Eigen Plot - Television Tropes & Idioms

A plot carefully constructed to use all the character-specific skills or abilities of the ensemble.

For example, if your team plays Elemental Rock Paper Scissors, they're going to have to face a water trap, a fire trap, an air trap, and an earth trap.

As a plot, it's a double-edged sword; don't do it, and someone gets left out. Do it too often, and it looks like the bad guys conspiring with the good guys to tailor their defenses to the heroes' strengths. Also, when one of the heroes has a lame power, there has to be a really bizarre obstacle in there to require his ability.

Frequently comes up in a Tournament Arc, where the heroes will have to pair off against their equal and opposite villains.

Most often occurs in series with heavy Super Hero Speciation. Can be the result of a Thematic Rogues Gallery.

A good hypothetical example is if the Justice League had to destroy a nuclear triad. Superman and other flying members would take out the strategic bombers, defaulting the ICB Ms to the grounded members, such as Batman, and the SLB Ms would go to Aquaman.

Named for a concept in linear algebra. If you speak Math, the people at wikipedia

will share their thoughts with you on the topic. If you speak less Math, Irregular Webcomic may help more.

In English: For each person on the team, there will be one and exactly one problem that calls for that person's specialty.

Examples:

The A Team (though, to be fair, the entire show was intended to be one giant Eigen Plot-slash-spoof)
Mission Impossible, in which the characters tailored their abilities to The Caper at hand
Film parodies: Mystery Men and Sky High.
In the first Harry Potter movie, the sequence of flying keys, life size chessboard, and logic-puzzle potions, allows Harry, Ron and Hermione to demonstrate their respective abilities. In the book, there were several other challenges, such as an angry troll that was supposed to be a guard, but was knocked out by the previous entrant, that made this fact less visible. In the book, it's justified, as all the obstacles were designed by teachers, and themed for their respective subjects.
Common in videogames, for example, in the The Legend Of Zelda games, each dungeon in sequential order is tailor-made with obstacles that require the treasures from the previous ones that the hero had access to. Apparently one can only get around dungeon D with a hookshot (or grappling hook, or magnet gloves) that is only found in one chest in dungeon C. You typically also need dungeon D's item to beat dungeon D's boss.
- Ocarina of Time screws this up a bit. The fourth, fifth, and sixth dungeons can be beaten in any order after getting the bow from the fourth, and the seventh and eighth can be beaten in whichever order after that.
- Back in A Link to The Past a lengthy puzzle in the 5th Dark World dungeon becomes much easier if you instead visit it after collecting the Cane of Somaria from the 6th dungeon.
Similarly, the dungeons in the Tomb Raider games seem to have been designed so that, after thousands of years of decay, they would still be wholly accessible by an individual with the physical stamina needed to crawl along ledges, swing from poles, and grapple from conveniently-placed wall rings.
The Winx Club ep "Truth or Dare" had the Winx Eigen-ing up a simulacrum out of their fundamental powers.
In the Mega Man series, and the following Mega Man X games, all of the end level bosses have specific weakness to weapons that you get from other bosses. This ensures that even the most useless weapons for fighting through the stages have a specific use. However, since bosses in some games are selectable in any order, they CAN be beaten without the specials. It's just a lot harder.
The James Bond movies feature a variant type of Eigen Plot; whatever inventions Q cooks up for 007, they're always precisely what he needs for the mission. He never finishes the movie with an unused gadget, and he never needs more than one copy of a given device.
- Parodied in an Eddie Izzard bit. "Bond never gets back and goes 'Q, I had a lot of shit I didn't fucking use! The watch that turns into a hamster, what was the point of that?"
- Perhaps unintentionally (and definitely annoyingly) subverted in Goldeneye, where Q spends some length describing Bond's new ride, a BMW Z3, in which Q proudly proclaims has Stinger missiles behind the headlamps. What pivotal role does this vehicle play? About 30 or so seconds of James Bond driving in it before he exchanges it with Jack Wade for a plane. (this happens because the deal with BMW was closed during late stages of production, thus no scenes couldn't be written to fit the car)
Aquaman of the Superfriends gave rise to a countably infinite number of such plots.
- Superman is a member of the Superfriends, and arguably pretty much every plot which involves him is an Eigen Plot, as they have to use Kryptonite or otherwise disable him somehow to give everyone else something to do.
Lampshaded in an episode of Teen Titans. Control Freak, a teenage TV addict super villain comes up with an Eigen Plot featuring a trial for all of the Teen Titans. He is upset to find that they're out of town and a secondary team is in their place. As the challenges were tailored to the exact limits of the main cast, the secondary team easily manages them. He has a temper tantrum and then returns with specific challenges for the substitutes.
Each episode of the 1970s live-action Saturday-morning show Electra Woman and Dyna Girl would begin with the titular heroines being given a newly developed module for their wrist "Electro-comps," giving them a new (and sometimes seemingly useless) power. Later in the episode, the duo would inevitably encounter a villain whose evil plot can only be thwarted by an imaginative use of the new power... which would then never be mentioned again in subsequent episodes.
The manga version of the Mew Aqua arc in Tokyo Mew Mew had the aliens taking a mew aqua into the realm of each of the girls' influences (for example, Mew Mint, whose power is air, had a chapter with a mew aqua floating above Tokyo Tower), as they tried to use it to fuel a Death Trap for both the girls and the rest of the city. It never ended up working. In the anime, though, this was abandoned and Ichigo got every single mew aqua, ignoring the other girls' elemental advantages.
Claire from Heroes can recover from almost any injury, which is good because she's prone to accidents like linebackers running offsides, crashing into her, and breaking her neck.
