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And now that they're here, I've got a feeling everything's gonna work out fine.
Everyone loves a leader.
A heroic bastion of morals, a charismatic master planner, a naive but determined everyman
- whatever their personality, the leader oozes heroism.
And everyone loves a lancer!
Edgy and isolated, jaded by the world, the central focus of a high caliber of emotionally
loaded character arcs.
And while these two usually take top billing in the five man band, the heart and the smart
guy are fairly well-respected as well - holding the team together through compassion, emotional
intelligence and a strong moral compass, putting together cunning plans and unraveling mysteries.
Everyone plays a part,
and everyone is appreciated.
But sometimes… the Big Guy is left waiting in the wings.
Those stalwart, unappreciated pillars of fiction whose defining characteristics are Big and
Strong are frequently regarded as little more than comic relief, if they’re even regarded
at all.
But I’d like to propose that the Big Guy is more than just big.
Today, let’s examine a trope that encapsulates the Big Guy but reframes them to highlight
their actual narrative role.
Today, let’s talk about the Powerhouse.
Now the powerhouse is a character archetype, but it might be more helpful to think of them
as a narrative role - a character who’s defined by what they can do more than who
they are.
The Powerhouse’s job in the plot is simple: they strengthen
the heroes.
They can hit harder, tank more damage, smuggle in a hilariously improbable arsenal of weapons,
hold off the army of minions while the hero runs off to advance the plot.
The narrative role of the powerhouse is to be powerful enough to do the heavy lifting
the heroes need to do.
Essentially, they’re in a weight class of their own, and their presence elevates the
rest of the team to a higher level.
The Powerhouse’s appearance is often used as a narrative signal that it’s gonna be
all right, guys - the cavalry has arrived.
Now the powerhouse archetype is technically not always found in a team, although that’s
mostly what we’re going to be focusing on today.
Some powerhouses run solo, and have heavy overlap with the Loner archetype, usually
being incredibly competent and capable of solving problems with heavy hitting but typically
encountering problems that can’t just be solved by hitting things very hard.
Essentially, solo powerhouses act as their own cavalry when they can get serious and
play to their strengths.
But powerhouses are more interesting in teams, so let’s stick with that for now.
Now, before we continue, we should probably lay out what exactly defines a powerhouse.
In a typical Five-Man Band, the Powerhouse is generally the Big Guy, and that role isn’t
limited to five-man bands - duos, trios, and squads of any number can have a designated
Large Character whose role it is to hit hard and tank damage.
But the Powerhouse is a little more complicated than that.
For one thing, the powerhouse isn’t always the biggest or strongest character on the
team.
Maybe another character is stronger, but they’re less reliable in a combat context - maybe
they’ve got a volatile personality, or they’ve got qualms against fighting, or some kind
of extremely exploitable weakness keeping them down.
For the powerhouse to be a supporting pillar of the team, reliability is more important
than raw strength, so the most consistently effective
fighter is usually the team powerhouse.
For instance, in The Avengers, I’d classify Thor as the team powerhouse, despite The Hulk
being the strongest by definition.
Hulk’s charming personality and tendency to get brainwashed, manipulated or otherwise
weaponized by the bad guys makes him rather unreliable from a narrative standpoint, whereas
Thor showing up is consistently regarded as a gamechanger because he can be relied on
to help.
Another powerhouse hallmark is simplicity for a similar reason.
There are plenty of heavy hitters in fiction that have extremely complex movesets built
on special secret techniques or dangerous forbidden powers or a swiss army knife of
assorted wacky skills, but the Powerhouse is simple in the same way a hammer is simple
- strong, well-balanced, and good at hitting things.
A complex powerset can contribute to that unreliability I mentioned - the hero might
struggle to pick the right tool for the job, but the powerhouse will just hit the problem
until it stops being a problem.
The powerhouse can usually be identified as the member of the team with the simplest approach
to combat.
Take Avatar, for instance - and check it off your Trope Talk bingo cards while you’re
at it: Sokka is a skilled fighter trained in several weapons, Katara uses her environment
creatively to outmaneuver the enemy, Aang usually relies on his mobility to outwit and
escape rather than fighting directly - and Toph hits things with rocks.
