Yes it makes sense. It would motivate them powerfully. But it’s been done too many times, and it’s too easy.
The rule makes you find more interesting ways of motivating them. Are they driven by bruised pride? By romance? By obsession? Anything is more interesting than rehashing the cliché Hollywood loves.
Similarly, don’t make a villain more evil by saying “they’re a dictator and also a kiddie-fiddler orremoved”. That’s just tacking on villainy.
That would be like having a right-wing US President, and saying “oh he’s also aremoved and best friends with a child-trafficker” - lazy, unrealistic writing. Make your villains more nuanced please.
new rule: all stories must either be explicitly revolutionary or be slice of life shows in post-capitalist utopias anything else is reactionary
I can get behind this
I mean…
what if we kill their houseplants
My name is inigo montoya, you killed my calathea orbifolia, prepare to die
But it’s been done too many times, and it’s too easy.
Ok then I don’t wanna see any cishet characters anymore. BO-RING!!! To put a twist onnit you could always have a protagonist with a weird found family, and have them get killed. People would cry, I think.
The rule makes you find more interesting ways of motivating them. Are they driven by bruised pride? By romance? By obsession?
By burning hatred mixing ugly style with lust…
That’s just tacking on villainy.
Ideally I think that if there is a “villain”/antagonist, they should have wronged the protagonist in a really achingly specific way. It should be extremely personal.
To put a twist onnit you could always have a protagonist with a weird found family, and have them get killed.
Too late, the Witcher series did that
Though largely people hated that arc and celebrated when the unhinged villain brutally murdered Ciri’s found family in front of her
Happens in Legend of the Condor Heroes, too.
More proof that The Witcher as an IP is a net negative…
As a fan of the games. I can’t argue with you (sad lol). I love the idea and shit but fuck most of the story is annoying AF.
But beyond snark that twists the premise in a gay and fandom-bent direction, the premise can be deconstucted itself: why does this conception of storytelling require a protagonist to be wronged by an antagonist who then must be stopped? Why does narrative only center around violent conflict? Has the burger reich so perverted our sensibilities? Is there no room for rumination on the internal lives of characters, the social links between them? The processing of grief? The trials of organising, perhaps? Existential dread? Does the ghost of Joϟϟeph Kkkampbell haunt us so?
Ideally I think that if there is a “villain”/antagonist, they should have wronged the protagonist in a really achingly specific way. It should be extremely personal.
The antagonist banged the MC’s dad and was gone in the morning when dad woke up.
This just in: a rule that prevents writing a sorry about a Palestinian fighting the Epstein Regime.
Sorry kiddos, your life story is a trope.
Well lets use the next trope: Kidnap the daughter/wife (has to be female)
are you suggesting they should write men you’d want to recover?!
Um a story about a group of women communist fighters mowing down nazi brigades in order to free their POW husbands would be about the best story I can imagine actually
Ok POW wives and I’ll watch it
Deal!
Nah let’s take it one further, just fridge them
The main character is forced to spend time with their cringe family and gets so annoyed that they go on a hero’s journey just to avoid them. Occasionally they get brought into a group phonecall where the family is having a shouting match over whether to buy a new chair or fix the broken one. The argument is never resolved over the entire 12-book series.
Disney in shambles right now
“Neither do we!”
If you wanna do something out of the ordinary, have a cast that’s mostly Black. (I know this exists, but it’s still pretty rare.) BUT I want it to be either fantasy or sci-fi.
Like I dont think there is a single fantasy or sci-fi show/movie with an entirely black cast at least that I know off.
EDIT You could say Black Panther, but Black Panther with a mostly white cast would be a very weird idea and feel wrong. So I don’t think that one counts, since it needed a mostly Black cast to work. Also super heroe movies are not what im thinking off when I say sci-fi/fantasy.
The Culture average skin tone in humanoids is a lot closer to Black than white, but race doesn’t really exist as a culturally meaningful category for them. The only time it comes up is some Azadians making shitty remarks about Gurgeh.
i’ll give you two guesses what the actors in any mainstream adaption would look like.
One of the many reasons nobody with the resources to make a Culture adaptation could ever be trusted to do so
Only a matter of time before Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf gets an adaptation. And there’s supposed to be a movie of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower soon.
Like I dont think there is a single fantasy or sci-fi show/movie with an entirely black cast at least that I know off.
Have you been reading books from Africa?