Stargate Atlantis usually has pretty blatant examples (a typical episode usually involves McKay having to come up with some insane plan using Hollywood Science which needs a sneaky plan to pull off that only Sheppard can come up with to pull off that involves a lot of violence which is of course Ronon's specialty.) The recent episode "Quarantine" subverted it when every one is locked in various rooms and each person has a part of the skills that they need to get out of the situation. Except no one is in a situation where they can use those skills, McKay The Smart Guy doesn't have a computer so Sheppard The Hero has to do all the technical stuff, Ronon The Big Guy is forced to do nothing, and Zelenka, another Smart Guy, has to do the dangerous air vent crawl that is pretty much Sheppard's trademark.
Subverted in China Mieville's Unlundun: when the heroine learns that the apparently random and pointless series of quests she was supposed to follow were actually carefully designed so that she would end up with exactly the right set of items to deal with the final challenge. It occurs to her, a little too late, that skipping most of the quests to save time might not have been such a bright idea after all.
Considered something of the "ideal" adventure plot in a tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons, where each character advances in a class that defines his or her talents. A smart Game Master keeps in mind the characters' capabilities and tries to include something for everyone. Published adventures try for this as well, but not every player group has the standard fighter/rogue/wizard/cleric dynamic these adventures are written for, and so multiple solutions for critical moments are necessary, making it possible for one character to steal the spotlight from the others by solving nearly everything through the solutions meant for his character type (the answer that works no matter what is usually "bash it apart"). That, or every important plot point is decided by either a fight (which all classes are designed to be able to take part in), or a simplistic puzzle (which doesn't rely on class abilities at all, but the players' ability to figure the puzzle out).
Frequently arises in A Series Of Unfortunate Events, most obviously in The Vile Village. Reversed in The Miserable Mill, where the protagonists are each forced into situations best-suited to their siblings' specialties.
Justified in Paycheck the movie, as the main character was part of a team of researchers who reverse engineered a machine for viewing the future he was able to fill his pockets w/ just the right random crap to get himself out of the series of perilous booby traps, assassination attempts, and relationship problems that plagued he the rest of the film. Note that this was the only thing justified about this movie.
Totally Spies. Just... Totally Spies.
The Russian folk tale "The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship" follows this model perfectly, making this one of The Oldest Ones In The Book. On his way to win a princess' hand in marriage, the Fool is obligated to pick up anyone who asks to come along with him. Each person he meets has a different bizarre skill, and each one saves his life once when he reaches the Czar and is subjected to various death traps and impossible tests.
- Similar situation: the fairy tale The Seven Simons is about seven brothers named Simon, each of whom has one skill at which he excels -- building an unbelievably fast ship, for example, or retrieving a piece of game no matter where it fell. Very specialized brothers, they are, and each skill just happens to be essential to winning the hand of a princess.
- As well, The Seven Chinese Brothers tells about seven brothers who are all identical, and each of whom has a powerful ability (hearing, strength, weeping) or immunity (to fire, to cold, etc.) All of these powers allow them to evade execution and live happily ever after.
- Yet another variation on this theme is the Grimm Brothers' tale The Six Men Who Went Far in the World, where an unemployed soldier teams up with a strong man, a keen-eyed sharpshooter, a super-fast runner, a man who can blow gale-force winds out his nose, and a man who can generate a field of cold by straightening his hat to con a king out of a warehouse full of treasure.
In the game Zork Grand Inquisitor, you find three totems, a griff (small, less powerful dragon), a brogmoid (a small, strong creature), and a flathead (basically human, except with a flat head and telepathy). And where are the Cosmic Keystones located? A sleeping dragon archipelago, a cave behind a strongly boarded door, and a casino. Any of the three creatures can visit any of the locations, but if they're not the right ones, they're next to useless (though the brogmoid can't reach a mailbox in front of the White House, and the Griff or flathead have to go there to send mail).
In the climax of Sky High, a situation arose for each one of "sidekick" characters to show off their fairly useless powers. Zach, whose only ability was to glow in the dark, had his moment when he was used as a human flashlight by the protagonists escaping through a dark tunnel. Ethan used his ability to turn into a puddle to get the drop on a bully through a clever use of misdirection. Magenta, who could shapeshift - but only into a purple guinea pig - used her power to crawl through a small ventilation shaft and and disable a bomb (even though technically the puddle boy could have done this as well if the shaft didn't go uphill). And finally, the girl who could manipulate plants fought a cheerleader that could make duplicates of herself ineffectually until the windows broke and the plants came in to aid their mistress.
- Although the girl who could manipulate plants didn't like violence, and refused to show off her powers at the assigning, so she was made a sidekick; despite having hero level powers. Though she can't quite make lemons.
Averted in the animated series M.A.S.K. Each episode began with the leader choosing which team members to bring based on the mission at hand. Therefore all characters in an episode had a legitimate reason to use their specialty. For example, if a mission was in the middle of a desert, they just didn't bring along the underwater specialist. This still resulted in a lot of lucky guesses as to who would just happen to be needed, though.

Egg Sitting

« Plots »

Empire With A Dark Secret

Exit

« Script Speak »

Flat Character

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools