GENERAL: This video is sponsored by Campfire, and victory!
I don’t know about you, but I could sure go for a power fantasy right about now.
Power fantasy is one of the greatest parts of story telling.
In fact, power fantasy is one of the few tropes to rival even the mighty love triangle.
Especially in terms of the number of stories ruined by it.
But that won’t happen to me because a real writer wouldn’t be so weak.
Follow my power fantasy guide and you’ll be churning out the best stories and you wont
even have to do 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, and 100 squats and a 10 Kilometer run!
Every!
Single!
Day!
So let’s rip and tear our way into a lesson on how to power level the power level of our
power fantasy!
But what is power fantasy?
Power fantasy is when a character, usually intended to be the audience’s surrogate,
is empowered, very often excessively so, and is considered a type of wish fulfillment.
It usually doesn’t have clear definition and has a lot of negative connotations to
the point of often being a criticism.
It’s also the bread and butter of the vast majority of American entertainment.
A character who gets a bunch of super powers and saves the world is a power fantasy.
So is a serial killer protagonist who murders his way through a secret cabal of other serial
killers.
It can even be something like a kid from the slums becoming the CEO of a powerful corporation
or a young girl that stops a war by herself.
Power fantasy can be incredibly broad.
Yet like any trope worth adding to a story, Terrible Writing Advice will always champion
adding it in excess!
The best way to add a power fantasy is to over power the story with the unlimited power
of our flawless main character.
Power fantasy is good for catharsis.
Building up the tension and then releasing that tension through strategically placed
power fantasy can create truly awesome moments.
All it requires is just a bit of patience.
Yeah.
I can manage that.
No problem.
Just gotta wait.
Yep.
Can’t let my protagonist be awesome just yet…
NO!
I can’t stand it anymore!
I must unleash my over powered protagonist!
YEAH!
IDDQD and IDKFA!
That’s how you do it!
Just let your protagonist rampage through the story on god mode!
If having the character effortlessly beat up villains is awesome in one scene, then
having every scene be that will surely make the entire story awesome.
This will make the story about as exciting watching a steamroller flatten pavement, but
that is a small price to pay so I can indulge in my personal power fantasy.
Making power fantasy personal is the best way to go about implementing it.
It will look a bit odd when the superhero protagonist sidetracks the middle of the story
to beat up a random English professor who gave me… um I mean our hero, a C- on a paper
that was totally an A+ essay you withered tenured fossil!
But that will just make the hero relatable!
Indulging in petty personal vendettas with disproportionate punishments against specific
individuals is something that we can all relate to.
That’s what heroism is after all, using power for personal advancement and to get
even over perceived slights.
Only losers stick to the moral high ground.
True heroes abuse their power at every opportunity.
The key to making this work is to make sure that the story always sides with the character’s
abuse of power by never suggesting that they are in the wrong or even worse, by taking
a neutral tone and letting the audience decide for themselves.
While power fantasy can be indulged and explored with an amoral character, at this point I’ve
projected myself too much onto them so I’ll just have the story say they are the good
guy even while they brutally murder thinly veiled caricatures of my book’s critics.
I just can’t see how this can make my all powerful character unrelatable?
Some writers suggest that characters exist on a spectrum of supermen to every-men, with
the every-man being more easily relatable and supermen being less relatable.
The vulnerabilities and flaws of the every-man make them easier to identify with given their
more mundane problems and outlook.
After all, it can hard to identify with a perfect superman like being.
Too bad this is completely wrong.
I know this is wrong because I am perfect in all ways, on top of being the single most
humble person on the planet, and I relate perfectly with myself.
Yes we could make the everyman transition to the superman by actually having them earn
those powers.
Having power come at a high cost or with significant investment has the potential to balance the
power fantasy aspects somewhat.
After all, with great power comes great references to that one Spider Man movie.
But we’re not here to explore the nuances and perils of balancing power with personal
responsibility, we’re here to indulge.
The last thing I want is to waste time on being responsible for all of that awesome
power.
That gets in the way of the fantasy part of the power fantasy.
It’s the same issue with having a character train to earn their powers.
Uh oh.
We just stumbled into a training arc!
Silly Terrible Writing Advice.
This isn’t an anime video.
