When To Kill Your Mother

We all want to kill the mothers. In a literary sense, of course. I don’t advocate killing your real mother in real life. That’s a bad idea. But in a story, it seems like more than half of the mothers in the world are killed off. There are definitely some absent fathers, but the mothers always seem to die in some horrible or drawn out way. What exactly is the problem writers have with mothers anyways?

A part of it probably comes from the idea that mothers are supposed to be nurturing and comforting figures in one’s life. As the ones usually giving the hugs in any story, taking that away from a character leaves a very understandable void in their life. Most people can sympathize/empathize with someone who has lost their mother, and understand how it might motivate someone’s life.

There is a risk, of course, of verging on the cliche. As mentioned before, everyone seems to lose their mother. It’s not very compelling anymore: in Thor 2: Dark World, when Freya died, it felt like a waste of a character. Killing her seems to have more to do with motivating Loki and Thor to action than serving any real purpose. It’s almost disrespectful to her powerful and compelling character.

Let’s look at another two examples of this trope in action, in two different popular TV shows (that are on Netflix, if you are interested): Supernatural and Merlin. Both of them deal heavily with lost mothers, but in completely different ways and I think there is something worth considering when you’re about to kill some mothers of your own. I believe that they both actually do a pretty good job of handling their fallen mothers.

So, Supernatural: it’s not a spoiler to tell you that the mother of the main characters, Mary Winchester, is killed in the first 10 minutes of the first episode. This death has impacts for the entire series: when she dies, it throws her entire family into a life of monster hunting that she was hoping to hide them from. It sends her husband into a downward spiral, where he leaves his sons for days while tracking her killers, and leaves him completely emotionally unable to handle them. The elder son Dean is left to practically raise his younger brother, and take on a lot of the traditional “mother” roles.

Now I have a lot of thoughts about this use of the trope. Is her death necessary to the progression of the story/development of characters: absolutely yes. Nothing would have happened without her. But I do think that there are some problematic areas. Her death is almost too important: she seems to represent more as a symbol than anything else. It is the loss of the “nurturer” and “mother” that they are upset about: the details of her personality are completely ignored, even when someone is supposedly acting in her name. And this is a common problem in stories; killing off a character is something that happens, but it shouldn’t be used for the sole purpose of causing something else to happen. For Supernatural, Mary’s death verges on symbolic, instead of personal. What saves her really, is that her own actions remain important even outside of the other characters. When she was alive, she retained personality at least.

A note: there is one episode in season 5, “Dark Side of the Moon”, actually addresses this issue in a really interesting way: Dean and Sam are seeing a memory Dean has of their mother that reveals that their parent’s relationship was a bit rocky before she died. Dean admits that their father idolized her after she died, forgetting about their actual relationship. It’s a really interesting moment of insight into the series that, of course, was never mentioned again. It’s moments like these, when the show goes out of its way to develop Mary into an interesting character in her own way, that other series should really take notes on.

What do I like better about Merlin? Before the story even begins, Arthur’s mother has already died. In fact, she died giving birth to him. She is rarely outright mentioned in the series, but her impact is almost impressive. Sure, the ban on magic in Camelot was caused by her, but the main conflict of the show is distinctly between the father and son. Would their relationship have been different if Ygraine had still been alive? Absolutely. But Arthur is not obsessed with the memory of his mother, and Uther, while compelled by what happened when his wife died, is working entirely in his own terms.

While there was nothing obviously wrong with the way that Supernatural handled their missing mother, I think that Merlin has taken an approach that feels more unique, and more realistic. Ygraine is not a character we feel we know, but I don’t feel like she’s been misused either. The conflict between the characters does not hinge on the misshapen image of her memory, but she remains a figure in the larger story. I would prefer that characters who have died do not become martyrs for someone else‘s cause. The fact that she has no personality is, of course, problematic, but I think the show does a good job when it highlights that some of what Uther does in his wife’s name was only his justifications. The audience is aware of the fact that she is being turned into a cause by him, and that it is wrong for him to do that. And if you cannot flesh out your character, I think bringing attention to the fact that their memory is being abused is almost as good.

There are, of course, mothers who have been killed off and misused far more than these two examples, but I just wanted to point out some of the things that a writer should be considering when they kill off an important character. When you’re killing someone off, first ask yourself: “Do they need to die?” and “Could a very expensive lamp take their place?”. Because if your character has the personality of a Zac Efron card board cut out, and their existence is only to propel more significant characters forward, than kill the lamp instead.

