Whoops? … I have temporarily hidden the introduction story for Helene Fabry (the other main character in my Kethyras stories) because I realized — in the first pairing story — I had made a fatal flaw, as the author / creator. As the title indicates and suggests, it’s what I occasionally (internally) refer to as a “Superman Conundrum” or, when referring to a series of movies, the “Sequel Issue”.
This is to say, if you have a character who is supremely powerful / gifted / talented / whatever … where do you go next? In order to make an interesting story in the first place, they needed to overcome or defeat a threat or enemy or whatever that was approximately equally powered.
After all, if the two sides weren’t equally matched, as a reader you’d be presented nothing but an ongoing “curb-stomp” (where one party basically “walks through” any enemies as if they’re not there), and that, realistically, is boring as hell. Sure, it’s possible to liven up the action but there’s no suspense — no tension — and absolutely no concern that the “hero” (however that’s defined) will fail or lose.
And then, once you’ve done that the first time, what next?
And this is where the “Sequel Issue” comes out to play. “That was really great! I loved it! So – what’s the next story?”
Following the path of needing to have increasingly powerful threats and the hero increasingly powering-up to overcome them, eventually you reach reality-altering issues and, often, some sort of subsequent “reboot” to reset the story environment to something more controllable.
Sadly, that’s largely what I came to realize about Helene. I had, indeed, made her too competent and too strong. Yeah, I could do another story or two with her, but after that, it would be far too obvious she was simply … well … boring.
So, it’s not back to the drawing board. I still like where I was headed with it. I just need to spend a little bit adding some more rough edges and the like to give her those all-too-necessary weaknesses and flaws.
