It's a commonly accepted theory in storytelling that, in order to keep an audience engaged,
the stakes need to escalate. This is demonstrably untrue; it's probably more accurate to say that,
to keep an audience from getting bored, the story shouldn't repeat itself too often. One way to do
that is raising the stakes; the heroes overcome a decently difficult challenge and are then
faced with a bigger challenge they can't solve the same way, and so ad infinitum. Of course,
a challenge doesn't need to be bigger to challenge the characters, it just needs to
be different in some way. There are a full dozen Miss Marple novels, thirty-three Hercule Poirot
mysteries and sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, and they don't get more perilous the further they
go - they're just different mysteries every time with different solutions. But there are genres
of storytelling where threats don't really have this lateral movement, and instead function on a
kind of linear scale. In these stories, while antagonists might have special abilities or
weird quirks complicating things, ultimately threats only have one metric that matters:
raw power. The heroes have a certain level of power, and can correspondingly be expected to
defeat any threat below that level of power. If you're introducing a new threat that you want
the audience to believe is an actual problem, it needs to be above that level of power, and that of
course means that the hero's powers and techniques and skills will just bounce off them harmlessly.
The archetypical instance of this is, naturally, Dragon Ball Z's power levels, which metatextually
is a rather depressing example of "becoming the very thing you have sworn to destroy," because
early Dragon Ball had a concept of strength that was very heavily dependent on technique;
characters in combat with each other would have different abilities that could counter
each other in different ways, like using the Solar Flare to blind even very strong opponents,
or a gimmick villain whose whole deal was that he was really stinky being countered by the fact
that Krillin canonically has no nose. Brute force was rarely the solution, which makes sense for a
story centered on martial arts. But in this world of training and techniques and slow, methodical
practice, the wildcard from the very beginning was Goku, who started the story already bulletproof
and went up from there. Almost everyone else was a pretty-much-regular-human who had to train their
powers from nothing, but Goku had this weird, natural advantage nobody really understood;
he was much stronger and much tougher than any kid could be expected to be, and of course under
certain circumstances he could turn into a giant gorilla. Add training on top of that
and you have a recipe for a protagonist who can basically win any fight given enough lead-time,
and that's before they added the thing about Saiyans getting stronger every time they almost
die. In the first arc of Dragon Ball Z things took a bit of a turn, when Goku's alien nature
was revealed and we met other Saiyans that had all of Goku's natural advantages but much better,
and Goku ended up scraping by with nothing but technique where he'd previously had the advantage
of brute force. This is a cool reversal that doesn't last very long, since once the term "Super
Saiyan" starts getting thrown around Goku just starts climbing the power ladder, getting stronger
and stronger and overtaking everyone else. The Frieza fight is a bit of a return to form,
since Goku is faced with overwhelming power and tries a number of clever techniques to circumvent
it - like exploiting the fact that Frieza can't sense his presence and is thus limited to only
attacking him when he can see him - but every time he ekes out the slightest progress, Frieza just
powers up a little more and pulls away again. When this arc introduces the concept of "power
levels" it's originally exclusively in the context of the bad guys underestimating their opponents.
A power level can tell them how physically strong their enemy is, but not how skilled,
and all the Earth-based fighters have crazy techniques they've honed over the years that are
where all their actual power comes from. The idea that you can put a numerical value on strength is
framed as a bit of a culture clash that results in the alien villains being frequently blindsided
by their earthly opponents. The problem is, in this very intriguing clash of training vs
talent and skill vs power, Frieza is overwhelming power that no amount of technique can overcome,
and as soon as the Super Saiyan enters the field, the conflict becomes power vs power. And once a
story's conflict structure is power vs power, it's very difficult to make it anything else.
The question then becomes how the heroes are supposed to defeat a threat that they
demonstrably… can't beat. In order to pose a problem in this paradigm it must be stronger
than them, but if strength is the only thing that matters, the heroes are straight-up out of luck
until and unless they find a way to get stronger. To highlight a threat's overwhelming force, it's
often demonstrated in the narrative that clever techniques or special moves won't work on them
to really drive home how scary they are. Under these circumstances, a writer has only two options
for defeating them: exploiting a weak point, or overwhelming them with even more force. Exploiting
a weak point only works if they have a weak point, which can seem a little contrived - but if they
do, the problem is solved; the clever heroes just need to find it, no power escalation required. But
some threats are just ridiculously powerful with no downsides, and to defeat them, the
heroes need overwhelming power of their own. And this is the context where we find the power-up.
