Welcome to day 5 of PREPTOBER! This is a series of daily questions and prompts to help you prepare for this year’s upcoming NaNoWriMo!
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Today’s question is:
Who loves your main character?
Feel free to share your answer in the comments! I would love to hear your response!
Today’s question is the inverse of yesterday’s prompt. And it is important for the same exact reason. If the people your main character loves inherently have value because of that love, then the opposite is true too.
Unless you are writing an Ebenezer Scrooge character (which has its own merit), there are going to be people in your Main Character’s life that love them, and therefore let us know (as readers) that the MC is worthy of our love too.
For instance, The Fault in Our Stars wouldn’t be as relatable if Hazel’s parents weren’t in the story.
They aren’t major characters, but their love, and pain, and suffering regarding Hazel and her sickness gives Hazel’s life real stakes. Her death would destroy the people in her life. Because she is loved in the book, she is worthy of love from the reader.
By extension, Augustus is (inherently) worthy of (the reader’s) love because Hazel loves him, which I talk about more in yesterday’s post. And this works well because Hazel is already validated to the reader by her parents. Each of these elements build upon each other.
This is one of the reasons why Black Widow’s death in Avengers: Endgame was so hard to pull off (And why the Black Widow movie probably should have been released before Endgame).
It works because the Avengers loved her, especially Hawkeye, but because they did not develop the Hulk & Widow relationship and she is a loner by nature, it was harder to pull off and I (personally) don’t think it had as strong of an impact as if Hawkeye had died instead.
Friendship love is validating, but it just doesn’t (naturally) have the same devastation as family or romantic love. It definitely works, it’s just not as strong. Like what if Frodo didn’t have Bilbo, would we like Frodo as much? I honestly don’t think so.
J.K. Rowling could’ve had erased Lilly and James Potter and just made Petunia and Vernon the parents of Harry, they certainly get more screen time. If we replace characters that love Harry with characters who detest him, he loses his weight as a sympathetic character. We are disinclined to love him because he himself is not loved. The fact that his parents died, to save him, because they loved him *so* much, makes him instantly lovable and worthy as the main character that the reader is prepared to follow throughout the rest of the novel.
So, who loves your main character and why?
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