The wise old mentor. The responsible parent. They exist almost entirely to provide guidance and advice to the hero, but what happens when the hero doesn’t want it? What happens when the hero pushes away their mentor? A hero arguing with the adults for the sake of arguing, or to force the hero to deal with the problem alone, should be avoided. At the very least, they should eventually come to realize the adults had a point. This can provide necessary conflict and growth for the hero, but when this becomes the hero’s defining characteristic, it gets old fast.

As I’ve written about before, sometimes it’s necessary for adults to step back so the children or teenagers can save the world. Sometimes, this takes the form of rebellious teenagers that know better than the adults because they’re teenagers. This is to be expected of teenage characters, because it’s common among teenagers. I was no exception at that age, but when it defines the character, it gets old. The fifth Harry Potter book is my least favorite of the bunch because that’s how it felt, like Harry was whining about his life the whole time. Adults make mistakes too, but the heroes should eventually come to an understanding with them.

The previous books fall into this trap as well. Harry refuses to listen to the adults, assuming he knows better, or they wouldn’t understand, or other reasons that are there to ensure Harry has to do everything on his own. While the adults are as much to blame as Harry, it never goes anywhere. Neither side seems to learn anything, making it conflict for the sake of conflict.

Heroes did this rather well. The character Claire Bennet, who could heal from anything, and her father, who tracked down and captured people with powers, had conflict throughout the series. While her father knows what he’s doing (mostly), Claire wants to live her life as normally as she can. They butt heads throughout the first season, but when Claire sees what the people for whom her father works are like, she realizes he’s been trying to protect her from them. At the same time, her father realizes that she’s more capable of taking care of herself than he’d been giving her credit for. Their understanding of one another gives the conflict a satisfying conclusion, instead of existing for the sake of killing time.

Creating conflict between characters is fine, but it should have some sort of resolution. The same goes for heroes not getting along with their mentors and the adults in general. Refusing to get along only so they can see the clarity of each other’s viewpoint later is good, but pointlessly arguing so the hero can go it alone isn’t. Eventually, it has to end, preferably with them seeing eye to eye.

#Essay #Characters #Mentors #Heroes

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Sometimes in a story, a protagonist turns antagonist. This shouldn’t happen at once, although there may be an inciting incident that pushes them over the edge. That character should slowly change, sliding ever closer to evil as they have to justify their actions to others. It makes perfect sense in their head, and if their friends can’t understand that, it’s their friends’ problem. While many of my characters did have problems that put their friends in danger, there were two that became active antagonists/villains: Sally-Anne and Rose. The difference was that Sally-Anne remained a perspective character, allowing my readers to see what happened in her mind. Rose, as far as her friends knew, snapped. Thus, I’m going to focus on Sally-Anne as an example.

This didn’t happen at once. Sally-Anne was everyone’s friend, trusted by staff and students alike at Hogwarts. Everyone knew her, and even though she was Muggle-born, the Slytherins didn’t actively harass her. People opened up to her, often sharing secrets or gossip. One of a few times she used this to her advantage was breaking up a fight between the Gryffindor and Slytherin Quidditch teams, blackmailing the Slytherin captain into complacency. In her mind, this was justified. As time went on, she saw her friends becoming less trustful of the Ministry (this is fifth year, when the Ministry didn’t trust Hogwarts), and believed that the Ministry was there to help them. She believed Harry when he said Voldemort had returned, but reminded him that his word alone wasn’t enough to cause everyone to panic, which is exactly what would happen if the Ministry agreed with him. Once again, she justified this with “I know better”. This is something that happens often with characters slowly turning: justification. They keep having to justify their actions because other people don’t see things the way they do.

Oftentimes when a protagonist is changing like that, another character is responsible. In this case, it was Umbridge. Sally-Anne saw Umbridge as a Ministry official, not a “goon” as Hermione might’ve put it, someone trying to reassure worried people and avoid a mass panic. As far as they knew, it wasn’t possible for anyone to come back from the dead, upon Umbridge insisted. She seeded Sally-Anne with the idea that Hermione was losing herself to grief after losing Rose. Once again, Sally-Anne understood this. She slowly began to wonder if her friends were right, and if there were other motives for claiming Voldemort was back.

