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The original was posted on /r/characterrant by /u/Aros001 on 2023-10-05 15:18:01.

Now, this isn’t to say that you can’t find a character who is very powerful boring. Everyone has their own tastes and not every character or story grabs people the same way.

But I do way too often feel like I see people just instantly dismiss some characters as boring because of their abilities, either already deciding before giving it a chance or going in with their minds already made up that their powers HAVE to rob the story of any tension or weight. That the character is too powerful for their story and they themselves not to be boring. And most of the time it really feels like the only reason they feel that way is because they are viewing that character and those powers outside of the context of their stories. They’ll look at it only from their own personal world POV or judge it in the context of a different world’s context, neither of which are fair.

The two big examples that come to mind for me on this (though there are honestly tons I could name) are Superman from DC Comics and Subaru from Re:Zero.

Superman is the one where the complaints against him are the most well-known. “He’s too powerful and has too many powers for their to be any challenge for him! He’s boring!”

…Except the character has existed for over 80+ years in the comics at this point. He hasn’t just been saving cats out of trees and getting murdered by Doomday every issue for the past eight decades. Comic writers and writers for his shows and movies HAD to come up with things that can actually challenge him or be good stories for him to take part in. He’s not Mickey Mouse. His company actually has actively done stuff with him.

Other Krytonians, collectors of planets, alien warlords, living electricity, Krytonite powered Terminators, mystical banshees, reality-wrapping 5th dimensional imps, clones, parallel universe duplicates, threats from the 30th century, sentient suns, parasitic monsters, high-tech arms dealers, telepathic wankers with Union Jack tattoos, intergalactic bounty hunters, fire women, atomic skeleton men, and the smartest man in the universe, just to name a few of the things Superman has had to deal with over the years that can consistently challenge even someone of his level of power. I didn’t even list Doomsday, Darkseid, or half the sh*t he has to deal with when he’s on the Justice League. I’m pretty sure they had to fight the literal armies of Heaven once!

And then there’s all the stuff he has to deal with that don’t involve fighting or that can’t be solved just by hitting things really hard. Dealing with the complexities of the world. Struggling between how much good he should do with his powers, since he’s not a god and shouldn’t just force his will on others, vs. how much good he even can do, since even his great power isn’t limitless and there’ll always potentially be someone just out of his reach who needed him (“All this power…and I couldn’t save them.”). Trying to find truth and fight corruption as a journalist. Trying to be a good husband and father. And all the stuff that comes with having Batman as a best friend.

Like, if someone doesn’t really find Superman that interesting because they feel he’s just not their thing? Totally understandable. But to just outright dismiss him as boring despite ALLLLLLLL those stories that’ve been done with him feels completely unfair, and half the time it’s because it is, because usually they’re not judging Superman in the context of his own stories but that of others. Yeah, Superman is overpowered when compared to Batman villains…and that’s why he typically doesn’t fight Batman villains! Batman does! Superman fights threats that can challenge him and that have emotional or thematic relevance to HIM!

Don’t get me wrong. 80+ years of stories from a variety of writers. Not every Superman story is as good as every other. Some most certainly have dropped the ball. But it’s not the majority. Surprise, surprise! Most Superman stories take into account that they’re writing for Superman!

Then there’s Subaru, who you’d think wouldn’t get the same criticism because a big thing about him is that he’s so much weaker than the other characters in his story, but no, I’ve seen people claim he’s overpowered too because of his Return By Death ability, which is essentially every time he dies he gets brought back to life at an earlier fixed point in his timeline. The logic is that RBD removes all tension from the story because “Well, we know Subaru won’t stay dead and he can just keep trying until he overcomes the problem. That’s so boring!”

So, where do I even begin with this one?

1. Death is not the only way to create drama and investment in a story. If the only way an author can get people to pay attention is by threatening to kill off a character, that’s typically a sign they aren’t doing a very good job.
2. How often do you watch a detective story and not except them to solve the mystery? Or a superhero story and for them to not defeat the bad guy? A romcom where the couple doesn’t get together? You’re not just investing yourself in these stories for the ending, you want to see how they get there too. Yeah, Subaru will keep coming back to life and eventually figure a way out of the situation he’s in but what about the journey to that point? What is he figuring out? What’s it doing to him? How does he do it in the end?
3. Again, CONTEXT. Dying in Re:Zero is presented as horrifically painful and traumatizing for Subaru, not only through experiencing his own terrible deaths over and over but also often having to watch everyone he loves and cares about get slaughtered too before he restarts, with him usually being powerless to do anything to save them. Just because the timeline restarts doesn’t mean that Subaru no longer went through those things. He still remembers! He still went through it! RBD isn’t an ability that removes tension from the story, if anything it adds more tension and drama to it, since death can never just be the end for Subaru. He’ll keep getting brought back and forced to experience these terrible things until he can eventually SOMEHOW overcome them.

I could name more than just these two characters who get unfairly sh*t on for being “OP and boring” and part of the reason it bothers me is because the refusal to look at context feels really selective.

Like, let me use an OP character that I know the majority of people love as an example: Saitama, from One Punch Man.

Now, you might be saying “Well, Saitama doesn’t count. He’s deliberately written to be a completely OP character. His entire series is supposed to be a satire of those kinds of tropes.”

YES! EXACTLY! The CONTEXT of Saitama’s story is what makes an OP character like him work! He would be an overpowered and boring character in the context of something like Dragon Ball…and that’s why his story isn’t Dragon Ball! Same with Ainz from Overlord, All Might from My Hero Academia, maybe even Light Yagami from Death Note, and so on. They’re all incredibly powerful characters, often to the point of being deliberately OP, but they work and aren’t boring because their stories are written in such ways where they are still given challenges and interesting premises that work for them. The CONTEXT of their stories takes into account how powerful they are and works with it to create something interesting.