Why the Chosen One Is Always an Orphan: How Do I Include My Protagonists’ Family?
Quick question: what do Harry Potter, Batman, Cinderella, and Oliver Twist have in common?
Hopefully, you answered something like this: their parents are deeeaaaaad!
Family, dead or otherwise, often plays a role in main characters’ fictional lives. In my own non-fictional life, family is important, and even when it isn’t the point of my story, I want my main characters to have fleshed-out familial situations like I do. When I’m reading or watching a story, I notice when characters seem to exist in a kin-less bubble, as though they sprang full-formed from the ocean.
It seems to me that there are a few different ways I’ve seen stories deal with family.
1. The story is about the family.
Examples: the Famous Five books, Little House on the Prairie, The Simpsons
Some stories are about or have a subplot including family life. That means the protagonist’s family are permanent supporting characters (or fellow protagonists). This one’s pretty straightforward, so I won’t talk about it much. See? I’m done already.
2. Off-screen or pretty much off-screen family motivates the protagonist.
Examples: The X Files, Batman, An American Tail
OK, there are a whole lot of book, movie, TV, and theatre protagonists whose parents were killed dramatically to spur the action of the plot. And there are a ton of others who act only to protect their loved ones. Still others just want to see their beloved sister/brother/pet once more.
But most of the time, the audience doesn’t care about these family members as much as the protagonist does. Heck, we barely get to see them for even a scene, if we’re lucky. They share the spotlight only for as long as it takes for us to understand that the protagonist cares about them, then, whoops! See ya never.
That’s because they’re usually non-characters. The protagonist cares about them because they’re family, not because they’re people, and we’re meant to project our own understanding of an ideal familial relationship onto them.
3. The family suddenly becomes important when they bungee-jump into the plot for a short time.
Examples: Star Trek: The Next Generation, House, M.D.
You can tell when a TV show takes this attitude towards family because suddenly this one episode is about the guest star. For instance, Wacky Family Member visits and throws the ordinary groove of the show into chaos! ROFLcopter! Man, Lwaxana Troi and Arlene Cuddy sure are hilariously different than their daughters but also the same in ways that really annoy said daughters!
Other times, this trope plays out more seriously: dad/mom/brother/sister is Bad or Very Troubled, and protagonist has to deal with being related to someone so problematic. This is actually just an opportunity for them to wonder whether their relationship with the guest character means they are a bad person. Then, depending on the kind of show this is, they will either think: maybe (ambiguous ending) or, no, definitely different (optimistic ending).
Or sometimes the family is only there to be the vehicle for backstory about the main character’s childhood issues, and the episode is about the main character solving those issues.
Anyway you hack it, this episode is about the main character, and the family member happens to be the vehicle in which the plot shows up.
4. The family is always around in the background to shed light on the main characters and occasionally to step forward and drive the plot.
Examples: The Good Wife, The Wire
On The Good Wife, we’ve met Alicia’s mother and brother, Peter’s mother, Cary’s dad, and Will’s sisters. On The Wire, we meet McNulty’s ex-wife and their kids, Omar’s grandmother, Michael’s mother and brother, the Brice family… a whole bunch of people, in fact.
Sometimes family characters are heavily involved with the plot, like Alicia and Peter’s kids or Wee-Bey and Namond. Sometimes, they’re characters we barely see, like the various extended families and parental figures on both shows. But they’re always there: the story doesn’t just forget they exist when other plot elements become more important.
When a parents acts a certain way, the consequences have fallout for him and for his kids; when a character decides to do something drastic, her family might voice their concern or interfere. We’re used to seeing the alcoholic cop implode in self-destruction, but we’re not so used to seeing him have to live with it as he tries to put together a new bed for his kids; we’re used to seeing the elderly parent do annoying things in a comic way, but we’re not used to seeing the protagonist have to make sure Mom has a caregiver on top of every other task on her plate.
Each of these approaches has its upsides and downsides, but for me, the most appealing are the first and the last. The middle ones don’t expand on these family members as people; instead, they’re plot devices. When a character’s family members aren’t people, I’m not getting that sense of family that I want to explore.
But the difficulty with the first and last approaches is you have to really get to know these fictional moms, dads, siblings, kids, aunts, uncles, etc.
When I was first working on the MS I’m revising now, critique partners would occasionally ask me about my two protagonists’ backgrounds. I had a vague idea of what their families were like, and I tried to mention their siblings calling them or missed messages from their moms. I thought that was enough.
But as I continue to revise and plan the rest of the story, I realise that I had no idea who these characters’ families were, and because of that, I didn’t know where they came from.
Now that I’ve fleshed out siblings, parents, relations, friends, I not only know my main characters much, much better, but I also have a broader, more detailed world to play in. The difficult part is going to be integrating that detailed world as organically and consistently as the examples I listed in number 4. It may not mean my new “family” characters ever make an appearance, but I still know how they influence the way my protagonists behave and think.