Dr. McNinja is a doctor that is also a ninja. More importantly, he’s the protagonist of an absolutely hilarious webcomic. This is what Real Ultimate Power would be if Robert Hamburger were a real comedian.
If you’re new to DMN, I recommend starting with series 2. For example, on page 21 a conniving pirate attempts to convince the Doctor that he can win his family’s respect by proving his medical skills are not worthless to a ninja.
Let’s say you’re writing a book about a candidate trying to join the Navy SEALs. Unless there’s something holding him there, he can always walk away if it gets too hard. That’s a lousy plot. There’s no consequence for failure! If failure is an acceptable option, we probably won’t care whether the character succeeds. You can make this story more dramatic by adding personal urgency. For example, perhaps the SEAL candidate had a brother or father that died as a SEAL and he sees it as his life’s mission to finish the job.
Here are some other suggestions to keep your characters in the story.
There is nothing to return to. The Empire killed Luke’s family. (Careful, this is a bit cliche).
Too much is at stake to walk away. In The Day After Tomorrow, the protagonist doesn’t have to trek from Philadelphia to Manhattan, but it’s the only way to save his son. Alternately, the characters in LOTR have no choice but to fight their genocidal enemies.
The character physically cannot walk away. If your character is in prison, he can’t avoid the local thugs. His only choices are submission and resistance. Alternately, she may be trapped on a spaceship with a killer alien.
Inquiring minds will want to check out Marvel’s Secret Invasion.
I’ve never been a fan of the Skrulls, Marvel’s standard shape-shifting alien villains. Sort of like an Atlantean invasion, aliens feel so far removed from the standard Marvel setting that the effect is campy rather than sinister. It’s also extremely hard to write an interesting alien invasion plot. Marvel seems to be treating this plotline like it’s novel, but the concept of a secret alien invasion is pretty tired (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the second Wild Cards novel, Animorphs). “Benevolent” alien invasions aren’t much better (The Day The Earth Stood Still and maybe The Happening).
I found the ads for Secret Invasion above-average, but more because the slogan “Embrace Change” is vaguely threatening and sounds like it came from a US political campaign.
Given a choice, try to find cause and effect. One event happens because of something else we’ve seen — ideally, something the hero himself has done.
Instead of having the hero accidentally overhear a key conversation, get him actively trying to listen. Or have an interested third party steer him in that direction — perhaps for his own reasons. At every juncture where a reader could ask “Why did that happen?”, try to have an answer that isn’t, “just because.”
CADET DAVIS ADDS: The most contrived plot I can think of is Heroes season 2. Please consider the following…
In the last two minutes of the first season, Sylar is nearly killed by a crowd of ten heroes but somehow slinks away into a sewer. No one, including a psychopathic MPD victim or the police officer who was seriously wounded by Sylar, thinks to make sure that he’s dead or otherwise accounted for.
The Company captures Sylar and keeps the formerly-superpowered serial killer in a zero-security facility with a single attendant that is tasked with restoring Sylar’s powers. There’s no reason to suspect that Sylar would have made a good employee under any circumstances, but how were they hoping that this would turn out?
Sylar kills the attendant and walks out of the facility. He tries to return to the US to find Suresh, but he drops of famine along the side of the road. The first person to come across him is Maya, another superpowered person that’s looking for Dr. Suresh’s father. What a lucky break! Sure, why not come along?
In spite of being wanted for murder and presumably not wanting to attract suspicion, Maya and her brother take Sylar along. Do not pay attention to the gringo in the back seat!
Peter’s failure to consider the possibility that Adam is evil starts out as implausible and gets so unbelievable that it strains the suspension of disbelief. Peter knows the following facts: The Company has held the virus for 30+ years without using it. Shortly after Adam escapes, the virus is unleashed. If you’re wondering whether Adam’s escape is related to the release of the virus, you’re already 5 episodes smarter than Peter.
One of the easiest ways to create comedy is to use a double act. You set up a comedic conflict between two characters– usually, one character is sober and the other is crazy or one is savvy and the other is clueless. This is a very flexible setup that can handle most genres. For example…
“It’s the most heart-warming phone ad of the year!” I’m not sure that heart-warming is the best fit for NFL Live. I think that the average American man likes his humor a bit more robust and, umm, funny.
UPDATE: We’re in the second quarter now and the ad has played three five times.
SECOND UPDATE: The ad ended up playing nine times, by my count.
Many villains do gratuitously bad stuff to remind us that they’re EVIL. For example, the nerdy antagonist in Live Free or Die Hard coldly executes his hackers even though there’s surely enough money to go around (ahem… hundreds of billions of dollars). Not only was it unnecessary for him to kill the hackers, but it was also out of character (he didn’t seem otherwise psychopathic). There’s no reason he should have been that evil– it didn’t gel with his main objective, which was to show his old agency that it was wrong to cast him aside.
Authors usually write their villains as gratuitously evil to make them badass. That rarely works. Except for Dark Knight’s Joker*, superevil villains are rarely as badass as their more restrained peers (such as Darth Vader, Dr. Octopus, Naomi Novik’s Napoleon and Dr. Doom). Why are superevil villains insufficently badass? A villain that feels more evil than his plot requires is probably cartoonish. In contrast, a badass villain is almost always serious and sober.
*In case you’re interested, I argue below the jump that the DK Joker isn’t unnecessarily evil.
The site is http://www.annecordwainer.com/ . Anne is a friend of mine and I would really appreciate if you would check out her site, particularly if you’re a fan of real-world magic stories. Does the site work? It feels like there’s something not quite clicking, but I’m not sure what.
–Wonder Woman 1984 is not nearly as good at the original. Pluses: the cast is still very charming, and a few of the fight scenes are effective. I did actually like most of the first hour of the movie. –Setting: In the original Wonder Woman, the WWI setting contributes to a hard bleakness which effectively […]
In Griftlands, Rook finds a rebel map with FRPERG ONFR written on it and chuckles. The writing doesn’t explain this, but it’s a crude cypher for SECRET BASE. Solution: rotate each letter 13 digits. E.g. the secret message starts with F, the 6th letter of the alphabet, and adding 13 turns it into S (the […]
1. I don’t know where to start with Captain Marvel. So many things went so wildly wrong that we’d need a presidential commission to get to the bottom of it. It’s like the Chernobyl of superhero movies. 2. If at any point you feel like your action movie would benefit from a character whose main […]
1. This version of Spider-Man is a useless toolbox who actively avoids doing interesting things, and what he does attempt is usually wimpy and/or incompetent. 2. Unlike most main characters, his choices don’t matter much. For example, he chooses to leave his supersuit at home (but his aunt sneaks it in anyway) and he tries […]
We’re up to 72 superhero movies since 2000 (current as of November 2017). You can download the full data here. Some observations: R movies are making up the quality gap with PG-13 movies. Superhero movies are improving. Over the last 5 years (2013-2017), the average superhero movie is averaging 70% on Rotten Tomatoes, up […]
Hey DeadPool, You are a funny guy. How did you become a super hero? What do you do when you’re not doing anything? Do you like being a superhero? Why do you wear a mask? Why do you wear red and white? Are you Canadian? Getting superpowers is sort of a long story. Some people […]
I feel like a marketing executive put a gun to the screenwriter’s head and said “I don’t CARE what the movie is about, put New York City, London, and Hong Kong in it. Just do that thing where the villain is trying to collect plot coupons around the world in places that happen to be […]
