Villain Power Scaling (It's over 9000!)

Quick! We wrote an insanely, unexpectedly successful one-off fantasy series! How do we top the villain?

1. A bigger, badder giant space laser

2. The villain’s secret jealous sister

3. The same power, but purple now

4. The True Mastermind you’ve never heard of

5. JK, they’re not actually dead!
   

When you choose to continue on a series and have already committed to possibly destroying the legacy of the characters who fought and died to save the world once by undoing it for money, you had better have a damn good story to tell. So if you decide your new threat is any of the above, you have quite the uphill battle ahead of you, my friend.

What is Power Scaling?

Power scaling is the nature of the ability of the heroes and the villains to grow more competent over the course of the story via new skills, new powers, or more training. Protagonist’s first fight (that they win, at least) will generally be against a baby, tier-one mook and not up against the main antagonist (*cough* Force Awakens *cough*)

As the story progresses, the mook that was so scary and so hard to beat oh so very long ago will become unnamed cannon fodder in the climax of the story. Generally speaking, this is a linear event and the hero and the villain are constantly one-upping each other until they come head to head in the unavoidable final fight.

Sometimes, things run askew. Maybe the hero’s super special power that saved them last time was a fluke, possible only in those specific circumstances, or one-time use.

Maybe they have amnesia, or the being that gave them that power revoked it, or using it cost them too much. Maybe they got seriously injured in the last fight using it and can no longer go near it if they want to not get hospitalized. Maybe the super power was another character that won the final fight for them last time, but died in the process.

It doesn’t have to be linear, but if you’re going to regress your character without creating a “why didn’t you do what you did last time” plot hole, you will need an ironclad excuse.

So, feast your eyes while I summon the Supernatural fandom back from the dead.

What not to do, as told by Supernatural

This show was originally written to last five seasons and five seasons only. No matter how die hard a fan you are or were, you cannot escape this fact, and neither could the writers.

• Season one villain: A demon and her demonic minions

• Season two villain: Psychic demon children and Papa Demon Yellow-Eyes

• Season three villain: OG Demon Lilith, and Dean’s ticking demon-deal clock

• Season four villain: OG Demon Lilith and preventing the rise of Satan

• Season five villain: Satan and some douchebag Angels

Then you have Ten. More. Seasons. trying to do better than Satan and the douchebag angels to… varying levels of success and stupidity.

The problem: Supernatural tried to be linear with their power scaling, focusing on ramping up the threat level to nonsensical ends while undermining the threat level of all who came before. The other problem: Sam, Dean, and Cas never stayed dead long enough for any of these threats to matter.

What I mean is this: In making the threat of the season so impossibly strong, by threatening the world over and over again no matter how many times they save it, by never committing to killing your three most important characters, by never letting the world go a little unsaved in the end, you’re left with a story that says it’s bigger, badder, bolder, but is really just a rinse and repeat that goes blander and blander each time.

Coming off Satan and the Douchebag Angels to… Cas and Crowley conspiring over the souls of Purgatory and the unseen war in Heaven because they didn’t have the budget for that, without any of the thematic weight of why it was angels and demons? Talk about a loss of momentum.

I rewatch a grand total of one episode of season six, “The French Mistake”. I have lost all context for the plot surrounding this episode and it’s virtually independent of the rest of the season because Sam and Dean get transported into the Real World as Jensen and Jared and poke fun at each other for 52 minutes. This episode is timeless.

The show wasn’t a complete disappointment for the remaining ten seasons or it wouldn’t have lasted that long. It had good beats, but they shot their load in Season Five. After five whole years of buildup to this main event it never recovered.

Alternatives to Linear Power Scaling

Anyone who has or even hasn’t seen Dragon Ball should know that series is famous for infinite power scaling. There’s always someone stronger, always some new secret powerup to unlock with the power of Screaming, always some new Super Sayan color that we promise is more powerful this time, for realsies.

That show is so dedicated to the bit that it’s gone full circle to being loved, not despite it, but because it’s so ridiculous. You did not write Dragon Ball. Do not do this.

Instead of the infamous clashing multicolored power beams, what other ways can you up the ante of this new threat after your heroes have conquered all they thought stood in their way?

Give a damn good reason why this villain, who is no different than the last schmuck, is unbeatable by the macguffin this time.

