Death to the parents of heroes!

No, literally. Everywhere you look, every heroic character from the latest mary-sue to Peter Quill and Kal-El, is orphaned. Why is that? Well, Cracked has an 80-minute podcast discussing that exact question. And maybe they'll come up with a few answers while they're at it!

http://www.cracked.com/podcast/why-amer ... rc=fanpage

It is a very common phenomena in characters and story telling.

But when you really think about it, it's one of the heaviest traumatic events a child or teen can go through. It provides inspiration and drive for the character, as well as reinforcing their solitude, especially with super heroes, indulging the stereotype of being a lonely, broken man who must hide his or her true identity, keeping all social relationships and affairs of the heart to a bare minimum.

It's a go-to, and I can kind of see why, again, especially with super heroes.


EDIT: Plus, a badass, solitary hero who has a loving, healthy functioning relationship with mommy & daddy has the potential to diminish the badassery and solitude within his/her personality, beliefs, and outlook on the world around them.

It's a cliche, but one that is almost justified.

If cliches have showed us anything, it's that you don't need to have a character be an orphan, or at least not have any kind of parents, to give them drive to become good, bad, or super. They don't have to be solitary badasses either.

Take the old school Superman for example, while he didn't have his birth parents, he had the Kents. They raised him in a small town in America as a relatively normal kid and he became the de facto champion of all things good. His loneliness, so to speak, stems from his being a Superman among humans.

But, that's also part of why he isn't so lonely. Humans have, mostly, come to accept him the same way his normal not dead parents had. And then new writers came in and things changed.

Fiction, and real life, are full of subversions of these cliches. It's kind of why I try to turn many on their heads myself in writing.