- KILL THEM
- Use them, what else?
- ...Something in between
I just thought this might be a fun and easy poll question. ^^ I know 'dead parents' are a tired trope, but there are a lot of valid reasons to use it (tbh, I'd rather read a story with dead parents than cardboard parents who are literally just there for set dressing).
Although I'd be lying if I didn't pick "Use them", because I usually do. Most of my projects in recent years have parent-child relationships right at their centers: either they work together as protagonists, or they have a villain/hero dynamic, or the whole family functions like an ensemble cast, with each parent and child going through their own arc. Fun stuff~
What I'm looking forward to is how people describe 'something in between', because IMO that's even more fun. ^^
Like, at it's most basic, it's not killing them, but just writing as if they're irrelevant, like how a lot of anime and other teen-oriented media works. You can assume the parents are there, because they get mentioned every once in a while, and how else does MC have a roof over their head? But they're rarely seen; and they're not important to the story.
At the extreme of this is the anime trope of 'parents working overseas', which I kinda liked as a kid. It felt like a more mature way of getting rid of the problem, with the added implication that MC's parents either trust them to look after themselves, or care so little about MC that they'll just put them in a house somewhere and forget about them. Lot of characterization you can do with such a minor detail. ^^
Then there's the more complex stuff you can do, like having the parents 'haunt the narrative', so to speak: technically, they have been killed off, but they're still very much relevant.
And not in the shallow "I'm doing this for my mother's/father's memory!" way where you just make the MC mention Mom/Dad in every other sentence, and maybe do some heart-wrenching flashbacks at the climactic moments...yes, that's valid too, but it's incredibly simplistic and predictable, and it's not what I'm talking about.
I mean stuff like having the MC behave in ways that showcase how they were raised by this dead parent, how they're still searching for the approval of someone who isn't there to give it anymore. Or conversely, how they're still trying to defy someone who can't control them anymore...maybe because they built their whole identity around these ideas of approval/defiance, and haven't yet figured out how to live outside of the context of an authority's opinion.
Similarly, you can make them a big presence in a story about reflection, simply showing how important they were in MC's past...whether this is through actual plot-relevant flashbacks, or their own self-examination. I definitely have a couple stories where the MC slowly realizes that a lot of what they value in themselves and in life is a reflection of what their parents valued in them and in life, and this can help soothe them during their journey and/or spur them to keep working to be better.
There's also stories where MC tries to fill their parent's shoes or "continue their legacy"...and yeah, this also has pretty shallow execution a lot of the time. But when it IS good, it can be very good.
I think there's a lot of interesting writing to be done about the different eras and societal contexts parent and child are working in, along with how they're viewed by others in their endeavors. Like, are other people putting more expectations on MC than their parent ever did, or vice versa? Have they perhaps decided that MC is just "wrong" for that legacy despite their efforts, and now they need to decide if their dead parent would agree? Is the legacy in question even a good one...?
I haven't written a lot of stories like this, admittedly...I think there was really just one (and technically, the parents weren't dead yet), where I very dramatically veered off the usual "MC's heart is in the right place; they should be the true king!" route towards a storyline that was more like "yeah you're not getting the throne, and tbh your parents would rather kill you than let you ruin their legacy, so it's time for Plan B". Because I thought it was subversive and fun, and opened up a much deeper discussion. ^^ But I'd like to work with a more straightforward "legacy" story sometime, that sticks closer to the tropes so I can deconstruct them better.
Anyway, what do you do with protagonist parents, and why do you do it? What do you like to see other authors do with the options presented?
