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MY PARENTS ARE DEAD - THE JOURNAL by BigBlueSkies
Hey! Scrolling through a couple character profiles on Weasyl here had me wondering about a popular background option for those people:
Everyone seems to have dead parents.
Talk to me about this. I'm honestly guilty of it myself with at least a few of my characters. What compels you as a player or writer to it? How does your character deal with it, or if not at all, why?
MY PARENTS ARE DEAD - THE JOURNAL
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Comments
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Mark's parents are alive and well, honestly. Never felt a reason to kill them, since his character doesn't require that level of drama.
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Were things less dramatic than perhaps I feel they needed to be, i'm certain many of my characters would have happy and full families. Good that Mark has his!
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Easier not to involve them in the storyline I think.They can run off into adventure without ever worrying about getting into trouble. Being grounded etc. Though if its a much older character its understandable. Also less work designing what they might look like and what's plausible genetic heritage. I'm still designing what some critters parents might look like.
I've only really had maybe 3 orphans as minor characters. The rest have parents and are alive. Though variety in their situations in life. XD Happy, divorced and etc.
I think its just easier to kill them off. XD lol
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You know, i had a reply for your comment this morning...then my brain went FRRRRRT.
i'll come back to this if I can remember what I wanted to address!
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Such was my temptation when writing characters as a teenager, but I gravitated away from it. It felt like a cliché, and didn't do much in the way of interesting character development.
I don't put a lot of work into my characters' parents, regardless. I decided Zen has adoptive parents, for example, but not much beyond that.
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I think, personally, it takes a little creativity when dealing with characters with lost parents, one or both. I feel confident in the characters I have who do have no parental figures, but I've fallen into those cliché traps before as well.
Experience with loss, sadly, tends to be the best informant of those feelings and sensations.
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I have quite a few characters myself and I think I have only killed off the parents of one of them and that was purposefully to make him the last of his own kind. He doesn't really deal with it either since it that happened while he was fairly young and he doesn't even remember it. He's also had a couple hundred years to deal with it and move on.
There are a couple of characters that just out lived their parents who just died of normal old age and probably just dealt with it like most people deal with the deaths of their parents. This just felt natural for me to write them this way since they gained immortality on their own while their parents remained mortal.
Then there are a few characters that I never really thought of as having parents to begin with; a goddess, a demon, and an ancient creature older than the universe he inhabits. So, there's really nothing for them to deal with since they never had parents to lose to begin with.
Besides them I figure the parents of most of my characters are alive and well or of indeterminate status even if they don't come into the background of my characters much.
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Of course, after all, the focus is on the character themselves, their merits, and all that accompanies. Unless it's relevant, most times you don't need to know about familial relations of kind and quantity.
Interesting that a couple characters of yours underwent apotheosis and dealt with loss in that way. Not often that happens! Unique.
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When it comes to my two main characters:
Kalista, well... who knows who her parents were, I mean she was born from an egg... that was a planet!
Kitila though, I relate her to my real life in a sense... but due to recent events, I'll not post that, but... it is relevant to topic. =(
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Parents back home, don't talk much, though. Not since the bird accident.
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Everyone wants to be Batman.
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Guilty as charged, twice!
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I'll try to be brief about Ilkarin's family history. Ilkarin was born around the time her parents were having to fight in a war, so to protect the newborn, they sent her off to live with a friend who would raise her until the war ended and she would return to her family. Sadly, the friend passed away, leaving Ilkarin alone and soon wandering over to a human town and being taken in by the elder despite many of the humans afraid or mistrusting of her because she was some dragon-creature.
Still, Ilkarin always had parents, and they are still alive, she just never really got to meet them or the like.
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Typically, the story of a protagonist--because an individual character's story, likely, has them as the protagonist in some manner or another--follows the concept of the Monomyth, the basic rubric which ancient stories follow and share in common with modern stories. Consider "Star Wars" episode 4, for a minute. Luke, the Protagonist, is in his comfortable world, what he's familiar with. An old man comes forward, and offers a call to adventure. The hero denies this call, but an action occurs which removes the stability of the heroes comfortable world. The hero takes this call to adventure and sorties forth. The antagonist kills the mentor, the antagonist looks to have won, but then a figure comes into the heroes life which helps the hero attain their perfect self. The hero then faces the antagonist, defeats them, or survives the encounter, and is put into another perfect world, until the cycle repeats.
Death of the family is a great call to adventure, it removes the perfect world with a tragic event, that provides challenges to the characters development and helps guide and pinpoint their choices preemptively.
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Tyr Remora
wouldn't know tyr doesn't have any parents to begin with :V