We talk a lot about character competence, and one of our listeners had to remind us that we’d never really explained what that means. So this week, we explain ourselves. We talk about what competence means, why it’s important, and how competent various characters should be. Since we’re obviously competent ourselves, this should be great, right? RIGHT?
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Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission.
Show Notes:
As I was listening to the discussion of situations where the villain seems incompetent because the hero and villain clash and the villain keeps losing it reminded me of times that has been done well. In those situations the villain maintains their threat level and competence if the villain inflicts a heavy cost onto the heroes.
One example of this happens in situations where the hero was losing to the villain before a person or thing helped out. It was that person or thing that tipped the balance and allowed the heroes to win, but they lost that person or thing in the process of scraping out a victory (stolen/captured, too damaged/injured to help again within the time frame of the story, etc).
When you were talking about the animal companions, it reminded me of the how to train your dragon books. If you haven’t read those, i would highly recommend them, they’re even better than the movie.
Really glad that I suggested this topic as this was a particularly good episode. Thanks!