Over Used Hero Arc

I’m sorry, this is a little ranty. To keep it simply, I really hate it when writers just kill off a parents family at the start of things because unless we know them, it’s not good story telling. This is fairly opinionated.

I’ve got a major pet peeve with hero’s. Other than the fact that most seem to be golden boy too goody goody folks that I can’t connect with because I believe deep inside we all have a bit of a degenerate wanting to get out and over indulge in something or do something inherently bad (which we all obviously repress) but because of BACKSTORIES.

The most over used things I have seen in books, movies, and fiction in general is the idea that you can just kill of the main characters family and give them a good motivation.


It’s a very lazy story. It actually removes a lot of character development that could happen. it hinders the character by giving them some big sad thing that is always over the characters.

Why do I bring this up?

It’s in a lot of fantasy stories and I’ve read / watched a bit of that lately. I’ve also been playing dungeons and dragons for most of my life and found that almost all of my PC’s (player characters) think it’s the best way to give a character motivation. It’s something I’ve seen a lot of writers do too.

Then I watched Godzilla on Netflix, the new one where there’s space ships and robots and stuff. It starts with a guy’s parent’s getting killed by Godzilla then his grandpa dies. This is the set up for the motivation for the characters anger an drive to kill Godzilla.

Why not have logic? Why not have it purely be that the human’s have almost run out of supplies and pretty much have to come back to earth (which is also true in the story.) Isn’t survival of the species enough? Nope. It’s that the parents and Grandpa got killed because of all this Godzilla stuff right?




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