Do you remember the Lord of the Rings movies? Little Frodo has been told to take this evil ring across the continent, and drop it in the fires of Mordor to destroy it. He goes on a grand adventure, lasting 9 hours over three movies, and finally completes the task.
Then Gandalf flies in one a giant Eagle and whisks Frodo (and Sam) back to safety.
So the infamous debate later arose – why couldn’t the Eagles just have taken Frodo to Mordor to destroy the ring in the first place. If you can FLY there quickly, why did Frodo need to traverse the dangerous land by foot, almost dying several times, almost failing several times (which would have been a world-ending event), and watching countless others die to protect him?
Well the real answer, of course, is that there would be no point to the books at all if the quest was easy. For the sake of the plot, the quest had to be hard. But once the quest was complete, we needed an easy way to get home. All for the sake of the plot.
So one thing that irks me is when a character demonstrates an ability that saves his/her life during one fight, and then we never see that ability again until the next time they are near death or never.
Like if a character has a power that can cause gravity to increase 100,000 times, they could just use that on every fight. No man or beast can defend against that. And even if they can withstand it, it would take every ounce of strength they have to endure, and the MC could just stab them in the neck with a sword.
But the MC uses that skill once (for example, to cause a flying mount to fall from the sky), and doesn’t use it in the next fight.
I get that the fights need to be close and need to be exciting. And every fight cannot be the same overpowered skill that defeats the enemy. But that’s only because the story is written and readers need to be entertained. If I had the skill of 100,000 times gravity, I’d just use it every time and not even get up from my chair to fight. Boring but effective.
