The Fights of Fantasy

What makes a good fight?

—In a story, of course, since in real life the best fights are the ones that don’t happen. But what makes a fictional clash worth reading?

And we do find them worth reading, watching, playing. Of course they’re a staple of storytelling since they’ve been all too real a force in real history. But, in a story they take on an extra kind of appeal.

Since I’m writing books like Running the Gauntlet, that starts with punching a hole in a wall, the question has me thinking.

 

Fighting Right

My Kindle is crammed with fantasy and science fiction. I have long boxes of some of the best superhero comic books ever written, and my movie picks keep an eye out for a really interesting monster.

Let’s face it, stories of the fantastic can be… fantastic.

And that’s one of the first things I look for in a story: the sense of what powers, weapons, and forces its people are dealing with. Give me a dragon-rider, a mindreader, a set of silver arrows and knowing they’re the only defense when the werewolf lunges out of the trees.

Except… anyone can make the action more flashy. Certainly anyone can write the same old fight and just say each super-punch leaves a bigger crater.

No, a really fantastic clash makes us believe a man can fly.

Give me a sense of what it means to sit on that dragon, soaring over canyons and racing to cut off an enemy who’s winging toward our unprotected town. How a telepath tries to read his opponent’s punches, but struggles to focus that power while keeping his physical guard up and his emotions steeled against his opponent’s rage. Or the razor-edged challenge of gathering every werewolf-slaying weapon and scrap of knowledge we can find and trying to herd a much faster, stronger creature into the one spot in the forest where we can get a clean shot at it.

I mean Chris Claremont, the revolutionary comic book writer whose X-Men were (among many other things) the first superheroes to feel like they understood how their powers really worked. Or Brandon Sanderson, creator of Sanderson’s Laws of Magic—and scenes like one in his latest book Rhythm of War, that’s a master-class in the long-standing question “How can one swordsman fight a dozen men?” (Short answer: very carefully.)

In this sense, it’s not the fighting at all that makes a scene work. It’s the imagination.

How does someone with flying or shapeshifting see the world? There’s nothing like a story that lets us walk in those shoes… or not walk, and why. And then the tale puts that whole expanded worldview to the test in strategic chess matches and split-second choices.

That’s the joy of gaming too: choosing our plans and watching whole new tactics or parts of the map get unlocked because of our choices, not just knocking down the next enemy in the line. Just this week I had a video game villain confront my character with all the killing he’d had to do to get by… and I took the chance to start investing in knockout blow and stealth abilities, because it seemed like the time for him to look for a gentler path when he could. A game’s story lets us explore those dimensions ourselves.

But that freedom comes at the price of a different experience: being led through the moments by a master storyteller.

Those scenes are some of the most compelling moments I’ve ever felt. When every step in a struggle, every choice, every twist, all builds the tension higher. Watch Indy force the snakes back from the Well of Souls, only to find the Nazis at the top grabbing the Ark anyway… or there’s a werewolf scene in Peter Morwood’s The Demon Lord that is so tense that…

There’s nothing like those times.

And no matter how much of that is a fight itself, it comes from using every tool the scene allows. Making the absolute most of that moment.

 

Right Makes Fight

Still, there’s another side to the best clashes: the fact that they are conflicts. That the “problem” each side is trying to solve is that the other guy needs him dead, beaten, thwarted, to win.

A good fight starts by making those stakes clear. A simple sparring contest still might be a merry rivalry, or a chance to show off. A good rescue is life and death, while catching up with a long-standing, well deserved enemy…

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die.”

Stories are appreciating the choices people make. One side of that is getting into those decisions and how they shape the struggle now – but the other is that they’re made by people, by the sense of what they’ve already chosen and been shaped by.

Revenge isn’t the only emotion that’s “best served cold.” And even that one dish can go into so many flavors – one story could be a tragedy of an anti-hero’s obsession with vengeance for its own sake, another could use it as one of many markers about why the enemy continues to need stopping.

Better yet, what made those people enemies at all? How much of that conflict have we seen forming before our eyes? One enemy could share a mutual hatred with the hero, but another could be a former ally who’s watched our hero break more and more rules and feels forced to shut him down.

Maybe the most popular manga and anime in Japan’s whole vast, rich storytelling history is Naruto, and it’s hard to picture that tale without recalling how ninjas Naruto and Sasuke go from classmates to team rivals to a much deeper conflict. This is called not pulling punches, and having over a thousand chapters to tell it all.

If a fight embraces that… anything’s possible.

Let someone tremble with fear, and use every moment between punches wishing he was somewhere else. Capture how one fighter’s struggling not to win but to hold off her enemy, protecting something she truly puts above her own life.

Or the hope that if one can push the other into the right corner, he can prove that they don’t need to fight after all. Even though the story’s shown how many times they missed the chance for something better.

There’s always another chance, even in something as inescapable as a fight that’s already broken out. Because a good story uses everything.