Typically heroes become more powerful gradually, through practice, training, and other broadly
realistic approaches to getting better at something. A power-up occurs when, instead of
slowly building up more skill, the hero's ability takes a discrete leap. They jump from one level of
strength/skill/ability to a higher one without much of an intervening state. Now this is not
actually 100% unrealistic - sometimes someone's ability is being hampered by a mental block,
untreated medical condition or similar issue that they find a way to work through or fix - but
the fact is, most of the time, people in the real world get better at stuff through slow,
methodical hard work. They don't just suddenly get stronger or faster or better at chess or whatever.
But in fiction, specifically fiction that lays out its threats on a linear scale and says "must be
this strong to continue", power-ups are a writer's best friend. Your heroes are losing, and the story
drives home that they are in fact doomed to lose - so how can you make them win? You've already
shown that the villain is indestructible, ludicrously powerful and mere inches from
victory - your hero doesn't have TIME to go hit the gym! But they have something more important:
you. You, the writer, have the power to grant them the boon they so desperately need. And so,
with the stroke of a pen, you do! The love of their friends or a nugget of hidden true
potential or a secret bloodline technique or a choosey magical artifact or a lil kissey-kiss from
their love interest suddenly stirs to life and the hero finds themself detonating scouters worldwide
as their power spikes off the scale. Now stronger than the bad guy, the hero defeats the bad guy,
and all is right with the world - all thanks to the powerup you so graciously bestowed.
Now if this happens too often, that's how you get power creep, where the constant threat escalation
leads to a gradual loss of relevancy for all the unfortunate deuteragonists that can't keep up,
but let's ignore those for now. Instead, let's talk about the different kinds of powerups,
and how our heroes can go about narratively earning them so it doesn't feel like you,
the writer, are fully cheating. See, the problem with a powerup is
by its very nature it kind of hits the narrative out of nowhere. If the audience knows it's coming,
the fight up to that point doesn't register as a tense, desperate battle, but as a waiting game for
the hero to get their act together and unlock more true potential or whatever. But if the
audience has no idea it's coming, when it does hit it can feel like a textbook Deus Ex Machina
that potentially undercuts a more interesting solution. To prevent this, most stories will hint
at or build up the powerup beforehand to sort of plant the idea that this character has more
potential than they're currently tapping into, and in the critical moment when the powerup hits,
the character will have a moment of revelation or personal growth or some other thing they
have actual agency in to make the powerup feel like a reward for quick thinking,
hard work or character development - or, in cases where the powerup is the result of
something like pure unbridled rage, it'll make it feel like a really good opportunity for the
hero to make the bad guy cathartically suffer. And a quick side note, the idea that a character
needs to earn their powerup only applies to good guys. Bad guys can get randomly stronger
whenever. This is because stories tend to be structured as a series of problems and solutions,
and while a problem dropping in out of nowhere just presents the opportunity for more story,
a solution dropping out of the blue feels like cheating the audience out of a story.
So there are several way a character can narratively earn their powerup. A
classic one is having a loved one in danger. Frequently this manifests if the bad guy has
been absolutely wrecking the hero up til now, and then threatens to turn their attention on
the typically-much-less-badass supporting cast and love interest. The impetus behind this powerup is
generally the idea that this character is more motivated to protect their loved ones than they
are to protect themselves, which is a nice little character moment, especially if this character
isn't particularly good at showing that they care. Typically the hero will then experience
a burst of indescribable fury and a corresponding powerup, which in some cases takes the form of a
full-on superpowered evil side - since even if the motivation is protecting loved ones,
the emotional component of rage tips the scales a little in the "maybe kinda bad" direction. These
powerups are typically temporary and function as a kind of juiced-up version of hysterical strength.
Relatedly, sometimes powerups are caused by a near-death experience. The hero gets absolutely
walloped, sometimes as a result of a heroic sacrifice but sometimes just because, you know,
they're facing an overwhelmingly powerful threat head-on, and this is kind of what you expect to
happen. As the character fades out, an empowering entity or a choosy magical artifact or their
own subconscious or a dormant secret bloodline technique or the story itself decides to reward
their sacrifice with a nice little boost so they survive the experience and come back swinging.
This is often loosely justified as some kind of failsafe or survival mode or adrenaline or
their body just acting on raw instinct with no limitations or whatever, but practically
speaking the justification is "the hero was straight-up about to die, what do you want?"
This has overlap with the powerups a character earns by proving their worth. The character
does something notably heroic - like a heroic sacrifice, but frequently much less deadly - and
it proves to a choosey artifact or empowering entity that they are worthy of the powerup.
