This video was sponsored by world anvil! 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! And thanks again to World Anvil for sponsoring
this video! As you may know, World Anvil is a browser-based
worldbuilding software designed for writers, gamers and other worldbuilders with the goal
of making it simple and easy to keep track of all the cool stuff they’ve been writing
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characters straight, and even a fully customizable calendar that lets you define your own holidays,
lunar cycles and more. Plus, thanks to the writer’s update, they’ve
also got a built-in word processor with a scrivener-like layout, so you can write your
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beats, so you can make sure you’re spacing out the Extra Dramatic Fight Scenes so you’re
not subjecting your team powerhouse to the worf effect by slapping them through a wall
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HOW TO WATCH LEVERAGE FOR FREE
Did you watch the trope talk on powerhouses?
Did you hear Red gush about a show called Leverage?
Interested?
Imbdtv.com
All you need to do is make an account. No you don't need a credit card, just an email address.
Yes there our commercials scattered throughout the episodes but there are not very intrusive and the brakes only last about 90 seconds.
Go watch it it's fantastic.
What if the powerhouses were the power of friendship we made all along?