Simple, reliable, effective.
That’s not to say powerhouses can’t be skilled or tactically-minded.
Lots of powerhouses rely less on strength than on being really, really good at what
they do.
Again, reliability is the most important part - a highly trained, very knowledgeable and
skilled fighter is typically more reliable than the Hulk-style super-strong loose cannon
type.
But even this more complex character is simple on paper:
They diagnose the problem and hit it with the solution.
It doesn’t always work, but that’s not really the point.
The simplicity is the point.
Here are some other signs that a character might be the powerhouse of the group!
It’s consistently their job to hold back the army of minions while the hero and/or
lancer go off and deal with the actually important bad guys with, like, names and backstories
and stuff.
Their combination of power and simplicity makes them well-equipped to deal with a bunch
of generic mooks while the more complicated characters handle the central plot.
In a similar vein, it’s consistently their job to take the kind of hit that’d put the
rest of the team out of commission so their allies can keep going and deal with the real
threat.
In both of these cases, the powerhouse singlehandedly takes on something that’d be too much for
the rest of the group, or at least very inconvenient, so the more specialized tactical fighters
can move on and deal with the core plot stuff.
Sometimes this can actually escalate to a full-on
Heroic Sacrifice if the powerhouse isn’t
guaranteed to survive whatever cool badass thing they’re doing, but in more chill cases
it just takes them out of the fight.
If the characters are ever in one of those situations
where they have to give up all their weapons before
going in somewhere,
the powerhouse will EITHER be the character with one cartoonishly heavy weapon everyone
else has trouble lifting, OR the character with a ridiculously implausible number of
weapons hidden on their person that takes a really long time to disarm, and somehow
they’ll still have more knives on them when the plot get real later.
The alternative is this is the character who has
NO weapons on them.
Watch out for this one.
If the heroes are ever in a really bad situation where the arrival of one character heralds
a complete reversal and the narrative shifts from a dire, potentially hopeless situation
to a proper fight with an optimistic outlook - that one character is usually the powerhouse.
Again, the cavalry.
This isn’t always true, because there's a
stock episode where the whole moral is
“oh we need teamwork and if we’re not all here we’re kinda screwed” and then
whatever
missing character shows up gets that treatment, but broadly if the fight is functionally all
over except for the cleanup after the character shows up, that character is typically the
powerhouse.
If the character is regularly hit first in combat to signify that the threat of the week
is really serious, you guys - that character is the powerhouse, because the narrative acknowledges
that taking them out is more impressive than taking out any other character.
But more importantly, this is also the main narrative problem faced by powerhouses.
I colloquially refer to this problem as Punching Superman Through A Wall Syndrome, but it’s
more commonly known as The Worf Effect, named for the character Worf in Star Trek: The Next
Generation.
Worf is a klingon, classic Proud Warrior Race guy and head of security, so it’s basically
his job to fight stuff.
Unfortunately, Star Trek as a franchise is pretty lacking in hand-to-hand combat - most
episodes are more like mysteries where problems are solved through clever strategy, uncovering
weird secrets, existential pondering on the nature of life, the universe and everything,
and the occasional negative space wedgie.
And on the rare occasions that there is combat, it’s ship combat, with phasers and shields
and stuff - no punches needed.
This means that Worf doesn’t really have a lot
to do on an average day, and pretty much the
only time combat becomes an issue is when the threat of the week bitchslaps Worf into
a wall to establish that, bad news, everybody, brute strength won’t be able to solve this
problem!
This unfortunately produces a character whose combat expertise is pretty much entirely tell-don’t-show,
and instead of it being a big thing when he gets gently karate-chopped into the nearest
console, it’s more of a token story beat to inform the audience that this episode’s
gonna take a while to get anywhere.
And despite the trope being named for him, Worf is far from the only victim of the Worf
Effect.
As soon as a character is designated as The Tough One, The Strongest Character, or - broadly
- The Powerhouse, it becomes incredibly easy for the writer to amp up a threat of the week
by having them take them out first.
On paper, it should work!
If this bad guy took out The Tough One, that must mean they’re really tough!
