated in various ways for the bulk of the season,
to the point where the bad guy leader was notably disheartened
when his band of seven got whittled down to one.
Now, most of the time, villains are fairly scornful and dismissive of the power of friendship.
This helps emphasize how evil and lonely they are.
Anti-villains, noble villains, or villains in the process of being redeemed usually go one of two routes--
they either base their entire villainous identity on the fragility and falsity of friendship as a whole
and are pulled out of solid villainy by being rudely awakened by the overwhelming friendliness of the heroes,
or they're a lot less dismissive of friendship than other villains,
and might even acknowledge that a character's bond with their friends is interesting or impressive.
A typical way this might play out is like this:
a character's been damseled and their friends are furiously attempting to rescue them.
The most villainy villain will be all like,
"Hah! What fools these are to rush headlong into danger just to save a single person!"
But the least villainy villain will be all "The concern they display for their friend is impressive.
We would do well not to underestimate them,"
and you see, you see what I'm going for here?
Generally the more one denies the power of friendship, the less heroic a character is.
Loner heroes gradually lose the loner instinct and become friendlier as they become more solidly heroic.
Even asshole loner protagonists will have moments when they display how deep their concern for their fellow heroes runs.
Villains disturbed or intrigued by the whole friend dealio
might break rank with the side of evil and either strike out on their own or
outright redeem themselves into heroism.
Usually the more you understand or trust friendship, the less evil you are.
The most heroic character in a story is almost always also the one that comes closest to embodying the
friend-that-would-literally-die-for-you-under-all circumstances character,
and the most villainous one is the one that doesn't understand why anyone would ever do that.
Note that this doesn't mean that the hero actually has to attain this ideal of friendship,
just that they're likely to be closer to it than anyone else.
Many heroes do have a betrayal breaking point, which, when crossed, does manage to sever their friendship.
This is almost always a really bad sign, and can on occasion lead to this formerly friendly hero being
terrifyingly efficient at taking down the character who managed to break their trust.
But as a general rule, heroes understand and embody the power of friendship and villains don't.
In fact, you could look at the notion of traditional heroism as taking the platonic ideal of friendship
and expanding it to apply to everyone and everything,
the most heroic heroes being the ones who would die to help anyone.
But what this "general rule" stuff means is that there's a very rare breed of villain who defies this stereotype,
and manages to actually be remarkably dangerous and intimidating as a result,
because if you have a villain that understands the power of friendship,
you have a villain that can exploit the power of friendship.
But how can friendship be exploited, you might ask?
Well, the most classic form is the villain damseling a character as a trap in order to lure in one of their friends,
who they know will be coming to the rescue.
But also consider the hostage scenario, where the villain, again relying on the heroic unwillingness to ever hurt a friend,
manages to make serious villain headway by putting a hostage between the heroes and the potential foiling of their plans,
which almost always works, for the record, because heroes are really predictable.
For villains that are specifically fallen heroes or former friends with the current heroes,
they can actually play some serious mind games with the heroes by, for example,
pretending to be brainwashed or fighting from the inside,
and exploiting the classic heroic unwillingness to hurt a friend in order to get some serious hits in.
The most extreme example I can think of is not actually one I've ever seen done,
and I've only seen it suggested or threatened once. Of course that doesn't mean it isn't done,
just that it's not all that commonly done, or at least not in the media I've watched.
Consider, if you will, the classic scenario in which the villain needs to torture one of the heroes for whatever reason, usually information.
Now this trope is done all over the place, but it almost always fails the villain and just serves to make the hero look badass when they refuse to crack.
They either break out or are rescued by--you guessed it--friends, and the plot progresses as normal,
minus a few angst breaks or recovery episodes.
But the hero's weakness here is obvious. They might be able to tank all kinds of abuse themselves,
but 90% of the time they can't bring themselves to let a friend get hurt.
So just grab one or all of the would-be rescuers that are guaranteed to be showing up sooner or later,
zap 'em around a little, and break the hero by proxy.
Given the choice between saving the world and saving a friend or love interest,
heroes choose the not-the-world option nine times out of ten,
and the crazy part is I've never even seen a villain try to make this plan work.
Once they grab one hero, they're all like, "Well, job well done, everybody,
Let's strap him to a spotlight operating table and get to work."
And then a suitably impressive amount of time later, they're like,
"Wow, this hero is one tough customer.
If only they had some sort of incredibly exploitable weakness we could use."
Like, come on, guys,
I realize most on-screen torture is just there to awaken oddly specific fetishes in a statistically significant portion of the viewing audience,
but could you at least pretend like you're striving for efficiency?
What, doesn't this bother anyone else?
Also, the only villain I know that even suggested doing this is Bill Cipher, (Gravity Falls)
but that's cause he's... terrifying, anyway.
But yeah, the bottom line is, the power of friendship is a very simple trope
intermittently used to validate the human desire for zero maintenance, stability in times of crisis,
and very rarely exploited by villains,
who'd probably see a lot more success if they'd just up their villainy game a little bit
and took a couple sight courses on the side.
So, yeah.