Note: This document is inspired by the Trope Talk video of the same name by Overly Sarcastic Productions. I highly recommend watching that video before reading this doc. In fact, you should watch some of their other videos too. They're all great!
Every character has strengths and weaknesses. Or more specifically, every character has a space of situations they're good at handling and a space of situations they're bad at handling. Now, this makes sense. Nobody's good at everything, and most people are only really good at a few things. And since most stories involve at least a degree of problem-solving, it makes for a more interesting narrative if your character has some things they're good at and some things they struggle with. Now, that's pretty simple when you're writing a single protagonist, but when you're writing with a group of protagonists, it helps to keep party balance in mind. Characters that work well together should probably have complementary strengths. If one character has a weakness or a general space of things they're not good at, another character could have that as a strength so the team can handle that situation even if the individual can't.
The concept of party composition mostly shows up in games like D&D, where it's common for players to balance the character they want to play with the problem-solving role the party might need them to play. If the party already has a tank who hits hard and eats damage for breakfast, it'd probably be redundant and unhelpful to play another tank, and it might be better to dust off the squishy wizard glass cannon character to hide behind the tank and chuck fireballs. A well-balance party composition can take a lot of forms, but the most well-known example in fiction is the Five-Man Band.
In the traditional layout, every character is defined by a single character strength that makes them exemplary in the specific space of situations they're designed to handle. The leader leads, tha lancer makes the leader more interesting, the big guy hits hard and takes damage, the heart handles the social and emotional stuff, and the smart guy is smart. Together, they can handle a much broader range of situations than each individual character could do alone. That said, some of these characters are more self-sufficient than others. Leaders are more susceptible to this, since they're frequently also heroes, and heroes are usually the writer's favorite character and thus often end up written with flaws that are much more token than structural. It's more common for the other team members to be more specialized to the point that there's a lot of situations they can't really handle. For example, the Big Guy is usually extremely reliable in uncomplicated combat situations, but frequently ends up shelved during any other plotline, or has to rely on a secondary skillset to run support.
Today, let's discuss the Big Guy's primary foil and opposite, the Smart Guy! These two roles are so complimentary that Big Guy-Smart Guy duos are very common outside the broader context of the Five-Man Band. One's the muscle, one's the brains. One can hit stuff real good, the other points them at stuff to hit. It's almost symbiotic. Where the Big Guy is defined by their strength, the Smart Guy is defined by their brains. The Smart Guy, sometimes known as the Mastermind or the Ideas Guy, is the designated Smart member of the team. Now "smart" is an extremely subjective judgment that can mean a lot of different things, so the Smart Guy is actually a surprisingly flexible archetype depending on the genre and the story they're in.
The Smart Guy is usually not the only character on the team who gets to use their brain, but they tend to do it more consistently than the rest of the gang, much like how the powerhouse might not be the unconditionally be the strongest character, but are more reliably powerful than their teammates. Other members of the team might have a burst of brilliance or a lot of expertise in their very specific area, but the Smart Guy is the character whose job is knowing stuff and putting the pieces together. Now, like the Big Guy, the Smart Guy is a very specialized character, and a very functional one. As in, they serve a narrative function. And that means when they're in a situation that doesn't play to their strengths, they often have very little to do. Big Guys and Smart Guys frequently end up on the shelf while the rest of the cast handles the actual central plot stuff, which I think is a shame!
Party composition is all well and good, but I tend to believe that the characters who compose that party should be able to stand on their own as characters. Doesn't mean they need to be able to handle any situation on their own, just that they should, you know, be characters in their own right, heroes of their own story. And heroes of their own story don't tend to wait around in the toybox while the rest of the cast does the actually useful stuff. Well-written Smart Guys have the agency and initiative, and will find things to do even if the story doesn't need any exposition or technobabble. Now, while the Big Guy is pretty simple conceptually and tends to work the same way across genres, the Smart Guy covers a little more ground and has a lot more functional variation. "Smart" can mean a lot of different things.
