Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

Actual ramblings this week. You’ve been warned.

You know the “magician” episode of any show that claims it deals with science vs. superstition? The one where the main characters for whatever reason encounter a professional magician? And somehow, the character who’s always right (can be either Reason or Faith, depending on the show), turns out to be able to perform at least one skillful magic trick and/or figure out how all the other ones are done?

I’d really love to see a “magician” episode where all the characters try to do card tricks and really suck at it.

Why? Not because I love Schadenfreude. (OK, not just because I love Schadenfreude.) But mostly because I’m thinking about competent characters. Not characters who are competent in their particular specialty, like Will Stanton or Dr. Crusher or Nite Owl. I mean characters like Batman and Sherlock Holmes – where the rules of the story say that whatever they do, they must be the best at it. Are there sheer cliffs to be climbed? Boxing or fencing matches to be won? Obscure literature and/or philosophy to be quoted? Witty remarks to be made? Foreign languages to be known? You can guarantee Holmes will either be an expert already or pick it up so quickly that you’ll miss it if you blink.

Competent Characters ™ like Holmes are most fun against villains you love to hate. If you can put yourself in Holmes’s shoes, it’s vicariously thrilling to know that no matter how big and bad the big, bad wolf is, and no matter whether the final challenge comes in the form of a winning a ping-pong tournament or proving the Goldbach conjecture, your guy’s gonna come out on top.

Likewise, it’s fun to watch Holmes best the people who represent all those morons you know you’re smarter than in real life. Everyone likes to think they could handle a murder investigation better than the police who keep screwing it up. “That would totally be me!” we get to think as we watch or read about Holmes decimating Lestrade and Gregson’s latest theory with a witty comment.

But Competent Characters can get annoying, too. There’s only so much you can take of someone who’s better than you in every way, shape, and form before you start to feel bad about yourself. Which is why incorporating a really Competent Character into a story can be a tricky piece of business. Fortunately, there are plenty of strategies to go about it:

1. Any Friend of Yours is a Friend of Mine
An easy way to make them likable is to let the reader or viewer see through the viewpoint of a normally competent person who admires and likes them. You can’t choose whether to see yourself as better than Holmes – after all, the fictional world he lives in is literally constructed to make him always the best – but you can feel awesome about yourself for being as patient and good-humoured as Watson, or for pegging the murderer or thief before the good doctor does. Also, Watson’s allowed to feel annoyed at Holmes for you, so you can defuse your own feelings through his.

2. An Unshielded Thermal Exhaust Port
Another way to un-jealous-ify the audience is to show that the Competent Character is really, really bad at something almost everyone is good at. Often, this is “sustaining relationships”. (But not always – Holmes is actually supposed to be pretty good at knowing what to say to people to put them at ease or make them feel comfortable or confident. In one story, he talks a woman into marrying him over the course of a few days. It’s not that he’s bad at forming friendships, it’s just that he doesn’t actually care enough… except the one or two times when he does. See: Watson, Victor Trevor) In any case, when the character’s supposed to be the rational one, their weakness is usually something to do with emotions or communication skills or both.

Can I interject here (well, since it’s my blog, yeah, I can) and say that one of the things I think I’d find  endearing in an otherwise Competent Character is him or her having a non-emotional hobby that he or she is really, really bad at but insists on doing and/or believes he or she is really good at. Like if Holmes loved to write poetry, but it was nausea-inducingly terrible, and every time he trotted it out, Watson and Mrs. Hudson had to find an excuse to leave the room. Or he knows it’s bad and keeps trying to improve it, but that just makes everyone avoid him more because he’s always asking them to critique his work. So, I guess like Basil of Baker Street, then. End of interjection.

Sometimes, this give-them-something-they’re-bad-at strategy leads to the variant on the Competent Character – the character who is pretty competent in her own field, but has such a swollen head that her efforts come across as funny. (Again, like Basil of Baker Street.) Actually, let’s take that out of parentheses. Basil of Baker Street takes the annoying out of Sherlock Holmes because everyone knows Basil’s annoying, even him. When he hurts the feelings of Olivia and Dawson, he eventually realizes what he’s done and tries to apologize. And he’s so adorably delighted when someone else praises the skills he acts like he takes for granted that you can’t help but feel for him.

3. People… Who Need People…
Which brings us to another strategy – show us that Captain Competent is emotionally dependent on other people. Let’s face it: Moriarty’s a total dunce for not realizing that the best way to get at Holmes is to threaten Watson or Mrs. Hudson or the Irregulars*. The moments that make us really love Holmes as a person and not just follow his exploits in an amused fashion are the ones like his touched reaction to Lestrade’s compliment at the end of “The Six Napoleons”, or the way he freaks out and threatens Watson’s would-be killer in “The Three Garridebs”. Holmes is most human when we can believe that he really would be lost without his Boswell.

4. It Never Rains…
The above two strategies lead to another popular one that Basil of Baker Street also exemplifies: have the Competent Character’s few screw-ups be very, very important ones. Or, in other words: have really bad things happen to her. All the time.

Obviously, this strategy is related to the fact that stories = bad things happening to a protagonist. Unless the victim has done something really, really wrong, most of the time we sympathize with someone who’s being hurt. No matter how unsure we are that Holmes is right to fake his own death for three years, we’re on his side when Colonel Moran attacks him.

Tied in with the whole Competence thing is the idea that being Competent is really, really important to characters like Holmes – practically their entire self-image. So if and when they do blow it, the bigger the mistake, the more they suffer as a person… and the greater the reader/audience sympathy for them. (And obviously, the worst possible mistake they can make is one that delivers the person they care about most (see above) to the bad guys.)

Of course, that’s not to say that Competent Characters always go this route. The one time Holmes screws up is with the whole “Norbury” thing – “you were wrong, but the truth came out in the end, so the only damage is to your ego”. Contrariwise, when Basil screws up, he falls for Ratigan’s secret plan, loses the little girl Olivia to the malicious villains, leads both Dawson and himself into a death-trap, and cuts short any hope that Ratigan’s vile (if ridiculous) plan against the Queen and mouse-England itself will be stopped in time to prevent a coup.

5. “He Has No Enemies, But Is Intensely Disliked By His Friends”
Making bad things happen to a Competent Character is relatively easy, since that’s the way stories work. The most difficult strategy, IMO, is to make the Competent Character a very amusing person. The reason this is difficult is because some of the things that make a character amusing – wit, humour, cutting idiots down to size – are the same things that can number among a Competent Character’s annoying virtues.

Most viewers and readers are willing to hang out with people they don’t adore if said people are entertaining, both in fiction and in real life. Lots of people aren’t too keen on Richard Dawkins’s ideas, but his way of presenting them is so engrossing that we devour his books and interviews anyways. Similarly, you may not want to get invited to a dinner party with Holmes, but his comments and actions are so entertaining that you don’t mind reading a story or two about him.

In conclusion, there’s no real way to guarantee a character who’s the best at everything isn’t going to be annoying. You might end up with Sherlock Holmes, or you might end up with Gary Stu. But, hey, if you end up with Gary Stu, he can still be the best damn Gary Stu there is!

Not the best damn Gary Stu there is.

* No, but seriously, this whole “not going to threaten the average-ly competent person the hero would clearly do anything to save” is apparently a villain pandemic. Say what you want about The X Files and The Dark Knight – at least they get this part right. For goodness’ sakes, Voldemort, just kidnap the %^&* Weasleys already!