Balance
One of the things that always bothered me about anime’, is that it felt like the characters in it were leveling up, little by little getting stronger as the shows progress to fight an ultimate boss.
Much like a video game these characters gained experience each ‘episode’ .. sometimes at the start of the series they would be super powerful to begin with and the audience was to sit in disbelief as the onslaught of enemies confronted them and the lead would just mow them down – up until the point there was an antagonist that the character had to deal with some inner issue in order to compete with.
It seemed like the same scenario in all of them, over and over again.
So, I am sitting here world building and want to ‘break’ that mold; It’s not easy. I am trying a different approach by organizing the characters in the story by grades of power, yes .. over 9000! yeowch. Still a good reference, however what I am doing is making a limited amount of ‘universal’ power available.
As the character grows stronger – an equal amount of “power” needs to be available for the other side. The stronger the protagonist (and side) get’s, an equal amount of power is available on the opposite site so building that side up at the same time.
Again, this feels like leveling up. There’s no twist there, how to make it different? What if there wasn’t any normal power gain from leveling up? The character is as powerful it can get with the skills it has; they have to train and train to become better. Well that just slows things down a bit it doesn’t stop the leveling methodology.
Of course, in the end there should be some feelgood moment where the antagonist actually becomes friends with the protagonist, switching the balance of all of that ‘other side’ power onto the protagonist’s side, leaving an empty amount of energy needing to be filled and .. something fills it; which makes the team have to deal with this whole new thing.
.. I just described the universe of Dragonball…Z, GT and all of that. In the end Goku ended up leaving with the Dragon because he knew he had to in order to take his power out of the balance make up of the universe; else the universe would continually compensate with something as equal in power; whether little pieces here and there that fill the void or one spectacular entity.
Now to figure out how to break that mold..
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