A basic rule of thumb for a heroic character is to avoid God-Mode at all costs. You can pump a hero full of god-like strength, speed, stamina, whatever; but you cannot, under any circumstances make your hero all-powerful. Why not? Because a hero with no viable enemies, no weaknesses, is just plain boring.

A similar thing happens when you crack God-Mode in a computer game. You’re all-powerful, then suddenly life is completely meaningless. Without the challenges of viable opposition, the game loses its interest. We need struggle and triumph to make life interesting. We need tragedy and strife and our hero needs to have something important taken from them to make them any kind of hero at all.

To put it simply, you can’t enjoy the seesaw of defeat/victory without the defeat coming first. That’s what makes the revenge genre so popular. We grit our teeth in anger as the hero’s back story is established (family killed by villains, hero disgraced in front of his peers, lies sown, the truth buried, etc.). We hang in there while injustice reigns because we know that when the hero finally gets on top, they’re gonna kick ass all the way to the moon. Our memory of the preceding tragedy makes the hero’s victory that much sweeter.

So how do you craft a viable hero; a character with sufficient strength and weakness to make them truly heroic? Myself, I’m not a fan of the James Bond style hero (at least, in the traditional rendering of Bond, where his victories over the bag guy are usually due to a well-placed wrench or some other lucky break or gadget). I like a hero that genuinely kicks ass; a figure that is potent and scary enough to warrant the respect of their enemies.

I also like a character with some deep personality flaws, or some inner tragedy that stops them from ever really enjoying their victories. Lately though, I’ve been developing a heroic character who is posing some interesting and perplexing questions.

Enter, the Shackled Man; one of the foundational characters within the Rust Chronicles universe. The Shackle is a mercenary gunslinger who is captured and imprisoned for his part in a failed rebellion, spending 40 years locked in a dungeon where strange etheric influences have altered his body and mind in peculiar ways. When he finally escapes from the pit (aided by some agency he does not remember), the Shackled Man carries his shackles as a kind of talisman. Infused with etheric power, the shackles grant him inhuman strength and power, but there is also a terrible cost to this new strength.

There is a sense, as the character develops, that he is a time bomb waiting to go off. There is something within him that is so powerful, it rivals the strength of the godlings (the race of superhumans that figure throughout the book series), but it also threatens to explode and wipe out the hero’s allies as well as his enemies.

I’m enjoying toying with the idea that the Shackle can’t fully control his power, but he’s forced to utilise it to aid his compatriots. I’m also playing with the notion that his thoughts and possibly actions are not all his own. There is, perhaps, some darker force at work within the etherically-enhanced fabric of his being.

The trick is in knowing where this all ends. To date, the Shackled Man has only shown the slightest hint of his power, but there are intimations that a storm is brewing. In a world populated with titanic characters, this figure emerges as a real wildcard that threatens to put the cat among the pigeons. The question is, how far do I take this hero? How hard to I push him and how tragic do I make his background so that the revenge cycle of is story is all the sweeter?

Do I let the Shackle explode and take out a wave of god-like enemies in one move, as well as wiping out a host of heroic “goodies”? Do I force him to hold back his power and watch his compatriots die at the hands of his enemies? Do I offer a nauseatingly sweet ending where he learns to control his power, kills the bad guys and saves his compatriots? Or do I use the advent of his explosion to bring about some new tragedy or plot twist which sends the hero on an entirely different journey (perhaps to an entirely different plane of existence)?

To some extent plot structure dictates the actions of all characters. To some extent, it doesn’t matter what I want to do. With the writing of the stories, the characters themselves develop beyond the writers limit. It’s an odd thought, but in many ways, I no longer control what will ultimately happen to the Shackled Man. I’m merely the first reader of his story and I’m just as eager to find out where it leads as anyone else.

Although, the mischievous part of me would love nothing more than to kill him off with some absolute absurdity; food poisoning from a bad gerkin!

MQ