OP referring to overpowered. I find sometimes thinking about it. Some of my ideas do fit that term. Some work within context and just sound silly only when out of context. Some are OP even in context. So what is one of your OP characters or moments? Whether it is a moment, a character, a concept. Whether it is only OP out of context. OP in context(like a police officer going into a primal instinct state and going to a building and mounting an armed assault by themselves and not getting hurt after killing 50 people. Not really OP next to a god but OP inside his world) or OP even in the context of other universes(Can beat superman!) So, do you guys want to share? I thought it would be nice to share ideas just because... why not? I guess if I ask people to share I should open with one. I will mention a character that is probably OP in the context of even other universes. A nameless character that I often call "Mother" as he/she created something like angels. Which called him/her Mother as they felt it was the natural name for .... it? The character lived for millions of years and while they were originally born and were normal at one point. They forgot there original name and gender. The character is so strong, that a star exploding didn't hurt them. Her/his original planet eventually exploded and didn't kill him/her. (him/her is getting annoying. gonna start calling her Mother.) Mother not only survived the force of Mother's planet exploding but continued to survive for hundred of years drifting in space. Nothing seemed to be able to kill Mother, not the vacuum of space, not the cold of space or the lack of food or water. Even being sucked into a black hole was not enough. Mother eventually broke out destroying it in the process. Mother was eventually killed by her own force as (Mother is getting annoying now too. Going to go with it) it crushed its physical body. Before dying though it managed to change the laws of physics! Which to sum the idea briefly. It sort of grabbed the fabric of space/time and twisted it into a new form. In a sense creating a new universe! OP enough? I don't write about this character. Most of my world is designed in the universe they created with few characters even aware that Mother ever existed. I am just a deep thinker. And the idea of someone that might be physical strong enough to beat superman makes me smile. lol So what do you think of my OP? Want to share yours?
In the side project I'm writing with @T.Trian there are plenty of OP characters. They are deities, so that kind of makes sense though. And like in your story, they're in the background, doing their own thing. There are some monsters that are pretty damn indestructible from the human perspective, though, and they get a bit more page time than the deities. The fun thing about this manuscript is that we can go really overboard with stuff because magic! In our main WIP, the OP moments are more down-to-earth, but there are a few of them. The main character gets recognized for going above and beyond during one mission. Her commanding officer basically takes down a tank on his own at one point... Yeah, there are definitely some OP moments in that story too, although we try to keep it realistic nonetheless. But it's not like that shit happens right on the first page. They are crescendo moments, the pinnacles of action, the last chance to kick it up a notch and let loose. I do want every story I tell to have a dash of extraordinary in it, and while it doesn't always have to be a superman-alien with the supersonic wings of an android angel, fireworks coming out of his ass, it's still fun to sprinkle in stuff that you wouldn't come across in your ordinary life.
I don't want to be presumptious. Is T.Train your spouse? If so that sounds like the most amazing thing ever! To share a passion and love of creativity. Side note. Reminds me of a workshop entry I posted. Some of the critism was that I didn't include the OP moment on page one. My WIP being about a girl born with a lot more power than she actively asked for. It is a crappy situation since her foster parents have very strong anti-fighting views in a fighting world. Her power and natural desire are to be a fighter. Yet her desire to please them is stronger. Chapter 01 has a moment where someone attacks her. She is forced to defend herself and in the end taps into her true power. Doing so, I think counts as a OP moment. In the context of her true power, she barely scratches the surface, but it was still enough to destroy her attacker. He couldn't even follow her movements, let alone keep up with them. lol. Also yeah I agree. Fiction or any creative writing is about awsome moments. They don't have to be magic to be awesome but if you are using magic. I see no reason to pull punches. I personally love magic as a way to express emotional concepts. In the above case. Since the girl is struggling with the conflicting desire of who she is and who her foster parents want her to be. Her power is restricted by her desire to please them. Meaning there is a direct relationship between her power and her self acceptance. I may be a sap but a girl becoming stonger based on her accepting herself is a concept I like.
