: Re: How to prevent seeming like a Marty Stu-ish villain is cheating? In a story I'm writing, there's a villain who is a genius strategist that can get anything he wants, whatever it is, by developing

@Ogunnowo420

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Adversity; You have to show that it's not easy to be this capable. If it is easy, then perhaps that's your problem. If it doesn't feel like the antagonist has "earned" his position and if the weakness is just kind of "there" for a story reason then it's not personal and wrapped up in a whole. Making your bad-guy too strong is the problem, you've already identified it.

Give him weaknesses or show the sacrifices he's making to patch his weaknesses and make it obvious, to the person who discovers the weakness, that the way the bad guy can be defeated makes sense with all of the other actions going on.

I will note that if someone has the ability to think of every consequence you might want to consider the theorems about the unknowable. That is, for any system described by logic, there will be some part of the system logic can't reach. You'll find talked about in mathematics/physics/philosophy. It seems like exactly the thing you want need.

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