In pro wrestling they used to have the practice of the challenger hyping up their opponents so, should they win, it looked like the challenger won despite the odds. And the challenged still looks like a bad ass even after they lost. I feel that kind of went away in the era of The Rock and Stone Cold and pretty much nobody got the praise, the audience preferring smack talk, but I'm not here to talk about something I stopped watching decades ago.
The concept came to mind last night as I was getting ready to start on Story Three for the comic. I realized that wasn't hyping up the character in it. In fact I was making them look like a bit of a boob. I was doing this in service of writing an explainer about space travel ร la Isaac Arthur, but in order to get there I had to do the character a disservice.
I'm rewriting the script today to make the character look like she actually knows what she's doing.
It's important to instill a sense of competence and confidence in a lead because it makes their future low point seem like an actual low. If the lead starts off getting punked all of the time then they have nowhere to fall down to and climb out of. They have already been established as an eternal loser. There's no redemption to be had because they have no better status quo to get back to.
To be clear: I'm not writing that sort of three act story. No Hero's Journey for you. Definitely not sorry.
But Superman needs to actually be super, you know?