In fact, the smart guy usually covers so many thinky-based roles that it's sometimes more efficient to define the Smart Guy by what they CAN'T do than by what they CAN. If it involves being clever, observant, well-educated, perceptive, technically skilled, inventive, and so on and so forth, they can probably do it. If it involves hitting something until it breaks, they probably can't. The Smart Guy is like a multi-tool. They can get you out of a lot of situations, but usually not the same situations you'd fix with a baseball bat or a folding chair. Now, there are a few broad roles that's very common for a Smart Guy to fill, and they're not mutually exclusive. Smart Guys can play a lot of roles, even in the space of one story, so they often conform to a grab bag of Smart Guy roles rather than specializing in one above all others.
In modern and sci-fi adjacent settings, you might find the Techie, the character who's good with tech. Computers, robots, spaceships, basically anything electric is under their purview. They could be a gadgeteer genius, a mad scientist, a hacker, an actual robot, or basically anything with a proficiency for keyboards and blinky lights. If a problem is technology-based in any way, this character is the designated solution. In superhero media, these guys usually run around in robot suits, unless they're villains, in which case they might turn their attention to building spacelasers and volcano lairs and stuff. In space-based sci-fi, they're usually the engineer who keeps the ship working. Broadly, this archetype gives the audience an inroad into a segment of the setting they're probably not familiar with. In a futuristic or otherwise unrealistic setting, future tech and sci-fi shenanigans are basically whatever the writer wants them to be, and worldbuilding-wise, they're a lot more inobvious to the audience than things like "space gunslinger" or "desert planet" that are basically familiar real-world things repackaged for Space.
For similar reasons, fantasy setting will usually make the Smart Guy the Mage. This depends on genre limitations, but the gist is that this smart guy has unusual powers by the standards of the setting. In sci-fi, they're usually psychic instead. But in fantasy and urban fantasy, they're typically a wizard, generally physically weak but highly skilled in their specific powerset. Sometimes, they're born with their abilities and hone them through practice. But in other cases, they earn their powers through book-learning and study, or craft their powers by making things like potions or magic artifacts. This archetype is also very useful from a writing standpoint because if your setting has a magic system, this gives you a character who knows everything about it and can explain worldbuilding details as needed.
This ties into the next big role, the Encyclopedia. This one has no genre limits and is, frankly speaking, one of the most common roles for the Smart Guy to fill. It's also one of the easiest to mess up. The point of the Encyclopedia is to know stuff. They've usually got worldbuilding book-learning, so they're up-to-date on basically anything that the heroes might need to have exposited at them. Typically things like history, politics, in-universe lore, monster identification, and so on. In the less well-written cases, the Encyclopedia has very little personality beyond this, and serves the largely functional role of getting the characters and audience up to speed on what's going on in the plot. Instead of having motivations or dreams, this character's sole role in the story is to tell the other characters and the audience what the story is. The Encyclopedia also has rare crossover with more combat-oriented archetypes, since sometimes the character is a walking encyclopedia because of their extensive life experience, like a grizzled monster hunter who's earned an encyclopedic knowledge of the monsters they fight.
This has some overlap with a more unusual Smart Guy role, the Street Smarts Guy! This character is smart because they're jaded and clicked into how the world really works. They're frequently cynical, and might be slightly older than the other characters. This is basically what happens when you combo The Smart Guy with The Lancer as a foil to a more naive Leader character, or with the Big Guy to produce a very effective heavy hitter, or with The Mentor to provide worldly guidance to the rest of the team. This character usually has more naive and inexperienced teammates, none of whom fill the more traditional Smart Guy role, making them the Smart Guy mostly by process of elimination.
Another somewhat unusual role for the Smart Guy is as the Tactician. This Smart Guy's job is coming up with plans for how the team as a whole is going to solve whatever situation they're in. They might be masterminding a heist or something, but even in less heisty situations, their job is basically to understand their teammates' respective strengths from the top down and figure out how to best utilize them. These guys frequently play chess. This is rarer than someother Smart Guy archetypes because it's a lot more central, and is often what happens when the Leader and the Smart Guy roles are merged into one character. The Tactician doesn't usually take a hands-on combat role, but they'll usually be the one who lays out the plan for how the combat is gonna go.
Now, there's plenty of other archetypes the Smart Guy can play into, but there are limits. The problem is, if the Smart Guy is good at too many other things, they kind of stop functioning as the Smart Guy and take on a more structural role, like the Lancer or the Mentor. Part of what defines the Smart Guy is the role they play in party balance. Now I've seen some confusion about this, because while the Five-Man Band is a very useful trope classification and it's very tempting to slot characters into the five color-coded roles, it's very rare for characters to be defined by only single traits, even in ensemble casts. Very few stories have fully clear-cut Five-Man Bands where each party member exclusively fits into only one role. Big Guys usually share traits with the Heart, Leaders are often heavier hitters than Big Guys, Lancers are typically the most street-smart and observant party members which has shades of the Smart Guy… They're not just one-dimensional archetypes, they're characters. Their title doesn't define everything about them, but it does define their role in the group. Even if the Leader can hit harder than the Big Guy, it's still the Big Guy's job to hit stuff. So while the Smart Guy can fill a lot of roles, if they have too much going on, they can stop fitting into the Smart Guy space. Like, is it accurate to say Batman is the Smart Guy of the Justice League? Well, yes… But there are more accurate ways you could describe him. Like the Lancer to Superman's de facto Leader, or "The Ace", the TVTropes term for a character who's good at everything. "Smart Guy" isn't technically wrong, but it's not fully right either, because it doesn't have the right implications.
Like I said earlier, part of what defines the Smart Guy is what they can't do. Most commonly, the Smart Guy can't fight, or at least can't fight as well as the rest of the group. For instance, in Avatar: The Last Airbender, check it off your bingo cards, Sokka is the team Smart Guy and also the only main character who can't bend. Over the course of the series, he does learn some pretty solid combat skills, but that's not what he brings to the team. Sokka's a startingly good tactician, and very good at maintaining a big-picture perspective, making him pretty much the only main character who consistently notices when they're being tricked or manipulated. He's even called out in-story as "the idea guy" because it is consistently his job to come up with the plans. And Sokka's a fast learner who undergoes a surprising amount of character development. The one thing he can't do is bend. No amount of training or study will change that. As a result, everyone else on the team can dish out way more damage than he can, so even though he does learn to fight better, he never fills the role of team damage-dealer, and while he can hold his own okay, what he brings to the table is tactics and military intelligence.
Now this is very common. Smart Guys are frequently non-combat, at least relative to the rest of the cast. Superhero Smart Guys aren't strictly non-combat because nobody in a superhero setting is fully non-combat, but they usually don't have powers. They'll either use tech they built themselves, or they'll have some kind of power that's not automatically super useful in a fight like telepathy or being really stretchy, forcing them to be tactical. The general term for this subtrope is the very on-the-nose "Weak But Skilled", which describes characters that don't have much brute force power but are very good at using what they do have, whether that's technology, magic, basic social skills, whatever. In some stories where the average team power level is pretty high, the Smart Guy being the Token Normal Human frequently means they eventually get left behind by power creep. Of course, in other stories, the Smart Guy's unique skillset often ends up turning them into a bit of a powerhouse. This is most common in fantasy settings where the Smart Guy gets to be a wizard and book-learning literally lets you bend the laws of physics, but it also shows up in sci-fi and sci-fi adjacent stories where the Smart Guy either is a robot or is running around in a cool robot suit. Arguably the best thing about building your superpowers is you can always build yourself more superpowers. But some Smart Guys basically don't rely on brute force at all, or if they do, they rely on other people using brute force for them. And frankly, these guys can be uniquely hard to write.
This is partly because smart characters in general are hard to write, for self-illustrative reasons. If the character is in a seemingly impossible situation and needs to figure out a cunning plan to escape using nothing but their wits and this paper clip they found, the writer has to do exactly as much intellectual legwork to figure out how the hell they're gonna do that. And if it were easy, it wouldn't be impressive when the character did it. We discussed this back in the Magnificent Bastards chapter. There's a difference between a character figuring stuff out and a character knowing whatever the author needs them to know, and the audience can tell which is happening. A Smart Guy with a fallback skill is simpler to write because they have similar easier ways to solve things than their brains. A character whose only option is coming up with a clever plan is going to overtax the writer's clever plan inator and make things difficult. It's well worth it if done right, it's just tricky. But Smart Guys often have at least one other skillset they can rely on in a pinch. Relying on gadgets or magic is all well and good, and some have at least a little combat training or a taser or something, but some Smart Guys pull double-duty as the party Face, the social one who handles the charisma checks. In fact, when a Smart Guy is good eniugh at talking to people, they sometimes end up in the Leader role, since technically speaking, all a Leader needs to be good at is handling their team, which can be presumed to be a corollary of being good at social stuff in general.