Finally, there’s the tipping point. For Sally-Anne, it was when she started believing Umbridge over her friends. She still didn’t entirely trust Umbridge, but she realized that Hermione refused to see reason when it came to their newest teacher. In Sally-Anne’s mind, Umbridge was reforming the school in which they’d nearly died multiple times in a few years, while Hermione had convinced herself and the rest of their friends that a threat existed where it didn’t. When Sally-Anne learned of a resistance movement within Hogwarts (the original books called it Dumbledore’s Army, while this version of Hermione chose to name it the Crimson Insurrection, which didn’t help their case), she initially tried to reason with them. When Hermione revealed that Umbridge was using physical punishment on students, Sally-Anne made a deal. She gave up her friends in exchange for Umbridge not using the punishment quills anymore. At that point, she was an antagonist.

Sally-Anne’s story didn’t stop there. I’ve written a poem from her perspective, Given Up on Me, which goes on to the point where she realizes that Umbridge has been lying to her. Umbridge’s entire argument was founded on the claim that Rose went mad and killed herself, which Sally-Anne realizes Rose wouldn’t do, not while her friends could be in danger. And if Umbridge lied about that, Sally-Anne realizes that she could’ve been lying about anything. She uses her position as the head of the Inquisitorial Squad to get a message out about what Umbridge has done to the school. After pointing out to Draco that Umbridge would likely throw them both over if it benefited her, he gets his family involved, which puts an end to Umbridge’s reign of terror. But as it says in the poem, “too little, too late”. This is the final part of a protagonist’s descent: consequences. There will be consequences for the character if this is done correctly.

Changing a character like this is tricky and should only be done with care. Both Wings of Fire and Star Wars do this with Darkstalker and Anakin Skywalker, respectively, but in both cases, we see the backstory of a character we know as a villain. We see them change, following the path they believe is right. But doing this with an active character, one the readers don’t know is becoming an antagonist, may lose readers. If they don’t like where the character is going, they may not stick around until the end. If you feel this is the path your character should take, tread lightly.

#Essay #Characters #Heroes #Villains #GirlInRed

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In many stories that focus around children or teenagers, it suddenly falls to them to save the world. In Harry Potter, Animorphs, and Wings of Fire teenagers suddenly find themselves responsible for the fate of the world. That leaves the question any responsible adult would ask: Where are the adults? Why aren’t they taking care of this? Why is it down to children or teenagers to save the world? I’m going to look at a few different approaches, but one I’m going to intentionally skip is that the adults are too incompetent to do it.

In Harry Potter, Harry is “the chosen one”. This is a cheap trick to explain away this problem. A prophecy claims someone has to change the world. No choice. No adults allowed. Otherwise, there’s no reason this person is doing this alone. As with all cheap tricks, they’re overused, because they’re easy. Fate says it has to be this way, so there’s no need to explain what qualifies – or forces – them to do the job. Further, the adults in Harry Potter are mostly absent from the main conflicts. A prophecy said that Harry has to defeat Voldemort, and everyone’s so afraid of him, that for the most part, they don’t try. I’m oversimplifying this, but the point is that Harry Potter takes a bad approach to this, and there are far better ways to do this.

The series Wings of Fire plays with this a little. There’s still a prophecy, but the main characters decide that if people are all expecting them to save the world, then they’ll do it their own way. They are in the unique position of being the only dragons (all the characters are dragons) that know about members of other tribes. In the midst of a war pushing two decades, this puts them in a unique position to save the world. But the adults outside of the war want to help them and keep them safe.

This is similar to the approach in Animorphs. The series follows a group of teenagers that were chosen to fight an alien invasion by virtue of being in the right place at the right time. They met another alien that told them about the invasion, making them the only humans who know about it. In this sense, they are “the chosen ones”, but chosen not by fate or destiny, but by another fighter in the war. Like in Wings of Fire, there’s no one they can trust to help them. Once their parents find out about the war, they offer their support, showing that they care about what happens to the main characters.

In Girl in Red, Hermione was the one that had to be involved in their war, despite protests from everyone from her parents to Dumbledore. As in Animorphs, she was chosen by another combatant (Rose) to fight an enemy only they understood, because it was too dangerous to reveal anything about said enemy. But this didn’t stop her parents from worrying, nor from the adults trying to help. It wasn’t that fate said it had to be this way, it was something about her and the people she knew. When children in particular read books about other people their age saving the world, they like to imagine that they can too. I think it’s better to teach them that there’s something special about them that they could use to save the world, rather than to teach them that one person is chosen for this for no reason. It’s also important that they know they can go to adults for help, even when they think they can’t.

When writing about younger characters tackling grownup problems, at the very least, the grownups should be protesting. If not, finding other ways to show that they care can go a long way, not only to develop the characters and their families and friends, but to improve the quality of your story. If you’re going to have children or teenagers saving the world, it should be because there’s something special about them, not because the adults are incompetent.

#Essay #Characters #Heroes #YoungCharacters

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA