I am writing a rather serious piece. While I don't know exactly how it's going to go point for point, I have the main idea in mind. It will be a story that for some measure parallels Norse Mythology (Actual Norse Mythology, so if you're thinking anything from the Thor movies forget it). For those that don't know a lot about Norse Mythology, here are where the stories are the same. There is a great big powerful god who is in charge of all other "gods" (Odin who is paralleled in my book by the character Azure.) Given the ability to see the future, Odin sees that in the end of the world (Ragnarok in Norse Mythology) he will be killed and essentially eaten by a giant wolf (Fenrir, also paralleled but don't have a name yet for this character) The gods get together, and go to the dwarves, master craftsmen, who forge an unbreakable rope that is thin as wire. They tie the wolf up with it and leave him there, like till Ragnarok where he breaks out and kills Odin. These are essentially the points I am paralleling here, except change the rope with what I can only describe as a Pandora's box or portable prison. It's like a world within a box, so even though the box isn't that big, you can still store things that are giant, like the wolf, inside even though it's small enough to just pick up. Anyways, the wolf in my story is locked away and stays trapped within for thousands of years till the plot of the story picks up. Azure, king of the gods, is having trouble with his young son Joshua. Joshua is a free spirit, doesn't take to rules or responsibility, spends no time studying or working hard at anything, and would rather lay around and watch the sunset than anything else. His father being uptight serious and literally king of the gods, he of course doesn't see eye to eye with his hippy son. A big event is coming up, and when all the gods are attending, a hooded figure magically comes into the room holding the Pandora's box and opens it. This releases the wolf and everything else Azure has ever locked away inside of it. Azure uses his powers to send Joshua far away from the castle, where the wolf and Azure begin their long awaited battle and as prophecies in ancient myths must always come true, Azure loses the battle and his life to the wolf. This is where the story really picks up though, with a slow start to allow for scenes of character building for Joshua and company and minor world building. With his father now dead, Joshua is heart broken. His home is in ruins now thanks to the climactic final battle, and his father is dead. The wolf basically swallowed him whole. Now, to address my problem, let me lay out the character of the wolf. He has a healing factor that I regret giving him, he is normally a gigantic skyscraper tall wolf, but can change shape to an almost demi human form, is extremely strong, and he loves violence chaos war and fighting of any kind. In his own words, "all that matters in this world is power, and I will seek it out where ever I can find it." He views those who are weak as being worthless, and he has no use for anyone who cannot entertain him in combat. Because of the healing factor, which I don't want to take away but have started to seriously consider it, the wolf can heal from any damage. If anything, I would replace the healing factor with extreme durability, but I can't eliminate it entirely as he doesn't have much else going for him other than physical strength on levels of Asura's Wrath. Anyways, the healing factor makes him like wolverine from X men, or well, dead pool. If comics aren't a good reference, then he's like Alucard from Hellsing, or since I'm going to go to this soon, Cell or Majin Buu from Dragon Ball Z. Now, characters with immortal level healing powers tend to be few and far between, and I have been researching stories with an immortal antagonist to try and figure out what to do. Here are some examples and why they don't precisely work in my story. Dragon Ball Z. In Dragon Ball Z, the protagonist Goku fights 2 main villains with the ability to self regenerate. Cell in Saga 3, and Majin Buu in saga 4. Their answer was to destroy every last cell of the villain. If there's absolutely nothing left of them, there's nothing left to start healing. Fun fact, this happened to dead pool once, he still came back. Anyways, this answer is simple, effective, and I hate it. If you were to ask me, how's the story in Dragon Ball Z, I'd say it's alright, but the show is written from an entertainment standpoint first and not a narrative one. I would never personally call it a serious piece. The writers often end up in corners they have to work their way out of because they don't plan ahead enough. That's why they had to come up with the answer, every last cell of the villain being destroyed means they're gone, and while that worked, the world of Dragon Ball Z and the world I am crafting are two completely different worlds. Dragon Ball Z has Goku fire a kame-hame-ha, his signature laser blast, as a child. The world is much more cartoonish than the one I am crafting, and while I'm not striving for absolute realism, this answer leaves me with plot holes. If that was all it took to destroy the villain of my story, why didn't Azure, king of the gods, just do that, or one of the other