This is frankly somewhat rarer than the converse trope, the Socially Inept Smart Guy, an archetype that is probably grounded in decades-old stereotypes about what nerds are like, where the Smart Guy is so focused on being smart that they don't do anything fun like punching things or talking to girls. This ties into a whole space of tropes where the Smart Guy is frequently neurodivergent, either coded that way, potentially accidentally, or explicitly stated in-canon. Now this is kind of a minefield, but it is not inherently a bad thing depending on how it's handled. There's nothing wrong with writing your Smart Guy's attachment to their area of expertise as something like a hyperfixation, or their technobabble as an infodump, or giving them insecurities about either or both of those things. There's just a lot of iffy stereotypes connected to the space of neurodivergence that it's very easy to stumble ass-backwards into, like how when the writers decided to start explicitly coding Sherlock Holmes as autistic, they did that by breaking down from the original canon and making him a selfish asshole with no friends. So original! No one'e ever thought of making the genius a jerk before! In fact, there's a whole space of topes around the Smart Guy being an antisocial jerk, and a lot of them are rooted in this space. Smart Guys frequently get written as emotionless and uncaring.
While that might be drawing inspiration from the stock character of the Annoying Know-It-All well-actually-ing their way through life, some of it probably has its roots in the broadly negative perception of the space if neurodivergence, where someone's most natural comfortable habits can come across as antisocial or disruptive to the neurotypical people around them, creating a perceived correlation between "this person is very focused on one specific area of expertise and really likes learning and talking about it" and "this person is weird and I don't get them so they're probably just not trying hard enough to socialize with me which makes them a bad person." It's no bueno. This part of the trope has been fading in recent years, which is a relief, but it's still a bit of a minefield when writing Smart Guy characters, since it's easy to use tropes without examining them too closely first, which means if the trope has some problems baked-in, they can end up getting repeated without the author meaning any harm by it or even realizing. For instance, it's not uncommon for the Smart Guy's teammates to make fun of their interests or try to convince them to be less of a nerd and/or more "normal", which can make sense for them in-character, and even sometimes gets used for character development if the Smart Guy's interests end up saving the day and causing the rest of the team to re-evaluate their judginess.
But sometimes, the writers are only making fun of the Smart Guy because the writer thinks that's the appropriate way to treat someone you don't understand, or someone who has niche interests like…the entire field of computer science, or the entire space of video games… I dunno, man. I feel like the Stock Hollywood Nerd is working off a definition of what was niche and nerdy, like thirty years ago at this point. Even D&D's gone mainstream. Wait, what IS niche and nerdy these days?
Now one thing about the Smart Guy we haven't mentioned yet is that Smart Guys can be evil. Evil Smart Guys are usually mad scientists, chessmaster manipulators, generally evil geniuses. Like heroic Smart Guys, evil Smart Guys don't tend to work alone, and will usually ally themselves with strong or powerful bad guys who they can manipulate into helping with their evil schemes. This does frequently backfire, though. Evil Smart Guys sometimes suffer from the ol' hubris problem, which undercuts their smartness a little bit by giving them a massive blind spot for their own vulnerabilities. As discussed back in the Magnificent Bastards chapter, the really scary Evil Smart Guys are the ones without glaringky exploitable character flaws. It's actually about as common for Evil Smart Guys to be the main villain as it is for them to be villain's right-hand minion, and either way, their usually a pretty dangerous threat. If they're the right-hand minion, they might conclude that their evil boss is too dumb to live and backstab them before taking over, which is the kind of thing heroes never need to worry about.
So the Smart Guy is kind of a tricky archetype to write. They're very…functional in most stories, which means it can be difficult to give them an arc of their own, especially if the writer doesn't really relate to them and treats them like an exposition machine. They're also typically balanced on the razor thin line between being useless and being overpowered, because being smart doesn't do you much good if you can't do anything with it, but if you're smart AND powerful, you become ridiculously dangerous, so any kind of development or powerup risks tipping them over the edge into rendering the rest of the team redundant. But they are potentially very fun, and it's always neat to watch a clever character figure things out and potentially save the say in the process.
Thank you so much for listening. If you have any requests, let me know in the comments, and I hope you enjoyed.