I was specifically taking about movies and shows. I’m aware there’s african-fiction in terms of books.
most of them from the black world have black casts from what I have seen
Nnedi Okorafor or N.K. Jemisin might have some scifi/fantasy. I know of their work but not read anything
While that is a very fair recommendation I dont think there are any movies / shows inspired by her. (fuck I just realized im in the writing comm)
Yeelen is a movie I can think of that ian’t American.
Ok. I will give you that. Still the landscape feels very sparse wouldnt you agree ? Like there is Sinners if we count that generously as sci/fantasy. In regards of recent movies but I cant think of much.
Sinners is legit good btw. Go watch it.
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if my whole family died i wouldnt want to do anything
The classic fantasy trope of ignoring how disabling trauma can be
I’ve made it a ground rule whenever I run TTRPGs that the player backstory can’t leave them parentless. Orphan with adopted family, fine. Raised by a street gang, sure. Collective community parenting, right.
The problem was always “orphan assassins”. Nobody in their backstory at all, parents dead, somehow a highly trained killer
Not having family ties makes sense for a person doing weird dangerous adventures.
No family ties is one thing if there’s a compelling reason for it that creates further storytelling opportunities. My problem, after a great deal of experience, is people reading Baby’s First Drizzt or something and inventing, ex nihilo, the brooding cloaked assassin with no ties to anyone or anything, who has no particular reason to join a part and no particular motivation to do anything at all except brood. Making people sit down and think about who their character is and why leads to more interesting characters, both for the player to play and for the other players to interact with.
I’ve let people do brooding assassin types in my games previously, and I’ll continue to do so, but my only requirement is that they give a reason for why they’re like that and how they got there. Maybe their child is being used to compel them to act, maybe they’ve been wronged by society and they’ve Become The Joker, maybe they’re literally cursed with bloodlust and avoid forming relationships due to the risk. I’ve seen all those. They worked great.
There are forms of writing that arent for tabletop games
Great, I’m not talking about those, I’m talking about one of my home rules for tabletop games.
The problem was always “orphan assassins”. Nobody in their backstory at all, parents dead, somehow a highly trained killer
I mean it makes sense to me that this kind of character would exist in a lot of settings. If you’re a gang of assassins looking for new people to turn into killers, a war orphan who has already become somewhat desensitized to violence, may be easily manipulable by filling the role left by dead parents, and who has no one who will know to come looking for them if they disappear seems like a pretty solid candidate
it makes sense but it tends to breed empty characters with no growth potential and no real hooks for storytelling
I suppose it can. That’s why the assassin gang/teacher(s) should fill the roles normally filled by family for that character. You can tell all kinds of stories about questioning the philosophy which supports being hired murderers, or recognizing and gaining distance from the abusive relationship which turned one into a killer, etc. I feel like a lot of these kinds of characters tell very interesting stories about figuring out who you want to be and learning that your mentors or parent figures aren’t necessarily good people.
Aha, and now you’ve created an interesting backstory with storytelling hooks! There was a war, the character is receptive to manipulation in exchange for comfort, and there’s someone turning victims into soldiers.
This is why Chainsaw Man appeals to so many people: the protagonist’s main motivation is to cop some titties and get laid. Whomst among us hasn’t charged into the mouth of eldritch horrors for the possibility of getting a Fr*nch kiss?
MC of Gintama’s main motivation is to do as little work as possible and to not get hasseled by his landlord
If life imitated art, we’d have better villains (thinking of BtAS)
My motivation is being a lumberjack in the forest to get sick gains but all of these gosh durn vampires keep interrupting my workout
All my ttrpg characters have alive parents that they get along with. It’s not like they all have perfect childhoods but I generally have been writing backstories with the gist of this post in mind
One of my players tried to have a dead parent but I just revealed he’d had his own mini-odyssey trying to get home and was basically fine. Reconciling one side who hadn’t seen him in 10 years with his experience of only being away a few months (there was a time stasis field involved) made for a much more interesting side plot than “my dad’s dead :(” did a backstory.
The character has a healthy relationship with his family, then their nephew has to move in due to <insert circumstances> and Nephew so talented it overshadows Character, it’s not like the family starts to be dismissive, they still care about each other, but now Nephew gets all the spotlight. You’d expect the Character to get jealous, but they actually become friends and Nephew offers to serve as a mentor, however the Character is like really bad at learning, hurting themselves in the process, this gets the family worried and they ask Nephew to stop it, which is quite severe psychic damage all things considered. After making a recovery Character decides to lay down and accept being mediocre, they get occasional encouragement to keep on, but none of it prevents them from the depressive slumber, years pass and the nephew eventually leaves, things go back to the way they used to?
