Troped: Emoptional Power
Is your story about overcoming trauma? Does your protagonist find strength from others more so than themselves? Maybe a found family is involved?
Emotional power tropes could be just the thing!
This isn’t just a single trope, but an umbrella term, consisting of tropes that I haven’t necessarily heard people talk about as a group before. The reason I think it makes sense to create this category, is because of the similar feelings that are both tied to the individual tropes and that they bring to the forefront of any story.
Usually, I like to look deep into a specific example of a trope being employed, but because this is so broad, I am going to come at it in another way and go over these tropes in three steps:
Defining emotional power tropes
Addressing why they often don’t work for people
Explaining why I love them
Emotional Power Tropes
Emotional power tropes can be subcategorized into at least three more specific kinds of tropes. These include, but at not limited to, any literalization of emotions equalling power, the power of friendship, and kindness or empathy leading to power.
A literalization of emotions equalling power is probably the most obvious variety of these tropes. It is anytime a story uses the concept of a character’s emotions being the source of power.
Two major examples of this would be the crests in Digimon Adventure, or the power rings in Green Lantern. In each of these, emotions such as love (helpfully, the one emotion demonstrated in both works), are almost used as fuel that run through a secondary device and translated to be something like a weapon for their wielder (be it through giving their Digimon the power to grow, or by making the wielder’s constructs more powerful).
The power of friendship is possibly the most infamous and sometimes ridiculed of these tropes. It is anytime a character is granted a boost of power thanks to their love of their friends or family. Or, conversely, granted to them because of their friends’ or family’s love of them.
Every climactic fight in Fairy Tail can come down to this trope. The heroes look like they might lose, but they (usually Natsu) gain that extra power and strength they need at the last moment so that no villain can hurt their friends. But this can come in (mildly) more subtle forms, such as YuGiOh, where Yugi’s friends give him the confidence he needs to find victory.
Another version, almost a reversal, of this trope can be seen in Black Clover and My Hero Academia. Both Deku and Asta demonstrate such positivity, empathy, and willingness to fight for everyone, that other people find their own strength. They make other people want to push themselves to be better.
And finally, there is any time kindness or empathy leads to power. These are probably the least transparent or heavy-handed version of the tropes, and include any time a character’s show of empathy or kindness lead to them gaining any kind of favour.
One example would toward the end of David Tennant’s run of Doctor Who, where a large collection of people he has helped during his time as the Doctor all come together to help him save the world. Or there is the “you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us” scene toward the end of Spider-Man, where New York citizens have decided that Spider-Man is one of them and they want to help him.
Why Emotional Power Tropes Often Don’t Work For People
The short answer is the fact that emotional power tropes are inherently cheesy.
For a longer explanation, let’s start by looking at the other primarily kinds of power that can be used in a climactic battle: physical power and intellectual power.
Physical power is probably the most common version used in any story’s fight. In these instances, it is easy for us to see evidence of how one character is physically more powerful than another.
This might not come down to pure strength, but another physical element, like speed, or a higher level of skills when it comes to fighting. But regardless of the exact type of physical prowess being demonstrated, there is a clear line between a quantitative ability and the results of the battle.
For example, when Rocky wins in a big climactic fight in Rocky II, we see how he reached this point by training his body to be physically more capable than his opponent.
With intellectual power, there are once again ways in which one character can be shown to be smarter than their opponent. There is a logic we can follow, potentially a trick that is explained as to how they thwarted the villain. Though, this kind of power being used in a story can be difficult, as it can really come down to how smart a move the writer can come up with.
Death Note is entirely about these kinds of battles but can also see examples of them in heist movies like Ocean’s Eleven, where twists are revealed and we see how Danny’s real plan played out.
When we get to battles of emotional power, there is no one-to-one real world correlation most of the time. This is why we get things such as the Green Lantern power rings, that are able to transfer emotions into being something physical, it’s a way to demonstrate how emotions can lead to victory.
There is an inherent cheesiness to the fact that we have to step so far out of reality to turn something incredibly internal, something that can be unrealistic as the final solution, and turn it into this metaphor in order to show how it could work.
Then there is how much harder emotional power can be to define or quantify. How do you say objectively that you care about your friends more than someone else cares about theirs in order justify getting that extra boost of power?
This all means that when an emotional power trope is involved, the subjectivity of emotions, especially to quantify emotions, makes it impossible to say that one character is necessarily more equipped to win than another. And because of this, it can sometimes lead to the victory feeling cheap.
But that’s enough being negative.
Why I Love Emotional Power Tropes
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
- Neil Gaiman, Coraline (And technically misquoting G.K. Chesterton in Tremendous Trifles, but I like this version more)
In all honesty, the reason I love these tropes is because of the way they come down to the optimistic, even idealistic, view of the world necessary to see these things as such powerful forces. It’s the fact that these stories exist to tell us that with enough hope, with enough belief in each other, the good, the positive, the kind, will prevail in the end.
This is an incredibly important kind of story to tell on two major levels. As the real world demonstrates how the people in power are not always “good”, it is important to show the strength that can form when good people come together. Then there are the more internal kinds of fights that these tropes can really demonstrate.
For a final example, there’s the newest season of Stranger Things (spoilers coming for the first half of season 4!). The big bad of the season is Vecna, a demon that exists as essentially a metaphor for depression and/or suicidal thoughts. He pushes characters to the point that they don’t feel like they deserve to live anymore. They become so caught up in guilt and all these negative emotions that they lose the will to go on. But in the end, the way to combat Vecna, is for the character to listen to their favourite song. To use the positive emotions that the music creates for them, to lead them to the door that they use to escape the negative ones.
Depression, anxiety, and other such problems, are not literal monsters. They can’t be fought in a physical or intellectual way. But the idea that positive emotions are what inevitably conquer them or, at least, are used to survive them to fight again another day, is an incredibly powerful thing.
There is a general moral that comes with these tropes: those who are there to bring positivity to the world will in the end defeat those who are just out for the negative; or to say it another way, love conquers hate. It’s a kind of moral that once again reveals the cheesy nature of these tropes, but it is a kind of cheesiness that I can never get enough of.
