Choose Your Fighter

My thoughts on writing in this particular essay stem from a video game: Dragon Ball FighterZ, DBFZ for short. I was a normal kid. I played the Street Fighter series, Smash Bros, some of the early Guilty Gear games. Mashing and footsies and rolling my face on the controller at parties. Nothing intense. I wasn’t out here doing twenty-hit combos. As you’d expect from a fantasy/sci-fi writer, my gaming interests tended toward RPGs. Years go by, travel and writing and life, and it’s been three generations since I owned a console. 

But somehow, I found my way back, just not as a player. In the interim, the number of people streaming video games on YouTube, Twitch, and other platforms exploded. Watching others play video games is—and my younger self would be furious to hear me say this—a most enjoyable experience nearly as rewarding as playing the games myself. 

I’ve poked around, checked out FPS and RTS competitions, but the one game that sucked me in was DBFZ. I suspect it was the combination of nostalgia for a childhood cartoon, over-the-top anime action, and good old-fashioned, highly addictive, bright colors and flashing lights. That interest has only expanded, flowing into other fighting games like Guilty Gear Strive, Tekken 8, Street Fighter 6, and a bunch of others, both old and new. Again, I’d like to stress that I don’t play these games. I watch other people play them. Usually while doing dishes. But the fighting game genre—notoriously light on (sensible, coherent) plots—has in curious ways begun to influence the way I think about writing.

One term that crosses across media is “character archetypes.” Fighting games, designed by different companies, often rely on similar patterns of characters that make them more accessible for players across time and platforms. The base class in many fighting games are the shotos, short for shotokan, a style of karate that informed the creation of Street Fighter characters Ryu and Ken. They’re straightforward to play, no gimmicks, and are a good choice for anyone new to the game or the genre. There are grapplers who are good with close-up throws, zoners who specialize in playing keep-away and dishing out damage at a distance, rushdowns who hammer their way into striking range and overwhelm the opponent. There are many more, and sometimes characters will combine multiple aspects of archetypes that work well in combination or work poorly enough that it creates an OP character that breaks the game. That’s the alchemy of the FG genre. 

There’s a familiar logic at work here, ideas that stem from other gaming genres like tabletop RPGs. There, we’ve got fighters along with rogues and rangers and sorcerers and wizards as I discussed in my previous essay. Another YouTube channel, Adam Millard’s The Architect of Games, went into a lot of detail about this in a video here. I highly recommend watching it but the short version is that classes/characters provide, “a slice of the game’s mechanics and thematic scope.” Classes and character types don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist to provide a means to learn about the world, how it functions, its rules, and its limits; they provide an inroad for the player to engage with the game, like a simple shoto in a fighting game. Additionally, character types often tell you something about the characters themselves. A barbarian in D&D might equate to a big-body character with armor in a fighting game. You can probably guess at common personality traits of a D&D rogue, paladin, or ranger. With a little more familiarity, the cast of a fighting game becomes equally familiar. 

This long lead-up on video games brings me to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. Brandon Sanderson has been in the fantasy writing biz for a long time. I first heard Sanderson’s name when he was tapped to finish the late Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time epic fantasy series. That was quite a feat. Oddly, though, I hadn’t read any of his work. While I’d planned to start with his Stormlight Archives, I instead found a used copy of Mistborn Book One: The Final Empire. So that’s where we’ll start. As always a synopsis. 

Mistborn follows two characters, escaped prisoner Kelsier and street urchin Vin, and their efforts to overthrow an oppressive and corrupt empire. Set in the world of Scadrial, where ash falls endlessly from the ruined skies, the Lord Ruler has reigned over the Final Empire for a millennium. He is an immortal tyrant, with acts of enslavement and genocide littering his brutal career. He is a monster and has surrounded himself with monstrous systems of control, like the Steel Inquisitors, magically-enhanced shock troops with thick spikes stabbed through their eyes that poke out of the back of their head. Their grotesque visages are matched only by their terrible powers.  

