It sounds like a fighter version of Insufferable Genius, combined with Does Not Know His Own Strength. Reminds me of some professors I had in engineering school who were super-experienced at their areas of study, yet taking a class from them was absolutely awful, and you leave his lectures more confused than when you went in. They just had no idea how to communicate their knowledge to people who hadn't been studying it since before most of us were born, let alone undergrad students lacking basic foundational knowledge. Like trying to teach calculus to someone who just learned adding and subtracting, or getting a child who's still on Cat in the Hat to analyze War and Peace. Most of these professors were at least okay to talk to as people outside of class; they were just terrible instructors.
So maybe when your warrior tries to teach people to fight, he takes things too fast and keeps accidentally assuming they're at a much higher level than they really are. He dives right into sword combat in his first week working with absolute newbie prospective warriors with Geek Physiques (either kind) who have very little strength, have never done any significant amount of physical activity or manual labor in their lives, and do poorly even in school phys. ed class, but nonetheless want to fight. He's too embarrassed to admit that he doesn't know what to do when his students don't even know how to run without hurting themselves, trip over their own feet when practicing footwork, and aren't strong enough to comfortably wield even a wood practice sword, let alone swing a real metal one with any sort of technique. He gets impatient and frustrated and bored, which despite his efforts leaks into his demeanor in a way that his students pick up on, and class becomes awkward and tense until he either loses his temper or his student(s) quit.
Maybe he realizes that teaching absolute newbies isn't for him and tries doing a masterclass instead, helping already highly-skilled non-Heavenly warriors get even better, but that goes sideways, too, because even these people just don't have the reflexes, raw strength, reaction time, and muscle memory that comes only from more than a whole human lifetime's worth of experience. This doesn't endear him to the higher-ups, who come to resent him in any sort of professional context, potentially even deeming him a liability. I also just imagined him trying to spar with a non-Heavenly warrior, and him accidentally maiming or even killing his opponent with a practice sword because he assumed they would dodge or parry a hit, but their "normal" reflexes just didn't catch it and, well, he's killed enemies with nothing more than a practice sword before.
And the part with him not taking battles seriously enough and forgetting that most people are nowhere near his level can have tragic results. Let's say he can comfortably take out ten evil minions by himself with a wood practice sword before getting tired, so when he sees a small swarm of a hundred advancing, he makes a snap decision and confidently sends out ten warriors, thinking they won't have a problem because they'll have metal swords, and those ten get slaughtered without taking out even a single minion. Your warrior-guy freezes because fuck, fuck, that's not how this is supposed to go. Do cooler heads prevail and take out the swarm of minions in a smarter way, or do the bad guys breach the defenses and kill more people? Either way, at least ten good warriors died on warrior-guy's orders because of his arrogance, and he now has to inform their families that their loved one's not coming home. Cue Character Development.
Edited by CrystalGlacia on Jan 3rd 2021 at 10:12:48 AM
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
Huh, Insufferable Genius was not a trope I thought to associate with him—he's actually supposed to be surprisingly affable and sociable, and these tendencies really only show when it comes to combat related things.
I'll clarify some things, though. I don't mean to be annoyed that you didn't know this, because I didn't mention it (I didn't want my opening post to be a massive infodump). These heavenly warriors are picked pretty much randomly and taking from their parents days after birth, at which point they are trained insanely hard. They all are ridiculously highly-skilled Child Soldiers from the moment they can stand to the exclusion of anything else. This is part of the reason Heaven randomly picks them—they don't need to self-select for particularly skilled candidates, it puts them through brutal training every waking second the moment they can walk. The philosophy is that anyone put through such training is going to come out an extremely competent fighter, barring literal disability (if Heaven is sounding somewhat morally dubious here: that's the point. We're talking an Exalted-style Celestial Bureaucracy that's rampant with corruption and strife.), so Heaven might as well just randomly pick the cutest babies on a whim and whisk them away. They all are very highly-skilled warriors—they have to be—he is just supernal to even all of them. They also all have no idea where their families are—Heaven doesn't keep track intentionally to prevent Tell Me About My Father shenanigans and in cases like him his parents died decades ago anyway. The overwhelming majority of them never ever meet their parents or families—their only companions are their fellows and the gods that train them.
However, your post is still quite useful, because many of the things that you're talking about apply to the other kind of magical warrior in the settings—humans who live in the mundane world and learn magic from other human mages. While mages had originally been in a Masquerade for centuries, eventually the word got out and there are indeed a bunch of regular-ass people who willingly sign up to learn to be mages now—many of whom are utterly unprepared for how brutal the training has to be. I don't want to sound all "thanks but your stuff doesn't apply to this situation because 'X'" because it's still quite useful!
Being unable to judge others' skill level correctly and being overconfident in a fight are all major flaws for a warrior if any level of team work is required in a fight. A squad leader with these kinds of traits is downright a disaster waiting to happen that will result in loss of his squadmates' lives. And it is absolutely natural that these things will result from the character's high level of skill.
The thing I don't like about adding personality flaws when creating a character is that I don't think that there is such a thing as a character flaw. Life isn't black-and-white and there is rarely a thing that is 100% "good" or 100% "bad". We, as human beings, can possess certain character 'traits' which are:
- Context-dependent;
- Their quality is in the eye of the beholder.
