1-3 Thoughts
This is a blog post talking about 1-3, if you haven’t read it yet, do so here. If you want to give criticisms for this section of the story, you will be able to post in the comments here!
Hoo boy. The first fight of this arc! Pretty exciting stuff, huh? I’m normally more methodical when it comes to conceptualizing this story, but when I get into the fight scenes, I usually think of one or two cool interactions that each new ability shown off in the battle, and then I write by the seat of my pants. It’s pretty fun, if you have the inspiration for it.
Although one of the hardest things to write in a fight scene is how the environment affects the battle. Although it’s something that you have to do, since otherwise it feels like your fight will quickly become boring without constant new elements added in. Sure, some battle series just constantly add in new factors through the characters, but that can feel really cheap if it’s done too much, especially if it’s without explanation. But as long as your power system is on a relatively low power level, you can easily add new environments as elements into the fight, which will quickly make your fight more interesting. Although if the power levels of your characters are too high, then it becomes a lot harder. After all, if someone can punch the peak off of a mountain, and survive a yacht falling onto them then what does it matter that their next fight is on a speeding train? It’s not impossible, but the lower the power ceiling, the more the impact the environment has on the fight. Granted, it’s not impossible to threaten powerful characters like that, if you usually have to almost invent the environment yourself. “Why aren’t these two super powerful not smashing through these train cars? They’ve punched the peaks off mountains before!” Then you’d have to invest some reason like how the train cars are 100x as dense, and that the train is going at hyper sonic speeds, so even such durable people will surely be killed if they fell off! So basically when the power level of your characters are high enough you have to constantly stop the fight (or explain beforehand) why these things actually matter. In many ways, this is actually worse than just adding in new abilities attached to the character, especially if their edition feels justified.
Man, I went off on a huge tangent, huh? My point is that since environments are so important to the types of fights I’m writing, that I made the main ability of the protagonist be one in which it’s interaction with the environment is key to utilizing it correctly.
When it comes to the actual chapter I think it shows off pretty clearly at what points I want to split a chapter into parts. At the end of each chapter part something intense happens that makes you want to read more. At least… that’s what I was going for. Again, I hope you liked it, I had a lot of fun writing it, and I hope you thought it was a good introductory fight!