Both our noble heroes and vile villains are aided by a form of magic called allomancy. I’ve often heard that one of the best parts of Sanderson’s work is his magic systems, and in this regard, he does not disappoint. If I had anything approaching a criticism of his work, it would be that he burns a lot of words on lengthy descriptions and explanations of magic, as Kelsier teaches Vin the ins and outs of allomancy. I don’t have the book in front of me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a full fifth of the page count revolved around the detailed magics at play in the land of Scadrial with a thick index in the back. It’s all a bit much (for me) when you just want to get to the fantastical fights, but I can see why that level of detail would be alluring to many readers.

The story begins as a heist. Kelsier and his young sidekick pull together a crew intending to raid the empire’s treasury. But as fantasy plots are wont to do, they end up embroiled in a full-scale revolution. The heist is another genre format that lends itself to character archetypes. Each member of the crew has a class, so to speak. Take Ocean’s Eleven. There’s a leader, an explosives guy, an acrobat, disguise experts, drivers, everything else. I’m reminded of other films—The Italian Job, Inception, Ronin—where very particular people with very particular skills are brought together—like a D&D party—and carry out some complex plot that usually ends up with a reveal that they stole the McGuffin in the first act and everything else is a misdirection. 

Returning to Sanderson’s magic system, I’m sure a careful eye will have noted that allomancy is quite close to the word “alloy.” Allomancy users, allomancers, consume (literally) different kinds of metal: steel, iron, zinc, pewter, etc. They can use these elements as fuel to perform feats of magic. Additionally, the magic can be directed externally or internally, as well as for pushing actions or pulling ones. An example might be instructive. A soother is an allomancer that consumes brass and performs a kind of external push to moderate the emotions of others. Their opposite is a rioter, an allomancer that consumes zinc and pulls on or inflames the passions of individuals or a crowd. A mistborn, like Kelsier and Vin, can consume every kind of metal, i.e., utilize every kind of magic. And again, a lot of pages are devoted to Kelsier, or another allomancer, explaining to Vin how to access her powers. Sanderson’s complex system gets a lot of ink. Kelsier is the old hand and Vin is his young apprentice. It’s standard storytelling fare where a young protagonist is initiated into the magical world by an older, wiser mentor. It’s familiar and hits the normal beats. 

I’ll also briefly mention that there’s a second system of magic in the world of Mistborn called feruchemy. It’s not a significant part of book one, but I understand it becomes more critical in subsequent novels. There’s a lot to cover. If interested, you can find more info on the Mistborn wiki here. But this essay isn’t about Sanderson’s magical systems.

In a very immediate sense, character types provide a comforting sense of familiarity for the reader; they’re cozy sweaters on a cold day. We often know what they’re going to say before actually reading the words. They’re a video game character type that might as well be a tutorial for the whole game. Again, if a character in any kind of media is identified as a rogue, that’s shorthand for a disreputable, antiauthoritarian rake who gleefully breaks the law. Wizard: erudite old sage. Paladin: goody two-shoes knight. 

Exceptions exist of course. And writers often intentionally play with these expectations, as Sanderson does in Mistborn. There are many allomancers that Vin meets along her journey. Some, given their magical skill sets, you’d expect to be brawling, boisterous fighters. Instead, they’re calm and refined, preferring a spirited debate to fisticuffs, and would order a nice sherry before a tankard of ale. Knowing when to play to type, or against it, is certainly an essential skill if a writer wishes to employ well-known archetypes. 

But returning to Millard’s insight regarding video game character classes representing a slice of a game’s mechanics, it’s easy to apply a similar understanding to characters in fantasy novels. A world with magic is often run by magic. It’s likely that the most influential people in a magical world are the people with magic (a common exception being that the people with magic are the oppressed minority as in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season; but there the people with magic are enslaved and society functions only through their enslavement). In a world of magic, magic will always be the keystone, the lynchpin, the gravitational force around which the rest of society revolves. 

In Mistborn, the Lord Ruler is the land’s most powerful magic user. He’s reigned for a thousand years. His powers, broadly his mastery of allomancy, quite literally created the rules and laws that the rest of his subjects live by. That’s obvious. What is less clear is that magic doesn’t just determine the characters’ arcs (i.e., lives) within the novel. In the largest sense, systems of magic determine the rules that the writer themselves must abide by. 