But there’s two problems with this.
First, the powerhouse needs to be established as actually powerful - it can’t just be
lip service.
We need to consistently see this character be strong, powerful, competent and reliable
in all those things to really get the sense that this is a character we can trust to be
badass.
If that gets properly established, then the first time that character gets fully smacked
around by some new and unknown threat, the audience recognizes that this is a very unusual
situation and thus this threat should probably be taken seriously.
But that’s not the only issue.
Establishing the character is all well and good, but
the problem is if this becomes a regular occurrence.
It doesn’t matter how tough the character used to be if from that point forward their
only role is getting smacked into stuff so all the other characters can be like “oh
no! not the strong guy!”
The powerhouse getting taken out should be a big thing, but since it’s also the easiest
way to establish a credible threat, it often ends up getting wildly overused, to the detriment
of both the bad guys and the powerhouse.
Worf may be the trope namer, but Superman is one of the easiest examples to cite.
In the earlier seasons of justice league, pretty much every jobber villain of the week
got in at least one good hit on the man of steel himself, consistently smacking him through
the nearest wall and out of the fight for a hot minute while the rest of the characters
got to tool around for a while until Superman pulled himself out of the pile of rubble that,
practically speaking, he shouldn’t have even noticed.
This is because it is very difficult to write a story with a lot of high-stakes combat when
one of your heroes is ridiculously strong and pretty much impervious to all harm.
Now, this gets some retroactive explanations later on - the main one is that Superman is
holding back all the time forever.
In his classic World Of Cardboard speech, Superman clearly and concisely explains to
Darkseid how hard it is for him to live in such a fragile world, always taking incredible
care to not hurt anyone too badly - which conveniently explains why he’s constantly
being batted around by d-list bad guys, because for him, whacking them hard enough to take
them out of commission without killing or maiming them is a razor-thin line, and it’s
a different line for every bad guy.
But Darkseid is ridiculously powerful, which means Superman can actually fight him without
holding back.
And it’s really cool for all of thirty seconds before Darkseid zaps him with a magic box
that puts him out of commission for the rest of the fight.
Ahhhh, sorry Clark, better luck next time.
Great speech, though!
So how do you avoid the Worf Effect without making the Powerhouse the defacto solution
to every problem?
Well, there’s a lot of ways to handle it.
For one thing, the powerhouse’s narrative role could be summed up as “strong enough
to handle stuff the others might not be able to”, but while that’s very useful in a
lot of contexts, very few situations are just conflicts of strength.
There’s almost always other factors - for instance, something as simple as a character
with a no-killing policy already helps explain why a fight might be a challenge even if they’re
physically tough enough to take the other guy out - doing it nonlethally might be more
complicated.
Or maybe the primary threat is a basic strong bad guy everyone has to overpower, but there’s
a secondary threat the powerhouse might be occupied with - the aforementioned “holding
off an army of minions” thing is a pretty common angle for this, or maybe there’s
an environmental problem the powerhouse has to go help out with, like an entire city falling
out of the sky.
The powerhouse might be able to handle either situation individually, but they can’t be
everywhere at once.
And a lot of conflicts really aren’t about physical strength at all.
In those contexts, the powerhouse’s primary skillset might not see much use - but they
also don’t get Worf Effected as often, because there’s no need for the narrative to establish
the new threat as a physical problem, because strength isn’t actually the issue.
For a really good example of this that requires some
explanation, I recently got really into a
show called Leverage.
If you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend it.
It’s got an ensemble cast with amazing chemistry, plenty of found family vibes if that’s
your jam - and a “heist of the week” format where the main characters take on various
corrupt and powerful people who’ve done bad things and faced no consequences, they
run
a con on them and end up taking them down while getting justice and payback for the
people the bad guys have hurt.
Kind of a modern Rovin Hood situation.
The core narrative loop is basically a crack team of people who are very good at what they
do coming up with a complex plan to scam the bad guy, executing said plan, dealing with
a few minor hiccups along the way before eventually taking them down and getting justice for their
victims.
Most of the bad guys are rich and powerful and largely untouchable through legal avenues
- it’s not exactly a hittable problem most of the time.