These powerups are more frequently permanent and function as basically level-up rewards for
general good-guy stuff, though the hero might in some cases need to do some heavy lifting
to acclimate to the new powerup, which as a bonus helps make it feel like they actually kinda earned
it instead of it just being handed to them. Now sometimes a character gets powers from an
empowering entity that grants them new abilities because "granting abilities" is what they DO,
but sometimes the powerup is structured a little differently. Sometimes instead the
hero gets their powerup by absorbing power from another source - a magical resource,
a slain enemy, power donated by their allies, the heroic sacrifice of a friend, there are a lot of
ways to flavor it but ultimately the impact is the same: the character acquires more power by taking
it from a source that… has power. The equation balances out pretty well. This is more often than
not a temporary thing, and is sometimes explicitly bad for them, which adds a ticking clock to the
fight since they won't be able to keep it up for long - but sometimes it's permanent,
especially when it involves something like absorbing someone's soul. Also, bad guys
sometimes do this one to highlight how evil they are, but it's okay when the good guys do it.
But not every powerup comes from an outside source. Sometimes it instead follows a moment of
revelation, where the characters figures something out, either about their enemy or abut themselves,
and this allows them to unlock some hidden potential they had. It might be accompanied
by a battle in the center of the mind to visually represent the internal struggle, or it might be
motivated by a friendship speech, or it could just be a little "aha!" moment where something
clicks for the hero and suddenly everything gets easier. Now this is all pretty dope, but this is
also where we find "the power was within you all along!" This is definitely not always bad, and it
can be a fun reveal, especially if the character overcomes a self-worth issue or processes a trauma
or is just really jazzed about the power of friendship and is rewarded by becoming a highly
capable badass, but it can be kind of annoying if it seems like the tipping point for the
character's sudden burst of power doesn't go any deeper than "they just decided they could do it."
And on a similar note, sometimes the powerup is only a powerup from the perspective of the
audience. Not only was the power within the hero all along, the hero was aware of this,
and was actively choosing not to use it. This usually hits after the character has done a
lot of training offscreen and is easing back into things, or has had their power actively restrained
by some outside force like training weights or magical bindings. So instead of getting a powerup,
the character reveals their true strength, typically accompanied by the sentiment that
it's about time they stop holding back. This can be a cool moment, but these "powerups" usually
won't be enough to solve the main threat of the story, since if the hero shows up already able to
fix everything the rest of the story kind of becomes a foregone conclusion. So while this
"powerup" will let the hero show off their power and skill, they usually won't get to use it to
beat anything stronger than the bad guy's right hand man. Defeating the actual main threat will
require a more traditional powerup or something like clever tactics, the power of friendship
or a good old-fashioned deus ex machina. This touches on a broader point about powerups,
which is that while they can be acquired through training, and in fact it makes the most sense for
that to happen, the dramatic needs of the story generally dictate that preparation and training
can never be enough to let the hero win. And the reason for that is pretty simple:
if the hero enters the final boss fight already able to win in a way the audience already knows
what to expect, the fight doesn't amount to much more than a waiting game. This is the
same reason that a heist planned onscreen always has to go wrong, and the heroes are more likely
to succeed if the audience hasn't heard their plan yet - if the audience already knows what's
going to happen and exactly how it's going to happen, why should the story bother to show it?
So typically the final fight needs some kind of surprise that serves as a catalyst to the final
powerup. The moment of revelation or the dramatic loved-one-endangering or the friendship speech or
the absorbing-power-from-an-unexpected-source - they all work as the wildcard to keep
the fight fresh and unpredictable. But while this is great from a Doylist
perspective, constantly seeking to surprise and thrill the audience can cause problems
that degrade the integrity of the world and the story's internal Watsonian rules. This is where
power creep comes in, but that's not the only problem that powerups can expose. There's a
sort of serialized escalation that follows from establishing a powerup mechanic in-story when
it's coupled with the general rule that a story shouldn't repeat itself. The powerup the hero
worked and slaved and maybe even literally died for is only going to work once. The next bad guy
needs to be even stronger, even harder to beat - because the story has established a paradigm
where the only way to make an enemy interesting is to make them immune to everything the heroes can
already do, and because if they didn't do that it would be weird that the hero didn't use their big
finisher final move right at the beginning. This is taking "no repetition" to a level of extreme
that is both unnecessary and actively harmful to the impact of the plot, because it essentially
constantly hits the protagonist with the Worf Effect. If their powers don't do anything to
any of the threats they face until they get the powerup they need and win immediately, it feels
like they may as well not be doing anything at all. For all their alleged complexities and
flashy special effects, fights in this structure amount to very long games of you can't hurt me,
I have my everything-proof shield. Now there are a bunch of ways to avoid
this. Instead of sticking the new bad guy behind a forcefield to explain why the last season's