As stated above, there’s no need to make the villain More Powerful* if your heroes have lost the world-saving abilities that helped them last time.

Exploit the hero’s other weaknesses

More Powerful* is never as exciting as you think it is. Often times, especially in superhero sequels, the villain isn’t necessarily stronger, but the niche power that they do have finds the chink in the hero’s armor that they didn’t have to worry about last time.

Make the hero’s niche skillset completely irrelevant

This time, the threat might not be something they can punch or shoot or smack with a hammer. This time, it’s their reputation at stake, or the villain is un-punchable because they’re simply unreachable, causing havoc the hero is helpless to stop.

Make the issue not the villain at all, but the hero or their team

Maybe the villain is just a schmuck that would be beatable on any other day, but team infighting means that they make utter asses of themselves and the villain doesn’t have to lift a finger to win because they’ve taken themselves out.

This can get very dramatic like in Captain America: Civil War or the Teen Titans epside "Divide and Conquer". Or, to comedic effect in the Spongebob Episode "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy V" (the one with the International Justice League of Super Acquaintances).

Some would argue that the above options aren’t power scaling at all if it’s not linear, and that’s fair. You’re telling a story though—is your story going to be about the superpowers and how cool they are, or the people who wield them?

It’s not actually power scaling, it’s about stakes

Supernatural began to feel so stale because even though we were told the villain this time was bigger, badder, bolder, the stakes were always the same. OSP has talked about this, how threatening to end the world has a foregone conclusion of “never actually gonna happen” because what author is crazy enough to let the world get blown up and all their characters murdered?

Raising the stakes, too, is not linear. Last time it was the world, this time, it’s the life of the love interest, it’s someone’s sanity, it’s a ticking clock on a secret that’s about to go public.

That’s why the first five seasons of Supernatural were so engaging. Were Demons the problem every time? Yes. The Demons were causing the problem, but they were causing five different problems. It was finding and saving their missing dad, then it was uncovering the sinister plan of the psychic demon children, then it was trying to escape Dean’s deal, then it was trying to stop the rise of Satan, then it was trying to stop the apocalypse. It was not five seasons of demons trying to destroy the world.

The more personal the stakes, the more likely your audience will believe the hero could actually lose this time. That’s what will keep them engaged. Dean died at the end of season 3! They lost! There was no escaping that deal. Sure he came back in the pilot of season 4, but the entire 4th and 5th seasons are haunted by Dean’s PTSD and new pessimism about the world given what he’s seen and done in Hell.

Threatening the world without destroying a legacy

So. The Star Wars sequels. Rain down your wrath like snow on a hot desert—these movies were a giant mess. The audience sat through six entire movies following the rise, fall, and redemption of one man who died to save his son and the galaxy.

Then, what, twenty years later, absolutely none of it mattered? New space Nazis are out for blood with the same equipment, same weapons, same soldiers, same reach, same motives. Within the theatrical release (because I am not paying money to buy content to do homework to understand a movie made for a layman audience) these movies undermined the legacy of the six that came before it.

It didn’t have to be a new galaxy-ending regime and the same rebels still rebelling for the same reasons—how the heck did they let another empire rise so fast?—it could have started small, inconsequential, and then the actions of the new cast then undermined everything Anakin worked for.

I feel like Mr. Incredible wondering why the world can’t just stay saved for ten minutes. All of this is salvageable. End the world again if you want. There will always be bad actors out to do bad things, you can’t expect a utopia to last forever. But that bleak reality is for the real world, not fantasy. In fantasy, the sacrifice of beloved characters must matter. Otherwise, what’s the point of their story?

How do you do this?

• Make the utopia the old characters died for last up until the new inciting incident, and make sure it’s the new characters’ fault, not just due to the passage of time

• Make the villain threaten something other than their legacy

• Make that legacy the banner behind which the new cast rallies, determined to make sure it wasn’t in vain

Or, burn the world down this time

Some of the best middle beats of a story feature a “did we just lose” moment a la Infinity War. The villain has won, fan favorites are dead, their home is in ashes, and now they’re not only starting from the bottom, they’re doing it with righteous vengeance.

Then the loss of the original character’s legacy is the tragedy, instead of a side effect. Then, in a way, they’re still part of the story, a ghost on the sidelines cheering on their successors, and we, the audience, are right beside them.