Why Trope: Chekhov’s Gun

I’m billing this as a series because there are a lot of tropes out there, and most of them are worth thinking about. So let’s pop over to Chekhov’s Gun for a moment, because with all tropes, you have to consider whether or not we should keep it up, or get rid of it all together.

Chekhov’s Gun is named after the man who insisted on it’s use: Anton Chekhov: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

It’s a pretty sound point he’s making: when not literally thinking about guns, it means that your story’s solution should come from something that has happened previously. It’s basically the opposite of deus ex machina – there is no magic answer coming from the heavens. The audience saw the gun already, and may guess that it is coming into play.

But is the audience a little too aware of what’s coming? There are certainly instances where you can see from the very beginning that something is going to be important, so should we stop using this trope?

It’s not exactly new: we’ve been using it for centuries. I don’t know about ancient audiences, but when I heard that Achilles was impervious to harm everywhere but his ankles, I had a good guess it was going to come up again later. This is the kind of heavy-handed foreshadowing that I do not recommend. But think about the other option: what if Paris was lining up his shot, and Homer the narrator suddenly mentioned “Oh, by the way, Achilles isn’t completely impervious. There’s a thing with his ankle. Very inconvenient”.

So what exactly are we supposed to do? We don’t want to be obvious, but it has to make sense, right? Balancing between the two is something that you have to do, now how are you going to pull it off?

Let’s think about the greatest book-to-film adaptation ever: Shawshank Redemption, because I think that it reveals a way that we can keep Chekhov in the game here. It’s a film that you almost like better the second time because of how many little bits all add up in the end. To focus on one, think about the poster. Do we know that he has the poster? Yes, Red already mentioned it. It is amazingly cool when you realize what he’s done. That should be the objective for an ending: surprise us with a character who uses what we’ve seen in new, interesting ways. Try to slip it into the story without shouting its significance at us. We’ll think you’re brilliant for coming up with it.

The Lying Liar Tells Lies or, Telling Stories

Not to harp on on one of my favorite theories too much, but I have to say that there is a lot to learn from post-modernist theory. Because I worry about keeping things interesting for everyone, we’ll focus on Satan. He’s like, by definition, interesting.

Before you get it into your head that I’m speaking on religion, cool it. I will not be harshing your religious buzz. The character of Satan has existed since the religious plays but on by guilds in the Medieval era – there are centuries of stories I can draw on that have no sacrilegious intentions.

Intentions, of course, being the operative word. I’m going with Milton’s Paradise Lost here for the most part, and it is hard to claim what how he wanted the Church to take his epic. It was published in the mid-1600s – after Shakespeare, but close enough to make the language nice and confusing. A call back to the ancient epics of old (see: Iliad, Aeneid, Odyssey). It’s considered one of the greatest works of English literature – if that gets you going. Its main character is Satan, proving that classic authors are cool too. [For more “cool”: Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe]

What is so impressive about Milton’s Satan (and there is a lot of awesome going on in him) is the story that he tells himself. The narrator, during a few moments of interiority  where we get a look into his feelings and thoughts, we see that his feelings and words don’t always match up. He convinces his minions that they’ve done the right thing, but this is only a story that he is telling them. His speeches might speak to the universal, but the war is very much a personal.

God (yes, he’s a character; Milton was pretty confident in himself) tells his own story. When he sees Stan fly out of Hell, he laments his choice to fall. He tells his son that he is sad that Adam and Eve will eventually fall to Satan’s tricks. A confusing combination of individual and predestined belief.

On the opposite side, Satan is unsure as to what he’s going to do. He has doubts, regrets, even sympathizing with Adam and Eve, when he first spots them in the garden. Can God somehow see past all of this to his inevitable decision, even though has has already attested to Satan’s free will. Take care to ignore your gut instinct to assume God is all knowing, because literary-God couldn’t even stop a few thousand angels from rebelling. He’s totally fallible here.

These are the kinds of conflicting stories, where the two characters are giving clearly self-serving versions of events, that create a crack in a story. Post-modernists love this: the story makes you aware of the fact that it’s telling you stories, and that there is no way of telling which is the truth. But why make things so confusing.

Post-modernism resents the idea that there is a supposed “right” answer Other than the joy of being confusing, this is pretty fundamental to how literature works. After all, what do we talk about if there’s a correct interpretation? Satan and God will tell you different stories and although you might be inclined to not trust the Great Deceiver, you do know one thing: they’re both operating under the impression that they’re right.

