My Life As A Writer: Learn To Read & See As A Writer To Improve

There's been some very good uses of character in action scenes out of the Gundam franchise over the decades, but this is still the best. From the penultimate episode of The 08th MS Team, protagonist Shiro Amanda vs. junior antagonist Norris Packard.

I come back to this sequence time and again as a good example of a well-written fight scene. The reason? It is a believable fight (verisimilitude), possesses tension (will Packard buy Kergeran enough time to get away/will the 08th Team defend its position), and concludes a father/suitor conflict concerning the love interesting Aina that also catalyzes the final character development for both lovers, and you can see who's driving the pace of action and when that upper hand shifts as you follow who has the superior frame of mind (and when it's broken).

Given that the giant robot is a stand in for the human body, allowing depictions of violence that are otherwise grounds for censorship in many markets, what you see here is a fight between one veteran soldier and the hero's entire unit (as well as the artillery they're escorting) as the microcosm of the larger Federation/Zeon battle in Southeast Asia during the One Year War.

Shiro is relying on his comrades and his determination to live for Aina cover for his clear deficiencies of skill as a warrior and acumen as an officer. Norris knows his suit, his enemies' suits, himself, and--for the most part--his enemies with absolute confidence. This mastery, coupled with expert familiarity with the terrain, is what allows him to utterly dominate the situation despite being grossly outnumbered and outgunned.

Norris is on offense from the first, and every move he makes is aimed at keeping his enemies off-balance between their ears; he knows that combat, first and foremost, is decided in the mind. He spooks them early, pulls them into his frame as The Great Zeon Ace, and by exploiting their fear of him he is able to go about his mission objectives--the Guntanks, as they pose a greater threat to Kergeran tham the Gundams--and make the 08th Team focus on him than their objective (maintain support fire on the Zeon base).

Norris makes them accept his terms of argument, as it were, and it is not until Shiro discloses that he's in love with Aina that Norris's frame brakes. Until this point, the frame was Great Zeon Ace Will Stomp Feddie Scum With Ease; now it's Determined Lover & Friends Won't Let One Zeon Punk Keep Him From His Girl. It's not enough to stop Norris from completing his mission, but it is enough to make both sides lose the fight, again demonstrating Shiro's inexperience leading to less-than-desirable outcomes despite himself.

The missing context, for those unfamiliar with this story, is that Aina and Shiro meet early on as they're both transiting to Earth as both are forced to shelther together in a wreck after a skirmish. They meet again, now both disillusioned with the war, and in typical Gundam romance fashion fall for each other despite conflicting loyalties. Norris is the surrogate father here, wanting only the best for Aina, which is why this is the Father-v-Suitor showdown and the result is a typical Gundam tragedy for all concerned.

(Yes, this turns out well enough in the end; Tomino didn't write this ending.)

In prose format, with good outlining, this can be done in one chapter. It requires setting up your subplots (as this series did) accordingly so you can enjoy your drama lasagna at this point, but it is worth putting in the work during preparation to ensure that the reader enjoys a rich narrative experience that satisfies them throughly while leaving them wanting for more.

While I'm using very well-known anime for convience, and A/V media has value for writers of any media to some extent, if you're working mostly in prose then I urge you to crack open those covers and read the old masters like E.E. Smith, Robert E. Howard, Walter B. Gibson, and Edgar Rice Burroughs; they were masters of economy of presentation, giving you slices of literary layer cake in a sentance and seven course meals over a single pocket-sized paperback novel. Don't let the Litfags and the snobs tell you otherwise; a lot of their work is either falling into the public domain or will in a few years from this post, so seek it out and read for yourself- and remember that libraries still exist, so look there as well as the used bookstores and Project Gutenberg/Internet Archive.

And if you're already thinking of how you can pull off something like this, you're already well ahead of the poor bastards that write Steven Seagal's scripts (including Seagal) as well as many present-day OldPub darlings like Tomlinson, Scalzi, and that savage half-wit who wins Hugos when Johnny-boy doesn't.