I noticed that I have an extremely hard time approving of the fictional smart (or genius, or super genius) guy. By smart I don't mean knowledgeable. It's perfectly fine if some fictional guy can recite every article from Wikipedia from memory because that's no more of an impossible power compared to being to knock down a mountain with a fist or whatever. I'm talking about guys who are supposed to possess superior intellect. While it is not necessary to be a genius to write about a genius, it's actually kind of hard if the writer is an average or worse person trying to pose as a genius. Yes, as an author you get to cheat because you control the world, but intelligence has to be consistent within accepted standards. I recently saw a random thread resurrected from the dead on One Outs, which is about a guy whose fastest pitch is 70 MPH and he has only one good special pitch and he dominates the Japanese Baseball League as a starting pitcher because of his superior intellect. Note that we're not talking about nijitsus here like a pitch splitting into 10 identical balls here. I get that some people might just read something as entertainment and not worry about how silly the entire premise is and that's fine, but I noticed that a lot of people genuinely believe that a guy who can't throw faster than 70 MPH with basically only one effective pitch wouldn't get absolutely shelled if pitching at a professional level for an extended time. I suppose you can just go with the usual 'people are dumb on the Internet', but we're talking about an audience that are at least respectable baseball powers (Japan, Taiwan, USA). I mean I've seen basketball manga where guys on Taiwan make statements like, "I bet Kobe can't score 50 points a game when he was a high schooler" (even journeyman NBA players can likely do that back in high school) and you can see that clearly the audience has no idea what high level competitive basketball looks like. I think there's some kind of appeal to authority/Emperor's New Cloth effect going on because I guess people assume someone who is publishing a book/manga/movie/whatever has to be kind of smart, and they say this character is super smart too so better act like you totally get it too!
Of course, being smart isn't really that useful as a power, especially as a super power. I'm pretty sure everyone is at least ten times smarter than a bear or a lion but good luck fighting one without some tools with your superior intellect. In Azumanga Daioh, Osaka suggested that if Chiyo gets kidnapped, she needs to use her superior genius power like they do in movies and put up a futile struggle and then die. That's probably the overwhelming likely outcome of trying to outsmart their way out of a significantly disadvantaged situation. There's a thing called the J.R. Smith problem for video games. J.R. Smith is an unreliable shooter in real life, but in basketball games he's an incredible shooter. If you look at his shooting percentage he's actually more accurate than a lot of the famous 3 point guys you can think of. In real life, J.R. Smith tends to take bad shots, but in a video game, aided by the full court vision the player can generally easily tell when you got an open look and when you should just pass. While I don't think J. R. Smith is a super intelligent guy, the fact that anybody can play J. R. Smith more effectively than his real life counterpart is not a function of intelligence. If you look at a diagramed NBA or NFL play, they're not exactly rocket science most of the time, and certainly we don't expect the average NBA or NFL player to be super intelligent. However, even if we have the same physical ability as an NBA or NFL player, there's no guaranteed we'd be able to see the correct outcome in the identical situation because it's hectic and chaos and we certainly don't get a bird's eye view of where everyone is, and of course the physical difference between us and a pro player would more than offset any possible advantage that can be obtained from being smarter. A few years ago I was watching college basketball and it was Cornell versus Kentucky, and at the beginning Cornell miraculously didn't get blown out. The analysts start saying about how this prove that Cornell guys use their superior intelligence to make up for their lack of physical skills (literally sounds like something out of a manga), and then the Kentucky guys just start dunking on the Cornell guys every other play and blow them out.
I wonder if this is because there's a decline in the book culture. At least in Asian countries I noticed there's this new thing about self-publishing stuff which basically is taking embarrassing creative attempts during our youth and hope someone approves it. If you go through a publisher, presumably the story has to meet some minimum level of compentence, but the barriers appear to be considerably less when you're talking about self published stuff. Sword Arts Online seems to originate as online fanfiction about a guy getting all the girls for doing nothing, and I guess if that makes you a lot of money there's no reason to say no to that. Maybe that's why I have more problem with Asian based fiction compared to western. Not that Western fiction is awesome or even necessarily makes sense, but take the most implausible or unrealistic story in a western fiction, there's probably someone vaguely professional who at least checked it out if it come out from the west. The ones that really make no sense like Captain Hydra I assume it was approved because the guys doing it figure they need some kind of change to spice things up. Compared to that, a lot of Asian stuff I feel would be bad even if it was fanfiction let alone any higher standards.
