McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Luke, *I* am your father...overused?

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arianne:
Hi, I was just wondering if it is becoming overused and cliched to have the villian of a piece be the main character's dad/mom/uncle/grandpa/sister etc etc? (Luke, who's your daddy? ;D) Or is it pretty much okay? Is it more annoying to have the author string you along for the whole book and then tell you the bad guy is the dad, or is it more annoying to have the fact that baddie is the dad out there in the open around the first or second chapter?

My friend mentioned that making the baddie a relative gives the reader more of a "shock factor", which brings with it a certain amount of emotional impact. I'm not sure I agree with him, as most of the dads-as-baddies are people teh main character has never known.

Anyway, thoughts?

Starbeam:
My opinion is that unless it's done very well, it tends to be overused.  Even worse when it's done badly, and obviously.  Or when it's done to try to make the reader think one of the villains is the characters father only to later find out that the father actually is the character you thought it was all along.  Eragon, for that one.


And just a sort of tangental pet peeve of mine, the actual line is never has Luke in it.

arianne:
Could I get more examples of "done badly"? I've never read Eagorn since a few of my friends hated it so much.

Sorry about the Luke ;D But I'm pretty sure people would go "huh?" if I just typed "*I* am your father...overused?"

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: arianne on July 06, 2010, 04:02:21 PM ---Hi, I was just wondering if it is becoming overused and cliched to have the villian of a piece be the main character's dad/mom/uncle/grandpa/sister etc etc?

--- End quote ---

I wouldn't say overused, I'd say it's an easy option.  Because a family connection is generally thought of as coming with strong emotional weight - good, or bad - and many of the less well done ways of doing this come with the assumption that, for the reader, "X is related to Y" automatically gets "X has strong emotional connection with Y" so the writer does not actually have to depict the strong emotional connection or how and why it forms.

I think that in the Dresden Files Jim is subtly commenting on this in the ways that Harry assumes that being related to someone automatically gives a strong emotional connection with them of a particular and predictable shape; things like Murphy's family do seem to me to make it clear that we are not expected to read Harry's assumptions about the way the world works as how the world in the DF actually works, as it's clearly a different shape of set of relationships that does not work in ways Harry intuitively grasps, by comparison with the Carpenter family dynamic, which he mostly grasps (and somewhat idealises.)

arianne:
Would it be accurate to say that Harry Potter's Voldemort is an anti-Luke, then? "He killed my parents, therefore he is the bad guy".

Actually, that one does seem to be a lot more overused!

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