Is God right: has Satan chosen to go down the path? Does Satan actually have something inherently wrong – the “Hell within” he speaks of? Or does it matter? Can we accept that the “truth” is less important that we can make worth it?

Post-modernists would say so. And Milton, after grumping and arguing for a while, would probably agree too.

Let’s Screw Up

Please stop telling me that your pprotagonist is always right.

I know that it’s cool when your main character is all smart, and suave, and ahead of the game, but it just plain isn’t interesting. There is no tension in a story when we already know that the protagonist is going to figure it out in the end.

Whatever happened to Chinatown? You know, the story of a detective of the noir tradition (think Maltese Falcon here) where the main character completely screws up? Because, spoilers here, he does not make the best calls in that film. In fact, a big part of film noir was putting characters into situations they couldn’t control, where they couldn’t always do the right thing.  It’s part of what made those stories so compelling, even to modern audiences.

So let’s make a protagonist that makes an epic mistake. Sure, it’s uncomfortable to watch, but you get the satisfaction of seeing them try to make things right. Yet again, I regret the loss of real tension in storytelling.

Believe In Your Local Unreliable Narrator

Lying is a lot of fun: this is why trust is hard to come by. You don’t need me to tell you that though. We all know that people have agendas and plans of their own. It’s barely interesting enough to talk about.

Which begs the question: if we’re all so used to this, why do we bother putting “surprise” betrayals into stories anymore? We’ve all watched a movie and seen the betrayal miles away: how shocking is it when the nice new guy they introduce this week is the bad guy? I mean, he’s the only one it could be, realistically. Or, you’re watching a detective ‘case of the week’ kind of show and the husband is the killer. Is that really surprising? He totally had a motive – they already knew that his business was doing badly. For Christ’s sake. This could have been done 20 minutes ago.

You can mark it as unoriginal storytelling, but I’m going to pick a fight on this one: I think that there is still a use for obviously unreliable characters, if done correctly. In a world of the genre-savvy, if you want to stay interesting you’re going to have to figure out a way to use the audience’s knowledge to your advantage. If you’re looking for an example, you’re going to have to look at, of all things, video games.

What do you mean she’s not honest? What gave you that idea?

There are a lot of games that have managed to do a really good job working with unreliable characters that still manage to be both compelling (even in their varying levels of transparency) and create a lot of tension in the story.Think Bioshock, Far Cry 3, and Portal – it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to realize that GlaDOS is several kinds of insane and manipulative. But knowing she’s dishonest doesn’t make the game easier. So how does this mechanic work so much better in these games than they do in TV?

The important difference between films/TV and something like a video game is the viewer’s participation in the story itself. Let’s think about Kreia from Knights of the Old Republic II (pictured above) – you can tell just from looking at her that she’s evil and probably going to try to murder you at some point. You can’t introduce a character in a cloak who jokes about dead bodies and refuses to show her eyes, and then expect the player to think she’s one of the good guys. So if she’s so obviously bad news, why do you end up shuttling her around the galaxy and doing her bidding?

Kreia is, from the very beginning, the only person in the damn story who seems to know what’s going on. And in games where you’re thrown into a random location and shot on sight, you need to take any kinds of advice and help you can get. Unreliable characters are, in their nature, unreliable because they’re as likely to tell you the truth as they are to lie their head off. And that creates tension.

When you’re stuck in a situation with nothing but the questionable advice from a skeevy source, you’re put in the horrible and uncomfortable position of figuring out what you’re supposed to do now: listen to Kreia and go into the Sith temple for ‘truth’, whatever the hell that means, or… what? Stay in your ship? Guess what the correct answer is with the information you have (i.e. absolutely nothing)? When she tells you to kill the dude, is it because they’re dangerous or dangerous to her? And why does she always have to be right about so many things? These are the real questions you want to be asking when a story introduces an obvious liar: your audience is being screwed over by their own understanding of the genre. You know that you’re going to need their help, and you get to live with the consequences. Yay

So here’s my advice for TV: chuck those stupid side characters with their supposedly ‘true’ life story and name. Bring in the people with fake smiles and blatant lies. Instead of making your characters incredible stupid and gullible, have them see through the lies around them, leaving them with one big question: what do you do now? Because I’m really, really sick of guessing the ending of every crime show.