creative writing - Avoiding spectacle creep

It's common in stories for spectacle to build over time. Each story arc, the stakes get higher, the drama gets more intense, the villains get more dangerous, and so on. For a story with a fixed endpoint, that's fine. So long I know where I'm going, it's just a matter of pacing the spectacle increase.

But for an ongoing story, that poses a challenge, particularly in a genre where the stakes start high. The superhero saves the city, then the world, then the universe, then the multiverse, then defeats every villain from every universe simultaneously while blindfolded and in a full body cast, and then what? How can I lower the stakes from there (or ideally, much earlier) without the audience getting bored?

How can I tell an ongoing story without falling victim to spectacle creep?

Answer

There are more things you can do with stakes than escalate ad nauseam.

First, you can vary the threat. For example, Buffy jokes more than once about "saving the world again". The difference comes from saving the world from different things; a new threat might require a new approach, pose a tougher challenge than the previous threat, etc.

Second, there might be personal stakes in addition to the "save the world" stakes: save the world without letting mum find out my secret identity, save the world and my lover whom the Big Bad has put in danger to distract me, save the world from my best friend who's gone crazy. (All from Buffy again, since I've already started with that example).

Third, once in a while, you can lower the stakes. How about helping a single person who's stuck in an abusive relationship? Or not letting any baddies interfere with a friend's wedding?

Fourth, your hero might get de-powered. They suffered a serious wound in the final battle of one story, so in the next story, they're still recovering, and it hinders their ability to deal with the threat of the day. Or they're going through some emotional stuff. Or last time they got fined for damage to buildings, roads, etc., so now they need to save the world without wreaking half a city in the process. Done too often, this trope becomes annoying (as do most others), but once in a while - it adds interest, not only by making the challenge more challenging, but also by showing the hero as not all-powerful. The audience's sense of danger to the hero increases, everything becomes more tense and more exciting.