I was thinking the other day about plots where the characters or narrator describe this long, arduous, dangerous hurdle that they had to overcome but they didn’t know if anyone ever had or whether they’d even survive it, and then it was indeed a long, arduous, dangerous hurdle, but in later books in the series, or later episodes if on TV, that same long, arduous process has become commonplace.
But while I feel like I’ve seen this a lot, I can’t think of a single example.
I’m not talking about a scenario where the horrible dangerous thing (or person) is really easy or actually friendly. I’m talking about a scenario where they really do face some very difficult or dangerous situation, but it seems to morph almost immediately into something that they can do at any time they choose.
It seems like it goes along with the sort of power escalation that’s common in fantasy series (whether book or TV), and I have a vague feeling I’ve seen it in Buffy and/or read it in The Dresden Files, but I’m still drawing a blank.
So, am I just making this up or is this a real phenomenon in some plots?
In the 7th Season of Buffy, she had to fight some sort of Supervampire. It took a full episode or maybe more to take one down (it has been awhile since I saw it) but after that first one was killed, suddenly they were killing them by the boat load as if they were nothing.
It’s pretty common, I think – the first time you encounter something, they make a big deal out of it. Later on, when they want to move on to other things, the long, arduous, etc. trip is a distraction from those. Very often you’ll see how, even in the initial piece, other people make or have made the long, arduous, etc. journey that exhausted our heros. Look at the final steps of the Quest for the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or (to pick a ludicrously wonderful example) the journey to the Valley of Gold in the movie Doc Savage.
And there’s the Voyage Home. Getting there is hard, but at the end of the book/story/movie, who wants to go through that again? So Bilbo’s return at the end of The Hobbit seems to have no difficulties. Frodo and Sam get flown out of Mordor at the end of Lord of the Rings, and Harry and company get flown out of the Chamber of Secrets.
Actually, I think the Ridiculously Easy Journey Home is a lot more common. Just click your Ruby Heels Together Three Times and repeat after me…
It’s fairly common in superhero stories, and similar.
The hero has trained himself, or developed a new power, or found a new artifact, or whathaveyou, to solve the seemingly unsolvable problem.
Now, they have the tools to do that again.
So, the same sort of thing can’t present a challenge any longer. So, the challenges get bigger.
So the hero picks another option out of the above.
The cycle repeats, and eventually the original unsolvable crisis is the sort of thing they handle offhand while rushing to the real problem, just so the audience doesn’t think ‘why is this mortal god dealing with such piddling crap?’
Iron Man springs to mind. He had the arc reactor for decades and nobody could figure out how to do anything with it, and then he built a little one, in a cave, with a box of scraps. Next thing you know, everybody’s doing it.
A real life example could be the Lewis and Clark expedition. They have a long, arduous trip up the Missouri river. Then on the way back they run into steamboats making the same trip.
If I remember correctly, they had to unlock the inner power of the Slayer or something to give the girls the necessary “oomph” to destroy them. Until they did that, nothing worked. It was very Deux Ex Machina’ey.
In the first of Robert Zelazny’s “Amber” books, he makes a huge deal over how difficult and potentially deadly it is to walk through “the Pattern” (a kind of magical maze that gives you power if you complete it). Then later on in the series, it seemed to me like everybody and his cousin is walking the Pattern.
The thing that comes to mind first is the powers that some of the kids had in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.
In the third movie (Dream Warriors) an important plot point was that one of the teenagers had the ability to “pull” people into her dream. That is, if she and another person were both asleep at the same time, she could pull that person into her dream so they were both in the same “world” at the same time, and they could fight Freddy.
In the fourth movie, this teenager transfers this power to one of her friends, who uses it to fight Freddy in that movie and the fifth.
The sixth movie (Freddy’s Dead) had an all-new cast of teenagers. Yet they just take it for granted that they have this dream pulling power. When one teenager is being murdered by Freddy, another one goes to sleep (or gets knocked out or whatever), just assuming that they will be in the same “world” as the other dreamer and can fight Freddy. No mention is made of this being a special power that only certain people have.
In Alien (the original film) the creature’s acidic blood was a BIG deal. A small amount dissolved right through multiple bulkheads and threatened to perforate the hull.
In the subsequent films it wasn’t such a big deal. A flame thrower rendered the ichor inert, and if a bullet caused someone to get splashed, it made them curse loudly.
Hmmm… off the top of my head, first thing that comes to mind is the Ronin Warriors anime. In the first episode the good guys fight a single one of the big bad’s footsoldiers, and it takes all five of the good guys a whole episode to defeat him. By the end of the series the good guys routinely slaughter groups upon groups of the foot soldiers.
In the first Transformers film, a fair amount of time is spent on figuring out a weapon that can kill the Decepticons. Eventually they figure out the super-hot rounds can do it, but even with them, the humans need to do special stuff to take out Decepticons (like getting underneath them and hitting the sensitive spots). By the second movie the humans are wiping out swarms of nameless Decepticons.
In the first Blade movie they establish pretty clearly that normal humans are simply food and can be torn to pieces quite easily by any vampire with their super speed and super strength. The human Whistler, after a lifetime of experience, was just barely able to handle killing one.
In Blade: Trinity, Blade has some vampire hunters called “Nightstalkers” help him out. These are normal human beings who still manage to not only easily kill dozens of vampires, but at one point Ryan Reynolds is captured, chained up, beaten, cracks wise, escapes, etc. No explanation of why he wasn’t decapitated instantly.
The Patronus charm in the Harry Potter books… it’s supposed to be super duper deluxe difficult magic to perform, but once that has been established and Harry produces one in a big dramatic way, he’s able to teach all kinds of students to produce them.
I think the deal with the Patronus is that it’s difficult to produce under stress, when you’d need it the most. How many of the DA managed to use one to actually ward off a Dementor in the lack-of-flesh, versus just practicing them in a safe classroom?
Another example would be Order of the Stick (which is based on D&D). At the beginning of the comic, the whole party would sometimes run from a half-dozen goblins rather than have to fight them. Many levels later, two of the characters are being chased by 22 hobgoblins, and Haley suddenly realizes that they don’t have to run any more, and kills them all single-handedly.
[OT] I don’t remember many details from the first Aliens movies, but I watched Aliens vs. Predator the other night, and the acidic blood was a BIG deal. An alien was captured by a predator’s net, until the net constricted enough to cut through his ‘skull’, leaking blood that ate through the net. (This particular alien had a crosshatch pattern on his skull for the rest of the movie.) The predator fashioned an acid-proof shield from an alien’s ‘skull’. The aliens released Big Momma Alien from her shackles by puncturing themselves and dripping their blood onto her restraints, etc… [/OT]
I didn’t take it that way - it’s difficult but achievable for young students. They all first started learning it as 3rd years when Lupin was the DADA teacher, and Harry just happened to be able to do it well when he really needed it. They were 5th years by the time Harry had everyone else doing it.
And it’s apparently trivially easy for talented adults, since they were using it as a replacement for texting:
“Yeah! I’m corporeal again! Let me at those dementors!”
“Actually, I just need you to find someone to open the gate.”