My story is a near future so I don't have anyone with weird powers but I do have one character who is a genius and can figure out the big picture in ways that the other main characters can't. She's really fun because on the surface she comes across as the most vapid character and the least connected to what's going on. The story is a political drama and takes place at a cable news network in Washington DC - and most of the characters are political news reporters. My OP character is actually the network's fashion and music blogger who doesn't care about politics and thinks it's boring. But she's obsessive about culture and music at the street level, which a lot of the politicos around her think is beneath them. She's also really obsessive about tracking music charts. She ends up being the one who figures out that a major counterculture event is about to happen based on pop music trends, and she's the one who eventually strings all of the crazy political events together. She's the only one who can figure out that the culture around her is broken, and that's what's driving the politics - while everyone else thinks her stuff is trivial and focuses on the high-political symptoms of the bigger problem. I'm planning to eventually bring this to a head in a big scene where she shows everybody how screwed they are by going on a huge rant - using absurd levels of music-download data to show everyone that the culture has shifted beneath them overnight. She's also fun to write because she's really good at figuring out social gatherings and can quickly become the center of attention at a party - but she has a lot of trouble maintaining personal relationships, and a really severe case of adult ADHD. So she can control the social games around her using her charisma, but she can't always control herself .
Yeah, we write together. Our brains are strangely connected, which allows us to write effortlessly together, literally (not as literally as our hands are on the same keyboard... Separate keyboards!). If the power is within her from the start, it wouldn't necessarily make sense to hold back for the sake of, say, plot development if she'd naturally use all her powers to fight right in the first scene. What I meant was that the characters I'm talking about don't push themselves to the absolute limits right from the beginning because their "trials" become only harder as the story progresses, the stakes rise higher, and their enemies multiply. At the beginning they can still get by as per SOP, do everything by the book, so to speak, but when the shit really hits the fan and they lose their team, it becomes this two against the world kind of situation where something akin to OP moments happen. Anyway, your story and character sounds really cool. I like the concept.
The critique was referring to how I opened slowly. Going through a full normal day for her. With little on action. Her being a college student and living what might be seen as a boring life until BAM Shit hits the fan right at the end of chapter 01. My thoughts being that I should show normal before shit hits the fan. The critique being that the action part should be page one. Also not exactly sure I understood the case you are talking about. What is SOP?
I think I know what you mean. T and I made the same mistake with our WIP and received lots of feedback advising to skip the day-to-day stuff and just get to her moving to space and starting her new job. Then we realized that's not really the event that kickstarts it all, so we took a step back and wrote an arrest-gone-wrong, which both justifies her getting the job and the subsequent chase for the person who was supposed to have been arrested. However, I think you can use the boring college life to set the scene for one paragraph or too and then contrast it with the conflict (which would, in turn, kick your story into motion). I just meant that they have their standard operations platform that they follow, but when things get really, really bad, they have to think outside the box, even break some rules and go against regulations to survive.
I don't think I have any. There's a bit of a far-fetched element in my first novel but it's not so far-fetched that it would fit an OP definition. I hope!
None of my stories really support having such a character (yet...who knows what might come in the future). Although, one of my main characters is a really good guitarist. Plays lots of really tricky parts very easily. Not sure how OP that is, but still.
Natural talent can count as OP. This is what I mean by OP in context. As Commandante Lemming mentioned a character that was just extra smart and observant. Sherlock Holmes would count for this thread. Because in his source material he was a cut above everyone else. That is what OP in context means. As opposed to OP out of context which would be maybe something like, well to some degree most magical genres. Magic is OP in the context of our world, but inside their own world it is common. So it is OP there. It is just normal, but because it is OP here. It can give the illusion of being OP when it isn't.
I probably have a lot more of them than I think, but I can think of one character from the top of my head: a being that I'll call "Eve". Whenever something major happens in my plot, she's somewhere in the background, carefully pulling strings. None of my characters have met her yet, but she's always there. She is the most powerful magic consumer in the whole story, where no one else can really use magic, unless she gives them some of her power. After which often the character overuses what's been given to them and burn themselves out. Eve is deliberately giving her powers to characters each time, weakening herself in the process, because she had been more or less "cursed" with... reincarnation-immortality, and she had lived long enough in each life to know that she's pretty tired of being reborn, prematurely murdered, and have the cycle repeat itself, over and over. She is hoping that, when her powers get too weak, she won't be able to be reborn again. It is pretty much all she has left is to gamble: grant people power, pray that they burn out their newly discovered powers soon enough, and her power weaken to where it can no longer sustain the cycle.