I suspect that this statement sounds circular. The writer designs the magic system. They can make it work however they want . . . Except they can’t. One of the most important pieces of advice I’ve been given about writing is that a writer makes a promise to the reader, and then has to keep it. If the writer promises a bunch of things and doesn’t back them up by the finale, that produces an unfulfilling read. With regards to magic systems, if there is a magic system in place that has, up to a certain point, worked a particular way. And then the plot requires something completely bizarre to happen out of the blue, and it works that way once and only once, that ruins the very careful spell the fantasy writer has woven; suspension of disbelief can only be suspended so far. Break rules when you have to, but break them sparingly. And never go easy on the protagonists. If magic is random, particularly all of a sudden, it doesn’t keep the reader guessing like one might think. It will be frustrating, eye-roll inducing. We’re no longer stretching those familiar archetypes or well-trodden tropes. We’ve broken a promise.

It stops being jazz and starts being noise.

Returning to the heist. In a boilerplate, made-for-TV movie, we’ve got a getaway driver, we’ve got a hacker, we’ve got a safecracker, we’ve got a cat burglar. Those characters, and their specific traits, determine the shape of the heist. If the crew lacks a safecracker (i.e. the writer doesn’t write in a safecracker), then there isn’t likely to be a safe for anyone to crack in this particular heist. Safes might as well not exist in this heist world. But if they’re confronted with a safe, and all of a sudden the getaway driver has nimble fingers and a perfect ear, people are going to be mad. Nothing was earned. It’s just a convenient, shoddily inserted deux ex machina plopped in to keep the story moving along.

The rules to which a writer binds themselves are important. Not every magical system has to be perfectly consistent. I always think of Gandalf in LoTR. I have absolutely no idea what his powers were. Not a clue. He made his staff glow and chased away a nazgul. Okay? He’s immortal maybe? He can smoke barrels of that Shire leaf and still take on Saurman? Sure. All of it. But it is the rules (or the limitations as Sanderson himself puts it in his Laws of Magic) that are vital. Character archetypes give the reader/player something to latch onto, a place to start as they begin to explore the mechanics of the world and the systems of magic that rule it. 

My point is this: it is the characters that determine the story, not the other way around as we might expect. In an intentionally structured story, the challenges presented to the characters are never insurmountable because—if the writer has done their job—they have established that the characters themselves possess the capacity to achieve them, or the capacity to grow in order to achieve them. The cost may be great, the fight may be grueling, but if the author set things up right, that young farm hand turned knight can indeed slay the dragon. Just not right off the farm.

There are no challenges that are insurmountable because by virtue of being part of a story, they necessarily need to be surmounted. Even in a tragedy, where the hero is unable to overcome the antagonistic force, it is their tragic flaw—greed, hubris, arrogance—that allows for failure. Plots, in traditional media, are constructed with characters in mind; plots are tailor-made for the protagonist. Therefore, it is essential that the right character (archetype) be presented with the appropriate challenge at the right time. 

As a final example, I’m reminded of the original release of the video game Deux Ex: Human Revolution. In this game, the player is able to select from a number of skill trees that can make their character either a run-and-gun powerhouse, a super hacker, a sneaky rogue, or any number of various combinations. But at one point in the story, the character is locked in a room with a fellow cyborg that might as well be a living tank. No amount of hacking or sneaking can save the character/player. This Penny Arcade comic does a good job of concisely explaining the situation. 

This was poor design. My understanding is that separate teams developed the base gameplay and the boss fights. And there must not have been much communication between them. Regardless, the game was sold on this illusion of near-endless character choice and then failed to allow for those choices. This is clearly what happened because in the DLC and re-releases of the game, they added patches so that there was more than one way to defeat any particular boss. Good writing, good design, requires consistency. Or intelligently-applied inconsistency. And very often that comes down not to the plot or the setting or the magic systems, but to well-developed characters whose strengths, abilities, beliefs, and flaws match the situations in which they find themselves. 

Don’t force your malnourished hacker into a katana kumite deathmatch with a roided-out ninja. And then have them somehow win. Even if the plot requires it. The characters move the plot just as much as the plot moves the characters.