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13 All characters have parents? An Inconvenient Truth
12 years ago
It's nuts..
For as many characters as I thought of, for every single one I may have to figure out what their family situation is.
This includes whether they have parents still living, legal guardians, how many parents, what their relationship is like between them and their parents..
..most importantly though I have to figure out how to relieve the emotional burden from the parents!
And it's rather inconvenient!
See, it's weird, I feel sort of guilty if, for example, a deer girl gets abducted by aliens and they run cool alien experiments on her!
And she's fine.
But meanwhile the parents are wondering where she is, and assume the worst.
It's kind of a buzzkill, you know?
I may need to come up with universally applicable solutions. Any ideas?
One idea is to use an alibi. In this case the aliens a forge a note saying she went to a boarding school or something.
And have her regularly phone home to let them know everything is ok and that she is so totally not being plowed by alien instruments.
Obviously, the alibi isn't always a plausible solution.
Another idea is to simply presume the parents are dead.
After all, you can't worry about your kids if you're dead.
A third solution is to presume that the character has no parents/guardians emotionally invested in her well being to begin with.
Thoughts?
Now that I mention it, simply presuming the parents are dead, or having the character be an orphan, seems like the best solution by far.
I could always make exceptions, on a case by case basis.
For as many characters as I thought of, for every single one I may have to figure out what their family situation is.
This includes whether they have parents still living, legal guardians, how many parents, what their relationship is like between them and their parents..
..most importantly though I have to figure out how to relieve the emotional burden from the parents!
And it's rather inconvenient!
See, it's weird, I feel sort of guilty if, for example, a deer girl gets abducted by aliens and they run cool alien experiments on her!
And she's fine.
But meanwhile the parents are wondering where she is, and assume the worst.
It's kind of a buzzkill, you know?
I may need to come up with universally applicable solutions. Any ideas?
One idea is to use an alibi. In this case the aliens a forge a note saying she went to a boarding school or something.
And have her regularly phone home to let them know everything is ok and that she is so totally not being plowed by alien instruments.
Obviously, the alibi isn't always a plausible solution.
Another idea is to simply presume the parents are dead.
After all, you can't worry about your kids if you're dead.
A third solution is to presume that the character has no parents/guardians emotionally invested in her well being to begin with.
Thoughts?
Now that I mention it, simply presuming the parents are dead, or having the character be an orphan, seems like the best solution by far.
I could always make exceptions, on a case by case basis.
And I'm guessing a missing female family member would cause more alarm than a missing male family member.
It might be why there are so man orphans in young adult fiction.
Right now I am building an entire small village for my long running D&D game. twenty families or so in three generations. It is complicated.
Or perhaps the aliens receive regular assistance from Furs in Black who come by to (temporarily) blank the parents' memories of their daughter or offer a cover story.
Men/furs in black is a good solution, in fact I came up with that solution as well. But it's only applicable in stories where they'd have reason to be involved.
annunaki capture somebody, for a whole year of indoctrination, and slip them back only a day after they left in earth time.
Instead of a ship, though, it is a planet.
I might have used the idea in other places too.
In fact, time travel is sort of like that.
Also, one idea I recently had, possibly as a result of weird documentaries on the subject, is multiple universes, to essentially duplicate the person so there are two of them.
For a more literal version, I actually had this idea, of someone playing a virtual reality MMO.
The creator of the game copies the person's data, so they go home, but the creator then activates the copy.
The copy thinks they are the original.
(a funny add-on idea I had, is the irl person later comes back and plays the game again.. and gets trapped for real. So now there are 2 of them in the game.)
Another idea I had.
A monster possesses a person, turning them into a puppet.
The monster later gives birth to a clone of that person, of the same age, and with all memories intact. The clone has free will, and is shocked and dismayed to see their life being handed over to the puppet.
But some of those ideas I think are unique cases. I wouldn't want to use them as the explanation every time.
But for your problem... maybe the aliens go the Great Race of Yith route and leave behind an imposter. Granted with the Yith they swap bodies for the abduction period, but your aliens could have 'make a copy' technology. Could even show what kind of shenanigans the copy gets into if you ever wanted to do a side thing.