Educational Backstory: avoiding arbitrary superpowers

Have you ever noticed how characters in science fiction and fantasy seem to have superpowers? I'm not even talking about the superhero type. I mean special skills - things that nobody else can do, that usually make these people indispensable to the plot. To pull from David Eddings, maybe one guy can steal anything and speak a secret sign language, maybe another can turn into a bear, maybe another never gets scared, etc. The nice thing about Eddings' characters is that he usually has a personal history for the character which explains their terrific strengths (and peculiar weaknesses).

This is really important.

A character who can do unusual things is really great, even if it's something as subtle as being graceful in movement. But without grounding, those special skills can seem arbitrary. When you look at actual superheroes, one of the coolest things about them is that they have special origin stories. Even the X-men's relatively arbitrary powers are grounded in a general tendency for human mutation.

So think through how your character got to be this way. Does she fight well because she was trained in kung fu? Does he have strong arms because he was apprenticed to the blacksmith? Does he know about lightspeed physics because he's a professor, or the ship's engineer? Does he know about linguistics in spite of his young age because he's the son of a famous linguist?

One of the things I always enjoyed about the character Pazu from Miyazaki's film, Castle in the Sky, was that he was a miner. As the movie starts, you see him hefting heavy weights and crawling all over (and repairing) these massive steam engines that bring the miners up from the tunnels below. You also see him being comfortable in dark tunnels - and all this seems perfectly natural. Then later when he's volunteering to repair the engine of a pirate's airship, climbing like crazy over the outside of the actual castle in the sky, and running through the dark tunnels inside it, you have no problem with any of it. You've seen him do it before, and it all works.

This is one of those instances where you can make your world personal. Think about your character's educational background. Is it based in experience? What kind? Is it based in institutionalized education? What kind of people does your character admire as mentors or teachers, and why?

You can even take it a little further - ask yourself what ideologies might come along with your character's experience or education. Was the master abusive, inadvertently teaching hatred of his social group? Did the teacher rescue the student from poverty or some other social situation, leading the student to adopt similar social views? Did the institution teach larger social values, or the values of the particular social group it serves?

Explore the possibilities.

Education...

Today will be my son's first day of Kindergarten. All around me are moms with five-year olds preparing their kids to go, many having attended preschool, many without. Some have tears gathering in their hearts at losing their little babies, others (like me) are grinning and excited about the new world that's about to open up.

Education is central to our society. It provides us with meaningful transition events of all kinds. Going to kindergarten for the first time, or graduating from high school, or going off to college and adult independence, and everything in between.

It also informs the way in which we expect to communicate. We get trained in this society to sit in groups and listen to another (usually single) person talk. This is not new; this is OLD. I'm imagining Plato sitting down with his pupils in the agora. And before him was Socrates, and before him...?

The content of what we learn has changed a lot. Or maybe not so much in its fundamentals - still trying to prepare young people to enter society in a meaningful way. Just that the society itself is not the same everywhere, all the time. US education values (or tries to value) critical thinking, exploration and innovation. Japanese education does an amazing job of providing literacy (in a very tough literacy system!), and high levels of performance on many tasks. Do they innovate? Sure - they've been growing and changing for thousands of years, even when they had no contact with the outside world. But the model of educational communication is slightly different.

American teachers value creativity, but they do have to value actually grasping the fundamentals of the topic, also. Too much free thinking and you can start dropping basic parameters of physics or mathematics. I'm only kind of kidding.

Japanese teachers come from a slightly different model, in which the expert (say, an artist or musician) didn't have to take students at all, but those who wanted to learn from him (her?) would have to sneak around, pick up what they could from listening or watching around corners until they could prove their dedication, whereupon they might be taken on as students. It's called "stealing the art." Thereafter the ideal is to duplicate exactly, with all skill and artistry, what the teacher does - and then to innovate. The innovation is still there, but subject to a few more stringent prerequisites.

The master/apprentice model is very common in fantasy and science fiction (and Star Wars, whichever side that falls on!). There are also schools of magic (Hogwarts being quite a standout!). It's important to consider how your characters come about the things they know, and if you think about how they consider their knowledge philosophically, that can really deepen your characters. Someone with super-ninja skills isn't going to get them by falling off a log. And I always wondered how the heck Jason Bourne learned all the stuff he knew before he turned into a doddering old man - but maybe it was the, um, intensity of the education he received!

I'll write more about this later, but for now it's time to go and get my kids started on a very big day.

I'm smiling.