Even if they’re relatively physically vulnerable, hurting them wouldn’t disassemble their
empire or expose their immoral actions to the world, and killing them isn’t on
the table, because morals.
But despite this largely nonphysical setup, the team has a designated powerhouse.
Alongside a mastermind planner, a grifter con
artist, a cat burglar and a hacker is Eliot
Spencer, the dude whose role in the team is literally described
as “hitter.”
Amusingly, in the very first episode, one of the crew
is constantly wondering what it is this guy even does, cuz
he basically doesn't do anything until partway through
the heist - when he has to punch some people.
It's - it's great.
Watch this show.
Despite actually being shorter than most of the cast,
he is unquestionably the team big guy and powerhouse, and he pretty much never loses
a fight in the show.
The only time he actually meets his physical match
in a fight and gets worried he might lose, they end up making out, so it’s
not really an issue.
He never gets worfed, because the story doesn’t need to worf him, because the real problem
can never be solved by him hitting it harder.
They never need to establish that a problem of the week is too strong for him to hit,
because most of the problems can’t be hit at all.
Instead in most episodes the bad guy has a couple bodyguards or hired goons or something
so Eliot can get in a token fight scene, and he spends most of the rest of the episode
either grifting, breaking into places, or squabbling with the hacker like they’ve
been married for fifteen years.
Now obviously there are a few more serious episodes, like season finales, where they
have to establish that things are actually very high-stakes and dangerous - and, astoundingly,
these episodes don’t worf him either!
In the first season finale a heist goes very wrong and basically every member of the team
is individually ambushed by bad guys, including Eliot, who gets a couple ribs broken in the
first part of the fight, which is the most injured we've
ever seen him at this point.
We cut away to the rest of the team getting outmaneuvered and captured by the baddies,
and it keeps cutting back to Eliot - not going down.
In the end, the bad guys don’t even get him - he just
kicks the crap out of the dude and keeps moving.
That’s not to say he's indestructible or he never gets knocked
down - he does, sometimes very hard - he just
always eventually gets back up again and kicks the crap
out of whatever took him out.
Eliot is also kind of pulling a Superman thing, where he’s holding back for basically the
whole show.
His thing is that he doesn’t like guns.
He has a tendency to break them whenever other people use them, and he mostly takes people
out with his bare hands or improvised weaponry.
But that’s not because he can’t use guns.
I don’t wanna spoil, but it’s kind of a big deal if he ever does pick up a gun and
doesn't immediately break it, because
he’s already terrifying enough without them, and his vaguely-defined but clearly very dark
backstory involves killing an awful lot of people.
If the solution to the problem was just killing people, Eliot could do it, although he wouldn’t
like it - it just almost never is the solution.
He never gets worfed, because the story overall isn’t solvable just by being a strong, tough
badass powerhouse, so he gets to stay that way throughout the entire show..
I mean, if you want a masterclass on avoiding the worf effect, just - just watch that show
and see how THEY do it.
And really, just watch it anyway.
Give me someone to talk to about this show!
So the worf effect is an attempt to establish that a character who seems like they should
be able to quickly and single-handedly solve the current problem actually can’t so the
more complicated plot can happen instead, which means if the story doesn’t inadvertently
make it seem like one of the characters could fix everything, the worf effect isn’t necessary.
The story needs to be well-balanced enough to keep any one character from seeming overpowered
or story-breaking by not always playing to the same set of strengths.
Strength is relative and situational, and the powerhouse’s strength is… strength.
Very useful in the limited space of uncomplicated combat situations, and outside of that very
specific
narrative role, the powerhouse is free to have a lot of character.
Or not.
Many team powerhouses are almost nonentities outside of the combat stuff, with maybe
a couple token character quirks like a penchant for food or… no, actually, usually it’s
just food.
But plenty of powerhouses have a ton of personality, and there’s almost no restrictions on that
personality, because as long as they can fulfill their narrative role of punching at a higher
weight class than almost anyone else, they can be anyone.
Serious, silly, imposing, tiny, dark and troubled past or sunshine
personified.
The only guaranteed trait… is they will probably be my favorite character.
So yeah!
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