The Origin Story

[Saarai]

I was doing some thinking concering RP, fiction in general really, and wanted to know everyone's thoughts on writing origins and the cliches that tend to come with them.

I want to know what you like to see when exploring what made a character who they are, what you hate seeing all the time, how you tend to go about such things when writing backgrounds yourself.

To get started, I'll say I'm not the biggest fan of the orphan background in fiction. I get it, orphans exist, but there can't be that many that rise to greatness, right? My dislike for stuff like that has made me avert many of the cliches associated with it. Most, if not all, of my characters have one or both parents. Those without parents lost them as adults, usually due to old age or disease.

Sometimes it'd done well, I think. Star Wars, for example, started off very cliche. Parents dead, killed by the evil guy in black armor.

Nope! He's your father, Luke. And, you have a twin sister.

Though, that twist has created cliches, for better or worse, based on that too. Some writers would say for worse.

[LawOfTheLand]

I'd say that my favorite characters take a trope (often one with negative connotations) and deconstruct it to its logical building blocks. This is a really good example of the sort of justification I'm talking about, though one has to wonder how one is to present a Mary Sue with any sort of meaningful conflict, let alone a handful of them as in that roleplay. So there's some Fridge Logic going on there.

[Tea]

To specifically address the orphanic character history for a moment it seems to me that it has a much more poor reputation than it deserves. A character is a character. If they are made well and played well then that character is a success. If you like challenge an advanced role-player to make an orphan and see what they produce. As they say, "If you want the best go to the best."

My opinion on the reputation of the orphan character is that it is so often used, and poorly at that, by inexperienced role-players. The orphan back-ground is the lazy choice. It is easy. Beginners who are not familiar with how to think of and make details for their characters tend to default to using it. Worse are those players who wish to impose their identity or their emotions on their character. The feelings of, "No one loves me," very often over power the reasoning that every young character should have a mentor or guardian. Itinerant solitary survival is extremely difficult to justify given the concept of natural selection and the assumption that some-one, a traveler, a trapper, a search party, or a patrol, should have noticed the orphan.

The combination of these happenings, and perhaps a few others not listed here, are significant contributions to the poor reputation which the orphan's origin has. This is only one role-player's opinion, of course.

As for other origins I will point out the noble heir. The poorly constructed noble heir of a fantasy or medi-eval role-play. Many ill researched role-players assume that the noble heir is the path to wealth and avoidance of education. The easy life. But for those of us who study we know that this is not so. The noble heir should be the most rigorously tested and educated mind in the land. They must be both mentally and physically courageous or no one will respect them.

Perhaps that is enough for now.

[Saarai]

You know, I've never seen the noble heir background used for a character in a long time. Granted, I haven't looked at a fantasy or medieval RP in a long time. In general though, I don't often see characters who come from wealth. Maybe that has to do with everyone loving the underdog story.

I admit I'm a fan of someone who has the odds against them coming out on top. There's a reason why so many of my characters in the Mulitverse, and if it's allowed, and other RPs tend to come from post-warzones and ghettos.

I grew up poor myself, so that's clearly an influence too.

[Tea]

Words are interesting. What if we removed the phrase noble heir and inserted the word prince or princess? Have you ever seen an amateur role-player try to make a prince- or princess-like concept? A young, pretty, wealthy character with near zero mental and physical training?

The mention of war refugee and poverty district characters interests me. I wonder what experiences the readers of the thread have had with them.

[Kestrel]

I think that specially because people are asking for long detailed backgrounds you get stuff like orphans and abusive parents. Many people struggle making an interesting origin story without drama, and, well... "Yeah, Johnny had a loving family and went from highschool to college without too many hitches" becomes much more difficult to make interesting than having an extremist cultist mom who dripped candles in the form of a pentagram on his chest and tried to summon satan in his body.

I believe you'll get a lot less of the orphans if you just shorten your history requirements or maybe even outright remove them. It's not so much the inability to think of a different history as it is feeling forced to pour out a shitton of words in a history section and make it not suck. Most people aren't here to be the next best-seller or make writing names or eating chips Death Note-epic, but to have fun. Writing ten paragraph histories about average Joe isn't fun. I think there's a limit to what you can expect from people as, honestly, the parts that really matter will be written in the IC. History sections are just explanations to go along with it.