The quickest way to an audience’s heart is to kill off one or both of your character’s parents.

From Orphans and their quests by Manvir Singh.  Interesting throughout.

The quickest way to an audience’s heart is to kill off one or both of your character’s parents. Aladdin, Bambi, David Copperfield, Frodo Baggins, Han Solo, Inigo Montoya, Jane Eyre, Little Orphan Annie (of course), Mowgli, Pippi Longstocking, Snow White, Tarzan, Vito Corleone, Professor X: all were parentless.

Orphaned protagonists are so common that an online encyclopaedia of narrative tropes has more than 25 pages on orphan-related themes, including ‘Street Urchin’ (Oliver Twist), ‘Disappeared Dad’ (Forest Gump) and ‘Doorstop Baby’ (Harry Potter). A page on ‘Death by Childbirth’ (Luke and Leia Skywalker) underscores the trope’s appeal by pointing to its statistical improbability:

Parental Abandonment occurs with an overwhelming frequency in fiction. On top of that, an overwhelming number of victims lose their mothers during childbirth. So sad, so tragic, so heart-wrenching … such a goldmine of a plot device. Nothing impossible about it, but the statistics are ridiculously high, especially for any industrialised nations…

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The sympathetic plot is simple. Protagonists have an understandable goal, such as marrying royalty or killing a monster. They confront obstacles, often in the form of mean opponents, eventually overcoming them through their skills or outside assistance. At the end, they receive rewards, such as power, prestige or a life lived happily forever after.

This structure – the goal, the obstacle, the rewards – makes up the core of the sympathetic plot. But at least four secondary features often pop up too. They don’t appear in all sympathetic tales, but they’re common.

First, protagonists are usually appealing. When the literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall studied characters from around the world, he found that, whenever protagonists’ looks were mentioned, they were almost always described as attractive. In fact, of 568 female protagonists coded, only eight were described as unattractive.

But there are other traits aside from good looks that make protagonists appealing. They’re often witty, brave, industrious or big-hearted.  

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Second, protagonists suffer early misfortunes. Like the characters listed above, they’re often orphaned, though they can also be abandoned or the children of poor rural folk. Some stories pile several of these tragedies on top of each other, as with Spider-Man, who starts out parentless but quickly loses kindly Uncle Ben too.

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Third, the protagonists’ opponents are mean and intimidating. They might be popular kids, sour coworkers or autocratic teachers. They might be cruel stepparents, callous stepsisters or pompous rival princes. Or they might be monstrous. They might have scarlet eyes, slits for nostrils and skin whiter than bone. They might have killed innocent children; they might wear a skull-shaped helmet over their lava-charred face. They might be giants.

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Finally, protagonists adventure. They traipse through unfamiliar worlds and face off against sequences of terrible obstacles. Sometimes, the protagonists’ goals propel them on their adventure, like when they set off to slay dragons. Other times, circumstances fling them into the unknown and they need to jury-rig their way home, like when a tornado whisks Dorothy to Munchkinland. The adventure is the glue binding the narrative together: it establishes an overarching goal, such as destroying a ring or getting home, and then riddles the route with tricksy hurdles and redirection.

Interesting throughout and filled with nuggets.

The Western focus on internal change makes anthropological sense: people in the West fixate on the internal. Psychologists have demonstrated this with a simple experiment. When researchers at Lewis and Clark College and the University of Nevada in Portland, Oregon, asked people to finish the sentence ‘I am ______’, people from the Western world responded with phrases such as ‘happy’, ‘a fun person’, or ‘a health-nut’. Meanwhile, rural Kenyans or Pacific Islanders said things such as ‘a mother’ or ‘a member of the Makea family’. Whereas most people define themselves by their relationships, people in the West emphasise their interests and personalities.