In the good old US of A stories, we just hand our super powers over to the main character
for free!
Using a training arc to establish the limitations and rules of their power?
Explore characterization through the hardship of their training regimen?
Nah.
Just have the character ace the training with ease, turning a prime opportunity to explore
new conflicts, establish a rules system for their powers, and challenge characters with
creative problem solving into yet another way for the story to gratify the main character
and by extension me!
I just want easy victories and nothing else.
The story’s tension will get one shot murdered just like the main antagonist in the final
chapter.
Yes for the audience it will be as unsatisfying as unlocking a video game achievement for
beating the tutorial, but for me I’m far too high on the power fantasy to notice.
Endless victory is the most desirable outcome for a heavy power fantasy character no matter
how much conflict it resolves in a way that denies future conflict.
Don’t bother strategically using heavy power fantasy as the key aspect of the story’s
central premise.
That would never work.
Nor would showing the pitfalls of unchecked power and ambition.
Even worse, contextualizing the power fantasy through a mythological lens.
Such justifications are not needed just like those pesky themes and any characterization
beyond a character using their power.
Power fantasy is all about balance, specifically tipping the balance overwhelmingly in power
fantasy's favor.
If a story is like a cake, then power fantasy could be thought of as the icing, and the
best cakes are basically all icing and no cake.
Just indulge in writing power fantasy like one indulges in binge eating sweats.
One can never have too much of a good thing and power fantasy should always be regarded
as a good thing and not as a tool that the writer can use in certain situations.
It’s important to remember that power fantasy cannot be used to explore the relationships
and dynamics of power and how humans wield it as well as how that relates to the human
condition.
The story must either have endless power fantasy or deeper themes combined with more nuanced
characterization, never both.
All stories must be either brainless action romps or joyless grim exercises in pseudo-intellectual
snobbery that disdains all forms of escapism.
I mean why would people want to escape reality right now?
But, hey, don’t worry too much about it.
You know what they say.
Absolute power fantasy sells absolutely.
GENERAL: Oh great.
The hipster knights return.
I can’t stand people like you.
The only bleeding heart I want to see is the broken entrails of my enemies.
Those make excellent grease for tank treads by the way.
KNIGHT COMMANDER: Uh.
No.
I just want you to stop selling out and taking sponsorships.
GENERAL: You can have my bloated defense spending when you pry it from my cold dead chainsaw
hand.
Soldier, I order you to open fire and destroy this man.
At long last I will finally have a real battle!
SOLDIER: Sorry, general.
Ammunition budget was the first to go.
GENERAL: Okay.
Fine!
Call in an airstrike!
SOLDIER: The Senate Appropriation Committee appropriated the Air Force budget.
GENERAL: Armor column, advance!
SOLDIER: Fuel funds got slashed in favor of healthcare subsidies.
GENERAL: Order an orbital bombardment from our battleships!
SOLDIER: Stuck in drydock.
Farmer bailouts.
GENERAL: Farming bailouts?
Farmers don’t do anything essential!
Whatever.
Throw a rock at him or something!
SOLDIER: Yes, sir!
I think I can... no wait.
Rock funding is gone so Congress can have a new jacuzzi wing in the Senate building.
GENERAL: No!
I won’t accept this!
I was promised a Sponsorship War!
Kill!
Killkillkillkilkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
KNIGHT COMMANDER: Is he okay?
SOLDIER: Looks like the IT department got downsized too.
GENERAL: Care Bear Stare!
What was I saying?
It doesn’t matter because this time we have a secret weapon.
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for visualizing the plot’s flow as well as character detail pages for backstories,
relationships, and even entire character arcs.
However, we’ve been using Campfire’s new and comprehensive world building pack to fill
out extensive intelligence profiles on our many rivals in the TWA expanded universe from
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Campfire Pro is free to use until the end of April, but is normally a one-time purchase
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The Worldbuilding Pack is 40% off at only $14.99 until the end of April 2020.
Subscription free.
TWA fans can go to bit.ly/CampfireProTWA2 or click in the link in the description below.
Wait.
Where do Sir Socialist go?
SOLDIER: He took the Sponsor and left.
GENERAL: And you didn’t try to stop him?
SOLDIER: No animation budget.