: Too much death in character backstories? Even in a horror game? The backstory of my five main characters involves a lot of death... The protagonist, who has two adopted daughters and raises

The backstory of my five main characters involves a lot of death...

The protagonist, who has two adopted daughters and raises them alone, lost both his parents and doesn't even remember them (part of a curse), lost his sister, who died giving birth to one of his adopted daughters (I say daughter here and not niece because neither the protagonist nor the sister knew they were siblings), the real father doesn't want to know anything about her, and the other adopted daughter came from an orphanage (it's assumed her parents died as well).

That's the first three main characters and already I have a death toll of five. The other two characters, two brothers, lost a young brother very early on and during the course of the game, both their parents are brutally murdered. So that brings the death toll to eight.

Now, I don't really have a problem using death in my story (as you can plainly see), but at this point, I'm beginning to think I use death too much. My game is actually a horror game with lots of characters dying already (explosive decompression is involved at some point), but even then, should I cut down on the deaths in the backstories of my MAIN characters? Would it feel forced to use death a lot for the main characters?

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@Odierno164

I would write this as a comment to @What 's answer, but I don't have enough points for that.

I will focus on two things when trying to answer your question.

The first: Agreeing with @What ; contrast is crucial if death in itself should still be horrifying. Since there is a lot of death already, the focus of the reader's/protagonist's fear should not be on death itself, but something related to it which makes it different from "the previous deaths"...

The second: This is something that could help with the first.. What are we actually afraid of?". The "holy shit... this could happen to my daughters" is an important point. Especially since death is "normal" in this dimension. @What makes a brilliant point comparing death in Syria and the U.S., and I will take this example even further. Yes, we usually think "Oh my, that's terrible!" when we hear tragic news, BUT generally people don't actually CARE unless they have a direct link (social, cultural, geological) to the people involved. If we should fear the death of his daughters, we must care about them intimately. In order for us to believe or share the fear that the protagonist feels or develops, it must be natural to feel sincere empathy for them, even within the murder dimension. I believe character development is absolutely crucial for this. When we care for the characters there WILL be a contrast between their possible deaths and the deaths of "strangers".

I don't know the structure of your plot (and it may be irrelevant) but we must know and care for the people involved, in order to fear their deaths. After all, I don't walk around fearing that a stranger will be hit by lightning or hit by a car. I fear that my friends and family will.

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: Too much death in character backstories? Even in a horror game? The backstory of my five main characters involves a lot of death... The protagonist, who has two adopted daughters and raises

More posts by @Karen856

: Scrivener: link files to different folders? Lets say you had two folders in your Research folder and you want a file to be "shared" or linked between folders: the file appears in both folders,

: Correct spacing for "Smith et al. (2008)" An academic paper is referred to as using the authors name and publication year. For example, Smith (2008) studied the property of blah-blah Smith

: Who owns the copy if a copywriter provides copy as a paid service? I build websites. I've used a copywriter to provide the website copy, the client paid the writer directly. I placed copyright

: What is a good way to name characters? Okay, here's what I want: I want a check list or step by step list I can use while trying to name my characters. I often have trouble coming up with

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