So in his FLFS playtest, Jason found the Thematic Batteries to be somewhat lacking:

Jason Morningstar wrote:
People would degrade their abilities when it didn't really matter, or when they were certain of success, in order to amp up their ability when it did matter. All thematically appropriate but not very interesting.

When I first read your response I was all, "Well that's how they're supposed to work."  Then it took me a day or so to figure out the problem.  Would it be fair to say you were expecting Thematic Batteries to complicate the situation during roleplay, Jason?  Most mechanics that look superficially similar function this way (GURPS Disadvantages, for instance).  Thematic Batteries can, but only at the player's discretion -- no reason why you can't charge your 'Useless Prat' battery at the worst possible time, after all.

But at least during roleplay, the purpose of Thematic Batteries is primarily to express character.  They are entirely cribbed right out of the narrative structure of adventure movies, where the main character is shown to be a "Dangerous Loose Cannon" in the first half hour and then uses that "Dangerous Loose Cannon" thing to beat down the badguys in the last half hour.  In terms of addressing premise, they are zero sum in this application, merely a mechanic that rewards characterization with efficacy.

Where the Thematic Batteries help focus premise and lead to tough choices is in the Engineering the Situation segment.  There you take those core elements of the characters and combine and oppose them to create the conflicts that you play through.  You are setting up a situation that the character has to respond to one way or another -- ie, address premise.  In roleplay, actual use of Thematic Batteries to pump stats is more or less riffing off of that main theme that you set up in the Situation, and the Spoils also exert some minor pressure for the character to address premise as a sort of constant low-grade reminder "Dude, this is totally about you!"  The main course is in the Situation, though.

First off, am I making sense or barnyard noises?

Secondly, and more to the meat of my inquiry, how do we reconcile flags that are used to create an engaging situation but are also used as player resources to address that situation?  This is why I've given a hairy eyeball at the discussion over "Gamist Flags", which seems to me to create a tautology -- this player has Cone of Fire, so we have the PCs fight the Ice Elementals, and the player wins handily.  It shades into the Czege Principle (being your own opposition is no fun).  My "solution" in FLFS was to make the flags (thematic batteries) zero-sum in terms of player resources -- you have to take that disadvantage before you can take an advantage on the same flag.  This also tends (in theory) to provoke the players to examine both the situation in roughly even terms -- they've got to suffer the situation before they rock it.  By contrast, The Shadow of Yesterday does not use flags (keys) as player resources, but as the trigger for the reinforcement system and gaining XP, thus avoiding the issue entirely.

I want to say that the thematic batteries inspiring the situation, and then the players using the thematic batteries -- for both disadvantage and advantage -- to address the situation, and the other players scoring spoils by continually reminding the player of their batteries, does Vincent's little tornado around the fruitful void.  But is this design completing a circuit, or is it shorting out entirely?