powerup won't work, the hero's power-up could have a drawback like a long charge-time, and associated
superpowered evil side, a complex requirement for activation, or a debilitating effect on them
so if it doesn't work they'll be taking themself out of the fight - all these indicate that using
the powerup would actually be tactically disadvantageous until they're out of other
options. Or you can put the threat behind a series of complex defenses that can't just be busted
down, and once they actually get to the bad guy then whacking them isn't too hard. Or the threat
can be more lateral - a powerup that lets the hero hit harder won't work on a threat that's psychic
or intangible or extremely long-range or entangled in complex political machinations. And even if the
threat is just stronger and tougher than the hero, that doesn't mean the hero categorically
can't win or needs to become stronger and tougher than them to win. It is honestly so funny to me
that shonen action anime is in large part inspired by martial arts movies, because the idea that a
physically superior opponent can be defeated by skill, precision, honed technique and practice
is the entire goddamn point of martial arts. But these problems are mostly in the long term,
narratively speaking. They arise after the story has already established the powerup,
when it's struggling to justify more threats posing a problem after the powerup. The powerup
itself is normally pretty awesome, especially if it's been suitably built-up, the hero feels
like they both really need and deserve the boost, and the antagonist about to get whacked by it has
been proven to be a real asshole the audience wants to see taken down a peg. In the same way
that a deus ex machina that rescues the heroes can be very satisfying if the audience really wanted
the heroes to be rescued, a powerup that turns the tables can be a very cool moment. But it can
also fall flat, and that usually happens when the only thing the powerup does is let the heroes win.
Most really impactful powerup moments have a secondary meaning lifting them up - like if the
hero's power boost comes from them finally processing that they aren't alone anymore,
or overcoming some kind of lasting trauma or loose end that's been causing them pain,
or it comes at the cost of another character's tragic sacrifice or it has a scary undercurrent
like a superpowered evil side or an uncontrollable rage that makes the audience and the supporting
cast wonder if this power boost is a good thing or another problem to fight. Methods like these
add a layer of meaning to the story that isn't just gradually increasing the power bar until
it hits the you can beat the bad guy now mark. This is why the idea of a protagonist earning
their powerup is so important, because otherwise it feels like a contrivance to solve a problem the
writer contrived to be unnecessarily unsolvable. Powerups without this narrative layer tend to
fall flat, and the shakiest cases tend to take two specific forms: "the true power
was friendship" and "the true power was within you all along." Unless the protagonist has been
explicitly written with an arc about overcoming isolation and loneliness through the acceptance
of their friends, "the power of friendship" feels pretty vapid as a justification because
it's not a change. These characters have typically been friends for most of the
story at this point. It's not clear why saying it out loud is what causes the boost - except,
again, in cases where the protagonist has been struggling with loneliness and really
needed to hear it confirmed that their friends genuinely like them and want them to succeed.
And on the subject of powerups that aren't a change, the most blatant offender is "the power
was within you all along." To be clear, this powerup can work very well! In most cases it
hits best in stories where the character had a badass weapon they relied on and recently
lost that weapon, and they've consequently been grappling with feeling powerless and fighting
their own muscle memory whenever they try to do anything combat-based - or when a character with
a power they can't control fails and disappoints people, which also works to make them feel
powerless and bad. When these characters realize that the true power was within them all along,
it's after struggling through loss and a feeling of weakness and failure that makes the revelation
a welcome affirmation. When this doesn't happen, you get stories where a character has struggled
through plot difficulties and inconveniences that their powers would render trivial to resolve, and
then they realize or are told at the last possible moment that they can actually fix everything
whenever they want, and then they do. Where is the change? What actually, tangibly happens in
this character's head that makes them suddenly able to do this thing they haven't been able
to do at all? "The power was in you" is a plot twist that feels like a change, but by its nature
it reveals that there is no change. And unlike the "stop holding back" variant, the hero doesn't even
exercise any agency in unleashing their power. It's kind of the truest expression of the trouble
this trope has with hitting the audience. Unless the powerup comes from an outside source like a
magical entity, a choosey artifact or absorbing another form of power, the powerup by its nature
comes from within the character. In a sense, the power has always been inside them all along,
because it had to come from somewhere and there aren't that many options. Which means the
character always had the potential to be able to solve this problem easily. Which begs the
question, why did it take them so long? Serialized stories that rely on powerups for threat scaling
frequently make less and less sense in hindsight, as the same character struggling against Baby's
First Villain Of The Week apparently had enough hidden true potential to singlehandedly fight
and kill god four seasons later. The powerup is a powerful trope - perhaps too powerful - and must
be used very responsibly to avoid destabilizing the very fabric of the plot. Unless it would
look really cool. So… yeah!