gods who are also insanely powerful. Azure controls lightning, it could work just like a laser blast and fry every cell the wolf had and incinerate everything. If the wolf could die from something that simple, then it would be too easy. When Cell comes into the story there aren't characters equally as strong as him or superior in strength to him yet, technically. When Majin Buu appears, he had been sealed away for a long time and when he was finally released he was still more powerful than everyone else. They had to grow stronger than him and finally defeat him, but don't get me started on the problems of Power Scaling in Dragon Ball Z. Another series with an immortal antagonist (spoilers) is the TV show Heroes. Now, trying not to spoil much, season 2 of the TV show Heroes introduces an immortal antagonist. He has been alive for 500 years or something like that, and he plans to basically kill all humans. To save a lot of trouble here I'll skip to the conclusion, and their answer is, to lock him up in a jail cell, then in a coffin that's already buried when the jail cell proves to not be enough. Now, this villain only has a healing factor, not powers, and that answer was already in my story, and it worked, till about the time the story begins when he escapes with some help and the magical McGuffin box is destroyed. I can't go this route, and it wouldn't complete the narrative of the story. The protagonist, Joshua, goes on a hunt for revenge, planning to murder his father's killer, and as such sealing him away would feel hollow and unsatisfying to the overarching narrative. It's like when you get to the scene in the a movie with a dad and a dead kid where the dad is faced with his child's killer and he can either shoot the man dead or let the police take him, and in the movies they always let the police take him, but there's no police in this world and no prison that can hold Superman. And lastly, I'm sure you can probably think of an example, but: the protagonist must get his own Magical McGuffin that will solve all his problems. To me, if a character at the very end of the story is able to just find like a literal Excalibur that will solve his problems for him, or Kryptonite, or silver bullets or what have you, either an over powered in its own right weapon, one true weakness to the enemy, then it's not satisfying, at least not in this context. My story wouldn't have a proper ending with hand wavy deus ex machina like this. It wouldn't feel right. This is the story of a boy who has to grow up and become a man so that he may hunt down and murder the monster that killed his father. If a story like NCIS had an episode where McGee or Abby died, and Gibbs hunts down the killer and they get to the scene where Gibbs is about to shoot the guy, and his phone just suddenly rings and the person on the line goes "Ducky was able to revive Abby after she's been dead all case/episode" at the fifty minute mark, then it wouldn't be a satisfying conclusion to the story, it wouldn't be the end to an episode it would just be stupid and feel like they wasted everyone's time for no good reason. You'd watch that and think "was I supposed to take any of that seriously? Who wrote this?" Or say, Superman has gone power mad and destroyed every last drop of Kryptonite in the world and begins a global conquest and Batman and Superman fight it out at the end after a long two hours movies where everything's going to hell, but they get to the end of the fight batman suddenly breaks out a chunk of Kryptonite he's been hiding and kills Superman with it, then you'd be asking youself, "why didn't he use that sooner, or why was their a runtime to this movie to begin with" "why didn't they show that Batman was hiding Kryptonite?" "Where was Batman hiding it that Superman couldn't find it when he destroyed every other trace of it on earth?" Etc yada yada you get the point. A book I have recently read that had a similar dilemma in it would be "SteelHeart" by Brandon Sanderson, which has this same kind of struggle with a nigh impervious Superman style villain, but this book is much closer to super hero comic book story than mine, and the only examples for the kind of serious piece would be the movie Watchmen, and it's not something I recommend and though it has a god like character that a group of people antagonize against in it, it doesn't relate to the topic at hand solely due to setting because they have a technology answer and more to the point a science answer and my world is fantasy, and that would be a whole nother section on its own delving into that movie and its answer to a basically god level character threat. So, I know this is rather long, but I like to ramble on really and it's given me a lot of space to lay out the key points. It's a serious narrative that I don't want a deus ex machina or magical McGuffin to fix, with an antagonist that is too over powered. So, in the end should I nerf the villain by not giving him healing and give him durability or something similar instead, or do you have any ideas. How would you handle it if your hero was faced with a villain who was this overpowered, or would you take the the character back to the drawing board like I have started to consider doing over the course of this essay long post.
