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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/27835
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm in a dilemma: I don't want my characters to have flawless, limitless and bad-consequence-less powers, but I also don't want to have my creativity limited by such rules and limits.  
In my case, it's not a book, but a multimedia work, i.e. such powers are _visible_, with flashy effects and all, instead of just imaginable, so the possibilities are different from books.

I find it awesome when I see a work where the creator has the freedom to make the character use a new power out of nowhere, usually a character whose powers are not much explained (or even well explained, but in an unexplainable/incoherent way they manage to do that) and most of the public just don't care about how the character found out that he could do that, or that doing movement X would result in such new power, or why it happened, no, they just like it, because it's cool, if it's cool, screw logic, [it's cool](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool)!

I want to have creative freedom to create the powers, but I don't want to keep the questions above unanswered. However, the more I explain the _why_s and _how_s, the less freedom I have, and the more I try to fix things up, the more incoherence is created.

Now how to resolve this dilemma? Do I keep all the rules and sacrifice "coolness" for the sake of coherence/realism, or do I surrender to the "Rule of Cool"?

Original score: 1