I guess in the end, to write about someone that is actually smart you actually have to be somewhat smart too. In Gou Long's "Twin Heroes", the main character's speciality is that he's the smartest man in a world of fireball throwing martial artists. For example, there's a scene where the hero arrives at the bad guy's hideout and found that his adamantium throne has been split in half by a sword (and it was verified that the throne was indeed made out of adamantium). However, the hero shows off his intellect by concluding it is not the mysterious swordsman that we've seen only in the prologue who can split adamantium with a rusty sword, because whatever tools that allowed the villain to make a throne out of adamantium would have been sufficient to split adamantium as well. That is a surprisingly simple deduction to explain the otherwise impossible feat, and it was hilariously wrong because it was indeed done by the mysterious swordsman who could split adamantium with a rusty sword and thus showing even the greatest deductive reasoning can lose to Occam's Razor (all the dumb guys in the story immediately assumed that the mysterious swordsman did it). In fact, Gou Long's work has a very significant detective story influence to it, and I think it's one of the simplest and yet cleverest case of deductive reasoning, even if it turned out wrong, and required no special knowledge or hidden info and can basically be explained in one sentence. It should almost be required reading for aspiring Asian writers that want to write about clever things. Sure, Gou Long is quite possibly the best ever at doing clever tricks that involves fireball throwing martial artists, but successful storywriting isn't supposed to be easy.
Of course, being smart isn't really that useful as a power, especially as a super power. I'm pretty sure everyone is at least ten times smarter than a bear or a lion but good luck fighting one without some tools with your superior intellect. In Azumanga Daioh, Osaka suggested that if Chiyo gets kidnapped, she needs to use her superior genius power like they do in movies and put up a futile struggle and then die. That's probably the overwhelming likely outcome of trying to outsmart their way out of a significantly disadvantaged situation. There's a thing called the J.R. Smith problem for video games. J.R. Smith is an unreliable shooter in real life, but in basketball games he's an incredible shooter. If you look at his shooting percentage he's actually more accurate than a lot of the famous 3 point guys you can think of. In real life, J.R. Smith tends to take bad shots, but in a video game, aided by the full court vision the player can generally easily tell when you got an open look and when you should just pass. While I don't think J. R. Smith is a super intelligent guy, the fact that anybody can play J. R. Smith more effectively than his real life counterpart is not a function of intelligence. If you look at a diagramed NBA or NFL play, they're not exactly rocket science most of the time, and certainly we don't expect the average NBA or NFL player to be super intelligent. However, even if we have the same physical ability as an NBA or NFL player, there's no guaranteed we'd be able to see the correct outcome in the identical situation because it's hectic and chaos and we certainly don't get a bird's eye view of where everyone is, and of course the physical difference between us and a pro player would more than offset any possible advantage that can be obtained from being smarter. A few years ago I was watching college basketball and it was Cornell versus Kentucky, and at the beginning Cornell miraculously didn't get blown out. The analysts start saying about how this prove that Cornell guys use their superior intelligence to make up for their lack of physical skills (literally sounds like something out of a manga), and then the Kentucky guys just start dunking on the Cornell guys every other play and blow them out.
I wonder if this is because there's a decline in the book culture. At least in Asian countries I noticed there's this new thing about self-publishing stuff which basically is taking embarrassing creative attempts during our youth and hope someone approves it. If you go through a publisher, presumably the story has to meet some minimum level of compentence, but the barriers appear to be considerably less when you're talking about self published stuff. Sword Arts Online seems to originate as online fanfiction about a guy getting all the girls for doing nothing, and I guess if that makes you a lot of money there's no reason to say no to that. Maybe that's why I have more problem with Asian based fiction compared to western. Not that Western fiction is awesome or even necessarily makes sense, but take the most implausible or unrealistic story in a western fiction, there's probably someone vaguely professional who at least checked it out if it come out from the west. The ones that really make no sense like Captain Hydra I assume it was approved because the guys doing it figure they need some kind of change to spice things up. Compared to that, a lot of Asian stuff I feel would be bad even if it was fanfiction let alone any higher standards.
I guess in the end, to write about someone that is actually smart you actually have to be somewhat smart too. In Gou Long's "Twin Heroes", the main character's speciality is that he's the smartest man in a world of fireball throwing martial artists. For example, there's a scene where the hero arrives at the bad guy's hideout and found that his adamantium throne has been split in half by a sword (and it was verified that the throne was indeed made out of adamantium). However, the hero shows off his intellect by concluding it is not the mysterious swordsman that we've seen only in the prologue who can split adamantium with a rusty sword, because whatever tools that allowed the villain to make a throne out of adamantium would have been sufficient to split adamantium as well. That is a surprisingly simple deduction to explain the otherwise impossible feat, and it was hilariously wrong because it was indeed done by the mysterious swordsman who could split adamantium with a rusty sword and thus showing even the greatest deductive reasoning can lose to Occam's Razor (all the dumb guys in the story immediately assumed that the mysterious swordsman did it). In fact, Gou Long's work has a very significant detective story influence to it, and I think it's one of the simplest and yet cleverest case of deductive reasoning, even if it turned out wrong, and required no special knowledge or hidden info and can basically be explained in one sentence. It should almost be required reading for aspiring Asian writers that want to write about clever things. Sure, Gou Long is quite possibly the best ever at doing clever tricks that involves fireball throwing martial artists, but successful storywriting isn't supposed to be easy.