Just have the hero outsmart the villain - it's described as being a monster which is monstrously powerful, but that doesn't mean it's clever. Maybe the hero can trick it into going back inside the box, but the box is magically augmented to make it seem like a perfect facsimile of the real world, so the monster doesn't even realise it's been caught. Or maybe have the hero infect it with some kind of radiation sickness or cancer or something, so it has to spend a lot of energy trying to "outheal" the damage, weakening it so it can be fought.
It's essentially a mathematical problem. If you have an unbalanced equation, you have to make one side strong or the other side weaker. Or you have to accept that the equation can't really be balanced. So, to make one side stronger - you can give the hero a magical prop without having it just pop up at the end of the story. Maybe a big part of the story itself is the quest for the prop? To make another side weaker - if you gave the villain a super-power, you can take away the super-power. Easy. Or, the option that's actually most interesting to me, since it seems to take it further from the comic-book realm and into the serious piece of writing you're aspiring to - accept that the equation can't be balanced. The wolf can't be killed. Your hero has to learn to accept that. Maybe the only way for the wolf to be killed is for someone else to be sacrificed and the hero has known this all along and his rage has made him believe he can go through with it but then at the final moment his true hippy nature re-asserts itself and he can't go through with it. Or he has to accept that the world has to be in balance and he can't throw off that balance by killing the wolf. The hero ascends to the godhood, now, taking his father's place, and he does it knowing that the wolf is lying in wait and sooner or later it will come for him, because the wolf always comes, sooner or later.
I might be being overly simplistic with this, but just create something that removes the wolf's healing factor. On Joshua's coming-of-age adventure, he has been sent away to another world. Maybe, Azure, who is a firm-believer in fate is bound to it's intentions and designs. Maybe, he sent Joshua away somewhere where there is technology that Joshua can study and learn from which will help his final battle. Maybe, Joshua's lack of following the rules and the prophecies is exactly the thing that means he IS able to kill the wolf, and therefore his actions cannot be defined by destiny. Sure it's deus-ex, but perhaps a material can be found, and the dwarves can forge a weapon from it, which will stop any healing, and it means the fight will be to the death. OR, the wolf is so hell-bent on fighting Joshua (and confident in victory) that he is willing to fight him as a mortal (or whatever, you get the point).
Plot twist: The hooded figure is actually Joshua! He has a split personality and doesn't remember that he was the one who unleashed the wolf. Makes his father saving him even more poignant. Then just add @BayView 's idea that the wolf can never be killed, it just has to be accepted as inevitable, and you're good to go. Time for a bit of regime change!
Truly M. Night Shaymalan will review my book as the greatest tale ever told with that twist ending. *Heavy sarcasm*. Thanks though, I appreciate the imput
I considered that, as that has been the case with a few comics of Wolverine, the villain from Heroes, and something else I can't remember the name of off the top of my head, but I'd have to develop a reason it has healing to develop a way for it to be canceled. Though, in one case with wolverine it was in a dead pool story where he has a serum that he dosed wolverine with and made it so he couldn't heal while the drug in his system. I'd also considered something along those lines. The show "Sleepy Hollow," which I didn't make it too far in has a character in it with an ax. This ax is special being that it remains at a constant temperature hot enough to cauterize any wound it makes. So I'd considered writing the equivalent, and having the protagonist cutting off the wolf's head with it. The wound would cauterize instantly, like with the Hydra in Hercules, and thus can't regrow, but that's mainly just in my options list.
Ahh, math my favorite subject. I'm actually considering going down that third route. I had thought of something similar, though far be it more complicated than the way you lined it out, in which the hero has to accept the fact he may never have revenge for his father. I really wasn't sure how to end the story with that though. Right now I'm juggling a couple ideas on it, and am trying to figure out what piece works the best both in narrative and theme rather than what's cool or interesting.