And being overly serious stick-in-the-mud can be endearing to some part of your audience (even if you as a writer, or the character themselves don't find it so) just as they can find someone annoying for being overly competent.
I'd like to share a video which illustrates my point better than I did. It isn't about writing per se, though a writer is in its spotlight.
Hope you'll find this useful.
Spiral out, keep going.
That, and/or Intelligence Equals Isolation. We often think of that and Insufferable Genius as only applying to nerdy characters, but I think the same principle can happen with anyone who is at a much higher level in some important skill than their peers. Such people have a harder time relating to others' experience in that context, which leads to problems like overestimation of skill level and ineffective teaching and transmission of knowledge. Socialization isn't just how you make friends- it's how humans get shit done.
So... are you saying that Warrior-Guy only really works with other Heavenly warriors who just haven't been at it for 146 years? I still think a lot of it applies. Sure, a twenty-year-old who has been priming their body for combat for the last nineteen years will be a much better fighter than a non-Heavenly twenty-year-old human warrior who's only been training seriously since they were, like, thirteen or something. But the twenty-year-old Heavenly warrior's reflexes and muscle memory is still not quite going to be quite at the level of Warrior-Guy who's been at it over seven times longer than them, nor will they have the same raw experience. A twenty-year-old Heavenly warrior just isn't going to have fought the same variety of enemies, directly experienced the same variety of tactics, and had the same span of time to refine their own tactics and strategies for those situations in twenty years as Warrior-Guy. He could totally still get frustrated at a gap that just won't close except with practice over a span of time too large for his liking, and as I'm sure he knows, fractions of a second can mean the difference between taking down your opponent and getting taken down yourself.
And as Millership said, the overestimation part can still have tragic results in any application requiring teamwork. Even if these younger Heavenly warriors don't have parental and sibling connections, they probably have friends and loved ones whose lives they've touched and who will have to live in a world without that person, and even if there's some Heavenly edict that prevents them from having social connections or taking lovers and raising children, that's still life lost. From a purely tactical perspective, you don't let some fogey send your guys to their deaths because he was too arrogant to understand that most of them don't have 140+ years of experience and maybe don't have as much experience with evil minions with that particular sort of catch. And each Heavenly warrior lost is a multi-decade investment by Heaven that's lost, and I don't see how Heaven's going to be cool with that. And if they are cool with that because We Have Reserves, even many thousands of them, then he can either agree with them (if not tentatively at first), or disagree and learn a lesson.
Also, the first thing to come to mind when I read the thread title (before I read the OP) was Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training, like with Jin from Samurai Champloo- he's a samurai trained from childhood who has zero aptitude for literally everything that isn't kenjutsu, which is a frequent source of comedy. I don't know how crazy this Heavenly military school is, but considering that Heaven takes recruits as young as a year old, there's probably something most normal people are expected to know that Heaven considers irrelevant to their mission of training super-badass warriors. There's the tech thing you mentioned, but maybe Heaven doesn't think their warriors need to be able to live as functional civilians, which, depending on tone and the needs of your story, could mean anything from having nothing going on in their lives outside of combat (and are thus terrible conversationalists incapable of not "talking shop"), to never being taught how to maintain a living space or live outside of a barracks, to being illiterate because they should be learning everything by doing and just need to be able to defeat whatever they're pointed at, right?
Edited by CrystalGlacia on Jan 4th 2021 at 1:13:21 PM
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
I am currently working on a particular character of mine. Long story short: this guy (the setting is an Urban Fantasy for the record) is part of a group of Heavenly warriors who were kidnapped from their families at birth and do the dirty work of the gods for them (heavenly laws discourage gods from interfering directly with human affairs). He is by far the best warrior of them all, and when writing his profile I had this sentence: "His major flaw is that he's so highly-skilled at combat, he often downplays the danger of particular things to newbies, finds their troubles with learning new skills to be annoying, and often doesn't take fights seriously enough, even when with others who need to take them seriously because they can't auto-win damn near every battle like he can".
But see, this isn't really a flaw. This is literally "this dude is SO AWESOME his awesomeness is a flaw" and that's not what I want to go for. I remember reading several "how to write a good character" things that warn against giving characters these "faux-flaws", where their supposed bad aspects are just wanking over their good aspects and pretending that's a problem.
Really, I'm having trouble making this guy a good fleshed out character—he's not the protagonist, and is meant to The Ace so to speak. He is a nigh-perfect fighter (to the point where he intentionally doesn't use any magic or Supernatural Martial Arts and still is capable of winning nearly every fight he's in, which in this setting is like willingly blindfolding yourself and using a wooden practice sword and still winning every swordfight against actual metal blades anyway—do we have a trope for this by the way? Willfully Weak doesn't work because he's still stronger and faster than everyone else, lol). His main "flaw" if anything is the fact that he's 145 years old and like, two years from dying, and that he's kinda inept with modern technology except that's played more as a charming character trait than a negative one.
Edited by Vadara on Jan 3rd 2021 at 1:57:08 AM