How do you write super-intelligent characters without having them just being able to make whatever sci-fi device they want out of scraps from their house, or being a generic hacker that can hack into literally anything?
How do you write super-intelligent characters without having them just being able to make whatever sci-fi device they...
Benjamin Wood
Thomas Torres
You don’t
Nicholas Nelson
You draw clear limitations about what the character is capable of. Have one field or even sub-field that the character can do superhuman stuff with. Character can have cross-trained and be knowledgeable in other fields, but should only be exceptional in one.
Nathan Morris
To make them rely on other people.
Jace Wright
Make him do alright, but getting occasionaly dupped by someone who knows how the intelligent guy will react.
Anthony Brooks
Gavin Adams
There's already a semipopular Yea Forums copypasta that explains it but basically give the characters an obvious A>B>C line of reasoning where you can clearly see the steps of their reasoning, how they reached their conclusion and make their solution something that is actually plausible.
Liam Barnes
He's not that smart. It's more like Idiocracy where everyone else is so dumb he just seems smart in comparison.
Gaz is smarter but is too lazy and apathetic to bother with Zim.
Cooper Ward
This the one you're thinking of?
Ayden White
enjoy
Wyatt Price
>“Gaz is smarter”
Dib has literally hacked into the mars space probe, reverse-engineered Irken technology, repaired Tak’s ship back to fully-functional, flew a rocket-ship to Mercury, piloted Mercury, hacked into Zim’s computer, etc. The smartest thing Gaz does is play video games.
Lucas Howard
>or being a generic hacker that can hack into literally anything?
i guess it works because he rarely hacks
Blake Price
>Knows basic chemistry
>Gets a God complex
It's shit
Brody Cook
Yeah.
Though to give some credit, at least Sherlock has a thought process and reasoning, even if it's so out there and nonsensical.
Season 3 Rick had episodes where the solution is just straight up "Fuck you, I'm better then you". The Toxic Clones episode was the best because Rick actually had to think and use a semi reasonable line of deduction to outsmart the problem.
Austin Gomez
>No
and
>No
Read then critique faggot
Jace White
They're of equal intelligence but in different aspects
Evan Howard
Oliver Barnes
Game of Thrones had the same problem once they ran out of source material. GRRM can write smart guys passably, but without him the HBO team struggled to make any plotters come up with plots that made any kind of sense.
Brayden White
I'm guessing you didn't read/watch the series then?
Adrian Taylor
You write Lunas instead of Hermiones.
Hermione is a generically intelligent womyn self insert for the author, whose Mary Sue-iness is outdone only by Harry himself. Her spectrum of education encompasses every class that she's in, and she's never without an answer to provide her friends when they're in need, along with generally being portrayed as correct on social issues, without offering any sort of challenge to her beliefs.
Luna has an understanding of people and their body language, tone of voice, and behavior that allows her to make very mature observations about people, while at the same time being an estranged autist who winds up offputting to some people because of her lack of social graces and obsession with superstition.
Just to note, I'm not saying to make all smart characters estranged/weird, I more mean having things that the smart character isn't educated on, or is poor at doing.
Eli Turner
>t. Waifus Luna
Jaxon Davis
What? Hermione was just that over achiever girl that was in every class, nothing else - she just spend a lot of time on aquiring a lot of knowledge
Thomas Young
>without having them just being able to make whatever sci-fi device they want out of scraps from their house
You kinda nailed it there. Limit their ability to assemble things by realistically limiting their access to the proper materials. By all means they can make a mustard gas bomb from houshold supplies, or a rudimentary dirty bomb from 20,000 smoke detectors, but nothing particularly sopohisticaed that would require precision instruments, or custom manufacturing, machining, things they can't access. To quote Commie retards - Seize the means of production.
Aiden Jackson
Did you notice how
provide multiple examples of what could be considered metrics of Dib's intelligence? Care to provide something comparable for Gaz
Connor Price
Look, as much as I dislike Sherlock too, that the NCFOM example in the first part does a poor job selling the "smart people written smartly" aspect, especially in comparison with something so out-there as the Sherlock example. "Oooh, a guy feels up a wall and then fires his gun at it." That's boring.
To answer OP's question, you can't. Power creep is a bitch, and it will quietly sneak up on you and get you when you least expect it. And if you're writing a "SUPER intelligent" character from the outset, unless the setting is strictly limiting and not a cape-like or animesque context where everybody and their mother has superpowers, that character WILL spiral out of control and end up becoming God. Lest you risk the audience start asking, "If smart guy is so smart, why can't they just solve the plot and then cure cancer?"
In such scenario, the best move is turn that character into a villain.
Levi Morris
It helps if you actually have at least a passing familiarity with what your character is gonna talk about