Due to the saturation of well, everything, people have forgotten what normal looks like
Fighting a 1v1 is hard. Like really hard. If you’re not as fast or not as long, not as strong, this all creates a challenge to what is already an exhausting activity. Everyone whose experienced combat sports knows this. In gaming terms, winning your 1s. Compelling stories have been created around how close a 1v1 competition/duel/fight/whatever is. The Rocky movies don’t necessarily get into the technical side of boxing but you feel the hits and understand the determination it takes to get up over and over and over again. But when dealing with fight scenes with more people, the story always seems to get watered down, as if compensating for the extra opponents by simplifying the narrative. The difficulty of 1vX fights seemingly scales linearly rather than exponentially.
The difficulty of being good has been normalized and overlooked by both stories and audiences alike. Things have been simplified to “he’s just faster/stronger” rather than anything technical. Part of this is obviously the skill needed to accurately portray a complex interaction, such as an outboxer being really good at keeping an inboxer out, but once the inboxer gets in and starts brawling the fight is over. (AKA the iconic Zoner vs Rushdown matchup in fighting games) The author/director has a lot of work to do to skillfully portray that information in an interesting way without explicitly telling the audience. That said, the audience also has an onus to use that noggin of theirs as well.
There’s a lot of depth in any well written fight. But instead it’s “He hits too hard” “I can’t get in because I’m not fast enough” “There’s too many of them” and the solution always ends up being a simple powerup, deus ex machina, or reinforcements. It’s a simple and an uninteresting way to solve a complex problem. Rather than seeing a technical solution, “He lowers his guard when he goes for kicks” or “The other mech has a slower response time when charging the laser, that’s a window of opportunity” we get all the flavors of “My friends are in danger, time to go even further beyond.”
This is especially relevant in fights where there is a numbers disparity.
Everything seems to trivialize how hard it is to win while at a disadvantage. Look at random video game highlights, the players always clutch up, always hit the impossible combo, the impossible shot. It seems so trivial right up until you’re in that sitaution. It’s so hard to fully show the inherent difficulty in any activity without being proficient in it yourself.
But scale in media has lost so much meaning it’s mind numbing. Which is weird. In 2v1 where people of the same skill level get into a fist fight, I know a character has to contend with twice the arms and legs they have. They physically do not have enough limbs to deal with everything going on. Unless you’re showing how skilled a specific character is over the average rabble, scale is poorly used. Even then, pure numbers should still come into play at a certain point, which I’ll get into.
Getting Specific With It
It brings me back to the Princess Bride. The film does a really good job showing the competence of the characters and how they’re competent. Take the first sword fight of the film for instance. We’re both shown and told that Inigo Montoya and Fezzik aren’t just random brigands, they’re good. Being told doesn’t mean much without showing the viewer.
Inigo fights Westley, the protagonist, while they expouse famous styles, counters, and techniques that they both effortlessly cycle through, only to reveal that they were both using their non-dominant hands. On top of that, there’s they’re both adding in extra flourishes just for fun. It’s a very clear and effective way to show both these characters are extremely knowledgable in sword fighting to the point of intentionally handicapping themselves. Westley spares Inigo because he equates killing him to killing an artist of the highest skill. John the drunk duelist asleep in the alleyway doesn’t get that kind of courtesy.
When facing Fezzik, a mountain of a man, Westley is physically outclassed in every way. No amount of speed or technique can beat Fezzik’s pure size and muscle.
Westley only wins because Fezzik forgot how to fight single opponents. He literally spent too much time fighting multiple people at once to remember how to 1v1. Even then it becomes a close affair.
These two are presented as cream of the crop individuals. They’re the best in the world when it comes to fighting through 1v1 exchanges with Westley. And yet in the climax of the story a gate presents an obstacle. It’s a giant barricade of wood and steel and to make matters worse, there’s 60+ guards. Too many for even Fezzik and Inigo to take on. Fezzik, this absolute unit, can only take on 10 and Inigo can take on 20 max. These are completely average guards but they’ve stopped Fezzik and Inigo simply by having too big of a disparity in numbers. It isn’t a skill issue, it’s simply overwhelming numbers.
Yet tune into any Marvel movie, anime, or half a dozen books and you’re blasted with characters winning 1v20s like its nothing. The numbers stop serving a purpose at a certain point, you stop caring whether its 10 people or 1000.
Obviously the power level of something like Princess Bride is different than Dragon Ball but when you think about it, this problem scales with power level. If everyone has access to magic or mechs or whatever it is, wouldn’t having to face 2 people with those tools be just as difficult as facing 2 people fist to fist?
Even if the point is to show how great a character is, how skillful they are at <fighting, magic, piloting, etc> there’s a certain point where numbers can and should cancel that skill out as with the gate.
Besides that, the old saying of
“The best swordsman does not fear the second best, he fears the worst since there’s no telling what that idiot is going to do.”
should also come into play. John the drunk duelist might not be good, but much like my flailing in any fighitng game, he’s bound to do something so stupid, so dumb, it works against the people who know whats going on.
In Conclusion
I don’t really have a solution to this problem, it’s just a case of the story teller having to be good enough to properly showcase this kind of thing and the audience being aware enough to appreciate it. I can turn my brain off and enjoy the spectacle of an army getting single handedly anihilated but feeling anything meaningful from that same scene often has to come from narrative or production rather than the action. Fights of scale have a definite place. But I still yearn for some more depth in those 1vX fights. Maybe I’m getting curmudgeonly about my media because I’m sick of Giant Laser X+1 beating Giant Laser X. There’s so much depth to get into, but instead we just scale up and call it a day.